Friday, January 10, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Today is the opening in London of The Arts Catalyst's "Republic of the Moon" project, which  continues through February 2. Participating artists, all of whom reexamine our relationship with the moon, include Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Leonid Tishkov, Joanna Griffin, and Tomas Saraceno.

✦ Research by economist P.H. Franses of the Erasmus School of Economics indicates that painters are most likely to create their "most highly valued" work when they are 41.92 years old. For more on Franses's study, published in Volume 25, Issue 4, of Creativity Research Journal, see "When Do Great Artists Hit Peak Creativity?".

✦ Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka's "painting" comprises layers of crystal growing inside a glass tank. What's particularly fascinating is that the work's final form is the result of the crystal's exposure to Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. The large installation, part of "Tokujin Yoshioka: Crystallize", a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) that continues through January 19, is astonishingly beautiful. Yoshioka's exhibition page features photographs of the installation and other works in the MOT show (click on each image to advance through the selections).


"Crystalize | Tokujin Yoshioka Retrospective at MOT", Spoon & Tamago, October 21, 2013

✦ The Getty has created a digital finding aid to the papers of Harry Smith, polymath painter, filmmaker, and collector of American vernacular art. The physical materials, including correspondents, original films, and manuscripts, are in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute. Some images of objects from Smith's collection of paper airplanes are reproduced in "Treasures from the Vault: Harry Smith and Patterns in the Wind".

✦ Looking for a Web application to track and manage your art inventory, sales, gallery displays, competitions, and the like? Artwork Archive may be a solution.

✦ The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, has acquired the personal documents, photographs, and sketches of Ed Ruscha. According to a news release, the archives include five personal journals, materials Ruscha used in creating his artist's book on Jack Kerouac's On the Road; portfolios; commissioned art; notes, photographs, correspondence, and contact sheets about the creation and publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, plus several other artist's books; and materials relating to a number of short films. Post-processing and -cataloging, the collection will be made available to students, researchers, and the public.


✦ The documentary Lost in Living (Ma and Pa Films) follows the lives of four women — a filmmaker, two writers, and a painter — illuminating their profound struggles to be artists, as well as mothers, wives, daughters, sisters, friends. You'll find the trailer for Lost in Living, which took seven years to make, at the link above and also on Vimeo (additional clips can be accessed on the film's homepage); it's an excellent introduction to the rich complexities and deep conflicts explored in the film. A DVD is available.

Lost in Living on FaceBook and Twitter

Ma and Pa Films Blog

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ The craft of quilt-making in the context of contemporary feminist theory is the subject of the exhibition "'Workt by Hand': Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts", on view at National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., through April 27, 2014. Featuring thirty-five 18th-to-20th-Century quilts from the Brooklyn Museum's Decorative Arts collection, including an 1830 Star of Bethlehem Quilt, the thematically organized exhibition offers examples of age-old quilting designs and techniques (e.g., "Log Cabin" and "Double Wedding Band" designs) and examines both cultural shifts in specific quilting practices (e.g., anonymity versus authorship) and the historical designation of quilts as craft, not art, objects. A gallery talk is scheduled for January 15.

Quilts in Brooklyn Museum Decorative Arts Collection

NMWA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ "From the Library: The Transformation of Ovid's Metamorphoses" continues through February 9 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The exhibition features prints, drawings, medals, decorative arts objects, and rare book selections to illustrate the history and popularity of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In addition to showing how the text was used and what kinds of books were produced for various audiences, the exhibition includes images accompanying different editions of the text.

National Gallery of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ "Red | Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship", running through February 2 at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, Indiana, features the work of five Native artists: Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe, Oklahoma), mixed media; Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut), conceptual sculpture, photography, and other media; Meryl McMaster (Plains Cree/Blackfoot), photography; Shan Goshorn (Eastern Bank of Cherokee), conceptual art incorporating traditional basket weaving; and Lawrence Paul Yuxwelptun (Coast Salish), a painter who was invited to participate in the show. The biennial fellowship program recognizes and celebrates both established and emerging contemporary Native artists; to date, it has awarded nearly $1 million directly artists and purchased more than 200 artworks from 30 Native American and First Nations artists. The museum has one of the world's most important collections of contemporary Native American art.

Here's a behind-the-scenes video of the exhibition's installation:


Artist Profiles and Image Gallery

Eiteljorg Museum Blog

Eiteljorg Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Opening tomorrow at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, is "Signs of Protest: Photographs from the Civil Rights Era". The exhibition, which will continue through August 3, includes photographs featuring protest signs and images relating the "culture of resistance" associated with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael. 

John Edwin Mason, associate professor and associate chair at Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia, will lead on January 23 a discussion, "Conversations: Signs of Protests" (free), of the role of photographs in our cultural memory and the use of images as aids in recalling important historical events.

VMFA on FaceBookTwitter, and YouTube

✭ On January 25, American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C., opens its Winter 2014 exhibitions: "Agustin Fernandez: Ultimate Surrealist", "Washington Art Matters II: 1940s-1980s", an exhibition of work by 90 artists; and "Sightlines: Ann Pibal, Jill Downen, Frank Trankina, and Dean Smith", curated by AU faculty member Tim Doud. All will continue through April 6.


Ann Pibal, XPCV, 2012
Acrylic on Aluminum
Courtesy of Artist and Katzen Arts Center

Katzen Arts Center on FaceBook

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