Friday, October 17, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Specializing in contemporary Latin American artists, All We Art Cultural exChange comprises an art studio and gallery in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Launched this past summer with an exhibition of Venezuelan contemporary art, the multidisciplinary arts venue also features a Venezuelan craft store. The business owners plan to open a cafe so that the spaces become "a place of encounter" and discovery (in addition to art/design exhibition, shopping, and "encounter" spaces, All We Art aims to provide cultural services and programs.) All We Art participated in the international art fair (e)merge and currently is showing, through November 9, the work of Anrika Rupp, who works both in Caracas and Miami. Exhibitions are monthly.

✦ I shared last month on social media this online image gallery for "Life: Magnified", an exhibition that continues through November at the Gateway Gallery at Washington Dulles International Airport. It is too good not to include here. See the 46 photos in person or do the next best thing and go online. The images are remarkable, and include a relapsing fever bacterium on red blood cells, the cerebellum, a human liver cell, a mammalian eye, a brain with Alzheimer's disease, gecko toe hairs, skin cancer cells from a mouse, HIV, and the mouth parts of a lone star tick (pictured below). The exhibition is a joint effort involving the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, American Society for Cell Biology, and Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority's Arts Program


Mouth Parts of Lone Star Tick
Igor Siwanowicz, Janelia Farm Research Campus
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia
Courtesy "Life: Magnified" Exhibition

✦ Her oils on Metrocards are just 2-1/8" x 3-1/4" but are surprisingly detailed. Painter Maud Taber-Thomas of Washington, D.C., and New York City, began making the tiny works in 2011, while living in the latter city. A graduate of the New York Academy of Art, where she studied classical painting, Taber-Thomas is drawn to the historic and the literary, as demonstrated by her lovely "Orlando Project", inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel, and specializes in portrait-painting. Browse her Website for inspiration. See Taber-Thomas's work at Susan Calloway Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.

✦ It's no wonder Joan ("Joe-on") Belmar is the recipient of arts grants and fellowships. Chile-born and now a citizen of the United States, Belmar is an immensely talented painter who works with such materials as mylar, acetate, vinyl, plywood, and plastic to "play with light, transparencies and the sculptural qualities of these elements" to explore and reference memories, perceptions, and changes over time and distance. It's clear from looking at images in his online gallery and at images of his various series that Belmar likes to experiment, and he does so to wonderful effect. His works on paper, so full of abstracted narrative, are worth a long look. Washingtonians can see his solo exhibition "Chords" at Addison/Ripley Fine Art through October 25. A slideshow of Belmar's intriguing work is available online at Adah Rose Gallery.

✦ It's true that everything has a purpose, and sometimes more than one, as these wonderful collages and drawings by Steve Greene prove. Greene likes to use old supply catalogues in his work, which he says are full of "random poetry". (My thanks to Paris Review Daily for the introduction.)

✦ In the brief video below, issued in September as part of the Art21 Exclusive series, the remarkable photographer Sally Mann, who lives in Virginia, talks about her relationship to Virginia Franklin Carter (1894-1994), the African-American who helped raise her and her siblings. Mann describes Carter as possibly "the single most important person in my life." The video includes images from Mann's Deep South series. The images are available in Deep South, published in 2005. Mann will be releasing next year a memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown & Co./Hachette Book Group, May 12, 2015), which will include photographs and be available as an e-book and audiobook.



Art21 Profile of Sally Mann

Gagosian Gallery Profile of Sally Mann

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ "Brides of Anansi: Fiber and Contemporary Art" continues through December 6 at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia. The exhibition features beautiful examples of the artistry of women of the African Diaspora. Work by Xenobia Bailey, Sonya Clark, Januwa Moja, Senga Nengudi, Nnenna Okore, Joyce J. Scott, Adejoke Tugbiyele, and Saya Woolfalk is featured. The fiber media include yarn paper, glass, metal, synthetics, and textiles. (Take some time and browse the artists' Websites.)


SCMFA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ In Huntsville, Alabama, Huntsville Museum of Art continues through January 18, 2015, "Ginny Ruffner: Aesthetic Engineering", a exhibition of large mixed-media works by the glass artist, who is based in Seattle, Washington. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Ruffner is the subject of the feature-length documentary Ginny Ruffner: A Not So Still Life. (See my post "Ginney Ruffner: Not So Still" for a sneak peek and other information about the documentary.)


Catalogue Cover

HSV Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, is presenting "The Lyrical Line: Prints by Jacques Villon and Stanley William Hayter" through December 21. The exhibition features prints by the French and British printmakers, respectively, which were donated to UVA by T. Catesby Jones. 

Short Biography of Jacque Villon

Short Biography of Stanley William Hayter

Fralin Museum of Art on FaceBook and Twitter

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, also part of UVA but off-campus, is showing work by Ricardo Idagi (Meriam) of Melbourne. Titled "Gurari - Saltwater Drinker", the exhibition includes nine sculptures, made of such materials as raffia, feathers, beer cans, and wrought iron. The exhibition concludes December 21.

Kluge-Ruhe on FaceBook

The African American Museum in Philadelphia is devoting the next several months to "Stephen Hayes's Cash Crop". On view through January 5, 2015, the exhibition includes a life-size installation of 15 chained forms representing 15 million men, women, and children who endured the "Middle Passage" (see the image at the exhibition link; the sculptures are inspired by the Brookes slave ship, a diagram of which is in the British Library); historic slave dockets loaned to the museum by the Delaware County Bar Association; and objects from Lest We Forget Black Holocaust Museum of Slavery. A video of Dario Moore's series of vignettes, "Sacred Slave Stories", told in dance also will be available for viewing. 


Diagram of Brookes Slave Ship (1789)


African American Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

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