Art news

Artist Opportunities # 579

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 02:13:45 +0100

Every week, we gather a variety of artist opportunities from the DC area and beyond. Find one below and apply today — good luck! Click here for recent opportunities posts, and submit your opportunity listing here.

Opportunities

Instructors Wanted at The Art League — Alexandria, VA

Deadline: Until filled The Art League is looking for skilled instructors in all visual arts disciplines. We’re particularly keen to recruit new hires for our sculpture, stained glass, and watercolor departments. Preferred applicants will have a personable and patient disposition, excellent communication skills, and the ability to teach their medium to groups of beginning, intermediate, and/or advanced level students. Class sizes range, depending on enrollment, from around 5 to 30 students. Experience teaching is helpful but not an absolute requirement. To apply, send a cover letter with statement of intent, resumé, and 6-10 tiffs or jpegs of current work to Ariane D’Souza via email at arianed@theartleague.org.

Call for Entry, Capricious Photo Award 2021 – NYC

Deadline: December 1 The Capricious Award provides one photographer with the resources and editorial support to bring a body of work to fruition. Each year the award is juried by photographers, critics and curators, with the intent to select a photographer whose work is both distinct in point of view and boldly relevant to the unfolding issues of our time. The recipient will be awarded with resources, valued at $25,000, geared towards the production of a limited-edition book. For more information, click here.

Call for Entry, True Blue Online Exhibit

Deadline: December 3 The color blue is the most universally appealing color on the spectrum. It can represent trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, and sensitivity. But it can also convey fragility, depression, impersonality, and even coldness. There was a time when the pigment blue was the rarest and most precious shade of all. Some artists even went into debt just to use the color! With so many intriguing shades of blue and so many meanings and representations, show us True Blue through your perspective. Learn more here.

Open Call, Mattress Factory 2021 Residency – Pittsburgh, PA

Deadline: December 10 The Mattress Factory is pleased to announce our new International Open Call for artist residencies and solo exhibitions. During their residency, artists are free to explore wherever their process leads them. The Mattress Factory will support each artist’s process from development through production and installation to exhibition. Solo exhibitions resulting from residencies will be scheduled from Spring 2023 onwards. Learn more here.

2022 Open Call for Solo Exhibition, Target Gallery – Alexandria, VA

Deadline: January 2 Target Gallery invites regional artists living in the D.C., Maryland, or Virginia to apply for an open call for proposals for a solo exhibition for the summer of 2022. The individual with the chosen proposal will receive an exhibition at Target Gallery from April 23 – July 17, 2022, as well as a virtual online catalog. The artist will also receive a $2000 stipend as well as $100 for an artist talk and additional programming throughout the exhibition. For more information, click here.

New Photography III: National Juried Exhibition – Easton, MD

Deadline: January 5 The Academy Museum’s acclaimed national juried photography exhibition returns in its third year with artist, publisher and editor Kris Graves as juror. The open call invites photographers at any stage of their career to submit a cohesive body of work comprising of five images, made between 2019 and 2021. The exhibition seeks to showcase the most compelling and relevant work made by photographers all over the US. For more information, click here.

Call for Proposals, Spring Solos 2022, McLean Project for the Arts – McLean, VA

Deadline: January 7 McLean Project for the Arts is seeking solo exhibition proposals for the Spring of 2022. Contemporary living artists working in the Mid-Atlantic Region are invited to submit exhibition or project proposals to be on display in the Emerson and Atrium Galleries. The dates for the exhibitions will be from April 14 – June 11, 2022. For more information, Click here.

Re-runs: These were previously posted, but it’s not too late to enter!

Smithsonian Magazine 19th Annual Photo Contest

Deadline: November 30 To be eligible for any category, a photograph must have been shot by the entrant since January 1, 2019. There are 6 categories: Natural World, Travel, People, The American Experience, Altered Images, and Mobile. Learn how to enter here.

Call for Entry, Anacostia Portraits – DC

Deadline: November 30 Anacostia Portraits is a participatory arts project using a historic photographic process to create a visual archive celebrating the people who make up the Anacostia region of the District of Columbia. In this revival of the 19^th century tintype, individuals with a connection to the community are invited to portrait sessions with photographer Elena Volkova at the Anacostia Arts Center. Each sitting produces two portraits, one for the participant and one for a final installation. For more information, click here.

Request for Qualifications, Brightview Innovation Center Public Art — Herndon, VA

Deadline: November 30 Brightview Innovation Center in Herndon, Virginia is requesting proposals for public art for three areas within its complex. Artists and artist teams can demonstrate qualifications for 1, 2, or all 3 of the art locations. Learn more here.

Call for Entries, SlowArt Productions Emerging Artists 2022 – Hudson, NY

Deadline: November 30 SlowArt Productions presents Emerging Artists 2022, the 30th annual competition for exhibition, promotion and $500 cash award. Open to all artists working in any media. This event is devoted to the discovery, introduction, and promotion of Emerging Artists. The exhibition will be held March 3 – 26, 2022, at the Limner Gallery. Click here for more information.

Call for Art, Create! Magazine

Deadline: November 30 Create! Magazine is pleased to announce a new juried call for entries for the Create! Magazine Winter Print Issue 2021-2022. We are proud to present our incredible guest curator for this issue, Daniel Raphael Gallery, a Contemporary Art Gallery based in Marylebone, London with a focus on emerging artists. All are welcome. Our calls for entry are open to all artists from every country unless we have a special edition that highlights a specific topic or interest. All styles and media are welcome. There are no educational requirements to apply to the open calls. Learn more here.

2021/2022 National Arts Club Fellowship – New York

Deadline: December 1 The Artist Fellowship provides a select number of artists, working in any one of the disciplines reflected in the NAC’s arts committees, a 18-month Artist Fellowship at the Club, situated in Gramercy Park, New York. Artist Fellows will be provided with complimentary Club participation, providing access to the historic clubhouse, public programs and discounted private overnight rooms. The Artist Fellowship provides opportunities for the recipient to be featured in Club programming and presentations. Learn more here.

Call for Artists, Hill Center Galleries – DC

Deadline: December 1 Hill Center Galleries is currently welcoming artists residing in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia to submit entries for its Regional Juried Art Exhibition. Three cash prizes and five Honorable Mention awards will be made. For more information, click here.

Call for Entry, Mozaik Future Art Awards

Deadline: December 1 The Future Art Awards is an annual open call to all U.S. artists of all creative expressions and backgrounds, designed to give critical financial support, exhibition exposure, and literary coverage to 50 artists through a blind review of their art by a jury of their peers. This year’s theme is Ecosystem X—an arts-based reimagining of life on planet Earth. We’re offering $5,000 awards to ten selected artists, in addition to a $5,000 student scholarship/stipend to a winning student artist. All artists will showcase their work in a curated virtual exhibition opening free to the public in early 2022. There is no cost to submit. Learn more here.

Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works – Granville, NY

Deadline: December 1 Collar Works is seeking artists to participate in the 2022 Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency program for individuals and parent artists. The Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency (EMAR) program by Collar Works is designed to provide a diverse group of emerging and established artists an immersive, supportive, productive, and communal atmosphere for art-making and dialogue on a bucolic 77-acre farm in Washington County. The summer residency is offered for 5 weeks, with 2 and 4-week residencies for individual artists and 1-week residencies for families. For more information, click here.

Call for Entry, High Contrast International Juried Exhibition – Poughkeepsie, New York

Deadline: December 10 High Contrast invites artworks that make stark contrasts visible and/or draw our attention to radical difference in the world around us. “High contrast” can exist in an artwork’s juxtaposition of strong black and white elements or vivid, bright objects cast against deep, dark shadows. The term might refer to oppositional differences in subject matter, i.e. big/small, curvilinear/angular, rough/polished. In our lives, we also encounter examples of “high contrast” in social and economic disparities, political polarization, or even in the plastic bag or garbage we see sitting in an otherwise pristine natural landscape. Learn more here.

Call for Artists, Like Clockwork, Vestige Concept Gallery – Pittsburgh

Deadline: December 11 Like Clockwork seeks to showcase works of art that address the nature of time. From birth, our daily routines, anxieties on aging, death, rebirth, to creation and destruction, the forms of time give shape to human experience. We are accepting works from emerging, mid-career, and/or professional artists. Work should somehow relate to the theme of the show. For more information, click here.

Call for Artists + Photographers $550.00 Innovate Grants

Deadline: December 14 Innovate Grant awards (2) $550.00 grants each quarter, to one visual artist and one photographer. In addition to receiving a grant award, winners will be featured and recognized on our website and join a growing community of vibrant and talented artists. To explore past recipients and for more information on how to apply visit our website!

Call for Artists + Photographers, Innovate Grants

Deadline: December 14 Innovate Grant distributes two $550.00 grants each quarter, to one visual artist and one photographer. The Fall 2021 cycle is currently open. Apply here.

Keyholder Residency Spring/Summer 2022, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center — Hyattsville, MD

Deadline: December 18 Pyramid Atlantic Art Center’s Keyholder Residency is a competitive opportunity for emerging to mid-career artists who want to have unlimited access to the studios in exchange for working 4 hours a week for Pyramid Atlantic. The residency is awarded to artists who hope to gain more knowledge and improve their skills in the printmaking, papermaking, or book arts studios. Two artists are selected twice a year by the Pyramid Atlantic artistic staff. Keyholders work in a productive community atmosphere alongside other artists and are expected to abide by all studio policies. Learn more here.

Call for Entry, New Photography III: National Juried Exhibition – Easton, MD

Deadline: January 2 The Academy Art Museum’s open call invites photographers at any stage of their career to submit a cohesive body of work comprising of five images, made between 2019 and 2021. The exhibition seeks to showcase the most compelling and relevant work made by photographers all over the US. The juror will select between 13 – 15 artists for the exhibition. Click here for more information.

Call for Art, Adorned: Inspired by Fabric and Fashion, Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center – Salmons, MD

Deadline: January 2 Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center invites emerging and established artists to submit original artworks to the juried exhibition ‘Adorned: Inspired by Fabric and Fashion’. This is a national juried exhibition. All media and performance welcome; small to large-scale works; cash awards. For more information, click here.

Open Call for Exhibition Proposals, Second Street Gallery – Charlottesville, VA

Deadline: January 3, 2022 Second Street Gallery is now accepting proposals for solo/group exhibitions for Season 49 (2022-2023). The gallery welcomes proposals for consideration in works of all media – drawings, prints, photography, paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, sound, performance, and interdisciplinary projects. Exhibition proposals must represent living artists, who may be of both emerging and established reputations. For more information, click here.

Call for Entries, 33rd National Drawing & Print Competitive Exhibition – Baltimore

Deadline: January 14 Gormley Gallery invites entries for the annual National Drawing & Print Competitive Exhibition, juried this year by Joy Davis, Director and Curator of Waller Gallery in Baltimore. A minimum of $1,500 is available in purchase prize money. Drawings and prints (not photography) in any medium up to 60 inches high (with frame) are eligible with no limitations as to color, surface, or materials. To enter, click here.

Call for Entry, Wharton Esherick Museum 28th Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition – Malvern, PA

Deadline: February 4 As the Wharton Esherick Museum celebrates its 50th Anniversary in 2022, we’re reflecting on how we’ve shared and interpreted Esherick’s remarkable self-portrait for thousands of people over half a century. In turn, we invite you to share innovative works of art, craft, and design that represent a self-portrait; wood must be part of your entry, but it doesn’t have to be the only material used. For more information, click here.

The Chelsea International Photography Competition – NYC

Deadline: February 15 The Competition is an ideal way to exhibit your talent to a wider international audience. With a distinguished panel of jurors and more than $55,000 in valuable prizes, it is open to photographers from around the world at any stage of their careers. To learn more and enter, click here.

Studio Internship Summer 2022, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center — Hyattsville, MD

Deadline: February 18, 2022 Pyramid Atlantic offers internship opportunities for enthusiastic, engaged, and serious-minded college or post-college artists. Our interns assist resident artists, renters, artistic staff, with printmaking, papermaking, and book arts projects, and in outreach education programs. In addition to hands-on experience with artistic projects, interns gain an understanding of the day-to-day operation of a non-profit art center and gallery. For the Summer 2022 season, Pyramid will accept two interns for this program. Click here to apply.

Call for Artists, The Delaware Contemporary’s Artist Registry – Wilmington, DE

Deadline: August 1, 2022 The Delaware Contemporary’s Artist Registry promotes working artists of our region through exhibitions, residencies, and commissioned projects. The Artist Registry is available to artists within a 250 mile radius of Wilmington, DE and will be the tool by which The Delaware Contemporary will collect, review and select artists for juried and curated exhibitions and projects. By submitting an application for the Artist’s Registry, The Delaware Contemporary will have access to an artist portfolio for the 2021 – 2022 season. During each season, artist portfolios will be regularly reviewed for upcoming opportunities including exhibitions, programs, and special events, as well as selected to be highlighted on the museum’s social media platforms. Learn more here.

Ongoing: These opportunities have rolling deadlines.

Call for Art, Links Bridge Vineyards—Thurmont, MD

Links Bridge Vineyards, a small artisan style winery located just outside of Frederick, Maryland, is looking to feature the artwork of various artists on the walls of their tasting barn for two weeks at a time. To learn more, call Joan Cartier 301-602-5733 or email her at linksbridgevineyards@gmail.com.

Pyramid Atlantic Workshop Proposals – Hyattsville, MD

Pyramid Atlantic offers year-round workshops in printmaking, papermaking, book arts, and hybrids thereof. We offer multi-week, daytime, evening, and weekend intensives for adults in our fully equipped studios. As part of a robust and diverse schedule of offerings, we welcome unsolicited workshop proposals, and hope that you will consider applying! Workshop proposal reviews are ongoing, but for best consideration, submit class proposals by the following dates: 1/15 for Summer Workshops; 4/1 for Fall Workshops; 7/1 for Winter Workshops; 10/1 for Spring Workshops. Questions? Email Gretchen, Artistic Director, Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso: 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars, and other work, Tahimik has collaborated with Filipinx artisans, creating intentional distance from the mainstream Occidental art world, just as he chooses to use non-professional actors and reject Hollywood conventions in his films. The exhibition catalogue cites the Tagalog term kapwa, meaning community, teamwork, and compassion for others, as a fundamental value in Tahimik’s art and the foundation of Philippine culture.

Next, I was hit by the overwhelming magnitude of Tahimik’s large-scale pieces. At first, the organization of the exhibition appears unstructured and chaotic. Wooden Mickey Mouse and Captain America figures hurdle atop air bombs toward shabby yet colorful Philippine fishing boats suspended in the air, and beached sea creatures protrude behind ships wielding ghastly, bull-shaped mastheads. This reflects a principal central to Tahimik’s practice: his kapa kapa style, meaning that the artist works in a way that is nonlinear and spontaneous.

Installation view of Kidlat Tahimik: Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso: 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars at the Palacio de Cristal, Madrid

Viewers can, however, orient themselves through some structural placeholders. In the center, a celestial ring of Indigenous gods made of wicker hangs from the ceiling, serving as a lynchpin of the exhibition. Wicker is reminiscent of the dap-ay of Philippine villages, a space in which elders pass on traditional stories to the new generation of their tribe. The installation contains three sections that outline critical moments in the Philippines’ colonial history.

The first section is a subversive telling of Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 conquest of the Philippines that focuses on the role of Magellan’s slave and translator, Ikeng, or Enrique de Malaca, whom the artist plays in his film Balikbayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment Redux IV (1979-2017). This section contains a sculpture representing the encounter between Magellan, Lapulapu, chief of the island of Mactán, and Lapulapu’s wife, which concluded in a battle and Magellan’s subsequent death. Lapulapu and his wife gather their strength and resistance from nature, their wicker bodies rising gracefully out of dried palm leaves, in contrast to the figure of Magellan, whose human-made iron body is in the process of corroding. Thus, at the level of materials, Tahimik reshapes the story as a victory of the native islanders over the colonizer.

Installation view of Kidlat Tahimik: Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso: 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars at the Palacio de Cristal, Madrid

Further into the exhibition, Tahimik invokes the Philippines Exposition of 1887, in which the Palacio de Cristal showcased Indigenous people and vegetation from the Philippines. Illuminated fluorescent letters pronounce “MadExpo 1887”; below, on a wooden arm brandishing a crucifix, more neon lights spell out “NUESTROS FILIPINOS CIVILIZADOS” (“our civilized Filipinos”). José Rizal, an advocate of Philippine independence and leader of the Filipino Propaganda Movement, who composed a response to the 1887 exposition, calling out its blatant racism and function as a “human zoo,” appears in a photograph and as a sculpture in this section. To the right of the main display, an animal figure wearing a chasuble menacingly grasps the waist of a nude female figure made of driftwood, representing the characters Father Dámaso and María Clara of Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tángere (1887). María Clara is the mestiza heroine of the novel who is revealed to be the illegitimate daughter of Father Dámaso, a Spanish friar. The section symbolizes both the racist and imperialist past of the Philippines Exposition and the corruption of the Spanish Catholic church, as well as the Indigenous resistance surrounding it.

