Arts Roundup: Harvard Shows Iranian Murals, Mohammed Ali is Questioned for Being a Muslim Artist and Richard Serra is Jewish!
May 25th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
In Tehran studying Farsi, Harvard student Fotini Christia noticed that pedestrians ignored the numerous murals “filled with religious symbolism” througout the city depicting Grand Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, memorials to the Iran-Iraq war’s martyrs and anti-Israel and -American themes. Her photographic documentation of the murals are on view at Harvard.
[Harvard U. Gazette]
Graffiti artist Mohammed Ali posts on absurd attempts to stop his (legal) graffiti art on peace, because the letters were Arabic.
[aerosolarabic]
“Dear Jesus,” starts Didymus, “A lot of what passes for religious art tries my faith.” On not finding “representations of people whose humanity I share.”
[Notes from Didymus]
Reform Judaism recommends Nadler’s Rembrandt’s Jews for summer reading, without any indication why a four-year-old book is so timely now. (I touch on the subject in Jacob van Ruisdael Is Not Jewish.)
[Reform Judaism]
Richard Serra, whose work (above) will appear in Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years at MoMA, speaks of his Jewish mother in this Time story and this podcast from PRI Studio 360 (also here). If this is news to you that Serra is Jewish, consider of his 326,000 hits on Google, only 26,500 mention the work Jewish, and the overwhelming majority of those mentions are not about Serra. Someone add the word Jew to Wikipedia quick!
[…] Serra, a Jewish sculptor, talked to Rose last night about a number of things, including a discussion about interior vs. exterior space in his works, and how they work better inside (where the exterior space grounds them), rather than outside in a field where they’d get lost. A 40 year retrospective of Serra’s work is at MoMA. […]