jasmindarznik.com

What Are We Doing Here?

“Obsessed with Light” Resurrects a Forgotten Revolutionary There are artists who disappear so completely from cultural memory that their rediscovery feels like archaeology—not just of their work, but of entire ways of seeing the world.

Cunningham and Asawa in Guerneville, CA, 1970 by Xavier Lanier Two Women, Separated by 43 Years, Bound by the Same Question: How Do You Make Art from the Life You Have?

Dressed up in Persian garb with my grandmother Aziz in the 1980s Every March when I was growing up, my grandmother grew sprouts for the Persian New Year, and a feeling of renewal would fall over the house.

Born in a small town in 1907, a flame-haired teenaged Gladys Parker hightailed it to New York City to study illustration in the 1920s.

“One night, a jazz-crazy sixteen year-old San Francisco girl put a pistol to her sleeping mother’s head. . .”

Originally published in Messy Nessy Chic In 1934, a young woman stepped off the train in Los Angeles’ Union Station.

Anne Brigman was a pioneer who made no distinction between her artistic practice and her quest for freedom.

Once upon a time, San Francisco had its own Harlem, and this Harlem had a queen.

He was a painter, she was a photographer.

A detail from Esther Bruton’s Murals in the Fairmont Hotel’s Cirque Room Hiding in plain sight all over Northern California, the Bruton sisters must be one of the art world’s best-kept secrets of the last century.

Estrellita in a family photograph, Amy Selwyn She was feted atop the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

Anne Brigman’s portrait of Isadora Duncan “I wanted to go and be free.”

Recently I had a chance to talk with Anya Groner about The Bohemians.

Quick—what’s your image of a flapper?

The “Kimono Gal” of the 1920s “That year, every metropolitan city, from Paris to London, was caught in an Orientalist fever called Japonisme.”

A force—there’s just no other way to describe her.

If ever a city and a man were made for each other, it was San Francisco and Sadakichi Hartmann.

When he was a San Franciscan, Maynard Dixon strode through the streets each morning in a tailored black suit, black Stetson hat, and black cape.

By force of time, but also immigration, my family’s lost many things.