Frank Smigiel

Please consider signing this open letter regarding the shameful closing of the DePaul Art Museum openletter.earth/letter-oppos...

Isaiah Zagar made Philadelphia, and in turn the world, a more beautiful place to live. May his memory be a blessing.

dense text of art spaces in overlapping boxes with founding year and operating budget

Scanned this incredible 2018 artifact of Bay Area arts spaces/projects, made by Carrie Hott for The Lab. How many have since closed and how many new things could we add?

Thanks Sarah — it’s wild to spin such a catastrophic blow to the Bay Area arts community as some kind of win for downtown. Will CCA artist faculty be picked up by the new org? Will young artists still come to learn + dream & call the Bay home? How does this create new infrastructures for art?

"So if the violence of the deportations, and the crackdowns, and the cuts, and the raids, and the air strikes, haven’t been enough for you, let something so simple and evil as the daytime execution of a poet move you to action." Thank you, @literaryhub.bsky.social 💥

Exclusive: S.F. drag club Oasis saved with multimillion-dollar gift The LGBTQ cabaret and club was slated to shutter after New Year’s Eve, but will now continue, Oasis owner D’Arcy Drollinger confirmed, calling it “a Christmas miracle.”

Days before it was slated to close, Oasis gets a Christmas gift that will allow them to reopen in 2026.

D'Arcy Drollinger gave me the exclusive!

www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

image captures a moment in time with four men dressed as Santa Claus at the Santa Claus School in Albion, New York, by American photographer Diane Arbus in 1964.

Diane Arbus, Santas at the Santa Claus School, Albion, New York, 1964

A headshot of Lauren O'Neill-Butler

“I felt an urgency around protecting these stories that weren’t being told and wanting to make a more complete history," -Lauren O’Neill-Butler on her new essay collection, “The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America.” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/american-action-then-and-now

Harlow's still here Fifty years ago, Harlow was the queen of Philadelphia nightlife, Jack Kelly’s girlfriend, and the city's most famous transgender woman. Today, she’s ready to tell her story.

Getting to know this legend has been one of the greatest joys of my life and I'm so pleased to introduce you to her with this gorgeous feature from the Inquirer, where she speaks for the first time in over 30 years on her incredible journey
share.inquirer.com/XdfXr9

The Miracle In Bilbao (Published 1997)

In honor of Gehry, here’s a gift link to Herbert Muschamp’s memorable piece about the Guggenheim in Bilbao before it opened.

“Have you seen the light? Have you seen the future? Does it work? Does it play?”

De Profundis: Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s Stirring Letter on Suffering and Transcendence, Penned in Prison “I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me… There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”

Oscar Wilde died on this day in 1900. Hear Patti Smith read the stunning letter he penned in prison, where he was thrown for loving whom he loved and where he received the injury that resulted in the cerebral meningitis that killed him www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/07/p...

Thousands of rare American recordings — some 100 years old — go online for all to enjoy The project, which will include some 50,000 songs from private record collections, is a collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and the Dust-to-Digital Foundation.

Thousands of rare American recordings — some 100 years old — go online for all to enjoy

A collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and the nonprofit Dust-to-Digital Foundation

laist.com/news/arts-an...

Philadelphia Art Museum chief exec Sasha Suda has been dismissed While the reasons for Suda’s dismissal were not immediately clear, several events in the past months have pointed to internal dissent at the museum.

While the reasons for Suda’s dismissal were not immediately clear, several events in the past months have pointed to internal dissent at the museum.

Pierre Robert Has Died at the Age of 70 The terrible news is true.

Massive, sad news for Philly

“You’ll See, a Lot Will Happen When I Die.” Remembering Gary Indiana At the time of Gary Indiana’s death on October 23rd, 2024, the writer was at work on several new projects with both his current publishers, Semiotext(e) and Seven Stories. Here Hedi El Kholti of Se…

Publishers Hedi El Kholti and Dan Simon remember their friend Gary Indiana on the anniversary of his death: “I took Horse Crazy home with me and read it over the weekend, and I was amazed. It felt like a major personal discovery.”

The Story of Art + Water For fifteen years or so, I’d been kicking around the idea of resurrecting the artist-apprentice model that reigned in the art world for hundreds of...

Read this article about it by one of the founders of Art+Water, Dave Eggers.

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Fate of San Francisco's Brutalist Fountain in Question as New Documents Emerge | Artnet News New documents show the property developer pushing to demolition Armand Vaillancourt's sculpture is responsible for maintaining it.

