What's Up
Body language, new stripes and prime real estate
- Smithsonian magazine, October 2006, Subscribe
Body Language
New York City-based photographer Iké Udé puts a modern stamp on uli, body-painting motifs of the Igbo people of his native Nigeria. Recent works by Udé and others are at the Museum of African Art until April 6.
Neo-Traditional
Some Native American artists delight in updating traditional forms with fresh subject matter (Roxanne Swentzell's 1990 clay figure Hands Up! pokes fun at Hollywood westerns). Such cutting-edge classics are on view at the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in New York until July 22.
Lost and Found
One man's trash is another's... post-modern sculpture? Dead batteries, broken light bulbs and old shipping pallets (Franz West's Caiphas & Kepler) find their way into fine art at the Hirshhorn starting October 26.
Prime Real Estate
Helen Frankenthaler painted in a garage. Mark Rothko (in 1952) had "a great big sunny room." Willem de Kooning paid $50 a month for his New York City studio. (Hey, it was 1953.) At the Portrait Gallery until October 27, photos of artists' spaces, plus their notes and letters from the Archives of American Art, offer a rare peek at masters at work.
New Stripes
Cute? Definitely. But the National Zoo's Sumatran tiger cubs (two females and a male), born May 24, are also something of a hedge against extinction: fewer than 500 of the subspecies exist in the wild.
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