All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Can you name this sculpture found in Washington, D.C.? (The answer appears at the end of this post.)

Image Credit: R.W. Plummer

Thomas Crane Public Library, Quincy, Massachusetts

✦ In my August 19 edition, I highlighted an exhibition of Etsuko Ichikawa and included a number of other links. Today, I invite you to take five minutes to view this wonderful video in which Ichikawa demonstrates how she creates her "glass pyrographs" using hot molten glass.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Albany's New York State Museum presents through April 28, 2012, "Before the Fall: Remembering the World Trade Center", an exhibition drawing on the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's sponsored artist residencies at the WTC. The show includes the LMCC works World Views, Studioscape, and Special Projects, in addition to works re-created after the loss of the North Tower in 9/11. Artists who were part of the residency program from 1997 until 9/11: Olive Ayhens, Donald Bracken (his work is especially compelling; see the slideshow here), Monika Bravo, Laurie Halsey Brown, Megan Craig, Dennis D'Amelio, Sjoerd Doting, Joellyn Duesberry, Bart Elsbach (scroll to end of page), Nancy Friese, Raoul Middleman, Michael Richards (Richards, a sculptor, died on 9/11), James Sheehan, Sonya Sklaroff, and Edin Velez. 

See LMCC's InSite Art + Commemoration, continuing Through October 11, for related activities, including writer, poet, and visual artist Jill Magi's "Nineteen Rooms for September 11".

An Artists Registry, comprising an online permanent collection of artworks created in response to 9/11 has been established as part of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.

LMCC on FaceBook and Twitter

NYSM on FaceBook and YouTube

✭ In Tacoma, Washington, "A Turbulent Lens: The Photographic Art of Virna Haffer" is on view at Tacoma Art Museum. Haffer (1900-1974) was also a printmaker, painter, sculptor, musician, and writer but best known for her photographic work, especially her portraiture. Work in the exhibition, which runs through October 16, is drawn from more than 30,000 photographic negatives, prints, and woodblocks at the Washington State Historical Society and in the Special Collections of Tacoma Public Library. A catalogue accompanies the show.

"Tacoma Art Museum Honors Life and Work of Oft-Forgotten Artist Virna Haffer", ArtDaily, August 9, 2011

TAM on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, opens "Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991-2009" on September 23. The exhibition, which will continue through March 31, 2012, includes a selection of von Rydingsvard's wall reliefs and magnificent monumental cedar works. 

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

Process Photos: von Rydingsvard in Her Studio

von Rydingsvard at the Sculpture Center, Long Island

von Rydingsvard on Art21

MOCA Cleveland on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ More than 80 daily used objects, from hats and combs to baskets, blankets, and wearable textiles, are included in Maryland's Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition "Hand Held: Personal Arts From Africa", opening September 25 and continuing through February 5, 2012. The late 19th- and early 20th Century work comes from 21 African countries and includes several major recent acquisitions being shown for the first time.

BAM on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Opening October 20 and continuing through March 26, 2012, at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City is "Lee Mingwei: The Travelers and The Quartet Project". The section titled "The Travelers" comprises artist-designed notebooks Mingwei distributed to family, friends, and acquaintances, who were asked to write down stories about "leaving home". The notebooks were passed from person to person and, after  having traveled for a year, were to be returned to MOCA no later than September 12 of this year. Any of 100 such notebooks that have been returned to the museum have become part of Mingwei's installation. Also addressing displacement, the section titled "The Quartet Project" is an interactive sound installation, in which viewers' movements in relation to sound monitors determine whether Antoine Dvorak's American String Quartet is activated or muted.

Take some time to browse Lee Mingwei's site; he has undertaken some fascinating projects.

MOCA on FaceBook and Twitter, 

__________________________

* The image at the top of the post, by R.W. Plummer and found in the Thomas Crane Public Library under Quincy's Granite Legacy (Industy Photographs), is a process photo of the Women's Titanic Memorial. Thirteen feet high, it was carved from a single piece of red granite. Originally sited in Washington, D.C., near the location of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the sculpture was moved in 1966 and re-erected in 1968 in Washington Channel Park on the Potomac waterfront. See "Channeling Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney" for a bit of history about the sculpture and additional recent photos, and this Wikipedia entry.