Witness Allen Ginsberg's Intimate Chronicle of the Beat Generation in Muses & Self @ Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles

Arthur Miller, William H. Gass, Hotel Royal Elevator, Copenhagen, November 1985 ©Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg is an exhibition of Ginsberg's personal photographs balances our understanding of the public, outspoken poet and most prominent figure of the Beat Generation at Fahey/Klein Gallery. At his core, Allen Ginsberg was a witness and chronicler of the world; his profound admiration for the beauty of the vernacular, intense observation, and celebration of the present moment guided his photography and poetry. The photographs included in this exhibition are joyful, often tender, sometimes profound while at other times humorous—and capture Ginsberg’s numerous meaningful relationships.

Muses & Self is on view through September 23 @ Fahey/Klein, 148 N La Brea, Los Angeles

Exhibition Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature @ Van Gogh Museum In Amsterdam

Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature demonstrates the influence of Van Gogh on Hockney’s work, exploring both artists’ fascination with nature, their use of bright, contrasting colors and their experimentation with perspective. This exhibition is the first extensive monographic Hockney exhibition to be organised in the Netherlands. The exhibition features works representing all of the techniques in his oeuvre. None of the works have been on display in the Netherlands before. Hockney – Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature will be on view through May 6 at the Van Gogh Museum 1070 AJ, Amsterdam. photographs courtesy of Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam)

Conversations with David Hockney

Sparky, illuminating and entertaining – a decade’s worth of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford that explore via anecdote, reflection, passion and humour the very nature of creativity.David Hockney is possibly the world’s most popular living painter, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. Here are the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. How does drawing make one ‘see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still’, as Hockney suggests? What significance do different media – from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad – have for the way we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? How have changes in technology affected the way artists depict the world? A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney is out now on Thames & Hudson.

[UPCOMING] David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers

David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers: Drawings on iPhones and iPads will be on view at the Royal Ontario Museum this October. "The Institute for Contemporary Culture presents the North American debut of this cutting-edge exhibition, which reveals David Hockney’s extraordinary use of this novel new artistic medium and its impact on shaping visual culture today. Hockney is one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, and Fresh Flowers is his first major show in Canada in over two decades. The exhibition features approximately 200 iPhone and iPad drawings displayed on 20 iPod Touches and 20 iPads." On view October 8 until January 1, 2012.

[BOOKS] Rebels in Paradise

"Los Angeles, 1960: There was no modern art museum and there were few galleries, which is exactly what a number of daring young artists liked about it, among them Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which in turn inspired the city. Today Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, around one hundred galleries, and thousands of artists. Here, at last, is the book that tells the saga of how the scene came into being, why a prevailing Los Angeles permissiveness, 1960s-style, spawned countless innovations, including Andy Warhol's first exhibition, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's mind-bending architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, even the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Doors, and other purveyors of a California style. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool." You can purchase the book here. 

The Truth is Not in the Mirror

Michael Corridore, Untitled 13, from the Angry Black Snake series, Courtesy of a New York Collector

Photography as a medium has always been actively concerned with describing identity. While a portrait is typically an artistic representation of a person where verisimilitude is the goal, here the inquiry is questioned and expanded. Rather than employing a camera to create an objective document, the artists in this exhibition are often involved in constructing narrative sequences that pose questions with open-ended outcomes. As the title, The Truth is Not in the Mirror... suggests, photography has the power to imply, construct, and/or deny a narrative. Many of the photographers are contemporary storytellers and, in this sense, their work reflects facets of our ever-changing precepts about family, identity, truth and fiction.  Artists include, in summary,  Michael Corridore, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Andy Freeberg, Lee Friedlander, David Hockney, Graham Miller, Martin Parr, The Sartorialist, Larry Sultan and Mickalene Thomas. The Truth is Not in the Mirror, Photography and a Constructed Identity is on view at the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin until May 22, 2011. www.marquette.edu/haggerty