Art news

Wait, we Have a Few ‘The Anarchist’s Workbench’ Books

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:28:11 +0200

Due to a mix-up with a wholesale order, we have a handful of copies of the first printing of “The Anarchist’s Workbench” to sell in our store. So if you missed out on the first edition, this is your chance to rectify it.

The book is $27 for the printed version or $0 for the pdf (download the free pdf here).

The second printing is in the works now. If you are a book collector, the second printing will have some physical differences (there are no significant changes to the content – just a couple typo fixes). The book will use a different interior paper and have a different diestamp on the cover. More details on the second printing will come soon.

— Christopher Schwarz

Wait, we Have a Few ‘The Anarchist’s Workbench’ Books (SOLD OUT)

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:28:11 +0200

Sorry. We sold out the 102 copies in 90 minutes….

The book is $27 for the printed version or $0 for the pdf (download the free pdf here).

— Christopher Schwarz

An Online Archive Tells an Alternate History of US Monuments and Architecture

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 23:50:28 +0200

Boz Garden, “Riotous Arrangement 2” (2020), digital photography (image courtesy the artist)

LOS ANGELES — ARCHIVE MACHINES, an online exhibition hosted by the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), offers one way forward during this time of social distancing. Curated by Olivian Cha, Kerstin Erdmann, and Rita Gonzalez, the juried exhibition of recent works by Los Angeles–based artists takes the form of a “living archive” of stories, objects, and photographs that expand our understanding of what perspectives have been left out of official records, and how they might reconfigure our relationship to the present.

The show is divided into four thematic sections. The first, “REVISIONING,” reframes and reconsiders our relationship to the past, while the second, “RESISTING,” addresses modes of political resistance. While these frames can feel a bit didactic, they offer helpful ways of considering how archives reflect personal and collective values in ways that are deeply political.

Allison Stewart’s photographs of former Confederate monuments, for example, depict empty plinths covered by graffiti or torn plastic. While one image captures the recent state of a monument once erected by the University of Texas to commemorate Confederate war hero Albert Sidney Johnston, it also has much in common with local histories of Los Angeles.

Johnston himself was once a local resident who enlisted in the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles, a secessionist militia, before becoming a celebrated Confederate general. After he bled out in the Battle of Shiloh, Griffin Avenue, Johnston Street, and Hancock Street in Northeast Los Angeles were named in honor of him and his family members. Just as local monuments to Christopher Columbus have been taken down in recent years, might we also see a reckoning and transformation of place names and streets in the city?

Allison Stewart, “Removed Albert Sidney Johnston monument, University of Texas, Austin Texas. Commissioned and donated by University of Texas regent George W. Littlefield. Installed at University of Texas Littlefield Fountain 1919, Moved to the South Mall 1933, Removed 2017” (2019), digital print (image courtesy the artist)

Rachel Zaretsky’s video work takes on a (now) less controversial, if no less fraught, monument: a Holocaust memorial by architect Kenneth Trelster that was once opposed by Miami Beach locals as “too somber” for their town. The bronze sculpture depicts an arm reaching toward the sky, surrounded by immiserated figures representing Jewish victims and survivors of Nazi genocide. Zaretsky, whose own family members are among the names etched into the memorial’s walls, describes the images and captions she finds through hashtags and geotags on Instagram — a gallery of namaste poses, vibrant filters, and sight gags that suggest even remembering the Holocaust isn’t enough to dampen the sunny beach vibes of South Florida.

Still from Rachel Zaretsky, “Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach by proxy” (2019), video (image courtesy the artist)

Boz Garden’s Riotous Folds: Possibilities for the Document series juxtaposes images and quotations about modern architecture, urban riots, and histories of Black dissidents. While architecture might be fascinated by glass as a symbol of progress and modernity, these works are more interested in their destruction — shattered glass as an anticapitalist metonym for the broken storefront and looted commodity. The project documents ways in which architecture reinforces the permanence of commerce and capital: An excerpt from an article about glazier company Giroux Glass recounts the supposedly heroic efforts of glass repairmen boarding up windows to protect businesses against looting.

In each case, the urban fabric presents ways of interpreting the world that are challenged or undermined (either intentionally or not) by people encountering these spaces. Tearing down statues and renaming streets might have great symbolic power, but deeper transformative shifts in how people experience the world or remember the past remain a work in progress. These artist-made archives might give us a sense of what possibilities await in the future.

ARCHIVE MACHINES runs online at the LAMAG website through November 1. The third thematic section, “REWIRING,” launched in September and the fourth, “RELATING,” launches October 1. The exhibition was curated by Olivian Cha, Kerstin Erdmann, and Rita Gonzalez.

Eight Great Books for Getting Through a Creative Block

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 23:50:13 +0200

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In some inevitable moments, every artist, writer, or creator of any form will find themselves staring at an empty canvas, page, or desktop, hitting a complete creative block. You either lack inspiration for what to do next or feel that being an artist, period, is impossible—society doesn’t value it enough! How can you go on? In such moments, stepping away from the ennui of the studio and reading a book can be the best way to escape your own head. These books present a tiny canon for getting out of a rut, particularly for visual art but also applicable to any field.

1. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler

Artist biographies are usually published long after the artist has passed away, looking retrospectively at their life and work and figuring out how the two interconnect. But the journalist and writer Lawrence Weschler wrote his book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees on the artist Robert Irwin in the midst of Irwin’s career, actively observing and reporting on his activities. The result is a book that’s not just about how Irwin moved forward in his practice, from paintings on canvas to immersive installation of light and space, but what it takes to be a practicing contemporary artist. Irwin has navigated every problem, from obstinate dealers to planting a garden at the Getty Museum. “Irwin’s minimalist passion arises in a spirit of zestful affirmation of human possibility,” Weschler writes.

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2. Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment by Paper Monument

Art school isn’t for everyone—it’s expensive, exclusive, and takes years to get through. But art assignments might be. The intermittent art magazine Paper Monument, led by the artist and professor Dushko Petrovich, published a book collecting art assignments from the likes of John Baldessari, William Pope.L, Chris Kraus, and Amy Sillman. Flipping it open is an easy way to give yourself something to do in the way of a specific task or project. Here’s Mira Schor’s assignment: “I give you my permission to fail for one week, or maybe less: I give you the order to experiment for just two hours, take two hours out of your life to do what you think is a bad work, to do something out of your habits or comfort zone, without fear of judgment.” (The assignments are also collected on a website.)

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3. What It Is by Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry combines visual art and writing in a way that few people have accomplished. Her books are not just comics but collages, memoirs, and philosophical texts. “What It Is” is an examination of her creative subconscious, confronting the core questions of what it means for her to make comics: How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? There’s a mystery to making art that often lays beyond words, but Barry feels her way toward answers. She finds that taking a walk sometimes helps.

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4. In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

A short text can change the way you think about everything, turning your perspective upside-down or inside-out. That’s how reading this essay by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki makes me feel. Tanizaki wrote the piece in 1933 as part of his job as a general cultural commentator for newspapers and magazines; it was first published as a book in English in the 1970s. But it feels relevant for any decade. Tanizaki describes the aesthetics of western modernity — industrial machinery, porcelain, and electric lights — clashing with the more traditional, softer style of Japanese antiquity. Tanizaki gently asks us to look at our surroundings differently, focusing on ambiguous darkness instead of bright light. “The beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows — it has nothing else,” he writes.

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5. Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt

Brian Eno is an artist and composer, but he also helps other musicians solve their problems as a producer for the likes of Devo, Talking Heads, and Paul Simon. In 1975, Eno worked with the British artist and multimedia pioneer Peter Schmidt to create “Oblique Strategies”, a deck of cards each emblazoned with a vague, challenging creative demand. The lines evoke the playful absurdity of Fluxus and the chance-driven composition of John Cage; they instruct users to “Work at a different speed”, ”Imagine the piece as a set of disconnected events”, or “Emphasize repetitions.” If you can’t decide how to proceed with a project, just draw a card and follow it as best you can.

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6. Octavia E. Butler’s notes to self

As a Black, female writer who wrote primarily science fiction novels, Octavia E. Butler faced plenty of obstacles to success and her stature as a pioneer of Afro-Futurism. But every time I feel remotely stuck, I remember the motivational notes to herself that she wrote on the back of notebooks and on spare slips of paper. They were affirmations that became prophetic: “My novels go onto the bestseller lists on or shortly after publication,” she wrote. “My books will be read by millions of people! So be it! See to it!” Other notes were about the work of writing itself: “Strike always — in all ways, at all times — always for intensity.” Butler explained her career and work further in the book of interviews, Conversations With Octavia Butler.

7. Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren

“Wabi-Sabi” is a Japanese term for the aesthetic appreciation of the handmade and rough hewn, seeking something more uneven than a perfectly manufactured object. The value is often epitomized in a cup made for the traditional Japanese tea ceremony: instead of spun on a wheel or stamped by a machine, the tea bowls are lumpy and misshapen, sometimes literally covered in its creator’s fingerprints. Wabi-Sabi’s message is that perfection, or overworking, can often be the enemy of art — trying too hard can be a problem. The designer Leonard Koren wrote this introduction to the idea in 1994, with words distributed with elegant sparseness across its pages — both text and artistic object. One of the first explanations of Wabi-Sabi in English can be found in “The Book of Tea” by Kakuzo Okakura.

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8. The Gift by Lewis Hyde

For most artists, the actual working life of art does not fit well into a market economy,” Lewis Hyde writes in his classic guide to creative practice in the modern world. The central problem is that art isn’t a perfect commodity for the capitalist marketplace; it works better as something given freely — a gift. “That art that matters to us — which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience — that work is received by us as a gift is received.” To read “The Gift” is to feel comforted that someone else understands the fundamental conflict between creativity and commodification. As Hyde writes: “The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society.”