“Documents reviewed by The Art Newspaper show that BXP, the property company leading the demolition effort and redevelopment of the Plaza, has largely been responsible for maintaining the Vaillancourt Fountain for almost 50 years.”

news.artnet.com/art-world/va...

Okwui Enwezor

Two very good essays on the selected writings of Okwui Enwezor, recently published by Duke University Press. One is by Oluremi C. Onabanjo:

4columns.org/onabanjo-olu...

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Meet Hyperallergic’s New Editor-in-Chief After 16 years in the role, I'm passing the torch to Hakim Bishara as I transition to the role of editor-at-large.

Over 16 years, Hyperallergic has been home to over 2,500 voices in independent art journalism. Now, it's time for a new Editor-in-Chief. Welcome, Hakim Bishara.

Beauford Delaney’s final self-portrait is a moving testament to his lifelong quest to accept his sexuality, especially when seen alongside his first portrait of James Baldwin. Free post; no paywall. Full essay here: garthgreenwell.substack.com/p/on-beaufor...

My nomination was approved! 🎉

In 2026—the 250th anniversary of his birth—Moses Williams, a master silhouette artist, will be honored with a PA historical marker.

For too long, only his enslaver, Charles Willson Peale, was remembered.

#MosesWilliams250 #TellTheFullStory

@vruss.bsky.social

Meet the Historians Documenting Every Object at the Smithsonian A group of citizen historians, alarmed by Donald Trump's targeting of Smithsonian museums, are on a mission to document their displays.

Trump’s promised review of Smithsonian exhibitions was too much for these historians. So they pushed back using good old-fashioned email lists. news.artnet.com/art-world/ci...

The University of the Arts’s archive will now live on at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania The collection, which might hold almost a million items, could've ended in a dumpster. But now, it will be HSP's largest and will cost an estimated $500,000 to catalog, conserve, and digitize.

The University of the Arts’s archive, which might hold almost a million items, could've ended in a dumpster.

But now it will now live on at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

a screenshot of a 1986 photo of a mostly white loft, with a pillow filled white sofa on the left, and a dark metal looking screen behind it, and a coffee table shaped like africa in front of it, and zebra printed rugs on the floor in the foreground, and behind a bent plywood breuer armchair, a set of five christo lithographs and a black and white keith haring painting hang on the white wall. some distinctive floor lamps I wish I'd looked into more are in the middle right. from ny magazine 1986, designer willi smith's loft, designed with rosemary peck

I had to track down this 1986 photo of designer Willi Smith's Lispenard St loft from NY Mag because it showed his friends' art: Christo & Jeanne Claude's prints, the painting Keith Haring made for him for New Years, and Dan Friedman's Africa-shaped coffee table greg.org/archive/2025...

Face Time: Rick and Megan Prelinger The archivists and researchers look backward — and forward — in a city where exchange and flow are bedrock

Beautiful profile on Prelinger Library and its founders by @eddiekimx.bsky.social in GazetteerSF: sf.gazetteer.co/face-time-ri...

Removing the Vaillancourt Fountain will destroy more than an epic skate spot OPINION: Armand Vaillancourt’s Brutalist fountain has always provoked debate. To destroy it, however, would be to obliterate the last truly insurgent modernist voice left in the Embarcadero.

Ted Barrow: “Vaillancourt’s fountain blasts with Brutalist vim — massive concrete tubes jutting upward, like a kinetic portrait of the city itself in rushing water and bas-relief abstraction.”

www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

Rosalyn Drexler, Artistic Whirlwind Who Defied Categories, Dies at 98

The first graf in this obit is the sort of life I aspire to:
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/b...

Image from around 1970 of the fountain flowing.

Tomato pink background with black outlined rectangles and black and blue text within: In skate videos and magazines of the late eighties and early nineties, the fountain looked otherworldly—an enigmatic relic from some radical civilization. That is what it was! What city but San Francisco could have built something so bold? Ted Barrow, Vaillancourt Fountain

In “Vaillancourt Fountain,” skateboarder and art historian Ted Barrow situates everyone’s favorite fountain, currently under threat of redevelopment, on the past and future Embarcadero.

To read SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF A FOUNTAIN, order Issue Two here: sfrw.square.site/product/issu...

“The First Homosexuals” Is a Dazzlingly Overwhelming Chronicle of Queerness in Art The curators wanted visitors to understand the vast scale of the contributions of queer and trans artists that art history has overlooked.

wrote about the exhibit here. observer.com/2025/06/art-...

RUPTURE Performance Series & Workshops: DIASPORADICA - Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture presents the world premiere of DIASPORADICA, a three-hour immersive performance by the experimental collective RUPTURE.

RUPTURE is here. fortmason.org/event/rupture/