Art Here and Now
Daring creativity happening now around the world
Featured
Categories: Drawing and Illustration, Featured, Graffiti, India, Installation Art, Manga & Comics, Multimedia, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, TextilesComments Off

At this Ted Talk, Ravin Agrawai presents an overview of 10 upcoming contemporary Indian artists. Below is the talk, and more in depth information about each artist.

More about the artists

Bharti Kher at Hauser & Wirth
Alwar Balasubramaniam
Chitra Ganesh
Excerpt from Rabbithole

Jitish Kallat
Perspectives on contemporary art, interview with The Economist

N.S. Harsha
Dhruvi Acharya
Raqib Shah
A group show including the [...]

Categories: Architecture, Design, Drawing and Illustration, Featured, Installation Art, Painting, United StatesComments Off

City Hostel, in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, features 54 rooms, each designed and decorated by 47 Seattle artists. The hostel also features a 20 seat movie theatre, with frequent art events, screenings and openings. In 2008, City Hostel was voted the top hostel in the United States by Hostelworld.com.
Artists were asked to [...]

Categories: Biography, Featured, Fiction, Germany, Non-fiction, United States, War & CombatComments Off

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse Five as his own science fiction take on his experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II. Letters of Note prints his letters home after being released from his German camp, Schlachthof Fünf – Slaughterhouse Five.
In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private [...]

Categories: Art Life, Dance, Featured, Music & Sounds, Performance Art, Technology, The World, United States | 1 Comment

Musicians, filmmakers and performing artists all invest a lot of time and money into writing, rehearsal, design, and sometimes character development and technology innovation. This investment can include hard costs and the time of dozens, or even hundreds, of people. For musicians and filmmakers, the fruits of their investment live on. The [...]

Categories: Drawing and Illustration, Featured, Food and Agriculture, Japan, Painting | 1 Comment

Back in 1993, people of Inakadate in northern Japan began planting four types of rice in patterns, which when mature, would form huge images when viewed from above.
Here’s a timelapse of several of the paintings growing into place.

Farmers use computer-aided plotting to design images and determine where the different varieties of rice should [...]

Categories: Featured, Haiti, PhotographyComments Off

San Francisco Bay Area photographer Lane Hartwell gathered photographers to publish a special magazine titled Onè Respe to benefit Haiti. The images celebrate life in Haiti, all taken before the earthquake. Other participating photographers include Mary Ellen Mark, Chet Gordon and Peter Pereira. The magazine was printed through HP’s MagCloud service. [...]

Categories: Conceptual Art, Controversy, Featured, Galleries, Installation Art, Multidiscipline, Museums, Performance Art, PhilosophyComments Off

I’ve had friends who collected Star Wars toys and kept them in the original packaging to protect their value. This certainly protects the monetary value, but doesn’t it deprive you of getting everything out of that toy it was created for? If you want to spark your imagination, have a fun afternoon, and [...]

Categories: Art Life, Conceptual Art, Featured, Installation Art, Multidiscipline, Performance ArtComments Off

Conceptual Art relies on ideas (concepts) and audience participation for it’s effectiveness, where many other kinds of art rely more on the object, and the skill the artist used to create it.
The New York Times asks Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark?
…conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes [...]

Categories: Drawing and Illustration, Featured, Painting, TechnologyComments Off

For about a year now, as many stories have covered, painter David Hockney’s new medium is the Brushes application on his iPhone. He’s had a gallery show with this work, with more scheduled. He is certainly not the first. For painters he has this advice: use your thumb, not your index finger.
The [...]

Categories: Controversy, Environmentalism, Featured, Government, Multidiscipline, Performance, Resources, Science, Technology, The WorldComments Off

This is a post for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change.
A few years ago, I wrote a post for Blog Action Day presenting ideas for creating art in more environmentally friendly ways – Making Art Without Unmaking the Environment. Art supplies and other byproducts of our work is notoriously toxic. Just like businesses [...]

Categories: Animation, Featured, Hungary, Israel, Performance, UkraineComments Off

In live sand animation, sand is lit from underneath using a lightbox and manipulated by an artist in real time to create images. This performance can be projected for a live audience or filmed.
Many commercials have been popping up lately which use sand animation. Who are these artists? There are four well-known [...]

Categories: Economics, Featured, Government, Italy, Painting, Public Art, Sculpture, SocietyComments Off

In these recently uncovered fake letters, imagined to have come from the archives of the fake University of Italy School of the Arts at Florence (UISAF), the Minister of Medici Bank, Francesco Sassetti, pleads with the head of the Medici Family and defacto ruler of the Florentine Republic, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to stop spending the [...]

Categories: Cinema, Dance, Featured, Music & Sounds, Short Films, Theatre, United StatesComments Off

In all the news reports of record-breaking crowds gathering to recreate Thriller’s signature dance sequence from beginning to end, I’ve heard no mention of Michael Peters, who choreographed Thriller with Michael Jackson.
Michael Peters was an award winning choreographer, winning Tonys and Emmys for his work, including choreography for Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, [...]

Categories: Art Life, Big Business, Controversy, Economics, Featured, Government, Philosophy, Society, The WorldComments Off

Richard Florida’s latest book, Who’s Your City?, has a lot of interesting ideas. It is a continuation of his work which started with the often quoted, celebrated and vilified Rise of the Creative Class.
In essence, the original book argues that economic greatness in any given place depends on the place’s ability to attract creative [...]

Categories: Art Life, Artforms, Big Business, Cinema, Dance, Drawing and Illustration, Featured, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Television, The Press, TheatreComments Off

I’ve noticed for quite some time that most media web sites and newspapers do not have an Arts section. The closest you find is Entertainment. The meaning of these two is of course very different, not because art can’t be entertaining, it can be. But art often has more purpose to it [...]