Asylum: Inside The World Of Closed State Mental Hosptials, a photographic exhibition of some of America’s most infamous mental health institutions, will haunt Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery through October 29th.  Photographer Christopher Payne’s outsized pictures, some of which have been blown up to be over a meter tall, pull back the curtain on the forbidding and largely hidden world of what used to be called ‘insane asylums.’ Still, appearances can be deceiving. “Once I got inside, they really weren’t that creepy,” Payne told Phawker. Once inside, Payne, who has a masters’ degree in architecture, explores the everyday use of rooms, […]

Before gaining his reknown as one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema,  Stanley Kubrick worked as a photographer for Look magazine. In 1949, a 21-year-old Kurbrick was sent to Chicago for an assignment: “Chicago, City of Contrasts.” MORE RELATED: At the age of 13, his father bought him a stills camera and he soon became fascinated by photography. He soon became an excellent amateur photographer, selling his pictures to magazines whilst still at high school. Later when he was looking for a job, Helen O’Brien, a picture editor at “Look” magazine, whom Kubrick had befriended, asked him […]

[Illustration by DAVMO] Visionary filmmaker David Lynch will make his solo debut as a musical artist this fall with Crazy Clown Time. Produced and written by Lynch, the album’s 14 original songs spotlight him on guitar and vocals. The album will be released on November 8 by independent British label Sunday Best Recordings / PIAS in America. Two tracks released late last year – “Good Day Today” and “I Know” – already have American and British critics buzzing about the album. The Los Angeles Times writes: “Frightening effects and mysterious lyrics: this is Lynch’s most unexpected venture to date.” The […]

DAILY MAIL: It was an era that defined a generation. The Great Depression marked the bitter and abrupt end to the post-World War 1 bubble that left America giddy with promise in the 1920s. Near the end of the 1930s the country was beginning to recover from the crash, but many in small towns and rural areas were still poverty-stricken. These rare photographs are some of the few documenting those iconic years in colour. The photographs and captions are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color. The […]

This is the first overview of the lifework of a major American 20th century artistic polyglot. Angus MacLise was an American artist, poet, percussionist, and composer active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Best known as the original drummer of the Velvet Underground, MacLise’s lifework included music, calligraphy, performance art, poetry, drawings, plays, and limited edition artist’s books. A suitcase of Angus MacLise’s artwork, publications, and manuscript as well as more than 100 hours of recorded music was left with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela for safe-keeping thirty years ago. […]

LOS ANGELES TIMES: Marc Chagall was an enormously popular 20th century painter, revered by the public for his rooftop fiddlers, biblical lore, upside down lovers and fanciful visions of Jewish shtetl life in the old Russian empire. Art historians and critics, however, have always had difficulty placing him among the many currents of modern art; to them, he often seemed unique, special, one of a kind. Some also found him repetitive and sentimental. But Chagall was not always a loner. In an innovative exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has decided to concentrate on his younger years when, far from […]

WALTER HOPPS: That Philadelphia exhibition of Andy’s was one of the most bizarre mob scenes I’ve ever witnessed… It was the first survey of all his work… It was crazy. It was the first time I saw a young avant-garde artist have a show mobbed as if it were a movie premiere… all kinds of people clamoring to get at Andy as if he were a star. MORE SAM GREEN: Andy was mobbed. We were pretty scared because we arrived late from drinks and thousands were jammed into the museum. It was a mob scene and they were all out […]