The final section represents contemporary Philippine society, in conflict with the neocolonial influence of omnipresent American culture. Beneath the airborne clashes between Mickey Mouse, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, and Bangkas (native water crafts of the Philippines) lie two wooden ships. One carries a sculpture of Inhabian, the Igorot goddess of wind, and the other a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe. The masthead of Marilyn’s boat resembles the horse from Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937), linking internationally recognized images from Spanish and American culture, the Philippines’ two colonizers. That of Inhabian’s ship, on the other hand, is a wild horse’s head towering over a bull’s head, perhaps suggesting the Indigenous Philippine triumph over Spanish influence in the face-off between the ships.

Installation view of Kidlat Tahimik: Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso: 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars at the Palacio de Cristal, Madrid

To showcase this work exactly 500 years after Magellan’s conquest of the Philippines in a space that, 134 years ago, was a “human zoo” of Indigenous people from the Philippines, is certainly poignant. Tahimik reclaims the postcolonial narrative presented in the same exhibition space that the Spanish formerly used to justify colonialism, adding nuanced counter-narratives to this history. As in his audiovisual work, this exhibition presents complex and unfinished narratives under constant revision, to be contemplated in the context of the Palacio de Cristal’s and Spain’s fraught histories.

Kidlat Tahimik: Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso: 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars continues at the Palacio de Cristal (Paseo República de Cuba, 4, Madrid, Spain) through March 6, 2022.

The Queer Feminist Agenda of Wilder Alison’s Abstract Wool Paintings

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:06:00 +0100

Translated from a French alliterative tongue twister “une mûre mûre murmure au mur,” Wilder Alison’s exhibition A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall reveals the artist’s ongoing exploration of language and queer identity through an intricate practice of wool painting.

Since 2014, Alison has been visually dissecting Monique Wittig’s novel The Lesbian Body, which theorizes the split subjectivity women experience in language, an inherently patriarchal structure, by textually slashing the French word for first-person subject: “j/e.” Translating Wittig’s seminal text into English, however, posed a problem — the first-person pronoun “I” is only one letter. The solution was to italicize the I, thus turning the word into a literal slash. This slash is at the core of Alison’s series of wool paintings currently on view at Fierman gallery.

First soaking wool blankets in dye baths, allowing a palette of four to six colors to stain the fabric, Alison subsequently cuts up the blankets and sews them into new compositions that emphasize the diagonal seam, aka slash. A subtle yet poignant critique of gendered power structures embedded in language, Alison’s investigation of queer identity through abstract form falls into a growing lineage of queer artists working in abstraction. By creating the slash through the constructive labor of sowing the wool surface back together, Alison counters the long history of male artists’ enactment of destructive slashes, such as Lucio Fontana’s famous slits, made by the artist literally cutting into the canvas. Alison’s approach to visualizing a split through the act of merging is equally paradoxical as it is poetic.

Installation view of A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall at Fierman gallery

The gradual, and rather unpredictable, process of dyeing merges composition and surface, recto and verso, in ways that the painterly gesture can only aspire to. The vibrant colors bleed out over the wool, creating cloudy stains — just like a ripe blackberry would do if it could indeed murmur against a wall. In addition to “wall,” the French word “mur” translates to “dyke,” and while Alison is aware it references the structure to stop water, the artist welcomes playing with the word’s English connotation which is linked to sexual identity.

Alison’s use of textile to convey a queer, feminist language evokes the long history of quilting and patternmaking to advance political agendas, going back to early 20th-century suffragette banners. As art historian Julia Bryan Wilson has convincingly argued in her publication Fray: Art and Textile Politics, craft has always been a central strategy in forming and assisting queer identities and sexual practices (for example, the early DIY crafting of sex toys).

Also on view are a series of rectangular ceramic pieces that echo the compositions of the wool paintings. Alison’s first foray into the medium, the ceramics appear to reveal a physical slit that was achieved through a process of carving into the material, and do not allow for the stain-like effect achieved in wool. The ceramics offer an intriguing instance of translating a conceptual design from one medium into another, reflecting how the disruption that occurs in textual translation can also occur visually.

A Ripe Blackberry Murmurs to the Wall continues at Fierman gallery (127 Henry Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through December 18.

A More Expansive Understanding of What It Means to Be Human

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:05:00 +0100

LOS ANGELES — In the court proceedings following the 1991 beating of Rodney King, the public learned of an acronym routinely used by the Los Angeles Police Department to refer to “young Black males who belong to the jobless category of the inner-city ghettos”: N.H.I., short for No Humans Involved. The acronym became the starting point for Jamaican writer and theorist Sylvia Wynter to pull apart what it means to be human in her seminal 1994 essay “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to my Colleagues,” as well as the title for the exhibition currently on view at the Hammer Museum. Curated by Erin Christovale and Vanessa Arizmendi, No Humans Involved is a visual continuation of Wynter’s critical reassessment, centering the point of view of Black and brown artists — the very voices originally deemed unfit to be considered human.

No Humans Involved, installation view, featuring SANGREE at the Hammer Museum

The group of seven artists all reconsider the theme through equally compelling visions: the duo SANGREE, for example, reframe human origin stories with their installation of whimsical artifacts recalling Aztec civilizations and ethnographic displays, while Wilmer Wilson IV presents two versions of a letter calling for African American human rights to be recognized, each one engraved into monumental salt blocks, thus confronting the persistent gap in the way in which humanity has been narrated and self-narrated over time. However, the strongest visual throughline in the exhibition evokes skin — blown up across Sondra Perry’s lenticular panels, filtered through skylight and WangShui’s sci-fi lens, and stitched back together in Tau Lewis’ garment-like constructions — as if these artists are ripping apart humanity’s casing and taking apart its guts in order to examine its makeup and reconstitute what it has the capacity to mean. By embracing the “nonhuman” as a point of departure instead of having to justify or prove the humanity of its artists, the exhibition succeeds in presenting a more generative, more expansive definition of what humanity is allowed to look and feel like.

No Humans Involved, installation view, featuring Sondra Perry at the Hammer Museum

No Humans Involved continues at the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles) through January 9, 2022. The exhibition is curated by Erin Christovale, associate curator, with Vanessa Arizmendi, curatorial assistant.

The Magnum Opus of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Influential Korean American Artist

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:04:00 +0100

LOS ANGELES — Since 2017, GYOPO, a nonprofit coalition of diasporic Korean artists, cultural producers, and professionals based in Los Angeles, has been organizing artist talks, screenings, workshops, and other public programs in an effort to provide space for cross-cultural conversations. On Saturday, December 4, the group will host their first in-person event of the year at Meldman Family Cinematic Arts Park, USC School of Cinematic Arts, a marathon reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (Cha’s archive notes that the artist intended the title to be unitalicized, one small example of the ways she bent language into her own form). Cha, an influential Korean American artist and writer, explored the nuances of diaspora, forced migration, language, and time in her sinuous experiments in performance, text, and video. Dictee, her only book, is considered her magnum opus. Tragically, in 1982, one week after the publication of Dictee, Cha was raped and murdered by security guard and serial rapist Joseph Lanza. She was 31 years old.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha at the window of her Berkeley apartment (1979) (photo by James Cha)

“Our motivation is to share Cha’s Dictee, a radical blend of experimental novel, poetry, autobiography, and cultural critique, with a younger generation who may not have had the chance to learn about her,” GYOPO members Yoon Ju Ellie Lee, Crystal Mun-hye Baik, and Yong Soon Min explained to Hyperallergic in an email. An interdisciplinary marvel, there are many ways to read Dictee, as it flits in and out of English, French, Korean, and between poetry, myth, memoir, collage, and photography. Resisting neat categorization, these experiments allow Cha to address the violence embedded within language, history, and gender norms.

With support from USC Vision and Voices and in collaboration with Deaf West Theater, Deaf and hearing volunteers will read the entirety of Dictee, simultaneously speaking in ASL and spoken language while pages from the book are projected in the background. A few video works from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha archive at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will also be on view. The event will include presentations by John M. Cha, the artist’s brother and biographer, in addition to Laura Hyun Yi Kang, a scholar and Gender Studies professor at UC Irvine, and Lawrence Rinder, a curator and former director of BAMPFA.

Born in South Korea before emigrating with her family to San Francisco at the age of 12, Cha was deeply marked by her familial history of migration and displacement caused by military dictatorships and numerous colonialisms. She rejected the rules of assimilation, instead drawn to the stories obscured by structural oppressions. Cha’s oeuvre grapples with the inexpressible, enacting what it is like to wade through and process painful histories and memories.

Cha’s own focus on systemic oppressions necessitates some engagement with her own passing, since the very same racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions continue to mark our own world. GYOPO points to the “racialized and sexualized murders of Asian American and immigrant women within the public sphere,” including the Atlanta spa shootings in March, and how silence and shaming warps the discourse surrounding these tragedies. While not offering closure in a traditional sense, Cha’s art and writing refuses to look away from the pain, urging us to contend with the ways our society obscures the history of harm against Asian American and immigrant women.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s hands on her typewriter (1981) (photo by James Cha)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “It Is Almost That” (1977) (detail); white press-type letters and white pastel on nineteen sheets of black paper; 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches each (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, 1992)

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee: A Marathon Reading will take place at Meldman Family Cinematic Arts Park (900 West 34th St, University Park, Los Angeles) on Saturday, December 4, 1–6pm. The event is free; RSVP recommended.

Cheetos Dust Artworks on a Yacht May Mark the Endtimes at Miami Basel

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:03:00 +0100

Lefty Out There: A shape with lion (cheetah) body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. (All images courtesy of Rock the Bells)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
~ William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

When William Butler Yeats wrote these words, surely Art Basel Miami Beach is what he had in mind. In this recurring race to the bottom, where rich people go to prove just how many things they would rather throw money at than equity, justice, the environment, or baseline humanity, a clear winner is already rising. Top prize in this anarchy of excess, veiled in a thin cover of culture, must surely go to a December 4 event summoned into this world by Rock the Bells and Cheetos, taking place on the Seafair Mega Yacht.

Enter Yacht the Basel, starring Lefty Out There: “The Art of the Cheetle” — if these words are not a hellish incantation that calls out whichever horseman of the apocalypse is currently waiting in the wings, what else are they? They also mean that one of those du jour street-artist-turned-muralists who like to cover everything in a repeating motif has now “upped” the ante by rendering his signature squiggles in Cheeto dust. Because taping a goddamn banana to a wall was not enough, no, the art world needed to do something even more stupid involving food. At sea!

</article>
<article>
<h1>Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Ode to the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s</h1>
<p>Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:02:00 +0100</p>
<figure></figure>
<p>The song <a href= — From *Licorice Pizza*

Plans for a Billion Dollar College Dormitory Are a Strange Mix of Carceral and Utopian

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:01:00 +0100

Billionaire donor bequests prison cellblock to put up undergrads. That, more or less, was the tl;dr of a flurry of recent criticism in response to plans for a new dorm at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). A girthy strongbox measuring around 350 feet wide and 475 feet long that will accommodate 4500 students over nine identical floors sandwiched between a ground floor and penthouse level with service and communal spaces, the building’s form certainly is carceral. To wit, in the rigid plan for each of the residential floors, individual bedrooms are ganged tightly together — a fractal of eight “houses” of eight “clusters” of eight cells per floor — in such a way that 94% of rooms will have no window to the outside. This particular aspect of the design has been the subject of much of the recent negative criticism of the building. So, too, is the fact that the design is the work of one of the project’s main financiers, the investor Charlie Munger, whose $200 million gift in 2016 came with the catch that the university must build according to his plans.

Proposed ground floor plan at Munger Hall, UCSB (image courtesy UCSB)

Munger is not a trained architect. However, working with the architect of record for the project, Los Angeles-based VTBS Architects, he has reportedly steered the dorm’s design from the beginning. Hence, those windowless rooms. In an illuminating interview with Architectural Record, Munger asserted that the preponderance of interior bedrooms was a functional outcome after he ruled out shared sleeping rooms and optimized the communal spaces, such as the fitness center and gastro pub slated for the penthouse level. “We had a window shortage,” he told the magazine, “So we just copied what Disney Cruise did.” Indeed, the project design team is touting “virtual windows” that will provide “circadian rhythm lighting” as well as a robust ventilation system to provide fresh air.

The reliance on technological building systems to such wholesale extent is unconventional for a building with human residents. But as this systems-reliant approach plays out in Munger Hall, it also highlights the provocative politics of the private room.

Interior rendering of a single-occupancy bedroom with a virtual window at Munger Hall, UCSB (image courtesy UCSB)

How well or poorly the design of Munger Hall will promote the communal aspect of dorm life relies on its novel bedroom design. The mostly windowless chambers will be furnished with the bare essentials of a bed, desk, and wardrobe — nothing more will fit. It is a bit of social engineering designed to nudge students out of their bedrooms and into the communal spaces throughout the building, such as the kitchens and great rooms in each of the houses or “our town in the sky,” as the penthouse level is called in design materials. The same spartan furnishings and absent windows that have drawn ire are thus the crucial elements for the building’s intended use and function.

To unpack this further, we can look back nearly a century to a very different housing proposal that was similarly defined by its lack of bedroom appurtenances. Co-op Interieur is a model for an apartment interior produced by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer in 1926 and published in his essay “The New World.” Designed in the precarity of 1920s Europe for a transient urban dweller, Co-op Interieur was represented by a photo showing the corner of a bare room with a bed, a table with a gramophone, two folding chairs, and a shelf. It is an image of emptiness. Floating in that emptiness was a critique of the cloying interiors of the petty bourgeoisie and a demonstration of a new form of living unencumbered by the surfeit of goods and possessions accumulated in the private home under capitalism. As architect Pier Vittorio Aureli explains, linking Co-op Interieur with the radically empty apartment interiors chronicled by Walter Benjamin during his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1926, “Once the private room is reduced to a minimum, people can fully engage in collective life.”

At UCSB, could those demanding exterior windows be clutching at a present-day equivalent of the bourgeois interior comforts rejected by Meyer and Benjamin? Could the omnipresence of essential building systems like HVAC and circadian rhythm lighting somehow instill a stronger collective feeling? That’s unknown. And while Hannes Meyer and Charlie Munger might really be just two strange bedfellows, there is another important parallel between their projects. Namely, each uses a moment of uncertainty to propose a new form of living.

Exterior rendering of Munger Hall, UCSB (image courtesy UCSB)

At UCSB, a longstanding housing shortage has become dire in the pandemic. And the university faces mounting legal pressure from city and county governments for failing to make good on commitments it made over a decade ago to help protect the availability of the local housing stock in exchange for their approval of its campus development plan. Given this context, it is hard not to see the university’s rhetoric about the communal spaces and amenities at Munger Hall as belying the critical issue of the building’s absurd density. It may just be the most ruthlessly efficient way to house 4500 students, virtual windows and all.

Activists Speak Out Against Plan to Relocate NYC’s Controversial Roosevelt Statue to North Dakota

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 23:00:00 +0100

A controversial statue of Theodore Roosevelt that has stood outside New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for more than eight decades will finally find a new home: the forthcoming Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota.

But not everyone is pleased with the announcement of the sculpture’s final destination. The activist organization Decolonize This Place (DTP), which has long advocated for its removal, called the relocation to the new presidential library “the latest example of garbage transfer.”

“A year and a half after the mayor conceded that this monument to white supremacy was no longer welcome, the city finally found a place to dump it,” the group said in a statement. “Long before it is carted away, the statue has already provoked anger and resistance in North Dakota, where it will sit on stolen land in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.”

Last summer, amid historic Black Lives Matter protests, the museum and the city announced their decision to remove the monument, a colossal equestrian bronze of the former US president flanked by two unnamed African and Native American figures. In a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the sculpture “explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.”

Over a year later, the contested statue remains on the museum’s steps, its removal and relocation delayed by public hearings required for monuments that sit on city land. In June, the NYC Public Design Commission voted unanimously in favor of a proposal to move the statue to a then-unconfirmed institution dedicated to Roosevelt’s life and memory. This month, the city entered into a long-term loan agreement with the Roosevelt Presidential Library, set to open in 2026.

A spokesperson for AMNH told Hyperallergic that the removal process “will take several months and will begin this fall.”

DTP protesters covering the Roosevelt statue with a parachute in October of 2016. (Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

The library has a budget of at least $100 million and will be built with private donations near Roosevelt’s former cattle ranch in the badlands of western North Dakota and the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Large parts of the park exist on land seized from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) people with the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851. Executive orders signed in 1870 and 1880 resulted in further loss of territory.

According to Native News Online, tribal leaders were not consulted with regards to the Roosevelt statue’s relocation. “If the state of North Dakota or the [library] asked for our endorsement directly…My answer would be hell no,” Chairman of the MHA Nation Mark Fox told the outlet. “I think it’s ignorant and inappropriate.”

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s immediate request for comment, but a spokesperson told Native News Online that they consulted with the North Dakota Indian Affairs office (a commission appointed by the North Dakota governor).

Because the Presidential Library system wasn’t established until 1939, Roosevelt, who served two terms from 1901 to 1909, does not have a dedicated archive and museum. In a letter on the new institution’s website, CEO Edward F. O’Keefe says it is an opportunity to “build a [Theodore Roosevelt] presidential library in the 2020s, not in the 1920s.”

“We can embrace his flaws, understand [Roosevelt] as a human being, and discover what we can learn from him, not just about him,” O’Keefe said.

Those “flaws” include Roosevelt’s fervent belief in the superiority of the white race and his support of aggressive allotment policies that led to the transfer of approximately 86 million acres of tribal land to the national forest system.

