All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ New York-based Heide Hatry, who exhibits throughout the United States and abroad, was the subject last month of a feature in Hyperallergic, where I first learned of her work.  Her many projects include Icons in Ash, a series of remarkable portraits that Hatry creates from the ashes of the deceased. A selection of the memorial portraits currently is on view through May 12 in "Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash: Cremation Portraits" at Ubu Gallery in New York City. (See exhibition checklist in pdf.)

Visit the Website devoted to Icons in Ash, where you can view Hatry's mosaic portraits, cinerary drawing portraits, cinerary photo transfer portraits, and pet portraits (the latter can be made using any of the techniques for humans' portraits). A 268-page book (see image below), A Collaborative Conceptual Artist's Book (Station Hill Press, 2017), with 19 images, is available.

Cover Art

Hatry has produced some 200 artist books and has edited more than 24 books and art catalogues. She is known for body-related performances and work that uses animal flesh and organs. 

✦ Japanese artist-designer Shota Suzuki's metal art is exquisite. See images of the work, which takes its inspiration from nature and includes sculpture and jewelry. Suzuki had a solo exhibition at Ippodo Gallery in March.

Shota Suzuki Metal Arts on FaceBook

✦ Megan Mead's custom paper pet portraits are charming, beautifully cut, and affordable. Mead talks with Ann Martin at All Things Paper. See her work at paperpups on Instagram and visit her Etsy shop, Paper Pet Art. (My thanks to Ann Martin for the post.)

Ann has brought to blog readers' attention as well the creative and whimsical bespoke pet portraits of paper artist Kathryn Willis of Memphis, Tennessee

✦ UK-based Sarah Purvey, who exhibits widely in New York and London, creates beautiful ceramic sculptures. Her black-and-white vessels especially draw my attention. New work by Purvey currently can be seen through May 6 at New Craftsman Gallery, St. Ives, Cornwall.

Sarah Purvey Page at New Craftsman Gallery

Sarah Purvey on FaceBook and Instagram

✦ The video below is Surface Folds: Yukiya Izumita Clay Wares. Izumita combines the techniques of origami and sculpture to craft his beautiful layered-paper works.




Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Some 120 woodcuts, lithographs, mezzotints, and drawings by M.C. Escher are on view at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin. The works in "M.C. Escher: Reality and Illusion", which continues through May 28, are from a large private collection from the Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece. Also included in the exhibition are early figure drawings, lesser-known book illustrations, Italian landscapes, and both architectural fantasies and tessellations.

Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum on FaceBook, Instagram, and YouTube

LYW Art Museum Blogpost "The Buzz About Escher"

✭ In New Orleans, Louisiana, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art is presenting paintings by the primarily self-taught sculptor and painter James Michalopoulos, who draws his inspiration from the city itself. (He's especially known for his New Orleans houses.) On view through July 16, "Waltzing the Muse: The Paintings of James Michalopoulos" features work from throughout the artist's career. Michalopoulos describes his styles as "an abstraction of the figurative; I like color, volumetric shape and graphic lines. While one may recognize the subjects of my paintings, through my work one discovers the spirit of them."*

* Quoted from Press Release

James Michalopoulos Paintings and Prints (Website)

Ogden Museum on FaceBook

✭ African American artist Sonya Clark's new, site-specific installations and performances exploring hair as an indicator of race and social status, a symbol of age and authority, a statement of contemporary style, and an object of beauty and adornment can be seen in "Follicular: The Hair Stories of Sonya Clark" through May 14 at Taubman Museum of Art, in Roanoke, Virginia. This is a major solo exhibition that includes live performances of Translations, in which a Richmond, Va., African American hair stylist, Kamala Bhagat, reinterprets a historic African hairstyle on Clark's head.  A selection of images is available at the exhibition link above.

A catalogue, The Hair Craft Project (see image below), co-winner of ArtPrize 2014, is available to order. (One of the stylists in the full-color-photo-and-essay book is Kamala Bhagat.)

Image of The Hair Craft Project Publication

Sonya Clark on FaceBook and Instagram

Taubman Museum on FaceBook and Instagram

✭ Pennsylvania's Philadelphia Museum of Art is showing phulkari, ornately embroidered textiles from Punjab, in "Phulkari: The Embroidered Textiles of Punjab from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection". On view through July 9, the exhibition also includes traditional phulkaris from PMA's own collection, as well as phulkari-based high-fashion ensembles by Indian designer Maninsh Mahotra. Following is a trailer for the exhibition:

A 96-page publication with 95 color illustrations accompanies the exhibition (see cover image below).

Catalogue Cover Art

PMA on FaceBook, Tumblr, and Instagram

✭ Open through July 9, the exhibition "Focus: Katherine Bernhardt", at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, features a recent series of paintings in which Bernhardt juxtaposes common, everyday objects (e.g., household products, fruit, toys, cigarettes, food) that float atop solid grounds of color. Bernhardt, of Brooklyn, New York, depicts popular, consumer culture in a simplified and flat style, and often uses odd combinations of things as well as mixed styles of painting in a single work.

Katherine Bernhardt, Windex cigarettes basketball, 2016

Acrylic and Spray Paint on Canvas

120" x 96"

Read an interview with Bernhardt at Artspace.

Katherine Bernhardt at ArtNet, Artsy, Canada, Saatchi Gallery, and Xavier Hufkens

The Modern on FaceBook, Instagram, and YouTube