All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ You'll find some of the most interesting art-related features anywhere on Global Museum.

Global Museum on FaceBook and  Twitter

✦ If you can't get to Canada to visit the country's many wonderful museums, do the next best thing: browse the Virtual Museum of Canada, which offers more than a million images and access to hundreds of virtual exhibits.

VMC on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✦ Browse the Web long enough and you'll find there's a museum, physical and virtual, for the strange, the wonderful, and everything in between. Among some recent finds that stretch our most common definitions of art: the nonprofit Birds of Vermont Museum, in Huntington, which has a collection of more than 500 carved wooden birds representing more than 250 species; the Wooden Nickel Historical Museum, San Antonio, Texas, boasting a collection of more than 1 million wooden nickels; the Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters, a collection of Soviet propaganda; The Toaster Museum, currently owned by the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan; the fascinating Virtual Museum of Bacteria; and Devices of Wonder from Getty Exhibitions.

✦ Earlier this year Design Sponge spotlighted 25 papercut artists you should know about. Fabulous work!

✦ A subscription to Marquis Biographies Online gives you access to Who's Who in American Art and other biographies in Marquis print titles that have been digitized.

✦ The portrait of Van Gogh you'll see in the video below is by multimedia artist Phil Hansen, who drew it in permanent marker using words from more than 1,000 individual stories "about an experience that shocked or caused disbelief". 

You'll find many more art projects on Hansen's Phil in the Circle. Also visit his site Phil in the Whaaat?, where Hansen espouses his "everyday creativity". Hansen, who is the author of Tattoo a Banana (Perigee Trade, 2012), spoke earlier this year at the TED 2013 conference "The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered."

Tony Sims, "Interview with Phil Hansen - Author and Banana Tattoo Artist", Wired, July 25, 2012

Phil Hansen on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ A retrospective of the cross-disciplinary work of Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), part of the Beat movement, continues at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, through June 2. DeFeo's amazing painting The Rose (1958-1966), subject of Jay DeFeo and The Rose by Jane Green and Leah Levy (University of California Press and Whitney Museum, 2003), is included in the exhibition with more than 150 other artworks, including collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, small sculptures, and jewelry. Don't miss online Slideshow: Installing The Rose, a massive work weighing almost one ton. A catalogue, Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, accompanies the show. (This exhibition previously was at the San Francisco Museum of Art.)

Here's a brief video about the exhibition:

The Jay DeFeo Trust

Online Gallery of DeFeo's Paintings, Works on Paper, Photographs

Read Holland Cotter's informative article "Not Just 'The Rose', but Also the Garden", The New York Times, February 28, 2013, and John Yau's "'The Rose' Is Not a Rose", Hyperallergic, January 6, 2013.

Whitney Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Continuing through June 30 at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is the two-shows-in-one "Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas and Gina Pane". In addition to examining the complementary aspects of the conceptual work of these multidisciplinary artists (performance art, sculpture, drawings, installations, film, video), the exhibition looks specifically at their differences. Jonas's video installation Reading Dante III (2010) is included in the show, which presents a comprehensive selection of Pane's work. An illustrated catalogue is available.

On Reading Dante, Video, Venice Biennale 2009: Joan Jonas (The work features sculptural elements as well as performance, film, and drawings.)

CAMH on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ In Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum is presenting through July an exhibition of the White-Line Prints by Japanese master printmaker Yoshida Toshi (1911-1995). The seven serene woodblock prints primarily depict Zen-temple gardens. What distinguishes these beautiful landscapes is Toshi's use of white lines rather than traditional black outlines. 

Images of Tenryu-ji Garden (1963), Stone Garden (1963), and Two Lanterns (1964)

Worcester Art Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Jeffrey Gibson's paintings on stretched animal hides and sculptures using hide wrapped around cinderblock are on view through July 14 at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. The Western-trained Native American artist (Choctaw-Cherokee) combines traditional craft motifs and materials with geometric abstraction and urban building materials to underscore the bridging of two cultures and to depict cultural life, beliefs, and criticisms. Selections of work from 2010 to now may be viewed at Jeffrey Gibson Studio.

ICA Boston on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ More than 130 drawings and prints, select paintings, and photographs will be on view beginning June 22 in "Undressed: The Fashion of Privacy" at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, which will continue through September 29, is a companion to "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity" and explores representations of informal dress and undress in intimate, personal situations as depicted in late 18th Century to mid-20th Century artworks by, among other artists, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cezanne, Edvard Munch, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

ARTIC on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Preserving Daguerreotypes with Nanotechnology

George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, has a large and important daguerreotype collection numbering thousands of images from all over the world. Considered to be the first form of photography, the daguerreotype was invented in the late 1830s by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851). One of the inventor's own daguerreotypes is in the collection.

