All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Art by Vending Machine

It's a small baby step to get people in the habit of living 

with art and collecting art, and just having fun.

~ Clark Whittington, Artist, Art-O-Mat® Creator

Art-O-Mat® at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Fun stuff! The Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., now has its own Art-O-Mat®, a late 1950s National Consoline Vending machine found near Nashville, Tennessee, that was installed July 23. Insert a crisp $5.00 bill, make a choice, pull the handle, and the repurposed, fully functioning machine will dispense an original acetate-wrapped artwork. 

The brainchild of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, artist Clark Whittington, the Art-O-Mat® machine is one of more than 80 to which more than 400 artists from 10 countries contribute cigarette-package-size paintings, jewelry, prints, sculpture, collage, and mixed media works. This Flickr stream documents the process of converting a machine into an Art-O-Mat® installation. From this abbreviated list of artists, select a name, click, and then view the image in the pop-up window to get an idea of what's offered.

Whittington first got the idea in 1997 while preparing for a solo art show. He obtained a cigarette vending machine made obsolete by no-cigarette-vending laws and retrofitted it to sell, for $1.00 a piece, his cigarette-package-size black-and-white photographs. (He put his paintings on the walls.)  Such was the delight over the machine that it remains in its original Winston-Salem location today, a local cafe now known as Mary's Of Course Cafe. Subsequently, Whittington and a group of other interested artists formed Artists in Cellophane, now the sponsoring organization for Art-O-Mat®. 

Want to know if there's an Art-O-Mat® near you? Go here. The machines are in locations, including art museums, in at least 24 states (at 21 sites in North Carolina alone) and the District of Columbia. They also can be found in Quebec, Canada; Surrey, England; and Vienna, Austria. 

Go here to take a look at some of the many cool machines in use. (Click on each image to enlarge the view.)

Just $5.00 for an original work of art! How could you possibly go wrong?

There are a number of Art-O-Mat® videos on YouTube. Here's just one featuring Clark Whittington, who talks about the idea and how it's evolved.

Chihuly + Alfonso Collaboration


My friends at Mosaic Art Now recently wrote about the Chihuly Collection at Morean Arts Center in St. Petersburg, Florida—the magnificent result of a collaboration between the internationally acclaimed glass artist Dale Chihuly and the equally esteemed Cuban-born architect Alberto Alfonso.

I cannot improve on MAN's post. Go and spend some time with the images there. The stunning Carnevale-inspired "Float Boat", pictured below, is just one of the enticements.

Dale Chihuly, Float Boat, 2010, 3 x 4-1/2 x 12'

Photo by Scott M. Leen

Alberto Alfonso

Lennie Bennett, "The Grand Designer" in St. Petersburg Times, June 6, 2010

Paul Anater, "A Backstage Tour of St. Petersburg's Chihuly Collection", July 11, 2010


CAFE: Online Calls for Entry System

The Western States Art Federation, a nonprofit arts service organization devoted to creatively advancing and preserving the arts in the West and to providing arts-related technologies to clients throughout the United States and Canada, has created a new Web-based arts tool: CallForEntry, or CAFE™.

CAFE™ is designed to facilitate the submission and management of applications for calls for artists, particularly artists for public art projects, fellowships, and juried visual arts competitions. Arts organizations and their administrators can use the system to manage artists' applications and jury processes; artists, who pay no fee to register or use CAFE™, can use the system to submit digital images of their artwork and provide other information required of respondents to calls for entry or other events. Currently, more than 40,000 artists have registered and have active profiles in the CAFE™ system.

Details on how to apply are here. An online demonstration of the system, which is customizable, can be arranged. A complete description is here.

Other technology systems created by WESTAF, which receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, include ArtJob, an online arts job bank with national listings; ArtistsRegister, an online gallery that connects visual artists with collectors, gallery owners, art enthusiasts, and others; ZAPPlication™, an online application and adjudication system for art fairs, festivals, and shows; and CultureGrantsOnline™, which facilitates management of grant-making processes. WESTAF also created the Cultural Vitality Index, a research-based tool to measure and generate comparable data about the health of an area's creative sectors.

Be sure to check WESTAF's resource-rich Annotated Arts Links for the arts community. It covers visual and literary arts, folklife, arts education, accessibility issues, tours, media resources, state and regional arts agencies, and international arts.