The point of creating forms is to make an idea communicable or to make that idea persistent enough to use, continuously or repeatedly, over time. The use of the form is what gives it meaning. "Usage" includes intentionally experiencing the form whenever that is relevant to a need or desire. Naturally, issues such as which form is "the right one" for the usage are basic here. But what makes a form "right", due to its availability and effectiveness, is the distinctive way that

With generative digital imaging, the panic is on about photography. That doesn't need to happen.

Richmond Art Center’s 2026 Art of the African Diaspora exhibit. By definition, a diaspora involves movement across space and time. Also, by definition, an event about the art of a diaspora involves people bringing culture across space and time. And in the Richmond Arts Center’s annual event – titled Art of the African Diaspora  – the criteria for participating makes identity a prerequisite consideration of what will appear in the diasporic pathways. But none of the above pred

A Critique of the Art of Identity Today, 2026 in California, African American visual artists are no longer strangers to galleries or large audiences. But this is true partly because it is 2026, and we have the internet and smartphones as distribution channels for self-publishing. It means that images can "premiere" everywhere all at once without gatekeepers. So as part of normal visual culture, the level of familiarity with whatever styles from whatever sources is exponential

How a commercial release of a documentary about a historical investigation ruptured the photojournalism community. https://malcolm-ryder.medium.com/shoot-the-messenger-475f18818cee Given the unholy combination of Social Media and AI as top corrosives of truth, it's important to remember that people are more of a threat than either of those. My analysis of the controversy over the documentary The Stringer is a long-form piece in my growing collection of articles about visual

Pre-Screening Photography There are many ways in which history and philosophy mythologize each other. But one overt pattern is that a philosophy acts as a filter of historical pursuit, while history makes arguments about what value a given philosophy has. In art this dynamic most often appears as a pairing of an artist’s motivation to change how to work, with a subsequent discovery of how a change influences what we recognize as being art. Artists are credited with innovation

Thinkers about photography sometimes work on the problem of whether a photograph is experienced in the way it was intended by the image maker. In some contexts, a mismatch is deemed a failure, but in others it is simply another dimension of experience in communications. The image may have what we often call "its own life" independently of the imagist, with no presumed value judgement of being good or bad. But implicit in viewing is that there will be a reaction to what is see

Imagination is an operational mental ability. We know that mental functions rely on other deeper factors, mainly an intact biological organization. But imagination isn’t like hunger; it is like breathing. In practice, the ability to imagine has no essential requirement other than to pretend -- to pretend that something IS, CAN BE, DOES or CAN DO.  It carries no requirement for proving feasibility or plausibility. And outside of some need to influence a relationship between se

Six Takeaways from a Sextet Gray Loft Gallery  stands out usually due to the artistry of its top-tier show layouts One navigates a Gray Loft show multiple times because of the many conversations owner Jan Watten creates among the works on display. But for those who move quickly this week (Saturday 11/8 ) , the gallery features an important departure: a show both chosen and hung by the six participating artists themselves. This is a group of women who have been working togethe

Most of the time, there is a practical reason why cameras would be preferrable to a pencil or a computer: creating a visual record. Records exceed the notion of "documents" in that a record is always attached to a concern about something specific, not just a view of it. And it is that concern that feels disrespected by the notion that a visualization of some event or condition thought to be relevant might not be reliable as a source of their real-world facts. We go through t

Artificial Intelligence works on some things that are so fundamental to creating information artifacts that in some ways it represents the only thing other than the internet that matured the true importance of digital computing. Anything that an electron can provoke can be presented through the brute effectiveness of an on/off switch, and computers can manage that at microscopic levels at the speed of light. Visualization, then, is simply a matter of how hard the computer can

Six separate takes on a controversial new film — not from a film critic but from a photographer who considers various aspects of how we view pictures and the medium. The new documentary The Stringer, released Nov. 28 on Netflix, refutes more than 50 years of celebrating Nick Út’s authorship of the iconic “ Napalm Girl ”  photograph from the coverage of the Vietnam War. Since the film saw its first public showing at Sundance, passions pro and con have been running very high ab

SF MOMA Fall 2025 Source: https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/fortuna-and-the-immortality-garden-machine/ The word conjure   neatly accounts for how a lot of art works. But what is it? I’m confident enough in my education to say that this AI-generated summary of “conjure” stands well for what I mean: To conjure means to produce or create something as if by magic, or to evoke a memory or image. The word's etymology traces back to the Latin verb coniūrāre, meaning "to swear toget

Pete’s Story Say the name “Escovedo” in Oakland, and right away there’s a chance that music starts playing in your head. It features beats that ruled before hip hop, and when it first came to Oakland it lived as well outdoors as in a club or on the road. Between today and its arrival in the 1920s and 30s, evolving from the confluence of Black and Mexican musicians, Latin Jazz gained and held prominence in its own social milieu and in the larger public sphere. But one of its m

The Gray Loft Annual Color Show, 2025 Some colors pop, some shout. Purple? Purple wells up. Perhaps quickly like a stain, or slowly like a bloom pushing its way through to the front of the line. But quietly. Or, it’s already there in plain sight, but like high heat on a kettle’s skin. If it touches you, it makes an impression fierce enough to make just the memory of it almost as strong as touching it again. Or, sometimes purple is smothering, wrapping your mind like velvet. I

At Gray Loft Gallery, Oakland What’s In A Name? The title of this show, Beyond the Frame, immediately gets us asking questions. Is the frame physical, or metaphorical? Actual or virtual? Is the idea about what is new, outside of the familiar? Or what is presented outside of what is conventionally allowed? A Celebration of Large-Scale Art, the subtitle for the show, then helps out: size matters . Now we know that what we’re looking for is an experience that size creates, whic

Photographer Steve Molnar knows quite a bit about places that most people wouldn't call their usual habitat. But through his pictures, having seen what he shows, we carry away a sense of being captured by the places just as he was. Molnar is known for work that is journalistic, following his instincts and concerns for people who live in some remote places without much attention except from each other. But this go around, his sixth at San Francisco’s 60SIX , he offers a medita

By any reasonable measures, Bill Weber is one of the Bay Area’s most established artists, celebrated repeatedly over many years and phases of work. His astonishing family history, spanning Germany, Missouri, and California, parks the listener in locales as diverse as Hearst Castle and Brentwood; and it weaves among people with names like Peralta, Dali, and Benny Goodman. At the drop of a hat, he’s opening one of many albums of memorabilia, unreeling the story. Most well-known

Judson King Smith at Transmission Gallery August 1 through September 14   I got to Judson King Smith’s current show the day before  his planned public reception. Transmission Gallery’s handout flyer accompanying the exhibit had to substitute for the artist not being there with me, but it went like a guided missile to the thing that should aid me the most: Smith’s central idea. Slightly reworded: all that we know about ourselves occupies just a moment in the passing of time.  

Gray Loft Gallery, August 2024 (Note: see the terrific thumbnail gallery of artworks in this show at grayloftgallery.com while reading this review…) A real tree person doesn’t just see trees; and not even “the tree ”…   For a real tree person, it’s always my tree. But when I show someone else my  tree, there’s always a chance that they just aren’t going to “get it”. What’s worse, the one thing all of us tree people begrudgingly know is that trees can do without us, yet we ca