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An Intricate Lace Mural Envelops the Facade of a French Fashion Museum

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 23:04:44 +0200

All images © Nespoon

On France’s northern shores lies the port city of Calais, a municipality that once was a destination for lace manufacturers. To escape economic and social difficulties, English textile artists and engineers immigrated in the late 19th Century, often establishing clandestine operations that defied patent laws by bringing specialty machines and practices to the region. Soon after, Calais became an industrial hub for lace manufacturing, employing around 40,000 residents.

A new mural by Warsaw-based artist Nespoon (previously) celebrates that rich history through an oversized textile that envelops the facade of a factory. The public artwork features delicate mesh and floral elements that cover the side of the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode, the city’s fashion and lace museum. Nespoon chose this particular motif, which dates back to 1894, from the institution’s archive before spray painting its intricate details onto the building.

Check out the video below to see the lace motif in-progress, and find more of the artist’s textile-based pieces on Behance and Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by NeSpoon (@nes.poon) on Sep 20, 2020 at 6:22am PDT

“Open for Exploitation”: Artists Project Messages on Guggenheim Museum Ahead of Reopening

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 22:31:50 +0200

A guerrilla projection on the Guggenheim Museum’s facade, reading “Seeking New Management” (all images courtesy of the Illuminator)

Yesterday, September 28, the artist-activist groups Artists for Workers (AFW) and the Illuminator descended on the Guggenheim Museum in New York for a series of guerrilla projections on its facade. The action was held in solidarity with the Guggenheim’s unionized workers and workers of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi ahead of the museum’s New York reopening this week (September 30 for members and October 3rd for the general public).

Traffic was scarce on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue when an old white van parked in front of the Guggenheim at 7:40pm last night. The vehicle, retrofitted to raise a large projector through an opening in its roof, belonged to the Illuminator. This is the third time that the group directed its projector at the Guggenheim’s spiral structure: It did it with the group Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.) in 2016 and 2014, and with Visual AIDS in 2015.

Members of the Illuminator setting up their projector in front of the Guggenheim

“Trustees to workers: Drop dead”

Within minutes, the Illuminator’s crew was atop the van to set up their gear. At 8pm, the projection lit up the Guggenheim’s facade with a series of messages reading: “Fair Contract,” “Seeking New Management,” “Open for Racism,” “$1.4 Million Dollar Director Salary,” “Austerity Wages for Workers,” and more.

“This action seeks to connect the exploitation of workers at the Solomon R. Guggenheim with the experience of workers in other Guggenheim locations, like the one in Abu Dhabi,” said a member of AFW, who prefers to remain anonymous, in a conversation with Hyperallergic during the action.

“Our aim is to put pressure on the museum to understand these are not isolated instances but are related through modes of racial oppression and exploitation of workers,” the activist continued. “That’s why the museum needs to ratify a contract with the Guggenheim’s workers union as soon as possible.”

“Open for racism”

“Open for exploitation”

AFW is a group of American and international artists based in New York City, which formed to support organizing museum workers across the city. In June, the group launched with a parody of the New Museum, presenting a website that replicates the museum’s branding to provide resources for anti-racist organizing. In July, the group launched the “Guggenheim Transparency Initiative,” a webpage that similarly mimics the museum’s official website but supplants its original contents with information about alleged race- and gender-based wage discrepancies within the museum’s departments.

AFW says that all of its actions against the Guggenheim are organized independently from the Guggenheim union and that its members have no professional affiliation with the museum. The group added that ahead of yesterday’s action, it consulted with the Gulf Labor Collective, a group of artists and activists that has been advocating for migrant worker rights in the Gulf since 2010.

The Guggenheim Union has not responded to Hyperallergic’s immediate request for comment.

“$1.4 million dollar director salary; austerity wages for workers”

“Solidarity with workers, NYC to Abu Dhabi”

The Guggenheim will open its doors tomorrow, September 30, against the backdrop of a string of controversies related to its policies of diversity and inclusion; grave financial losses that led to 92 furloughs and 24 layoffs; and unresolved contract negotiations with the Guggenheim union.

Most recently, an anonymous group of current and former workers called A Better Guggenheim accused the museum’s leadership of fostering an environment of sexism, racism, classism, and abuse. In a letter sent earlier this month, the group demanded the resignation or removal of the museum’s three top executives: Richard Armstrong, Director; Elizabeth Duggal, Senior Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer; and Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Chief Curator.

Artists for Workers and the Illuminator organized the projections in solidarity with the Guggenheim’s unionized workers and workers of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi

Last night’s projection caught the attention of passersby who stopped to snap photos, but only a few of the Fifth Avenue pedestrians reported having knowledge of the tensions between workers and management at the Guggenheim.

Tito Urunca, an artist who has been selling his photographs outside the Guggenheim for 10 years, was taking an evening walk when the projections started. “I know many of these workers; they work very hard for little money,” he told Hyperallergic. “Many of them had to change jobs during the shutdown.”

In a statement to Hyperallergic, the Guggenheim wrote: “We continue to negotiate in good faith with Local 30. We hope for a fair resolution that benefits our employees and the long-term financial health of the museum.”

“The Museum is listening to all our staff about our shared vision for the Museum going forward – a more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and accessible institution that can continue to operate for generations to come,” the museum’s statement continued. “We are committed to moving forward with a fair, respectful, and positive work environment for all Guggenheim employees. We recognize and appreciate the contributions of the talented staff who bring our mission to life every day.”

Joiri Minaya Isn’t Here to Entertain Your Tropical Fantasies

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:51:34 +0200

Joiri Minaya, “Container #7” (2020), archival pigment print on Canson Baryta Photographique paper, 40 x 60 inches, edition 1 of 3 (+1 AP) (all images courtesy Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York)

Joiri Minaya experiments with an empowering remedy for Dominican women subjected to the longue durée of the colonial gaze. To locate and instill agency, she mines disparate archives — Google image searches, ethnographic documentation, tourist postcards — uncovering and appropriating hyper-sexualized representations.

Joiri Minaya, “Continuum” (2020), archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl paper, 11 x 14 inches, edition of 12 + 3 AP

In digital collages such as “Continuum” (2020) — on view in her latest exhibition at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York — Minaya imposes Google image search results of Dominican women, often in highly eroticized poses, onto historic photographs taken by colonial ethnographers. Weaving historic and contemporary images, she remixes and collages snippets of postcards sold in tourist shops in Santo Domingo, then slips them back into shops throughout the city, covertly intervening into the circulation of images designed for consumption.

Placing her own body within the frame, Minaya creates and wears brightly patterned bodysuits sewn so as to force the wearer into a particular pose, transforming them into an odalisque or a siren. These loud and colorful suits are worn in self-portraits, captured in convincing yet artificial natural environments. Such picturesque tropical landscapes parallel the exoticization of Dominican women — a social fabrication that exists in tandem with the presentation of (un)natural tropical landscapes designed to uphold a colonial vision of Caribbean authenticity.

Installation view of I’m here to entertain you, but only during my shift, Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York

Tensions — of beauty, desire, fact and fantasy, agency, and stereotypes — are further exemplified in works such as “Ayoowiri / Girl with poinciana flowers” (2020). These beautiful orange flowers, native to the Caribbean, carry a historical legacy: once used as abortifacients by enslaved women, they offered resistance to a plantation economy that depended on their reproductive labor.

In Minaya’s creative practice, Dominican women refuse to be confined by a dominant gaze. With its provocative title, I’m here to entertain you, but only during my shift exerts Minaya’s demand for a visual politic that flirts with beauty, ecology, and the desire to be seen, without capitulating to the pull of exoticization.

Joiri Minaya, “Ayoowiri / Girl with poinciana flowers” (2020), archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl paper, 11 x 17 inches, edition of 15 + 3 AP

I’m here to entertain you, but only during my shift continues through September 30 at Baxter Street at the Camera Club of New York (126 Baxter Street, Chinatown, Manhattan). The exhibition was curated by Corrine Y. Gordon.

New Era

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:30:16 +0200

A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Adrián Nuclear. Model is Ezra Ma. Make up by Mohsen Mohsen. Fashion Brands …

Influential Social Practice Art Fellowship Program Shuts Down Because of Covid-19

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:24:28 +0200

The New York–based nonprofit A Blade of Grass, which has supported the production of socially-engaged artworks through funded fellowships, has announced a significant restructuring of its operations and program as a result of financial challenges precipitated by the pandemic. In a sign of the health crisis’s impact on small arts nonprofits, the organization will end its fellowship program, with the artist fellows named in March 2020 representing the final cohort in the program.

A Blade of Grass also announced that it will lay off its current five-person full-time staff in October and cut salary and benefits for its executive director, Deborah Fisher. During the 2021 fiscal year, the nonprofit will launch a commissioning model through which it will support the creation of a selection of artworks and related public programs. In addition, the nonprofit will organize “listening sessions” with artists to discuss their needs and formulate new modes of meeting them.

The organization’s annual Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art had awarded individual grants of $20,000 to eight artists during each cycle. Those funds went toward the development of artworks that address social, political, and economic issues across different communities.

Since the fellowship program was launched in 2014, it has been considered one of the top initiatives devoted to social practice art, which relies on outreach, conversations, and activism, and often does not take the form of physical objects. Major artists and groups, including Simone Leigh, Black Quantum Futurism, Ras Cutlass, Monica Sheets, Chinatown Art Brigade, Suzanne Lacy, and Dread Scott, have been named A Blade of Grass fellows in the past. The organization’s 2020 cohort includes Cannupa Hanska Luger, Taja Lindley, the theater collective Papel Machete, and others.

