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Posts Tagged ‘art’

Slow Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Cassandra Giraldo / Wall Street Journal
Slow Art Day host Phil Terry, center, points to El Anatsui’s installation ‘Gli (Wall).’

Thank you, Anna, for pointing out reporter Rebecca Bratburd’s cool story in the Wall Street Journal.

“If art-museum crowds appeared to be moving at snail speed on Saturday,” writes Bratburd, “it’s because they were celebrating Slow Art Day, during which participants in 274 museums around the world got a new, slower perspective on enjoying art.

“Inspired by the experience of gazing at Hans Hofmann’s ‘Fantasia’ and Jackson Pollock’s ‘Convergence’ for hours, Phil Terry launched the art appreciation day in 2010. …

“Mr. Terry, CEO of the New York City-based consulting firm Creative Good, noticed that no one had planned to host an event at Brooklyn Museum this year, so he did the honors. On Saturday, he handed instruction sheets to each of the 35 or so participants. They included straightforward tips, including but not limited to: “Look closely. Back up. There is no wrong way.’ …

“The group then set off at a turtle’s pace to meditate on five of the museum’s roughly 1.5 million works: El Anatsui’s ‘Gli (Wall),’ ‘Waste Paper Bags’ and ‘Peak’; Valerie Hegarty’s ‘Fallen Bierstadt’; and an untitled work by Richard Pousette-Dart. …

“Part of the point is to counteract the rapid pace of modern life, as much as the often overwhelming museum routine, said another participant, Sam Davol, a musician in the band the Magnetic Fields. ‘I felt like I was in slow motion and everyone was whizzing by,’ he said. ‘I began to become self-conscious about it, like a guard would think it was weird that I was standing there for so long.’ …

“Elizabeth Ferguson … said her smartphone complicated matters. ‘I wanted to focus on the piece of art in front of me, but in the midst of it I was getting texts, I wanted to Instagram it, check in on Foursquare and tag #SlowArtDay,’ she said.”

Read more — and try moving slower in your next museum, too.

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Incredibly Beautiful Places

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 25, 2013| 2 Comments »

I’m so glad Kai put this on Facebook. He linked to photos of beautiful places. But at Bored Panda you can also find a bird that looks like Salvador Dali, a dad who illustrates his kids’ lunch bags every day with cute cartoons. and a do-it-yourself Porsche made of plastic pipes and aluminum foil. Or you can watch a video of an astronaut crying in weightless space.

I thought, “What the heck?”

Here’s a bit of explanation from the About page.

“Boredpanda.com is a highly visual art and design magazine dedicated to showcasing the world’s most creative artworks, offbeat products and everything that’s really weird or wonderful. …

“We got popular among pandas in a very short time, and now we have an average readership of 1 million unique visitors per month generating ~2 million of page impressions. Most of them come from USA, UK and CANADA .

“So, if you have a story, a product or some weird artworks that are cool enough for pandas – it is a perfect opportunity for you to get noticed. Click here and share it with everyone else!” More.

I myself am going to read up on Thomas Lamadieu. “Every time he looks up, Thomas sees a potential canvas where the building rooftops frame the sky. He photographs it and uses the odd sky shapes to create whimsical line drawings.”

Here are two of those beautiful places I mentioned.

Photo: Allard Schager
Tulip fields, the Netherlands

Photo: Oleg Gordienko
Tunnel of Love, Ukraine

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Restoring a Magnificent Synagogue

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I liked this story by Penny Schwartz from the Sunday Globe. It’s about the painstaking work of restoring a magnificent synagogue built in the 17th and 18th centuries and destroyed by the Nazis in WW II.

“For the last 10 years, Laura and Rick Brown have been immersed in the art and architecture of Poland’s historic Gwozdziec synagogue. …

“Now, after a decade of research and building small-scale models, the Browns and their international team of 300 carpenters, artists, and students have created a nearly full-scale replica of the the triple-tiered roof and intricately painted ceiling and cupola of the Gwozdziec synagogue, considered one of the most magnificent, well-documented of the wooden synagogues of the era. …

“ ‘They really have done something miraculous,’ said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor of performance studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, who was tapped to lead the museum’s exhibit development team. …

“The Browns’ approach to building, using traditional tools and techniques dating back to the time the synagogue was built, offered something beyond having a copy of the synagogue roof built as a prop, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said. …

“Both sculptors, the Browns came to the Gwozdziec project as founders and directors of Handshouse Studio, an educational nonprofit in Norwell [Massachusetts] that replicates historic objects using authentic methods. …

“Looking back on the journey, Laura and Rick say they are humbled by the hundreds of people, including many MassArt students and graduates, who have given so much time to this project.

