All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦  Baltimore, Maryland's Walters Art Museum has removed copyright restrictions on more than 10,000 images. Its Website now includes a dedicated section, Works of Art, showcasing the high-quality digital images and including detailed information about the artworks.  A site visitor may download any of the photographs,  and search, tag, and create his or her own online art collection that may be shared via FaceBook or Twitter. Images may be searched by category, date, creator, medium, places, museum location, tags, and community collections. An artwork is featured daily. This is a tremendous resource, and the Walters is to be applauded for making it available!

Walters Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube 

✦ Wired magazine recently published online "Super Small: Top 20 Microscope Photos of the Year". All of the featured images are top picks from more 2,000 images submtted to the Nikon Small World annual contest. The photographs will amaze you. 

Details for 2012 Small World Photomicrography Competition and Small World in Motion Competition

✦ You'll find here a visual archive of Santiago, Chile. (My thanks to the Smithsonian's The Bigger Picture blog for the link to this wonderful site.)

✦ Ohioan Matt Kish, who is a librarian but, he says, not an illustrator or an artist, began a project in 2009 to draw illustrations for every page of Moby-Dick. The project became a book, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Tin House, October 2011). I think you'll find the illustrations unlike any others for the classic novel.

Drawing the White Whale (20 of Kish's Illustrations)

Matt Kish Blog

Interview with PBS NewsHour Art Beat

Here's a short video revealing some of Kish's beautiful visual narrative:

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In  Norfolk, Virginia, the Chrysler Museum of Art continues throuh January 1 "Interstices: Mapping Contemporary Art", a show of 80 rarely or never-before seen works from the Chrysler's modern and contemporary art collections. The exhibit is organized into six thematic sections: Identity Politics, Tell Me a Story: Art and Narrative, Mirror, Mirror: Reflections of Self, Remembering History, Inversing Reality, and Mediation.  

Chrysler Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, is exhibiting through year's end "Jessica Stockholder: Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood". For the project, which includes  large  freestanding pieces resembling mobile folding screens, the sculptor collaborated with cabinetmaker Clifford Moran and master printer Gary Lichtenstein to use wood from a 125-year-old ash tree that had been on the museum's property and cut down after it died. Images from the exhibit may be seen here (scroll to end), on Flickr. and on Stockholder's site.

Jessica Stockholder

Hollow Places Court in Ash-Tree Wood (Detail), 2011

Jessica Stockholder and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

In this video, Stockholder talks about the project and her collaboration with Lichtenstein and Moran:

Jessica Stockholder Website

Art21 Profile of Jessica Stockholder

The Aldrich on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Work by award-winning Creek sculptor Retha Walden Gambaro is on view at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. The exhibit, "Retha Walden Gambaro: Attitudes of Prayer", is on display through May 13, 2012, in the museum's Nichols Sculpture Garden.

Tricia Parker, "Retha Walden Gambaro's Sculpture Work Is Worth Facing the Elements on the Heard Museum's Patio", Phoenix NewTimes, June 16, 2011

Images of Selection of Gambaro Sculptures

Heard Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts begins showing "Bill Viola: Ocean Without a Shore" on November 19. Made in 2007, the video and sound installation, a new acquisition by PAFA, runs 90 minutes. If you're in Philadelphia and have never seen one of Viola's works, take the time to see the film.

PAFA on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Writing Without Paper Post on Viola on June 18, 2010

✭ A site-specific installation by Swoon, "Anthropocene Extinction", is on view at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston through December 30. The labor-intensive installation for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg At Wall extends from the elevator atrium to the lobby, 40 feet up to the ceiling, the large artwork in the space  to date. It comprises streams of intricately hand-cut paper and a 400-pound suspended pyramid-shaped bamboo, wood, and copper structure. Video of installation footage and an interview with the artist accompanies the exhibit, which remains on view through December 30, 2012.

Adam Ragusea, "Street Artist Swoon Brings Her Art Inside", RadioBoston, September 2, 2011

Swoon on YouTube and FaceBook

Swoon Presenting Her Work at MoMA, Parts 1 and 2

ICA/Boston FaceBook and Twitter

ICA/Boston Blog, Currents (There are two posts here about the installation.)

✭ In Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts continues "Visions of the Orient: Western Women Artists in Asia 1900-1940", on view through January 15. The exhibition of 125 prints and paintings  focuses on work of four artists — Helen Hyde, Bertha Lum, Elizabeth Keith, and Lilian Miller — who, while living in Japan, learned the art of  producing woodblock prints. The show includes rare paintings and drawings of the artists, original woodblocks, proof prints, and printmaking tools.

Lilian Miller, Rain Blossoms, Japan, 1928

Woodblock Print, 9-3/4" x 14-5/8" 

Scripps College, Claremont, California

Gift of Mrs. Simon Bolivar Buckner

Woodblock Prints in the Ukiyo-e Style (Metropolitan Museum)

Japanese Woodblocks Explained

Create a Woodblock Print (How-to at PBS)

NMWA on FaceBook and Twitter

NMWA Blog, Broad Strokes (See "Visions of the Orient: Western Women Artists in Asia 1900-1940". The blogpost includes some background on the artists and additional images.)