“In a moment when socially engaged artists have a particularly critical role to play, we are also being faced with the reality that arts funding, in its current form, is precarious precisely because the arts are perceived as serving too few,” Fisher said in a statement. “While we could not have predicted these circumstances, we have to deal with the moment as it exists and make the difficult but necessary decisions now to establish a more sustainable model that will allow the organization to continue to fulfill its mission and the commitment it made to supporting socially engaged art and the artists who create it.”

The Boldly Feminine Gaze of Hiba Schahbaz

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:13:19 +0200

Hiba Schahbaz, “Self Portrait As Olympia (After Manet)” (2020), oil on canvas, 60 x 84 inches (all images courtesy DeBuck Gallery)

Women of color, especially immigrants — artists or otherwise — are often forced to grow smaller, to fold themselves into becoming almost invisible, to avoid attention and be grateful to be allowed a place to stand. Hiba Schahbaz’s large-scale paintings, on view in her latest show, Dreaming, are therefore a bold assertion of the right to claim and occupy space, both figuratively and literally.

Schahbaz, born in Karachi, trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting at Lahore’s National College of Arts, and later studied at New York’s Pratt Institute. Dreaming showcases her life-size oil paintings of women, a pivot from her smaller, water-based works on paper, of which one is also on view. Figures are shown communing with nature and with other women, and tending to themselves.

Installation view of Hiba Schahbaz: Dreaming, DeBuck Gallery, New York

As her artwork grows in scale, Schahbaz transposes depictions of nature from the miniature style to her large canvases: lotuses, lions, snakes, pearls, leaves, and doves surround the women, almost like a cocoon. The meditative gaze of miniature paintings makes itself evident here in the delicate tendrils of hair curling around lotus stems, or strings of pearls clinging to immaculately-drawn toes.

The women in the artworks, drawn in Schahbaz’s likeness, are self-portraits as well as symbols of the community of women the artist surrounds herself with. Be it “Dreamers” (2020) in which five women (or five images of one woman) with flowing dark hair sit unclothed in various stages of recline, or “Strength” (2020) — in which the same figure sits on her knees, facing a lion — the works convey a desire to commune and connect. Paintings of solitary women wrapped in the comfort of flowers and pearls, as in “Self Portrait As Sleeping Venus” or “Self Portrait as Olympia” (both 2020) emphasize the need to devote attention to oneself.

In Schahbaz’s work, femininity and delicateness are political. Her gaze, and that of her figures, is both persistent and disruptive.

Hiba Schahbaz, “Strength” (2020), tea, gouache and watercolor on earth stained paper, 60 x 84 inches

Hiba Schahbaz: Dreaming is on view (by appointment and online) through October 10 at DeBuck Gallery (505 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan). The online exhibition can be accessed here.

Slumming It

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:52:42 +0200

In the 1970s, New York looked like a city in decline. The Mayor’s Office had been running a deficit since the 1960s, borrowing to balance the budget, but in the spring of 1975, the banks that had kept the city afloat declined to extend further credit, initiating a fiscal crisis. By October 16, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, which President Gerald Ford famously refused to alleviate. The Municipal Assistance Corporation, a committee formed several months earlier to manage the city’s finances, and composed almost exclusively of bankers, pivoted to enforcing austerity. The policy was buttressed in 1978 by the establishment of the Emergency Financial Control Board, which was also concerned with finding market-based solutions to the scarcity of funds. This subtle takeover of key governmental functions by financiers resulted, in the short term, in mass layoffs of civil servants, rollbacks of social services, and the proliferation of the most potent symbol of what had come to be known as “Fear City”: abandoned tenement buildings. Set on fire by deadbeat landlords in the South Bronx and occupied as squats by artists on the Lower East Side, these structures and their neighborhoods birthed two of the most influential art scenes in the history of New York, if not the world. Artists fought governmental mismanagement as one might expect them to: by sublimating their frustrations, seizing the city’s transformation as their subject and their cause.

Andrew Strombeck, DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2020; 310 pages, $95 hardcover.

In the long term, the fiscal crisis fostered the financialization of the city’s economy, planned gentrification, and gross mishandling of the AIDS epidemic. Following historian Kim Phillips-Fein and others, Andrew Strombeck, professor of English at Wright State University, argues in DIY on the Lower East Side: Books, Buildings, and Art after the 1975 Fiscal Crisis that this economic reconfiguration of New York contributed to a broader breakdown of the “long networks of the Fordist economy.” Alan Greenspan, chair of President Ford’s Council of Economic Advisers, weaponized the crisis to advocate for “a new moral politics” that preached financial responsibility and reductions in government spending, providing an ideological blueprint for the contemporary Republican Party. Artists and writers downtown, Strombeck contends, found new ways of “doing it yourself,” by which he means much more than making homemade clothes or zines. The mandate to hustle triggered by a shrinking social safety net resulted in a primitive version of today’s gig economy, and provided a new model of the ideal laborer: “people who love their job, value creativity, and who don’t mind working unpaid overtime.” While these “culture workers,” as Strombeck prefers to call them, can be credited with the gentrification of the Lower East Side (and by implication, the rest of New York, San Francisco, the world), they also practiced a politics of community and resistance that demonstrated “the possibility for living and creating outside of the self-management demanded by post-Fordist work.”

Strombeck sees this turning point in economic, political, and cultural history reflected in the work of New Yorkers who spent the fiscal crisis making art: he devotes chapters to Gordon Matta-Clark and David Wojnarowicz; painter Martin Wong, writers Miguel Algarín, Bimbo Rivas, and other affiliates of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the nonprofit performance space established in Alphabet City in 1973; novelist-critics Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana, and Lynne Tillman; and the editors of the little magazines Semiotext(e) and Between C & D. The DIY ethos born of austerity and exhibited in this work represents, for Strombeck, a “utopian possibility at the moment of Fordism’s destruction,” when our present reality of Amazon, Uber, TaskRabbit, and OnlyFans might have gone another way. It is under the rubric of dot-matrix printed journals and storefront galleries, do-it-yourself tenant advocacy, afterschool programs, and banking that the arts flourished during times of trouble, in physical spaces reclaimed by artists whose formal inventions mirrored the conditions of their lives.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floor: Boston Road, 1972

For Strombeck, the monologues collected in Wojnarowicz’s Waterfront Journals (1978–80) preserve “a narrative record of lives that appear in corners of the post-crisis city’s disused landscape, only to disappear under the underclass-scapegoating logic of redevelopment.” Wojnarowicz cruised the West Side piers in the guise of an amateur anthropologist (a role he would reprise with more zealous political intent amid the AIDS crisis and the culture wars) while Matta-Clark made art out of disused buildings in the Bronx, illegally cutting holes that celebrated their inherent value. The theoretical reappraisal of these buildings into objets d’art because of his excisions parodied real estate’s exploitation of neighborhoods for profit, which Strombeck reads as antithetical to the artist’s leftist stance, a signpost “toward private-public models of development that would assume more and more primacy in the aftermath of the financial crisis,” and culminate in the High Line.

But Chelsea is not the Lower East Side, nor is the Bronx, or even SoHo, and Strombeck’s specious geography suggests the inexactitude of an outsider. Matta-Clark did not live or work on the Lower East Side, and though the legacy of Semiotext(e) has merged with the myth of downtown because of the writers it has published, the journal was founded uptown, on the campus of Columbia University. Strombeck is quick to indict dilettantish attempts to explain New York to New Yorkers when they appear, for instance, in the work of French philosopher Félix Guattari, who presented an insensitive paper on “blacks in Harlem” to the audience at the Semiotext(e) “Schizo-Culture” conference at Columbia in November 1975, sharing a bill with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, William Burroughs, and John Cage. As Strombeck himself notes, the innovations of Black culture in Harlem and the Bronx at this time were far from insignificant, and the imprecision of his purview makes their absence here conspicuous. DIY on the Lower East Side does not purport to be a comprehensive history, but its case studies offer variations on a theme rather than a coherent thesis about the Lower East Side, assigning ’70s New York’s most radical energies to the neighborhood by association.

The book’s argument hinges on “the indelible mark” left by the fiscal crisis on art and writing of the period, “shaping the ways” its authors “thought about modes of living, working, and making art.” Some of them (Wojnarowicz, the Nuyorican poets) were prolific activists, but Strombeck praises Between C & D’s editors Joel Rose and Catherine Texier especially for “documenting downtown instead of curating it,” functioning as “archaeologists” rather than trying (and inevitably failing) to “represent” the Lower East Side. Strombeck’s terminological distinction (and occasional slippage) implies a conflict between the documentary and representational modes that his methods, steeped in French sociology, “surface reading,” and “post-critique,” fail to unpack. The book’s attention to Indiana and Tillman is welcome, as they deserve more appreciation in the field of literary studies than they have received, but the analysis is not always as insightful as Strombeck supposes it to be. His explications are often too cursory or allusive, as in a passing evaluation of an Indiana story as “typically queer,” or the insistence that Tillman’s “Madame Realism” columns, many of them originally written for this magazine, “anticipate” the critical practice of philosopher Jacques Rancière. One would hope to find more life in a work of ostensibly biographical criticism than Strombeck seems willing to supply: what of the artists’ friendships, rivalries, and affairs—or rare finds such as an early short story by Anthony Bourdain in Between C & D, which is referenced without comment?