“They are grateful to MassArt for allowing them the flexibility to create courses designed for the project including a series of Lost Historic Paintings’ classes analyzing and replicating quarter-scale, then half-scale models of the Gwozdziec synagogue ceiling panels.

“The 85 percent scale replica represents more than the grandeur of a long ago synagogue, Laura said. ‘This object speaks to a very painful history that is still very alive,’ she said.” More.

Photo: Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff
Artist Rick and Laura Brown at their studio in Hanover, Massachusetts.

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Timely Installation of Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Check out Big, Red & Shiny, “a non-profit arts organization and online art journal [set up to] commission and publish articles, essays and reviews that explore the theory, history and reception of art in its current conditions.”

A tweet sent me to BR&S, where I learned about a special art installation that was hung in the MassArt courtyard on Tuesday.

Stephanie Cardon of BR&S writes, “This is the story of how one student’s year long effort has brought solace and joy to a community when it is most needed. In spite of the crystalline air and brilliant sunshine, Tuesday morning was dark for Bostonians near and far. … Yet, serendipitously, it was on this day that Leah Medin poured a sheet of gold, soft as a caress and reaffirming as a cheer, onto many wounded hearts.

“Her gesture was simple, but took months of planning and painstaking work. While carefully conceived, her sculpture unintentionally came to represent the soaring expression of spirit many of us so desperately needed to find that very day.

“I met with Medin to talk about the timely unfurling of her piece, The Gold Divide, in MassArt‘s central courtyard. For those who witnessed it, the hushed voices spoke of awe and wonder and hope. I was curious to hear how the sculpture had come about, and how its transformation into a symbol affected her.

” ‘What happened Tuesday was everything I wasn’t expecting,’ she said about the overwhelming public response. After all, Medin had been planning this piece for over a year. It all started during her junior year abroad in Amsterdam, where she would ride her bike all around the city. As she biked, she took in the sun and the air.

“The fabric — 440 yards of gold crystal nylon organza stitched in 57 foot long panels — was inspired by these outings, by the sense of freedom and exhilaration they contained, by the light.  …

“On the day of the Boston Marathon, Leah Medin was still hard at work in an empty school, putting the finishing touches on the cloth, reinforcing its seams. When she heard what had happened off campus, while she was quietly and solitarily working to meet her deadline, she had a moment of doubt. ‘I called my mom. I wasn’t sure I should stick with it. She told me that now more than ever it was important to bring something beautiful to people.’

” ‘I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, there were all these eyes on it. On my baby! It was touching the surface and reaching inside the buildings, caressing the people, running along the ground.’ …

” ‘A lot of people have come up to me and said thank you. I don’t even know many of them. We give each other hugs.’ ” More.

See more of Leah’s work at leahmedin.com

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More Street Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 18, 2013| 2 Comments »

I like street art and have blogged about it a lot (for example,  Slinkachu, Banksy, Egypt, Os Gemeos). It’s an expression of freedom, so even when it has a serious side, it is cheering.

I’m glad to learn about Street Art Utopia, an amazing site for browsing.

It’s not clear to me how you post something there. Although I see it has the supposed Banksy painting I photographed in Boston a while back, it’s not my picture. If you figure out how to participate at Street Art Utopia, let me know.

Thanks for the tip, Andrew Sullivan.

Photo: Flickr user ajhaysom
Street art by Adnate in Fitzroy, Melbourne, Australia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Addition to Poetry

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 16, 2013| 2 Comments »

In addition to poetry, art often brings comfort. (Artists don’t usually want to make anyone “comfortable,” which has a different connotation.)

One reason art brings comfort is that creativity generates surprises, and surprises may bring delight.

