Friday, January 31, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The dramatic, wafer-thin flanges, plumes, and curly forms of Ursula Morley Price's beautifully glazed stoneware will keep you coming back for another look. See images of Price's exceptional work on the McKenzie Fine Art Website. (My thanks to Art Is a Way for the link.)

Open Gallery from Google allows you to create your own online exhibitions.

✦ Recognized as a master of the art of origami, Robert J. Lang will delight and awe those seeing his work for the first time. He has exhibited his sometimes complex designs nationally and internationally, won a variety of awards, and is a featured in the documentary Between the Folds. His works includes monumental origami and origami cast in bronze. He creates some 20 new pieces a year. Take some time to browse his excellent Website.

✦ The portfolio  of Kristen Hayes, whose solo show "No Room for Doubt" recently concluded at The Athenaeum in Alexandria, Virginia, includes lyrical site-specific drawings, mixed media on wood, works on paper and canvas, and murals. Her style, marked by recurrent use of circles and tree-like shapes, is distinctive and colorful.

✦ Toronto nonprofit Art Canada Institute has launched the Canadian Online Art Book Project, which will be publishing annually up to a dozen art e-books, in English and French. The first release is Jack Chambers: Life & Work; in the 1960s, Chambers was the highest paid artist in Canada. The planned peer-reviewed 50-book series will be downloadable at no cost. Among artists whose work will be featured this year or in 2015: Kathleen Munn (1887-1974), Michael Snow (b. 1928), Mungo Marin (1879-1962), Emily Carr (1871-1945), and Gerson Iskowitz (1921-1988). This is a tremendous five-year initiative that will make Canadian art history highly accessible to a huge audience.

A CBC video with institute staff is viewable here.

Naoko Serino uses jute to create fiber art full of light and air. Her soft sculptures are masterful.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ A two-part collaborative exhibition of the drawings of Alice Aycock, "Some Stories Are Worth Repeating", has been organized and is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The SBMA's show, continuing through April 20, covers the years 1984 to the present, while the show at AD&A Museum, running through April 19, examines work from the years 1971-1984. The latter includes architectural drawings, sculptural maquettes, and photo documentation of realized and imagined projects. More than 100 works are being shown.


Alice Aycock
 Hoodo (Laura), from How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts
Vertical and Horizontal Cross-section
 of the Ether Wind (1981), 1990/2012
Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 27-1/2" x 39-1/4"
Collection of the Artist

Organized by Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, the exhibition, the first to explore in detail the sculptor's creative approach and artistic practice, and, in particular, the role of drawing in Aycock's career, is accompanied by a hard-cover catalogue.  

Exhibition Review at The New York Times

Alice Aycock's Website

SBMA on FaceBook and Twitter

SBMA Blog

AD&A on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ In its first show devoted to a contemporary artist of gems, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, is featuring more than 400 pieces by 20th Century jewelry designer Joel A. Rosenthal, aka JAR. "Jewels by JAR", continuing through March 9, includes one-of-a-kind creations using diamonds, sapphires, pearls, garnets, topazes, tourmalines, and other exquisite stones, as well as natural materials. This is the first retrospective in America of JAR's jewelry. A catalogue (see image to right) accompanies the exhibition.

MET Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

Now at the Met, Museum Blog

✭ Yesterday, Washington's Bellevue Art Museum opened "Crating a Continuum: Rethinking the Contemporary Craft Field". Continuing through April 27, the exhibition presents more than 60 examples of fine craft in wood, ceramic, and fiber, including work by emerging artists Sonya Clark, Anders Ruhwald, Mark Newport, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor and by established artists Peter Voulkos, Ed Moulthrop, and Dorothy Gill Barnes. All the work comes from the craft collection of Arizona State University Art Museum.

Bellevue Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Oklahoma City Museum of Art is presenting through April 13 "Come on Down", comprising a colorful site-specific installation by New York sculptor Lisa Hoke. Hoke has created a monumental wall frieze more than 150 feet long and 15 feet high into which she has incorporated objects such as recycled paper, product packaging, and plastic cups. 


OCMOA on FaceBookTwitter, and YouTube

✭ Paducah, Kentucky's National Quilt Museum is showcasing 30 fine art quilts by Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry, who is acclaimed for her use of brilliant colors and eye-catching designs. The exhibit, "30 Quilts for 30 Years", all new and all 30-inches by 30-inches, is on view through March 11. The award-winning Fallert-Gentry has exhibited internationally; her work is in public, private, museum, and corporate collections.

In this brief video, the artist talks about the exhibit:



Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry on Pinterest 

The National Quilt Museum on FaceBookTwitter, and YouTube

Notable Exhibits Abroad

✭ American artist Richard Fleischner is enjoying his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at South London Gallery. On view through February 23 are small-scale sculptures, drawings, and photographs. 

Fleischner is a sculptor, installation artist, painter, and furniture maker. His installations are in numerous urban sites around the United States, including MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Known for his environmental art, Fleischner lives and works in Rhode Island.

