All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ With a background in scientific and medical illustration, 3-D artist Bryan Christie shows us in his elegant and even haunting mixed media, digital prints, video, and sculpture what can happen when art uses science to explore the body and reveal its wonder. I was especially taken with Christie's Hand 1 (2011). See his portfolio for additional award-winning work, encompassing human anatomy, biology, medical explanations, architecture, maps, technology, animals, and more. Christie's animations are marvelous.

Christie's Blog BCB

✦ New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched MetPublications, a portal to the museum's publishing program. Beginning with 650 titles from 1964 to today, the resource will continue to expand. Plans are to provide access to almost all of the Met's books, bulletins, and journals, including online publications. Typical information includes a description, table of contents, author information, awards, reviews, and links to related content by author, theme, and keyword. Searching also is possible by publication type and collection. Available in-print work carries a link for purchasing. Contents of many titles may be read online, searched, or downloaded as pdfs.

✦ From New York City architecture to glacial landscapes in Norway, Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand, and Patagonia, photographer Caleb Cain Marcus creates images of astonishing beauty. In numerous museum collections, his work achieves a painterly quality, drawing the eye again and again into discovery. Take time for  his marvelous photographs of glaciers, A Portrait of Ice (available at Amazon; see image at left), and his project America, featuring images from Louisiana, Virginia, Arizona, and Utah during the four seasons.

✦ The Reed College Digital Collections comprises more than 80,000 images and other digital materials, include artworks, photographs, maps, and primary source documents. I especially enjoyed browsing the collection of Artists' Books, which include traditional letterpress-printed poetry collections, conceptual book works, sculptural and visual works, concrete poetry, and magazine work. Recent additions include the Kiki Smith and Leslie Scalapino collaboration The Animal is  in the World like Water in Water, Anna Akhmatova: Poems with art by Oleg Gergatchov, and An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy edited by Xu Bing. The section may be browsed by artists, books, and genre, as well as word(s) and title. Both Gallery View and Slideshow View are available.

✦ For anyone who missed the MoMA's 2003-2004 exhibition "Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things", do the next best thing: go online to see the interactive Website, which presents more than 200 images, in addition to music and video. Work may be explored by theme, process, and image. It's a wonderful introductory resource about the internationally known sculptor and printmaker. 

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Washington, D.C., "Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets" is on view at the National Portrait Gallery through April 28, 2013. The exhibition includes portraits of poets Walt Whitman, John Ashbery, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and many others by such photographers as Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Hans Namuth, and George Plath Lynes, all aiming a keen eye to "putting a face to the distinctive voices of American poetry." Before you go, take time for the exhibition's informative Web pages: Prologue, Make It New, The Beauty of Inflections, Asking Compassion, and The Spoken Word, where you'll find images, biographical information, cultural context, artists' drawings and paintings of poets, interesting quotations, and audio recordings.

National Portrait Gallery on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and iTunes

Catalogue of American Portraits on FaceBook

✭  Organized by London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Peabody Essex Museum's "Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones" displays plumed bonnets, silk turbans, sequined caps, "fascinators", pop cultural headgear, and many other styles created by such designers as Balenciaga, Givenchy, and Schiaparelli, and curated by the British milliner. The exhibition (highlights in PEM's press release) is arranged thematically: sources of inspiration, creation (techniques, materials, processes), buying and selling, and wearing and etiquette. (A full description and installation views online accompanied the show while it was at Bard Graduate Center earlier this year. The London museum maintains a microsite online.) The exhibition at the Salem, Massachusetts, museum is on view through February 3. According to Jones's Website, it is joined by displays of Boston milliners and a cabinet of American hats from PEM's collections (included is Boston Red Sox David Ortiz's baseball cap).

A book by the same name (V&A Publishing, 2012; see image) is available. (The catalogue is on sale at PEM also.)

PEM on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest

✭ San Francisco Museum of Art is presenting through February 3 a retrospective of the work of Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), part of a community of Bay Area artists, poets, and musicians who came to prominence in the 1950s. The exhibition includes nearly 130 collages, drawings, paintings, photographs, small sculptures, and jewelry spanning four decades of art-making. DeFeo's approach to materials was unconventional, her physical process described as "intensive". Her extraordinary work The Rose is the subject of a book, Jay DeFeo and The Rose, edited by Jane Green and Leah Levy (University of California Press and Whitney Museum, 2003); it resides at the Whitney.

A number of interactive features, videos, and audio recordings relating to the exhibition can be found here. The Jay DeFeo Trust features comprehensive information about the artist and her work. A 320-page catalogue of the exhibition (available as of November) includes essays 300 color and 30 black-and-white illustrations.

The exhibition travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, in February.

"The Untold Story of Jay DeFeo's The Rose", Phaidon (Article), 2012

Oral History Interview with Jay DeFeo, Archives of American Art, June 3, 1975-January 23, 1976

SFMoMA on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The Japan Society, New York City, is featuring "Silver Wind: The Arts of Sakai Hoitsu (1761-1828)" through January 6. Work by the Samurai-aristocrat-turned-Buddhist-monk includes 58 screens, scrolls, painted fans, lacquer wares, and woodblock-printed books. Of special note is Maples and Cherry Trees, a pair of screens lined with gold leaf and painted in previous mineral pigments; the screens replaced Waves, a pair of 12-foot-wide six-panel screens sheathed in silver leaf and brushed in black ink, that were so fragile they could only be displayed until November 4. An admission fee is required to see the exhibition. A catalogue accompanies the show.

This video introduces the retrospective exhibition:

Japan Society on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube