March 11, 2013
Owsley Stanley (1935 – 2011) was a figure of the San Francisco Bay Area counter-culture, playing a pivotal role in the counterculture of the 1960s. As a crafts-person, he became best known simply as ‘Owsley’ – the LSD ‘cook’ (underground chemist). Stanley was the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley produced more than 1.25 million doses of LSD.
Under the professional name of ‘Bear,’ he worked with the psychedelic rock band the Grateful Dead’s international fan ‘family.’ Bear was an early soundman for The Grateful Dead, a band he met when Ken Kesey invited them to an Owsley Acid test party. As their sound engineer, Bear frequently recorded live tapes behind his mixing board and helped The Dead become the first performers since Les Paul to custom-develop high-fidelity audio components and sound systems.
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March 10, 2013
Graham Hancock (b. 1950) is a British writer and journalist specializing in unconventional theories involving ancient civilizations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past.
One of the main themes running through many of his books is the possible global connection with a ‘mother culture’ from which he believes all ancient historical civilizations sprang. Although his books have sold more than five million copies worldwide and have been translated into twenty-seven languages, his methods and conclusions have found little support among academics, his work being labelled ‘pseudoarchaeology.’
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March 9, 2013
David Černý [chair-nee] (b. 1967) is a controversial Czech sculptor. He gained notoriety in 1991 by painting a Soviet tank pink, to serve as a war memorial in central Prague.
As the Monument to Soviet tank crews was still a national cultural monument at that time, his act of civil disobedience was considered ‘hooliganism’ and he was briefly arrested. Another of his conspicuous contributions to Prague is ‘Tower Babies,’ a series of cast figures of crawling infants attached to Žižkov Television Tower. For the 2012 Summer Olympics Černý created ‘London Booster’ – a double decker bus with mechanical arms for doing push-ups.
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March 6, 2013
Thomas Frank (b. 1965) is an American political analyst, historian, and journalist. He co-founded and edited ‘The Baffler magazine.’ He is a former columnist for the ‘Wall Street Journal,’ authoring ‘The Tilting Yard’ from 2008 to 2010. Frank is a historian of culture and ideas and analyzes trends in American electoral politics and propaganda, advertising, popular culture, mainstream journalism and economics.
With his writing, he explores the rhetoric and impact of the ‘Culture Wars’ in American political life, and the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. Frank started his political journey as a College Republican, but has come to be highly critical of conservatism, especially the presidency of George W. Bush. Frank summarized the thesis of his book ‘The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule’ as ‘Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad.’
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March 4, 2013
Robert Cialdini is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. He is best known for his book on persuasion and marketing, ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.’ The book has been translated into 26 languages has also been published as a textbook under the title ‘Influence: Science and Practice.’
In writing the book, he spent three years going ‘undercover’ applying for jobs and training at used car dealerships, fund-raising organizations, and telemarketing firms to observe real-life situations of persuasion. The book also reviews many of the most important theories and experiments in social psychology. Cialdini distills his theory down to six key principles: Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity.
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March 4, 2013
Charlie Munger (b. 1924) is an American business magnate, lawyer, investor, and philanthropist. He is Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, the diversified investment corporation chaired by Warren Buffett; in that capacity, Buffett describes Munger as ‘my partner.’
Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011 (Wesco was approximately 80%-owned by Berkshire-Hathaway during that time). He is also the chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation.
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March 2, 2013
Eddie Huang (b. 1982) is an Asian American restaurateur, food personality and former lawyer. He is the owner of Baohaus. Huang was born in Washington, D.C., to immigrant parents from Taiwan. He was raised in Orlando, where his father managed a successful group of steak and seafood restaurants. Huang identified with African-American culture, especially hip-hop, at a young age. He received a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, Rollins College and a J.D. from Cardozo School of Law.
