All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Art for Haiti Auction

Bidding for a painting by Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin, "And Haiti Will Bloom Again" (acrylic on canvas, 24" x 18"), will open on September 8 and end September 17. The work is being auctioned to benefit the Smithsonian Institution-Haiti Cultural Recovery Project. Go here for an image of the painting and auction details. More about the painting is here. This New York Times article, "Rescuing Art From the Rubble of the Quake", is of interest, as is this Smithsonian magazine cover story, "In Haiti, the Art of Resilience".

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Opening September 10 at Contemporary Art Museums, St. Louis, Missouri, is "Richard Artschwager: Hair". This show, on view through January 2, 2011, promises to be a fascinating exploration of Artschwager's use of rubberized horsehair. 

Image above left: Richard Artschwager, Climbing Boy, 1999, rubberized hair and masonite, 59" x 2-1/2". Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. © Richard Artschwager

An influential artist who began his career as a cabinet-maker, Artschwager straddles the Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art categories, his ideas about perception playing off against his ideas about deception. Drawing from more than 40 years of art-making, the exhibition includes images of iconic Artschwager: blps (lines, Y-shapes, hook designs) exclamation marks, corners, hair-covered furniture.

The New York Times critic Roberta Smith reviewed a survey of 25 years of Artschwager's work at the Whitney Museum of America Art in 1988; go here to learn more.

For other images of Artschwager's work, go here and here.

Also scheduled for September 10: "Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views". This is the first major museum monograph in the United States for the Tel Aviv-born and Los Angeles-based photographer known for the "unstill" image. It includes more than 30 photographs and a survey of Lassry's 16mm films. 

✭ Artists' use of the circle or sphere in creating two- and three-dimensional work is examined in "Full Circle", on view through October 31 at the Boise (Idaho) Art Museum. Drawing on BAM's permanent collection, the show features work by Grace Knowlton, Robert Rauschenberg, Sam Francis, Ron Davis, and Jeffrey Simmons.

Jeffrey Simmons, Janet's Yellow, 1999,
oil and alkyd on canvas, 61" x 60"

Collection: Boise Art Museum, Gift of Ben and Aileen Krohn

✭ Work by Jessica Gondek, associate professor in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Loyola University Chicago is on view through September 19 at Loyola University Museum of Art. The exhibition, "Jessica Gondek: A Decade in Print", includes examples of Gondek's digital and traditional prints, all created between 2000 and 2009. The artist's interests range from geometry and technology to machine aesthetics, nature, and architecture. 

For a slideshow of Gondek's amazing woodcut and digital prints, go here; images of her paintings and prints inspired by Antoni Gaudi architecture may be viewed here.

✭ Autumn themes are the subject of "Of Clover and Chrysanthemum", an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints opening September 1 at the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design. The show, which will conclude December 12, includes the work of Nakayama Sugakudo.

Nakayama Sugakudo, Golden-Crested Wren and Sasanqua, 

From "Studied from Life of Forty-eight Hawks", 1858

Image: Museum of Art - RSID

✭ The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center has mounted South African artist William Kentridge's work in "William Kentridge: The World Is Process", on view until October 24. The exhibition's focus is Kentridge's drawings and includes sculpture and stop-motion video art. Kentridge, who lives and works in Johannesburg, is considered an internationally important artist whose work exposes both the cultural and personal experiences of being South African.

Examples of Kentridge's editioned works on paper are here.

The Divine Jane

Any artist who has that quality of timelessness

has that quality because [she] tells the truth. 

Jane Austen's perceptions don't date because

they are correct, and they will remain that way

until human beings improve themselves intrinsically, 

and this will not happen.

~ Fran Lebowitz

What does a writer's collection of letters and manuscripts tell us about the author's life?

This question was put to six contemporary writers, scholars, and actors given an opportunity to examine and hold in their hands The Morgan Library & Museum's major collection of Jane Austen letters and manuscripts, the subject of the New York-based  institution's exhibition "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy", on view earlier this year.

The interviewees — Cornel West, Colm Toibin, Sandy Lerner, Siri Hustvedt, Harriet Walter, and Fran Lebowitz — also were asked about their impressions of Austen on reading her work for the first time, their thoughts about Austen's enduring popularity, and the person or persons they would invite to dine with them and Austen at an imagined dinner.

The often emotional, even star-struck-seeming answers of the interviewees are the subject of The Divine Jane: Reflections on Austen (immediately below), the marvelous documentary short (16 minutes) commissioned by The Morgan Library to complement its exhibition. Directed by Francesco Carrozzini, the film begins an engaging conversation that you might continue yourself once you've re-read and absorbed Emma, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, or other Austen works.

The Divine Jane: Reflections on Austen from The Morgan Library & Museum on Vimeo.

Each of the interviewees was interviewed and filmed separately, allowing us to hear and see the interviews in progress. Here are the individual videos: Colm Toibin, award-winning novelist and short story writer; Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems; Siri Hustvedt, novelist, essayist, and poet; Cornel West, Princeton University professor, civil rights advocate, and author; Harriet Walker, associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company who has also appeared on British television, in film, and on Broadway; and Fran Lebowitz, humorist and best-selling author of Metropolitan Life, a book of essays. 

Resources

Excerpt of Naxos AudioBook recording of Jane Austen's Lady Susan, with Walter in the role of Lady Susan Vernon

Derbyshire Writers' Guild, a community of readers and writers of Jane Austen fan fiction

Jane Austen Information Page, with annotated, illustrated hypertext of novels

Brandeis University Professor Andreas Teuber's Jane Austen Page