Richard Fleischner at Beam Contemporary Art

SLG on FaceBook and Twitter

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Artist Watch: Patrick Palmer at EIL

I am at Escape Into Life today, where I'm spotlighting British artist Patrick Palmer, of whom art critic Claudia Moscovici has written, "Patrick Palmer is a master of figurative art. His post-romantic nudes are not only exquisitely painted, but only dreamy, delicate and suggestive. They only hint at sensuality and evoke fantasy in the subtle and elegant manner that distinguishes art from pornography."


Patrick Palmer, Reclining Nude, 2007
Original Oil on Canvas
65 cm x 50 cm
Available as Limited Edition Giclee Print
11.8" x 16.5" x 0.4"
© Patrick Palmer

Please Do Not Copy or Use Image

One look at Patrick's superb work and you'll understand why I'm so delighted to feature him in today's Artist Watch column. 


Patrick Palmer on FaceBook and Saatchi Online

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Peter Korn on 'Why We Make Things'




You really are engaging your hand and your head and your heart
. . . and when you're working in the studio and things are going
effortlessly, it's like you as a human being 
are firing on all pistons really well.
~ Peter Korn, Radio Boston Interview

I've been reading a wonderful book, Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman (David R Godine, October 2013), by Peter Korn, who founded and is the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, Rockport, Maine.

The process of becoming a craftsman was 
the process in the sense of building an identity. . . .

. . . we create and edit and maintain stories of the world 
and how we fit into it that are our identity. . . .

. . . we are creating, in a sense, the story of ourselves. . . .

Listen in on this excellent discussion (23:30 minutes) with Korn that was recorded at Radio Boston on January 16. It opens with a reading by Korn, who then discusses how he moved from being a carpenter to being a craftsman, the process of "having an idea and then doing the hard work to manifest it excellently in the world" to find fulfillment and meaning in life, about "striving for excellence", and about creativity. Talking about his concept of "thinking with things," he also identifies some of the tools he uses as a master furniture-maker.



Why We Make Things Website

Excerpt

Godine Publishers Page for Why We Make Things

Why We Make Things on FaceBook

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Singing in the Rain (Poem)

Singing in the Rain

Madame's old umbrella
has run its reign, turned
inside out in the mistral.

She takes it — ribs splayed,
catch springs loosed,
the uncomfortable handle

inconveniently gone missing
— to the last repairman
in Paris. He welcomes all

the brokenness in a corner
of his crowded Pep's Maison,
raises not even a black brow

as Madame mouths Merde!
The snapped ribs, short tusks
that poke and jab, are one

thing, torn canopy another,
and price the only negotiable
she'll weather in good time.

The repairman takes his
expert measures in silence,
offers Madame the choicest

of carved wood shafts, new
scotch-guarded shield, extra
runners for along the top.

Madame nods her oui, watches
the quick job done. She smiles
to think of singing in the rain.

© 2014 Maureen E. Doallas
___________________________

This poem was inspired by the NPR story about "No Rain on His Parade: Parisian Preserves Art of Umbrella Repair". 

Monday, January 27, 2014

Monday Muse: Indiana's New Poet Laureate

I see poetry as an act of loving service — to people, to animals
and the planet, and to the culture at large. Poetry grants us 
the opportunity to practice a meaning-making activity in which
the smaller sense of self eventually dissolves into a more
expansive Self with a large sense of purpose beyond the individual.
~ George Kalamaras*

George Kalamaras has been appointed Indiana's new State Poet Laureate. He succeeds Karen Kovacik, whose two-yerm term ended December 31, 2013. (For my profile of Kovacik, see my post of May 16, 2011.) Kalamaras's own term of service is January 1, 2014, through December 31, 2015. (See my post of March 7, 2011, on Norbert Krapf, Indiana's state poet from 2008-2010, for background and other information on the official position.)

Kalamaras plans to launch in February 2014 "Wabash Watershed: Where the Rivers of Tradition Meet the Rivers of Innovation", which will function as a one-stop Website for information about poets who live in Indiana and list poetry-related events and activities. As he told The Journal Gazette, "Poetry is sometimes misperceived as only a high art, that not all people can understand it. My responsibility is to let the people in the state of Indiana know that poetry is for them. It's not beyond the common person. Poetry is for everybody."

* * * * *
We're, in many ways, born poets.
. . . Poetry . . . it's also play, and we forget that
poetry should be play . . . return us to those origins
of what's it's like to be our child-like selves again.
~ George Kalamaras, Northeast Indiana Public Radio Interview


Chicago-born, now Fort Wayne resident George Kalamaras, Ph.D., is the author of more than a dozen full- and chapbook-length poetry collections, most recently, Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof (Ugly Duckling Press, 2010), The Scathering Sound (Anchorite Press, 2009), Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees (Stockport Flats, 2009), with artwork by painter Alvaro Cardona-Hine, and the full-length Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004) and Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003).

