All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The national competition Looking@Democracy, offering $100,000 in prize money, is seeking short creative media pieces. Entries should either tell a story about why government is important to our lives or how we might together strengthen American democracy. Acceptable submission media include videos, audio clips, animation, music videos, public service announcements, infographics, and digital graphic art. A category for emerging artists is intended for students, youths, and nonprofessionals. The deadline is April 16. Looking@Democracy is a project of the Illinois Humanities Council.

✦ April 19 is the deadline for applicants for USArtists International 2013 grants for projects taking place between July 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014. Instructions and guidelines are at the link.

✦ Don't miss the charming and engaging drawings (in pencil, gouache, ink, and crayon on paper, sometimes collaged) of award-winning Canadian illustrator Julie Morstad. (My thanks to Hannah Stephenson for the link.)

✦ The National Arts Education Public Awareness Campaign offers some facts about arts education's importance to child development and 10 Simple Ways to get more art in your child's life.

✦ Individuals, collectives, and community-based organizations in the United States, Mexico, and Central America may compete for Transnational Cultural Remittances grants of $2,000 to $20,000. Submissions should be for art activities that support, preserve, or extend cultural practices among linked communities in two of more of the following: Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and the U.S. The deadline for 2013 grants is April 4.

✦ The ceramic sculptures of Noriko Kuresumi, which the Japanese artist explains are created "by imagining the source of harmony and balance of the ocean", are gorgeous. Below is a video showing 360-degree views of her Sea of Memory 020:

Kuresumi Ceramics on FaceBook

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Wausau, Wisconsin, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum continues through April 7 the traveling exhibition "Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami".  More than 100 works by 40 artists from 13 countries, including Giang Dinh, Eric Joisel, Michael G. LaFosse, and Bernie Peyton, exemplify the mastery of this often stunning art form. The show travels to Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, in June and to Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon, in October. Images, video, and additional information about the exhibition may be found here.

The museum also is showing the work of paper sculptor Calvin Nicholls, who uses only X-ACTO® knives, toothpicks for dabbing glue, and paper to create his striking 3-D works. This exhibition, too, runs through April 7. 

Here's a video showing some of his work:

LYWAM on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ The James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, will open "Infinite Mirror: Images of American Identity" on April 13. The exhibition of more than 50 multimedia works (paintings, works on paper, photographs, video) by such well-known artists as Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Luis Jimenez, Tomie Arai, and the late Elizabeth Catlett-Mora examines the use of portraiture and figuration to express emotional and social ideas and to depict the circumstances and experiences of multicultural populations in America. The exhibition, to run through July 7, will travel to Juniata College Museum of Art, Washakie Museum & Cultural Center, Foosaner Art Museum/Florida Institute of Technology, and Richard E. Peeler Art Center/DePauw University.

Sungho Choi, Drawing for American Pie, 1996

Mixed Media, Paper on Panel

30" x 30" x 1-1/2"

© Sungho Choi

Photo Credit: D. James Dee

Image Checklist (pdf)

✭ "Journey Through Mountains and Rivers: Chinese Landscapes Ancient and Modern" continues through April 28 at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Highlights include a number of extremely fragile Song Dynasty paintings, which will not be displayed again for 10 years, and the first showing in the United States of the beautiful paintings of Xu Longsen (see images of his work here).

Nelson-Atkins on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Thirty paintings and drawings by Boston-born African-American artist Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) are on view through October 14 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The exhibition ranges over Jones's entire artistic career. In addition to painting hundreds of portraits, she worked in textiles, designed masks and stained glass windows, and taught art. 

MFA on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ If you're lucky enough to be in New York any time before August 4, head to the Brooklyn Museum to see "Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui". The artist's first solo show in a New York museum, the exhibition presents more than 30 works in metal and wood that El Anatsui has transformed, as only he can, into site-specific sculptures. Twelve of his recent large-scale wall and floor sculptures are featured. The metal pieces are made with bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, Ghana, where the artist lives. I've been privileged to see his work, which I find unforgettable.

Here's the trailer for Susan Vogel's documentary Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui:

Trailer: Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui by Susan Vogel from Susan Vogel on Vimeo.

Also see Susan M. Vogel, El Anatsui: Art & Life (Prestel Publishing, 2012).

El Anatsui at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.

Brooklyn Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube