Expedient MEANS

Notes on Film, Art, Writing, Technology and other things by Steve A Furman

Category: Art

  • Artivism as Activism in Laguna Canyon

    Artivism as Activism in Laguna Canyon

    It was only recently that I learned of the term “artivism.” It came to me through a friend by way of an amazing project and a book. The project emerged from the mind of Mark Chamberlain a California artist who used his formidable photography talents to mobilize a community. With the…

  • Remembering Roger Ebert

    Any lover of film my age was heavily influenced by what Roger Ebert wrote about the movies. He was not trained in film theory and started out his career as a journalist. You might say he was in the right place at the right time as the Chicago Sun-Times decided…

  • Washington, A Work in Progress

    I spent last week in Washington D.C. This city used to be a frequent destination for me to visit museums, take in the architectural beauty and reflect on our history as a nation. This was however my first visit in nearly nine years and it was a very different trip…

  • SXSW – Storytelling

    Austin welcomed the 20th SXSW Interactive event. That’s right twenty years. Despite the fact that digital moves at the speed of light, it has a way of creeping up on us. We’ve become so comfortable with it permeating nearly every corner of our lives we hardly notice when it does.…

  • Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective

    It was over 90° in Chicago today. Climate change is making this incredible city more desirable with each passing year. But never mind that. Hot weather and the pop art king drew me to one of my favorite places on earth, The Art Institute of Chicago. I went with my…

  • Passion and the Digital Space: A Moment in Time

    There are over 133,000,000 blogs actively indexed by Technorati. Each day 900,000 posts are published to those blogs and they are read by 346,000,000 people worldwide. Well, maybe not all of those 900 million posts are read. Those numbers stagger the mind (see source here). But serious blogging is about…

  • Art, Journalism and Dialogue in the Internet Age

    As a technology optimist I am almost always in favor of pushing the art  and science of the web further. As we know the current period is hyper-focused on Social Media. We hear a lot of discussion about the new era of personal journalism. The news is now frequently reported…

  • Appreciation: The Art Institute of Chicago

    I first visited the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960’s as a young boy. I ascended the great staircase and entered the Impressionism gallery and was absolutely blown away. Instantly I was transformed into a hardcore museum goer for all time. I’ve done a rough calculation and believe…

  • The Modern Wing Takes Flight

    The completion of the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago adds an additional 264,000 square feet of gallery space to this already impressive museum. It’s now the second largest in the country, trailing only The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had the good fortune of being…

  • Adrew Wyeth – Simple yet Complicated Modern American Painter is Dead at 91

    We have all seen dozens of images from the three generation of Wyeth painters. The Elder, N.C. Wyeth, helped shape my childhood memories with his realistic illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Treasure Island and others. As I grew older Andrew took center stage for me and he pushed his…

  • House at Dusk: A Study

    Only the top floor of the stone apartment building is revealed in Hopper’s House at Dusk. Our eye traverses past each window and quickly we notice a woman, alone of course, sitting on a bright red chair looking down. Perhaps she is reading a book or stroking a newly acquired…

  • Google in the Classroom – What if…?

    I have always loved the way Google transforms their logo to draw attention to key dates or milestones. You can see a previous post on this topic here. Underway now is Doodle 4 Google. School kids from kindergarten through high school have been invited to create their own Google logo…

  • Edward Hopper – Sunlight on the Side of a House

    It was gray today with periods of showers. Perfect for spending time in the Art Institute of Chicago viewing an exhibition of Edward Hopper’s works. Hopper is a mild obsession of mine. But you have to understand that mild for me is probably equal to an off the charts extreme…

  • Video Self-Portrait From SFMOMA

    I had an extra hour this week between sessions while attending a board of advisors meeting in San Francisco, so I walked two blocks to the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). I really love this structure and was here while it was under construction, then came back a couple of times after…