Max Halperen

No one who has experienced the spectacular show spread over the floors and through the grounds of the North Carolina Museum of Art could doubt that top honors for the best show of the year would go to Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight. The grand poetry of its panoramas, its delightful ironies and whimsies, […]

Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight at the North Carolina Museum of Art is the most ambitious show ever curated by the museum–56 artists, 92 works, with paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, assemblages, installations and videos spread throughout the building and spilling out on to its grounds. But this is scarcely the reason for a visit […]

Nancy Baker has one of the wittiest and most serious post-modern minds in Raleigh. On the walls of her Tire Shop, in beautifully painted replicas of 15th and 16th century illuminated manuscripts, an extra-terrestrial’s head peers from St. Veronica’s veil and stares through a window at the Nativity. St. Jerome has his traditionally friendly lion […]

Graffiti–love it or loathe it, you can’t escape it. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted near the Italian city of Pompeii, mummifying people, streets, houses and art in a blanket of hot ashes. The volcano also embalmed and thus saved all sorts of scrawled graffiti–drawings, obscenities, curses, notes, memorials–left by folks who wanted somehow to […]