Kalamaras's collection Kingdom of Throat-Struck Luck (Paperback, Elixir, 2012) was awarded the Elixir Press Poetry Contest; The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), Kalamaras's first full-length collection, was a Four Way Books Intro Series winner. Another book, The Recumbent Galaxy (C&R Press, 2010), on which he again collaborated with Cardona-Hine, won the C&R Press Open Competition.

Numbering among Kalamaras's other chapbooks are The Mining Camps of the Mouth (New Michigan Press, 2012), recipient of the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press 2012 Chapbook Contest; Symposium on the Body's Left Side (Shivastan Press, 2011), the limited-edition Mingus Mingus Mingus (Longhouse, 2010), Beneath the Breath (Tilton House, 1988), and Heart Without End (Leaping Mountain Press, 1986). Excerpts from his electronic chapbook The Transformation of Salt are published in The Drunken Boat. He has contributed many articles to scholarly periodicals, including The International Journal of Hindu Studies. In addition, Kalamaras, who practices Yogic meditation, has written Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (SUNY Series in Literacy, Culture, and Learning, 1994); available through resellers, it is a study of Hindu mysticism and Western discourse theory.

The prolific poet's wide-ranging interests in spirituality, Hindu scriptures, Zen Buddhism, blues music, science generally but biology and the natural world and animal behavior especially, Chinese poets and the work of Cesar Vallejo, whom he credits as his literary hero, and his deep relationship to Indiana ("Somewhere inside me a gray barn is rising") are reflected throughout his poetry. Pain, joy, celebration, sorrow — all work their way through Kalamaras's writing, underscoring his belief that beyond self-expression and communication, poetry is a means to "celebrate the various connections I have in the world."**

Kalamaras does not limit himself to any one structural form. He writes in couplets, in quatrains, in cut-up sections, with broken lines. Sometimes he addresses his words to "you"; at others, he uses "I". His enjambment is noteworthy.

When you read Kalamaras's poems, you notice at once how full of images they are (sometimes the images are entirely surreal, seeming to have no relation with each other), how they call from memory that lives inside us.  There is, on the one hand, Kalamaras the teller and, on the other, Kalamaras the rememberer of what is come and gone; what comes from that combination of narration and meditation can be stunning (see the last excerpt below). There is deep and close observation of nature, an attentiveness to self-scrutiny that never seems put-on or ironic. There is lyricism and physicality. And there is a feeling of self-containment, which may, perhaps, arise from the way the poems progress, sometimes mystical, sometimes wholly down-to-earth. This is a poet who's not afraid to contrast the complementary with the contradictory. He welcomes you to join him in his experience of the world.

To illustrate, here are excerpts from several of Kalamara's beautifully written poems.

All night wondering why you're here,
what you came to find. Something
to do with the bruise. That hole you carry
and get sick of so fill with clotted
cream, [. . . .]
~ from "Cut of the World" in The Transformation of Salt
(Electronic Chapbook)

This is where Gandhiji was burned at death.
What remains is a square of black marble

and where the head might be, an urn of ash
as a memento, for the Mahatma

now swims in the Jamuna and borders
New Delhi. So many deaths and burnings

glow in votive candles and marigolds [. . . .]
~ from "At Raj Ghat" in The Theory and Function of Mangoes

Charles Mingus was one-third Chinese.
He, too, came to the study of bones

His bass was a bone. His  toe was a bone.
He'd sit and pick chicken groans from his soup.
[. . . .]
~ from "Affirmation" in Your Ox-Head Mask as Proof

[. . . .]
In the mining camps of my mouth, I kept bending a pan of her purest gold. Leaping up
into me like wildfire. Even at high altitude columbine grow. The lung is an amazing organ.
An origami crane in the chest. We need new names just to breathe. Names of 
destruction and love. Names that wing us into the ever-hopeful West. [. . .]
~ from "The Mining Camps of the Mouth"  in The Mining Camps of the Mouth

(The long lines of that last excerpt wrap because of this post's column-width.)

A professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990, Kalamas is widely published in literary periodicals and magazines in the United States and abroad. Some of his more than 725 published poems have appeared in Arsenic Lobster Poetry JournalThe Bitter Oleander, BlackbirdChariton Review, Columbia Poetry ReviewConjunctions: The Web Forum of Innovative Writing, Copper NickelThe Cortland Review, Delaware Poetry ReviewDouble RoomThe Drunken Boat, The Florida ReviewGargoyleHunger MountainThe Iowa ReviewMalpais Review, New American Writing, New Letters, Parthenon West ReviewPavement Saw, Solo CafeStand Magazine (UK), Sulfur, TriQuarterly, Tupelo QuarterlyVert Magazine, VerseDaily,  Ur-Vox, and many others.