One reason for this may be the sheer ambition of Strombeck’s project, which traverses disciplinary boundaries in search of a conception of DIY that is political as well as aesthetic: though “DIY is absorbed into late capitalism itself,” he writes, “we can nevertheless see in DIY a desire for ways of living outside of the boundaries of work.” The inclusion of Acker, already the subject of voluminous scholarship, feels perfunctory, and it’s not exactly clear why the art criticism of Tillman and Indiana—commissioned, edited, and paid for by legacy publications—belongs in this genealogy. But Strombeck’s research on Between C & D, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and El Bohío, a disused public school building converted into a theater and arts center by the community organization Charas, supplies a corrective to more cynical accounts of the counterculture post-1975, elaborating an ethos that “meant taking into your own hands what the government has stopped providing,” one that was “well-meaning and complicit, activist and entrepreneurial.”

It is not exactly reassuring to learn that the pioneers of gentrification were no less ambivalent about disadvantaging others for mere subsistence than the current class of ostensibly progressive urbanists for whom real estate colonialism is the norm. Yet the archive is rich in what could have been, pre-Starbucks and Giuliani. Neoliberalism has not yet succeeded in killing New York for good, but in times of crisis, communities cannot live on mutual aid alone, and it will take much more than a DIY attitude to ensure a future for the people, the buildings, and the art that call the city home.

The Best Camera Lenses for iPhones Will Yield Artful Photographs and Films

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:45:58 +0200

In 2020, five years after a film shot exclusively on iPhones premiered at Sundance (Tangerine, 2015) and the year when Naomi Campbell shot her own self-portrait with an iPhone to grace the cover of Essence magazine, carrying around a clunky DSLR is almost passé. Photographers and videographers aren’t ditching their cameras quite yet, but more and more professionals and hobbyists are using iPhones to create striking, high-quality images and videos. If you don’t have the newest phone decked out with ultrawide, wide, and telephoto lenses—or even if you do—a professional lens, attachable directly to your phone, will enhance the quality, zoom capability, and effects available to you. Below are five of our favorites.

The Best Ribbons for Delicate Finishes and Trims

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:43:22 +0200

Tie a bow, weave a pattern, build a wreath. When it comes to ribbons, the creative possibilities are nearly endless. So too, it appears, are the varieties of ribbons, which come in all sorts of widths, finishes, colors, and patterns. Whether you need a temporary embellishment or a permanent trimming, a good ribbon should look attractive and neat while being easy to transform into your wildest designs. Simplify your search with our recommendations below.

The Best Poppy Liquid Extract and Oil for Your Drying Needs

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:41:35 +0200

Of the many drying oils you can keep in your arsenal, poppy oil is an excellent, versatile choice. Extracted from poppy seed, this slick medium can improve the performance of oil paint by increasing its flow, enhancing its glossiness, and adjusting viscosity to an ideal consistency. This pale, semi-drying oil does take longer to dry than linseed oil, but it is also less susceptible to yellowing. This makes it particularly well suited for use with pale colors or whites. Whether you’re interested in trying poppy oil for the first time or are searching for a different brand, our picks below will help you find the best product for your studio.

The Best Pipe Cleaners for Crafting

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:39:37 +0200

Pipe cleaners, as their name makes clear, were originally developed to clean tobacco pipes. Consisting of a wire core covered by short bristles, these long and flexible tools can reach narrow, unseen areas with ease. But their creative potential was quickly identified by artists, who have used pipe cleaners to sculpt and weave all kinds of fascinating works. Today pipe cleaners come in myriad colors, finishes, and sizes and are an especially popular material for all-ages crafting. Our recommendations below will help you find the ones that will reliably hold up to your particular uses.

The Best Metallic Acrylic Paint for Glittery Effects

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:36:49 +0200

If you’re looking for a paint to impart an all-over metallic effect or one that can just add a light-catching detail here and there, metallic acrylics may be the way to go. But it’s hard enough to find an acrylic paint with a flawless consistency, let alone one with a beautifully balanced metallic sheen. Many look too glittery; others too dull. To find that perfect space between the two extremes is an art that few companies have mastered. Fortunately, we’ve located some excellent products to guide your choice. Check out our reviews below.

The Best Marbled Papers for Scrapbooking, Sculpting, and More

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:35:07 +0200

Decorated with dense, intricate patterns, marbled papers are some of the most alluring papers to use in your art. These colorful sheets were traditionally prepared by hand: An artisan used a stylus to comb through or rake pigments floated on a solution, then transferred the pattern to paper. The results, wavy and flowing, were often used for bookbinding. Today the centuries-old art form has been adapted for quick manufacture, with many papers simply printed with marbled designs. But if you’re willing to invest a little more, you can still find handmade sheets. Whether you’re looking for affordable decorative papers for scrapbooking or carefully processed ones for memorable artworks, our picks will help you find the best option for the job.

New Study Reveals Potentially Groundbreaking Drawing Hidden Beneath ‘Mona Lisa’

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:34:46 +0200

A new study on the Mona Lisa has revealed evidence of a charcoal underdrawing, suggesting for the first time that Leonardo da Vinci used a preparatory sketch to create the famous portrait.

The underdrawing, detected by multispectral analysis, was likely created using the spolvero technique, a method for transferring a sketch to canvas in which holes are pricked along the outline of an image and dusted with charcoal.

The study was conducted over a 15-year period by scientist Pascal Cotte, who published the findings with Lionel Simonot in the Journal of Cultural Heritage. In 2004, Colette was invited by the Louvre to digitize the Mona Lisa with his pioneering Lumiere Technology camera, a high-resolution multispectral camera, which is capable of detecting light reflected over 13 wavelengths. The Lumiere technology also employed modern infrared reflectography, which is used for detecting charcoal underdrawings through faint light reflected on the charcoal’s surface.

Cossette detected the spolvero marks in the Mona Lisa’s hand and hairline—the lighter areas of the painting—which revealed that Leonardo shifted her pose, turning her head to stare more directly at the viewer. The analysis noted too what appears to be a hairpin, which only invites more questions as the accessory was not in vogue in Florence at the time of the portrait’s creation. In an interview with the Express, Cossette said that the detail may have been allegorical, as the hairstyle was used more typically in depictions of goddesses or the Virgin Mary.

The study also stated that the drawing may have been used to create more replicas of the painting, such as the one displayed in the Prado in Madrid, which owns the earliest known studio copy of the Mona Lisa.

“These discoveries increase and increase the mystery of its creation, in the end we understand that it is the work of a very long ‘creative act’—which spans more than a decade and in several stages,” Cossette said.

The Best Paper Airplane Books for Learning an Age-Old Craft

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:26:29 +0200

If there’s one paper craft that every person has likely attempted at least once, it’s the craft of folding a paper plane. From gliders to darts, these lightweight soarers have been around for millennia, captivating not only children but also adults from Leonardo da Vinci to Jack Northrop, the cofounder of Lockheed Corporation. In addition to illustrating aerodynamic design and theory, these folded aircraft, whether simple or highly complex, can be just plain fun to make. Plus, they stretch the creative mind, challenging you to unlock the potential of a single sheet of paper. Below, our picks of the best paper airplane books to get you aloft in no time.

The Best Origami Kits for Beginners of All Ages

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:18:50 +0200

Origami, which literally means “folded paper” in Japanese, is a timeless art form that is also incredibly accessible. People of all ages can pick up a sheet of paper and manipulate it into essentially any subject, although there is a canon of traditional forms that has been established over centuries. It’s a highly portable art that’s perfect to practice while traveling or waiting for an appointment. Whether you’re looking to pick up origami as a casual pastime or a serious hobby, it can be economical to purchase a kit, which includes not only an instruction book but also a supply of papers to get you started. Our picks below include options for origami enthusiasts of all ages.

The Anti-Immigrant Ballot Measure That Galvanized California’s Latinx Community

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:10:47 +0200

From 187: The Rise of the Latino Vote (2020), dir. Dignicraft (all images courtesy KCET)

Go back to any major US political event within the past few decades and you can see the same key themes resonating with today’s climate. I leave it to you to decide whether this makes such times prophetic of our own or merely indicates the cyclical nature of the beast. In either case, the battle over California Proposition 187 in 1994 is a dark forbear of contemporary discourse around immigration. That ballot initiative was a reaction to a string of economic, social, and environmental upheavals that laid the blame for all the state’s woes on undocumented immigrants. The new documentary 187: The Rise of the Latino Vote, directed by members of the art collective Dignicraft, revisits this controversy and examines its fallout.

Among other things, Prop 187 called to block undocumented immigrants from public services, including education and non-emergency healthcare, and for the institution of a statewide citizenship-screening system. It was blatantly unconstitutional, flagrantly targeted people of Central American descent, and would cost more money to implement than it would supposedly save by preventing undocumented people from “leeching” off the system. A large majority of Californians opposed it. And yet a majority of those who voted (or at least were able to vote) allowed the measure to pass. Racism and xenophobia overrode all logical concerns. The echoes of 2016 are obvious, and demonstrate the distressing staying power of anti-immigrant (especially anti-Latinx) sentiment in US politics.

But despite its passage, Prop 187 was never enforced and ultimately discarded after a few years, and that’s thanks to the wave of activism and solidarity it galvanized among Latinx Californians and their allies. The documentary 187 posits this political awakening among the state’s Latinx population as the prime mover for California’s shift to becoming the Democratic stronghold it’s been for the past few decades.

Dignicraft incorporates archival materials into 187 with flair, playing historical news footage on miniature TV screens to clearly delineate it from contemporary interviews with figures like California State Senator Maria Elena Durazo and Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund (MALDEF) President Thomas Saenz. It’s as though the materials are the collective memory of the interviewees. (And in a sense, our media history could be said to be an embodiment of our collective memory.) This also underscores how political movements in the modern age are both driven by and filtered through the mass media. Despite all the changes to the communications landscape since the ’90s, that’s another element that certainly hasn’t changed.

