All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Baltimore printer Erin Wallace runs Friends with Benefits, a collaborative printmaking project. The group's first release is "Piles", comprising seven artists' interpretation on the theme of piles. Participants are Andrew Neyer, Sam Alden, Jen Mussari, John Chae, Jordan Bernier, Alyssa Nassner, and Luke Pearson. Each of the 100 hand-editioned sets of eight 5"x7" letterpress prints, collected in a folded cardboard holder, is $60. All are charming and, at that price, offer a great start to a print collection of your own.

✦ A marvelous example of an arts and education partnership: Three years ago, with support from the Appalachian Community Fund, the Beehive Design Collective, Machias, Maine, and grassroots organizers in Appalachia joined together to fight the destructive practice known as mountain top removal coal mining. As part of "The True Cost of Coal" project, the group's volunteer illustrators and educators undertook a Graphic Campaign to produce a folding poster depicting mountain top removal coal mining (see below) and a narrative booklet, available in English and Spanish. The group conducts workshops and "picture lectures" across the United States (booking information is here). 

Coal Campaign Image Gallery

Coal Campaign Blog 

Information About the Collective

✦ The public art project "At What Cost" is intended to bring attention to the worldwide crisis in human trafficking and labor abuse of children and adults. Sponsored in part by the International Labour Organization and focusing on abusive practices in production of goods and provision of services, it tells, in photographs and recordings, the stories of 10 individuals forced to work in abusive conditions in such industries as agriculture, mining, seafood production, domestic services, textile fabrication, and sexual services.  

Art Works Projects (Art and Design for Human Rights) is the organization behind the project.

Niko Koppel, "The True Price, With a Hidden Cost", The New York Times Lens Blog, October 12, 2011

✦ Don't miss this online presentation of Salvador Dali illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ This year is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and New York's Asia Society (one of my favorite museums) is exhibiting through December 31 more than 60 paintings by the Indian poet, artist, and thinker. If you can't see the show in person, don't miss the dedicated Website for the exhibition, "Rabindranath Tagore: The Last Harvest", which includes information about Tagore, who, without formal instruction, began drawing and painting at age 63, and guides you through the show, section by section: The Beginning, Beyond the Pages, Discovery of Rhythm, and Faces of the World. A compilation of books and online sources (the latter are hyperlinked) also is provided.

A catalogue, The Last Harvest: Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore (Mapin, September 2011) accompanies the show.

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled (Portrait of a woman with veil), 1934

Colored Ink and Opaque White on Silk

35-5/8" x 23-13/16"

Here's a video preview of the show:



A related video presents a talk by Harvard University professor Sugata Bose on Tagore's literary, artistic, and political legacies.

Asia Society on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Asia Society Blog, re:Asia

✭ Showing through March 3, 2012, at the membership library Boston Athenaeum is "Artists' Books: Books by Artists", drawn from Boston Athenaeum's own collection. On view are works by Ryoko Adachi, Harriet Bart, Xu Bing, Laura Davidson, Stephen Dupont, Iliazd, Russell Maret, Christopher Wilde, and more than two dozen others. 

Slideshow of Featured Books (You may also see selections here. Click on to enlarge and obtain information.)

✭ In Hartford, Connecticut, The Wadsworth Atheneum presents "Patti Smith: Camera Solo" through February 19. Included in the exhibition are 70 photographs, a multi-media installation, and a video work. The show marks the first exhibition of Smith's photography in the United States.

"Camera Solo: See Patti Smith's Photos of Rimbaud's Spoon, Mapplethorpe's Slippers, and Other Obscure Arts Relics", ArtInfo, October 20, 2011

Wadsworth Atheneum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Seventy-one color and black-and-white photographs by Madeleine de Sinety are on view through December 31 at Portland (Maine) Museum of Art. The exhibition of the Rangeley, Maine, resident's photography is the fourth in a series featuring living artists from Maine and elsewhere.

PMA Image Gallery

"Anticipating the Photograph: Madeleine de Sinety at the PMA" at VoxPhotographs Weblog

PMA on FaceBook and Twitter 

✭ Oregon's Portland Art Museum has mounted "APEX: Adam Sorensen", a show of the Portland artist's landscapes that the museum describes as "harbingers of environmental degradation" that "embrace a pop-culture aesthetic, but are influenced by 19th- and 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints." The show continues through January 1.

Adam Sorensen at PDX (There is a large, representative selection of Sorensen's images at this gallery site. You'll find a video here.)

Adam Sorensen's The Glows at Elizabeth Leach Gallery

PMA on FaceBook and Twitter