Work by Kalamaras is anthologized in Malpais Review Number 2 (Malpais Review, 2013), Malpais Review: Number 4 (CreateSpace, 2012), Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry (Somerset Hall Press, 2008), Anthology | Visiting Authors, 2006 | Syracuse YMCA Poetry (The Downtown Writer's Center, 2006), The Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner, 2008), 2: An Anthology of New Collaborative Poetry (BookSurge Publishing, 2007), Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms (Routledge, 2002), Writing With Elbow (Utah State University Press, 2002), The Bitter Oleander Volume 4 Number 2 (The Bitter Oleander Press, 1998), The Best American Poetry 1997 (Scribner, 1997), and TALISMAN No. 16 Fall 1996 Special Boston/U.K. Issue: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Talisman, 1996), among others.

Kalamaras's honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship Grant (1993), Indiana Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship Grants (2011, 2001), the Abiko Quarterly (Japan) International Poetry Prize (1998), and an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship to India from the Fulbright Foundation and U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture (1994). In addition, Kalamaras has completed two writing residencies at Hambridge Center for the Arts and is the recipient of an Outstanding Research Award from Indiana University-Purdue University (2009).

Resources

Photo Credit: Indiana University-Purdue University Department of English and Linguistics

All Poetry Excerpts © George Kalamaras

* Quoted from Indiana Arts Commission News Release on Kalamaras's Appointment, January 9, 2014

Indiana Arts Commission, "Poet Laureate News" and "Verbatim: George Kalamaras of Fort Wayne Named State Poet Laureate" (IAC News Release at The Journal Gazette)

Keiara Carr, "IPFW Professor Named State Poet Laureate", The Journal Gazette, January 9, 2014

AmyJo Arehart, "Interview with George Kalamaras", Interview, Columbia Poetry Review, Columbia College Chicago, May 7, 2013 (Here, Kalamaras makes an important statement, "We need to look at the world and observe and feel the reciprocity of the inner and outer realms. . . to remain mindful that we respect poetry enough to embrace it as an attentiveness practice and not as a commodity.")

Claire Guyton, "Visiting with George Kalamaras", Interview, Hunger Mountain, VCFA Journal of the Arts

** Julia Meek, "Interview: Indiana's New Poet Laureate on Expression and Connection Through Verse", Northeast Indiana Public Radio, January 8, 2014 (5:52 minutes)

George Kalamaras Profiles at C&R Press, Four Way BooksIndiana Arts Commission, Indiana University, IPFW College of Arts and Sciences, New York State Writers InstitutePoets & Writers, ShadowplaysSPD BooksQuale Press,

George Kalamaras Poetry Online: "Heat", "Kali's Thigh", "Cut of the World", "And Finally, the Brides of Lust", "The Scrotal Itch", "At the Ashram of Trailanga Swami", Beloved Star", "Meeting Alison at the Malaviya Bhavan, Banaras Hindu University", "The Resurrection of Andre Breton's Ashes", and "Looking for My Grandfather with Odysseas Elytis", All at The Drunken Boat; "Tongues : 9" (from Scraps of Said) at Tarpaulin Sky Press; "I Make Easy Emptiness" and "The Antelope Tree", Both at Hunger Mountain; "Hall of the Imperial Silkworm" and "Sphex", Both at Blackbird; "Azoic Bottom" at The Cortland Review; "At Raj Ghat" at Four Way Books; "Unanswered Left Shoe" at OmniVerse; "The Theory and Function of Mangoes", "Hysteresis", and "Mud", All at Reading Between A&B; "Across the Great Divide", "Listening to Ramatam After Thirty-Five Years", and "So We Can Teach Ourselves Not to Bleed", All at Delaware Poetry Review; "Buddy Guy's Blues and the Discovery of Feedback" at Chicago Blues Guide; "On the Brink" at Tupelo Quarterly; "Letter to Phil From Manitou Springs" at Four Way Review; "Wasp Work", "Fiji Fright Wig", "Seven Minutes Twenty-Three Seconds", "Less Than Or Equal To", and "Tapeworms", All at Phantom Limb Press; "The Mining Camps of the Mouth" and "The Age of Bent Blood in the Throat", Both at VerseDaily; "The Pawnee Buttes" at Clade Song 2; "We Construct Many Mouths"and "The Hands of Drawn Space", Both at caffeine destiny; "Living in the Material World" at Double Room; "I Wore Monk Hair" and "Again and Again", Both at Word for Word: A Journal of New Writing; "Surrealist Inquiry" at Jacket Magazine; "One of Only Two" at Shadowplays; "Affirmation" at Galatea Resurrects; "Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof" and "From the Book of Tongues (32)", Both at The Hamilton Stone Review; "The Preparation of Bone Glue" at Your Chicken Enemy: Poets You Should Know; "Vasko Popa and the Myth of the Deadpan Myth", "A Barbarian from the Gobi: How Henri Michaux Kissed Us Awake", "Is Autoeroticism a Fierce Form of Incest?", "What the Aghoris Taught",  and "The Practice of Austerities", All at Tripod; "The Trouble with Being Human" at Barnstorm Literary Journal; "Hypnosis of Breathing" at Elixir Press and High Water Mark Salon; "Placental Chauvinism" at The Volta; "Francis Ponge Is on Fire" at a heap of broken images; "The Bluest Blues" at Chicago Blues Guide; "The Sense of Lost" at Pavement Saw Press; "The Birds Cannot Disappear" at Oyster Boy Review; "Queen of the Blues - For Koko Taylor" at The Bluegrass Special