So although I’m still preoccupied with Boston, I’ll leave Boston for today and write about Cleveland.

Thank you, Mary Ann, for pointing to the Gwarlingo blog, which recently said of the art scene in Cleveland,”prepare to be surprised.”

Blogger Michelle Aldredge writes in part, “It is possible to experience the best of Cleveland culture entirely on foot. …

“According to Ann Craddock Albano, the director of The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, the 550-acre area that encompasses the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cleveland Symphony, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Cleveland Cinematheque, Cleveland Institute of Music, and numerous university and medical facilities is the most concentrated neighborhood of world-class cultural institutions in the country. …

“The latest jewel in the Circle’s crown is Farshid Moussavi’s new building for the Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA is Moussavi’s first museum design, and also the first American project by the Iranian architect, whose firm, Farshid Moussavi Architecture, is based in London.

“A few blocks away from MOCA, at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management building, silver planes slice through red brick like paper in a windstorm. While Frank Gehry opted for flamboyance, Moussavi wisely chose a simpler, less ostentatious design for MOCA—one that is unique and engages the surrounding neighborhood.” More.

BTW, I wouldn’t mind hearing what other folks do for comfort.

Photo: Michelle Aldredge
The zigzagging stairwell is the most eye-catching feature inside the new MOCA Cleveland

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Skagen Art Colony

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 11, 2013| 4 Comments »

Anna%20Ancher.%20%22Breakfast%20before%20the%20hunt%2C%22%201903.%20On%20view%20at%20the%20%22A%20World%20Apart%3A%20Anna%20Ancher%20and%20the%20Skagen%20Art%20Colony%22%20exhibit%20at%20the%20National%20Museum%20of%20Women%20in%20the%20Arts.%20%28Courtesy%20Skagens%20Museum/%29

Anna Ancher painting from the Skagens Museum: “Breakfast before the hunt,” 1903.

Kristina often gives me her Women in the Arts magazine after she’s done with it. This time I was particularly taken with a story on a show in Washington called “A World Apart: Anna Ancher and the Skagen Art Colony.”

DeNeen L. Brown writes that among the 64 paintings and oil sketches, the depiction of light is breathtaking.

She says, “At its height in the 1880s and ’90s, Denmark’s Skagen Art Colony attracted dozens of artists who were drawn to the isolated fishing village by the light and the unspoiled land- and seascapes.

“While the exhibition focuses on Ancher, the most prominent woman, it also includes works by her husband, Michael Ancher, as well as Laurits Tuxen, Viggo Johansen, Christian Krohg, Oscar Bjorck, Holger Drachmann, Carl Locher and P.S. Kroyer, whose large-scale oil paintings capture the ‘heroic’ life of fishermen in Skagen. …

“Ancher, who was the only native of Skagen among the artists in the colony, became an icon in Denmark not only for her art but for breaking social boundaries. She was a wife and mother who painted at a time when most women abandoned work after they married and had children. She also painted during an era when women were prohibited from studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. …

“The Skagen colony artists became known as part of the modern breakthrough movement, shrugging off the academic tradition of neoclassical painting styles preferred at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and building on realist, naturalist and impressionist movements to depict everyday life and everyday people in an unidealized way.” More.

In case you should be in Washington in the next few weeks, the show runs through May 12 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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FBI and the Gardner Heist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 10, 2013| 2 Comments »

Photo from FBI site: An empty frame in the Dutch Room of the Gardner Museum, where Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black once hung.

The agent overseeing the FBI investigation into the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist spoke at my workplace today (a real perk of my job).

I learned a lot. Did you know, for example, that because Mrs. Gardner’s will specified that no art was to be moved, sold, or replaced, the paintings had no insurance? They were not be replaced. The agent said that the usual scenario is that stolen art is held for ransom from the insurance company. The thieves probably didn’t dream that there was no insurance on Rembrandts and Vermeers.

Our speaker was quite entertaining (for example, showing a slide from the Simpsons cartoon in which Vermeer’s The Concert is found in Montgomery Burns’s mansion ). He answered many questions and punted others as the investigation is ongoing.