Conservators at George Eastman House are using nanotechnology to preserve and stop the decay of the images in their collection. Below is a brief video, The Nanotechnology of the Daguerreotype, that explains the fascinating use of this pioneering technology and what it has helped conservators at Eastman House learn about deterioration of the silver plates on which the images were recorded.

My thanks to the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog where I first learned of the video.

Also of Interest:

The Daguerreotype: Photographic Processes (Video)

The Making of a Daguerreotype (Video)

George Eastman House Daguerreotypes on Flickr

James Goodman, "George Eastman House Takes Steps to Preserve Daguerreotypes: Effort Aims to Save Old Photographs", Democrat and Chronicle, January 2, 2013

Michael Zhang, "The Beauty of Decayed Daguerreotypes", PetaPixel, January 9, 2013

Use of Nanotechnology to Preserve The Cincinnati Panorama, The Public Library of Cincinnati

The Daguerreian Society, FAQs 

George Eastman House on FaceBook and Twitter

George Eastman House Blog

Kassube Animates Lowe

Here's a relatively recent release from the wonderful MotionPoems: an animation by visual artist Angella Kassube of award-winning poet Bridget Lowe's "The Pilgrim Is Bridled and Bespectacled". Lowe's debut poetry collection At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky was published earlier this year by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Text of Poem

Other Poems by Bridget Lowe

To see more of art director and animator Angella Kassube's work for MotionPoems, go here.

MotionPoems on FaceBook

Carnegie Mellon University Press on FaceBook

Working Theory (Poem)

Working Theory

How you lose
the one you love

takes invention.
Consider the way

your screen flickers
before it goes

dark, its blinking
some kind of code

you fail to receive
and system checks

miss too often.


Human intelligence
is no match

for what happens.


Somewhere inside,
deep in the heart

of that computer,
you let go the one

last key stroke
impossible to retract.

© 2013 Maureen E. Doallas

Monday Muse Asks Did You Know

Today's post is another in an occasional series presenting something you might not know about poets or poetry.

Did You Know. . .

✦ The voice of English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889) was recorded in 1889. Go here to listen to Robert Browning Trying to Recite His Poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix".

✦ The renowned Italian painter, sculptor, and architect Michaelangelo (1475-1564) wrote more than 300 sonnets and madrigals in his lifetime. In 1904, Charles Scribner's Sons published the second edition of The Sonnets of Michaealangelo Buanarroti: Now for the First Time Translated Into Rhymed English, currently housed at the Internet Archive.

✦ James Joyce's publisher Elkin Matthews rejected Joyce's Dubliners in 1907 but that same year accepted Chamber Music, a selection of 36 poems written for an imagined love; it is, perhaps surprisingly, accessible reading. The version available at the link was published by B.W. Huebsch in 1918. Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company Press published in 1927 Joyce's collection of 13 poems titled Pomes Penyeach; a group of composers subsequently wrote musical settings for each of the poems, which were compiled in The Joyce Book, published in 1933 (see "Musical Settings of Pomes Penyeach").

✦ Witty poet e.e. cummings dedicated his collection No Thanks (1935), which he self-published with $300 from his mother, to the 14 publishers that had turned him down. The collection, originally titled 70 Poems, was issued in three formats of 9, 90, and 900 copies. The dedication was a concrete poem, that is, a poem composed visually to resemble a funeral urn.

✦ In addition to being a writer, cummings was a painter. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin owns 87 original artworks by the poet, including portraits and landscapes, as well as some works by others from cummings's personal collection.

✦ There are more than 133,000 entries for poetry in the Open Library. Among some of the more unusual titles are Soul of Tiger Woods: Sports Poetry in Motion (Gramercy, 1998),  Asinine Love Poetry (XLibris Corp., 2005), Supernatural Poetry (Riverrun Press, 1978), and Parlour Poetry: A Hundred and One Improving Gems (Michael Joseph, 1967).

Thought for the Day

. . . Wherever I am

I am what is missing....

~ Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole"

__________________________

Mark Strand, Poet, Editor, Translator, Prose Writer; Recipient of The Gold Medal for Poetry from Academy of Arts and Letters (News Release, 2009) and Numerous Other Awards

Mark Strand Profiles at Academy of American Poets, Columbia University School of the Arts, and Modern American Poetry

Mark Strand Poems at The Writer's Almanac

Nathalie Handall, "Not Quite Invisible: Nathalie Handal Interviews Mark Strand", Guernica, April 15, 2012

Wallace Shawn, "Interviews: Mark Strand, The Art of Poetry No. 77", The Paris Review, Fall 1998

Saturday Short

Today's Saturday Short features a brief demonstration of the art of Medieval blackletter typography by Seb Lester, a video graphic designer and illustrator.

My thanks to the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog, where I first saw this example of beautiful script, and to This is Colossal, where the video also was featured ("Seb Lester Demonstrates Medieval Blackletter Calligraphy").

Jennifer Farley, "The Blackletter Typeface: A Long and Colored History", SitePoint, November 7, 2009

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦  Los Angeles-based fine arts photographer Aspen Mays completed in 2009-2010 a Fulbright Fellowship in Chile. Her wonderful Sun Ruins series, exhibited in 2011 at Golden Gallery in New York City, was one body of work to come out of that experience. Take a few minutes to look at the online images from the abstract series and then read this interesting Art21 post about Mays's work.

✦ Istanbul-born painter and photographer Asli Erel, whose work recently was in "Letters of Love and War" (March 14 - May 8) at Lahd Gallery in London, pursues through her art an interest in traditional calligraphy and Islamic decorative arts that draw on Sufi philosophy. In addition to oils, Erel works on wood. Images of some of her beautiful paintings are here.

✦ The series Reading Women (2012) is performative photographer Carrie Schneider's documentation of writers, artists, and musicians engaged in "the incredibly intimate experience" of reading, Schneider explained to The New Yorker, adding that what impelled her to undertake the project was the desire of one artist to connect with another creative "in a way that resonates with her own art and life." Enjoy exploring Schneider's fascinating work on her Website.

✦ The nonprofit Museum Computer Network, founded in 1967, provides opportunities to explore, implement, and disseminate new technologies and best practices. If you're a member of the greater museum community, take a look at the benefits and resources of the group and follow its blog Musematic.

MCN on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ Indulge your interest in patterns at Pattern in Islamic Art, where you may download more than 4,000 images of patterns and designs found in Islamic decorative arts. The wonderful site also includes among its features information about the origins and significance of decorative arts in Islam, interesting drawings and analyses of patterns, and a glossary. Slideshows (by region) are found on the Photo Archive page. Be sure to visit the About page to discover all that's available on the site.

✦ Below is a Pace Gallery interview with Jim Dine, who talks about his painting  A Color Chart from 1963. The interview is part of the "50 Years of Pace" anniversary celebration in 2010 that highlighted the artists, landmark exhibitions, and key events that have continued to distinguish Pace's presence in the art world.

Interview with Jim Dine-- 50 Years of Pace Series from Pace Gallery on Vimeo.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, The James A. Michener Art Museum continues through June 16 "Transformations II: Works in Steel by Karl Stirner". Known as "the Father of the Eastern Pennsylvania Art Movement", Stirner (b. 1923), formerly an industrial designer, creates his abstract expressionist sculptures from discarded metal that he collects from the street, scrapyards, shipwrecks, and Bethlehem Steel, among other sources. The exhibition complements a retrospective of Stirner's sensual, beautifully fluid, and compelling work earlier this year at Payne Gallery, Moravian College, Bethelem, Pennsylvania. A catalogue of Stirner's work is available.

Images of Karl Stirner Sculpture, Drawings, and Portraits of Stirner at Work

Karl Stirner Arts Trail, Easton, Pennsylvania

Kelly Huth, "Off the Canvas: Profile of Karl Stirner", The Express-Times, April 30, 2010

JAMAM on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ An exhibition of glass sculptures by Corrine Whitlatch, "Visual Musing on a Search for Peace", continues through May 24 at The Gallery at The Jerusalem Fund in Washington, D.C. The pieces, representing Whitlatch's reflections on traveling in the Middle East, comprise glass, iron, and pottery shards from places she visited and incorporate regional symbols and icons.

Images of Whitlatch's Work at National Capital Art Glass Guild

✭ The exhibition "Frank Gehry at Work", presenting more than 30 process models from 1985 to 2012,  continues through June 30 at Leslie Feely Fine Art, New York City. 

The Architecture of Frank Gehry, Gehry Technologies

Leslie Feely Fine Art on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Fifty primarily figurative and representational artworks, including paintings, works on paper, collages, and fabric works, representing the lives, traditions, and environments of African Americans are on view at Michigan's Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in "Reflections: African American Life from the Myrna Colley-Lee Collection". Artists represented in the show include Romare Bearden, James VanDerZee, Elizabeth Catlett, and Betye Saar. Myrna Colley-Lee is a costume designer and arts patron.