Video: George Kalamaras @ Acoustic SpokenWord Cafe, March 10, 2012;

George Kalamaras's Blues Poetry Column at Chicago Blues Guide (Archive)

David Peak, "The Mining Camps of the Mouth by George Kalamaras", Review, The Rumpus, December 4, 2013

Brooks Lampe, "Hindu Surrealism: George Kalamaras", Review of Your Own Ox-Head Mask as Proof, The The Poetry, June 22, 2011

"George Kalamaras: Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair", Review, The Great American Pinup, April 1, 2011

Daniel Casey, "'Teetering on a Necessary Boundary': Tony Trigilio Examines George Kalamaras's 'God Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors'", Gently Read Literature, September 1, 2008

Except from Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair at Quale Press

Preview of Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair at GoogleBooks

Preview of The Mining Camps of the Mouth at GoogleBooks

Preview of Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension at GoogleBooks

Previvew of The Recumbent Galaxy at GoogleBooks

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Thought for the Day

[H]aving a wound is not the same as being wounded.
~ Chris Abani, Poet and Novelist
______________________


Saturday, January 25, 2014

Saturday Short

Only we can tell our stories.

An important new documentary tracing the Egyptian protest movement that began in 2011, from the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak to the ousting in 2013 of Mohammed Morsi, premiered last week on January 17: The Square. (See list of screenings.)

Directed by Jehane Noujaim and produced by Karim Amer, The Square (Noujaim FIlms, Inc.) already has received many accolades, including an Oscar nomination for "Best Documentary Feature" and the 2013 Sundance World Cinema Audience Award" (Sundance archive on the film). 

Here's the official trailer for the film:



The Square on FaceBook and Twitter

Kickstarter Campaign for The Square

Ann Hornady, "'The Square' Movie Review: An Exhilarating Portrait of Egyptian Politics", The Washington Post, January 16, 2014

Michelle Kung, "Egypt Documentary 'The Square' Could Put Netflix in Winner's Circle at Oscars", Speakeasy Blog, The Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2014 (The article includes an interview with Karim Amer.)

Colleen Kelsey, "Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer Take The Square", Interview Magazine, December 2013

A.O. Scott, "Brave Optimism of Tahrir Square Meets Other Fierce Forces", Review of The Square, The New York Times, October 24, 2013 (A video about the film is here.)

Friday, January 24, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The cast glass sculpture of German-born Sibylle Peretti is exquisite. Her beautiful two-dimensional mixed-media work, which often features children's images, is deeply evocative, sometimes disturbing, and narratively rich. In her Artist Statement, Peretti says she uses images of children "to open our eyes to a mysterious sensibility we may have lost. My children-protagonists are immaculate in their innocence, transmitting a savage view of our own isolation."  Peretti was a 2012 USA Friends Fellow and the recipient of grants from Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation.


Sibylle Peretti at Heller Gallery (New York City) and Callan Contemporary (New Orleans)

✦ I recently was introduced to the internationally award-winning sculpture of Parvaneh Roudgar, who currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. As you will see when you visit her Website, Roudgar, who was born in Iran and grew up in Italy, creates elegant, technically masterful abstract and figurative sculptures in bronze, patinated or glazed terra cotta, fiberglass, and stainless steel that manage to convey a remarkable range of emotion. The works are at once visceral and poetic. (I particularly like her haunting Middle East Woman 1, part of a series available at artclvb.) Don't miss her large and graceful outdoor pieces.

Parvaneh Roudgar on FaceBook

✦ This online Color Mixing Guide might help you expand your range of colors. Download the color poster for your studio. (My thanks to painter Susan Cornelis for the links.)

✦ The papers of Ben Shahn, scanned in their entirety and including family records, correspondence, project files, photographs, artwork, and a range of printed materials, dating from 1879 to 1990, have been digitized and made available at Archives of American Art. The collection contains more than 41,000 images.

Charles Clary, who exhibited last month with Ryan Cobourn at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York City, layers precisely hand-cut, brightly colored paper to create his unusual and playful sculptural forms that he describes as "intriguing land formations that mimic viral colonies and concentric sound waves". A native of Tennessee (he currently lives in Murfreesboro), Clary shows his work regionally, nationally, and internationally. He has been featured in numerous publications, including This Is Colossal and Wired magazine.

Charles Clary at Nancy Margolis Gallery

✦ This video with fascinating Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was filmed by ArtInfo during Kusama's attendance at a 2013 exhibition, "I Who Have Arrived in Heaven", at David Zwirner in New York City. The show, which was on view from November 8 to December 21, required three gallery sites and showcased 27 large paintings by Kusama, who joined Zwirner gallery in early 2013.