From 187: The Rise of the Latino Vote (2020)

187: The Rise of the Latino Vote premieres Tuesday, October 6 in Southern California on KCET, with encores following nationwide.

A Passionate Collector’s Pre-Cinema Objects Will Go to Academy Museum, Illuminating Early Film History

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 20:00:34 +0200

Decades before the Lumière brothers projected their first film in Paris, artists and inventors the world over were tinkering with technologies meant to captivate audiences through cinematic storytelling. These days, those pre-cinema machines are the subject of passionate collecting, and few collections come near the quality (and quantity) of the one created by Richard Balzer.

Until his death three years ago, Balzer, a Boston-based organizational consultant, spent more than 40 years accumulating pre-cinema objects, among them magic lanterns, projection devices from the 17th century first used in the scientific field and later adopted for popular entertainment, and early peep show boxes through which viewers could gaze on detailed images accompanied by a showman’s narration; he kept them in a carriage house–cum–private museum behind his home in Brookline, a Boston suburb. Now, the more than 9,000 objects in his holdings are headed to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Items from the collection will be on display when the Renzo Piano–designed building on Wilshire Boulevard opens next spring.

Acquiring the collection is a huge development for the museum, said Academy Museum curator Jessica Niebel, who ranks it among the best of its kind worldwide and spent three years in the effort to procure it. Niebel sees it as crucial to the institution’s ability to show the “evolution of visual storytelling.” The museum’s mission is to tell a holistic story of cinema, and the Balzer collection will play a critical role in illuminating the medium’s beginnings.

The acquisition process began when Niebel visited Patricia Bellinger, Balzer’s widow, to see the collection. In the carriage house, Niebel saw meticulous displays organized by object type so as to clearly convey their purpose. One of them was a parlor amusement popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in which people viewed perspectival etchings called vues d’optique through a magnifying device that gave them depth. Here, they were backlit in a cabinet, suggesting illusionistic “night views” of the scenes portrayed.

Objects on view in Balzer’s private museum in the carriage house behind his home in Brookline, Mass.

“I immediately understood how important it was for him to not just own these objects but to share them and to demonstrate how they worked, and to show off the wonder they once created, and they still do,” Niebel said of her visit, adding that the inviting setup, which featured framed paintings and prints on the walls, “brought the whole thing to life.”

Singling out objects from among the thousands in the collection is a daunting proposition. For Niebel, a 1737 engraving by Edmé Bouchardon depicting a woman lanternist holds a certain historical intrigue, since traveling magic lantern performers in the 18th century were typically men. The curator also has a special appreciation for two rarities in the collection: a bull’s-eye magic lantern that is among the earliest objects of its kind, and still has all its original parts; and two sets of glass slides for a projecting praxinoscope, a 19th-century device whose invention marked “an important step in the technical development” of cinema, Niebel said. Balzer did not possess a projecting praxinoscope, very few of which have survived, and Niebel believes he must have been searching for one for years.

Edmé Bouchardon, L’orgue de Barbarie, 1737.

Among Bellinger’s favorites is a triunial lantern from 1891, made of wood and brass; its three lenses enabled lanternists to create continuous movement of images across screens. She also favors the “peacock lantern,” a viewing device circa 1895 with colorful, rounded lenses, and “incredibly simple but stunningly beautiful” lithographs that transform when held up to a light source.

“Today, it’s sort of hard for me to remember that Jessica never met Dick,” Bellinger told ARTnews, referring to her late husband, “because he would’ve just adored her, and they like the same things—they would’ve had a whale of a time together. Jessica is the reason that the collection ultimately went [to the Academy Museum], because of her sensibility, her appreciation, and her real love and delight.” It was important to both Bellinger and Balzer that the collection be kept together to preserve its historical scope and, as Bellinger puts it, “to honor his memory and what it meant to him.” She joined the Academy Museum’s board of trustees this past July, and describes it as a “perfect fit” for the collection.

For Niebel, one of the collection’s greatest strengths is its comprehensiveness—it includes examples of a broad range of object types, all of which are in good condition. And if there is a rare example of a certain piece, it is often found in the holdings.

“You can only find these if you collect for a long, long time,” Niebel said of the collection’s more singular objects. “Magic lanterns come up at auctions all the time. Some things you can really find easily, and they might not even be that expensive. But only over the four decades that he collected was he able to find objects in such fine condition and objects that are so rare yet representative of something.”

Animation disc for a Living Pictures Optical Illusion phenakistiscope from Germany, ca. 1840.

Balzer was a businessman with an artist’s eye. Although best known as a consultant—he started in that line with the United Automobile Workers and United Steelworkers, and in 1967 founded the firm Balzer & Associates, Inc.—he worked as a photographer throughout his life, and his photographs are in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the monographs Street Time, China: Day by Day, and Clockwork: Life In and Outside an American Factory, among others. He authored the 1998 book Peepshows: A Visual History, and he was also cofounder of the nonprofit Petra Foundation, which for 25 years offered fellowships centering on social justice.

Balzer’s passion for pre-cinema objects was sparked in the mid-1970s when he met a collector of such material at an antique fair in the United Kingdom. Once he caught the bug, he bought in bulk, acquiring entire collections from auction houses or individuals and setting up a payment plan, then selling off pieces he didn’t want and applying those proceeds to his original purchase—often making money in the process. He wound up with a collection that is as broad as it is deep, with pieces from Europe, Asia, and North America.

Ceramic Magic Lantern designed by Johann Falk in Nuremberg, Germany, 1895.

“He loved this gentle kind of showmanship and trickery that was involved in so many of the objects,” said Bellinger, adding that he took great joy in putting on magic lantern shows after dinner parties, at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other venues.

Balzer also nurtured his fascination with pre-cinematic storytelling through the Magic Lantern Society of the United States and Canada, an organization founded in 1979 that brings together enthusiasts in the field. He was chairman of the Society from 1984 to 1989, and hosted two of their conventions in Boston, in 1987 and 2014, gathering collectors and purveyors of such esoteric materials to share and preserve information about their history and care.

“This is something that appeals to a particular kind of person, someone interested in pictorial history, showmanship, and the pre-history of cinema,” said Larry Rakow, a longtime friend of Balzer, who served as vice president of the Society from 2004 to 2008, and himself hosted two conventions. The organization now has more than 100 members internationally.

Rakow, who was first acquainted with Balzer when he sold him a large selection of magic lantern slides he had acquired in the early 1980s, said that the scope of the Balzer collection—the number and range of objects, books, and ephemera—is what makes it so significant, and Balzer’s “tremendous love for the medium” and “very wide appreciation of virtually everything that went into the history of cinema” was what set him apart as a steward.

“Without being arrogant about it, Richard Balzer showed me exactly where I was on the pecking order of magic lantern collectors, and it was not very high up,” Rakow said, adding that the Academy Museum has an opportunity to help visitors “start filling in the blanks” in the history of magic lanterns, which is a “part of pre-cinema history that was effectively lost.”

A hand-colored engraving from the 18th century showing a perspectival view of the interior of the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

As fascinating as these objects are, they rarely left Balzer’s carriage house. Some of them figured in a 2017 exhibition entitled “The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820” at the Harvard Art Museums, where Balzer performed a magic lantern show. Balzer didn’t live to see the 2018 exhibition “Phantasmagoria” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on which he collaborated.

Marjorie Cohn, curator emerita of prints at the Fogg Art Museum and former head of the Harvard Art Museums, met Balzer in the early 1990s when he wanted help identifying the types of prints he had collected.

“We would have wonderful conversations about the excitement of the chase and about the way one dealt with dealers and the way one dealt with other collectors and museums—the whole culture of collecting,” said Cohn, who collects Old Masters prints and Japanese drawings. “I think the thing that amazed me most about his collection—beyond the scope and his knowledgeable identification of what he had—was the preciousness of the things he had. We’re not talking precious in terms of market value, but in terms of their sheer survival,” Cohn said, alluding to figurines, games, and devices that are hundreds of years old.

Peacock Sciopticon, produced by the Pettibone Brothers Manufacturing Company, Cincinnati, ca. 1895.

Last year, the MFA Boston, acquired about 40 objects from the Balzer collection. Ben Weiss, director of collections and curator of visual culture at the MFA, has witnessed audiences’ “pure delight” in the pieces, particularly young audiences.

“Very simple optical tricks totally captivate people, and it’s amazing to watch,” Weiss said. “And everybody—all the designers, all the graphic designers—they all came away just feeling giddy with pleasure at the prospect of working on the show.”

“The kinds of objects he had that were more ‘object’ than ‘art’ were never terribly artful because that wasn’t the whole point,” Cohn added. “I never turned up my nose at what he showed me because it was so obvious why he collected them. He made a whole universe.”

Bellinger hopes that in its new home at the Academy Museum this universe of curiosities can help people of all ages understand the history of cinema more deeply, and perhaps help younger visitors imagine how people entertained themselves in earlier times. The Academy Museum’s assessment of the fragility of some objects and how frequently they can be displayed is still underway, and Niebel said that understanding visitors’ first impressions of the museum will help inform future presentations of the Balzer collection and other such materials. As part of the gift, the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in L.A. will receive Balzer’s related collection of books, prints, and other ephemera.

