All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Master glass artist, sign-writer, and graphic designer Dave Smith is a wonder. At his studio in Torquay, Devon, United Kingdom, Smith creates intricate pieces requiring many hours of meticulous attention to detail. His Website features images of his acid-etched silvered mirrors, reverse gold-leaf mirrors, and hand-painted and hand-lettered pictorial pub signs. Smith is the subject of a wonderful documentary, David A. Smith — Sign Artist, by Danny Cooke. The film goes behind the scenes to show us what goes into the making of Smith's extraordinary handcrafted artworks. Also see Cooke's excellent film The Making of John Mayer's 'Born & Raised' Artwork, in which singer-songwriter Mayer explains the difficulty of finding what he wanted until he saw Smith's work.

✦ Edwin G. Lutz, who inspired Walt Disney, published in 1921 Drawing Made Easy: A Helpful Book for Young Artists (C. Scribner's Sons). The step-by-step guide may be viewed in full at The Public Domain Review. Lutz's charming What to Draw and How to Draw It (Dodd & Mead, 1913), which makes drawing look easy, is at the same link. The Internet Archives features a copy of Lutz's illustrated Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development (C. Scribner's Son, 1926).

✦ Using vintage books as sculpture, Dutch artist Frank Halmans creates sets of imaginary buildings. His built of books series, spotlighted at Design Boom, is a wonderful metaphor for his explorations of domesticity and memory. 

✦ Award-winning painter, muralist, illustrator, designer, and writer Michele Wood is an artist to watch. See her original paintings, original charcoals and collages, and prints of original linocuts here. Wood most recently did the illustrations for the honors-winning I Lay My Stitches Day: Poems of American Slavery (Eerdmans) by Cynthia Grady.

✦ One of the most visited nontraditional galleries in Prague is Art Wall Gallery. Originally a space for posting Communist propaganda, it was re-imagined by American artist Barbara Benish for exhibitions of contemporary art. The Art Wall has been abandoned and brought back to life several times since it was conceived; from 2008 to 2011, it was forced to remain closed when the city withdrew its lease. Read about the project and its ban and subsequent reuse as exhibition space. Currently, Prague's mayor serves as Art Wall's patron, while organizational management is provide by c2c Circle of curators and critics. (My thanks to the Art21 blog, where I first learned about Art Wall.)

✦ The book trailer below is for Aimee Lee's Hanji Unfurled: One Journey Into Korean Papermaking (Legacy Press, 2012), the first English-language book about Korean paper arts. I encourage you to explore Lee's interesting Website and to note her workshops, which draw many students here in the U.S. and abroad. (Aimee Lee was spotlighted at one of my favorite sites, All Things Paper, in 2010.)

Hanji Unfurled book trailer from Aimee Lee on Vimeo.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ New York City's Rubin Museum of Art continues "Living Shrines of Uyghur China", an exhibition of New York artist Lisa Ross's photographs of sacred landscapes in Xinjiang in northwestern China. Ross has been privileged to explore the region, largely closed to artists and foreign researchers, thanks to her connections to a Uyghur anthropologist and a French historian. The images in the show, which remain on view through July 8, speak to a time and place that greatly contrast with the region's current rapid modernization. 

Lisa Ross, Black Garden (An Offering), 2009

Archival Pigment Print on Cotton Paper

© Lisa Ross

A book of photographs, Living Shrines of Uyghur China (The Monacelli Press), with text by Ross and essays by Alexandre Papas, Beth Citron, and Rahile Dawut, is available. With book purchases, the artist is offering a signed, limited-edition print, in one of two sizes and printed on 100 percent cotton rag paper, of her Black Garden (Desert Offering) from 2009. Purchasing information is here. See images from Ross's four online galleries for Living Shrines. Marvelous, often moving work!

Rubin Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and ArtBabble

✭ Cast bronze sculptures by Mark Calderon are on view at Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington, through June 29. The gallery also is showing sculpture and paintings by Sherry Markovitz. (Markovitz is profiled in this Art Zone in Studio video.)

✭ The 2013 California-Pacific Triennial (formerly, California Biennial) opens June 30 at Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California. This re-launch of a survey of contemporary California art will bring together artists from a cross-section of Pacific rim countries, including Peru, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Guatemala, Australia, and China, as well as the United States and Canada. A list of participating artists can be found at the link.

OCMA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ New work by award-winning Moe Brooker (b. 1940) will be on view at June Kelly Gallery, New York City, beginning June 2. The exhibition will run through August 2. An alum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Philadelphia's Tyler Schol of Fine Art, Temple University, Brooker was awarded the 1985 Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts, the 2003 Van Der Zee Lifetime Achievement Award, and a 2004 Conrad Nelson fellowship. You cannot look at Brooker's work and not smile.

Enjoy this short video with Brooker at his studio:

Moe Brooker Profiles at Moore College of Art & Design, Fabric Workshop and Museum, and Sande Webster Gallery (Images Available)

Notable Exhibits Abroad

✭ Sundaram Tagore Gallery is presenting through June 23 at its Singapore location "Joan Vennum: The Space Around Us". Vennum (b. 1930), a New York-based artist represented by the gallery, floods her abstract paintings with gorgeous color; her hand is assured, her line beautiful. See, for example, her Yes (2011),  Latitude (2007), Distant and Candid (2003), and O (for Rimbaud) (2006), all oils on canvas. The gallery offers several publications about Vennum's work. Vennum's O (for Rimbaud) was featured in "Hong Kong 2010", a temporary exhibition of the Art in Embassies Program, Department of State. She was featured in the gallery exhibition "Perspectives: Nine Women, Nine Views" in 2011 (watch video of opening reception).