All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Helping artists who are experiencing homelessness, as well as artists with disabilities or other disadvantages, is the primary mission of ArtLifting, which travels around the nation in search of artwork made by the creatives who are its focus. Founded a year ago this December, ArtLifting describes itself as a "low-profit limited liability" social enterprise. Currently, it offers work, both originals and prints, as well as various products that use the images (e.g., iPhone cases), by the more than two dozen artists it has discovered. Work by two artists in the Washington, D.C., area recently was added (read "Two Homeless Artists Find a Platform for Selling Their Work"). Under contract to ArtLifting, the artists receive "the majority of proceeds" from sales of each original artwork and 55% of gross profit from sales of prints of the work. The organization keeps a portion to pay operating costs. Giftcards are available. Keep ArtLifting in mind when you're wondering what to give as a gift.

ArtLifting on FaceBook and Twitter

ArtLifting Blog

✦ Andrew Simonetti, founder and director of Philadelphia-based Artists U, has written Making Your Life As an Artist. The book is reviewed at Fractured Atlas Book Club. It is available in print and downloadable as a free pdf at Artists U.

✦ Her art making, says paper-cut artist Elise Wehle, helps "remind [her] that not everything is as instantaneous as a click of a mouse." Additional work, including portraits in paper-cut collages, can be seen on Paper Thought, Wehle's blog. (My thanks to Seth Apter for the link to Wehle's Website.)

Elise Wehle Artwork on FaceBook and Twitter

✦ Nature inspires the new mixed-media work of Marilyn Henrion. Henrion's series Portals comprise digitally manipulated photographs that are pigment-printed on silk and then hand-quilted. Each 12" x 12" piece is mounted on a stretched canvas "floated" on a painted wood panel. Unique and beautiful.

✦ A selection of Van Gogh's letters, The Best Letters by Van Gogh (Dutch Media Group, 2014), is available in print and as an e-book. The version shown in the image below is in Dutch. An English edition is expected soon.

Cover Art of Dutch Edition of The Best Letters

✦ Art including photo-essays is just one of the features of the online not-for-profit magazine Warscapes.

Warscapes on FaceBook

✦ Below is the trailer for Buddhist Art: A Fragile Inheritance from Mark Stewart Productions.

BUDDHIST ART: A FRAGILE INHERITANCE - TRAILER from Mark Stewart Productions on Vimeo.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In an introductory exhibition titled "From Neoclassicism to Futurism: Italian Prints and Drawings, 1800-1925", the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., is presenting 70 prints, drawings, and illustrated books organized in three sections. In the first, examining traditional styles and the role of art academies through the first half of the 19th Century, are engravings, stage designs, and topographic views. In the second are works stressing naturalism, individual expression, and creative approaches to printmaking through the end of the century. In the third are examples of modernism's precursors, the short-lived Futurism movement, and early modern artworks. Drawn from the NGA's collection of Italian prints and drawings and showcasing work by 52 artists, including Luigi Sabatelli, Giovanni Boldini, Gino Severini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Giorgio Morandi, the show continues through February 1, 2015.

Giovanni Fattori 

Woman of the Gabbro [Donna al gabbro], 1886-87

Etching on Wove Paper

The Ahmanson Foundation

2013.28.4

NGA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ At Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft. Worth, Texas, contemporary artist Benito Huerta is presenting his drawings, watercolors, and prints, together with a selection of works on paper drawn from the museum's collections, in "Fresh Perspectives". Huerta worked with assistant curator Maggie Adler in choosing and organizing the artworks. The exhibition, which continues through January 11, 2015, is in addition to the museum's installation of Huerta's painting Axis Mundi v. 2.

Benito Huerta Website

Amon Carter Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and Vimeo

✭ Maine's Portland Museum of Art has drawn from The Berger Collection, which it calls "the most significant private collection of British art in the United States", to present "Treasures of British Art 1400-2000". Included are 50 masterworks by Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Joseph Wright 'of Derby', Sir Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Gainsborough, John Constable, George Stubbs, and Sir Howard Hodgkin. The exhibition, organized by Denver Art Museum and on view through January 4, 2015, also includes artists Angelica Kauffman and Adam Birtwistle.

A full-color catalogue is available. The exhibition will travel to Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee (January 25, 2015 - April 19, 2015); Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah (August 14, 2015 - January 5, 2016); and then back to Denver Art Museum, where the catalogue also is available.

Cover for Treasures of British Art 1400-2000

In its audio series, the museum offers the exhibition-related "The Backstory: To Be Fried by the King", an episode with Karen Sherry, PMA's curator of American art and collections director, who talks about changes in painting style leading to Benjamin West's cancelled commission The Ascension (9:55 minutes):

Read Bob Keyes, "'Treasures of British Art' at PMA Showcases Work Spanning 6 Centuries: 1400-2000", Maine Today, October 2, 2014. Also read "The Curator's Perspective: The Berger Collection" on the PMA blog.

PMA on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ At the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, you'll find "The New Art of the Loom", on view through January 25, 2015. Showcasing 24 contemporary international tapestries by artists from 16 countries, the exhibition examines the incorporation of traditional weaving techniques into contemporary work that addresses such themes as cultural identity, history, and storytelling. Among the featured artists are Christina Altona, Susan Hart Henegar, Sayed Mahmoud, Inge Norgaard, Bum Soo Song, and Henriette Zegers ten Hom.

KMAC on FaceBook

KMAC Blog

✭ The installation Apex by Wendy Red Star, a Crow who grew up in Montana, is on view through December 7 at Oregon's Portland Museum of Art. Part of an ongoing series of exhibitions of Northwest-based artists, Apex makes use of historic photographs, tapestries, text, and objects to re-conceive and "re-humanize" the tribal leader Chief Medicine Crow.

Wendy Red Star on FaceBook

Wendy Red Star at Bockley Gallery

Portland Museum of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube