All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Temple University Press in March published Jane Golden's and David Updike's Philadelphia Mural Arts @30, which looks at the history of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, founded in 1984, and its influences on society, individuals, and communities. For an interesting post on the book, read David Updike's "Appreciating Philadelphia's Mural Arts @ 30" at North Pilly Notes blog.

✦ Relationships, embodiment, and containment are the thematic threads woven within and throughout the organic sculptures and fiber art of Michigan's Jo-Ann Van Reeuwyk, chair of Calvin College Art Department and director of its Art Education Program. View her more than half-dozen galleries of images on her Website. I am taken especially with her beautiful Sanctuary and Body Bag series.

✦ Illinois master calligrapher Timothy R. Botts, who worked more than three decades as a book designer, claims Sister Corita Kent as a major influence on his art. See his lovely work in his online gallery. Botts accepts commissions for visual interpretations of texts, wallpieces, murals, and handmade and handbound books.

✦ The rhythms of New Orleans are at work in printmaker and sculptor Steve Prince's visually rich linoleum (lino) cuts. See Prince's The Making of Second Line for Michigan (for ArtPrize 2012).

✦ New York City's A Blade of Grass provides resources to artists who "demonstrate artistic excellence and serve as innovative conduits for social change." See the Overview on ABOG grants (for individuals and organizations) and artist fellowships. (My thanks to Austin Kleon for the link.)

✦ For a wonderful online exhibition of Chinese painting and calligraphy, visit the Seattle Art Museum's  interactives site, featuring essays, forums, images, and much more.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In the first museum exhibition of its kind, the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, is presenting "Multiple Exposures: Jewelry and Photography". On view through September 14, the loosely thematically organized show of 170 objects (10 video works) by more than 80 artists from 20 countries looks closely at how contemporary jewelry artists manipulate and use digital images to reveal changing views of beauty and the human body, examine social, political, and cultural issues, perceive memory and desire, and question issues of identity. Among the exhibiting artists are Wafaa Bilal, Jiro Kamata, Kara Ross, Joyce Scott, and Noa Zilberman. A fully illustrated, 288-page catalogue published by Officinia Libraria is available. See images at the exhibition link above. The press release for the show offers additional details.

MAD Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ "Richard Estes's Realism" opened yesterday at Maine's Portland Museum of Art. Organized with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the show features more than 45 works by Estes, described as "the foremost practitioner of American photorealism" and "renowned for his precise, crystalline style." Paintings of Manhattan and other cities and natural sites and several rare portraits are on view in the five-decade survey, which continues through September 7. A catalogue is available.

The exhibition will travel to SAAM in October.

PMA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭  Amon Carter Museum, Ft, Worth, Texas, continues through July 6 "June Wayne: The Tamarind Decade" (1960-1970), which features more than a dozen prints the late artist (1918-2011) created while overseeing Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now Tamarind Institute). The prints, in various states or versions, reveal Wayne's deep knowledge or printmaking. See images of three prints: Three Observers (1963), At Last a Thousand II (1965), and To Get to the Other Side (1967), all lithographs.

June Wayne at Tamarind Institute

June Wayne Obituary, The New York Times

Amon Carter Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and Vimeo

✭ "The Art of the Louvre's Tuileries Garden" opens June 14 at Oregon's Portland Museum of Art. The exhibition, which will continue through September 21, celebrates the art, design, and evolution of the famous garden in Paris and will feature more than 100 sculptures, paintings, photographs, and drawings by European and American artists of the 17th-20th centuries. Works by Pissarro, Manet, and Cartier-Bresson, among others, will be on view. Lectures, plein air painting, family activities, and other related events are planned. 

Portland Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ On June 14, Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, opens "Norman Rockwell: Murder in Mississippi", a look at Rockwell's preliminary drawings, photographs, preparatory oil sketch, and finished painting ("Murder in Mississippi") relating to the death in June 1964 of three civil rights activists. LOOK magazine asked Rockwell to illustrate the magazine's investigative cover story, "South Justice", about the incident. The exhibition, which also is a look at Rockwell's creative approach, will run through August 31.

MS Museum of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Museum Blog