Adrian Wiszniewski: A New Heaven and a New Earth
By Essay Issue 72
ON MAY 29, 1996, Glasgow City Council opened its new Gallery of Modern Art in the Royal Exchange Building. At a cost of almost 10 million pounds, the renovation transformed what had once been Glasgow’s great temple of commerce into a shrine to modern art. The Exchange Building stands on Queen Street, long ago a…
Read MoreA Spade is Not a Spade: The Art of Fabian Debora and the Mystery of Los Angeles
By Essay Issue 71
THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…
Read More111th Street Jesus: The Art and Faith of Muralist Kent Twitchell
By Essay Issue 82
KENT TWITCHELL has painted Jesus on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles four times. One of those Jesuses (until it was whitewashed recently by a new property owner) was on the exterior of a liquor store at Vermont Avenue and 111th Street, in a gang-patrolled part of south Los Angeles known by city homicide detectives…
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