Today, Saturday Short presents a sand mandala of the deity Chakrasamvara created by Lama Karma Tenzin at the Rubin Museum in New York City. It took Lama Karma more than two weeks to create the artwork, comprising millions of grains of crushed marble, and just two minutes to destroy. (Note: The video is without audio.)
Lama Karma appeared at the museum in conjunction with "The Dragon's Gift - The Sacred Arts of Bhutan" exhibition (2008). The show featured nearly 90 artworks, including gilt bronze and wooden sculptures, ancient and modern ritual objects, and thangkas (paintings and images created with applique and embroidery framed in brocade).
✦ Brooklyn- and Dallas-based painter Michelle Mackey has produced a number of striking series, including, most recently, Star Service (bonnie and clyde); The Berlin Stories and Inscape, both from 2007; and The Layers Seriesand Residual States, both from 2003. She is as apt to find her inspiration, she says in her Artist Statement, in "the surface mix of cracked mortar, shiny metal, peeling paint, and rusty scaffolds" as in "conversations, books, music, patterns, and other sources for ideas on color, form, and composition." See her Painting Process Video. Mackey most recently was in a group show, "Fresh Tracks: an abstract dialog", at the Beatrice M. Haggerty Gallery at the University of Dallas.
✦ I dare you not to say "Wow!" after you watch Shinichi Maruyama's water sculpture movie. Be sure to look at each of the series on his site, including the Water Sculpture images and the marvelous Kusho. His Artist Statement offers some of his reflections on those series. Maruyama is part of the "Turbulences II" exhibition at Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, through September 1. He was also in "Marcel Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase — A Homage" at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, earlier this spring.
✦ Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York launched post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe. It is intended to be an online journal, archive, exhibition space, and open forum for exploring modernism in all its aspects: established and experimental, historical and emerging, local and global, scholarly and artistic. You'll find essays, interviews, practices, workshop listings, and continually augmented image and video content. Some content is organized thematically.
✦ Today's short video features Nancy Dwyer, figurative painter and sculptor, whose work was installed earlier this year at Fisher Landau Center for the Arts, Long Island City, New York ("Nancy Dwyer: Painting & Sculpture, 1982-2012"). Dwyer, who is an associate professor of sculpture at the University of Vermont (brief profile here), calls her word sculptures her "expressions. They're very short poems."
Exhibitions Here and There
✭ In New York City, the Museum of Modern Art has mounted an exhibition of images by modernist British photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983). The show, "Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light", on view through August 12, presents for the first time Brandt's beautiful photographs of moonlit London during the Blackout and improvised shelters during the Blitz. Sarah Hermanson Meister's illustrated catalogue Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light (MoMA, March 2103), accompanying the exhibition, presents the photographer's entire oeuvre in the context of 20th Century photography; it includes an illustrated glossary of Brandt's retouching techniques and an appendix of his photo-stories published in World War II.
Bill Brandt Archive (You'll find a four-part video interview with Brandt on the site.)
The Carter also is exhibiting a series of lithographs created by Ed Ruscha at Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now, Tamarind Institute) in 1969. "Ed Rusha: Made in California" continues through July 21.
✭ The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design is featuring through June 30 artists Angela Bulloch (Copper 2, 2011), Haroon Mirza (Pansonic2, 2011), and Anthony McCall (Miniature in Black and White, a slide projection installation, 1972) in "Double-and-Add". The artists use time-based media (programmed light, sound, and slide projection) to "investigate the sensory transmission of information" through electricity, RGB-light (Red/Green/Blue color-changing strips/bars), algorithms, and other immaterial systems. The exhibition title is a play on a mathematical term used in binary coding.
✭ John Mulvany curated for Tamarind Institute "Good in the Kitchen", an exhibition that explores gender and scenes of domesticity. The exhibition included lithographs created at Tamarind over the last 30 years; interestingly, more than half the images were by men. Among the artists represented: Mark Licari, Donald Sultan, Marie Watt, Hung Liu, and Alison Saar. The exhibition closed March 13 but the online component may be viewed here (pdf).
Learn how, in less than two minutes, you can stay creative:
Even though No. 4 is "Get away from the computer." (did you laugh at that, as I did?), you'll have to stay online to check out these articles matched to each of the suggestions. (My thanks to cut-paper artist Elsa Mora for the video link and articles list.)
What's your favorite way to keep the inspiration going?
Today's Wednesday Wonder is Mother Nature, which never fails to surprise and awe. To wit: scientists at Brown University who have been studying a certain species of bats (Glossophaga soricina) have determined that the bats are born with a "hemodynamic nectar mop", that is, a tongue tip designed by nature to use blood flow to improve ability to feed. As blood flows, small "hair-like" structures go erect, extending tongue length and surface area, thereby allowing optimal amounts of nectar to be "mopped up" and consumed at once.
Here's a wonderful video made available with the news release about the study findings, which have been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study's lead author Cally Harper and her colleagues Sharon Swartz and Beth Brainerd say additional study and understanding of the bats' vascular system could inspire innovations in medical technology designs, including development of more flexible mini surgical robots.
Be sure to click on the news release link to see an up-close image of the "nectar mop". That image also appears in Kenneth Chang's "Tongue Like a Mop" at The New York Times (May 10, 2013).
Also of interest: the robotic bat wing Brown researchers have built.
In the music video below, which combines archival footage and contemporary scenes, Harjo recites her famous "Eagle Poem" and performs a solo on her saxophone. Directed and produced by Native Hawaiian filmmaker Lurline Wailana McGregor, the video was nominated for a prize at the Native American Indian Film and Video Festival in 2002; it has been screened nationally and internationally at film festivals around the world.
To see more of Harjo's work in theatre, film, and video, go here.
✦ 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.
✦ 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.
✦ 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."
✭ 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.)
✭ 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.)
✭ 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.
✭ 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.
✭ 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.
I am the author of "Neruda's Memoirs and Other Poems" from T.S. Poetry Press. I own a small art-licensing business, Transformational Threads, http://www.transformationalthreads.com; have many friends in the arts and publishing fields; enjoy attending theatre, dance performances, concerts, movies, poetry readings, and art museums and galleries; own two Westies; and have one son, four sisters, and two brothers. I made my living as a writer and editor for more than 30 years and retired in 2007. I'm not done writing yet, as you can see.
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