“I have high hopes that children will have the opportunity to engage with it,” Bellinger said. “I think they’ll learn about the wonders of cinema and the origins and the history of so much that is our world today. It’s a whole other way to bring history to life and to teach … and … entertain people.” It’s also an opportunity for Hollywood to reach out beyond the film capital: Bellinger added that it will “enable this institution, which is so incredibly important to the history of our country, to be able to tell its own story and reach further back beyond the United States to where the story begins.”

A version of this article appears in the Fall 2020 issue of ARTnews, under the title “Beginning to See the Light.”

Affected by a Central Force, Dancers Perform Implausible Bends on a Perpetually Spinning Stage

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:51:36 +0200

“Celui qui tombe,” or he who falls, is an illusory performance from self-described circus artist Yoann Bourgeois (previously) that opens with six dancers on a spinning platform. As the central stage turns, the performers run forward to fight the perpetual motion, even though their efforts keep them in the same spot. The sextet moves easily throughout the performance, grasping onto each other and stopping in neat lines as they respond to the stage’s revolutions. As Kottke notes, the centripetal force of the platform makes it possible for the dancers to contort their bodies into seemingly implausible positions, like the acute bends shown below, and remain standing.

Bourgeois created “Celui qui tombe” in 2014 and shares an extensive collection of similar illusions on YouTube. You also can keep up with his work on Instagram.

Book Club #67: Florian Hetz – zwei

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:30:29 +0200

The new monograph “zwei” by Berlin photographer Florian Hetz presents a broad cross-section of his distinctive visual world. …

The Best One-Hole Punches for Function and Decoration

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:30:05 +0200

While found today on desks in all kinds of offices from the corporate to the creative, the humble hole punch was originally invented to be used on the go. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the earliest patent for a paper punch, from 1885, was issued for a gizmo that conductors could use on railroad trains. This handheld device featured two spring-loaded metal clamps, one with a sharp cutting surface for piercing tickets. Notably, this conductor’s punch doesn’t look that different from 21st-century handheld versions, which are of course used by many people who don’t ride the rails for a living. Punching power, though, has certainly improved since the Victorian era, with some punchers capable of puncturing material much tougher than paper. Whether you need functional holes or a batch of confetti, our picks below will help you find the best punch for your project.

The Best Luminous Markers for Glowing Work

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:16:06 +0200

Sometimes you just want your art to shine—literally. To achieve effects that are visible in the dark, pick up a luminous marker, which is generally as easy to use as a standard marker, and add glowing effects to drawings or messages without any extra mess. It’s important that you read the descriptions of each product, as some markers’ lines can simply be charged under sunlight to glow, while others are activated by UV light (also called a black light). Markers also come in a range of sizes and colors. To ease your search, we’ve gathered our top picks below.

The Best Bookbinding Screws for Fastening Pages Together

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:12:45 +0200

Bookbinding screws are among the fastest and most accessible ways to hold papers together. More generally known as screw posts or Chicago binding posts, these little fasteners consist of two parts: a post with a smooth, hollow shaft and a shorter cap with threads. Using them is a breeze: All you do is punch a hole in the papers, slip the smooth post through, and screw the cap into the post. The only tool you need for this straightforward process is a screwdriver. Whether you want to bind photobooks, scrapbooks, portfolios, swatches, or a pile of loose documents, our picks will help you find the best set for your needs.

The Best Glow-In-The-Dark Paint for Striking Effects

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:10:32 +0200

Glow-in-the-dark paint is a fun medium to use, whether for adding a surprise element to your artwork, creating festive messages, or just plain experimentation. Like regular paints, these come in all kinds of colors and can be applied with a paintbrush or even your fingers. When looking for the right product for your needs, you should consider the glow strength as well as duration; some might glow for only a few minutes, while higher-quality ones can remain luminous for hours after just a few minutes of light exposure. Explore our top picks below.

The Best Craft Glue for Forging Strong Bonds Between Varied Materials

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:07:22 +0200

Craft glue, traditionally an adhesive that can be used on many materials, is an essential product to have on hand. It’s important to know the properties of what you’re working with, though, as some craft glues are not particularly strong, dry too quickly, or dry with an ugly yellow sheen. At the very least, a good craft glue should be easy to work with and leave no trace, so your projects look as streamlined and undisturbed as possible. Our picks below will help you discover all the amazingly creative things you can do with a simple bottle of glue.

The Best Archival Storage Boxes for Photos and Art Will Keep Your Works In Great Condition

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 19:01:25 +0200

Chances are, you have an old shoebox or bin lying around your home or studio, chock-full of photographs, sketches, or other keepsakes. A shoebox is a fine storage solution, but not one that will preserve its contents for many lifetimes. If you’d like your artworks and collectibles to have the greatest chance of lasting for generations, it’s vital that you keep them in an archival container. These boxes are made in a variety of materials, but they should absolutely be acid-free to keep your papers from becoming brittle. Upgrade your storage methods with our top archival-quality picks below.

The Best Mulberry Paper Sheets for Delicate Creations and Decorations

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:51:56 +0200

Mulberry trees are the unsung heroes of silk fabric, as their leaves make up the diet of silkworms. But the bark of the tree gives us another gift. It’s used to make traditional Thai mulberry paper, or saa paper, which is valued for its delicate look and surprising sturdiness, not to mention its sustainability: The tree naturally sheds its bark once a year. Textured with sweeping arabesques of long fibers, mulberry paper makes for beautiful gift boxes and wrapping paper as well as more intricate craft creations like lanterns, scrapbooks, and origami. Even book and manuscript conservators value the paper for its ability to hold and blend in with the original. Whatever your project, a quality mulberry paper is key. Here are our favorites.

The Best Gesso Brushes for Smooth Strokes

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:48:33 +0200

Gesso and varnish brushes are typically big and have relatively short bristles that can spread large amounts of material over your canvas with strength and efficiency. It’s important to find a good-quality gesso brush that won’t leave behind bristles or texture the canvas surface too much. We’ve picked our favorite gesso brushes to help you make a good choice; peruse our reviews below.

The Best Blank Postcards for Handwritten Notes and Small-Scale Artworks

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:45:50 +0200

In the day and age of instant emails and the constant pull of social media, it’s still a treat to receive a postcard in the mail. And if you’re going to go through the trouble of sending a note to your loved ones via snail mail, why not make it as personal as you can? With precut and lined blank postcards ready for your personal embellishments, you can send each of your recipients a note that is truly one-of-a-kind. Ahead, find the five blank postcard options that we like best.

The Best Cardstock for Painting, Drawing, and More

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:31:32 +0200

Sometimes you need a heavier paper than what you can find in your inkjet printer. Perhaps you plan to make a drawing with high-pigment markers and don’t want the risk of bleed-through; or maybe you want to craft a sign that won’t blow around in the wind. Or perhaps you’re on the hunt for a fun arts and crafts project to embark on with your children. No matter what the reason, cardstock is a great alternative to paper on many an occasion. From rainbow tones to bright white classics, find the best cardstock options by considering our picks, below.

In 1971, Both the USPS and The Term “Mail Art” Were Born

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:28:26 +0200

The first widely circulated use of the term “mail art” in print occurred in the title of an exhibition catalogue: Mail art—Communication à distance—Concept. This publication was released in November of 1971: the same year that mail processing in America was transformed by the founding of the quasi-corporate United States Postal Service. The exhibition took place on the other side of the Atlantic, as part of the seventh Biennale de Paris, and was the brainchild of a French master’s student in his early twenties. A year prior, curator Marcia Tucker had organized a show with Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondance [sic] School at the Whitney Museum of American Art, featuring postcards, letters, and drawings from 106 participants, though the survey didn’t use the term “mail art.” Indeed, artist John Held Jr. recalls that the exhibition was presented without “standard curatorial comment” altogether. The French show is significant because it foregrounds the role of the postal service itself—which looms in the background, if not the foreground, of many postal works. With the USPS’s crucial role in this year’s election, it is instructive to revisit this exhibition that highlighted the roles postal workers play in artistic production.

Invitation to submit to the 1970 exhibition “Ray Johnson: New York Correspondance School” curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In the US, the transformation of mail in July of 1971 was brought about by an act of Congress that converted the former federal Post Office Department into a government-owned company that was expected to generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining. Previously, for some two centuries, American taxpayers had funded the POD. The reorganization into this autonomous entity was agreed to by unions and the government after postal employees, primarily led by Black workers, had successfully engaged in dramatic nationwide wildcat strikes in March of 1970. In New York City, where the strikes began, stocks fell and some feared that the market would close altogether. After unsuccessfully ordering postal workers back to their jobs, President Nixon summoned the National Guard to the Big Apple. However, the Guard and other miscellaneous military personnel—deployed in a mission dubbed Operation Graphic Hand—were unable to restore normal mail service. The 1970 strikes protested pay so low that many mail carriers and other workers required second jobs or received welfare assistance. In return for collective bargaining rights and long-overdue raises, postal worker unions accepted that their place of work would be run as a business—a Nixon-administration idea that they had earlier resisted. According to American mail historian Philip F. Rubio, Frederick Kappel, who had headed AT&T before becoming USPS chairman from 1972 to 1974, saw the resulting Postal Reorganization Act as a first step toward privatizing the mail.

