For the last year, Bay Area artist Chris Sollars has sported a biblical behemoth of a beard, although his cleanly shaven cheeks are once again on view in Sollars’s newest project, Hairy, on view as part of YBCA’s Bay Area Now.  It’s an interesting update on an identity-probing lineage that includes predecessors like Chris Burden, Gordon Matta Clark, James Luna, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons. [.....]

Originally published on: December 20, 2008 Loren Schwerd‘s Mourning Portraits provide humanized descriptions of the blight that persists in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Working from her photographs taken in efforts to digest these remnants of life, she rebuilds crumbling artifacts as scrupulous and loving memorials to her community. Out of human hair extensions, discarded near St. Claude Beauty Supply in New Orleans, she depicts[.....]