Yayoi Kusama Website

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Currently up at Dallas Museum of Art: "Robert Smithson in Texas", a look at five projects Smithson proposed for Texas. The show, on view through April 27, includes photographs, little-known drawings, and sculpture related to the projects.

DMA on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ In Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is presenting 14 photographic and text-based works by Sophie Calle. The exhibition, "Sophie Calle: Last Seen", running through March 3, includes work created in 2012 and, for the first time at the Gardner, a Gardner-inspired work, What Do You See? (Vermeer, The Concert). The painting that inspired Calle was one of 13 works stolen from the museum in 1990.

The Gardner on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Miami's Perez Art Museum (formerly, Miami Art Museum) is showing through February 23 a selection of works by Cuban painter Amelia Pelaez (1896-1968). The exhibition's socio-historical approach presents Pelaez's work in the context of Havana's cultural and urban environments during the first half of the 20th Century. Part of the primera vanguardia, the first group of Cuban artists who traveled to Europe before WW II and returned to introduce Cubism, Surrealism, and other styles of the time, Pelaez is considered among the most important of Cuba's Modern painters.


Perez Art Museum on FaceBook and Twitter 

✭ In "The Shadows Took Shape", a title drawn from a Sun Ra poem, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, takes an interdisciplinary approach to its exploration of how Afrofuturism has influenced contemporary artists. The exhibition features more than 60 artworks, among them 10 new commissions, including photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and multimedia. A 160-page illustrated catalogue (image below) accompanies the show.


Exhibition Catalogue Cover

The Shadows Took Shape on Tumblr (An explanation is provided here of Afrofuturism.)

The Studio Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube


✭ "Mind, Heart and Hand", a juried exhibition of work by members of the Monterey Bay Metal Arts Guild, is on view at Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History through February 2. The metal work ranges from sculptural jewelry to large constructions.

Santa Cruz Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and Vimeo

MGMAG on FaceBook and Twitter

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Thursday's Three on Literature and Poetry

Today's post is taking a break from strictly visual arts to offer three items related to literature and poetry.

✭ Experience what it's like to time-travel via poetry with "60 Years in 60 Poems" at The Space, a wonderful digital arts site. Lift off with your choice of paths — year or theme — and then settle in for a unique visual and aural presentation that incorporates archival film footage and recordings. It's helpful to get your bearings by first reading the About pages, which cover the site design, the readers, the poems, and the archive. 

The Space on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ One of my favorite sites, ArtWay, now offers a section devoted to Art and Poetry, accessible from the homepage. 

✭ Want to brush up on your rhyming skills? Try the Rhyming Dictionary at Rhymer, which also explains end, last-syllable, double, beginning, and first-syllable rhymes.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Jeremy Deller at Venice Biennale

For the past year's 55th Venice Biennale, the British Council commissioned a work by Jeremy Deller (b. 1966), a conceptual, video, and installation artist and winner of the 2004 Turner Prize.

Deller's English Magic offers a unique perspective on his country. Just watch and listen:







The music, recorded by Melodians Steel Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, comprises a performance of  a soundtrack released by The Vinyl Factory, The Man Who Sold the World by David Bowie,  Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald, and excerpts the third movement of Symphony No. 5 in D by Vaughan Williams.

Deller's work currently is traveling through the United Kingdom. See English Magic UK Tour 2014.

Jeremy Deller at The British Council (Profile and Media Archive)

British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

British Council on FaceBook and Twitter

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Dead Silence (Poem)

Dead Silence

The roses have been abandoned
in the village of Kuta Rakyat,

the ash from the erupting Mount
Sinabung collected in the spaces

between the slips of the creamy
soft-lipped petals. Two hundred

twenty times a week the volcano
straddling the Pacific Ring of Fire

spews its face powders into air,
the pyroclastic flow on all flanks

racing with hurricane-force speed.
Unpicked coffee beans lie in paths

of too-hot lava runs, a dog goes down
in a plumed dome of smoke, and rice

already harvested is emptied again
from wooden bowls. There are rocks

being thrown from heaven. The chili
trees wither and once-bright skins

of oranges bear crusty coats forbidden
to the masked children still showing

up for school lessons. Among gnarled
grey-black stalks, a single hibiscus

flower rises like a cup of red wine.
When lightning strikes, the ringing

of cell phones ends in dead silence.

© 2014 Maureen E. Doallas
__________________________________

Indonesia's Mount Sinabung has been erupting for weeks now, displacing tens of thousands, destroying crops, and threatening native flora and fauna. The stunning photographs of the eruption are the inspiration for this poem.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Monday Muse: 2014 Poetry-Related Exhibitions

Today, Monday Muse rounds up a number of poetry-related exhibitions planned for this year, in the United States and abroad; among them are the following:

✭ Through May 25, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida, is presenting "A Human Document: Selections from The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry". A highlight is a rare example of concrete poetry: Un Coup de des (A Throw of the Dice), published by Stephane Mallarme in 1897.

