Friday, August 30, 2013

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ The community-based project "Music is My Life" features the artwork of 129 youths, ages 15 to 25, who are experiencing homelessness. A show of the work just concluded at Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Friends of Homeless Young People on FaceBook

✦ Taking advantage of public interest in Nazi-looted art, Switzerland's Federal Office of Culture has launched a Website aimed at researchers, claimants, and museums. Looted Art is available in German, French, and Italian; the English version is in progress.

Catherine Hickley, "Swiss Website Aims to Help Museums Track Nazi-Looted Art", Bloomberg, June 17, 2013


projectSCREEN at Oklahoma City Museum of Art is a bi-monthly series of "moving image art" by regional, national, and international contemporary artists. 

✦ Today's video is a peek at the sculpture of Stephen De Staebler (1933-2011) and the 55 works, primarily in clay, that were on view last year in the retrospective "Matter + Spirit" at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California.



Exhibitions Here and There

✭ A mid-career retrospective of 239 fantastical paintings, drawings, prints, and book art by artist and best-selling writer Audrey Niffenegger is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts through November 10. The exhibition, "Awake in the Dream World: The Art of Audrey Niffenegger", is organized around three themes: "Adventures in Bookland" (visual and graphic novels and artist's books), "States of Mind" (22 self-portraits), and "In Dreamland". A catalogue (powerHouse Books, May 2013) accompanies the exhibition.


Cover Art for The Art of Audrey Niffenegger Exhibition Catalogue

A show of new etchings by Niffenegger recently concluded at Printworks Gallery in Chicago. Wayne McGregor of the Royal Ballet has choreographed a dance inspired by Niffenegger's graphic novel Raven Girl


NMWA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Continuing at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, is "Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966". On view through September 29, the exhibition features more than 130 drawings and paintings, including not only Diebenkorn's early abstracts but also work from his later figurative period. 

A 256-page catalogue accompanies the show for which tickets are required.

A companion exhibition, the retrospective "The Errand of the Eye", showcasing photographs by Rose Mandel, continues through October 13. Mandel, a Diebenkorn contemporary and colleague, studied under photographer Ansel Adams.

de Young Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ An exhibition of the quilts of Ernest B. Haight — he made more than 300 between 1934 and 1986 — is on view in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum. Continuing through March 2, 2014, "The Engineer Who Could: Ernest Haight's Half-Century of Quiltmaking" features quilts with Haight's trademark designs, including his large star medallions and "stained glass window" effects. Known for his complex geometric patterns and bold colors, Haight devised ways to speed piecing, which improved accuracy and consistency, and to machine-quilt, which reduced the time needed to make a quilt. Haight self-published Practical Machine-Quilting for the Homemaker in 1974. He was inducted into the Nebraska Quilters Hall of Fame in 1986. Haight's father Elmer learned to hand-quilt and made at least five quilts with his son. Exhibition-related events include a program on September 6 with quilt artist Joe Cunningham ("Men and the Art of Quiltmaking") and a public lecture next February, "The Importance of Being Ernest", with curator Jonathan Gregory.

Selected Exhibition Images

Podcast with Curator Jonathan Gregory

IQSCM on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ The work of visionary artist Paul Laffoley, who founded the Boston Visionary Cell in 1971*,  is on view through September 15 at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. The exhibition, "Paul Laffoley: Premonitions of the Bauharaoque", spans the artist's career and includes work from 1965 to the present.

The term "Bauharoque", as Laffoley explains in his Artist Statement, "combine[s] the heroic modernism of the German "Bauhaus" with its aspiration toward a technological utopia, and the exalted theatricality of the Italian baroque, in which an exuberance of form and illusion serve to express the mystical union of art and life."

Laffoley was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.

* See Ken Johnson's New York Times article "Paul Laffoley: 'The Boston Visionary Cell'", January 17, 2013.

Audio of Lecture on Paul Laffoley

Paul Laffoley at Kent Fine Art LLC

Henry Art Gallery on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Hankblog, Henry Art Gallery Blog

Notable Exhibits Abroad

✭ Work of the German expressionists Kathe Kollwitz (1867-1945) and Ernst Barlach (1870-1938) is on view at The Museum of Religious Art, Lemvig, through September 15. The exhibition, "Beyond the Borders of Existence", marks the first time these artists have been shown together in Denmark and Norway. 


Kollwitz at the MoMA

Ernst Barlach Haus (Private Museum in Hamburg, Germany)

Museet for Religios Kunst on FaceBook

1 comment:

Kathleen said...

WOW! So much neat stuff going on. I am particularly tickled by the Audrey Niffenegger stuff.