All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, is featuring a wonderful online exhibition "A Tonic to the Imagination: Costume Designs for State and Screen by B.J. Simmons & Co., 1889-1959".  Included are more than 200 images of costume designs and other materials from 60 theatre and film productions; among the 10 categories are Actors & Managers, Early Shakespeare, and Musicals & Revues.

✦ The nonprofit Institute of the 21st Century, dubbed i21c, a digital archive of curator  Hans Ulrich Obrist's Interview Project, which involved scores of major figures in art, architecture, literature, and science, debuted the weekend of July 29. More than 2,500 hours of interviews are eventually to become available.

8-Part Recorded Lecture on The Art of Curating, 2004 on YouTube

i21c on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ Are designers artists? Let's hear what Italian designers Elsa Shiaparelli and Miuccia Prada have to say about the issue in "The Surreal Body" by director Baz Luhrmann, conceived for the exhibition "Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations" at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the show closes August 19).

Luhrmann's video series for the exhibition includes "Ugly Chic", "Naif Chic", "The Classical Body",  "Hard Chic, "The Exotic Body", and "Waist Up/Waist Down".

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Santa Fe's Tai Gallery, one of the premier exhibitors of bamboo, ceramic, and textile arts, is showing through August 31 "Desert Bloom: Form and Motion in Clay — The Ceramic Sculpture of Fujino Sachiko". This solo exhibition for Sachiko, the first outside Japan, inaugurates a collaboration with Joan B. Mirviss Ltd., New York City. Information about the collaboration and exhibition is available here; information about the artist is here.

✭ Joining in the extensive continuing celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Romare Bearden's birth is Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which is presenting "From Process to Print: Graphic Works by Romare Bearden" through September 2. Organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation in New York City, the exhibition of more than 75 prints travels to the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York, in  October, where it will be on view until January 6, 2013. A color catalogue accompanies the show, which ranges over Bearden's lithographs, etchings, and serigraphs, including his important photoengraving series The Train and The Family, as well as prints based on collages, including the Odysseus series and Piano Lesson.

Exhibition Gallery Guide (pdf) and Image List (29-page pdf)

Romare Bearden Foundation

Centennial Tribute Website

✭ British artist and light designer Bruce Munro has created a series of large-scale, site-specific light installations for the beautiful Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania (approximately 30 miles from Philadelphia). The installations, best seen at night, are on view through September 29. (Evening hours are until 11:00 p.m. through September 1. Find visitor information here.) The solo exhibition of eight outdoor installations and two installations within Longwood's four-acre Grand Conservatory covers 23 acres. 

Among the installations are the 300-foot-long Arrow Spring: Beyond Flower Garden Walk made up of 15,000 LED flashlights; Field of Light: Small Lake, comprising 7,000 frosted glass spheres; Waterlilies, for which Munro mounted recycled CDs on foam discs; Candlelight: Canopy Cathedral Treehouse, which uses lights concealed in porcelain vessels to illuminate the interior space; Water Towers: Meadow at Hourglass Lake, composed of 69 structures made with one-liter recyclable plastic bottles filled with water, laser-cut wood layers, and fiber optics connected to a LED projector and sound system; Forest of Light: Forest Walk, requiring 20,000 illuminated glass spheres; Snowballs: Orangery, for which Munro created six large glass chandeliers whose colors change in unison; and Light Shower: Exhibition Hall, comprising 1,650 teardrop-shaped diffusers suspended from the ceiling by fiber-optic strands. (A statement from the artist about each installation appears at each of the links.)

This time-lapse video shows the installations as they are being assembled and how they look at night (additional videos for the installations are available on YouTube):

Here's Munro's statement about the exhibition and a second brief video in which the artist talks about his installations:

In addition to the outdoor light installations, Munro has placed small sculptures on view for On Light Exhibit: Music Room.

Light: Installations by Bruce Munro App at iTunes for Apple and Google Play for Android

Exhibition Catalogue

Bruce Munro on FaceBook and Twitter

Longwood Gardens on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Longwood Gardens Blog Behind the Plants

✭ In New York City, George Adams Gallery will open "James Barsness: A Survey of Paintings, 1993-2008" on September 7. The award-winning Barsness is in numerous public collections, including those of Di  Rosa Art Preserve, Napa, California; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; and Yale University Art Gallery New Haven; Barness has exhibited extensively in group and solo shows around the United States.

Images Here and Here