All Art Friday
All Art Friday Spotlights
✦ A multimedia projection of images and voices by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Projection: Places des Arts, 2014, has been enjoying a run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal (Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal); it concludes November 23. Site-specific, large in scale though intimate in result, Homeless Projection was created with the help of the St. Michael's Mission and other community organizations to give those experiencing homelessness an opportunity to tell their personal stories. Wodiczko, winner of the 1998 Hiroshima Art Prize for contributions to world peace, has made more than 80 public projects around the world. He currently is designing and producing for the homeless, immigrants, and war veterans "instruments and vehicles for survival and communication". Read "Projection Art Project Will Have Everyone Looking Up at Montreal's Homeless" in the Montreal Gazette. Mark Vallen has written an essay about Wodiczko, "Illuminating Contradictions" at Art for a Change. Also see The Homeless Vehicle Project.
✦ Artist and composer Jem Finer, poet Lavinia Greenlaw, essayist Jay Griffiths, and filmmaker Ben Rivers are part of the year-long commissioned project Stay Where You Are, curated and produced by Steven Bode of Film and Video Umbrella, in the United Kingdom, and Gareth Evans and supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation. Begun on February 1, 2014, and slated to conclude on January 31, 2015, the project's participants, all world travelers, were asked to "pause to reflect on the appeal of the local" and to create work focused on their home environment. Each has won numerous awards for his or her work.
Finer, who is based in the United Kingdom, has been exploring the area near his studio at Trinity Buoy Wharf, assembling his part of the project, 51º 30' 44" N, 0' 0' 38" E, from layers of sound he's recorded at night, morning, afternoon, and evening in each new season of the year. London resident Greenlaw calls her project The Built Moment, a series of text she describes as "[s]itting somewhere between poetry and prose [and forming] the record of a yearlong inquiry into present-tense perception." Griffiths, who lives in Wales, has designed Hearth: A Thesaurus of Home, which she calls "meditations on the nature of 'home'." Also of London, Rivers is undertaking Things, which comprises a series of shorts about his "domestic surroundings and the familiar, often treasured objects he turns to for comfort or material." Take time to visit each link; the results of the individual projects to date, both singly and as a whole, are fascinating.
Begun October 22, 2014, and expected to conclude on May 31, 2015, FVU's newly launched commission A Light Shines in the Darkness (read the press release in pdf) is an exhibition of artists' films traveling to churches and cathedrals around England, including Winchester Cathedral (the exhibit there ends November 25), Holy Trinity Church in Lancashire, and Norwich Cathedral. The artists are Suki Chan, Alexander and Susan Maris, Melanie Manchot, Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone, Kathleen Herbert, and Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson.
✦ Last month saw the release by David R. Godine, Publisher, of Belinda Rathbone's The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change, and a Daughter's Search for the Truth. The Rafael painting, previously unknown and uncatalogued but attributed to the Renaissanace master, was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1969. An Italian who researched the painting's export from Italy challenged BMFA's ownership rights, plunging into crisis the museum's director, Perry Rathbone. The book's author, Belinda Rathbone, is the director's daughter and a biographer and historian, and seeks, through research of primary source materials and interviews, to tell what happened to lead to Perry Rathbone's resignation.
Cover Art of The Boston Raphael
✦ Those familiar with the work of Leonard Baskin will recognize the master printmaker's influence on Michael Kuch, who studied with Baskin. (See Kuch's paintings and books.) And, like Baskin, who founded Gehenna Press, Kuch founded his own: Double Elephant Press. Holdings from the latter are housed in a number of important collections, including those of the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kuch's etchings most recently were published in award-winning The Little River (Two Ponds Press, 2013). The exhibition "Michael Kuch: Selected Works from the Double Elephant Press" is on view through December 15 in the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Libraries.
✦ Virginia-based Reni Gower, who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, is a painter and paper-cut artist who describes her work as a "blend of both painting and sculpture." I'm especially taken with her contemporary encaustic-and-collage works detailed in brilliant colors and a variety of geometric shapes arranged in intricate patterns. Gower's exhibition "Heated Exchange" is touring through Mid-America Arts Alliance's ExhibitsUSA National Traveling Exhibition Program.