“There is still time to melt down the monument and recycle the bronze for a much better purpose,” DTP said in its statement. “Spare the people of North Dakota.”

From Intricate Stencils to Vibrant Flowers, Nine New Murals Transform Blank Facades in Tbilisi

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 20:31:53 +0100

MonkeyBird. All images courtesy of Tbilisi Mural Fest, shared with permission

Since Tbilisi Mural Fest began in 2019, the streets of Georgia’s capital have seen the towering, large-scale works of artists like Collin van der Sluijs (previously), Case Maclaim, and Faith XLVII (previously), whose celestial, intersecting circles are a highlight of this year’s event. The 2021 festival features nine pieces in total that range in aesthetic and subject matter, including a mythological, black-and-white stencil by MonkeyBird (previously), bold botanicals by Thiago Mazza (previously), and a striking trompe-l’œil papercut by 1010. Each monumental work addresses an environmental, social, or other relevant issue affecting today’s world, and you can find 2021’s lineup below. (via Street Art News)

Thiago Mazza

1010

Faith XLVII

JDL

Left: Kade90. Right: David Samkharadze

APHENOAH

Foundations

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:00:03 +0100

When SFMOMA established its archives in 2006, the museum was lucky enough to have its early records, dating back to its founding in 1935, still intact and ready to be accessed by the research public. Among those records were ones documenting the activities of the Women’s Board, formed in 1934 as an auxiliary to the almost exclusively male Board of Trustees and tasked with fundraising, event, and publicity responsibilities.

“When it was set up it was meant to be primarily social, with the idea of a Lady Bountiful, you know, to receive at receptions and previews and so on,” SFMOMA’s first director, Grace McCann Morley, explained in a 1960 interview with the Regional Oral History Office. “Well, these women were of a caliber to whom that would not have had continuous appeal. They were perfectly willing to do their duty socially, and it was very necessary and helpful, of course, to have that kind of social representation at our big openings and previews and so on, and the social publicity that it produced was very good. But they were of a type to respond with more conviction to other more serious interests, and that’s why I called on them so continuously and so urgently, and very often at much sacrifice of their time, energy and even money, to give me support in the educational development of the museum.”

Morley, seated far right, in a meeting with the members of the Women’s Board, c. 1956

It may be easy, as I once did, to dismiss at first glance the volunteer work of well-to-do women, but it would be a mistake. These individuals established the foundation of SFMOMA as we know it today. From early on, their focus, with the guidance of Morley, was squarely on education and community outreach. The museum’s film program and other important offerings such as tours, classes, lectures, concerts, and performances were established within the first couple of years of the group’s operations.

Here are just a few of the events sponsored by the Women’s Board:

Filmmaker Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema film series

Koto performance by Shinishi Yuize, 1953

Ravi Shankar performing on April 10th, 1957

School tour of the exhibition Design in Scandinavia, 1957

Children’s art class, 1961

Before SFMOMA could afford a paid staff, the Women’s Board oversaw numerous endeavors at the institution. Member Louise Ackerman volunteered at Saturday morning children’s art classes, and managed the library from 1938 until the museum could afford to hire a librarian. Clara Heller paid for art periodical subscriptions for the library; she and Helen Crocker Russell also donated film equipment. The group established a $25 revolving fund to set up the museum bookshop, and upon the recommendation of Marge Lindner, the museum even opened a branch in the Parkmerced Towers in 1952. Its goal was to “enlist the interest and active participation of a great number of residents who could not otherwise take advantage of museum membership.” The space hosted classes and exhibitions.

Bookshop at the Van Ness building, 1953

Library at the Van Ness building, n.d.

Parkmerced gallery, 1952

Morley relied on the Women’s Board heavily during World War II, when the draft left the museum understaffed. Its participation in the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program was among its most notable activities during this period; member Dorothy Liebes, a textile designer, introduced the program to her colleagues in 1943.

Meeting minutes describe the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program as consisting of “artists from many fields who are willing to donate their time and services to teach their crafts to the convalescent soldiers, sailors, and marines now in the seven service hospitals in the Bay Region. This work will be carried on under the supervision of an American Red Cross field worker, its object being threefold: first, to provide the men with recreation; second, to teach them to re-educate their muscles; third, as a morale builder as well as a possible means of support.”

It was an effort to use art as therapy for wounded soldiers, recruiting local artists as teachers and placing them in military hospitals. A motion was passed that the work be carried on under Liebes’s chairmanship and that the museum help register artists willing to give their time.

Promotional brochure for the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program (recto).

Promotional brochure for the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program (verso).

Bay Area artists, including Ruth Armer, Victor Arnautoff, and Clay Spohn, volunteered for this program in many capacities — as instructors, as jurors for the exhibitions of the works produced, and as advisors. The artist and writer William Justema proposed expanding the program to include writing workshops. Writing to Marion Chidester, Justema explained that “there are many wounded men who have no feeling for the plastic expression who might, however, be helped by having their means to express themselves in writing increased. In my own case I was often sustained through the fourteen months I spent in the Army by a kind of verse diary I was always working on — in the sense that it gave me a thread for my days, a continuous interest… Everyone is said to have a story in him — the wounded surely have.”

Justema’s suggestion does not appear to have been incorporated into the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program. The body of records, though, reflects the commitment so many local artists had to this program.

Installation views of 2nd Annual West Coast Arts and Skills Exhibition, American Red Cross in 1948

Another significant Women’s Board contribution was the Rental Gallery, launched by Chidester in 1947. This precursor to the Artist Gallery at Fort Mason ¹ was an early museum effort at community outreach. Works were exhibited in the gallery space dedicated to the program and available for rent or sale to the museum public. “There is a section of the art-minded public which does not find the time to attend the many interesting exhibitions in the museum,” Chidester explained in a report. “But with the aid of the Rental Gallery works of art by local artists are circulating in private homes — in most cases the environment for which they were created. Some become a permanent possession through purchase. Thus this plan inevitably serves the artist.”

Rental Gallery invitation.

In its early decades, Rental Gallery exhibitions featured Bay Area artists such as Ruth Asawa, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Adaline Kent, Emmy Lou Packard, David Park, Nell Sinton, and Hassel Smith, to name a few.

Installation view of the exhibition Rental Gallery in Spring 1954

Installation view of the exhibition Rental Gallery in Spring 1955

Installation view of the exhibition Autumn Rental Gallery in 1956

In the 1956, the Women’s Board added a school program component to the Rental Gallery, extending the reach of its existing rental and educational activities. Schools were invited to participate by bringing their students to the museum. The children were given an introductory tour by a museum docent and then brought to the Rental Gallery, where they voted by ballot for their favorite work.

Installation view of the exhibition Spring Rental Gallery (1958) with school group in the background

Rental Gallery School Program brochure

Thank you letter from student

The Women’s Board contributed in myriad meaningful ways beyond their original mandate, often behind the scenes. Members sent care packages to enlisted staff during World War II, for example. And after the war, they donated art books to damaged German university libraries. Back home, Janette Spencer worked with engineering to oversee lighting in the galleries; Frances Elkins helped furnish the museum member’s room; Margery Smith managed the renovations to the staff break room and kitchen.

In a 1982 oral history with the Archives of American Art, Morley mentions that whereas the board met once a year at most, the Women’s Board “met monthly and had a very deep interest in everything that went on in the museum, lending a lively support to everything it did. This was a constant encouragement and solace in periods of disappointment and in failures to achieve the standards that one aspired to.”

The board disbanded in 1975 and joined with another auxiliary group, the Membership Activities Board, to form the Modern Art Council (MAC). On the occasion of this merger, Mary Heath Keesling, former trustee and President of the Women’s Board, summarized, “To attempt to write about the spirit of the Women’s Board is like trying to describe in everyday terms one of the nature’s rare phenomena. The spirit, which was a unique quality of this particular board, was based on belief, and this belief created a force — a selfless and tireless dedication that has prevailed throughout the years. Many who served responded to the magic and thus remarkable things took place on a simple volunteer level. The belief was established by Grace McCann Morley, the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Art ². Along with John Humphrey ³, a couple of typewriters, and a few prints and drawings from Albert Bender ⁴, the Museum began in its present surroundings. Most of all it began at the outset of a glorious period in the history of the art of the Bay Area. Grace Morley was firmly convinced of the importance of art and she gave generously to the local artists space in the Museum to show their works.”

During my nine years at SFMOMA, I spent a lot of time in the archives poring over inspirational moments in our history, trying to understand why they happened, how they were sustained, and how they could be replicated. A desire to make sense of the world is probably what drew me to this profession in the first place; there are so many factors for why a good thing doesn’t last or why good people have to leave. So I search for clues — even if the ability to make sense of things is little comfort when faced with colleagues losing their livelihood and the institution losing parts of itself.

This summer, my last at the museum, brought news of the end of the museum’s Artist Gallery, Film Program, Modern Art Council — and Open Space. It is hard to say goodbye to these foundational programs, and it seemed appropriate, as I, too, was leaving, to reflect on their creation and their contributions.

The post Foundations appeared first on Open Space.

Learn to Build Speculative Worlds in SCI-Arc’s LA-Based Fiction and Entertainment Postgraduate Program

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 17:51:37 +0100

“Mercury XX,” short film designed and directed by Miriam Kuhlmann, SCI-Arc Fiction & Entertainment 2020

SCI-Arc’s Master of Science in Fiction and Entertainment is a one-year, three-semester program during which students work with world-renowned professionals from the entertainment industry to develop expertise in worldbuilding, storytelling, film, animation, visual effects, and video games to build new forms of creative practice. 

Our perception of the world is unquestionably determined by the extraordinary shared languages of fiction and entertainment. Through these stories, we exchange ideas and engage with our environment. Fictional worlds have always been sites where we can prototype new scenarios and emerging cultures. They can act as teleportation machines, helping us immerse ourselves in the various consequences of the decisions we face today. They can be both cautionary tales or roadmaps to an aspirational future.

The Master of Science in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc provides the opportunity for students to learn the techniques of entertainment design and visual storytelling, as well as employ a broad range of digital and narrative tools to imagine, animate, and produce compelling, alternative worlds. Deeply embedded in the entertainment industry of Los Angeles, the program challenges students to develop provocative stories that critically examine the emerging conditions of contemporary life.

Organized as a year-long thesis project, students are encouraged to develop a unique directorial voice and personal body of work that may take the form of a short film, animation, music video, documentary, video game, graphic novel, VR environment, immersive experience, or performance. The Fiction and Entertainment curriculum simultaneously creates space for students to develop their own interests, passions, and agendas while directly focusing on preparation for careers that will continue to propel their professional practice after graduation and help them to transition into their chosen field.

Throughout the year, students are supported by an intense program of workshops, talks, and mentoring sessions led by world-renowned filmmakers, concept artists, screenwriters, and animators from the film and entertainment industry. A critical motivation of the program is helping students to establish a productive network of collaborators and ongoing mentors to help launch them and their work after graduation.

Recent graduates from the program are developing careers in production design, creative direction, video games, visual effects, commercial, music video and TV production, media art, and design research. Projects incubated within Fiction and Entertainment have premiered at festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW, Rotterdam, and platforms such as Nowness, VICE, FACT, and many more.

Applications for students and scholarships are now open, and details can be found on the program website.

“Breach,” interactive concept album by Rick Farin, SCI-Arc Fiction & Entertainment 2019

“Earth Mother Sky Father,” music film directed by Kordae Henry, SCI-Arc Fiction & Entertainment 2018

“Where Turtles Fly,” video game created by Andre Zakhia, SCI-Arc Fiction & Entertainment 2020

“A Graphic Memoir,” VR experience created by Ainslee Alem Robson, SCI-Arc Fiction & Entertainment 2019

London: Announcing our March 2022 Selection Committee

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 16:31:44 +0100

Applicants to The Other Art Fair benefit from a juried selection by esteemed art experts. The renowned Selection Committee changes with each edition of the fair to ensure that a fresh perspective is brought to each selection process. These members of a globally significant art community set the high standard of the fair, ensuring visitors can buy from our artists with the confidence that they are investing in the very best emerging talent.

We are happy to introduce our esteemed Selection Committee for The Other Art Fair London, happening March 10 – 13, 2022, at the Old Truman Brewery, Shoreditch.

ALESSIO ANTONIOLLI

Director of Gasworks

Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks, where he leads a programme of exhibitions, international residencies and participatory events. He is also the Director of Triangle Network, a world-wide network of visual art organisations that work together to create artists’ exchanges and to share knowledge with each other. He has lectured widely and has been part of many juries including the UK’s Turner Prize in 2019.

ELLEN MARA DE WACHTER

Arts and Culture Writer

Ellen Mara De Wachter is an arts and culture writer based in London. Her writing has featured in a range of publications, including Frieze, Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, The World of Interiors, Tate Etc. and The White Review.

Her book ‘Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration’ explores the phenomenon of collaboration in the visual arts and its potential in society at large. She is co-author of ‘Great ~~Women~~ Artists’; ‘African Artists: From 1882 to Now’ and several medium-specific anthologies. She has contributed essays and interviews to exhibition publications on a broad range of artists including Kathrin Böhm, Fiona Tan, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Melanie Manchot, Emma Hart and Jonathan Baldock, Rachel Maclean and Sora Kim, among others.

In 2013-15 De Wachter was Curator of Public Collection Development at the Contemporary Art Society, where she was responsible for the acquisitions scheme for museums across the UK. Prior to that, she worked at various arts organisations in London, including the Barbican Art Gallery and the British Museum.

She mentors artists and writers, and has taught widely, including at Central Saint Martins, Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College.

REBECCA WILSON

Chief Curator and VP of Art Advisory, Saatchi Art

Rebecca Wilson is the Chief Curator and VP, Art Advisory at Saatchi Art. She was formerly a Director at the Saatchi Gallery, London, where she was instrumental in the launch of the gallery’s online presence.

In 2007 she created New Sensations, a prize for art students which identifies and supports the most exciting emerging artists in the UK.

Prior to joining the Saatchi Gallery, Rebecca worked for 14 years in book and art magazine publishing: she was editor of ArtReview, and before that deputy editor of Modern Painters. She has over 15 years of experience working with emerging artists.

Infrared Light Enhances Versailles, Provence, and the Beaches of Normandy with Dreamy Shades of Pink

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 15:38:06 +0100

All images © Paolo Pettigiani, shared with permission

Previously having captured the Dolomites and New York City’s Central Park in a candy-colored glow, photographer Paolo Pettigiani now adds urban and rural France to his ongoing collection of infrared images. The magical series documents the rolling lavender fields of Provence in watermelon hues and Versailles’s landscaped terraces or the Gothic abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel in bright, saturated tones. Pettigiani shoots each location with a full-spectrum camera that unveils otherwise invisible wavelengths and enhances the trees, grasses, and stone surfaces that reflect infrared light with varying shades of pink.

See more from the France Infraland series on Pettigiani’s Behance and Instagram, and shop prints of the surreal landscapes on Lumas.

Many Galleries are Closed on Mondays . . .

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 15:00:49 +0100

(in photo: clients with 3 Geometry Totems by Linza) On a Monday in May, I happened to be alone in the gallery. This isn’t usually the case, but my gallery...

The post Many Galleries are Closed on Mondays . . . appeared first on RedDotBlog.

Where Intuition and Mathematics Meet with Jean-Luc Feug...

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 14:00:18 +0100

As the saying goes, you have to learn the rules in order to break them. For Jean-Luc Feugeas, a French painter with a PhD in mathematics who now works as a university researcher in theoretical physics, the rules of perspective and the principles of geometry ebb and flow on the canvas, bending to the artist’s intuition. The results are fragmentary, colorful compositions wherein figures coalesce with their surroundings. Slouching and sprawled across furniture, or pensively caving inward onto themselves, the figures in Jean-Luc’s works come alive in their movements, seemingly conscious of the illogical spaces that contain them. Addressing themes such as relationships, longing, and migration, these formally fragmented spaces become metaphors for the social and political spaces that we, the viewers, navigate everyday.

Jean-Luc’s work has been collected internationally, with works held in private collections throughout North America, Europe, and East Asia. He has exhibited around the world, with his most recent exhibition at Frogman Gallery in Beijing. He has also been commissioned for numerous public mural projects, including the 2019 mural Un Sauvage on the occasion of Muralis, the Festival of Urban Art in Dax, France.

Tell us about who you are and what you do. What’s your background?

As far back as I can remember, I have always divided my time between drawing and music. Mathematics imposed itself. Painting came to me later. Music never left me. Over time I figured out my approach is one of a researcher, both as a scientist and as an artist.

What does your work aim to say? What are the major themes you pursue in your work?

The themes I deal with are perfectly ordinary: I speak about people, family, love, absence, society, life—its torments and its appeasements… Meetings mainly feed my painting.

Can you walk us through your process for creating a work from beginning to end?

The initial intention feeds my first pencil lines on paper. The lines then follow one another. I choose to privilege my intuition of reality to the elementary rules of a realistic representation: a character can be confused with a table or a chair; a swimming pool can appear in a room; I free myself from the rules of perspective and proportion. The gestures follow one another and circulate. Accidents follow one another, sometimes with happiness. They guide me if I know how to decipher them. This succession of balances and imbalances, tensions and resolutions, instills a breathe, assisted at first and more durably afterwards.

