All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Heads up, Montreal artists. Artist Holly Friesen is now curating Art Bomb, a new collaboration with Art Bomb Daily of Toronto, an art auction service. See Holly's post "Art Bomb Daily".

✦ The permanent memorial installation La Geometria de la Conciencia (2010) by Alfredo Jaar is on view at the now-open Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) in Santiago, Chile. The commissioned work, comprising opaque glass, computer-controlled LEDS, and wall mirrors, is a moving memorial to the victims of the Pinochet regime; reached through a glass-enclosed stairway leading to an underground space, it is a completely experiential piece, exposing viewers over the course of three minutes to total darkness that gradually lifts to make visible a bank of 500 laser-cut silhouettes, meant to represent the dead and "disappeared" but created from living models, before once again plunging the viewing chamber into darkness. (A description of the work is on the last page of this pdf. The work is also discussed in this interview with Jaar in Art Monthly.) Jaar considers the piece a "monument for all Chileans."

Alfredo Jaar Website

Alfredo Jaar at Galerie LeLong 

✦ Google has introduced the series "Art Talks". The monthly feature will engage curators, museum directors, art historians, and educators from cultural institutions around the world. For more information, read "Introducing Art Talks on Google+".

Google Art Project

✦ Daniel A. Siedell, whose background includes a decade-and-a-half as an art history professor and museum curator, is one of the most thoughtful and insightful art bloggers I read (you'll find his columns at Patheos). See, for example, this excellent essay about the extraordinary work of New York-based artist Claudia Alverez, who is a painter, sculptor, and drawer.

✦ My friend the poet Hannah Stephenson at The Storialist introduced me to portraitist and illustrator Dan Park. I like his narrative-packed illustrations Diner, Share, and Subway Dreams.

✦ Take some time to explore ARTos Foundation, a contemporary arts and science center dedicated to research and creativity. An Art21 blog interview with its founders, artists Archilleas Kentonis and Maria Papacharalambous, is here.

✭ Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry spoke about Middle Eastern art and artists at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C. Here's an interesting summary article about his remarks. (My thanks to Art of the Mid East for the link.)

✦ Ninety artworks by 51 artists in the collections of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, are featured at Google Art Project. Check in periodically at the GAP for a wonderful introduction to work you might otherwise never have a chance to see.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Cleveland Museum of Art is continuing through May 5 "Fred Wilson: Works 2004-2011", which offers a representative overview of the influential visual and conceptual artist's work with the installation of the sculptures The Mete of the Muse (2006), To Die Upon a Kiss (2011), and Ota Benga (2008), and the untitled (Flags) (2009). Wilson is known for his site-specific installations, especially his rearrangements of museum collections, that create unexpected relationships among objects, people, and places. 

In this video, Wilson speaks with curator Mindy Taylor Ross about his artistic practices and, more specifically, his public art project E Pluribus Unum for Indianapolis:

Fred Wilson Past Work and "E Pluribus Unum" from Gail Payne on Vimeo.

Fred Wilson at Pace Gallery and Crown Point Press (Wilson talks about his prints for Crown Point in this video.)

Barbara Pollack, "Fred Wilson Creates an Installation", ARTNews, October 29, 2012

CMA on FaceBook and Twitter

Museum Blog

✭ Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting through August 25 "Martin Saldana: Once Upon a Time", a folk artist (1874-1965) who was featured in Life magazine in the 1950s and whose "naive" paintings are in collections worldwide; 18 works in the CSFAC's own collection are included in the exhibition. The vibrant, charming paintings document Saldana's childhood in Mexico, ranch life, and a love of animals. The "outsider artist" first picked up a brush when he was in his mid-70s and thereafter painted every day until his death.

Images of Saldana Work Here

CSFAC on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ On view until March 17 at American University's Museum at the Katzen Arts Center are works on paper by Washington, D.C., artist Andrea Way. The retrospective exhibition includes works from 1982 to 2012. Also on show for the winter season are sculptures by contemporary Russian artist Grisha Bruskin, ballpoint pen drawings and three-dimensional constructions by Andrei Molodkin (CRUDE), and figurative paintings by local artist Susan Yanero, who is on the faculty of Washington Studio School.

Susan Yanero, Wolf at Red's Window, 2010

A video of CRUDE at Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, is here.

AU Museum at the Katzen on  FaceBook

✭ The first international loan exhibition dedicated to Belle Epoque painter Anders Zorn (1860-1920) continues through May 13 at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The show, "Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America", features two dozen paintings and 22 drawings, photographs, letters, and Zorn's bequests to Isabella Gardner. Loans come from Sweden's Gothenburg Museum of Art (Goteborg) and the Zornmuseet, as well as the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the Chicago Art Institute. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and a variety of related public programs that examine Zorn's relationship with Gardner and his place among other Nordic artists of the 1890s are planned. A slideshow is available at the exhibition link.

Anders Zorn, Study for The Omnibus, Oil Sketch, 1892

Zorn Museum, Mora, Sweden

Photo Credit: Lars Bergland

The Zorn House

Gardner Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and Pinterest

Notable Exhibits Abroad

✭ The Musee des Beaux Arts, Limoges, France, is showing until April 15 "Suzanne Lalique-Haviland - Decor Reinvented". Suzanne Lalique-Haviland (1892-1989), daughter of Rene Lalique, worked in glass, china, textiles, watercolors, interior decor, and theatre design and the exhibition, in addition to surveying her artistry, also examines connections between her designs and her father's extraordinary jewelry and glasswork. Included are loans from family and private collectors, as well as borrowings from Cite de la Ceramique, Sevres, the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts, and Comedie Francaise. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

"Suzanne Lalique-Haviland, Reinventing Decor", The Art Tribune, December 29, 2012

Musee des Beaux Arts on FaceBook 

Exhibition-Related Video (in French)