All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Interactive Digital Collaboration Project

Sponsored by The Art Institute of California ~ Orange County, Los Angeles-based Kuro Interactive and Vision Design Studio have organized and launched an experiment in interactive digital collaboration involving artists from around the world. Called Shape the Hive, the project invites artists to submit artwork online that will be combined continuously to create a single huge art installation, the final size of which depends on the number of people collaborating. The concept, denoted by a honeycomb-shaped logo, is to connect artists intentionally using the Web as platform and tool for collaborative creation. The "hive" is the creative community.

Information about submitting work for an available hive or "pod" in the honeycomb is here. (To navigate the site, use the pulldown Expand Menu to the top and right of the site. Click and drag to explore the parts of the honeycomb. An interactive map on the site allows you to see pods currently "active".)

To entice artists' participation, Shape the Hive will award a MacBook Pro to the pod that receives the most votes in a social media popularity contest on the site. The competition ends on July 15; the winner will be announced August 1. It will award a $10,000 scholarship to The Art Institute to the submission receiving the highest number of points on creativity, use of space/time, and aesthetic quality; a team of faculty and industry professionals will judge each submission and may award as many as 20 points in each category. In addition, it will award a second prize of $5,000 and a third prize of $2,500. Entries for the scholarship competition, which is open to 2010 high school seniors and international students, must be submitted by July 31; winners will be notified by August 15 and have until August 30 to accept the offers.

Shape the Hive on Twitter

Art Exhibition Roundup

✭ At The Art League, in Alexandria, Virginia, Teresa Oaxaca's solo exhibit "Classical Realism: New Works", heads into its final week. Closing June 7, the show comprises Oaxaca's recent paintings and drawings, including "In Time" (see image at left), inspired by Jan Brueghel's "Triumph of Death Over Life". Oaxaca, who uses primarily oils, works entirely from life, drawing and painting from a live model. Images of Oaxaca's stunning work may be viewed here.

✭ "Illusions of Time: Two Photographers" continues through June 13 at the Athenaeum (201 Prince St., Alexandria, Virginia; 703-548-0035). On show are Lisa McCarty's altered Polaroid emulsion transfer images from her "Florid Interiors" series and Stephen Schiff's ditigal prints, titled "Potomac Ice". Trading on both nostalgia and reflection, McCarty's work addresses the changes in the home and environment of her grandparents. Schiff's photographs, taken along Georgetown's Potomac River waterfront following a snowstorm, went unprinted for three decades.

See McCarty's work, including "Florid Interiors", here. Schiff's "Potomac Ice 127" (January 1977) was shown in Gallery West's 13th Annual National Juried Show of artwork from across the United States.

✭ Opening tomorrow at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts: "Petah Coyne: Everything That Rises Must Converge". Coyne, who makes creative if somewhat morbid use of dead fish, taxidermy animals, horsehair, birdcages, black and white wax, plywood, chicken wire, artificial flowers, bows and ribbons, black sand, and sundry other materials, includes in the show both photographs, described as "ghostly", and sculptural works from a decade ago, such as selections from her series based on Dante's Inferno. Coyne's pieces can be found in many public and private collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery. She is represented by Galerie LeLong in New York City. The exhibition runs through July 29.

Coyne has a FaceBook page on which she includes a YouTube video of her 2008 show at Galerie LeLong. An interview with Coyne and a close-up of one of her sculptures are here. Her "Altar Mary" (see image at right; click on for larger view), a wax-encrusted installation commemorating Irish Catholic women who immigrated to cities such as Detroit, can be seen here; also found on that page is a installation slideshow and a video clip. Coyne is the subject of Petah Coyne: Vermilion Fog, co-authored with Ann Lloyd (Charta/Galerie LeLong, 2008). She's quoted in the book as saying her simultaneously figurative and abstract sculptures are "like a plant on somebody's porch that's kind of lost its mind."

✭ The Sylvia White Gallery, Ventura, California, is hosting through June 19 an exhibition of William T. Wiley's prints and tapestries. Tonight, Wiley will be present at the gallery for a reception and book signing.

The exhibition is in conjunction with "What's It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect", now showing at the Berkeley Art Museum until June 30. A 50-year survey of Wiley's artwork, the exhibition was organized and opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (October 2, 2009 - January 24, 2010).

Selected works from the exhibition may be viewed here. Be sure to visit Wiley's Website.

✭ Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art is presenting "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" through September 6. Dating from the 1950s to 1990s, some 79 of Ginsberg's black and white photographs of himself and other "Beat Generation" poets and writers — Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady — comprise the first scholarly exhibition of Ginsberg's photographic work. An "Art Talk" connected to the show is available online. A list of Ginsberg's work in the NGA's collection is here.

✭ The Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas, Texas, debuted "Modern Twist" on May 1. The exhibition showcases 20 baskets from 1948 to 2008 and other gorgeous bamboo works from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, California. It also features the extraordinary art of Motoko Maio, including three of her byobu folding screens, which use panels of different sizes (each screen has 13 folds instead of the traditional 6 or 12). Maio's unique style and approach make the screens functional, as partitioners of space, without blocking sound or air flow and, in Maio's view, create a suggestion of "erotic possibility". The show runs through September 5.

For more on byobu, go here.

✭ At the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture you'll find, through July 31, "Zuan: Expressions of Modern Design in Early 20th Century Japanese Art". The exhibition includes paintings, prints, lacquer ware, ceramics, and kimono and early graphic design on postcards, illustrations, and posters designed by such masters as Hashiguchi Goyo, Takehisa Yumeji, and Kamisaka Sekka.

Image above right: "Woman in a long undergarment", Hashiguchi Goyo (1880-1921), polychrome woodblock print with mica accents; privately published in 1920; Nihon no hanga, Amsterdam. 

Interview with Glass Artist Tim Tate

Artist Rosetta DeBerardinis' informative interview with the superb glass artist Tim Tate, who founded Washington Glass School and is one of the Washington, D.C., area's best-known artists, can be found here.

Ellen O'Grady's Drawings From Palestine

Recently, the Jerusalem Fund Gallery in Washington, D.C., mounted the exhibition "What Ham Saw: Drawings From Palestine" by Ellen O'Grady, an artist and social justice activist who lives in Durham, North Carolina. O'Grady spent six years in Israel and Palestine and often draws inspiration from her time there to tell visually the stories of individual Palestinians caught in the continuing conflict. O'Grady's paintings from her book Outside the Ark: An Artist's Journey in Occupied Palestine, based on the time she lived and worked on the West Bank, were exhibited at Jerusalem Fund Gallery in 2006.

Below is a brief video of O'Grady talking about her drawings in the show that closed May 7. Close-up images of the drawings may be viewed here and here.