All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Driftwood is an unusual choice for jewelry, and Nina Morrow has made a specialty of creating bracelets, bangles, pendants, rings, earrings, and necklaces from driftwood found on the banks of the Rio Grande (she lives in Santa Fe). The wearable results are as unique as they are stunning. See Morrow's portfolio.

✦ The documentary Art and Craft, about art forger Mark Landis, is screening at film festivals around the country. Here's the official trailer for the film, directed by Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman. Following its release, the documentary will be issued on DVD; it will air subsequently on television.

Art and Craft on FaceBook

✦ The natural world finds an inspired place in the woven forms of the largely self-taught sculptor Karen Gubitz. Following her legal career, Gubitz took up art full-time, subsequently winning awards for her work around the country. See her portfolio, which includes The Grand Gathering, an installation for ArtPrize 2014 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

✦ Hammer Museum at the University of California Los Angeles presented in 2012 the first museum survey in the United States of the sculpture of Poland's Alina Szapoczikow. Included in the exhibition by this significant but not so well-known sculptor were Szapocznikow's carvings in Carrara marble and assemblages in polyester resin; in all some 60 sculptures and 50 works on paper were on view, in addition to photographic works. Complementing the exhibition, "Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972" (see a slideshow), was a program on the late Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, presented for "cultural context". Listen to audio of that program; the speakers include poet and scholar Piotr and UCLA professor Roman Koropeckyj. Also available is this unusual remix incorporating the reading at Hammer.

Hammer Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and Vimeo

Hammer Watch + Listen Archives

✦ Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art offers a digital edition of its exhibition catalogue "The Great War: Art on the Front Line". The show concluded October 19.

✦ Are you an arts instructor or otherwise interested in visual literacy? Take time to browse The Visual Literacy Toolbox: Learning to Read Images. The site includes online activities, lesson plans, a "bank of questions" to generate explorations of the components of visual literacy, and strategies for using the toolbox.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Opening November 8 at American University's Katzen Arts Center is "The Intimate Diebenkorn: Works on Paper, 1949-1992)". Featuring some 40 artworks, many never viewed publicly before, the exhibition includes the great Richard Diebenkorn's pencil and ink drawings on paper, collages, and watercolors created over four decades. The show will be up through December 14.

Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, c. 1958-1966

The exhibition will travel to Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma, California, where it will be on view June 6, 2015 - August 23, 2015; it will conclude at Montana Museum of Art & Culture, The University of Montana at Missoula, from September 24, 2015 - December 12, 2015. A 128-page catalogue with 88 full-color images (Kelly's Cove Press) accompanies the exhibition (see image below).

Catalogue Cover

Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)  Catalogue Raisonne

AUArts on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Opening today at Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art is "Speaking Visual: Learning the Language of Art", on view through January 25, 2015. The exhibition features artworks from the museum's own collection to instruct viewers in methods for and approaches to art interpretation.

November 5-8 the museum will present "The Art of Seeing: From Ordinary to Extraordinary", the 47th Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association. The public is welcome to attend the conference, which convenes with academic researchers, educators, museum professionals, artists, and business thought leaders discussing how people increasingly are communicating with visual language. The keynote speakers are David Howes, an anthropology professor and director of Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies, Montreal; ceramist Magdalene Odundo; Dr. Joseph Rosen, a plastic surgeon with Dartmouth Medical School; museum educator Philip Yenawine, director of education, MoMA; Nick Sousanis, co-founder of The Detroiter arts and cultural Webmagazine; Stephen Apkon, founder of Jacob Burns Film Center; Lynell Burmark, who won Stanford's Walter Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching; and artist Aminah Robinson. The sessions are free. 

Toledo Museum of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ While it's closed for expansion, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is showing around the Bay Area. Among its offerings is "Fertile Ground: Art and Community in California", on view through April 12, 2015, at Oakland Museum of California. The show is about four creative communities: the circle of artists who worked with, influenced, or were influenced by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the 1930s; painters and photographers, including Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko, Minor White and Imogen Cunningham, associated with the California School of Fine Arts in the 1940s and 1950s; faculty and students at UC Davis in the 1960s and 1970s, including Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley; and the Mission District artists of the 1990s and forward. Five videos related to artists whose work in in the exhibition are on the exhibition page.

Elmer Bischoff, Orange Sweater, 1955

Oil on Canvas

Collection SFMoMA

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Mark Schorer

© Estate of Elmer Bischoff

Photo Credit: Ben Blackwell

SF MoMA on FaceBook, Twitter, and Tumblr

Notable Exhibition Abroad

✭ A group exhibition, "This is Me, This is Also Me", opens November 6 at McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. On view through March 14, 2015, the show presents the work of  thirteen artists whose work focuses on self-representation and self-portraiture. Included are photographs, paintings, drawings, prints, installations, sculpture, and video art addressing ideas about displacement, doubling, recognition, mis-recognition, and memory and counter-memory in autobiographical art. Featured are works by Carl Beam, Rebecca Belmore, Deanna Bowen, Cathy Daley, General Idea, Doug Guildford, Jin-Me Yoon, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kent Monkman, Edvard Munch, Grace Ndiritu, Andy Warhol, and Joyce Wieland. The exhibition includes a curators' edited collection, Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography (University of Toronto Press, 2014). A panel discussion is scheduled for November 27; a discussion with three of the artists is planned for March 12, 2015.

McMaster Museum of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube