All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights


✦ Today is International Museum Day.

✦ The latest iteration of Google Art Project launched last month. Among the enhancements: many more participating arts institutions, improved search options, cross-collection highlighting, and a facility that allows users to create their own collections and share them with friends.

✦ The work of "paper engineer" Matthew Shlian is inventive and captivating.

✦ The educational Website Oh Freedom!, developed by Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of African American History and Culture, aims to be an in-depth resource for teachers who use American art in studies of African American civil rights.

✦ There's a museum for everything, and the latest is the Museum of British Surfing in Braunton, United Kingdom. (My thanks to Art Beat for the link.) The collection includes surfboards, wet suits, photographs, memorabilia, and more, including a section where you may upload your own surf history.

Museum of British Surfing on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ In Washington, D.C., the Hirshhorn Museum, wrapped in Doug Aitken's SONG 1, became a panoramic movie screen. Here's how it looked before the sunset-to-midnight show ended on May 13:

Hirshhorn Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

The Seattle Art Museum is next to get an Aiken treatment. The museum has commissioned the artist for Mirror, shown here. The artwork is to be installed in early 2012.

✦ Realist painter Andrew Wyeth is the subject of this motionpoem. Go here for text of the poem, which is by L.S. Klatt.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Colorado, Denver Art Museum is the exclusive U.S. venue for "Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective", on view through July 8. The exhibition spans 40 years of fashion design and includes a selection of 200 haute couture costumes by Saint Laurent. Organized thematically, the exhibition also includes photographs, drawings, and film.

Here's a video of the exhibition in Paris:

Denver Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, is showing paintings, drawings, and prints of Julie Mehretu. Organized by Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, Minnesota, "Excavations: The Prints of Julie Mehretu" is on view through June 17. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Julie Mehretu, Entropia (review), 2004

Lithograph and Screenprint on Arches 88 Paper

© Julie Mehretu

Exhibition Press Release

Julie Mehretu at Highpoint Center for Printmaking

National Museum of African Art, David Binkley and Kinsey Katchka Talk with Julie Mehretu at Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora, March 28, 2003 (NMAfA Profile of Mehretu)

Julie Mehretu on art21

FLLAC on FaceBook

✭ Running through June 9 at Smith Center for Healing and the Arts is "Fluid: Rhythms, Transitions & Connections". The exhibition, at the center's art gallery in Washington, D.C., presents the work of artists Francie Hester, Lisa Hill, and Rebecca Kamen, each of whom addresses questions relating to loss, memory, and our connections to nature and one another.

Hester is showing her Connectome Series, on the complexity and transitoriness of memory. Kamen, working with sound artist Susan Alexjander, investigates the biological and metaphysical relationship with water and the body. Hill, drawing on her parents' signatures, examines how identity is formed and altered by time and health.

Included in the exhibition is the installation Words as Legacy - A Leaf of Knowledge, created by Hester and Hill and inspired by the words of Bendan Ogg, a poet who died from brain cancer at age 20. A feature of the installation is a community knitting project that attracted more than 100 participants.

Words as Legacy

Rebecca Kamen's Fluid Series (Also see the series as installed at The Brink Gallery, Missoula, Montana.)

Fluid - The Soundtrack Story (pdf) Note: The Fluid sountrack is available to download at Alexjander's site.

Smith Farm on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

See my post "She Got to Build the Universe", about Rebecca Kamen's installation Divining Nature.

✭ New York City's Rubin Museum of Art, one of my favorite haunts, is presenting "Illuminated" through September 3. The exhibition, which examines both aesthetic and technological approaches to creating and adorning sacred books, features illuminated Tibetan manuscript pages and entire books dating to the 13th Century, in addition to a bi-folio of the "Blue Qur'an", illuminated pages of Jain Sutras, and other exquisite ancient texts. Also on view are book covers that are carved from wood, painted, and made of leather or silver repousse. 

Rubin Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, ArtBabble, iTunes, and YouTube

Internet Sacred Text Archive