Friday, April 16, 2010

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Elissa Farrow Savos

Sculptor Elissa Farrow Savos is showing in Beautiful: Virginia Women Artists and the Body, at the Greater Reston Arts Center, Reston, Virginia, April 29 - June 11. Joining her in the group show are realist figurative painter  Elizabeth Menges (she painted an intimate group of portraits titled Breast Cancer Survivor Series, 2007 - 2008), photographer Victoria F. Gaitan, and photographer Bernis von zur Muehlen. All four are widely known and much-exhibited artists. Their show should not be missed.

Savos is a favorite of mine. Always about women or girls, her work — fashioned from polymer or ball clays, oils or acrylics, fabric scraps, weathered wood, rusted chains, and other detritus Savos finds and collects — is deeply intuitive, emotionally engaging, and beautifully realized. As she says on her Website, "Every piece I make is about story-telling, each a narrative of some woman somewhere, and every woman everywhere."

When you visit the artist's Website, take time in exploring the Gallery, which offers images of the many wonderful pieces Savos has created: her Women I - V series and her often-moving Figures. Note especially the faces on the sculptures, the expressions Savos allows them. You'll see reflected experiences of loss, marriage, the burden of motherhood, illness, roles domestic, social, and political: narratives of truth and stories we recognize.

The artist's work also can be seen at Artfile Online.

Image above right: "Collecting Souls" from Women IV © 2008 - 2010 Elissa Farrow Savos.

The Greater Reston Arts Center is located at 12001 Market Street, Suite 103; telephone 703-471-9242. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

An artist's recent post on Savos and her work is here.

Sculpture Project at NMWA

The National Museum for Women in the Arts dedicated April 28 the installation on D.C.'s New York Avenue of some of the most colorful and exuberant of Niki de Saint Phalle's monumental sculpture. The New York Avenue Sculpture Project, as it is known, is intended to "transform" the avenue's medians into four blocks of changing outdoor installations of sculpture by artists who are women. The dedication ceremony for the de Saint Phalle work is the first phase of the public art project. The last phase will be completed in 2015.

The voluptuous mosaic figures — "Nanas", de Saint Phalle called them — are nine- to 15-feet tall and are said to have been inspired by the work of Spanish artist-architect Antoni Gaudi (1852 -1926). The NMWA selected the sculpture in consultation with the Niki Charitable Art Trust and federal and local agencies involved in the project.

Image above left: "Nana on a Dolphin"(1998) © Niki Charitable Art Foundation.

O'Keeffe Online

If you're made about Georgia O'Keeffe but can't travel to Santa Fe or to a museum with O'Keeffe's works, try getting your fix online. Selections from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Research Center collections recently were posted here, and more are to be added.

Currently showing at the museum: Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, through May 16.

Image shown at right: "Red" (2008) © Susan Rothenberg.

Go here for Art:21 offerings on Rothenberg.

Exhibitions Here and There

Picasso: Themes and Variations is showing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through August 30. The show of approximately 100 works from the MoMA's collection examines Picasso's creative process through printmaking.

✭ The Milwaukee Art Museum is exhibiting Raphael: The Woman with the Veil (La Donna Velata, c. 1516) through June 6. Once considered the most famous painting in the world, the artwork is on loan from the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy.

✭ Wearable and un-wearable works for women, men, and children are the subjects of Wearable Art/Un-Wearable Fashion at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland. The show's objects — cross-cultural, architectural, sculptural, and made of nontraditional materials or for nontraditional functions — will be on display through June 19.

Greenspiration, juried by independent curator and arts consultant Trudi Van Dyke, is at the Workhouse Arts Center, Lorton, Virginia, through June 13. Including the work of both professional and amateur artists residing in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the show aims to "intrepret the theme of green in the most creative ways".

✭ In Washington, D.C., Smith Farm's Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery presents, through May 3, Scents & Medical Sensibility. The unconventional theme of the exhibition — exploring how we experience and know the world through our sense of smell — is realized by turning the gallery into an olfactory lab, with some participating artists using aromatic oils and fragrances and others using visuals to invoke olfactory stimuli.

She Said It!

Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn a living. ~ Madeline L'Engle

4 comments:

Louise Gallagher said...

Oh goodie! All art Friday. My weekend mind and spirit spa retreat!

Thank you btw for the link to O'Keefe online!

Awesome.

Anonymous said...

hi maureen!
thanks for another edition of all art friday.
i want to savor all the goodies you brought.


n.

Laura said...

Oh, wow--Savos. That photo is gorgeous. you say it right when you say emotionally engaging.

S. Etole said...

And your ending quote pretty well sums it up ... appreciate the links.