Friday, February 24, 2017

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The American Craft Council is observing its 75th anniversary this year. To celebrate, it's enclosing in each issue of its American Craft magazine a poster from a collectible series of nine that only subscriber-members will receive. (The magazine publishes six times a year.) The first poster, which appeared in the February/March issue, is the wonderful makers' vision statement. 

ACC on FaceBook and Instagram

Note: The ACC's annual Baltimore, Maryland, Craft Show began February 22 and continues through this weekend.

✦ Illustrator and author Christoph Niemann has published a new book: Sunday Sketching (Abrams, October 2016); a German edition is available. Among Nieman's many other books are WORDS (Greenwillow Books, October 2016  ), a visual dictionary for children.

Cover Art

Christoph Niemann on FaceBook and Instagram

✦ A multi-part video art instruction series, Art Basics with Dick Termes, launched in late January on South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The Online and Education Department at SDPB has created a complementary teaching and user guide, including lesson plans and ideas for activities. (Read the series announcement.)

Art Basics with Dick Termes on YouTube

✦ Textile artist Tien Chiu has published Master Your Craft: Strategies for Designing, Making, and Selling Artisan Work (Schiffer Publishing, 2016). The 176-page book offers insights from 22 master artisans, including glass artists, fiber artists, metalworkers, and ceramists, and provides a structured, practical approach to sustaining a successful career in craft-making. (View Table of Contents.)


Cover Art

Tien Chiu Blog

✦ South Africa-born sculptor Estella Fransbergen concentrates her attention of "the expression of human form"; in particular, the female torso. In addition to working with clay and bronze, the primary media for her torsos, Fransbergen uses such materials as crochet wire, glass, twigs, shells, feathers, Swarovski crystals, and pearls, quartz, and coral, to give the torsos both a fuller bodily shape and sense of movement. Her gorgeous creations combine the aspects of strength with the seemingly ethereal. The artist, who lives in the U.S., will be showing her work this weekend at the American Craft Council's Craft Show in Baltimore, Maryland. Visit her Website to view Fransbergen's portfolio.

Estella Fransbergen on FaceBook

✦ Here's an abbreviated Louisiana Channel film from Roxanne Bageshirin Laerkesen in which five artists — Richard Serra, Phyllida Barlow, Antony Gormley, Sarah Sze, and Doug Aitken — talk about making sculptures.


Full interviews with each of the artists can be found at "5 Artists on Making Sculptures".

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, is presenting "Poets and Painters" through October 30. Among work on view: Darragh Park's painting Oriane (c. 1982) with an autograph poem by James Schuyler; Jennifer Bartlett's painting At Sands Point #16 (1985-1986); Alex Katz's photoengraving Portrait of Frank O'Hara (2009); and Ray Johnson's collage Marianne Moore's Hat (1973).

Parrish Art Museum on FaceBook and Vimeo

✭ Work by New Mexico-based multidisciplinary artist and educator Paula Wilson is on view through April 29 at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska. Featuring Wilson's paintings, videos, black-and-white prints, and prints on fabric, the solo exhibition, "Paula Wilson: The Backward Glance", addresses themes of race, identity, and objectification of the female body in the context of reimagined historic heroines — the Athenian Acropolis's caryatids — whose narratives Wilson reconstructs to represent the reclaiming of feminine and multicultural power. Several photographs from the installation are at the exhibition link.

Paula Wilson on FaceBook and Instagram

Bemis Center on FaceBook and Instagram

✭ Continuing through March 26 at Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Massachusetts, is "John Bisbee: Material Obsession", comprising the site-specific installation of welded spikes, Out of the Garden, including the sculptures Viper (2016) and Fruit of My Roots (2016), and Text (2016). Adhering to his manta, "Only Nails, Always Different", Bisbee crafts his work from the single medium he has used for almost three decades. See Bisbee's recent work for views of the remarkable installation.

Here's a short video with the sculptor:



Fuller Craft Museum on FaceBook

✭ Like John Bisbee, sculptor Al Farrow also works with limited material:  second-hand guns and ammunition that he repurposes to create extraordinary objects, including reliquaries, mosques, cathedrals, and a variety of other devotional pieces such as menorahs. Farrow's talents as showcased in the exhibition "Divine Ammunition: The Sculpture of Al Farrow", at Washington's Bellevue Arts Museum through May 7, will leave you amazed. A generous selection of Farrow's architectural structures can be seen at the exhibition link above and on Farrow's Website (see Reliquaries).

Here's a 2009 video with Farrow at his Marin, California, studio (the video runs approximately 28 minutes):


Al Farrow on FaceBook

Bellevue Arts Museum on FaceBook, Instagram, and Vimeo

✭ While you're in Washington State, head to Tacoma's Museum of Glass for "Into the Deep". Continuing through September, the exhibition presents more than 55 marine-inspired glass objects by 16 national and international artists, including Alfredo Barbini (1912-2007), Dale Chihuly, Shayna Leib, Kelly O'Dell, Kait Rhoads, Raven Skyriver, and Hiroshi Yamano. Three digital tours are available. Fifteen of the displayed pieces were made in the museum's own Hot Shop.

On April 30, from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., the museum is host to the exhibition-related program "Kids Design Glass in the Hot Shop".

Museum of Glass on FaceBook and YouTube

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