As you may have seen recently, the FBI announced that they knew who had stolen the art and at least two of the places it had been seen. They have not announced the names of the thieves but may do so once they work through all the leads the latest announcement has brought. The statute of limitations ran out on the theft after five years (Mass. Senator Ted Kennedy subsequently pushed through a federal law extending the limit to 20 years), but possession of stolen art is a crime not subject to time limits.

I learned that the museum had good security. As most locals know, the guards let the thieves in believing they were cops. When you have a Trojan Horse inside, security doesn’t help, the agent said. Nowadays guards in different museums call each other every 20 minutes just to check.

Extensive research has shown there has never been a museum theft like this, where the thieves stole so much of value and also so much of little value and took a leisurely 81 minutes to do so.

And perhaps there has never been a crime at a major museum where the paintings were not insured.

The agent believes the art will be recovered one day. Read the FBI dedicated site, here.

Photo: Simpsons

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Unique Printmaking Nonprofit

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I enjoy blogging about my cousin the tree artist (here, for example). I’m a longtime fan.

Today I learned that one of Sally Frank’s miniprints has been accepted into the International Mini Print Exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut.

According to its website, “the Center for Contemporary Printmaking is the only nonprofit organization between New York City and Boston solely dedicated to the art of the print, including printmaking, papermaking, book arts, digital processes, and related disciplines.”

Sally Frank does many different kinds of prints and drawings. You can see how varied are the media she works in at her site, here.

Monotype: Sally Frank

trees-by-sally-frank

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Experiencing Music Visually

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »

My mother took in renters, and the last guy who rented my brother’s old room was a serious tinkerer.

There was no space to move around among all the gadgets and spare parts, but he did manage to squeeze us in when we were around and show us a particularly cool invention.

It was a colorful display on a computer screen that responded to sound, loudness, and rhythm of music.

I was thinking about that guy as I read the story that James Sullivan wrote for the Boston Globe about Bill Sebastian, inventor of “a kind of optical synthesizer called the Outerspace Visual Communicator, or OVC.

“Designed to let the user ‘play’ with images as part of a musical composition, the original OVC was a custom-built keyboard featuring an array of sensors to be brushed with fingertips (‘like fingerpainting’). It created dynamic color changes in the lights on a structure overhead, such as a dome over a concert stage.

“Sebastian performed with the OVC in a few extended runs with Sun Ra and his big band, the Arkestra.”

Now Sebastian has built “a new visual synthesizer — this one in 3-D…

“For the past several months, two fellow engineers and computer programmers have been working …  on proprietary computer programs and prototypes of the new OVC, which, in place of the keyboard and buttons, is operated by hand controllers that look a bit like robotic arms fitted with valves (like those of a trumpet) and sliders (roughly analogous to the frets on a guitar). Sebastian envisions applications for the 3-D OVC ranging from planetariums to virtual reality headsets.” More.

Whatever happened to that guy at my mother’s house? What was his name again?

Photograph of Bill Sebastian, Visual Music Systems, by Dina Rudick, Globe staff

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Cabby’s Found Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 26, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Longtime readers may recall I took a playwriting class a couple years ago. One of the assignments — which I blogged about here — was to listen in on a conversation in a public place and write it down word for word. Very awkward, but a good lesson in the random way people really talk.

Now the artist/cabby Daniel J. Wilson has taken the concept to an extreme, recording customers’ conversations and using them in his art.

Matt Flegenheimer writes at the NY Times that while driving a taxi in New York, Wilson “secretly recorded the conversations of his passengers, assembled the highlights into an audio collage of the back-seat musings and installed the final product in his taxi, playing the clips for his riders …

“ ‘It’s this world where people act like you don’t exist, even though you’re three feet away,’ Mr. Wilson, 35, said from the front seat of his cab recently. ‘You get this fragment of a person.’ ” More.

Much has been done with the invisibility theme in literature: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the powerful Mammy in The Sound and the Fury, the murderer disguised as an “invisible” waiter in an Agatha Christie novel — you can probably come up with more.

The Times article discusses the invasion of privacy. I think invasion of privacy might be the penalty for treating humans as invisible.

