All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Build a Photography Collection

A unique opportunity is being offered to photography collectors. Beginning October 1, FocusMaine.com, a portal to Maine's fine art photographers, galleries, and arts institutions, will make available for purchase each week a signed, editioned photograph by a participating photographer. In addition to the image, which will cost $50.00 (the price will hold until the particular edition of 50 sells out), FocusMaine will provide information about the artist—his or her accomplishments, methods and techniques, and reasons to collect. The project is a great way to learn about Maine's fine art photographers and a highly affordable way to begin to build a photography collection. Go here to sign up for e-mail notice about each week's offering. 

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Tacoma, Washington, the Museum of Glass is showing "Preston Singletary: Echoes, Fire, and Shadows" through September 19. Singletary, who draws powerfully on his Tlingit ancestry, is a renowned glass artist. (His work can be seen in Washington, D.C.'s National Museum of the American Indian and in many other prominent museum and private collections.) Images of Singletary's extraordinary glass sculptures may be seen here. The artist is represented by the prestigious Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe. 

✭ The Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) Art in City Hall program is presenting "Inside/Outside: Art by Prison Inmates and Ex-Offenders". The exhibit, which opens September 7 and continues until October 29, includes work from ex-offenders in the city and artists still in prison. Gary Steuer's very good post on the show and the function that art serves among inmate populations is here. (Steuer is chief cultural officer for Philadelphia.)

✭ On September 11, Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art opens "Spencer Finch: My Business, With the Cloud". The show, on view through January 23, 2011, and the first solo exhibit for Finch (also see narrative biography here) in the city, includes all-new work: sculptural installations, photographs, and drawings. Of particular interest is the site-specific "passing cloud" that Finch plans to install in the museum's Rotunda. (An image is provided in the video below.)

Finch is co-author, with Susan Cross, Daniel Birnbaum, and Suzanne Hudson, of What Time Is It on the Sun? (MASS MoCA, 2007). Images of his drawings, installations, photographs, mixed media, and recent projects or other works can be accessed here. For an interesting interview with Finch, by Susan Cross, curator at Mass MoCA, go here.

Below is a video profile of the artist that looks at his process and projects. His work with colors and light and glass is fascinating, I think. Note, for example, his creation of an image of a glacier and his project involving New York's Hudson River.

Spencer Finch Artist Profile from Suzanne Glickstein on Vimeo.

✭ At Iowa's Figge Art Museum, "Mercedes Matter: A Retrospective Exhibition" opens September 4 and remains on view until January 2, 2011. An Abstract Expressionist painter who studied with Hans Hofmann, Matter (1913-2001) founded the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. The exhibit at the FAM covers the years 1922 through 2000.

✭ Esopus Space (64 West Third Street, New York City) presents photographer Mark Hogancamp in "Mark Hogancamp: Picturing Marwencol". The exhibition of 50 photographs opens September 16 and runs through October 21. Go here for the site for Marwencol. An Esopus archive of Hogancamp photographs is here. 

✭ "Cabbagetown District", an industrial area near downtown Atlanta, Georgia, that is now on the National Register of Historic Places, was for more than 20 years a subject of deep interest to photographer Oraien Catledge. On September 25, the Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, presents "Oraien Catledge: Photographs of Cabbagetown", a show of some 80 images from a collection that grew to number tens of thousands of black-and-white negatives. The exhibit closes January 16, 2011.

Here, in "Picture Man", a video produced for the exhibit by Terminus Films, is Catledge reminiscing:

Picture Man from Terminus Films on Vimeo.

Another short with Catledge is here, along with commentary about the video production.

Also see Chad Radford's article for Creative Loafing, "Photographer Oraien Catledge Remembers Cabbagetown", November 23, 2009. At the end of the article is a wonderful visual essay of old photographs and an interview with Catledge. Other images are here. 

In conjunction with the exhibit, University Press of Mississippi has published Oraien Catledge: Photographs (August 2010). The book is available via Amazon.

Art-Related Sites of Interest

Here's a short list of art-related sites you might want to know follow:

✓ Art Advice, a well-written blog by Sylvia White, the highly respected founder and director of Contemporary Artists' Services. Subjects of articles range from pricing art, to writing an artist statement, to marketing and promotion, to working with galleries.

✓ Art for Justice, whose tagline is "Promoting Humanity Through Art". 

✓ Artist Marketing Salon, which Marie Kazalia, the artist who maintains the site, describes as a "reference library of sorts" for self-directed art promotion and marketing.

✓ ArtSpan, a portal to provide artists with affordable, easy-to-use and -manage, and fully functional Websites, which include such features as Individual Shopping Carts and Prints-on-Demand. (Disclosure: ArtSpan Galleries provides the Website for my business Transformational Threads.) Through a template approach, artists select the kind of Website that best suits their needs. All forms of visual art are represented by the membership.

✓ No Longer Empty (NLE), a nonprofit organization founded by artist Asher Remy-Toledo and operated by a group of volunteers, including independent curators Manon Slome and Julian Navarro (see About for brief bios for each of the staff), that arranges for public art exhibitions in vacant properties throughout New York City. 

✓ Rojo, an organization that works with artists around the world to help establish creative networks, coordinate collaborative art projects or host exhibitions, and publish monographs, books, and other art-related matter. Rojo has offices in Barcelona, Spain; Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Milan, Italy; publishes a magazine open to all artists; operates an art store online; and produces video broadcasts of artists' work.