Not long after graduating from law school, Huang decided for a career change. After being laid off from a New York law firm, he worked as a stand-up comic and as a marijuana dealer. He was interested in food as he had grown up watching his mother cook at home and had learned many skills in the kitchen. He learned management from his father.
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February 26, 2013
Alex Gross (b. 1968) is a visual artist currently working in Los Angeles; he specializes in oil paintings on canvas whose themes include globalization, commerce, great beauty, dark mayhem, and the remorseless passage of time. Alex graduated in 1990 from Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California. Since then, he has become established as an artist in the Pop Surrealism movement (e.g. lowbrow).
In 2000, he received a fellowship from the Japan Foundation; he spent two months traveling throughout Japan, researching and collecting a wide variety of Japanese Fine and Commercial art, as research for his own artwork. Part of his collection was compiled and published by Taschen under the title ‘Japanese Beauties’ in 2004.
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February 26, 2013
Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator based in New York City. Among comic fans, she is best known for her ongoing monthly covers for ‘The Unwritten’ and her cover art for P. Craig Russell’s comic book adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sandman: The Dream Hunters,’ published by Vertigo (DC Comics). Her self-titled monograph was published by Gestalten in the fall of 2011, and her children’s book, ‘Barbed Wire Baseball,’ written by Marissa Moss, is scheduled to be published by Abrams Books in the spring of 2013. She has been a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts since 2003.
She graduated from Waseda University’s School of Commerce in 1988 as valedictorian and soon began her first job in the corporate PR department of one of Tokyo’s largest sogo shoshas (trading company). Eleven years later, she resigned and moved to New York City to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an artist. She set out to earn a second bachelor’s degree, this time in illustration at the School of Visual Arts. However, after finishing her sophomore year, she was accepted into the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program. She graduated in May 2003.
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February 13, 2013
Chet Helms (1942 – 2005), often called the father of San Francisco’s 1967 ‘Summer of Love,’ was a music promoter and a cultural figure in San Francisco during its hippie period in the late Sixties. Helms was the founder and manager of Big Brother and the Holding Company and recruited Janis Joplin as its lead singer.
He was a producer and organizer, helping to stage free concerts and other cultural events at Golden Gate Park, the backdrop of San Francisco’s Summer of Love in 1967, as well as at other venues, including the Avalon Ballroom. He was the first producer of psychedelic light-show concerts at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom and was instrumental in helping to develop bands that had the distinctive San Francisco Sound.
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February 7, 2013
Steve Powers (b. 1968) is a New York City artist who at one time wrote graffiti in Philadelphia and New York under the name ESPO (‘Exterior Surface Painting Outreach’). Powers is from Philadelphia’s Overbrook neighborhood; he graduated from Robert E. Lamberton High School in 1987 and took classes at The Art Institute of Philadelphia and the University of the Arts. In 1994, he moved to New York with fellow writer and designer Ari Forman, in order to expand the reach of his magazine, ‘On the Go.’
ESPO’s work often blurred the lines of legality. For example, pieces like ‘Greetings from ESPOLand’ utilized the style of the Asbury Park Billboards and appeared to be a legitimate billboard. In 1997 ESPO began his most ambitious non-commissioned art. He painted on storefront grates in Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, TriBeCa, and the South Bronx, covering the entire grate with white or silver paint and then using black to make each grate into a letter in his name.
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February 6, 2013
Marc Quinn (b. 1964) is a British artist and one of a loose group known as the Young British Artists. He is known for ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ (a sculpture of Alison Lapper, an English artist who was born without arms) and ‘Self’ (a sculpture of his head made with his own frozen blood). Quinn has used blood, ice, and faeces to make sculptures; his work sometimes refers to scientific developments.
Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Quinn’s sculpture, paintings and drawings often deal with the distanced relationship we have with our bodies, highlighting how the conflict between the ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ has a grip on the contemporary psyche. In 1999, Quinn began a series of marble sculptures of amputees as a way of re-reading the aspirations of Greek and Roman statuary and their depictions of an idealized whole.
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