All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Fun Artistic Collaboration: The Exquisite Book

A party celebrating the debut of  The Exquisite Book  will take place tomorrow at the New York Public Library and include a signing.

A variation on the Surrealist drawing room game Exquisite Corpse, the book represents the work of 10 groups of 10 artists, including visual artists, illustrators, and designers, each of whom contributed a single page of artwork without being able to see any but the immediately preceding page. The visual thread connecting each page to the other? Literally, a horizon line beginning at the left side of the page and extending to the right, with the latter the new take-off point. Each contributor had just two weeks to come up with a page. The entire project lasted approximately five months; the collaborative process was documented here. 

The principal authors are New York-based illustrator and pattern designer Julia Rothman and Chicago-based graphic designer Jenny Volvovski and animator Matt Lamothe. All three are partners in Also Design. The book's foreword is by Dave Eggers.

A list of the 100 participating artists is here. All of the names are linked to the contributors' own Websites, so you can have some additional fun exploring their artwork.

For a list of scheduled events involving the book, go here. Some of the artwork is shown here and here. A video about the book is here.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Miami, Miami Art Museum presents "Focus Gallery: Purvis Young" through November 7. The show of paintings, selected primarily from the museum's own collection, trace the arc of Purvis' art career. Purvis, a "self-taught" urban artist, died in April 2010. 

For a slideshow of some of Young's artwork, go here.

Image above at right: Film Poster for Purvis of Overtown 

✭ At Nebraska's Sheldon Museum of Art, so-called "outsider art" is the subject of "Parallel Starts: Outsider Art Inside Collections", continuing through October 17. The show is made up largely of  works from the museum's permanent collection.

The museum's fourth annual Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration is scheduled for October 31, 12:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

✭ The work of author and photographic illustrator Walter Wick, known best, perhaps, for his I Spy book series, is on show at The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, through January 2, 2011. The exhibition, "Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos, and Toys in the Attic", is Wick's first museum retrospective; it includes photographs and installation models, including those for Wick's Treasure Ship (April 2010), part of Wick's puzzle book series, Can You See What I See?.

✭ Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina, has mounted "The Record: Contemporary ART and VINYL". The show, which opened earlier this month and continues through February 6, 2011, features the work of 41 artists who use use vinyl records in their sound or other installations, sculpture, drawings, paintings, photography, video, or performance art. Included in the show are two commissioned works: Satch Hoyt's 16-foot canoe crafted from red 45-rpm records and Xaviera Simmons' photographs of North Carolina landscapes for which original musical responses have been recorded on a 12-inch record and are played with the installation. The show's regularly updated Website offers "B-side", a collection of links (for example, learn how vinyl records are made or listen to audio), blogs, and other resources related to vinyl records and collecting. A hyperlinked list of the artists, among whom  are Laurie Anderson and David Byrne, is here.

✭ The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is presenting with Urasenke Foundation "The Way of Tea" on November 13. The program uses the museum's traditional tea room to showcase the seasonally themed tea gathering and tasting. A documentary on the construction of AAM's tea room is immediately below.

William Kentridge Film

The wonderful resource Art21 recently announced a new film, William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible, which will be broadcast publicly on PBS on October 21. Kentridge is a South African artist known for his animated films and charcoal drawings addressing apartheid, colonialism, and totalitarianism.

The trailer for the documentary is below. Go here to learn more about Art21's first single-artist feature, watch related videos, and view images.

This video accompanied a Museum of Modern Art exhibition earlier this year, "William Kentridge: Five Themes", a three-decade survey of the artist's work.