All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Focus on Virginia Artists: Kathie Ratcliffe

With today's edition, I begin a new feature — Focus on Virginia Artists — to bring attention periodically to one of my home state's many creators of fine art and craft. 

Kathie Ratcliffe hand-pieces miniature quilts at her Nine Patch Studio in Waterford, Virginia, a National Historic Landmark village that each October sponsors the three-day Waterford Homes Tour and Crafts Exhibit. For her 8"x8" signed quilts, Ratcliffe draws on her knowledge of 19th Century American pieced quilts and quilt patterns, as well as her research into trends in fabrics of the period and colors and designs typical of regional genres. Ratcliffe describes her artworks as "faithful interpretations" of the antique originals that are her inspiration. 

Ratcliffe's collectible miniature quilts are mounted on archival mat board and may be purchased framed or unframed. Prices generally are less than $500, excluding taxes and shipping and handling. Go here to see Ratcliffe's current collection.

Quality limited-edition, signed giclees (digitally printed reproductions of Ratcliffe's designs for her miniature quilts) also are available through the artist. 

A member of the Waterford Quilters' Guild, Ratcliffe participated in last weekend's Western Loudoun Artists Studio Tour and will be among the artisans showing at Art at the Coach Barn/Shelburne Farms (September 24 - October 24) and at this fall's Waterford Fair (October 1-3).

Ratcliffe's work also can be found here.

Quilt History and State Quilt Documentation and Regional Quilt History

Guggenheim Calls for Video Submissions

New York City's Guggenheim Museum has issued a call for submissions of new or existing videos created over the last two years at youtube.com/play. The museum will accept any form of video — from animation and motion graphics, to documentary work, to music videos, or entirely new creative art forms — through July 31, 2010. At the end of the submission period, the museum will identify as many as 200 videos for online viewing at youtube.com/play; out of that group, as many as 20 videos will be selected by a jury of visual artists, filmmakers, graphic designers, and musicians for presentation at a special event in New York in October that will include simultaneous presentations at Guggenheim locations in Berline, Bilbao, and Venice. Details are here.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ A collaborative photography exhibition, "Exquisite Corpse", opened yesterday at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C., and continues through July 3. The show is a 21st Century version of the Exquisite Corpse method invented by Surrealists in 1925. At CAP, three curators begin the project with a photograph, one of his or her own; each image is passed to another photographer who creates a new image in response the photo received; that new image then gets handed off to the next photographer, until all 28 photographers in the exhibition have had a turn. The result is three sets of images, none of which is known in advance. Those collaborating in this project include not only Washington, D.C., area photographers but also photographers in New York, California, China, and South Africa. 

Image: Takako Araski, Bible of the White Sand, 1989,
chamotte and sand

© Takashi Hatakeyama

✭ At the Katzen Arts Center at American University "Soaring Voices: Recent Ceramics by Women of Japan" is on view through August 15. The exhibit features 87 innovative works by 25 artists, including Takako Araki (see image above) and Kimiyo Mishima. 

Some other exhibitions at the Katzen are "Jacob Kainen: Geometric Abstractions" (through August 8) and "Norse Soul—The Legacy of Edvard Munch, Social Democracy, Old Myths, Anarchy, and Death Longings" (through October 17).

✭ At the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, "Collecting the New (1960-2010)" is open through August 1. In the exhibition are contemporary paintings, sculptures, photography, graphic art, video, and examples of other "new media" selected from the MIA's own collection as well as holdings of collectors, galleries, and artists. Among the artists represented are Mona Hatoum, Ghada Amer, David Reed, Ross Bleckner, Richard Pousette-Dart, Gerhard Richter, Eric Fischl, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama (see image at right, Untitled, oil on canvas) Jasper Johns, Petah Coyne, Raymond Hains, Jim Dine, Zhang Huan, Robert Polidori, and Thomas Struth. Slideshows of selected images from the thematically arranged work: New Poetics, Reviving Realism, Poptical, Recuperation, and Passages.

✭ In London, Waddington Galleries' "William Turnbull: Beyond Time" continues until July 3. The exibition includes a first-showing of eight paintings dating from 1957 to 1960 and a number of  bronze sculptures representative of this important British artist's work. Go here to view images.

Image at left: William Turnbull, Horse, 1999, bronze, 71-1/2" x 29" x 80-3/4"; Waddington Galleries

✭ Opening July 2 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts," Women to Watch 2010: Body of Work: New Perspectives on Figure Painting", comprises 16 works by artists Mequitta Ahuja of Texas, Nikki Hemphill of Arkansas, Hannah Barrett of Massachusetts, Julie Farstad of Greater Kansas City, Jennifer Levonian of Pennsylvania, Kate Longmaid of Vermont, Ann-Marie Manker of Georgia, and Rose Wylie from the United Kingdom. The exhibition will be on view until September 12. 

Legal Issues and Artists

Founded by former corporate attorney Kianga Ellis, Avail Art is a membership site aimed at helping professional visual artists understand the legal issues associated with art-making. Artists who join have access to online live-streaming video conversations, question-and-answer sessions with legal experts, instructional guides on specific areas of the law and legal matters, and more. Avail Art also advocates on legislative and policy issues on behalf of artists.

Forthcoming in October

Writer and photographer Julianne Davidow is the author of the forthcoming Outer Beauty Inner Joy: Contemplating the Soul of the Renaissance, to be published this October by Bunker Hill Publishing. Thomas Moore, psychotherapist and author, most recently, of Care of the Soul in Medicine, contributes the Foreword.

The book is described as "a spiritual book about spiritual beauty. Using the wisdom and works of the poets and artists of the Renaissance, the author explores the knowledge that, as Thomas Moore points out in his Foreword, has been utterly lost to the modern mind; divinity and humanism go together. Soulful, timeless words are placed with evocative images to reveal the attitude and quality of mind of a period that remains fundamental to modern spiritual well-being."

The book may be pre-ordered through Amazon.

Next Year's New York Attraction

Unusual "plants" — clusters of fiberglass "roses" and "petals" on stainless steel stems — will be arriving in mid-town Manhattan in January 2011, just before the weather takes a serious turn for the worse and winter doldrums set in. "Grown" by artist William Ryman to heights of 3 feet to 25 feet, "The Roses" will be installed along a designated stretch of Park Avenue, where they'll remain for five months. Costing some $1 million, the art project commissioned by the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee required the approval of the City's Parks Department. 

Ryman, clearly, has a unique green thumb: Not only are his creations the tallest roses ever grown, they're also the heaviest, weighing in at 1,000 pounds to 2,500 pounds each. According to the company fabricating the sculptures, the roses also will be able to withstand winds of up to 120 miles per hour.