All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Call for Entries

The McLean Project for the Arts, McLean, Virginia, has issued a call for entries for its "Strictly Painting 8" themed exhibition, which will be juried by Jayme McLellan, founding director of Civilian Art Projects. Details about the exhibition and submission guidelines are here. The deadline is April 11. Cash prizes will be awarded. The exhibition will run from June 16 until July 30. 

'Get Closer' to Enter Met Photography Contest

"Get Closer" Campaign, Designs of Featured Museum Objects 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is sponsoring its third "It's Time We Met" promotional campaign: "Get Closer", highlighting details from works of art in the museum's collection. (A composite image of some details of objects featured in the campaign is above.) For "Get Closer", tell the Met about your favorite details from a work in the collection, what you see that someone else might have missed, what intrigues or inspires you about the art. Share your thoughts with photographs and words. Submissions will be accepted through Friday, April 8. The top five photos and descriptions will be published online and each winner will receive a one-year individual  membership to the museum. Complete submission guidelines are here. 

The Artistic Talents of Children and Monkeys

Research seeking to discern who better paints abstract art — a professional artist or a child, a monkey, a chimp, a gorilla, or an elephant — has been getting headlines recently. A summary in Psychology Today of some of the results indicates that when the work of an artist of the caliber of, say, Helen Frankenthaler or Mark Rothko or Sam Francis is paired with that of a child or an animal, art students and psychology majors  participating in the study selected the artist's work as the "more preferred" and judged it "of better quality" most of the time. Interestingly, labeling of work seemed to sway judgments of quality, with art students preferring 30-40 percent of the time a child's or animal's painting over a professional's when the former was labeled incorrectly.  (My thanks to ArtInfo) 

Abstract: "Seeing the Mind Behind the Art: People Can Distinguish Abstract Expressionist Paintings from Highly Similar Paintings by Children, Chimps, Monkeys, and Elephants", Psychological Science, March 3, 2011

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In New York City, "Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met" continued through May 30 in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To view images from the exhibition, wchi features site-specific sculptural installations by the Icelandic artist, go here.

Katrin Sigurdardottir

New York Times Review of Exhibition

Met on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Foursquare

Met Podcast Page

✭ Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art is showing through May 8 "Teresita Fernandez: Blind Landscape", featuring the internationally known artist's recent abstract sculptures of polished stainless steel, glass, plastic, graphite, and other materials.

Teresita Fernandez, Borrowdale (Drawn Waters), 2009

Natural and Machined Graphite on Steel Armature

21.18" x 43.5" x 86"

Installed, USF Contemporary Art Museum, 2009

© Teresita Fernandez

The work on view, drawn from the artist's projects spanning 2005 to 2010, comprises 10 pieces, including Borrowdale (Drawn Waters) (see image above); Epic, a graphic wall installation; and Vertigo (sotto en su), which is eight layers of precision-cut, highly polished metal that has been woven into an arboreal pattern and suspended from the gallery's ceiling. 

A series of artcasts featuring Fernandez is found under Exhibition Resources here.

A profile of Fernandez, a MacArthur Fellow, is on the MacArthur Foundation's site. See this interesting interview with Fernandez in heyoka magazine. Also see Megan Voeller's "The Wondrous Graphic Creations of Artist Teresita Fernandez" at Creative Loafing, August 19, 2009.

Teresita Fernandez at Lehmann Maupin Gallery (Bio, Interviews, Selected and Available Works + More)

Installation Video of "Blind Landscape" at USF Contemporary Art Museum

Time-Lapse Video of Installation of Epic

Teresita Fernandez on FaceBook (Wikipedia)

MOCA Cleveland on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace

✭ In Washington, D.C., the marvelous "Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef" project, along with the "satellite" Smithsonian Community Reef, is on view through April 24 at the National Museum of Natural History. These "reefs" comprise thousands and thousands of crochet "organisms" consisting of yarn and found materials. Tens of  thousands of hours of labor, 90 percent by women, have been expended to create the coral reef models that are part of the traveling exhibition.

Sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, co-founders of The Institute for Figuring (conceptually headquartered in Los Angeles), are the brains behind the project and used (and have taught to others) hyperbolic crocheting techniques, invented by a mathematician, Dr. Daina Taimina at Cornell, to give the corals their natural-looking forms. It is, Margaret Wertheim says, "almost impossible" to model hyperbolic geometry except with crochet and crochet is the best medium with which to model corals.

Project Description at TIFF

Dr. Daina Taimina's Hyperbolic Crochet

In this fascinating and witty 15-minute Ted Talk, Margaret Wertheim explains the sisters' project (note what she has to say about "play tanks").