Meanwhile, in France, the youthful scholar Jean-Marc Poinsot had become fascinated by what he perceived as an overlooked mode of artistic production, the envoi, literally “a sending,” and here, specifically, an item sent by an artist in the mail. Poinsot’s curiosity was roused by artist-friends including Christian Boltanski, Jean Le Gac, and André Cadere, with whom he was then socializing as he completed his dissertation at Nanterre. Wanting to bring greater attention to the envoi form, as well as to a growing body of work by contemporaries, Poinsot began soliciting contributions from artists in and around his network of acquaintances, writing to the Swiss Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, among others, for advice. As historian Klara Kemp-Welch notes, Poinsot explained to Vautier, who preferred to be called simply “Ben,” “Envois are only to be found in the possession of their recipients and, as they are not visible in magazines, galleries, or museums, I am obliged to return to their source.” Poinsot’s major finding about mail art seemed to be that “postal communication is a form of long-distance communication, and thereby the aesthetic object is modified both in its form and in its presentation.” Although Poinsot does not elaborate regarding this “modification,” it is clear that many artists considered the bureaucratic processes and official material and graphic formats related to the mail a significant part of the artworks they sent to one another.

Yves Klein: Blue Stamp, 1958, International Klein Blue pigment on postage stamp, 1 by 3/4 in.

The artist Ken Friedman, a Fluxus participant, has written of his experience with postal regulations and his enjoyment of the challenge of trying to send via the USPS “objects that were difficult or perhaps impossible to mail,” such as large chairs. As Friedman notes, this activity required not only precise knowledge of acceptable dimensions and packaging rules but an ability to negotiate with postal workers, who themselves became more intimately involved in the work of art in the case of a bulky or unusually shaped package—perhaps more to their annoyance than creative fulfillment. Also worth considering is the death of Aspen, the “first three-dimensional magazine,” edited by Phyllis Johnson, formerly a writer and editor for Women’s Wear Daily and other periodicals. Aspen met its end in 1971 (the year of Poinsot’s exhibition and the creation of the USPS), after six years of operation and ten issues. The project lost its second-class mail license due to the Postal Service’s ruling that Aspen was not a magazine but rather a “non-descript publication” that was “unclassifiable; belonging, or apparently belonging, to no particular class or kind.” Without a second-class license, it was prohibitively expensive to mail subscribers the experimental magazine—a box containing thematically organized media items. Both of these examples point up the simultaneous freedom and banal constraint represented by the postal service, particularly in regard to visual art. It is clear that artists associated with mail art were interested in the possibilities of the post as a means of circumventing the formality of galleries and museums, of establishing intimacy across distance, and of engendering surprise and joy in one another—not to overlook the general cheapness of this method of sharing work, particularly meaningful in the US, where artists have long been unable to expect much assistance from their government. We might also add that mail art could (and can) be a form of political resistance, establishing vocabularies and codes that would be significant to recipients but meaningless to state censors or other less-than-welcome readers. All the same, artist Yves Klein, who created a series of stamps in his signature blue for exhibition invitations in the 1950s, had to be sure that his self-made postage was regulation size. At the post office, he not only paid the established price for mailing but also tipped the postal clerk to postmark his diminutive paintings. This was not an economic exchange of the same order as one with a gallerist, collector, or museum acquisitions representative, but it was nevertheless a necessary negotiation. And all those who mail artworks (or, anything at all, for that matter) engage in such apparently mundane and yet official, regulated, and theoretically uniform transactions.

View of the exhibition “Aspen Magazine: 1965-1971,” 2016, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

In his quest to make an array of (previously semi-private) mailed artworks visible on the occasion of the 1971 Biennale, Jean-Marc Poinsot turned not only to practitioners associated with Fluxus, but also to artists who were participating in slightly older networks: the francophone Nouveaux Réalistes and Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondance School, a network of artists who engaged in a sort of postal “dance.” The responses to Poinsot’s invitation were overwhelmingly numerous and varied, surprising and delighting him (he had a good mail day every day for several years, he claimed). The project, which was originally conceived as taking the form of a book exclusively, grew by chance when Poinsot was invited to contribute to the section of the 1971 Biennale devoted to conceptual art. Poinsot selected forty artists—among whom were such well-known figures as Johnson himself and On Kawara—to be included in the book as well as in the exhibition. He also designed a participatory component: visitors to the installation were able to mail their own letters using a stamp dispenser and a working post box and were invited to make phone calls using a provided stall and to employ photocopiers as well as a photo booth to reproduce traces of their presence in the cavernous gallery in the Parc Floral de Vincennes. The exhibition, which included a selection of works by Eastern European artists, traveled to Belgrade in January of 1972 and to Zagreb the following March.

One of the more unexpected qualities of Poinsot’s exhibition was its inclusion of a number of artists from the Soviet bloc, where state control of media and other institutions gave their envois a different valence from that of pieces produced in the West. Some of these works were designed to encode messages in the guise of “nonsensical” aesthetic experimentation; others were subject to redaction and other forms of institutional mark-making and censorship.^⁠ Mailings by the Hungarians Gyula Konkoly and Endre Tót as well as the Czechoslovak Petr Štembera were included—with each artist engaging in his own form of pointed evacuation of meaning from his missives: Konkoly simply reproduced a rejection letter from a grant-making organization in Paris, Tót opted for a series of O’s in lieu of words, and Štembera offered a grouping of blank pages. Tót additionally made use of a poignant artist’s stamp that proclaimed the reason for his communications: “I write to you because I am here and you are there.” When the show arrived at the Galerija Studentski Centar in Zagreb, the gallery director, Želemir Koščević, elected not to open the crate containing all of the envois but rather exhibited the container itself as-was, documenting this artful decision by having himself photographed standing before and atop it. As Kemp-Welch writes, Koščević believed that the exhibition of the works at the Biennale in Paris had “marked the end of the life of this idea,” and that he was therefore exhibiting “the postal package as postal package.” So concluded the circulation of Poinsot’s precocious and unusually engaged master’s thesis.

Cover of the January‒February 1973 issue of Art in America, which featured David Zack’s essay “An Authentik and Historikal Discourse on the Phenomenon of Mail Art.”

As Gérard Régnier, a critic and later the director of the Picasso Museum, wrote under his penname “Jean Clair” in a succinct and illuminating preface to the exhibition catalogue, once an object or practice is considered art—“consecrated to, confiscated by a museum” —it then loses its everyday role, becoming, in a sense, “superbly useless.” Thus, there was some acknowledgement that a number anti-institutional artistic practices were receiving their first institutional recognition by being included in a traveling exhibition and a publication with a print run of 1,500 copies. Yet, Poinsot was more concerned with loftier questions in his introduction. Writing in the tortured style of a diligent graduate student, he focused on the question of how meaning relates to artistic form, citing Marcel Duchamp as a paradigmatic example of an artist who generated a “self-enclosed” world of signification, in which the art object is at once a “means of communication and . . . a study of the mechanisms of communication.”^⁠ Poinsot offered Duchamp’s exploration of postal dynamics in Rendez-vous of [Sunday] 6 February 1916, a series of postcards narrating a meeting as well as explaining some of Duchamp’s own works, as a canonical example of art commenting upon distribution networks. That Duchamp gave these postcards by hand to his friends, Louise and Walter Arensberg, much-noted collectors of modernist works, might be seen as further proof that the artist intended to comment on the channels that enable art to circulate and survive. Poinsot, for his part, was very concerned with how an artwork intended for a private recipient might become public, “the means by which,” as he wrote, “we become conscious of [these artworks].” He considered that artists might at some point decide to sell some of the works they received by mail, but would do so at “risk of distorting their meaning.”

As we know, this episode, far from representing the conclusion of mail art, was merely one in a long series of actions and events that are ongoing today. Many artists with varied practices, from Yoko Ono to Joseph Beuys to K8 Hardy, have engaged in reciprocal mail-art practices, defying the stereotype of the isolated, incommunicative genius. A visit to the post office can indeed seem so ordinary (or, so distressingly, ploddingly time-consuming, depending on the time of year and one’s location) that it can be easy to forget the incredible benefit that a state-run, non-market-driven post represents. In the United States, where cuts in service and compensation have been the norm since 2011 and where the federal government has repeatedly attempted to privatize the service since the Kappel Commission recommended that the postal service be “self-supporting,” some citizens may forget that an inexpensive and ubiquitous mail system is essential. As commentators and historians have pointed out with increasing frequency, the United States Postal Service continues to be the only delivery service that goes everywhere in the United States, “to patrons in all areas” and “all communities,” as Title 39 specifies. This law also says, rather plainly, “The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.” Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS—whose options that are significantly more price-impaired—deliver, in combination, approximately 130 billion fewer pieces of mail within the United States than the USPS each year. This is a figure that takes a moment to sink in.

Although much is currently being made, and very rightly so, of Trump-campaign donor Louis DeJoy’s June 2020 ascent to the position of postmaster general—along with his leaked plans for austerity, slowing of service, and firing of senior USPS officials—DeJoy’s ambitions are not entirely original. For nearly fifty years the USPS has maintained its awkward status as a semi-public/semi-private “self-supporting” corporate entity.^⁠ Its ability to continue on this path has been challenged not just by the advent of email and other forms of electronic communication, but by oversight issues, including a provision in a 2006 law that requires the USPS to fund employees’ future retirement medical benefits in advance, which has been blamed, if controversially, for many of its financial woes. The Great Recession did significant damage, and the company has not turned a profit since 2007. In the context of art, it is difficult to imagine On Kawara notifying a wide array of individuals of the time at which he woke up at a rate of $12.40 (intrastate delivery to a residentia

The Best Bookends for Storing and Displaying Your Tomes

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:09:57 +0200

When it comes to your bookshelves, bookends are often a must. Whether you’re trying to keep your novels in line or attempting to tame your textbooks, bookends are a simple solution to prevent your volumes from falling over or slipping off their shelves. While their function may be the same, bookends run the gamut in terms of style and material. Ahead, find the five bookend sets that we find most noteworthy.