Elizabeth Catlett, Sojourner Truth (from Black Woman Series), 1947

Linocut, 18" x 14"

2nd Edition, 1989

Myrna Colley-Lee Collection

Organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, D.C., the exhibition will travel to Louisiana's Alexandria Museum of Art (November 1, 2013 - February 17, 2014), Mississippi's Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel (September 2, 2014 - November 16, 2014), and Alabama's Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (January 15, 2015 - March 15, 2015).

Exhibition Images

Exhibition Prospectus (pdf)

KIA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ A group show of landscape paintings, both representational and abstract, is up at Morton Fine Art, Washington, D.C. On view through June 4, "Beyond Yesterday: A Collection of Landscape Memories" features work by five MFA artists: Ethan Diehl, Jason Sho Green, Choichun Leung, Julia Fernandez Pol, and Vonn Sumner.

MFA on FaceBook and Twitter

MFA: Curator's Notes, Gallery Blog

'Babeldom': Poetic Elegy to Urban Life

A  talent to watch, London-born Paul Bush is an experimental filmmaker and stop-frame animator with a background in fine art. He began making shorts in the 1980s and, following considerable critical acclaim, turned to filmmaking in the 1990s. In 1996, he founded Ancient Mariner Productions to produce his films, which he currently finances primarily with lecture fees, workshops, and teaching. 

In his debut feature-length (81-minute) film Babeldom, which he wrote, produced, and directed, Bush creates a portrait of a city of the future as narrated by one of its inhabitants. Described as a "science fiction documentary", the movie is a collage of sorts, assembled from film shot in cities around the world, including London, Berlin, Barcelona, Shanghai, Dubai, and Osaka, as well as from "found footage", that is, moving images collected from recent research in science, technology, industry, and architecture. In his Director's Notes, found toward the end of this News page, Bush explains, "The central metaphor of Babeldom is that all of time is present at the same moment, captured in different layers of the city. The prehistoric lies beneath the Roman, the Roman below the Medieval. We too are buried below countless centuries in which the city has built upwards like a futuristic Tower of Babel. As in Boethius's vision, all of time can be seen at once, if only one could view the city from outside, but each of us is destined to live our lives in one small layer of the city, unable to move lower or higher more than a few levels. . . ."

Have a look at the trailer for this fascinating conceptual film, which was completed in 2012 and was shown earlier this year in the United Kingdom and also screened in Lisbon at the animated film festival Monstra:

To see extracts from selected shorts and some longer films, including The Albatross (1998), Furniture Poetry (1999), While Darwin Sleeps (2004), and Lay Bare (2012), go here. Bush's The Albatross is a beautiful animation of 19th Century wood engravings of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, brought to life by scratching directly on the color film stock. The five-minute-long Furniture Poetry is an amusing play on the concept of "now you see it, now you don't". Lay Bare is a composite portrait of the human body, assembled from close-up images of more than 500 men and women from all over the world. His While Darwin Sleeps, in which thousands of insects pass through the film, each for a single frame, is on view with the Walter Linsenmaier exhibition of insects at the Natural History Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland. (See the film on YouTube.) Various university and college libraries in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, China, Switzerland, and Austria have Bush's titles in their holdings.

Wednesday Wonder: Fiber Optic Tapestry

Artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese invented a technology for creating a new media art form they call fiber optic tapestry. Out of it came 50 Different Minds, which they describe as "a conversation between Bauhaus artists Josef Albers and Anni Albers" during which the color theory of the former unites with the advances in weaving achieved by the latter. 

Conceptually, it is, at its most basic, a form of communication and networking redefined in 21st Century style. The warp-and-woof or patterning of the data visualization, the artists explain, is produced with words from Twitter tweets and flight arrival and departure times at nine of the world's busiest airports. The software is programmed to display colors that respond to tweets using the hashtag #optictapestry and color words.

This video shows the custom tapestry, which comprises nine fiber optic panels and a computer controlled lighting system, as it is being woven on a hand loom, and describes the processes behind its fascinating making:

LigoranoReese 50 Different Minds from LigoranoReese on Vimeo.

The tapesty debuted in 2010 at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

Kickstarter Campaign for Fiber Optic Tapestry

Josef Albers (1888-1976)

Anni Albers (1899-1994)

Josef & Anni Albers Foundation

Ligorano/Reese Collaborations

"Joy of Collaborating: recipes for time-based art"