All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Renee Phillips introduced through her Healing Power of ART site (see feature article here) the work of New York City-based Nancy Azara, who shows her evocative sculpture (carved and painted wood with gold and silver leaf and encaustic) and lyrical collages throughout the United States and abroad. Such wonderful work merits more than a quick browse! In Minneapolis, Katherine Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota is exhibiting Nash through February 23 in "The House We Built: Feminist Art Then and Now".

In this video, Azara talks about her creative process:

Nancy Azara's Spirit Taking Form (Red Wheel Weiser, 2002)

Nancy Azara on Twitter

Nancy Azara Blog

✦  Tim Knowles of the United Kingdom has produced a series of unique Tree Drawings by attaching drawing tools to tips of tree branches and recording on paper the wind's effects on the trees. Also notable are his Nightwalks and Full Moon Reflections.

✦ Drawing on the Japanese art forms of bonsai and suiseki (stone appreciation), Takanori Aiba creates elaborate fantastical sculptures of craft paper, plastic, plaster, acrylic resin, paint, and other materials. 

✦ The Prison Arts Coalition, founded in 2008, is a national network providing information and resources about prison arts programs in the United States. The PAC represents a consortium of artists and arts organizations devoted to promoting arts in prisons and sharing information and resources about prison arts. Visual art, writing, audio, and video are featured in the Gallery section of the Website.

PAC on FaceBook and Twitter

PAC Blog

✦ In December and January, internationally known visual artist Ann Hamilton, a professor of art at The Ohio State University, installed at the Park Avenue Armory, New York City, the event of a thread (Roberta Smith's review here) which combines "readings, sound, and live events within a field of swings that together invite visitors to connect to the action of each other and the work itself, illuminating the experience of the singular and collective body." In the video interview below, taped on December 8, 2012, the artist speaks about her work with the Armory's artistic director Kristy Edmunds. Be sure to read Hamilton's own description of the installation at her Website.

In this video, the artist is shown working with her crew to set up the installation:

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In New York City, Alexandre Gallery opens "Tom Uttech: New Paintings" on February 21. The exhibition of the contemporary landscape artist, who maintains that the "best response" to his work is to "go straight to the wildest piece of land you can find and sit down and let it wash over you and tell you secrets", will run through March 30. Images of Uttech's evocative, even mystical paintings (available through the gallery) may be viewed here. See additional work by the Wisconsin native at Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee. Uttech also is a photographer; see images here of his digital inkjet prints.

✭ An exhibition of new work by Polish sculptor Monika Sosnowska opens today at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado, and continues through April 21. In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum is publishing an illustrated book documenting some 10 years of exhibitions and including essays by curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and Joseph Pulitzer Jr., professor of modern art at Harvard University. A conversation with the curator is planned for April 4.

A 40-foot-tall steel sculpture, Fir Tree, by Sosnowska is on view for two more days in Manhattan.

AAM on FaceBook

✭ The Art Institute of Chicago continues through April 7 "We The People", its show of five sculptures by Vietnam-born and currently Berlin-based Danh Vo, part of the artist's project to reconstruct on a 1:1 scale individual elements of the Statue of Liberty that then will be shown at museums and other art venues around the world. Fragments by Vo also are installed at the Oriental Institute, Booth School of Business, and University of Chicago Law School.

Danh Vo Artist Talk on Vimeo (Vo talks about his solo exhibition last fall at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.)

ARTIC on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ In Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Women in the Arts today opens "A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony", which will continue through May 12. This is a comprehensive exhibition of the Danish painter's work, featuring more than 60 paintings by Ancher (1859-1935) and artists in her circle, part of the Impressionist movement at Skagen, a seaside community in northern Denmark that is home to numerous lighthouses dating to the 1600s.

Anna Ancher, Sunlight in the Blue Room*, 1891

Oil on Canvas, 65.2 cm x 58.5 cm

Skagens Museum Acquisition, 1926

* Also translated at "Sunshine in the Blue Living Room"

Anna Ancher at Skagens Museum

56 Artworks by Anna Ancher at The Athenaeum

Profile at Viden Information

NMWA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ "Chagall: Beyond Color" puts paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and collage of the master on view at Dallas Museum of Art from February 17 to May 26. The exhibition also includes a display of costumes that Chagall made for the ballet Aleko, choreographed by Leonide Massine to music by Tchaikovsky. This is the first time since the ballet's inaugural performances that the costumes have been placed on exhibit in the United States. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the show, which is co-organized by La Piscine Museum, Roubaix, France (the exhibition was on view there from October 13, 2012, until January 13, 2013).

DMA on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube