Brentwood Arts Exchange is currently showcasing FREEDOM: Selected Works From The Uhuru Quilters Guild, a group exhibition, featuring the works of artists Renee Anderson, Melba Brown, Phyllis Fagan, Cheryl Deene Hurd, Angela Lanier, Maxine Morgan, Tametha Morrow, Betty Phillips, Adrienne Randall, Sandra Schmidt, and Rose Swain. "Uhuru" means "freedom" in Swahili.

Ecologists speak of biological redundancy as natural engineering to protect systems. Any edge is, in effect, a pool of many small variations on biological functions in case any species in the core habitat is threatened or weakened. These subtle complexities reinforce ecotones. That wider impact from the periphery to the heart is the rub. In our age of climate change, unless we intervene in fragmentation, nothing will be left to mitigate the disaster of maximum warming.

This year’s VukovART street art festival in Vukova, Croatia, featured a number of international street artists, including Boa Mistura from Spain, BustArt from Switzerland, Jana Brike from Latvia, Juandres Vera from Mexico, Mr Woodland from Germany, Victor Splash from Russia, Artez from Serbia, Kerim Mušanović from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Šumski from Croatia, and Marion Ruthardt from Germany.

In the 1940s, a Chicago heiress turned the notion of a dollhouse on its head. Tapping into the power and intimacy of miniature dwellings, Frances Glessner Lee constructed 18 tiny scenes of violent death set in rooming houses, rustic cabins, garages, attics—even a nursery. Lee’s crime scene dioramas may be a trifle outdated, but time has not robbed them of any of their power.

The Fricks had the Fragonard Room rebuilt in the early 20^th century to complement the artist’s Progress of Love series. Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) was a prolific French painter of the late Rococo period who painted these works for the music pavilion on Madame du Barry’s property (du Barry was the last mistress of Louis XV). Visitors will now have the rare treat of enjoying the collection in its entirety, even if the former ambience is absent.

In recent years, Lawson has admitted to creating environments for the work itself, in order to allow for the reflection “of both looking and being looked at” she desires from her audience. Her portraits are framed in mirrored glass, so that standing at a certain angle in front of a portrait one confronts the self. Where holograms in the portraiture are embedded, does it detract or enhance the overall effect?  It’s hard to say.

Johnston’s songs have been covered by several hundred artists, including David Bowie and Tom Waits. The late Kurt Cobain mused that Daniel Johnston is the best songwriter in America. In 2006, his life was documented in the award-winning film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and his painted illustrations were exhibited in the Whitney biennial. Johnston had a lifetime battle with mental illness, and medication prescribed for this condition damaged his liver requiring multiple hospitalizations. He died from a heart attack in his sleep before the morning of September 11, 2019.

The airline industry was highly regulated until the late 1970s, when deregulation in the United States started a trend to liberalize air traffic around the world. Until then, ticket prices and the destinations an airline was allowed to serve were the main subjects of regulation. Airlines were regarded as important agents for economic growth as well as ambassadors of their home countries abroad, and regulation was to provide stable economic conditions for this promising new industry.

Director Don Millar gives us insights into the artist’s processes, particularly through the reminiscences of his daughter Lina Botero Zea, who was also an executive producer on the film.  At one point, she and a brother visit a storage space for their father’s works not visited since the 1960s.  The viewer shares their excitement as they roll out the sketches, reveling in Botero’s strokes of color and endless experimentation.

The great reverence that Mendoza has for the past (and an equal infatuation with the lurking shadow of the future) is omnipresent in his alla prima portraits, which pay tribute to his literary heroes. His combination of expressionism and neorealism embodies the era in which many of his subjects thrived. As a perpetual student of history, he draws a line from late modernism through post-contemporary art.