All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✭ An established textbook for studies in art history, Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition, eighth edition (Pearson [Prentice Hall], 2010), is supplemented and complemented online. For example, at Scholars Resource, which has collected more than 100,000 images that it licenses for classroom teaching and research, you'll find digital images sets correlating to the textbook, chapter by chapter. The "Browse Images" button at the top of the page allows views by periods of art history or by artist, type of art, museum, or country and site. (A tutorial explains how viewer-enabled images may be used.) The publisher's own site for educators provides in-depth information about the book (features, table of contents, sample chapter, etc.), in addition to instructor and student resources.

✭ While in Old Town Fredericksburg, Virginia, a few weeks ago, I happened upon a cooperative, Art First, featuring the gourd art of Leah Comerford. A Virginia resident since 1998, Comerford uses such techniques as pyrography (woodburning), bead weaving, hand-netting, and carving to create a series she calls "The Underworld". Recently, Comerford has made versions of her series into jewelry, watercolors, pastels, and flatwork. See many additional images of her work here. Comerford is the author of Five Gourding Tutorials.

✭ I recently came across the Pop Laval collection online. Between 1910 and 1966, Claude C. "Pop" Laval took more than 100,000 photographs in California, recording life as lived in the Great Central Valley. Beginning around 1914, he also supplied movie newsreel content to Metrotone and Pathe news services. Thanks to his great-granddaughter, Laval's work, including his aerial mapping from the early 1930s, is being digitized and exhibited, and prints of his work may be purchased. The Laval studio and gallery are in Fresno. The Website features a daily Picture of the Day from the archives.

Exhibitions Here and There 

✭ Celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, is presenting through the end of the month "Masterworks of American Photography: Artistic Communities". The show highlights the museum's extensive holdings of work by Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988), Nell Dorr (1893-1988), Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), Eliot Porter (1901-1990), Erwin E. Smith (1886-1947), and Karl Straus (1886-1981). In addition to photographs, the exhibit includes albums, letters, and correspodence from colleagues and admirers. Brief biographical information about the photographers is here. 

Eliot Porter Collection Guide

The museum also is marking the 100th birthday of printmaker, painter, and educator Will Barnet with "Will Barnet: Relationships, Intimate and Abstract, 1935-1965", an exhibition of prints, drawings (some on view for the first time), and paintings. The show is on view through December 31. 

Amon Carter Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and Vimeo

Blogs and Podcasts

✭ Tomorrow, July 2, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art opens "Motor Cocktail: Sound and Movement in Art of the 1960s". On view through October 30, the exhibit showcases work from the museum's own collection, including Jean Tinguely's Motor Cocktail, restored for the exhibit and being shown for the first time in 20 years, and Francoise and Bernard Baschet's Aluminum Piano (1962). Work by Jesus Rafael Soto, Josef Albers, Gregorio Vardanega, and George Rickey also is included. A series of concerts, Crystal Baschet Concerts, in which Chicago musicians will play and accompany Aluminum Piano has been scheduled.

This video gives you an idea of what Aluminum Piano sounds like:

MCa on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube

Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland

Baschet Brothers, Les Sculptures Sonores (in English)

✭ In Birmingham, Alabama, the Birmingham Museum of Art is showing through July 24 "A Stitch in Time: Southern Quilts in the African-American Tradition". Drawn from the BMA's collection, which is one of the largest collections of American quilts in the United States, the show features masterworks by Nora Ezell, Yvonne Wells, Chris Clark, and the Freedom Quilting Bee.

Yvonne Wells is featured in the Alabama State Arts Council documentary Coat of Many COlors: A Tapestry of Alabama Artists. See the video segment with Wells here. Renowned for her quilts, which are in museum and private collections the world over, Nora Ezell was a 1992 NEA National Heritage Fellow; she published in 1998 My Quilts and Me: The Diary of an American Quilter (Black Belt Press).

BMA on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube

✭ Denver (Colorado) Art Museum has mounted eight exhibitions around the theme "Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World", on view through September 18. The exhibits include "Marajo: Ancient Ceramics at the Mouth of the Amazon"; "Overthrown: Clay Without Limits", in which artists create large-scale installations responding to the museum's architecture; "Blue & White: A Ceramic Journey"; "Dirty Pictures", featuring contemporary photographers' depictions of mud in their work (this exhibit will remain on view until January 8, 2012); "Mud to Masterpiece: Mexican Colonial Ceramics"; "Focus: Earth & Fire"; "Nampeyo: Excellence by Name", a show of pottery by the first Native American woman, Iris Nampeyo, to gain personal recognition for her own work (on view through January 1, 2012); and "Potters of Precision: The Coors Porcelain Company" (now known as CoorsTek).

Image at Left: Zeke Berman, Maple Branch, 1983. 

Gelatin Silver Print, 16"x 20"

© Zeke Berman

Image at Right: Dieter Appelt, Liberation of the Fingers, 1977-79

One of Six Gelatin Silver Prints, 15-3/4" x 12" Each

© Dieter Appelt. 

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art

Artist demonstrations, a Mud Studio, and an Outdoor CLAYground are part of "Marvelous Mud".

Nampeyo: Hope Mater Potter

Arizona State Museum: An Interview with Dextra Nampeyo About Her Grandmother 

Nampeyo Family Pottery Video

An image of all six prints comprising Liberation of the Fingers may be viewed here.