ARTES MAGAZINE

So Santa Claus is standing there, going “Ho, ho, ho,” a big smile on his face, hands patting his round, red belly, and then all of a sudden he lets loose with a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Your eyes widen, your jaw drops. After you recover from the shock, the [...]

In 1697, William Congreve penned these lines: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” Seems like nothing has changed in over three centuries, at least based on what is going on up at Hartford TheaterWorks, where a Woman (yes, it’s capitalized) takes a young playwright in [...]

The idea of contemporary India, and a quintessential one at that—a conglomerate of many Indias, with its fluid social fabric and multitudes of people—is the paradox that confronts the photo-artist, JJ Valaya, an accomplished designer and pioneering fashion guru. Through his viewfinder, Valaya captures the fascinating multiplicity of a burgeoning city where he has lived [...]

When I was about 12 years old looking through some Playboy magazines purloined from my father’s closet, I studied imagery that resembled some of the postmodern feminist works found in the Ringling Museum exhibition Beyond Bling: Voices of Hip-Hop in Art. What submerged in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s during hippie years, feminist years, and [...]

In my small New England city, the post office was a down-scaled, classically-inspired structure of harmonious proportions, designed to serve as a symbolic link to a democratic ideal, filled with promise, several hundred miles south, in L’Enfant’s capital city of Washington, D.C.. For many years, when I was a young stamp collector, I would patiently [...]

The Mint Museum welcomed a record-breaking 17,000 visitors to its new facility in uptown Charlotte during its grand opening weekend on 1-3 October, 2010. The debut of the Mint Museum Uptown was accompanied by a 24-Hour Grand Opening celebration, featuring free admission, live entertainment, and art activities for all who attended. Designed by the architectural [...]

Contemporary art is the art of our times. Although time can seem linear, exacting and in some ways predictable, life today can nevertheless feel chaotic and filled with contradictory agendas. Health issues, economic woes, war and global warming seem to headline the news constantly. Artists, sensitive to their surroundings, perceive these sudden shifts as critical [...]

As more people select high-rise living in cities across the country, they are facing the tremendous challenge of how to get lighting where they want it, when the construction is primarily concrete. Often they are given a few junction boxes from which to draw power for their lighting needs. Sometimes they don’t even have that. [...]

Our California-based lighting expert explains a remodeling project in dramatic before/after images that is both earth friendly and cost effective People are constantly being hit over the head with green design. In these hard economic times homeowners are not moving into the next bigger house but are instead staying put and investing their hard-earned…if somewhat deflated…equity [...]

As the movers and shakers of the handmade rug industry, the interior design trade plays a pivotal role in shaping the end consumers’ purchasing decisions. After focusing on the greenness of the handweaving process from the manufacturers’ standpoint (See “Special Green Report—Handmade Rugs—The Original Green Floor Coverings,” ARTES (Oct. 13, 2009), this article takes a [...]