In this journal-like report, Steven Hirsch looks back at his recent discovery of the strange, burned-wood pictures made by the self-taught artist Tancred Calhoun and offers some observations about the purposes they might have served for the relatively isolated man who created them.

During his lifetime, few people knew that Tancred Calhoun (1947-2020), a U.S. Army veteran who had served in the Vietnam War, created unusual artworks made by burning images into wooden boards. Calhoun’s pictures exude sexual energy. They’re peculiar — and oddly compelling. brutjournal contributing photographer and painter Steven Hirsch recently discovered Calhoun’s works and did some serious sleuthing to learn about the life of the self-taught artist who produced them. See our art-filled report about this noteworthy, new find in the outsider art field.

Since 2013, the artist Naoto Nakagawa has produced two large groups of paintings — his “Earth Series” and his “Mona Lisa Series” — whose wide-ranging subject matter and complex compositions refer to the history of humanity’s intellectual and cultural achievements. These technically, thematically ambitious series exude a sincere, humanistic air. In them, Nakagawa expresses a sense of wonder in the face of the power of the human mind. Now, the symbolism in his art has taken, as he says, a local turn. He’s still thinking philosophically on a broad scale, but the imagery of his newest paintings, which are now on view at Kapow Gallery in downtown Manhattan, more explicitly refers to the city he has called home for more than six decades.

The exhibition “ALFREDO JAAR: YOU AND ME AND THE OTHERS,” at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, offers what the Chilean-born contemporary artist Jaar, a deep, provocative thinker, calls “an anthology” of his works in various genres and media dating back to the early 1970s. Jaar’s work is inherently political but never in a partisan way. It’s never polemical. Instead, his art, from small, image-based pieces to large, spectacular installations, explores the fundamental meaning, function, and impact of that which is political and, by extension, of that which is just or unjust. See Edward M. Gómez’s photo-filled report.

Beginning in 1959 and lasting into the next decade, a massive urban-renewal project in San Francisco saw the destruction of its Western Addition, whose historic heart was the Fillmore District. Once known as the “Harlem of the West,” the atmosphere and architecture of that urban zone, as well as the life of each of its varied, often overlapping communities, was forever transformed. The local government created its own soulless photo record of the project. Separately and on their own, the late artist Ernest Burden, Jr. (1934-2022) and Sheila Stover, his wife and fellow artist, created their own more vivid, dramatic photos of that grand demolition. They’re now on view at the San Francisco Historical Society in an eye-opening exhibition organized by their son, the artist and architectural-image specialist Ernest Burden III. See our photo-filled report.