All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Minnesota Public Radio offers the weekly Art Hounds program, during which three people from the arts community talk about a performance, opening, or other event they think others will want to see.

Art Hounds on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ Interested in a participatory art project? Check out Inside Out. Anyone may upload "messages of personal identity" that then are recreated as posters and returned for exhibition in participants' communities. Both individual and group portraits are accepted, and all displays of the posters are documented, archived, and viewable virtually.

Inside Out on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✦ Published twice a year by Forecast Public Art, Public Art Review focuses exclusively on contemporary public art. It includes opinion, analysis, and criticism and boasts a readership comprising artists, architects, curators, city planners, educators, students, design professionals, program administrators, writers, and others interested or working in the arts.

Forecast Public Art on FaceBook

✦ You don't have to go Paris or London to find wonderful art in the underground. The New York City Arts for Transit program, founded in the 1980s, oversees the selection of artists and the installation of their work in the city's subway and commuter rail stations. It encompasses not just commissions for permanent visual art (see calls for artists); it also includes Music Under New York. Among the artists whose work can be seen below ground: Robert Kushner, Jackie Chang, Roy Lichtenstein, and Faith Ringgold, who is the subject of the video profile below. Ringgold's work is Flying Home Harlem Heroes and Heroines, 1996, in the 125th Street Station. You'll find more information about it here.

Watch Art Underground: Faith Ringgold on PBS. See more from SUNDAYARTS.

Arts for Transit Podcasts

Arts for Transit Lightbox (Work of New York-Based Photographers)

Arts for Transit Poster Program and Art Cards

Arts for Transit on FaceBook and Twitter

Metro Arts and Architecture 

"GrrlScientist Photographs the Museum Below: The Mosaics of NYC's 81st Street Station", Mosaic Art Now, December 5, 2011 (This great post highlights the mosaics and reliefs beneath the American Natural History Museum.)

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In New York City at Peter Blum SOHO, "Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art" continues until January 14. In addition to funerary vessels, paintings, pottery, weavings, and basketry from 14 tribes, the exhibition includes modern and contemporary works by Josef Albers, Max Ernst, Agnes Martin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock, as well as Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, among other artists. The show also displays a selection of important publications that document Native American life. The gallery has published in an edition of 1,500 a hardcover book with images of all the works in the exhibition and text by poet and art critic Carter Ratcliff and Comanche author, essayist, and associate curator, National Museum of the American Indian, Paul Chaat Smith. Images of a selection of 22 works may be viewed here.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Blue, Black, and White Abstraction #12, 1959

Oil on Canvas

16" x 30"

✭ A year ago I wrote a post about the discovery of Chicago photographer Vivian Maier, whose wonderful work currently is on exhibit at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City. The show, "Vivian Maier - Street Photographer", continues through January 28. Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City also is exhibiting Maier's photography, through February 25. On the West Coast, "Vivian Maier - A Life Discovered" continues, through January 28, at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles. John Maloof, who acquired a cache of Maier negatives at auction, has edited Vivian Maier - Street Photographer (Powerhouse Books), which was published in November (information about the book is here). This article "Vivian Maier: The Unheralded Street Photographer" appeared in Smithsonian Magazine in December.

✭ Thirty sculptures in wood created over nearly four decades comprise the exhibition "Ellsworth Kelly: Wood Sculpture", continuing through March 4 at the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston. This is described as the first museum exhibition to focus on Kelly's "totemic" wood forms.

Peter Plagens, "Beautiful, Quiet and Spare", The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2011 (Exhibition Review)

Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments (Checkerboard Films, 2009), a 65-minute documentary by Edgar B. Howard and Tom Piper (A short video excerpt is here.)

Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks Gallery

MFA/Boston on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ "Charles Dickens at 200", featuring manuscripts, letters, original illustrations, and photographs, continues through February 12 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. If you view the online exhibition, be sure to read the letters, too.

Alfred Bryan, Caricature of Charles Dickens, 18__

Gift of Miss Caroline Newton, 1974

Morgan Library on FaceBook and Twitter 

✭ In Poughkeepsie, New York, the Frances Lehman Leob Art Center at Vassar College opens "Marco Maggi: Lentissimo" on January 20. The show of all new work by the Uruguayan-born artist will continue through April 1. 

Marco Maggi at Josee Bienvenu Gallery

Marco Maggi at Museum of Modern Art, New York

Marco Maggi at Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2011

Interview with Marco Maggi at White Hot Magazine, March 2009

FLLAC on FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo

FLLAC Blog Off the Wall

Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ Science Gallery, an initiative of Trinity College Dublin, is showing through January 20 "Surface Tension: The Future of Water", in which artists, designers, engineers, and scientists collaborate to explore water's physical properties, its role in politics and economics, and how it is clean and distributed. View the online gallery of participating artists (click on each image for more information). The video below introduces some of the artists.

Direct Video Link

✭ Charles Dickens also is the subject of an exhibition, "Dickens and London", continuing through June 10 at the Museum of London. The first major Dickens exhibition in the United Kingdom in more than 40 years, the show includes paintings, photographs, costumes, and objects illustrative of Dickens themes. Also on display are rarely seen manuscripts (e.g., Bleak House, David Copperfield) in Dickens's own hand. Highlights include an audiovisual experience in which the desk and chair Dickens used is "brought to life" and a showing of a specially commissioned film, The Houseless Shadow, by documentary filmmaker William Raban (see trailer below). An iPhone/iPad app allows you to "journey through the darker side of Charles Dickens's London." Tickets are required for the exhibition.

Exhibition Leaflet

Dickens 2012, Celebrating the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens (This site will keep you busy browsing.)

Charles Dickens on SoundCloud (Record your favorite lines and passages.)

Museum of London on FaceBook and Twitter