All Art Friday

All Art Friday

The Art of Gaman 

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese Internment Camps, 1942 - 1946 opens March 5 at the Renwick Gallery, part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gaman (gah-mon) is Japanese for "ability to endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity".

The exhibition showcases more than 150 items — such as baskets of twine, paintings and art assemblages, wood carvings, teapots, toys and games, musical instruments, furniture made from scrap lumber — created in the internment camps that President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed be established following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Most of the items are on loan from former internees or their families. (More than two-thirds of the 120,000 Japanese-born immigrants, first-generation Japanese Americans, and children of first-borns who were interned during World War II because of Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 were born in the United States and thus Americans by birth.)

Archival photographs and documentary films accompany the show. An online slide show is here.

A book of the same name (image shown above), by Delphine Hirasuna, Terry Heffernan, and Kit Hinrichs (Ten Speed Press, 2005), is available through Amazon.

Josef Albers at Hirshhorn

Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration is on view through April 11 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The Hirshhorn has a large and comprehensive collection of the German-born Albers's works, and this exhibition highlights paintings covering 50 years of the influential artist's career, which included teaching at the renowned Bauhaus and North Carolina's Black Mountain College and an influential position as Yale University's art department chair. The nearly 70 artworks on view, ranging from Albers's black and white designs on paper or other media to the optical illusion color squares in oils and acrylics, are supplemented with objects on loan from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, including documentary photographs, a video, and examples of the artist's teaching aids.

A 1968 interview with Albers in the Smithsonian Institution's Achives of American Art is here.

Call for Artists: What Matters Most?

New York City-based Ecoartspace has issued a call for artists to create and donate for a benefit exhibition a small (8"x10") work on paper that relates to one of the responses by leading environmental experts, writers, and readers to the question "What Matters Most?" posted on Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog Dot Earth beginning in mid-February. The artwork must be original — it may be a drawing, photograph, painting, print, or mixed media piece — and must be postmarked by April 10. The exhibition and sale, hosted by Exit Art, will be in New York City, April 15 - 28. All artwork will be sold first come/first served for $150 per piece. Proceeds will support Ecoartspace's mission to create opportunities to address environmental issues through the arts. Details about participation and updates can be found on the Ecoartspace FaceBook fan page or here.

DNA Testing of the Pharaoh

Stan Parchin, publisher and editor in chief of Art Museum Journal, writes here of what DNA testing and Ct scanning revealed about the cause of death and lineage of the pharaoh King Tutankhamun (King Tut). Fascinating discoveries.

Freedom In Creation: Art as Therapy

Providing opportunities for children of war-ravaged nations to express themselves through art as therapy and art as education is a major objective of the nonprofit organization Freedom in Creation. Currently, FIC supports weekly three-hour art classes for 35 children in Uganda, where war has been raging for more than 20 years. In addition, FIC is working on the ground in Uganda to help build and renovate educational and arts facilities; facilitate national and international art exchanges between children and adults to promote peace-building and community; and provide access to clean drinking water and training to renovate broken water wells and drill new wells.

An exhibition, The Story of Freedom, is on view through May 2 at Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, North Carolina. Also featured is Torn From Home: My Life as a Refugee.

FIC encourages art exhibitions and sales and opportunities for "Global Village Education" relationships with U.S. schools, universities, and churches to benefit the organization's mission and outreach. Volunteer opportunities are detailed here.

Videos of FIC initiatives in Uganda may be viewed here. Art-related initiatives are described here. Work of featured Ugandan artists is here.

He Said It!

Art is in a race with its interpretation. ~ Painter Fairfield Porter (1907 - 1975), Art in Its Own Terms (co-written with Rackstraw Downes)

The papers of Fairfield Porter, who was also a lithographer, art critic, and poet, are in the Archives of American Art. Digitized in 2006, they include more than 9,500 images, correspondence, business records, and printed matter.
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