California Literary Review

Contrary to what is often written about her, Frida Kahlo was not a surrealist. She was a magic realist who painted her life as it happened to her, as she felt and remembered it. We know this because in her paintings we recognize and empathize with her pain, both physical and emotional. [Philadelphia Inquirer]

There is life in the hands of Manny Vega. With nothing more than a pair of pliers, thick fingers and boundless patience, he transforms thousands of stubby tiles of stone and glass into glimmering mosaic portraits of poets, drummers, mothers and sons. By the end of the workday, he has to plunge his numb, dust-covered hands into hot water to revive them. Five of his best-known mosaics are in East Harlem, including his most recent portrait of Julia de Burgos, the Puerto Rican poet whose words were as influential as her life was tragic. [NYT]

“Design and the Elastic Mind,” an exhilarating new show opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, makes the case that through the mechanism of design, scientific advances of the last decade have at least opened the way to unexpected visual pleasures. As revolutionary in its own way as MoMA’s “Machine Art” exhibition of 1934, which introduced Modern design to a generation of Americans, the exhibition is packed with individual works of sublime beauty. [NYT]

For the two young women, the way things feel and sound are paramount, even at an art museum exploding with visual interest. They, their teacher and the three young men in their group, all of them blind, had been given gloves because they were about to take a “touch tour” of some of the museum’s most prized sculptures, a regular service the museum provides to blind and partially sighted art enthusiasts. [NYT]