Lifestyle

Sambas and Stone Island may be ubiquitous at this point, but in England during the 1970s till the 1990s, it was a symbol of camaraderie for many and a calling card to get in a brawl for the most extreme. Casual Culture, sometimes referred to as Terrace Culture, was one of the first and perhaps most iconic football-fashion movements and the theme of a new exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. As British clubs, such as Liverpool F.C. and Nottingham Forest F.C., began their European success in the late ’70s, many supporter groups came home from away fixtures with sneakers and fits that were months away from appearing in any local shops. “You had youths who didn’t want to identify themselves as particularly from one team,” said Grant Fleming, an East Londoner who was a part of the...

While Art is typically created through a singular voice, history has provided rare glimpses of artist duos — from Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Anni and Josef Albers, to DABSMYLA, along with Claire Tabouret and Nathan Thelen. Speaking on the latter couple, the French and American duo are showcasing a joint body of work as part of FOG Design+Art fair that opened today in San Francisco. The new artwork centers around Pamela Colman Smith, a 20th Century artist, writer and occultist best known for her illustrations on the Rider-Waite tarot deck from 1909. Tabouret and Thelen were recently inspired by Smith’s work as they created wall frescoes in their newly renovated home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. The eponymously titled exhibition carries a similar mysticism as Thelen prese...

Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota is facing criticism over the firing of a professor who had shown an illustration of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class. As first reported by The New York Times, Dr. Erika López Prater had repeatedly warned her students in the syllabus that they may opt out of seeing images of holy figures, such as a Medieval artwork of the Prophet Muhammad, as it is considered in some Muslim circles to be un-Islamic. “The prophet himself was aware that if people saw his face portrayed by people, they would soon start worshiping him,” a scholar told CNN. “So he himself spoke against such images, saying ‘I’m just a man.’” One student, Aram Wedatalla, who also serves as the president of Hamline’s Muslim student association took offense to the lesson and co...

“You start to think in geometric shapes as building blocks again.” Music is a big part of your work, be it through a band poster or record sleeve. What music are you most into? I think it all started with ’80s and ’90s hip hop for me, and through that I became very interested in sampling and what the sampling sources were for those records. So I learned a lot about funk, soul, disco, jazz etc. — because I wanted to create tracks myself. And actually that whole approach made me interested in a lot more kinds of music, mostly from the sixties. So I guess my taste would be very eclectic, although I tend to go for a bit more ‘beefy’ music than something ethereal. At the studio, I play a lot of ’90s hip hop, electro, house, punk and psychedelic music. From time-to-time, I still make music mysel...

To accompany her first monograph, Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu worked with Phaidon and Artspace to release a limited-edition print entitled WaterSpirit washed Pelican, 2022. For those unfamiliar to her work, Mutu approaches image-making like an archaeologist, by mining found objects and art history in an attempt to probe questions of identity and representation, as well as ecology, politics and more. In the past, this process has translated into semi-mythological artwork that is charged with unorthodox materials, such as tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers and sand. “Working with older prints and found materials is a kind of archaeography,” said the artist in a statement, “a re-discovery and re-naming of an image. It’s my way to conjure up something from the past that can return to t...

Katherine Bernhardt‘s work can be dizzying, fascinating, colorful and at-times non-sensical — all at the same time. Her subject matter, equally, has no boundaries — Crocs, Pikachu, mushrooms, ET and floating Swoosh’s. For her latest show, the St. Louis-based artist chooses to profile America’s favorite rebel, Bart Simpson. Housed at Canada gallery in New York, I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you? is understandably humorous on first glance, as many of the paintings depict Bart as he moons the viewer. Beyond the risqué scenes shown, however, Bernhardt opens an interesting dialogue into color and semiotics — blending high and low culture to comment on the many archetypes in American pop culture. Despite always getting into trouble, “Bart is a good guy,” wrote a release by the gallery, “loy...