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    Leigh Silver

    Leigh Silver

    Contributor

  • Audrey Niffenegger's Dream World

    "The compulsion when I'm writing has often been: 'Let's kill them all!' writes Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Traveler's Wife," in a piece for the Guardian. Niffenegger's tendency to tap into the psychology of her seemingly troubled subjects -- most often women -- shows up on her canvases as well, particularly in her first major museum show, a retrospective at The National Museum of Women in the Arts this month. Niffenegger's show will include including fictional illsutrations of her literary characters, dreamlike compositions, and self-portraits where she appears in various forms -- as Medusa, a jailbird, and a bad fairy.

  • The Most Famous Polaroids

    Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera, spoke in front of one of his factories in 1970 and dreamt up the camera of the future: "A camera which you would use not on the occasion of parties only, or of trips only, or when your grandchildren came to see you, but a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses." As Christopher Bonanos at the Wall Street Journal points out, Land predicted unbelievable technological advancements -- the Polaroid camera was just the first step. In a new book from Prestel, "The Polaroid Years: Instant Photography and Experimentation," curator Mary-Kay Lombino takes a look at the freedom ushered in by Land's camera and how some of the most famous contemporary artists played with Polaroids.

  • The Concrete Jungle Comes Alive

    The French street artist known as Levalet, aka Charles Leval, fills concrete recesses and jagged sidewalks with black-and-white figures. Levalet's paste-up people, which we first spotted on Colossal, end up interacting with their environments in interesting ways. To find the perfect spots for his works, Levalet wanders around Paris taking measurements.

  • How Likely Are You To See A Woman's Artwork In A London Gallery?

    An audit of more than 100 commercial galleries in London has found that only 5% represent an equal number of male and female artists. East London Fawcett's (ELF) art audit also found that not a single woman appeared on the top 100 auction performances list in 2012. The audit which looked at works from April 2012 – April 2013 gathered data on 134 commercial galleries in London, which collectively represent 3,163 artists.

  • WATCH: Awesome Daft Punk Piano Cover

    As we await the release of "Random Access Memories," Daft Punk's comeback album, we can enjoy the cover of one of their top hits. Reddit user BeamPacer writes that he used to used to be a self-employed musician, which is evident watching his quick fingers jump across the keys in the video above. Let us know what you would jam out to the piano version of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" in the comments. "Random Access Memories" is due in stores and on digital retailers on May 21.

  • 'Both Grotesque And Brutally Honest'

    Anyone can tell you who's already made it, but HuffPost Arts & Culture's On Our Radar series is here to tell you who's about to blow up -- and, in some cases, go pop. Once you get a glimpse of Eugene Reznik's black-and-white photographs, it's hard to get them out of your mind. Slanted lines and angled shadows alienate the Brooklyn artist's lonely subjects in weighty geometrical compositions.

  • WATCH: An Amazing Underwater Dance Routine

    In Conor Horgan's short film, "Deep End Dance," Bolger dons a suit, and his mother joins him for a set of pool acrobatics. "It was me trying to marry two loves of my life: dance and water," Bolger, the co-founder and artistic director of CoisCeim Dance Theatre in Dublin, says in the video. CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misspelled the filmmaker's last name as 'Hogan', not 'Horgan'.

  • Curator Sues SF Museums!

    The former longtime curator of European art at San Francisco's Fine Art Museums has challenged her firing in court, saying she was dismissed illegally for supporting a union demonstration and protesting financial fraud. Lynn Orr had worked for the museums for 29 years and as curator for 11 years when she was fired Nov. 20. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court, she said the museums' human resources director, Charles Castillo, told her she was being terminated because of her performance, even though managers had never criticized her work in the past.

  • Martin Parr 'Life's A Beach' Exhibit And Book Capture Fun In The Sun From Brazil To Japan (PHOTOS)

    In a newest exhibit and upcoming book from the Aperture Foundation, "Life's A Beach," Parr's photos of sunbathers from all across the globe maintain a balance between raw honesty and saturated colors. Let us know what you think of Parr's summer shots in the comments.

  • WATCH: 'Evolution Of Music' A Cappella

    On Sunday, comedy queen Rebel Wilson kicked off the MTV Movie awards with her co-stars from "Pitch Perfect" for an epic pop-song mashup. In the video above, five singers take us on a gleeful ride through ten centuries of musical history. From Gregorian chants of the 11th century to the pop hits of the aughts, Pentatonix blows our minds with their seamless instrument-free arrangements.

  • LOOK: Hauntingly Beautiful Decay

    Often, we can feel the ghosts of former inhabitants even when nature has taken over structures once forged by human hands. As forgotten spaces are neglected and fall into ruin, they can become hauntingly beautiful.

