Artist Kudzi Chiurai is one of my favorite in South Africa—which is to say, living in South Africa, since he is Zimbabwean. We—that is, my bff /photographer David and I—have been here for more or less seven weeks, and Kudzi—I don’t know, Kudzi just breaks my heart. He is the most soft-spoken artist I’ve ever interviewed, which contrasts entirely to his artwork, which tends to involve things like election violence and depictions of Robert Mugabe on fire. I asked him if he thought that art could ever exert political muscle—if art could change dire political realities, like those in Zimbabwe—and basically, he has to say yes, because otherwise, he is engaging himself in a lifelong struggle with futility. But of course he said no, that it didn’t, that art was powerless in the face of corrupt institutions designed to make money for those who support them. (Them being the institutions.)

These are photos from our shoot at Kudzi’s apartment in downtown Johannesburg this weekend.

This is a crazy, unbelievable, ridiculous city with an equally ridiculously early last call. We will be happy, I think, to be back in NYC next week, but we’ll miss it in a way I would not have thought possible. I mean that in the most literal way.

For the longest time, including two years nominally attending art school, we never totally wrapped our heads around the Georgia O’Keeffe thing: It was all cow bones and VAGINAS, if you know what we mean, which was entirely too much of both. And that Lifetime movie, God love Joan Allen, didn’t do much for us, either. But we’ve had our heads spun round by this New York magazine piece, which contains the amazing observation: “Who knew underarm hair could be so titillating?” (We agree!) We suggest: read the article! We are excited by the notion that she took one for the team [of female artists to follow] and that she was too busy doing stuff to shave. This has always been our logic, but it’s more convincing coming from her.

For more favorite things, please click here.

One of our very favorite designers. There is basically no way on the planet that we couldn’t love this. See more from Alyson here

We're running a bit late today, thanks to the five inches of snow that has completely shut down the city of London. (City of London: we're not impressed!) Actually, it's awesome to see any community withstand some sort of crisis, even the impossibly minor one of five inches of snow, and be like, Our president could take care of this with a wave of his magical fingers. That is a new feeling.

So we are here to say: Little Paper Planes is our website of the day, and: Lisa Congdon! Permanently adorable. Lisa Congdon letterpress print, $35

There are three amazing fashion-oriented photo exhibitions at ICP. Like: above! This is Juergen Teller, obvs, from Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now. It is weird! We love it. He makes us think Marc Jacobs is a genius.

This is not so contemporary. What a strange, strange picture, no? Tree! Parasols! Bizarreness. Anyway, it’s from: Edward Steichen in High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years.

And finally: This, by Stephen Shore, is from This Is Not a Fashion Photograph. We can’t believe people ever looked like that, collectively. We have never been to a party like this.

Firstly: Yay Inauguration! Secondly: For some reason we’ve been talking about buying art all week, and we think the best place to do this, rather than, say, the mall, is 20X200, because they put up something new every Tuesday and Wednesday at 2 p.m. We always forget—maybe because we are in such a rush to get back in time for Dr. Phil—but we hope we will not today. The idea: three sizes of each piece, ranging in price from $20 to $2000. $20! We don’t think of ourselves as being able to afford art, but we can definitely afford $20 to make everything in our apartment look all nice and grown-up-like. Remember: 2 p.m. the next one is available! If we can remember the Hautelook Lauren Conrad sale today (11 a.m. ET, to be precise; as always, email us if you’re like an invite at thumper at bunnyshop dot org), we can remember this.

In today’s reader submitted Bunnyshop Hearts—as always our favorite kind! please send us yours here!—we have this note from K.:\

Dear BS,

I’m not really sure if I’m in the minority of D.C. based readers, but as a heads up to others in the area there’s a huge art festival going on there…  I may just be out of the loop here, but anyways, BS seems the place for artsy/culture/music-esque things… so check out artomatic.org.  I’m going to go myself because the art + music + workshops and book signing factors seem to being calling my name. 

Oh and it ends on the 15th!

-k

Awesome! We are that place. Or at least we aim to be. Anyway, if we were in D.C. this weekend, we would totally go to the PostSecret show. The image above is from their website (we really hope it’s okay that we’re showing it here—only in honor!) and it just gives us chills. If you don’t know it, you’re missing out. Don’t miss out! The PostSecret book, meanwhile, is here.

We started our "book tour" in D.C. last October, and it was just so hysterical. We had our very first one in the Dupont Circle Olsson’s, and about 15 people showed up, and we went to the car and cried and cried because the crowd was so small—of course we had no idea at the time that except for our hometown reading, that would be our biggest night(!). (Interesting fact: Every bookstore’s readings coordinator will have a story about how some big celebrity—Newt Gingrich, Jenna Bush, etc., did a reading at her store where no one showed.) Anyway, the next night we were at the Olsson’s in Arlington, and literally not a single person showed up except for this one homeless man, and after we read just a bit he literally was like, "Read more!" so we did, and then we stopped and were like, "Okay?" And he stands up, says, "Okay," and leaves. Thank God we take a lot of yoga classes because we swear to God we just laughed the whole way back to NY. Not about the homeless guy, mind, but the distance between our expectations and our reality, and how it was all going to be fine anyway.

Er, moving on: We meant to say that if you are in the neighborhood, definitely check out Olsson’s, our favorite bookstore in the hood.

We generally do not buy art. It’s so complex, what with the editions and numbers and lithos and prints and canvasses and repros. In our house, we’ve hung silkscreened show posters, a Shephard Fairey print, and some of our own work. Oh, and a couple Pennsylvania Deutch hexes.  That’s it, really. Most art we see is either way too out there for us, or just too expensive. And while we’re not snobby about much, we don’t really like posters.

We were pleasantly surprised when we came across these photos from Jim Lloyd. The imagery itself is captivating, and even a little sneaky. It’s super, super affordable – which means we can splurge and frame it in a massive goldtone frame.

We have to admit, we kind of love the Marc Jacobs bag in this one.

Anyway. We’re all over these.

Prints, $150 ea 10"x20"

-LB

Read rest of story…