Hair gone gray
Half a century ago, the very staging of Hair read like a political act
Micha Barnes 2:30 p.m., June 20
W.S. Di Piero
W.S. Di Piero is a recipient of Guggenheim, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest awards, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He lives in San Francisco and is the author of numerous books of poetry and essays. He wrote an essay on his father in June of 2000.
His recent books include Nitro Nights (2011, Copper Canyon) and TOMBO (2014, McSweeney's). Prior to that was When Can I See You Again: New Art Writings (2010, Pressed Wafer), which contains many of his Reader columns.
Articles by W.S. Di Piero
Beauty built on blood
Teotihuacan 2003 finds at L.A. County Art Museum
In 2003, an archaeologist digging near the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, one of the grand structures at the ancient city of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico, felt a soft spot in the earth that turned out to ...
Familiar muralists, but a lot unfamiliar
The uncanny in Balboa Park
One pleasure of anthology exhibitions is discovering pictures by unfamiliar artists. The English-born artist Leonora Carrington was new to me when I saw a small picture by her in Modern Masters from Latin America, currently ...
Deep, unusual Mexico in photos
Our Lady of Guadalupe, drug-war dead, the border from above, filthy rich girls
Modern Masters from Latin America reminds us, if we need to be reminded, that Modernism knew no borders. Point/Counterpoint, a compelling selection of 19 contemporary Mexican photographers currently at the Museum of Photographic Arts, has ...
Twelve Bellini holy pictures at the Getty
A precious event so close to San Diego
Pictures sometimes become devotional objects or pilgrimage destinations. Their contents have the feeling of secular-sacred spaces. The room called the Living Hall in New York’s Frick Collection houses several robust portraits, Titian’s force-of-nature Pietro Aretino ...
Kerry James Marshall addresses the absence of blackness
We’re the violators of their culture of leisure.
Slinky, unfurling forms run around and through many of Kerry James Marshall’s paintings. They frame individual pictures’ contents and rope together serial canvasses into a narrative of styles and scenes. In his 1993 De Style, ...
Artifacts of the cult
The Reformation was heaven for haters.
Tension between Death and the woman is as wiry and volatile as the religious tension of the times.
Life as meat
Post–World War II London artists dabbled with expiration date
In the years following World War II, the biggest art conversation was about abstraction and what to do with it. The critical center was New York and the artists in question were Pollock, Rothko, de ...
Beautiful disgusts after some masterpieces
By the 18th Century, mighty Venice had become what Goethe called “the drawing room of Europe.”
Many of us seek and cherish essences when traveling to foreign places: a food, a shop, a fall of light, an open-air market, the peculiar curve or steep of street or hillside, the play of ...
Bawdy shots
Mapplethorpe’s work “moves toward a kind of perfection — it’s just a matter of refining.”
I was 11 or 12 when I befriended an older neighborhood boy who was a fanatical bodybuilder. Johnny pumped iron in the basement and would interrupt any conversation to do handstand pushups against a wall. ...