  • Candyland Dreamscapes Come To Life

    If you've ever wanted to stroll through the Lollypop Woods or hike up the Gumdrop Mountains of your childhood Candyland game, then you'll fall in love with Pip & Pop's cavity-worthy installations. Australian artist Tanya Schultz is the sugar plum fairy behind Pip & Pop. "Throughout history there has been a long tradition of depicting journeys through, and in search of, imaginary lands and utopian worlds," reads the Pip & Pop's bio.

  • Portrait Of A Year In Turmoil

    Activist artist Molly Crabapple's new series of paintings titled "Shell Game" at Smart Clothes Gallery in New York portray a darkly humorous year in cartoonish figures. While "Shell Game" bursts with depictions of corruption and violence, for Crabapple, the past few years have been a mix of birth amid destruction. "Yes, it was awful, but it was also magic, she told Wired in an interview. Like Hannah Hoch's politically-charged Dadaist collages or Frida Kahlo's symbolic works, in Crabapple's paintings a political message emerges from the visual chaos.

  • LOOK: New Art Book For Typography Lovers

    "A public lettering is made unique by the relationships it sets up with what is around it: not a blank page, but the sky, the streets, the sunlight with the shadows it creates, the rain making the colours brighter, combined with the slow erosion from the passage of time," Anna Saccani writes in the introduction to her new book, "LetterScapes" (Thames & Hudson, May 2013). What began as Saccani's doctoral thesis turned into an ode to the art of large-scale public typography projects. Looking at both the sculptures themselves and how they function in a public context, Saccani shows us that "LOVE" can mean something different in New York City or in Tokyo, depending on the context.

  • Years Later, The Visionary Art Of Forrest Bess Still Stuns

    Like the mystic shamanism of Joseph Beuys or the perilous thirst for speed and violence of the Futurists, American painter Forrest Bess developed a challenging manifesto, claiming the key to immortality was through a unification of male and female energy. In the New York Times last year, Roberta Smith likened Bess's life to Vincent van Gogh's, in that both artists lived in relative isolation throughout adulthood and dealt with bouts of serious depression. Bess became a backwoods eccentric on an isolated island in Bay City, Texas, spending days trying to scrounge up cash by selling bait and painting vibrantly colored landscapes.

  • 'It Brings Cats Back From The Dead'

    Anyone can tell you who's already made it, but HuffPost Arts & Culture's On Our Radar series is here to tell you who's about to blow up -- and, in some cases, go pop. Io Echo recently released their first album "Ministry of Love" today, but the band has already been linked to art superstars. After seeing the duo Ioanna Gika and Leopold Ross perform live, MOCA director Jeffery Deitch asked Io Echo to curate an audio-visual festival last July called PLAY MOCA.

  • Groundbreaking Punk Exhibition Is Coming To The Met

    At the Metropolitan Museums of Art's upcoming exhibit, "Punk: Chaos and Couture," Hell is the first of seven "punk heroes" with a gallery showcasing their impact on the fashion world. Hell rose to cult fame in the late 1970s through his band Richard Hell and the Voidoids. While the group didn't last long, Hell's ripped and safety-pinned clothes have immortalized him as an emblem of New York's seminal underground scene at the time.

  • LOOK: TIME's Most Iconic Retro Covers

    From 1942-70, Boris Chaliapin was TIME Magazine's go-to man, an illustrator who could create work at record-breaking speeds. During his years at TIME, Chaliapin drew 413 covers of memorable personas. For his prodigious work, "Mr. Time" is the subject of a retrospective at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in D.C. this May, where 26 of his images will be on display.

  • New Documentary Reveals How The Bay Bridge Stole The Spotlight

    Earlier this month, artist Leo Villareal gave San Francisco's other bridge a chance to shine. Villareal illuminated the sweeping lines of the Oakland Bay Bridge with a light display like no other. In the video above, simply titled, "25,000 LEDs Illuminate The San Francisco Bay Bridge," The Creators Project takes a look at this record-breaking installation.

  • WATCH: Behind The Scenes Of A Classic Opera

    Giuseppe Verdi's "La Traviata" -- "the fallen woman" in Italian -- tells the tale of Violetta, a tragic heroine who is desperate to remain free and love freely, despite social constraints. While Verdi's masterpiece have delighted opera patrons for the last 150 years, a new film by Philippe Beziat sheds light on the classic opera for a wider audience. In "Becoming Traviata" Beziat shows us the whirlwind of decisions, details, and practices that went into enacting the rise and fall of Violetta for the 2011 performance of "La Traviata" at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.