At Heaven’s Door: Donald Blumberg Photographs
Out of the darkness they come, like Orpheus blinking into the light, or that mob of dead souls called up by Odysseus to drink from a puddle of blood. The…
Author Stephen V. Kobasa
Stephen V. Kobasa
Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a writer, curator, and political activist. A previous contributor to Big, Red, & Shiny, he has also been published in Art New England, the New Haven Independent, Artes Magazine, the Hartford Advocate, and the Catholic Worker.
Inventing a Pond
Thoreau heard trains in Walden. There is the recorded sound of one in the exhibition Walden, revisited, on view through April 26 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, but…
Louise Menzies: Time to Think Like a Mountain
After the flood, imagine letters scattered by their floating. This is how the past returns to us, in fragments of single pages pulled free of their bindings, or as newspaper…
Fictional Horrors: A Reflection on Art, Torture, and Hypocrisy
Torture is still in the air. Only two months ago, United States Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that no further action would be taken to prosecute anyone for the deaths…
Painting with Ashes
Charcoal is made by burning, so an artist might use slivers of charred ruins to draw with. In the midst of all the color, it is the prominence of this…
FILM REVIEW: RESTREPO
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA This is the scene that tells everything. The soldier is visible only from the chest down, wearing shorts, sneakers, and no socks. He is firing an…
PETER WAITE @ JOHN SLADE ELY HOUSE
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA When asked his opinion of Western civilization, Gandhi famously replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Peter Waite¹s sculptures are evidence of it…
BEARING WITNESS: STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINES @ WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Do you remember Franz Kafka’s drawing machine? It is the executioner’s device of the story In the Penal Colony, where it punctures the text of the…
PHIL LIQUE @ ARTSPACE
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA War’s dogs are out and about. We should know this. A thousand Americans dead in Afghanistan, and the number of slaughtered civilians only an underestimated approximation.…
WILLIAM LAMSON @ ARTSPACE
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Comedy refuses mortality. That is Buster Keaton’s lesson, and why, I think, he is a greater artist than Charlie Chaplin. There is something too elaborately contrived…
EPIPHANIES ALONG COMMERCIAL STREET @ PROVINCETOWN
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA In Provincetown, there is a great deal of what no longer is. Who sits in the poet Stanley Kunitz’s garden now, or writes in Norman Mailer’s…
TUFTE @ ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM
TUFTE @ ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM By Stephen Vincent Kobasa There is always a vanity to the making of art, although there is a difference between vanity of intention and…
SOL LEWITT @ MASS MOCA (LEWITT AGAIN: DRAWING CONCLUSIONS)
SOL LEWITT @ MASS MOCA (LEWITT AGAIN: DRAWING CONCLUSIONS) By Stephen V. Kobasa Why not draw a line that does not end? One could be made by extending the instructions…
SOL LEWITT @ MASSMOCA
SOL LEWITT @ MASSMOCA By Stephen V. Kobasa Into the maze – the shifting from walled in to walled up to walled out, moving through the bands of color as if…
NATHAN LEWIS @ SETON ART GALLERY
NATHAN LEWIS @ SETON ART GALLERY By Stephen V. Kobasa What if there was painting that mattered? There is an unequivocal answer to this question in the survey of work…
SAVING WORDS: CORITA KENT @ BRESLIN FINE ARTS
By STEPHEN V. KOBASA Print this article These were the flash cards for resistance. Corita Kent began as an artist in a Roman Catholic religious order, until her outrageous reverence…