All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Focus on Virginia Artists: Woodturner Tom Boley

A few miles south of Purcellville, Virginia, is Red Oak Hollow, site of a one-person shop where artist Tom Boley practices woodturning magic. 

Boley became interested in woodworking as a child and learned the craft after many hours of sawing, drilling, piecing, sanding, hammering, varnishing, and buffing in the basement of his parents' home in Illinois. After he grew up and left home in the mid-1960s, he had neither a place nor equipment and his hands were idled for many years. Boley married in 1975, and he and his wife took up residence first in California and then Japan, before returning to California and Japan several more times and, ultimately, landing in Virginia in the 1990s. In between all those moves, Boley took up woodworking again, bit by bit and piece-meal. After moving around Virginia a bit, he settled in a place with room for a shop that he began to fill with equipment. A chance encounter at a woodworking show in Northern Virginia led to adult education classes and head of the nonprofit Capital Area Woodturners. After retiring from his day job as a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Boley became a full-time woodturner. 

Boley fashions beautiful bowls from maple, bocote, mesquite, camphor, walnut, and other woods, wood hats, and small items such as bottle stoppers and pens. Recently, he's turned his attention to architectural woodturning, such as custom-made balusters, porch posts, and finials and newels, and has even renamed his business the Red Oak Hollow Lathe Works.

A member of the recently opened Gateway Gallery and Gift Shop, in Round Hill, Virginia, where he sells his bowls, Boley participates in the Western Loudoun Artists Studio Tour each summer, gives woodworking demonstrations, keeps watch for wood he can reclaim, and welcomes inquiries about his custom work.

Artists Support WITNESS

The international human rights organization WITNESS provides training and support to local groups to use video in human rights advocacy campaigns. Through Artists Support WITNESS, founded and curated by Izhar Patkin, internationally known visual artists contribute a fine art print in a limited (100 piece) edition to promote awareness of the organization and its activities. Editions currently available have been donated by Cai Guo-Qiang, Alfredo Jaar, Shirin Neshat (who collaborated with Patkin), Olaf Breuning, Sebastiao Selgado, Fabrice Hyber, and William Wegman; prices range from $750 to $3,000. The sign and numbered lithographs may be purchased as a set. Go here to view the images.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Chicago's DePaul University Art Museum has been "repurposed" by the Stockyard Institute as a "nomadic studio". Part of Studio Chicago, a year-long collaboration between arts organizations and educational institutions, "The Nomadic Studio", which runs through November 21, transforms space usually used for exhibitions only into such interactive, mixed-use facilities as a convertible recording studio, a teacher center, a publication office, a live-performance venue, and a public library. The Stockyard Institute was founded in 1995 by Jim Duignan, an associate professor of DePaul's School of Education.

✭ The Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania, is showing through September 5 the work of Jun Kaneko, internationally renowned for his inventive and technical artistry in glass, textiles, bronze, paper, and canvas. On display are dangos, described as "large moundlike freestanding rounded forms", drawings, sculptures, wall "slabs", and paintings from Kaneko Studio. One sculpture, a blue head, weighs 900 pounds and is mounted on a 1,200 pound steel table. (See image to right.)

For a brief video presentation about Kaneko, which includes information about the blue head's construction and installation, go here.

Born in Japan in 1942, Kaneko emigrated to the United States in 1963 and now maintains his studio in Omaha, Nebraska. He has taught at leading art schools, including Rhode Island School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art; exhibits around the world and is represented in the collections of at least 50 museums; and has founded, with his wife Ree Kaneko, a nonprofit organization, Kaneko, that seeks to explore creativity in the arts, sciences, and philosophy.

Jun and Ree Kaneko also founded the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha.

✭ Maine's Portland Museum of Art is displaying through September 12 "American Moderns: Masterworks on Paper from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art". The show of 90 works on paper traces American modernism from John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe to Ellsworth Kelly. Included are Edward Hopper paintings of Maine scenes. Go here to view the images.

✭ At The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, Gina Ruggeri's paintings on Mylar are the focus of "Gina Ruggeri: Immaterial Landscape", on view until August 29.

Image at left: Gina Ruggeri, Double Cavern, 2009;  Gina Ruggeri and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York City; © Gina Ruggeri

Go here to view other stunning Ruggeri paintings, prints, and drawings. A number of installation views are here.

✭ At the St. Paul, Minnesota, Gallery of Wood Art, you'll find some extraordinary work by 15 master studio woodturners and the 30 emerging artists they selected to exhibit with them. The show, "Be Our Guest — A Progressive Invitational", on view through August 26, features, among others, contemporary artists Jason Schneider, Dan Tilden, Marilyn Campbell, John Jordan, Mark Sfirri, and Sharon Doughtie.

Also on display are vintage and reproduction lathes and a collection from the past of treen, everyday household objects made of wood.

Image at right: Binh Pho, Nightingales


The Gallery of Wood Art is sponsored by the American Association of Woodturners, an international nonprofit organization with more than 13,000 members.

✭ The International Quilt Study Center & Museum, in Lincoln, Nebraska, is presenting through November 7 "South Asian Seams: Quilts from India, Pakistan & Bangladesh". The exhibition offers several dozen examples of ralli and kantha and many large photographs depicting the lives of the women who make the quilts.

In ralli, a brightly colored textile from northwestern India and eastern Pakistan, patchwork, embroidery, and applique are hallmarks. In kantha and sujuni bedcoverings, found in East India's states of Bihar and West Bengal and in Bangladesh, quilting stitches, often depicting animals and the sacred lotus flower, figure as the principal decoration. The sujuni are made from layers of recycled cotton garments, both sari and dhoti.

Image below: An example of a dharki, or patchwork, quilt from India.

An article describing the quilts and other objects in the show is here. Another is here.

The center also offers a collection of recorded Quilt Stories from visitors representing more than a dozen countries.