Category: by Seph Rodney

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Pandemic BLM Politics: Graffiti from New York, Long Beach, and Los Angeles

By Carrie Paterson
Photos by Seph Rodney, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Carrie Paterson

It was lucky for me that early in the (first?) summer of the pandemic, I encountered the writings of Slovenian “graffitologist” Mitja Velikonja, just as my home street corner started filling up with warring pandemic wheatpaste posters and stickers. Like many shops and businesses around the country, the tenants decided to board up the windows in a (hyperbolic, on my quiet street) show of fear about property damage that might ensue from the Black Lives Matter protests

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Alberto Burri at the Guggenheim

By Seph Rodney

Around each bend in the Guggenheim rotunda, Alberto Burri’s works give off the scent of free-form experimentation, worked by both the elements and the will. He applied heat, flame, pressure to disparate mediums; he ripped and tore fabrics, allowed substances to dry, crack and fissure, all the time attentive to the process as well as to what could happen if something in the formula were changed. It seems counterintuitive that being so careful and particular, so watchful, would be tantamount to liberty for Burri. But his independence conspicuously reveals itself here.