Friday, March 29, 2013

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Congratulations to the Washington School of Photography and Capitol Arts Network on the opening of their fabulous new digs in Rockville, Maryland! I attended the grand opening earlier this week and was impressed and delighted by what has been accomplished. The renovated facilities on Wilkins Avenue, which provide more than 27,000 square feet of classrooms, galleries, photography studios, and workspaces for artists, are a dream-come-true. So much attention and hard work went into this project. Kudos to Missy Loewe of WSP and Judith HeartSong of CAN and their respective boards for this wonderful contribution to the community! If you live in the Washington, D.C., area, take a drive out and say hello. You'll be welcomed!

✦ In January Art21 launched the Art21 Translation Project with partner nonprofit Amara. The intention is to transcribe and translate Art21 videos about contemporary artists to make the videos accessible around the world. Initial plans are to bring 100 artists' voices to global audiences.

✦ Music is integral to the work of Brooklyn-based painter  and sculptor Jennie C. Jones, recipient of the $50,000 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize from Studio Museum in Harlem. Jones will be featured in a solo exhibition, "Higher Resonance", this May in The Directions Gallery at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. I especially like Jones's suite Components, consisting of three "speaker cabinet" silkscreens and three "reverberation" bass string prints. (Prints from the suite are available at Lower East Side Printshop in New York City.)

✦ Next time you find yourself looking up Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), take a look at Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, an interactive site with an animated timeline encompassing the course of Duchamp's artistic career. (My thanks to Charles Kessler at Left Bank Art Blog for the link.)

✦ This spring Lower East Side Printshop, New York City, is offering classes in water-based screenprinting (April 3 - May 8), solar plate etching (April 23 - May 28), and itaglio printing (May 15 -July 2). Sign up now!

✦ The video below, which comes by way of Ann Martin at All Things Paper (many thanks, Ann!), spotlights the work and life of artists Lam Quang and Kestrel Gates, who design and craft gorgeous hand-made paper lights. Their artisanal work can be seen at HiiH (pronounced "Hi Hi") Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

HiiH Lights from Cineastas on Vimeo.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art in Durham is showing more than 100 photographic works from public and private North Carolina collections in "Light Sensitive". Organized around five themes, the exhibition examines how the camera has been and is used for social and aesthetic purposes. On view are a range of types of images, from early daguerreotypes to large contemporary C-prints. Among the famous photographers artists represented are Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, Aaron Siskind, and Vik Muniz; among the photographers from North Carolina are William Noland, Tom Rankin, and Margaret Sartor. A number of images are being shown for the first time. The exhibition runs through May 12.

The Nasher also has mounted the first major solo museum exhibition of the work of multidisciplinary artist Wangechi Mutu, who was born in Kenya and currently is based in Brooklyn, New York. The show, "Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey", which continues through July 21, features more than 40 works from the mid-1990s to today, including collages, a monumental wall drawing, sculptures, a site-specific installation, and animated video. On public view for the first time are Mutu's sketchbooks.

Here's an introductory video about Mutu from Art Gallery of Ontario, which showed Mutu's work in 2010:



Wangechi Mutu Studio on FaceBook

The Nasher Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ In Portland, Oregon, the Portland Art Museum continues through May 19 "Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video". The retrospective exhibition of the native Portland photographer's work, which has been reviewed extensively (the show originated at Frist Center for the Visual Arts), features more than 200 images, written texts, audio recordings, videos, and installations covering Weems's career over the last 30 years, including such major work as From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Ritual and Revolution, and the more recent video project Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment. The show will travel to Cleveland Museum of Art, Stanford University's Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, and the Guggenheim. 

The catalogue Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (Yale University Press, October 2012) accompanies the show.

Portland Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Some 150 works from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art are on display through June 1 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (485 Broadway) of Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among the objects showcased in "In Harmony" are early glazed ceramics, illustrated manuscripts (folios of the epic poems Shahnama and Khamsa), and lacquerware. A free augmented reality app, providing access to audio, video, and Web links for various objects on view, has been created and a catalogue has been prepared for the exhibition. See feature article in Islamic Arts Magazine (December 2012).

Harvard Art Museums on FaceBook and Twitter


Cleveland Museum of Art is exhibiting through June 2 "The Caporali Missal: A Masterpiece of Renaissance Illumination". The manuscript, acquired by the museum in 2006 and on view for the first time, is the work of Barolomeo Caporali and his brother Giapeco Caporali, who decorated the missal for the Franciscan community in Montone, near Perugia, in 1469. Complementing the presentation of the missal are additional panel paintings and manuscripts by the Caporalis, as well as liturgical objects (including vestments, a chalice, and a processional cross) loaned by museums and churches in Umbria and shown in the United States for the first time.


Bartolomeo Caporali, Missal, 1469
Assisted by Giapeco Caporali
Ink, Tempera, Silver, Burnished Gold on Vellum
400 Folios; 3 Full-page Illuminations, 31 Historiated Initials
35 cm x 25 cm
Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund 2006.154


Cleveland Museum of Art on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Work by visionary artist Forrest Bess (1911-1977) goes on view at The Mentil Collection, Houston, Texas, on April 19. The exhibition, "Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible", presents approximately 40 paintings and rare works on paper, as well as selected letters by the artist, who lived a rather isolated and impoverished life in a fishing camp outside Bay City, Texas, where he was born, and taught himself to paint by copying still lifes and landscapes. A prolific artist whose early works he sold for $10.00, he met influential art dealer Betty Parsons, who gave him six solo shows at her gallery in New York City between 1949 and 1967. 


The show, which will include Robert Gober's Forrest Bess installation for the Whitney, will continue through August 18 and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue (see image above) published by Yale University Press and available in May. Prepared by Clare Elliott, assistant curator at The Menil Collection, the catalogue includes a contribution by Gober.

Selection of Paintings and Letters by Bess

Go here to view an interesting recent Antiques Roadshow feature about a Bess oil painting. The appraiser values the painting, to which is affixed on the reverse a price label of $150, at $75,000. 

The Menil Collection on FaceBook and Twitter

Notable Exhibit Abroad

Planning to be in London this spring or early summer? Don't miss the fascinating Wellcome Collection exhibition "Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan", on view through June 30. More than 300 works by 46 artists are being shown. You'll find a video preview, image galleries, a curator's essay, and additional resources at the link.

1 comment:

Diane Walker said...

Thanks so much for the Easter wishes, Maureen; may your weekend, too, be blessed and bring with it a spirit of resurrection and joy...