And then, a detail appears. It justifies everything and the breath settles. The trajectories then follow one another, meet, fade, correct and complete each other. The initial intention resurfaces. I obey. I want only one line. Then, I put the colors, I oppose them and associate them. I resolve a multitude of minute imbalances until the emergence of a global balance, which when reached, marks the end of this divergent phase. The line then closes. The canvas is finished.

Who are your biggest influences and why?

I singularly lack in originality because my influences mainly come from the very famous figures of art. If I were to choose, here are the main ones: Le Corbusier because he is an explorer and a precursor; Wassily Kandinsky because he is both a theoretician and a practitioner in art; Robert Rauschenberg because he knew that disorder is equilibrium; Pablo Picasso because he never stopped inventing.

In addition, I keep very preciously advices from my two mentors: my piano and harmony professor taught me to listen; and my scientific mentor, a Russian professor of physics, taught me the importance of integrity.

How does your work comment on current social and political issues?

To answer this question, I choose the example of the piece Un Sauvage. This has been created [as a mural] for the French Urban Art Festival; it is also one of my paintings. Un Sauvage is about those who leave for a simple journey or for a better life. Those who have decided to draw their borders and territories. Those who follow their own line and who dream of freedom. Un Sauvage is the day after the big day, the day of the longed-for departure. It is also the day of an inexorable shipwreck. Un Sauvage is the story of those who, captive of a makeshift boat, are abandoned at sea under an overwhelming sun, with others. Many others. Like them. Migrants, who dreamed of this “better world” that now considers them unworthy. Which treats them like savages. This is the story of a rescue that will never come.

It is a line of horizon or arrival, a line of flight or political, a line of life, of floating and finally a line of sight… Un Sauvage is the story of a shipwreck. Ours, no doubt. The shipwreck, a model of democracy. Of an ideal. It is the observation of a consented brutality, of our egoism, of our individual and collective cowardice which is transformed into a human catastrophe which ends up blowing up in our faces. Un Sauvage is a feeling of helplessness.

What memorable responses have you had to your work?

My work has been called “post-neo-modern” by a curator. I found it great fun and, in fact, I sure like it. More seriously, sometimes, people who own my paintings contact me. It is very disturbing, because by listening to them speaking about my work, I understand that the process that I have initiated is continuing on without me. The observer makes the work. It is the quantum dimension of art!

Love reading about all things art? You can have articles from Canvas, curated collections, and stories about emerging artists delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for the Saatchi Art Newsletter.

Featured Artist Sara Miller

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 13:00:13 +0100

Fiber artist Sara Miller’s colorful portfolio moves beyond traditional quilts with a new contemporary interpretation. Find more of her work on her website.

“Out of the Box – Blues #1″ fiber, 41″ x 45”

I create Art to Brighten Your World. I’m a fiber artist, art quilter, mixed media and abstract expressionist painter. I love bright vivid colors.

“Sunny Daze #1″ fiber, 30″ x 48”

Since growing up in New York, I have lived in both Los Angeles and the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Recently I relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to pursue my passion for the arts. I now have a fabulous new studio/gallery in Santa Fe called Sara Miller Contemporary Art.

“Out of the Box – Celebration #2″ fiber, 28″ x 28”

I believe my passion and career as a fiber artist started at the early age of five. In kindergarten on finger-painting day, I decided the pale pink dress my mom had made me wasn’t bright enough. I decided to embellish it with a bright red rose on the front. Needless to say, my teacher and mom were not as happy with the results as I was.

“Out of the Box – Bridges #2″ fiber, 42″ x 33”

In seventh grade, I learned to sew in home economics class and began sewing many of my own clothes. I loved making clothes because they were always unique and one of a kind. I’ve been creating with fiber for as long as I can remember.

“Out of the Box – Circus #1″ fiber, 35″ x 41”

After years working in the computer industry, in 2002 I was able to pursue a much more creative career. This changed my life’s path to the creative world that I am now lucky enough to work in. I combined my technology background with my love of sewing. I was hired to become a creative consultant for an international sewing machine company. My job was to inspire customers using the latest computerized sewing and embroidery machines.

“Purple Dream” fiber, 37″ x 47″

While creating quilts and teaching others how to quilt, I developed a unique quilting template system. I marketed this system internationally to the quilting industry for almost twenty years. During that time frame, I also began to design fabric for a major New York fabric manufacturer. I did this by painting on fabric using fabric paints, much like I did in kindergarten.

“Out of the Box – Bridges #1″ fiber, 35″ x 50”

My goal as an artist is to bring the joy and happiness I experience when creating to my viewers and collectors. The bright colors in nature inspire and energize me. I don’t do dull, and am happiest working with vivid colors.

“Out of the Box – Celebration #1″ fiber, 27″ x 38”

I love working with unexpected colors, curved flowing shapes and textures using fabrics and fibers. They seem to take on a life of their own. I use these elements to represent how life is always changing and flowing, creating new directions and experiences.

“Sunny Daze #1″ fiber, 24″ x 48”

After spending so much time in my studio during the pandemic, I’ve really enjoyed getting back to my roots as a fiber artist. My newest series is called Out of the Box.

“Out of the Box – Circus #2″ fiber, 40″ x 48”

During the trying times of Covid, I found comfort in getting back to my sewing machines and working with fabric and fiber once again. Getting outside the edges of my canvas was the small freedom I had to escape the boundaries I felt being confined to in my studio and home for so many months.

Artist Sara Miller invites you to follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.

Want to stay current on cutting edge business articles from Artsy Shark, plus artist features, and an invitation to the next Call for Artists? Click below to sign up for our twice-monthly email. You’ll get all this plus opportunities and special offers that you can’t get anywhere else!

For Email Marketing you can trust.

The post Featured Artist Sara Miller appeared first on Artsy Shark.

“The Day After Tomorrow” by Photographer Eric Asamoah

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 11:22:27 +0100

“Distance” by Illustrator Evan M. Cohen

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 11:21:24 +0100

Last minute Domestika Cyber Monday 2021 deals!

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 10:43:29 +0100

All courses, including the expensive ones are now, just US$9.99.

Go find your favourite artists on Domestika.

Book Review: Batman: The Definitive History of the Dark Knight in Comics, Film, and Beyond

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 06:25:02 +0100

This is a humongous 400-page hardcover that's probably a must-buy for all Batman fans. This is definitely the definitive history of Batman to date.

This book tries to cover a lot and it does a good job. It covers the different medium Batman has appeared in from the first appearance in comics in 1939, to TV shows, animation, movies and video games. There lots of beautiful huge artworks, storyboards, comics and photos. It's very interesting to see how Batman has evolved over the decades. And I still get a chuckle each time I see Lego Batman.

The commentary is extensive with artists, directors and creatives such as Neal Adams, Tim Burton, Paul Dini, Steve Englehart, Mark Hamill, Grant Morrison, Jule Newmar, Christopher Nolan, Denny O'Neil, Joe Schumacher, Scott Synder and Zack Synder.

This is the best book to learn all about Batman. Author Andrew Farago has done an incredible job with this book. Just the sheer size of the book is enough to put a smile on any Batman fan.

Highly recommended.

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

Batman: The Definitive History of the Dark Knight in Comics, Film, and Beyond is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN) and Book Depository

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

The links below are affiliate links, which means I earn some commission from each purchase, but at no extra cost to you.

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

Our Wandering, Rootless Nature, Given Shape by a Jewish Tradition

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 22:03:00 +0100

LOS ANGELES — The Jewish holiday of Sukkot is one of contradictions. Known as the “Festival of Booths,” it celebrates both the bounty of the fall harvest and commemorates the biblical exodus of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage. During the weeklong autumn holiday, Jews erect a sukkah, a temporary, walled structure whose roof is covered with vegetation, often palm fronds. The sukkah recalls the provisional huts that farmers would live in during harvest season, as well as the makeshift dwellings that the Israelites sheltered in during the 40-year period spent wandering the desert, between leaving Egypt and finding the land of Canaan. Also central to the holiday are the ushpizin, seven ancient exalted guests who are symbolically invited into the sukkah, one on each night. (More recently, seven female figures, the ushpizot, have been added to the tradition.) Poor people or others in need are often invited into the sukkah to represent the ushpizin in real life. The harvest bounty being celebrated is tempered by a prayer for rain, looking ahead to potential future seasons of drought.

Sukkot provides the framework for We Are All Guests Here, an eight-person exhibition at Bridge Projects, a gallery whose mission is to explore the crossover between art and spirituality. In the holiday’s complex and opposing themes of precarity and plenitude, searching and security, the artists — all of whom have “various connections to Judaism” — have found ways to engage with a range of contemporary issues. “Homelessness, migration, water rights, lynching. Every piece touches on a difficult topic,” Cara Megan Lewis, co-director of Bridge Projects, told Hyperallergic. Even though they’re confronting heavy topics, “there’s this element of hope. The commandment to rejoice” — another central tenet of Sukkot — “is present in each of the works,” she noted.

Some of the artists reflect on the physical structure of the sukkah. Jenny Yurshansky’s hovering, crystalline shelter, “We Are All Guests Here,” recreates the sukkah’s traditional woven reed pattern in cast glass. A refugee herself from Soviet-era Moldova, Yurshansky speaks to the tenuous nature of the security and safety that refugees and migrants yearn for, threatening to shatter with the slightest blow. Her reeds are modeled on Arundo donax, a plant that is now blacklisted as an invasive species in California and targeted for removal, a bitter metaphor for the hostility many migrants face.

Susy Bielak, “Cuarto de Estar (Living Room)” (2021), wall coverings created with digitized paintings, antique dresser mirrors, acrylic, steel bases, photo transfers and graphic rubbing on custom-cut MDF (photo by Robert Wedemeyer)

Susy Bielak explores architecture as well, not of the sukkah, but of her familial home in Mexico City. Her background also reveals a story of migration, from Poland to Mexico, and the Ukraine to Los Angeles, where her parents met at Canter’s Deli. “Cuarto de Estar (Living Room)” reimagines her paternal grandparents’ house in Mexico City, where they settled after fleeing Poland over a century ago. On the backs of freestanding vintage dresser mirrors, Bielak has transferred hazy photos of the home’s interior, some taken by her 20 years ago, others by her father 40 years ago, like palimpsests of the home’s story. Wallpaper covers two walls featuring a repeating motif of a water jug, referencing the water and wine that are part of Sukkot’s ritual, and contains the viewer like an envelope.

Rael San Fratello, “Sukkah of the Signs/Homeless House” (2021), purchased and collected signs from individuals experiencing homelessness, wood (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Although she was born in Mexico, Bielak was raised in Pittsburgh, returning to Mexico to visit throughout her childhood. “I grew up far from family,” she recalled during a recent phone call. “This house was family for me.” In much the same way that the sukkah represents rootless rambling, so too does the home for Bielak. “We were talking about the sukkah as a place to hold the memory of wandering,” she explained. “Home and domestic objects do the same thing.”

“Sukkah of the Signs” by Rael San Fratello, the collaborative duo of Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, is a shack whose walls are made from cardboard signs asking for food, money, or assistance that the artists purchased from those who made them. Despite its metonymic depiction of the link between insecurity and stability, the homeless it represents remain faceless and nameless, still unknown multitudes. It misses the opportunity to humanize these individuals, each of whom has their own story of wandering and yearning for shelter and sustenance.

Brody Albert, “We Buy Houses” (2021), indigo-dyed and Pomegranate-stained wood (photo by Robert Wedemeyer)

Brody Albert takes a more abstract approach to our mundane material surroundings. “We Buy Houses” is composed of plywood recreations of signs and discarded objects found in his Lincoln Heights neighborhood: Signs for check cashing joints, discarded pizza boxes, and predatory flyers offering cash for homes in hopes of capitalizing on peoples’ desperation. The verisimilitude of their construction is at odds with their otherworldly blues and reds as they are dyed with pomegranate and indigo.

“In the mindset of the pandemic, I was thinking about the moratorium on evictions, the housing crisis, impossibility of home ownership,” Albert told Hyperallergic. Once a neighborhood filled with Jewish and Italian immigrants, Lincoln Heights is now primarily Latinx. The neighborhood is being reshaped once again, only now through gentrification which threatens to push out longtime, lower-income residents. The abundance of Sukkot is referenced in the pizza boxes, specifically the Little Caesars Hot N Ready, which is supposedly the most nourishment you can purchase for five dollars, though the quality of that nourishment is questionable. What does it mean when the physical fabric of your environment, the place you call home, is actively hostile towards your well-being? the piece seems to ask.

Mira Burack, “Sacred Bouquet” (2021), four-channel video installation (photo by Robert Wedemeyer)
SaraNoa Mark, “Prayer for Rain,” collected water from Lake Michigan, Mississippi River, Colorado River, and Castaic Lake. carved clay, carved glass, aluminum (photo by Robert Wedemeyer)

Two other artists explore Sukkot’s connection to the land. In her four-channel video installation “Sacred Bouquet,” Mira Burack replaces the traditional “Four Species” of the holiday — lulav (date palm frond), etrog (citrus), hadass (Myrtle), aravah (willow) — with flora native to her home in New Mexico: juniper, yucca, prickly pear, and piñon. In SaraNoa Mark‘s evocative installation “Prayer for Rain,” water gathered from Lake Michigan, the Mississippi River, the Colorado River, and Castaic Lake drip from hanging glass vessels onto carved clay tablets, linking ancient ceremony with current issues surrounding water rights. Burack and Mark emphasize the site-specific nature of the sukkahs, which take on different characteristics wherever one is raised.

The work in the show that most explicitly links the twisted themes of Sukkot to the turbulence of contemporary society is “Shelter in Place” by artist, dancer, and choreographer Adam W. McKinney. The installation reflects on Fred Rouse, an African American man who was lynched by a white mob in Fort Worth, Texas a century ago. In tintypes by Diné photographer Will Wilson, McKinney poses as Fred Rouse in locations around Fort Worth related to the lynching. Using an AR app developed by Wilson, Talking Tintypes, viewers can see the figure come to life, thus “making the antique contemporary,” McKinney told Hyperallergic. “I’m using my body as a canvas by which I remember him, and using dance and imagery as a way to heal historical and contemporary anti-Black racial violence.”

Adam W. McKinney, “Shelter in Place” (2021) (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Alongside the photographs is a two-screen video installation depicting McKinney performing a dance that represents the Shechinah, or Glorious Clouds. “When the Israelites were in the desert, God sent clouds of glory to protect them on their journey,” he explained. It is both a comforting but painful vision that questions how history would have been different had glorious clouds been sent to protect Fred Rouse.

McKinney wrestles with this painful history, not simply to unearth and expose it, but to move towards a place of healing and growth. “Sukkot is also known as the ‘time of our rejoicing.’ I ask: ‘how can we be happy and rejoice if we don’t fully understand our history?’”

This points to something that the artists in We Are All Guests Here all underscore in different ways: that Sukkot is not the commemoration of a long-ago event or veneration of an ancient figure. Rather it is a living festival, whose flexibility continues to offer solace and community for new generations. “None of us have ever arrived,” Bridge Projects’s Lewis said. “We’re always in that desert, always waiting on the promised land, that sense of belonging.”

Adam W. McKinney, “Shelter in Place” (2021) (iPhone screenshot of AR activation, photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

Benin Artist, “Plaque with Figure of Leopard” (circa 16th–17th century), Edo: Benin Kingdom, Nigeria, copper alloy, 13 3/8 x 17 3/8 x 1 1/2 inches, at the New Orleans Museum of Art

Organizations like the Legacy Restoration Trust are working with the Benin government, the Digital Benin Project, art historians, and museums throughout the world to ensure the creation of a sustainable, world-class institution to showcase these treasures.

We can begin to right the wrongs of the past by helping ensure that future stewards of these works have the resources to tell the story of Benin for generations to come. It will take time, patience, and deep discussions about establishing practices that will guide these decisions going forward, and it is something I am committed to doing in my capacity as an advisor for the new museum.

Through like-minded partnerships and collaborations, we can move forward together in telling the story of the kingdom’s past in ways that highlight why these works are considered such wonders. This work is just beginning, but it is just and truly noble in its endeavor to correct past offenses.

In my role as the Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, I am fortunate to work at an institution that is as committed to participating in the processes of repatriation as I am. The museum has signed up to be a part of the Digital Benin project, along with furthering the conversation about repatriation at academic conferences and in other art spaces.

While indeed the Benin Bronzes were created for the Oba, they now belong to the citizens of Benin, Nigeria, who in turn want to welcome those who want to see their world. And just like artists who want others to be moved by the beauty of their creations, so too will Benin be proud to host the world as it joins us in celebrating our dynamic artistic heritage.

The Complicated Legacy of Modernist Minori Yamasaki, Architect of World Trade Center

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 22:01:00 +0100

Buildings, like people, have lifespans. They are conceived, they exist, and then they die, with causes of death ranging from demolition to disaster to deliberate attack. No building is forever, and no architect’s career has embodied this truth more than that of Minori Yamasaki, whose best-known structures — the original World Trade Center and the Pruit-Igoe housing project — were both destroyed on national television. In his book Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021), author and artist Justin Beal argues that neither the twin towers nor Pruit-Igoe will — or should — be remembered as masterpieces. But he argues that no other pair of structures, from their auspicious beginnings to their premature demise, “have exerted a greater influence on the course of American architecture.”