The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, assembled by Ruth and Marvin Sackner, includes rare manuscripts and published works, both historic and contemporary, as well as artists' books, typewriter art, mail art, critical texts, periodicals, performance poetry, "assemblings", micrography, correspondence, paintings, sculpture, and other fine art, and much more.

Trailer for Documentary About Sackner Archive

✭ Coming to Queens, New York City, in March: "Poetic Voices of the Muslim World", featuring photography, calligraphic masterworks, and the works of a wide range of poets, including Rumi and Adonis. The show, a two-year initiative that opened in March 2013 in Los Angeles, California, and Jacksonville, Florida, highlights poetry from Asia, Africa, and diaspora communities in the United States and focuses on Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetic traditions.

Presenters City Lore and Poets House have created an informative companion Website of the same name. The site explores the roots of Islamic poetry, the Qur'an and Arabic literary culture, epic and romance, and important poetic forms such as the qasida, ghazal, and zamil; spotlights Egyptian poetry, Sufi verses and hymns, and contemporary folk traditions; examines innovations and East-West dialogues, politics and poetry, and adaptations; spotlights American and global voices of poetry; and includes in English translation poems or excerpts from long works, both ancient and contemporary.

✭ The FotoFest 2014 Biennial, "View from Inside: Contemporary Arab Video, Photography, and Mixed Media", to be held in Houston, Texas, March 15 - April 27, will include a number of events showcasing contemporary poetry, literature, and music.

Obsidian Art, in the United Kingdom, is opening "The Art of Poetry" March 21. All the work in the exhibition will be inspired by or illustrate a poem.

A few days are left before submissions close. Entries, which must be by UK artists, may be in in any medium (painting, illustration, drawing, printmaking, photography, ceramics, textiles, glass, wood, metal, jewelry, etc.); they must be postmarked by February 5.

Obsidian plans to publish a book with a selection of images and poems. The show will run through April 27.

Images and Words from 2013 Exhibition "The Art of Poetry"

✭ St. Catherine of Bologna Patron of the Arts Association, Ringwood, New Jersey, will hold its "15th Annual Photo, Art & Poetry Exhibition and Sale" in March. The exhibition prospectus indicates that entries are first-come, first-served and must be in hand by March 9. The theme is "Celebrating the Light That You Are".

Crossings Gallery, in Zumbrota, Minnesota, will present "Poet Artist Collaboration XIII" in April, during National Poetry Month. The deadline for entries by poets and artists is January 29. Guidelines and entry forms are available online.

✭ The Text Festival, scheduled for May 3 through July 9 at Bury Art Museum, Lancashire, United Kingdom, will feature a number of exhibitions that examine contemporary language art (poetry, text art, sound and media text, live art): "The Language of Lists",  "Passage Collage", "Text Archive / Chances", "Polari Mission", and "Volume 3: The Dark Would".

Bury Art Gallery, Museum and Archives on FaceBook

✭ A major exhibition of the work of William Blake (1757-1827) will open at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, in early December. The show, "William Blake: Apprentice and Master", will run through March 1, 2015. Tickets will be required.

Ashmolean on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The exhibition "1914: death of the poets" opens in the fall at Bibliotheque Naitonale et Universitaire de Strausbourg (BNU), France. Tentatively scheduled for September 23 - December 20, the show will focus on the lives and writing of three European poets who died on the battlefields of World War I — Charles Peguy (1873-1914), Ernst Stadler (1883-1914), and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) — and examine "the particular view of poets on death and the meaning of war". 



The Wilfred Owen Collection, First World War Poetry, Digital Archive (This online archive is the repository for more than 7,000 items of text, images, audio, and video.)

This year marks the centenary of the First World War, also known as the Great War. In conjunction with observances in Europe and elsewhere, an international conference on British poets of WWI will be held September 5-7 at Wadham College, Oxford. A program of lectures, panel discussions, recitals, exhibitions of items from poets' archives, and displays of poets' publications is planned. 

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Thought for the Day

You should write because you love the shape of stories
and sentences and the creation of different worlds 
on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is
the finest teacher of how to write.
~ Annie Proulx
________________________________

Quoted from Christopher Cox, "The Art of Fiction No. 199, Annie Proulx", Interview, The Paris Review, No. 188, Spring 2009

Annie Proulx's most recent books are Bird Cloud: A Memoir (Scribner, 2011) and  Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyming Stories 3 (Scribner, 2008).

Annie Proulx, Featured Author, The New York Times Archives

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Saturday Short


Today's short is the trailer for WORDLESS!, the new Art Spiegelman and Phillip Johnston project that combines talk, slides, and musical performance. The show takes place today at BAM, on January 22 at Colorado College, (this show will be streamed live), and on January 25 at University of Chicago



WORDLESS! on Tumblr

"WORDLESS! The Library of America's Lynd Ward Collection Inspires New Art Spiegelman Show", Reader's Almanac, The Library of America Blog, January 14, 2014


Art Spiegelman on FaceBook

Friday, January 17, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Sculptor Hilary Berseth, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, can be said to leave at least part of the creation of his artwork to chance; he uses bees in crafting his abstract "Programmed Hives". Berseth fashions forms of thin wax sheets or wire armatures that he then places in specially designed hives, where the bees take over to produce the final works. Berseth also has crafted quasi-organic metal objects grown in chemicals; some were shown in Berseth's 2010 and 2008 exhibitions at Eleven Rivington in New York City. 

