Category Archives: Exhibit

Miles Davis: The Art of Cool

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An exhibition of original artwork by Miles Davis,“Miles Davis: The Art of Cool,”  is at the Napa Valley Museum in partnership with Napa Valley Performing Arts Center at Lincoln Theater June 8-July 28.  The exhibition features sketches and oil paintings by Davis and some personal items including one of his trumpets, a 1989 Grammy Award and a Miles Davis Yamaha Amplifier. The showing is  inspired by Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork a new book by Scott Gutterman with Miles Davis, scheduled for release on October 10th.

The Napa Valley Museum and Napa Valley Performing Arts Center at Lincoln Theater are situated mid-valley in Yountville, Calif., between St. Helena and Napa. For more information about the exhibition and events, visit Napa Valley Museum.

Barbara Rubin’s “Chistmas on Earth”

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Barbara Rubin’s  twenty nine minute Christmas on Earth is a film of an orgy staged in the Lower East Side apartment of Tony Conrad and John Cale at 56 Ludlow Street in 1963.  She was seventeen at the time.  The double projection of overlapping images of nude men and women clowning and making love is one of the first sexually explicit works of art in the american postwar avant-garde. Rubin spent three months “chopping the hours of film up into a basket” until its contents were ultimately separated onto two different reels, with one reel projected at half size inside the other reel’s full-screen image. In 1966, the film was projected onto the performing Velvet Underground as a part of Andy Warhol Up-Tight (an early incarnation of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events). Rubin, who later introduced Bob Dylan to Allen Ginsberg (and, according to John Cale, Edie Sedgwick to Andy Warhol), died in 1980 (in childbirth, in France) at the age of thirty five.

Barbara Rubin, "Christmas on Earth" (1963)

Barbara Rubin, “Christmas on Earth” (1963)

An exhibit of her work is currently At Boo-Hooray Gallery (265 Canal St., 6th Fl., btw. Broadway & Lafayette).