Aerial photograph of the future site of the World Trade Center; found in 1963/64 Special Issue of Via Port of New York

Throughout Sandfuture, Beal uses Yamasaki’s life as scaffolding for a hybrid work of architectural history, cultural criticism, and personal memoir. Memories, anecdotes, statistics, critiques, and archival excerpts all blend together. The book eludes easy categorization: Beal writes in nonlinear fragments, eschews chapters and section delineations, and moves freely between genres. Readers seeking biography, be warned: the back cover claims that it is “about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki,” but Sandfuture is less “about” Yamasaki than it is periodically haunted by him.

Sandfuture by Justin Beal (cover); Battery Park Beach, May 15, 1977, Fred R Conrad, courtesy the New York Times/Redux. Cover design by John Morgan Studio

Beal is often keener to parse his own experiences than Yamasaki’s. His personal digressions can slow the book’s narrative momentum, but they also contain some of its most elegant prose. A gifted writer, Beal is especially adept at translating the haptic sensations of architecture onto the page. At the start of Sandfuture, he describes the twin towers: “You could stand in the space between them,” he writes, “where the air vibrated with silent energy, and imagine you were standing between the tines of a tuning fork.”

At his best, Beal is an astute critic. He punctures the outsized influence of tuberculosis on modern architecture, as distinctive features like white walls, sparse decoration, open interiors, and ample windows can be traced back to the advent of the sanatorium. He unearths the tradition of human sacrifice within construction, citing one Balkan folktale that says a building is only complete once an offering — usually an immured person — has been made. And he expands upon philosopher Paul Virilio’s concept of “the integral accident,” which suggests that essential to the aura of tall buildings is the anxiety that they could topple at any moment; the skyscraper, Virillo wrote, “cannot be decoupled from the specter of its own failure.”

Aerial view of Pruitt-Igoe apartments, March 3, 1968; US Geological Survey

In Sandfuture, Yamasaki’s life and work likewise cannot be decoupled from the specter of his failures. In the latter half of his career, the acrophobic architect fell steeply from favor: after the construction of Pruit-Igoe in 1955, he earned a “reputation as a cost-conscious designer who could deliver a handsome product on time, even at a mammoth scale.” The Yamasaki name attracted high-profile projects, including the commission to build the twin towers in 1962; the following year, he graced the cover of TIME.

But by the ’70s, Pruit-Igoe had fallen into such dire disrepair that it was torn down, its demolition spawning photographs that turned it into “a symbol of the failure of a generation of architects to deliver the social and political panacea they had promised.” Meanwhile, public opinion toward the World Trade Center, under construction from 1966 to 1973, shifted as the era’s politics sowed widespread cynicism. Pundits that had once cheered the project now decried it as a monument to bureaucracy, inequity, and reckless American capitalism. By then even his earliest and most outspoken supporters, among them the brilliant and fiery Ada Louise Huxtable, turned on him; when asked, 20 years after the towers were completed, if she regretted any of her past critical judgements, she replied: “The only thing I think I screwed up on was Yamasaki.”

Minoru Yamasaki and assistant with Model of World Trade Center (c. 1969), photographed by Balthazar Korab (courtesy the Library of Congress)

An artist’s legacy, Beal shows, is shaped as much by cultural forces as it is by the artist’s actual body of work. Yamasaki’s architectural philosophy, at least at the outset of his career, is beautiful to behold: in essays like “Toward an Architecture for Enjoyment” and “Visual Delight in Architecture,” he championed the idea that “delight and reflection” are essential, but often absent, components of modern architecture. He argued that “good architecture makes you want to touch it” and abhorred the totalitarian instinct to make buildings “powerful and brutal,” rather than “inviting, friendly, and humane.”

Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Rainier Bank Tower (Seattle, Washington, 1972-1977), photographed by Balthazar Korab (courtesy the Library of Congress)

Yet by the end of his career, Yamasaki’s original ethos seemed not just naive but impracticable. Within 30 years of one another, his two most well-known works were destroyed, their ruins linked forever to the perils of American idealism and hubris. Toward the end of Sandfuture, Huxtable herself best explains the bend in Yamasaki’s arc, which mirrored a mass disillusionment in the power of architecture and design to better people’s lives. “We truly believed that the horizons of technology, the horizons of art were going to lead us to a better place and make us better people,” she says of modernist architects, including Yamasaki. “We found this wasn’t true.”

Sandfuture by Justin Beal is published by MIT Press.

The Complicated Legacy of Modernist Minoru Yamasaki, Architect of World Trade Center

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 22:01:00 +0100

Buildings, like people, have lifespans. They are conceived, they exist, and then they die, with causes of death ranging from demolition to disaster to deliberate attack. No building is forever, and no architect’s career has embodied this truth more than that of Minoru Yamasaki, whose best-known structures — the original World Trade Center and the Pruit-Igoe housing project — were both destroyed on national television. In his book Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021), author and artist Justin Beal argues that neither the twin towers nor Pruit-Igoe will — or should — be remembered as masterpieces. But he argues that no other pair of structures, from their auspicious beginnings to their premature demise, “have exerted a greater influence on the course of American architecture.”

Aerial photograph of the future site of the World Trade Center; found in 1963/64 Special Issue of Via Port of New York

Sandfuture by Justin Beal (cover); Battery Park Beach, May 15, 1977, Fred R Conrad, courtesy the New York Times/Redux. Cover design by John Morgan Studio

Aerial view of Pruitt-Igoe apartments, March 3, 1968; US Geological Survey

Minoru Yamasaki and assistant with Model of World Trade Center (c. 1969), photographed by Balthazar Korab (courtesy the Library of Congress)

Minoru Yamasaki & Associates, Rainier Bank Tower (Seattle, Washington, 1972-1977), photographed by Balthazar Korab (courtesy the Library of Congress)

Sandfuture by Justin Beal is published by MIT Press.

The Magnificent History of Japanese Screens

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 22:00:00 +0100

In Japan’s premodern era, people began and ended their lives surrounded by screens. Women gave birth between screens that were covered in cranes and tortoises, animals thought to bring good fortune, happiness, and a long life. And at the arrival of death, the deceased’s body was often accompanied by an inverted or upside down screen, a visual token of irreversible loss. From castles to temples, in paper or silk, screens have played a vital role in Japanese life for centuries. Japanese Screens: Through a Break in the Clouds (Abbeville Press), edited by Claire-Akiko Brisset and Torahiko Terada, is an exquisitely illustrated and enlightening new book that reveals the screen’s unique role in Japanese history and culture from its origins to the 20th century.

Screens were first imported to Japan from China in the eighth century. The byōbu, or “barrier against the wind,” was initially an object of the imperial court, where it delineated symbolic and material space during enthronements, anniversaries, banquets, and coming-of-age rites. Large and elaborately ornamented screens served as important elements of aristocratic women’s wedding trousseaus and were sent as diplomatic gifts as far away as Europe, while smaller kobyōbu were used in incense ceremonies to trap and retain fragrances.

Tosa Mitsuoki, “Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maples with Poem Slips,” Japan (1654/81) (the Art Institute of Chicago)

Beyond their ceremonial functions, screens like Tosa Mitsuoki’s “Autumn Maples with Poem Slips” (1649-86) offered elites a source of cultural connection. This screen — along with its companion “Flowering Cherry” — is delicately painted with gold, silver, and ink on silk, and is packed with meaning that viewers would have enjoyed deciphering and interpreting.

The screens’ leaves and blooms will soon fall, representing life’s impermanence. Maple and cherry trees evoke the spring and autumn, themes that appear in poems written on the tanzaku strips of paper hanging from the tree’s branches. These contain verses taken from imperial anthologies that would have been familiar to the screens’ educated spectators. Empress Tōfukumon’in displayed this screen during official gatherings to spark conversation and reinforce her status. As a sign of her wealth, she commissioned 30 different calligraphers to contribute to the screen’s painted poems.

“Whose Sleeves?” Japan (18th century), anonymous, pair of six-panel screens, ink, colors, and gold on paper (National Museum of Asian Art, Freer Gallery of Art, gift of Charles Lang Freer)

Eventually, with the arrival of the Edo period and the rise of the merchant class, screens made their way to other sectors of society. These new patrons favored more everyday subjects, including what is known as “Whose sleeve?” scenes, which depict clothing, bags, pets, and other personal effects gathered informally together. These screens were joined by smaller makura byōbu, or “pillow screens,” that kept drafts away from working class people while they slept. Another more easily accessible object that mirrored the screen’s segmented, collapsible visuals was the folded paper fan, or ōgi, which emerged in the 10th century.

Whether in a palace or a private home, screens are highly beautiful and functional elements of domestic space. Together with sliding doors, shutters, and curtains, screens create mobile partitions that can be opened, closed, and arranged according to the residents’ needs. And with these movements, screens’ images and visual readings continually shift as well. Situated at the intersection of painting and sculpture, decoration and architecture, Japanese screens are dynamic art objects. This book captures them in all their colorful, multifaceted glory.

Tawaraya Sōtatsu, “Waves at Matsushima,” Japan (early 1600s), pair of six-panel folding screens, ink, color, gold, and silver on paper, 166 × 369.9 cm (National Museum of Asian Art, Freer Gallery of Art, gift of Charles Lang Freer)

Yashima Gakutei, “White Cat Hissing at Its Reflection in a Black Lacquer Mirror Stand” (c. 1830), polychrome surimono woodblock print (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Ogata Kōrin, “Irises at Yatsuhashi (Eight Bridges),” Japan (after 1709, Edo period), pair of six-panel folding screens; ink and color on gold leaf on paper (the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Japanese Screens: Through a Break in the Clouds, edited by Claire-Akiko Brisset and Torahiko Terada, is published by Abbeville Press and is available on Bookshop.

How to Grab Success and Forget About Getting Found

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 23:04:00 +0100

Believe you can and you’re halfway there. Theodore Roosevelt Stop letting prevalent myths about the starving artist and getting found mess you up. It’s a tough road to follow to become a successful artist. It takes creativity, determination, vision, and business skills. You have to endure more criticism than other business owners do. But that’s […]

The post How to Grab Success and Forget About Getting Found appeared first on Art Marketing News | Prosperous Ideas for Artists.

Zig pigment markers compared: Fabricolor, Painty FX and Posterman

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 06:45:32 +0100

Kuretake is a Japanese company that makes stationary products and they make a lot of markers under the Zig product line. And under Zig, they have pigment markers such as Fabricolor, Painty FX and Posterman.

Here are the features for each.

Zig Fabricolor

For writing on cloth
Zig Fabricolor markers with 14 colours
Zig Fabricolor TWIN markers with 30 colours
Water-based inks
Opaque, non-bleeding
Permanent after ironing
Fine or brush tip. No chisel and broad
Dries to matte surface

Zig Painty FX

Alcohol-based inks
Xylene free
Works on metal, glass, plastic, wood and more
Opaque, quick dry, low odour
Tips sizes 1.5mm, 2mm, 5mm chisel
Dries with low gloss surface
14 colours

Zig Posterman

Works on glass, plastic, metal, wood and stone
Opaque, lightfast and produce a chalk look
Water resistant after drying
Erasable with Zig Posterman Cleaner
17 colours, water-based ink
Tip sizes from ultra fine, fine to chisel and extra broad

Zig marker pricing is usually quite competitive and reasonable.

So each marker has its own characteristic. Zig Fabricolor and Posterman use water-based inks while Zig Painty FX uses alcohol-based inks. Some caps have removable replacement tips secured onto it. Nice.

This is the opacity test.

The Zig Fabricolor is noticeably more opaque compared to the Zig Painty FX. Unfortunately, I only have white for Zig Posterman so I can't say much, but it looks opaque enough.

And these are the UNI Posca (left) and UNI Paint markers for comparison. UNI Posca performs very similarly to Zig Fabricolor, while the UNI Paint markers performs similarly to the Zig Painty FX. There are 66 colours in the UNI Posca range so that's a lot more colours compared to Zig Fabricolor.

Here's how the markers behave or work with watercolour applied on top.

It seems like all three Zig markers repel water slightly.

The UNI markers work nicely with watercolour.

Zig Fabricolor and Posterman use water-based inks and will leave streaky edges. The ink will dry with a matte finishing.

Zig Painty FX uses alcohol-based inks and produces sharp edges. The ink dries with a low gloss finishing.

The inks are said to be lightfast but I did not test for the lightfast quality since it's very time consuming. There's also no pigment information provided. If you want to use these markers to create art that will be exposed for long periods of time, make sure to test the lightfast quality first (and let me know).

Here's a watercolour sketch drawn with markers applied on top.

The Zig Fabricolor markers are definitely very opaque and nice to work with. They have good covering ability.

On the left are dots created by the UNI Paint markers, and right the UNI Posca markers. The UNI Paint markers use oil-based inks and the inks are absorbed into the paper rather than remain on top, hence the lack of opacity.

Lamp posts on the left were drawn with Zig Painty FX and they aren't as opaque compared to those on the right drawn with Zig Fabricolor.

The white strokes were created with Zig Fabricolor and Posterman.

Conclusion

I don't have much to say about Zig Posterman since I only have that ultra-fine tip in white.

Zig Fabricolor is very comparable in quality compared to UNI Posca markers. I would recommend them for use on rougher surfaces, e.g. paper, because water-based inks leave streaky edges on smooth reflective surfaces. The ink is very opaque and has good covering ability.

Zig Painty FX can work on more surfaces. It works great on reflective surfaces since the strokes dries with sharp edges. The ink dries with a low gloss and the colour does not seem as vibrant compared to Zig Fabricolor under certain light conditions, e.g. under reflections.

These Zig markers work great on top of watercolour but not below. Whereas UNI Posca markers work great on top and below watercolour. This could matter depending on how you create your art. I usually use opaque markers are the last stage to add details or overlapping elements so it's not an issue for me.

I like the Zig Fabricolor markers. They perform well and comparable to the UNI Posca markers I've been using for years.

Artful Weekend November 27-28

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 04:00:15 +0100

Welcome to Artful Weekend, our guide to fun and interesting ways to enjoy art in person or virtually.

This weekend: November Open Exhibits at the League plus our Holiday Ceramics Sale; movie themed art at Del Ray Artisans; luminous installations at Addison/Ripley; and panoramic drawings by Teresita Fernández at Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery.

November 2021 Open Exhibit

Small Red New Guinea Impatiens 2021, by Margaret Anne Dawson, received Honorable Mention in the November Open Exhibit.

This month’s Open Exhibit, juried by Nicola Charles of D.C.’s 11:Eleven Gallery, is now on view! Open exhibits are a great way to view the breath of mediums and styles of our member artists. November’s Best-in-Show winner is Flamingo Pair, a frolicsome digital media piece by Kip Platto, a first at the League for this contemporary medium.

Sculpture artworks are particularly prominent this month. They include The Tuscan, a terra-cotta bust by Melanie Vacchio; The Couple, a gazing duo made of hand-built porcelain by Christine Moerenhout- Hubloue; the whimsical, bisque stoneware In the deepest water by Christina Andreasson; the lapis-tinged Check Mate/s, king and queen set by Sabine Arndt; and I Dissent, Barbara Wilson‘s likeness of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg gesturing as the title suggests. It is on view in the Gallery and online through Sunday, November 7.

Edward Ugo: The Shape of Happiness

Pyramid by Edward Ugo; Acrylic

Bold, colorful geometrics strike an upbeat chord in The Shape of Happiness, painter Edward Ugo’s solo exhibition at The Art League Gallery. It opens Thursday, November 11, and will be on view through December 5.

Earth and Steel IMPart Special Exhibit

This special exhibit, features ceramics and bladesmithing works created by artist veterans at The Art League. The IMPart program connects recent Injured Military Personnel with visual arts experiences created for personal enrichment, relaxed social engagement, the improvement and redevelopment of fine motor skills, and expressive catharsis.

Small Business Saturday with The Art League

There’s lots to choose from at our Holiday Ceramics Sale.

Make The Art League your destination for Small Business Saturday! Stop by our tent at 100 South Royal Street for our Holiday Ceramics Sale for unique, handcrafted items that make treasured gifts. Then, head over to King & Union where we’ll be selling jewelry by Jeaim Lee-Coverley, small prints from our collection, and art supplies from our store.

Groovy Movies: Artwork Inspired by Motion Pictures

This is the final weekend to catch Groovy Movies: Artwork Inspired by Motion Pictures at Del Ray Artisans. In this flick-fun curated exhibit, local artists interpret the movies—from American Film Institute (AFI) classics to cult films like “Abbott & Costello Meets Frankenstein, Barbarella, to Yellow Submarine and Zorba the Greek; 2704 Mount Vernon Avenue, Alexandria, VA. Click here for a video tour.

Yuriko Yamaguchi: Coexist

Yuriko Yamaguchi, Embrace, 2013, hand cast resin, stainless steel wire, LED light, 42x24x11 inches.

“I believe that everything is interconnected—sea creatures, land creatures, geology and our body and our so-called different races and ethnicity,” says Yuriko Yamaguchi who recently joined Addison/Ripley Fine Art’s family of artists. For Coexist, she fuses organic and manufactured elements in a tapestry of colors and textures and connects them with delicate webs of wires, many of which are lit from behind with subtle LED configurations. The resultant structures are both literally and visually light, airy, and configured to float in space; on view through December 4, 1670 Wisconsin Avenue, NW.

