Josh Smith: Emo Jungle @ David Zwirner New York

Josh Smith’s “Emo Jungle” exhibition, featuring the artist’s latest works, is now on view at David Zwirner in New York. Smith has developed a prolific and expansive body of painting that employs visual motifs as a means of exploring the potentiality of the painted surface. Each painting serves as a stage in an ongoing, heterogeneous process of image production and experimentation, in which visuals and colors are recycled and refined. Smith’s series of grim reapers, devils, turtles, and tropical landscapes are rendered in lush ribbons and fields of color, leaving the viewer a dazzling display of reimagination.

“Emo Jungle” is on view through July 19 at David Zwirner 525 W 19th St, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner.

Folk Art: The Clay Skulls of James "Son Ford" Thomas

Photo by William Ferris, 'James "Son Ford" Thomas and Clay Skull, Leland, 1971' Collection of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Grave digger, blues musician, and dark, mystic soul of the south, James "Son Ford" Thomas made skulls from clay collected at the banks Mississippi's Yazoo River, often using authentic human teeth. His art mirrored, or was a catharsis, from the constant nearness of death at his job digging graves. "We all end up in the clay" was Thomas' oft quoted philosophy on life. The cemetery was probably a great place to pick up teeth too.  You can find his work at various blues museums throughout the south.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper