All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Be sure to browse SFMOMA's multimedia offerings, including videos, podcasts, audio commentaries, and interactive features. The range of online educational material, including artist interviews, mobile tours of exhibitions, and videos with artists discussing their creative processes, is rich and rewarding. 

Open Space, SFMOMA Blog

SFMOMA on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✦ Read painter and printmaker Sandra Bowden's wonderful essay for ArtWay titled "The Vocation of the Artist". Writing that art should "feed your soul, enrich, and teach you in ways you know are right for you in following [your] particular talent", she urges us to follow our passion, be a "birthgiver", and "create art that illuminates, not just illustrates." Be sure to visit Bowden's Website; her work is stunning.

✦ Artist Susan Cornelis has released an affordable e-book In the Company of Muses: Adventures in Mixed Media Art Journaling, a self-paced multi-media course. Susan, a wonderful artist and instructor, includes her Muse Group practice tips for achieving "creative flow through playful art making", meditation, and writing; a materials list for your art space; detailed mixed media art lessons covering inks and gesso, image transfer, antiquing paper, and more; demonstration videos of art-play lessons; instructions for creating art journals; and access to a forum on FaceBook where images and ideas can be shared with others following the course. An introductory video about the e-book is at the link and on YouTube.

✦ The annual Ray and Nancy Loeschner Art Competition is open to all artists who work in a two-dimensional format. The application deadline is November 2. Go here for additional information and a link to the application. A prize of $3,000 is awarded to the first-place winner.

✦ In this video, Amsterdam-based artist and designer Job Wouters ("Letman") talks about his wall mural Home (2013) in Walker Art Center's lobby. I like what he has to say about beauty and the meaning of the word he selected for his painting. Wouters, who has won many awards for his work, which ranges from editorial illustrations, to fabric prints, posters, site-specific murals, and body-paint designs, created the piece for the Walker's "Insights 2013" program, a design lecture series. (Still photos are available at the link for Home.) For information about his book Letman: The Artwork and Lettering of Job Wouters (July 2012), go here.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Continuing on view at ASU Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona, is "Turn off the Sun: Selections from La Coleccion Jumex". The exhibition, on view through September 7, features major works and installations from the collection that have been centered around the broad themes of borders, labor, movement, and site. (La Coleccion Jumex [English], based in Mexico City, comprises more than 2,600 works by emerging and established contemporary artists from Mexico, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.) Participating artists are Doug Aitken, Alejandro Almanza Pereda (he has contributed a site-specific commission), Francis Alys, Inaki Bonillas, Raul Cardenas Osuna/Torolab, Lawrence Carroll, Jose Damasceno, Mark Dion, Sam Durant, Monica Espinosa, Dan Graham, Cao Guimaraes, Daniel Guzman, Liza Lou, Eduardo Sarabia, Santiago Sierra, Robert Smithson, Superflex, Mungo Thomson, and Jeff Wall. Mexican curator Paola Santoscoy will give a lecture about the current art scene in Mexico on September 5.  

Fundacion/Coleccion Jumex on FaceBook and Twitter

Julia Chaplin, "Art on the Edge in Mexico City", The New York Times, 2006

ASU Art Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ "Japan's Modern Divide: The Photographs of Hiroshi Hamaya and Kansuke Yamamoto" continues through August 25 at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The Getty has created a separate page for each photographer. That for Hamaya offers images of his Japanese landscapes and society, while that for Yamamoto presents Surrealist-inspired, avant-garde images. The work of both photographers, a study in contrasts, is equally fascinating.

See this excellent article on Hamaya by Ian Buruma: "The Japan Beneath the Snow", NYR Blog, The New York Review of Books, April 10, 2013.

The Getty Iris (Online Magazine)

The Getty on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ More than 100 photographs by Abelardo Morell (b. 1948) are on display at The Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, "Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door", covering the period 1986 to the present, is Morell's first retrospective in 15 years and includes many color images being shown for the first time. Born in Cuba, Morell came to the United States in 1962, taking up photography while a student at Bowdoin College in Maine and finding his inspiration in Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. His subjects range across books, maps, money, and other conveyors of cultural meaning and his techniques vary widely, from photograms to pinhole camera obscura. He's considered one of our most inventive and innovative contemporary photographers. (Be sure to spend some time on his beautiful Website, which features an excellent selection of his marvelous work.) A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which remains on view through September 2.

The Universe Next Door Monograph

Abelardo Morell Blog

Artic on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The year-long celebration of sculptor Bernar Venet (b. 1941) at Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, showcases five large outdoor works in steel. The sculptures remain on view until October.

Lanie Goodman, "Venet: A French Artist and His Domain", The Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2011

Meijer Gardens on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Tennessee's Memphis Brooks Museum of Art continues through July 13 the exhibition "Where Water Meets Land: New Work by Andrew Saftel". The show features Saftel's photographs from a month-long visit to Bangladesh; Saftel layers his images to draw contrasts between the country's natural and urban landscapes. 

See images of Saftel's interesting narrative paintings on wood, sculpture, and works on paper.

Exhibition Brochure (pdf)

Andrew Saftel on FaceBook and Twitter

Andrew Saftel Studio, Saftel's Blog

The Brooks Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Re: Brooks, Museum Blog