Teresita Fernández: Dark Earth

Dark Earth (Cosmos), 2019; Solid charcoal and mixed media on chromed panel 3 panels, each: 80 x 64 x 2 inches

MacArthur Foundation genius Teresita Fernández is known for her luminous works that poetically evoke the landscape while also referencing the sociopolitical and historical colonial violence embedded in our ideas of place. Dark Earth, on view at Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery, features an immersive, panoramic charcoal wall drawing that encompasses golden, reflective panels that delve into the buried, layered, and often omitted social history that continues to shape our present-day perceptions of the people and places around us. See it in the gallery through December 12, or virtually here.

This holiday season support Alexandria’s independent stores and businesses by shopping local. Learn more about Alexandria Shop Small Week here. Enjoy the weekend!

The post Artful Weekend November 27-28 appeared first on The Art League.

Call to Submit: New Booooooom Photo Book

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 22:01:40 +0100

Light Streams through Delicate Floral Bouquets Cast in Colorful Stained Glass

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 20:17:49 +0100

All images © Samantha Yates, shared with permission

From her workshop in Shipley, West Yorkshire, artist Samantha Yates crafts long-stemmed botanicals in colorful stained glass. She draws on her background in horticulture to shape the curved metallic borders and gleaming petals and leaves. “I love the limits with the copper foil technique (no painting, no fusing), the challenge of trying to recreate 3D with 2D, (and) asking myself what are the essential qualities of that plant, that flower, that leaf? Is it color, shape, the stem outline?” she explains.

Casting vibrant shadows, the stylized pieces are based on florals the artist picks from her garden or around her home—see examples on Instagram—and are paired to evoke moods similar to those of fresh bouquets, “I love light, the transparency of glass, the paper-thin quality of petals, light through leaves,” she says.

See more of Yates’s delicate botanicals and shop individual stems and bouquets on her site. (via Lustik)

Abstract, Textured Patterns Woven With Natural Fibers Compose Massive Wall Hangings by Tammy Kanat

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 17:29:57 +0100

A decade into her weaving practice, Australian artist Tammy Kanat (previously) continues to explore the possibilities of fiber, texture, and knots. Her giant wall hangings rely on patches of tufted wool, concentric circles in linen, and fringed, silk motifs suspended in lopsided brass rings to evoke organic forms and naturally occurring patterns.

Focusing on energy and movement, each abstract piece contrasts high piles and flatweaves comprised of thousands of knots that Kanat composes without a preconceived plan. “I often think of my weavings as a novel, as I work on a piece it is one chapter at a time until I finish it. Not knowing what the end will be keeps me driven and engaged. I have been creating more intricate woven shapes, inspired by my surroundings in nature,” the artist says. “I have become more engaged and curious about the slow detailed process of weaving, experimenting with one knot at a time.”

In her most recent body of work A Woven Metaphor, Kanat utilizes more angled frames with vibrant gradients radiating outward. The wall hangings are “about the shapes and colors gently pulling you into the piece. A dark center which evolves gradually to a lightness on the outside providing relief,” she shares. “The works are a juxtaposition of complexity and simplicity.”

Kanat shares glimpses into her weaving and shaping techniques on Instagram, and you can explore an archive of her pieces, and find her celebratory 10-year project, on her site.

Miniature Watercolor Works by Ruby Silvious Are Painted on Stained Teabags

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 15:58:26 +0100

Ruby Silvious’s quaint seaside scenes and bucolic landscapes nestle between the torn edges and wrinkled folds of a used teabag. The Coxsackie, New York-based artist (previously) paints miniature scenes of everyday life on the stained paper pouches, leaving the string and tags intact as a reminder of the repurposed material’s origin. Silvious sells prints of her watercolor pieces on her site, and you can follow her latest projects and news about upcoming exhibitions—she will be showing her upcycled works in France and Japan in 2022—on Instagram.

How to Behave in an Art Collector’s Home

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 15:00:24 +0100

Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to deliver a sculpture to clients’ home. The couple had seen the piece in the gallery and wanted to have us bring...

The post How to Behave in an Art Collector’s Home appeared first on RedDotBlog.

Artist Spotlight: Ákos Ezer

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 14:34:20 +0100

Featured Artist Juan Carlos Cepeda

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 13:00:02 +0100

Colombian artist Juan Carlos Cepeda shares a collection of bold figurative paintings drawn from his life experience and culture. View more work on his website.

“Expectants, from Scream of Serenity Series” acrylic on canvas, 160cm x 200cm

Art helps me share the story of my life. My work allows others to experience what I have endured and surrendered thus far throughout my life journey, growing up in a less than favorable environment.

“Binacle I” acrylic on canvas, 200cm x 160cm

Born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, I never felt whole. I craved an outlet to express myself. I was fortunate to have inherited my artistic ability from my parents, who encouraged me to follow my dreams.

“Rescue, from Scream of Welcome to the Jungle” acrylic on canvas, 200cm x 160cm

You could say art runs through my veins. As I grew older, the best way for me to communicate was through art that showed how I was internally experiencing the world.

“Prosperity Collectors II” acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 120cm

Inspired by my life and my culture, my art modernized itself, evolving as I did.

“Environmental Vitiligo, Reborn of a Race” acrylic on canvas, 200cm x 160cm

I experienced many hardships, but was surrounded by an environment abundant in nature’s beauty and foliage. This inspired me to create my own technique, fragmenting the rules of art and remodeling it into a unique, modern perspective.

“Diversity” acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 120cm

As a youth, I began to learn more about my artistic nature. I dabbled in retouching the photographs of a well known photographer. This taste of creativity pushed me to evolve. It fulfilled the need to express myself as an escape from my reality.

“Diversity II” acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 120cm

I began to learn about different artistic movements such as Hyperrealism, Figuration, Expressionism and Surrealism. Each technique’s degree of difficulty urged me to learn more and polish my craft. Ultimately I pushed myself beyond my artistic boundaries to a whole other level.

“Obra: Sobrecogida” acrylic on canvas, 200cm x 160cm

I use a mixture of materials on canvases. My cultural roots transform ancestral traits, movements and customs into a new technique of modernization that reflects a message of life.

“Reprogram I” acrylic on canvas, 150cm x 150cm

Although I am self-taught, my work has been exhibited since I was the young age of twenty-five. My talents have been embraced and I have rapidly gained international recognition for my works. I’ve had the pleasure of exhibiting in the United States, Mexico, Panama, India, Singapore, Dominican Republic, Bombay, London and Australia.

“La Conquista” acrylic on canvas, 120cm x 160cm

It has been beyond gratifying to express my voice through my artwork. My ability to immortalize my culture through art has always been important to me. My culture has survived as I have. I strive to continue to emphasize the importance of remembering and reviving history while still being a part of it.

Juan Carlos Cepeda invites you to follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Want to stay current on cutting edge business articles from Artsy Shark, plus artist features, and an invitation to the next Call for Artists? Click below to sign up for our twice-monthly email. You’ll get all this plus opportunities and special offers that you can’t get anywhere else!

For Email Marketing you can trust.

The post Featured Artist Juan Carlos Cepeda appeared first on Artsy Shark.

AYANEGUI Spring/Summer 2022

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 13:00:00 +0100

AYANEGUI presents 23 classy streetwear looks, for this Spring/Summer 2022 featuring classic shapes cut and contrasting fabrics. This …

Is this biomimicry yet

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 11:00:00 +0100

A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography and Styling by Berk Akkaya. Production by İlker Demirel. Models are Allen Stewart, John …

The Art-Inspired Holiday Gift Guide

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 06:01:00 +0100

Every year when the holidays roll around, we find ourselves wondering: What sort of gifts will the art folks in our lives truly appreciate? For as we all know, artists and art workers have particular tastes and strong opinions — and rightfully so. The holiday season is always better with a little art-inspired fun, and the items in our store offer a few accessible ways to help you make it happen.

For starters, help your friends and family host a feast with tableware inspired by work from artists like Louise Bourgeois and Keith Haring, and make sure to use an artful tea towel to keep things clean. Playtime comes after dinner — how about a modern art puzzle or game for fun with the whole family? Once that’s over, they might want to spend the rest of the evening perusing a good book, or maybe they’ll share a bedtime story with their young artists. But perhaps they have plans to go out, and you can help them dress for the occasion with a new scarf or one of the many choices from our collection of art-inspired socks.

The possibilities really are endless, especially when you consider that we offer free shipping on all domestic orders over $100. If you’d like some extra inspiration, check out last year’s guide for more holiday gift ideas. And if you simply can’t decide, Hyperallergic Store gift cards always make wonderful presents.

In addition to our membership program, our store is another great way you can support our independent arts journalism year-round. As a thank you for supporting us, members get a discount code for 10% off all orders in our store (if you are a member and are unsure where to find the code, get in touch with us at membership@hyperallergic.com).

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” Enamel Pin

We can’t get over how the design of one of our favorite new pins makes for such a lovely interpretation of the artwork it’s based on. The colors and lines on this miniature enamel rendering of Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” (c. 1665) channel the painting’s expert use of light, endowing the pin with an alluring mystique worthy of the original.

Make it a set and get the matching socks!

Basquiat Skull Bag

Show off your elevated taste in art while schlepping your books and other assorted carriables around in this vibrant blue tote, which features a design based on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. If you like the bag but prefer a smaller size, this funky three-pack of zip pockets comes with a pocket-sized version.

Visit the store for more artfully designed bags and totes.

Portrait of Félix Socks

Art socks inspired by a painting of an anarchist art critic? Sign us up! Paul Signac’s portrait of Félix Fénéon, who coined the term “Neo-impressionism” and helped promote what is now known as Pointillism, is ready to take its place in your wardrobe. Fun fact: Hyperallergic’s editor-in-chief Hrag Vartanian already has a pair — “Portrait of Félix Fénéon” (1890) is one of his favorite paintings.

Shop our collection of art-inspired socks!

This Book Is a Planetarium

Defying every expectation of what a book can be, this pop-up extravaganza transforms into six fully functional tools: a real working planetarium projecting the constellations, a musical instrument complete with strings for strumming, a geometric drawing generator, an infinite calendar, a message decoder, and even a speaker that amplifies sound.

Explore more art-inspired games, toys, and activities!

Louise Bourgeois “Spirals” Teacup & Saucer

Add an artful twist to your daily tea respite with this teacup and saucer, featuring details from the woodcut series Spirals by Louise Bourgeois. While the original works can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, these delightful ceramic adaptations will be right at home in your kitchen cabinet.

Decorate like an art collector — shop our home goods.

Mini Rugs Coaster Set

A fun and elegant way to cushion drinks, the original rugs these coasters are based on are from Northern India, Turkey, and Northwestern Iran or Caucasus. Dating from the 14th to the 19th century, these exquisite fabric works can be seen today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Let art protect your books and furniture from ring stains:

This is a huge 288-page hardcover artbook for Samurai Shodown (2019). This artbook is published by Dark Horse with good colour reproduction, low gloss paper and good binding. The original publisher seems to be Pix'n Love which released the book in Europe. Both editions feature the same content. Pix'n Love also has a limited slipcase edition with 2 prints.

From what I've read, there are more than 80 characters from all the series and spinoff. The only characters this book features are from the 2019 game and they are

Haohmaru
Nakoruru
Hanzo Hattori
Galford D. Weller
Ukyo Tachibana
Kyoshiro Senryo
Jubei Yagyu
Tam Tam
Charlotte C. Colde
Genjuro Kibagami
Earthquake
Shiki
Yoshitora Tokugawa
Yashamaru Kurama
Darli Dagger
Wu-Ruixing
Shizuka Gozen

Some cancelled characters and background characters are also included. Additional characters from season 1, 2 and 3 are not included.

There are designs for the characters, costumes, weapons and epilogue storyboards. The art is good. There are sketches and huge eye catching character splash art. Graphic designs included are the battle icons, Steam icons, icons under life bar, fonts.

The last few pages are interview with director Nobuyuki Kuroki and character designer Yumi Saji. You can read about the game origins, art direction, character roster and design. I was looking forward to reading more about the characters but there isn't much text except for the short character profiles.

It's a great artbook for fans of the game.

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

The Art of Samurai Shodown is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN) and Book Depository

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

The links below are affiliate links, which means I earn some commission from each purchase, but at no extra cost to you.

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.

Catherine Murphy’s Observational Paintings Find the Uncanny in the Ordinary

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 22:05:00 +0100

Catherine Murphy is one of our great artists. Over the course of a career that began in 1971, she has never branded herself, relied on a format, worked in a series, or produced signature works, which makes her unique. She is an observational painter who does not return to the same well, which is practically unheard of in art. What further sets her work apart from other observational artists is that her paintings are both uncanny and emotionally loaded.

A doormat in winter; an open suitcase with two neatly pressed and folded shirts; two clear plastic bags filled with clothes, sitting on a broken office chair in a nondescript corner — there is nothing extraordinary about Murphy’s subjects. And yet there is something inexplicably disturbing about her paintings and drawings. It is this aspect of her work — her particularizations of the ordinary — that are central to why I believe she has become an unrivaled figure in contemporary art.

As a longtime admirer of Murphy’s work and the author of her only monograph, Catherine Murphy (2016), with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers, once again I was bowled over by the singularity of vision she attained in her exhibition Catherine Murphy: Recent Work, at Peter Freeman, Inc. (November 12, 2021–January 8, 2022). While the specificity of light and scene has been true of her work since the beginning of her career, in this exhibition of nine oil paintings and four graphite drawings she seems to have pushed into a new and ominous territory, having to do with vulnerability and aging — a subject that few American artists other than Jasper Johns have addressed with any equanimity.

Catherine Murphy, “Flight” (2020), oil on canvas, 60 x 49 3/4 inches

Formally, Murphy does a number of things that distinguish her from other observational painters. The most important is that she does not use a one-to-one scale to paint what she sees. Rather than adhering to this formula, which has been a mainstay of painting from life, she enlarges the scale, with the two largest paintings in the current exhibition measuring five-by-five feet square. By squaring everything up, she enhances the relationship between seeing and subject matter.

The relationship of subject to scale shifts from painting to painting, with “Packed” (2018) — an overhead view of two different-colored, striped button down shirts folded neatly in a suitcase — occupying a perceptual zone where we are not quite sure how far we are from the suitcase. The frontal view suggests that we are physically rather close to the shirts, as we look straight down into the suitcase. Why have we stopped to look so intently, we are apt to ask ourselves? It is in this moment of questioning that Murphy’s paintings reach another level. We are not simply looking into the suitcase, because the scale suggests that something else is happening. Have we just opened it or are we about to close it?

The connection between our body and what we are looking at is Murphy’s innovation to observational painting; she always establishes a visceral connection between viewer and subject, which, in the paintings “Flight” (2020) and “Kitchen Door” (2021), becomes fraught with the possibility of what could happen next.

In “Flight,” we are positioned at the top of a flight of carpeted stairs looking down at a belted, checkerboard bathrobe lying at the bottom. Compositionally, the stairs start at the painting’s bottom edge, rising more than halfway up the surface, with the bathrobe just fitting in the remaining space along the top. Everything is carefully calibrated, but none of it seems contrived.

Catherine Murphy, “Night Watch” (2018), graphite on paper, 23 1/16 x 37 15/16 inches

Seemingly standing at the top of the stairs, looking down at the bathrobe, we feel as if we are inside the painting. Whereas many observational painters make the viewer feel like a detached observer, possibly even a voyeur or innocent witness, Murphy pulls us into a situation while inviting us to figure out what is going on. Whose bathrobe is it? Why is it at the bottom of the landing? Is someone throwing the dirty laundry down the stairs because it is easier than carrying down a crammed hamper?

Once you see the painting in its entirety, you begin to notice other aspects of it, which further grab your attention. This is really one of Murphy’s masteries. She can make a fuzzy carpet look fuzzy. There is no shorthand in her paintings. Everything — from the fuzziness of the carpet to its uneven color and apparent staining from use — is there in the work. As we refocus and our attention shifts, this viewer at least was brought back to the possibility of falling down the stairs, of joining the sprawled bathrobe. By making everything in the painting pertinent, Murphy compels us to look all around it, placing us in a more precarious position because we have momentarily not paid attention to where we are standing.

This state of heightened consciousness also sets Murphy’s paintings on a different plane of apprehension and interaction. One way she achieves this is through her remarkable ability to mimic the surface of the thing that she is painting, be it fuzzy, patterned wallpaper in “Prequel” (2021) or the faded green leather armrests of a well-used office chair in “Bags of Rags” (2019), which, as a meditation on mortality and time, is one of the most powerful and quietly chilling paintings in this mesmerizing exhibition.

Catherine Murphy, “Kitchen Door” (2021), oil on canvas, 52 1/4 x 60 inches

In “Bags of Rags” two large transparent garbage bags filled with clothes are piled onto a green leather office chair that has seen better days. We don’t know the circumstances, which is central to our experience of the work. The chair has been pushed into a corner and we seem to be standing in front of it, contemplating what is before us.

Whose clothes are these and why have they been stuffed into plastic bags, as if they have no further use? Are they being donated to a thrift store? What about the dyed leather chair that is tinted a faded green? Just as I think “Flight” is about vulnerability and the fear of falling, something that concerns older people, “Bags of Rags” is about remnants and the obsolescence of a broken-down chair. One strength of this painting — and there are many, starting with the way everything is painted — is that Murphy never directs our thinking. It is the things themselves that hold our attention, even as they evoke our future.

