All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ An art-and-the-law blog worth following: Art and Artifice.

✦ You'll want to spend more than a moment at the Website of French paper artist Nathalie Boutte (b. 1967). Images of her marvelous collages, which resemble mosaics, especially her portraits, are here. (My thanks to my friend Ann at All Things Paper for bringing Boutte to my attention.)

✦ My friends at the Smithsonian Institution Archives have uncovered a remarkable trove of images from the Nicholas V. Artamonoff Collection, comprising 543 photographs taken in Istanbul and five archeological sites in western Turkey by Nicholas Victor Artamonoff (1908-1989). Browsing the collection, maintained by Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., is a delight.

✦ This short, The Art of Time by Martina Chamrad, takes us to the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a behind-the-scenes look at lithography. Now in its fifty-second year of printmaking, Tamarind has worked with a stellar group of artists, among them Elaine de Kooning, Jim Dine, and Kiki Smith.

The Art Of Time from Martina Chamrad on Vimeo.

Chamrad's blog Between East and West is worth a look. Her other videos are accessible here; her Les Ottinger short is noteworthy.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Turlock, California, Carnegie Arts Center is exhibiting through March 14 the textile artistry of Yvonne Porcella. The show, "Yvonne Porcella: A Retrospective", honors Porcella's textiles, which are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (see her Snow on Mount Fuji there), and other notable arts institutions. Her quilts, as the image below shows, are  imaginative and beautifully made narrative collages, exceptionally rich in color and full of intriguing symbols, figures, and forms.

Yvonne Porcella, Answering the Riddle, 1990

© Yvonne Porcella

An informative six-page press release on Porcella's retrospective that includes images is here. Also see Lisa Millegan Renner's feature article, "Yvonne Procella's Fabric Art Next for Turlock's Carnegie Arts Center", Merced Sun-Star, January 13, 2012.

Porcella is among the quilters profiled in the PBS documentary America Quilts.

Yvonne Porcella Blog

Yvonne Porcella Profiled at Quilters Hall of Fame, Alliance for American Quilts, Bernina (five-page pdf showing Porcella's wonderful pieced wearables and applique blocks), and Planet Patchwork

Preview of Porcella's Six-Color World: Color, Cloth, Quilts & Wearables (C&T Publishing, 1997) at GoogleBooks

The video below was produced by the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (currently holding a Quilt National) while hosting a 25-year retrospective of Porcella's work:

✭ Washington, D.C.'s Phillips Collection, one of our finest local art venues, is showing through May 27 Brooklyn-based Alyson Shotz's Ecliptic, a series of three interrelated monumental drawings of yarn and nails. The work was commissioned as part of the museum's popular "Intersections" series.

Phillips Collection on FaceBook and Twitter

Experiment Station, Phillips Collection Blog

Free Phillips App for iPad or Android

Selected Images of Alyson Shotz Artwork at Derek Eller Gallery

✭ In New York City, one of my favorite museums, Museum of Arts and Design, has opened "Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design", on view through August 12. All of the artists represented use such materials as dust, ashes, dirt, and sand to address in their work issues of ephemerality, impermanence, memory, loss, fragility, and disintegration. Featured are Zhang Huan's haunting ash sculptures (see his ash, steel, and wood Jesus of 2011), James Croak's extraordinary life-size sculptures of unfired dirt (see one series of process photos here), and Kim Abeles's work using city smog (see The Smog Collectors at her site). From March 6 to May 14, a series of "live" installations, Swept Away Projects, are scheduled and will include Catherine Bertola, who creates artworks from dust, which she describes as "a mechanism for storytelling". Video interviews with participating artists and an exhibition catalogue complement the exhibition.

Phoebe Cummings, Flora, 2010

Unfired Clay

Photo: Sylvain Deleu Courtesy of Artist

Cummings, who works in raw clay, was last year's recipient of the prestigious Spode Award (see this feature about the award). See some of her other work here.

MadMuseum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

MadMuseum Blog

✭ The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, is presenting "Nancy Chunn: Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear" through April 15. Comprising a series of paintings in which Chunn uses the allegory of the folk fable Chicken Little to show how fear and panic enveloped American culture and politics after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, the show includes six of Chunn's 11 "scene cycles" for which she has appropriated found images from different decades that she has grouped on different-size canvases to mimic frame-by-frame views of 24-hour news broadcasts; she organizes the canvases over what she calls "amoeba" shapes painted directly on the wall. In the scenes she portrays environmental disaster, road rage, poverty, crime, and the "nightmares" of healthcare and medical research. A selection of images may be viewed here.

Nancy Chunn, Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear

Scene VI: The Road (Detail), 2006-2007

© Nancy Chunn

Photo: Bill Orcutt Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts New York 

Nancy Chunn Artist Page at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (Here you'll find Chunn's biography, a list of selected publications, press coverage, an interesting discussion of her work, and images of Chunn's work.) This 10-minute YouTube video of Chunn's "Nancy Chunn: Media Madness" exhibition features the artist talking about her fascination with American history, culture, media, and politics, and her technique, imagery, and artistic intent. She also discusses her use of the Chicken Little story and how she employs humor to uncover serious issues.

Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ At Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, United Kingdom, the art of "Turner and His Contemporaries" is on view through April 14. The exhibition of more than 40 works from the Sir Hickman Bacon Watercolour Collection presents not only J.M.W. Turner's sublime watercolors but also those of Thomas Girtin, John Robert Cozens, and John Sell Cotman. An exceptional show of 18th and 19th Century watercolors. 

John Sell Cotman, A Windmill (Detail), c 1828

© Sir Nicholas Bacon

A color catalogue of the show is available. A selection of exhibition images may be downloaded here.

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