Exhibitions Here and There
✭ In Northampton, Massachusetts, Neilson Library at Smith College continues its exhibition "Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter". On display through December 15 are more than 100 collages, drawings, and illuminated writings from the fictional archive of Ruth Griesman, alter ego of artist and writer Robert Seydel (1960-2011). The exhibition will trail to Queens Museum of Art (July 19, 2015 - October 26, 2015) and the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago (February 11, 2016 - April 9, 2016). Accompanying the show is A Picture Is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel (October 30, 2014), a collection of more than 70 "journal pages" and illustrated writings (many of the nearly 100 collages have never been published or previously exhibited). The book (see image below) is published by Siglio and Smith College Libraries.
Browse the Exhibition Brochure. (pdf)
Robert Seydel Collection at Hampshire College (The Robert Seydel Reading Room opened September 12.)
William Allan Neilson Library on FaceBook
✭ Forty works on paper, most on view for the first time, make up "The Intimate Diebenkorn, Works on Paper: 1949-1992", an exhibition at American University's Museum at The Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. Featured are pencil and inks drawings, collages made of torn papers, and watercolors. The exhibition concludes December 14. (Note: I saw the exhibition on November 9. For anyone familiar only with the painter's abstractions, the exhibition is a fine introduction to Diebenkorn's figurative work and portraits. A book titled From the Model (Kelly's Cove Press, 2013), with an introduction by Chester Arnold, is available and includes the images of drawings in the show. Most of the 99 images in the book are published for the first time.)
Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, c. 1958-1966
Among other late fall shows at the Katzen: "Prague, The City of Eugenic Minds", which includes a Pavel Stingl documentary, animations and paintings by Xenia Hoffmeisterova, and literary artwork by Czech author and translator Patrik Ourednik (English); "Sculpture Now 2014: WSG 30th Anniversary", current work by the Washington Sculptors Group; "My Oyster #7: Michelle Grabner & Brad Gillam", spouses who collaborate on art; "Ad Infinitum", comprising new site-specific works by Clifford Borress, Ian Pedigo, and Letha Wilson that examine form and context; and "Lay of the Land: Alan Sonfist & Karin F. Giusti", featuring Sonfist's Surface Memory (1967-1971) and Giusti's Three Seasons at Black Forest Farm (2011). All conclude December 14.
If you visit any of the above exhibitions, take time to watch the fascinating documentary, which includes archival footage. Also, the highlights in the sculpture show are Foon Sham's Canyon of Salt (hickory and salt, 2012), Julie Zirlin's Detail, Waves (stoneware fired in sawdust, 2013), c.l. bigelow's nest #23 (copper pipe, tubing, and wire, 2014), and Janet Wheeler's Vessel V (red osier sticks, Kozo paper, raffia, paint, copper wire, 2013).
If you visit any of the above exhibitions, take time to watch the fascinating documentary, which includes archival footage. Also, the highlights in the sculpture show are Foon Sham's Canyon of Salt (hickory and salt, 2012), Julie Zirlin's Detail, Waves (stoneware fired in sawdust, 2013), c.l. bigelow's nest #23 (copper pipe, tubing, and wire, 2014), and Janet Wheeler's Vessel V (red osier sticks, Kozo paper, raffia, paint, copper wire, 2013).
The Katzen on FaceBook and Twitter
Art at The Katzen Blog
✭ Opening tomorrow at California's Oceanside Museum of Art is "Naked: 20th Century Nudes from the Dijkstra Collection". Continuing through March 8, 2015, the show draws from Bram and Sandra Dijkstra's extraordinary collection to present traditional and modern figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs featuring the male and female nude human figure. Among the artists represented in the exhibit are F. Humphrey Woolrych (1868-1941), Elliott Daingerfield (1859-1932), Charles Hawthorne (1872-1930), Isabel Bishop (1902-1988), Jan Matulka (1890-1972), James Aitcheson, Dan Dickey, and James Hubbell.
Oceanside Museum of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube
✭ Abstract paintings by Russian artist Sergey Fedotov, who originally studied to be a physicist, go on view December 6 at Coral Springs Museum of Art, Coral Springs, Florida.
Here's an introduction to the artist, who had his first solo exhibition in Moscow in 2001:
Read Bruce Helander's critically appreciative article "From Russia with Love — Sergey Fedotov" at HuffPost Arts & Culture (2012).
Posts
1 comment:
Intrigued with Siglio. A Picture is Always a Book and The Address Book both on wish list. Collage at its best. You quickly bankrupt my generous monthly book allowance...
Post a Comment