Whether in painting or drawing, Murphy seamlessly merges the objectivity of looking closely and directly with different levels of subjectivity. Her process is always at the service of looking, and one never sees a signature flourish or mark. She is particularly sensitive to the surface feel of a thing, be it the texture of the striped cotton shirts in “Packed” or the mottled and perhaps bruised skin of a young woman’s bare legs in “Head to Toe” (2018).

Catherine Murphy, “Torn” (2020), graphite on paper, 30 x 29 1/4 inches

The angle of the composition and the cropping are essential components of her inquiry, with each painting giving us a different view of a specific thing, the frontal one of the patterned back of a camouflage jacket in “Camo” (2020) or the four angled views shown by a surveillance camera in the tour de force graphite drawing “Night Watch” (2018), which replicates that eerie, otherworldly light of a camera filming the perimeter of a house at night.

I think one reason why Murphy is not more widely celebrated is that her work is neither hip nor cool. The views are not theatrical and dramatic, as they are in Edward Hopper, who was a clunky painter and great artist. Murphy’s paint handling is not overtly dramatic, but it is breathtaking, because she seems to able to recreate every kind of surface, from used leather to large plastic buckets filled with water, to the perforated rubber doormat in “Kitchen Door” (2021). If “Flight” conveys the fear of falling, “Kitchen Door” transmits the anxiety of slipping on a winter night, beginning with the moment you leave your house and step out into the world, while “Night Watch” is about a feeling of vulnerability and the need for protection.

Murphy depicts the doormat as a trapezoid rising from the painting’s bottom edge and tilting forward. The angle of the tilt and the close-up view suggest the viewer is standing inside, about to go out. The doormat’s angled plane seems to be foretelling the future, as well as underscoring the anxiety one might have about falling, especially if you feel frail or vulnerable. It is this state of our physical being that Murphy speaks to. By picking a subject that is literally underfoot, and being attentive to it, and to the piled snow and stone pathway, she shatters the illusion of security that many people believe will never change. Her sensitivity to aging and the feeling of defenselessness that can flood any one of us is unique and original, especially in the current art world and its worship of signature styles, which can be seen as a misguided bulwark against time passing. The art world should do the right thing and honor Murphy’s greatness.

Catherine Murphy: Recent Work continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Street, Manhattan), through January 8, 2022.

Giving Cameras to Kids as Tools of Self-Exploration

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 22:04:00 +0100

Susan Sontag wrote that “in deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects.” For as long as photography has existed, the morals and merits of the medium have been debated. Many photographers in the realm of documentary or “street” photography have been accused of exploiting their subjects, objectifying or exotifying them to be consumed by viewers hungry for a glimpse into another life. In response to this critique of the assertive authority of the photographic gaze, photographers over the last half century have developed projects and programs to bring their subjects into the creative process and enable them to present their world through their own eyes. The scope, intention, and success of these projects varies widely and significantly. While some photographers believe the medium possesses a special social and political power, others simply aim to gain further perspectives, crowdsourcing the task of seeing, and hopefully better understanding, the world.

Take photographer Wendy Ewald. As early as 1969, she was embedding herself into new environments, from Appalachia to South Africa to Mexico, and teaching the children she met to use film cameras to reflect their dreams, fears, and everyday realities. As Andrea K. Scott writes in The New Yorker, Ewald worked this way “twenty years before the term ‘socially engaged art’ entered the lexicon.” The artist’s educational work with Appalachian kids resulted in haunting images accompanied by personal narratives that revealed a perspective previously unseen in art. In an interview with PDN, Ewald said, “I believe as an artist I can get something through collaboration that I couldn’t get any other way. And I’m always looking for fresh ways of seeing.”

In the last several decades, versions of this project — what is often called participatory photography — have proliferated. They take many forms, and have many different goals, including providing educational opportunities, engaging the public, raising social awareness, creating more interesting art, or attempting to get closer to a person’s subjective reality. Can these projects counter the pitfalls of photography as an exploitative or voyeuristic medium? Done well, yes. But the temptation to over-promise the impact of this kind of work is great, especially when it comes from artists outside of the communities they’re working with.

Ruby Cornett, “I asked my sister to take a picture of me on Easter morning” (1975-1982), gelatin silver, 8 x 10 inches (courtesy /copyright Wendy Ewald)

In many cases, as in Ewald’s work, the subjects-turned-photographers are children from impoverished or difficult backgrounds. The appeal of teaching young children photography is undeniable — it’s an accessible and direct way to show them that how they see the world matters, and that their choices about what to include or leave out constitute the making of art. The images children produce offer unique access to a view of both their inner and outer lives, not filtered through the adult gaze.

In these projects, we see that the framing of an image is just as crucial, if not more crucial, than the image itself. Beyond the authorial power of whoever takes the image, the curatorial power determines how these photographs and projects are presented in the world and received by the public. In a New York Times article, Teju Cole quotes Susie Linfield: “We, the viewers, must look outside the frame to understand the complex realities out of which these photographs grew.”

Take Born into Brothels, a widely acclaimed documentary film that followed photojournalist Zana Briski as she taught children in Calcutta, India, to capture their environment. While the moving story was not without successes and charms, projects like this have the potential to further entrench the myth that an individual savior can swoop in and solve massive systematic problems. A response in The Telegraph Online from a sex worker in Calcutta called Born Into Brothels a “one-sided portrayal of the life of sex workers in Sonagachi. It shows sex workers as unconcerned about the future of their children. This is not true […] We fear the global recognition of such a film […] may do a lot of harm to the global movement of sex workers for their rights and dignity.” This objection seems to have more to do with the artist’s framing of the documentary than the nature of the project or the children’s photographs themselves.

Hoyt Grace, FREE FILM: JUNE 2020, (courtesy of the artist / worthless studios)

Through Positive Eyes addresses the issue of framing by accompanying and contextualizing pictures with written, personal narratives. The global project created by photographer Gideon Mendel in partnership with the UCLA Art and Global Health Center foregrounds moving and mundane images of and by people living with HIV/AIDS around the world. Mendel spent 20 years documenting people impacted by HIV/AIDS in a more traditional photographer-subject role, and had been criticized, according to The New Yorker, for “present[ing] his subjects as powerless, nameless people headed for death.” With Through Positive Eyes, Mendel explained that “the time had come to shift power relations and hand the camera over to people living with HIV, so that they could make their own photographs and tell their own stories.”

This type of participatory photography project acts as a political and social PSA. Though the images are at times well composed or technically skillful, the ultimate goal is to reduce the stigma surrounding the disease, and give people a chance to tell their own stories. “The people I know did not go looking for AIDS. AIDS showed up in their lives,” wrote Aninha from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “I have heard of people who were killed for having AIDS, for being gay. We cannot go on in a world like this.” Her photographs include an image of lacy white underwear on a faded floral carpet, small figurines accompanied by a red AIDS ribbon, a sandwich sliced diagonally on a plate, two shaving razors overlaid as if in an intimate embrace, and an orange seen whole, then sliced, then splayed open.

Photographer JR has taken on large-scale public projects, wheatpasting billboard-sized portraits on buildings and other public outdoor spaces. For his Inside Out Project, which is billed as the “largest global participatory art project,” he aimed to remove himself from the artistic process by creating a format and providing tools for others, but not actually photographing or pasting any of the work himself. People and communities are invited to take selfies, which are printed in black and white and designed to be posted in public spaces, in theory drawing attention to topics or people otherwise overlooked. Since it was launched in 2011, more than 400,000 people have engaged with the project globally.

JR’s collaborative film Faces Places, made with director Agnès Varda, highlights his Inside Out Photobooth trucks, a mobile way to reach more people on the streets and across the French countryside. Each participant enters to be photographed. The photo is then printed large-scale, and pasted in a nearby area. There is no single acting artist; the “photographer” is the photo booth (though the body of work is still widely attributed to JR). Together, these portraits create a visual community that celebrates the everyday lives of a broad range of people on a large scale. Though the premise feels gimmicky and facile, it’s still refreshing to see public space reclaimed for the public, rather than for advertisers and celebrities.

Dominick Lewis, FREE FILM: JUNE 2020, (courtesy of the artist / worthless studios)

A recent effort by Brooklyn-based nonprofit worthless Studios also shows the continued interest in photography as a collaborative exercise with its project, FREE FILM: USA. It encompasses an Airstream trailer with a dark room, and an ambition to visualize a nation divided. Between August and December 2019 the team at worthless Studios handed out a free roll of 35mm film to photographers across the country with the prompt “red, white, and blue.” 990 rolls of film were returned to the trailer for free developing and scanning. The lofty goal, as stated on the worthless Studios website, was to “democratiz[e] the documentation of our ever-shifting realities.” By diffusing the process of documentation, they were able to cover a broader expanse of experience, thus transforming the solitary act of looking into a collective experience. The impact of the project comes from the curatorial choices of the team, who selected from over 35,000 images to compile their photobook, placing children with toy guns in Salt Lake City next to those with toy guns in Minneapolis, individuals obscured by their newspapers from Philadelphia and San Francisco. An ice cream truck flying a worn American flag in Detroit contrasts with a confederate flag displayed in Birmingham. We see breakfast plates, basketball, and cars, protests and police. In LA, a children’s drawing of palm trees perfectly parallels a landscape of palm trees in San Diego.

In the United States today, nearly everyone walks around with a camera in their pockets. Our lives are relentlessly recorded, and film photography is expensive, clumsy, and slow. It’s hard to imagine that installing and operating a darkroom out of the back of a van is the most convenient way to gather imagery from artists. But it’s the concept of the project, its labored technical process and ambitious scope, that is enticing. About the medium of photography, Ewald told PDN, “I think the analogue process gave the kids a real focus and it slowed them down — and me too.” Today, the turn to analogue reflects a trend toward nostalgic formats, a desire for something tangible in an otherwise disembodied digital world. Maybe we’re craving a collective that isn’t just online, a narrative that brings the fractured pieces together between the two covers of a book, or pasted to the sides of our buildings, the hope that something might unify us, even if all we have in common is our own subjectivity.

Required Reading

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 22:02:00 +0100

No words:

US added to list of ‘backsliding’ democracies for first time

Alexandra Lange writes for Bloomberg CityLab about how the women behind some historic buildings are finally getting their due:

Saarinen House at Cranbrook, the educational campus north of Detroit, went through a similar process beginning in 2018. Designed by architect Eliel Saarinen in the late 1920s, the house served as the home and studio of Eliel, first head of Cranbrook’s architecture department, and Loja Saarinen, first head of the weaving department. Tours had long focused on the architecture of Eliel. But over time, as the curation staff explored the work of Loja, they came to see that she was as integral a part of the property’s story.
“She is not really a weaver, she didn’t sit at the loom and knot, she was an entrepreneur,” says Kevin Adkisson, curator at the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research. When Saarinen House was invited to join the National Trust’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program, staff were able to “confidently argue that this was her home and studio as an artist and designer,” Adkisson said.

Toek Tik was part of a genocidal regime in Cambodia and helped loot art for foreigners (because, he says, he was offered hard currency unlike other things he could sell. Now, he’s supposedly trying to help return the objects he helped steal (um, how about being held accountable for genocide? Though he sounds remorseful, but don’t they all when they’re called out.). Anyway, Tom Mashberg of the New York Times has the story:

In the two decades he was active, ending in the late 1990s, Toek Tik, who goes by the nickname Lion, estimates he plundered more than 1,000 artifacts, many of them considered the finest masterpieces of Khmer culture, such as huge sandstone sculptures of deities and their attendants.
So far, he has identified more than 100 as being in the collections of museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Others he has spotted in respected private collections.
His testimony, and that of others who worked for him, has become the centerpiece of a global effort by Cambodia to claw back its fabled heritage as it challenges the museums and collectors who have long defended their acquisitions as fully documented and unquestionably lawful.

Oh, my. A.O. Scott’s review of the new House of Gucci film is delicious:

But for all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing. The true story of how the Gucci family lost control of the company that still bears its name — and of how its scion, Maurizio Gucci, lost his life to a hit man’s bullets — could have inspired Bernardo Bertolucci to heights of decadent spectacle, Luchino Visconti to flights of dialectical extravagance or Lina Wertmuller to feats of perverse ideological analysis. The raw material plays as tragedy and farce at the same time.

Ain’t it the truth:

US response to Covid has ultimately been like our response to school shootings: Once we decided unimaginable loss was a price worth paying for an imagined ideal of freedom, the number of deaths ceased to matter. We’d trade a million lives for our need to do exactly what we want.
— Peter Manseau (@plmanseau) November 23, 2021

Kevin Birmingham’s new book The Sinner and the Saint explains the demons that drove Fyodor Dostoevsky to write Crime and Punishment. Steven G. Kellman, of the LA Times, reviews the book:

Dostoevsky struggled to craft an account by Raskolnikov, a brooding law school dropout, of how he killed a pawnbroker and her half sister with an ax. At a crucial point, he grew disgusted with what he had written, discarded it all and started from scratch. What enabled him to find traction was his decision to switch from first-person narration to an intimate third-person perspective, a vantage point that would, he said, be “invisible but omniscient.” As Birmingham asks, “Why not peer over Raskolnikov’s shoulder while he’s face-to-face with the stupid, deaf, sick, greedy pawnbroker, waiting for his moment?”
Birmingham himself applies this approach to Dostoevsky, peering over the Russian master’s shoulder as he peers over Raskolnikov’s. The result is a book about a book, an inside look at literary creation. The reader becomes a spectator to the construction of “Crime and Punishment” while learning a great deal along the way about the criminal justice system in 19th-century Russia, temporal lobe epilepsy, promissory notes, phrenology, gold mining, nihilism and much else.
“A man would turn over half a library to make one book,” claimed Samuel Johnson. The principle is no less true for those who write one book about one other book. Michael Gorra’s “Portrait of a Novel” (2012) and Rebecca Mead’s “My Life in Middlemarch” (2014) both benefit from their authors’ extensive acquaintance with more than just “The Portrait of a Lady” and “Middlemarch,” respectively. John Livingston Lowes filled more than 600 pages of “The Road to Xanadu” (1927) while documenting the books Samuel Taylor Coleridge read before writing two poems.

The publisher of the Arkansas Times explains why he is fighting the state’s anti-boycott law, which he says threatens freedom of conscience and is impacting community past the small fundamentalist bubbles they often first emerged from:

These types of laws are not restricted to states in which fundamentalist Christians hold sway. In 2016, California passed a law requiring large contractors working with a state agency to certify that they will not discriminate against Israel, and Andrew Cuomo, as governor of New York, signed an executive order that compels state entities to divest money and assets from a list of organizations regarded by the state as participating in the boycott. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York proposed national anti-boycott legislation.
Let’s be clear, states are trading their citizens’ First Amendment rights for what looks like unconditional support for a foreign government.
When our case reached the Federal District Court in 2019, the state argued that boycotting was not political speech but rather an economic exercise and therefore subject to state regulation. We found that argument absurd. After all, our nation’s founding mythology includes the boycott of tea. Since then, boycotts have repeatedly been used as a tool of political speech and protest, from the Montgomery bus boycott to end segregation to the Delano grape strike protesting exploitation of farmworkers. University students throughout the country engaged in anti-apartheid boycotts of and divestment from South Africa. In 1982, the right to boycott as a method of collective political speech was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in N.A.A.C.P. v. Claiborne Hardware Company.

A new study of the top grossing films from 2010 to 2019 found that Asian Americans were often the butt of jokes. Sakshi Venkatraman, writing for NBC News, explains the study, titled “I Am Not a Fetish or Model Minority”:

It suggests that Asians on screen often serve as the punchline or the butt of the joke, the study says.
Long Duk Dong, an Asian foreign exchange student in the 1984 movie “Sixteen Candles,” is a character that experts say was an early watershed example of APIs being mocked on screen.
“Anything he said was something that you laughed at, not with,” sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen told NBC Asian America. “He kind of defined Asian characters for decades.”
The survey also gauged the opinions of 329 Asian Americans in the entertainment industry, revealing that over 93 percent agree that API representation on screen is inadequate, and 95 percent feel that representation behind the scenes is inadequate. Of the films studied, only 4.5 percent of main cast members were API. But even when in the main title cast, three-fourths of Asian characters are in supporting roles.

The Steele dossier, which has been proven to be fake (Axios called it “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history”), isn’t the only anti-Russian propaganda being peddled as “fact” in journalism. Aaron Maté has highlighted five Trump-Russia “collusion” stories that were based on lies:

Many other prestigious outlets published a barrage of similarly flawed articles. These include the report by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy that the Mueller team obtained evidence that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague in 2016; Jane Mayer’s fawning March 2018 profile of Steele in the New Yorker; the report by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier of BuzzFeed that President Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress — explicitly denied by Mueller at the time; and Luke Harding of The Guardian‘s bizarre and evidence-free allegation that Julian Assange and Paul Manafort met in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.
McClatchy and BuzzFeed have added editors’ notes to their stories but have not retracted them.
In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.
RCI sent detailed queries about these stories to the Post, the Times, and the journalists involved. The Post‘s response has been incorporated into the relevant portion of this article. The Times did not respond to RCI’s queries by the time of publication.

What is this abomination!?

In Eastern Oregon you get a free Roundmeal (or equivalent Henton's product) with every half-rack of beer you buy pic.twitter.com/1oxoeMhR1M
— Stephen Judkins (@stephenjudkins) November 23, 2021

Turkeys are just like us (do you still want turkey?
The Official Edition of the Constitution, the First Printing of the Final Text of the Constitution (Photo by Ardon Bar-Hama; courtesy Sotheby’s)

And who was ConstitutionDAO outswanked by? The winning bid was placed by Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of hedge fund behemoth Citadel Advisors. The Museum of Modern Art board member has also made hefty donations to the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Florida’s Norton Museum of Art, and the Shed at Hudson Yards. A prolific collector, the Constitution’s $43.2 million price tag pales in comparison to the $500 million sum he doled out to acquire Jackson Pollock’s “Number 17A” (1948) and “Interchanged” (1955) by Willem de Kooning in 2016.

Griffin is also a vocal crypto skeptic, leaving one to wonder if he was goaded by a motley community of socialists and trolls into going over budget just to prove a point. He recently told Bloomberg, “I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed toward making the United States stronger.” Impassioned, he continued, “Let’s face it — it’s a Jihadist call that we don’t believe in the dollar.” For now, Griffin, who once opined that the rich had “insufficient influence” on the political process, has reaffirmed the power of good old-fashioned wealth to own and control access to American democratic ideals — a practice he regularly and vociferously engages in as a major donor to Republican campaigns.

This copy of the Constitution was last sold in 1988 to real estate developer S. Howard Goldman for $165,000. His widow, Dorothy Tapper Goldman, also a collector and a retired professor and teacher, offered up for sale not only the record-breaking Constitution but also an array of state constitutions, an early copy of the Articles of Confederation, an official printing of the Stamp Act, and a rare print of the Bill of Rights.

Selby Kiffer, an international senior specialist in books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s who also handled this Constitution’s last sale in 1988, estimates that this copy was among around 500 published at the same time. It was printed by hand by Philadelphia printers John Dunlap and David Claypoole, and Kiffer guesses that it was probably printed on the night of September 16, 1787. Totaling six pages in length, the document includes not only the text of the Constitution but also the roster of delegates who voted for the Constitution and the resolution accepting it. These print copies are remarkable not only for their “primacy” but also because they would have been produced for delegates like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin.

Proceeds from the sale of Goldman’s collection will support the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, established in 2018 and “dedicated to furthering the understanding of our democracy and how the acts of all citizens can make a difference.” We can only hope that this non-profit’s motives are less cynical than the proud new Constitution owner’s.

This Watercolor Is One of the Earliest Depictions of a Black Woman Living in Scotland

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 22:00:00 +0100

David Allan, “Edinburgh Milkmaid with Butter Churn” (c. 1780–1790) (all images courtesy National Galleries of Scotland)

Last week, the National Galleries of Scotland announced their acquisition of one of the earliest known images of a Black woman by a Scottish artist. “Edinburgh Milkmaid with Butter Churn” by artist David Allan is a rare, 18th-century watercolor that takes a Black woman as a primary subject at a time when they were typically relegated to the margins of portraiture.

Born in Central Scotland in 1744, Allan studied at Foulis’ Academy of Fine Arts in Glasgow. Later spending a decade in Italy painting portraits and historical paintings, Allan grew interested in drawing expressive sketches of street life. Arguably the first Scottish artist to eschew the painterly tradition of depicting historical scenes and the aristocracy in favor of people across the social hierarchy, Allan drew inspiration from all walks of contemporary life.

“Edinburgh Milkmaid” is a small-scale depiction of what appears to be a working-class woman, as suggested by her modest dress against the backdrop of an upper-crust Edinburgh street. Captured in the midst of the day, the woman, standing next to her milk churn, peers softly at the viewer. Allan paints the unnamed woman delicately, taking care to outline the patterns and shadows of her dress and the complexities of her unassuming expression.

David Allan, “An Edinburgh Fishwife” (c. 1785) from his Edinburgh Characters series

Although much is unknown about the painting and its subject, this image may be inspired by a group of works known as Allan’s Edinburgh Characters, a series that depicts the lives of the city’s ordinary citizens. Allan began the series around 1788 and drew over 20 images of workers and traders amongst the tools of their trade. These works typically portrayed an individual or a pair of figures drawn in thick outlines of ink to reproduce the image easily.

Unlike “Edinburgh Milkmaid,” dated in the mid-1780s to early ’90s, Allan’s character studies were evocative drawings that simply captured types, often eluding the detailed expressions and personalities of the sitters. The Edinburgh Characters only gestured toward the essence of people like coalmen, soldiers, and fishwives, but never their specific identities, offering insight into the city’s 1780s milieu. Many images from the series are held in the National Galleries’ collection.

“We are so pleased to bring this remarkable, rare and extraordinary watercolour into Scotland’s national collection,” said Christopher Baker, the National Galleries of Scotland’s director of European and Scottish art, in a statement. “It is an incredibly striking and special work, one which we believe will be enjoyed by many and, we hope, lead to new research on its background and most importantly the story of the woman depicted.”

Radu Ionut by Ted Sun

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 21:00:00 +0100

A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Ted Sun. Model is Radu Ionut signed at Big Picture Artists. Styling by …

Schinkel Pavillon: HR Giger & Mire Lee! An exhibition till 02.01.2022

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 19:00:00 +0100

BERLIN! SEX, VIOLENCE, BIRTH, DEATH – At a time in which dystopian, near apocalyptic visions have proliferated widely, …

all is a gentle spring – Wishing Well 2021

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 17:00:00 +0100

#Campaign – Introducing the independent Australian fashion label all is a gentle spring and its Wishing Well 2021 …

Artist Robin Babitt Created BACHUKI, A Bumblebee Who Teaches Us Valuable Life Lessons, Happiness & Creativity

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 16:13:18 +0100

Visual Artist, Author and Illustrator Robin Babitt is known for her unique style of art and illustration, humor and vibrance. The latter comes from having Synesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon where information meant to stimulate one of your senses, stimulates several. Robin see’s everything in color. This natural ability to experience life through color has always guided Robin into a creative path, using her art as a vehicle to spread wisdom and messages of morality. Her recent creation BACHUKI, takes readers on a journey where tiny lessons are taught by a Bumblebee who sees the world through the lens of a kaleidoscope, making the stories more surprising, vivid and interesting.

Robin’s relationship with color and how color affects our wellbeing, was the inspiration behind the creation of BACHUKI. She authored and illustrated two children’s books, A Very Little Bumblebee In A Great Big World and BACHUKI Meets VENOM, telling stories in rhyme and color through the eyes of a little Bumblebee, while covering important issues such as social and emotional learning, COVID-19 and vaccination, climate change, and poetic language. “There’s a huge need for BACHUKI. He brings us back to basics. He tries to put things in a perspective where children relate and parents enjoy. I look forward to seeing this little bee evolve being accessible to all children in all formats, through animation, fuzzy toys, games and more,” said Babitt.

We recently had the pleasure to chat with the artist to learn more about BACHUKI and her current projects:

Q – Can you tell us about your newest creative endeavor BACHUKI?

A – BACHUKI is a very little Bumblebee who sees the world through the lens of a kaleidoscope. BACHUKI came to me while I was sitting at a two-seat, hi-top at a local restaurant several years ago. The restaurant played great music from the 60’s and 70’s. I’d take my sketchbook, pens and pencils to that restaurant to write and draw. It was in this great place where ideas and storylines came to me easily. Everyone knew why I was there and enjoyed watching the process. BACHUKI was born.

Q – You have such a unique ability known as Synesthesia, can you tell us more about “seeing letters and numbers in color” and how this phenomenon plays a role in your art and writing?

A – I refer to BACHUKI as my alter-ego. We see things in a unique way. We see things in color. The world refers to this phenomenon as Synesthesia, however this has always been my norm. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon described as the stimulation of one sensory that leads to the involuntary experience in a second sensory. Grapheme or color Synesthesia is seeing letters and numbers in color. Months in the year and days of the week are associated with colors as well. It wasn’t until my 40’s that I found that what I had experienced my entire life, had a name. The ah-ha moment. Everything now made sense. Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Tori Amos and Billie Eilish have Synesthesia. Duke Ellington and Albert Einstein had it as well.

Q – BACHUKI seems to deepen our understanding of ourselves. What was your inspiration to create him, how did he come to be?

A – BACHUKI sees the world as I do. Together, we give the reader a different perspective. In turn, children gain insight into what it’s like to be a bee who sees life through the lens of a kaleidoscope. I chose a bee because as a kid I had a fear of them. I was stung almost every summer and I blamed it on the fact that the bees loved my mother’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I knew that if I could turn something that was frightening to me as a child into something I could love and adore, now that would be amazing. Yes, I bonded with a bee who wasn’t looking for my sandwich. He’s looking to make the world a better place for our kids.

‘Murtle the Turtle’ from BACHUKI, A Very Little Bumblebee In A Great Big World

Q – In your opinion, how does an artist create meaningful work, and how is BACHUKI intertwined in this role for you?

A – A Superhero in his own mind, BACHUKI admits to being perfectly imperfect. Everyone understands what it feels like to be one tiny grain of sand on a great BIG beach. BACHUKI shows you how special you are in this great BIG world, and that every day you can do something amazing. I write the stories in rhyme because words are quickly forgotten but rhymes stay with you forever, and together with my illustrations, BACHUKI takes readers on a colorful journey asking only that you “bee” yourself and strive to “bee the best you can bee.” BACHUKI’s home and family are his moral compass ending each “bee-z-y” day with a soft place to lay his head. Before folding his wings and closing his eyes, BACHUKI and his Mom read their favorite book together, BEE MINE.

Q – How can we use the arts to inspire action or positive change in the world?

A – BACHUKI and I watched as children and adults were affected by circumstances beyond their control when COVID-19 surfaced. Life began changing for all of us and no one had an answer, but BACHUKI had an idea. Adults adapted to the changes and children relinquished dreams before they began. BACHUKI arrived to assure kids everywhere that everything will be okay. There’s a huge need for BACHUKI. He brings us back to basics. He tries to put things in a perspective that children can relate to and enjoy. The world is changing at a very fast pace. The structure has fallen, rules and guidelines ignored, conversations are abbreviated, kindness has become a weakness and hatred is the dirty laundry blowing in the wind over your neighbor’s fence.

BACHUKI is best described by others:
“BACHUKI loves people. He makes you feel that everything is going to be okay.”
“BACHUKI is confident. Everyone wants to be his friend. An uplifting addition to our family.”
“BACHUKI is a great Mediator between a parent and child.”
“Vibrant colors are consistent throughout. They are calming and empowering.”
“The stories are touching, warm and cozy.”
“Both books end in a peaceful place. Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew that at the end of our bee-z-z-y day, we would bee as content as BACHUKI?”

BACHUKI with his Mother

Q – What’s on the horizon for BACHUKI, we see incredible Games, Animations, and Toys; can you tell us how you see him evolving?

A – Nothing has given me more pleasure than watching BACHUKI evolve. Writing and illustrating his stories energize me. I look forward to seeing this little bee evolve being accessible to all children in all formats, through animation, fuzzy toys and games and of course, more stories to be told. His future is there for the making and the possibilities are endless. Book 3 and 4 of the BACHUKI Series, are in their final stages and will be available Spring/Summer 2022. Let’s see what happens to VENOM and what it’s like to be a little bumblebee in the highest Court in the land. I am excited to be on this journey with BACHUKI and look forward to sharing more of him with the world.

Artist Robin Babitt being interviewed by her artwork on exhibit with Artblend Gallery at SPECTRUM Miami during Art Basel Week 2019

Robin Babitt is a well-known South Florida visual artist, author and illustrator, widely recognized for her intense color palette and bold style. Her work has been exhibited in local galleries, museums such as Cornell Art Museum in Delray Beach, international magazines, art fairs, and exhibits such as Artblend/Spectrum Miami, Miami Project, during Art Basel Miami Beach. She is the author of the beloved art cookbook, Bon Art-Petit Recipe Book, a colorful and delicious cookbook complete with Robin’s unique illustrations, recipes and humor, scheduled to be released Summer 2022. Visit: https://bachuki.com/ to learn more about BACHUKI and to make a purchase.

Artist Spotlight: Kelli Vance

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 13:07:15 +0100

Art news

Artist Opportunities # 579

Opportunities

Instructors Wanted at The Art League — Alexandria, VA

Call for Entry, Capricious Photo Award 2021 – NYC

Call for Entry, True Blue Online Exhibit

Open Call, Mattress Factory 2021 Residency – Pittsburgh, PA

2022 Open Call for Solo Exhibition, Target Gallery – Alexandria, VA

New Photography III: National Juried Exhibition – Easton, MD

Call for Proposals, Spring Solos 2022, McLean Project for the Arts – McLean, VA

Re-runs: These were previously posted, but it’s not too late to enter!

Smithsonian Magazine 19th Annual Photo Contest

Call for Entry, Anacostia Portraits – DC

Request for Qualifications, Brightview Innovation Center Public Art — Herndon, VA

Call for Entries, SlowArt Productions Emerging Artists 2022 – Hudson, NY

Call for Art, Create! Magazine

2021/2022 National Arts Club Fellowship – New York

Call for Artists, Hill Center Galleries – DC

Call for Entry, Mozaik Future Art Awards

Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works – Granville, NY

Call for Entry, High Contrast International Juried Exhibition – Poughkeepsie, New York

Call for Artists, Like Clockwork, Vestige Concept Gallery – Pittsburgh

Call for Artists + Photographers $550.00 Innovate Grants

Call for Artists + Photographers, Innovate Grants

Keyholder Residency Spring/Summer 2022, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center — Hyattsville, MD

Call for Entry, New Photography III: National Juried Exhibition – Easton, MD

Call for Art, Adorned: Inspired by Fabric and Fashion, Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center – Salmons, MD

Open Call for Exhibition Proposals, Second Street Gallery – Charlottesville, VA

Call for Entries, 33rd National Drawing & Print Competitive Exhibition – Baltimore

Call for Entry, Wharton Esherick Museum 28th Annual Juried Woodworking Exhibition – Malvern, PA

The Chelsea International Photography Competition – NYC

Studio Internship Summer 2022, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center — Hyattsville, MD

Call for Artists, The Delaware Contemporary’s Artist Registry – Wilmington, DE

Ongoing: These opportunities have rolling deadlines.

Call for Art, Links Bridge Vineyards—Thurmont, MD

Pyramid Atlantic Workshop Proposals – Hyattsville, MD

The Queer Feminist Agenda of Wilder Alison’s Abstract Wool Paintings

A More Expansive Understanding of What It Means to Be Human

The Magnum Opus of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Influential Korean American Artist

Cheetos Dust Artworks on a Yacht May Mark the Endtimes at Miami Basel

Plans for a Billion Dollar College Dormitory Are a Strange Mix of Carceral and Utopian

Activists Speak Out Against Plan to Relocate NYC’s Controversial Roosevelt Statue to North Dakota

From Intricate Stencils to Vibrant Flowers, Nine New Murals Transform Blank Facades in Tbilisi

Foundations

Learn to Build Speculative Worlds in SCI-Arc’s LA-Based Fiction and Entertainment Postgraduate Program

London: Announcing our March 2022 Selection Committee

ALESSIO ANTONIOLLI

ELLEN MARA DE WACHTER

REBECCA WILSON

Infrared Light Enhances Versailles, Provence, and the Beaches of Normandy with Dreamy Shades of Pink

Many Galleries are Closed on Mondays . . .

Where Intuition and Mathematics Meet with Jean-Luc Feug...

Tell us about who you are and what you do. What’s your background?

What does your work aim to say? What are the major themes you pursue in your work?

Can you walk us through your process for creating a work from beginning to end?

Who are your biggest influences and why?

How does your work comment on current social and political issues?

What memorable responses have you had to your work?

Featured Artist Sara Miller

Fiber artist Sara Miller’s colorful portfolio moves beyond traditional quilts with a new contemporary interpretation. Find more of her work on her website.

Want to stay current on cutting edge business articles from Artsy Shark, plus artist features, and an invitation to the next Call for Artists? Click below to sign up for our twice-monthly email. You’ll get all this plus opportunities and special offers that you can’t get anywhere else!

“The Day After Tomorrow” by Photographer Eric Asamoah

“Distance” by Illustrator Evan M. Cohen

Last minute Domestika Cyber Monday 2021 deals!

Book Review: Batman: The Definitive History of the Dark Knight in Comics, Film, and Beyond

Tags:

Our Wandering, Rootless Nature, Given Shape by a Jewish Tradition

The Complicated Legacy of Modernist Minori Yamasaki, Architect of World Trade Center

The Complicated Legacy of Modernist Minoru Yamasaki, Architect of World Trade Center

The Magnificent History of Japanese Screens

How to Grab Success and Forget About Getting Found

Zig pigment markers compared: Fabricolor, Painty FX and Posterman

Conclusion

Tags:

Artful Weekend November 27-28

Welcome to Artful Weekend, our guide to fun and interesting ways to enjoy art in person or virtually.

This weekend: November Open Exhibits at the League plus our Holiday Ceramics Sale; movie themed art at Del Ray Artisans; luminous installations at Addison/Ripley; and panoramic drawings by Teresita Fernández at Maria & Alberto de la Cruz Gallery.

November 2021 Open Exhibit

Edward Ugo: The Shape of Happiness

Earth and Steel IMPart Special Exhibit