Photo: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Victoria Reis, left, called Daniel J. Wilson’s audio collage “the least pretentious and most experimental” work she had seen all week, and tipped him.

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A Fort Point Artist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

If I come to work early, I often take a walk at lunch. I love the Greenway, which is especially nice in spring and summer. And the Fort Channel district (the Mayor likes to call it the Innovation District) seems to have something new to see almost every week — repurposed warehouses, galleries, restaurants, pocket parks.

Fort Point Arts got bumped from its space next to Flour (a yummy restaurant) on Farnsworth, so one lunchtime I made a point of checking out its new space off A Street.

I especially like that they show art depicting the Fort Point neighborhood — partly because walking there makes me attached to that part of Boston, and partly because Fort Point is changing fast. (About 18 years ago, when I went to an arts open house there, many artists had studios with beds on ledges and  tiny kitchens. Some artists were squatting in dangerous buildings with wires hanging down, no heat, no doors, no lighting. That world is gone.)

Laura Davidson was one of the featured artists when I was last in the Fort Point Arts shop. She had some block prints of her neighborhood that I admired.

Be sure to check her home page. Everyone should have a home page that looks like a treasure map.

Art: “Endangered Neighborhood” reprint of 1995 view of Fort Point), 2012, Laura Davidson

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Kind of Crazy Organizing Impulse

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 21, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I got this story from a recent post by Andrew Sullivan, who got it from Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing, who links to Leo Kent at Humans Invent.

It’s about Swiss artist/comedian Ursus Wehrli, who has written a book called The Art of Clean Up.

Leo Kent asks the artist how the book came about.

“I had already done two books before this one,” Wehrli answers. “The first two were about tidying up art and for the third one I devoted myself more to everyday situations or objects. I very often go to museums and I actually like modern art but I was standing in front of a piece by the very messy Swiss artist Jean Tinguely. He is famous for putting all sorts of colours, material and objects on a canvas and I tried to imagine what a cleaning lady would do if she had to clean up his studio.

“I imagined how she would not really know where the mess starts and the art begins so she would end up cleaning not only the floor and the tables but the artworks. I realised this was a fun approach because you really start to look at art very differently if you try to bring some order to it.” More.

More on Wehrli’s process here, at FastCoCreate.com, where Hugh Hart adds to the story.

(You just never know what will turn up next at Andrew Sullivan.)

Photo: The Art Of Clean Up

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My Cousin the Tree Artist, Cont’d

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Facebook can be annoying, but I guess it does sometimes pay to be on it.

After “liking” a number of my cousin Sally Frank’s nature photos and art over the years, I finally figured out via Facebook that much of her work is on a WordPress blog — and she has had the blog longer than I have had this one.

Trees are a specialty. Often she will start with a photograph like the one below for inspiration. She then turns to printmaking, which you can learn about at her blog.

“Ms. Frank uses centuries-old printmaking techniques like etching and aquatint on copper plates, as well as innovative methods like solarplate intaglio. She says that although her work is grounded in drawing, she finds the unpredictable nature of printmaking inspirational and exciting.” More.

This photo reminds me of the strangler fig that I saw years ago in Costa Rica, a tree that wraps itself around a host and literally loves it to death. The host tree crumbles, and only the strangler is left — with an empty space inside.

Sally’s photo probably has a happier story — perhaps a nymph turned into a tree to escape danger.

Photo called “bound”: Sally Frank

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Dragon and Chimera

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2013| 4 Comments »

According to wikipedia, “The term chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional animal with parts taken from various animals.” Which explains why it has been appropriated in genetics where it relates to the phenomenon of different creatures sharing T-cells.

Anyway, I have a brother who studies chimerism and its potential application for organ-transplant retention. I may not have this quite right, but I think if you could have enough of the cells of an organ donor in you when you get a transplant, you wouldn’t need to take antirejection drugs.

I had been trying to explain this to people when I decided to go out for a walk in Fort Point Channel. Eerily, this sign greeted me.

chimera

I think it’s an eclectic gift shop or interior decorator business.

Other signs and portents on the same walk related to Suzanne and Erik’s Year of the Dragon baby.

dragon on roof

dragon sculpture in fort point

Who is the dragon artist? I need to know more.

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