Hilary Berseth at All Visual Arts, New York Magazine, Trendhunter (The New York magazine feature offers a slideshow illustrating how the sculptures are made.)

✦ The New York Public Library offers an online exhibition of work by Mary Cassatt: "Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt". Viewers may browse by title,  date, or medium. The prints span 20 years, 1878 to 1898.

NYPL on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) is the subject of this excellent feature at The Public Domain Review: "Time and Place: Eric Ravilious". Ravilious was a wood engraver, book illustrator, muralist, theatre designer, and watercolor painter (his works are now in the public domain). An exhibition of Ravilious's prints was held at Pallant House Gallery in West Sussex, United Kingdom, this past fall. 

James Russell is the author of Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs (Mainstone Press, 2009); Ravilious in Pictures: Travelling Artist (Mainstone Press, 2011), Ravilious in Pictures: War Paintings (Mainstone Press, 2010), Ravilious in Pictures: County Life (Mainstone Press, 2011); and Ravilious: Wood Engravings (Mainstone Press, 2013). Also see Alan Powers's Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2012) and Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer (Lund Humphries Pub Ltd, 2013).

✦ If you don't already know, the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and Vatican Library have collaborated on a project to share with us their most ancient texts: Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and 15th Century printed books, both secular and religious. The Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project went live in early December and already is a remarkable resource. By the time the project is completed, some four years from now, 1.5 million pages will be available online to researchers and the public.


✦ In the video below, the marvelous sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard discusses her bonze work Ona, a permanent installation outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. My thanks to Art21 for the video.



Exhibitions Here and There

Diana Al-Hadid's massive sculpture Nolli's Orders, is on view at Akron Art Museum through March 16. Thirteen feet high, the sculpture is made of steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam, and paint and is Al-Hadid's response to her exposure to Italian and Northern Renaissance painting, Gothic architecture, and Helenistic sculpture. 



Akron Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is presenting through March 16 "Flesh and Metal: Body and Machine in Early 20th Century Art". Organized with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition features works by Giorgio de Chirico, Alexander Rodchenko, Constantin Brancusi, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Jean Arp, Salvador Daily, and other modern painters, printmakers, photographers, and sculptors. Thematically arranged, the exhibition has four sections — the human figure, the imagination, the urban landscape, and the object — showcasing featured artists' responses to the rise of the machine in modern life. Various art movements (Futurism, Purism, Vorticism, and Constructivism) are illustrated by the selections, which cover the 1910s to early 1950s.


CAC on FaceBook and YouTube

✭ In Atlanta, Georgia, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University continues its exhibition of photographs of Rome. "Conserving the Memory: The Fratellis Alinari Photographs of Rome", on view through February 2, is drawn from the Fratelli Alinari Photography Firm founded in 1854 by Leopoldo Alinari and his brothers Giuseppe and Romualdo. The images of the Eternal City document both treasured artworks, such as the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum, and architecture, including St. Peter's Basilica, as they appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition selections are drawn from the museum's permanent collection


Michael C. Carlos Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ "Robert Davidson: Abstract Impulse", the first major exhibition in the United States of the Haida artist Robert Davidson (b. 1946), runs through February 16 at Seattle Art Museum. On view are 45 paintings, sculptures, and prints created since 2005, and images of earlier work that help explain Davidson's artistic development. Davidson is considered a highly significant figure in Northwest Coast Native art.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which will travel to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, where it will be on view April 10 through September 14.

A considerable number of images of Davidson's marvelous art, including scultpures, jewelry, paintings, prints, and masks and totem poles, may be viewed at Davidson's Website.


Image above to right: Robert Davidson, Green Tri Neg, Acrylic on Canvas, 2009

SAM on FaceBook and Twitter


Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ There's still time to see "KIMSOOJA Unfolding", an exhibition of the Korea-born and Paris- and New York City-based artist at Vancouver Art Gallery  through January 26. This first retrospective of the artist's career covers work created over 30 years, tracing Komsooja's practice in textile-based pieces (she is known for her bottari, objects wrapped in fabrics), site-specific installations, and, most recently, single- and multi-channel video production. Kimsooja, who addresses issues of time and memory, identity, displacement, and humanity and the material world, represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale 2013 (video interview at the Biennale).

Here's a brief video introduction:



A book of the same name, co-published with Hatje Cantz of Berlin, accompanies the exhibition. In addition to essays, it features more than 100 images of Kimsooja's work.


Cover of Exhibition Catalogue

Concept of Bottari (Text and Image)

Kimsooja Website (There's a lot to see and read on Kimsooja's Website. It's well worth a visit.)


Vancouver Art Gallery on FaceBook and Twitter