The Best Blank Cards and Envelopes for Crafting and Special Occasions

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:06:46 +0200

There’s nothing like making a greeting card that’s truly your own. Why buy a cheesy supermarket card for your best friend’s birthday or Father’s Day when you can create one yourself? Whether you’re looking for a postcard type or a fold-over style, a rainbow of colors or earth tones or white, you’ll find what you need among the blank cards and envelopes we recommend below.

The University of Texas at Austin Presents Its Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:00:36 +0200

The University of Texas at Austin is proud to present the work of the MFA class of 2020 in _____: Revisited: 2020 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition, now on view at the Visual Arts Center through November 20, 2020.

Comprising works in painting, photography, sculpture, video, and installation, this exhibition celebrates the critical discussions and collaborative experience this group of 12 artists has shared over the past two years. The exhibition title is left intentionally open, acknowledging the long pause and recent return to work this cohort has experienced, inviting each artist to fill in the blank as they reconsider their artmaking in a new context.

Through a range of interdisciplinary practices, the artists explore what it means to persist as a body trapped in time — a notion drawn from the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Revisiting their work in the wake of monumental change, each graduate acknowledges these perspectival shifts: what it means to make art; what it means to be an artist, an activist, a good person; where purpose can be found; and how change can be made.

Featured artists include Lauren Bechelli, CC Calloway, Heather den Uijl, Mathieu Grenier, Rafael Fernando Gutierrez Jr., Saeid Janaati, An Phung, Jerónimo Reyes-Retana, Will Shea, Maia Snow, Hannah Spector, and Anika Todd. A fully-illustrated digital catalogue with essays authored by students from UT’s graduate program in art history will be published later this fall.

To learn more about the artists featured in _____: Revisited and plan your trip to the exhibition, visit utvac.org.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Studio Art MFA program is a multidisciplinary environment resulting from the individual interests of its graduate students. Within well-equipped facilities, artists explore various practices, discovering applications to new and traditional modes of expression while simultaneously examining links between art and the world.

Professionally active faculty, knowledgeable technical staff, a robust visiting artist and critic program, and the tremendous research facilities housed at The University of Texas underpin a rigorous studio-intensive program. Applications are due January 10, 2021.

Visit art.utexas.edu for further information and application details for the UT Austin’s MFA in Studio Art.

Boredom to The Basement, I Could Have Been a Dancer

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:00:03 +0200

A KALTBLUT exclusive. Photography by Olivia Ezechukwu. Model is Rifke Sadleir. Designer and Styling by Chantelle Lucyl.

“I …

What Does ‘Home’ Mean During the COVID Pandemic?

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 17:55:12 +0200

From Behind the Rent Strike (1974), dir. Nick Broomfield (courtesy Anthology Film Archives)

Around the world, there is a crisis in affordable housing, and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed this issue to the brink. Millions who were already perpetually living on the knife edge of home security have been among those hit hardest by quarantine and the attendant loss of paid work. With this in mind, the programmers at Anthology Film Archives have put together a new streaming series of films about “housing rights, displacement, and the meaning of home.” Home Truths, which kicked off several weeks ago, will continue through the month of October.

This program has a format distinct from that of most other online screening series. Rather than acquire a simple roster of titles, Anthology has collated a broad range of ways to watch different films. While the theater is hosting movies such as Frederick Wiseman’s Public Housing (1997) and Ayo Akingbade’s Street 66 (2018) on its Vimeo page, the program also includes copious links to other sources for the lineup, from the Criterion Channel to filmmakers’ personal sites to nonprofits, including numerous free titles. All of this is to make the program in line with the spirit of these movies, which frequently touch on themes of community solidarity and cooperative power.

Anthology’s program description reads:

At their best, these films bring into relief the vital importance of “home” as a source of emotional and cultural meaning in people’s lives — as a necessity for both body and soul. They identify displacement as a force that robs people not only of the roof over their heads, but also — perhaps even more destructively — of their sense of their own identities, their individual and communal histories, and of their culture.

Anthology is presenting the series in association with Shelterforce, a nonprofit resource for housing rights activism. The theater also recommends this list of housing and tenants rights resources from the New York Public Library.

When: September 16–October 31
Where: Online via Anthology Film Archives

Download Hundreds of Frames from Studio Ghibli Animations for Video-Chat Backgrounds for Free

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 17:30:53 +0200

Ponyo on the cliff

Thanks to Studio Ghibli, you can hide piles of laundry and errant messes while videoconferencing from home with one of 400 stills from classic animations. The renowned Japanese animation studio recently released an online archive of images— which boasts iconic frames from films like Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo and Spirited Away and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya available—for free download. Each month, Studio Ghibli will add an additional eight images, mostly derived from new works.

This recent collection appears to be an extension of the studio’s release of video-conferencing backgrounds earlier this year. Explore the entire archive and watch for upcoming projects, which include a new Miyazaki-directed film, on the studio’s site. (via Hyperallergic)

Ponyo on the cliff

Spirited Away

When Marnie Was There

The Wind Rises

The Borrower Arrietty

Resting Grounds by Caroline Pajak

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 16:00:05 +0200

Caroline Pajak is a self-thought photographer born in Poland. Pajak spent many years travelling and gaining experience in …

Early Hoppers Are Copies, Guston News Reverberates, and More: Morning Links from September 29, 2020

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 15:12:41 +0200

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

News

A graduate student in London found that some of Edward Hopper’s early paintings are copies of work by other artists. [The New York Times]

Alongside a rare Botticelli, Sotheby’s will offer a painting by Rembrandt in January with an estimate of $20 million to $30 million. [ARTnews]

Apollo magazine showcased 40 African artists under 40. [Apollo]

Ahead of his exhibition at Tate Modern, Bruce Nauman “looks back on studio stunts and liquid lunches with legends.” (Per the headline: “Jasper Johns gave me a few bourbons—and my legs gave way.”) [The Guardian]

Guston

Aindrea Emelife took issue with the recent postponement of a big traveling Philip Guston show. “As a black female writer and curator, I believe in the power of art to enable change. Change feels uncomfortable. It gurgles in your belly, it riles you up. … Postponing this discussion, and the power Guston’s work has to enable it, may avoid some discomfort in the short term, but it’s akin to putting a plaster on a wound.” [The Guardian]

Alex Greenberger talked to a chorus of observers offering differing opinions both for and against the postponement. [ARTnews]

History

Jennifer Schuessler reports on activists calling for “more history” when, in cases like the Civil War, too little is often the norm. “The idea was to move beyond binary debates about problematic monuments—tear down or keep?—and instead emphasize the inaccuracies and omissions of the existing commemorative landscape, including the erasure of Black history.” [The New York Times]

The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia is mounting a retrospective of Elijah Pierce, whose work made with wood and a pocket knife between the 1920s and ’70s “has an eerie resonance to American today.” [The Guardian]

Gentileschi

Rebecca Mead dove deep into the legacy of 17th-century Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi. “The pioneering painter survived a rape, but scholars are pushing against the idea that her work was defined by it—and celebrating her rich harnessing of motherhood, passion, and ambition.” [The New Yorker]

In case you missed it, ARTnews surveyed some of Gentileschi’s most notable works, including her very intense Judith Beheading Holofernes. [ARTnews]

Misc.

South Philly artist Maria Möller “is turning her block into a get-out-the-vote art exhibit.” [Philadelphia Magazine]

The Centre Pompidou in Paris could close for up to three years—or remain only partially open for seven years—for maintenance work on the 1970s-era building. [The Art Newspaper]

BmoreArt’s Picks: September 29 – October 5

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 14:53:57 +0200

The post BmoreArt’s Picks: September 29 – October 5 appeared first on BmoreArt.

Alongside Rare Botticelli, Sotheby’s to Offer $20 M. Rembrandt Biblical Scene in January

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 14:00:08 +0200

Sotheby’s recent announcement of plans to auction a rare $80 million Botticelli portrait in 2021 has put a new spotlight on the Old Masters category. Now, the auction house has unveiled a biblical scene by Rembrandt titled Abraham and the Angels (1646), to be sold alongside the Italian renaissance work in January during the house’s Masters Week evening sale. The painting is estimated to sell for $20 million–$30 million.

The small-scale work, measuring at only 6 ¼ inches by 8 ¼ inches and dated 1646, is one of five biblical scenes by the artist still held privately. Made during the artist’s prime, the work depicts a scene from the book of Genesis in which three angels posing as travelers visit the elderly couple Sarah and Abraham to deliver a divine message that Sarah will give birth to a son.

“The subject of Abraham visited by three angels proved a fruitful source for etchings and engravings, but this was Rembrandt’s only painting of the story,” said George Wachter, Sotheby’s chairman and co-worldwide head of Old Master paintings. “With the vast majority of his biblical scenes in institutional collections, it’s extremely rare to see such a major work at auction.”

The present work is among the most widely studied Rembrandt biblical pictures. According to the work’s catalogue essay, this painting shows Rembrandt shifting away from the baroque stylings of his early work toward something more subtle.

When the painting was shown in 2017 at the Frick Collection in New York, curator Joanna Sheers Seidenstein said that the work shows “a new approach to pictorial narrative” for the artist. At that time, it was one of nine small-scale works featured in the Frick’s showcase centered around Rembrandt’s depictions of Abraham. Prior to that, the work was shown in a traveling exhibition devoted to Rembrandt at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004.

The work was last sold at auction in 1848 for just £64 at Christie’s, according to the work’s ownership record. Its first recorded owner in 1647 was Dutch entrepreneur Martin van den Broeck. It changed hands several times, and passed through the collections of Benjamin West and Sir Thomas Baring. For decades the work remained in the Heemstede-base von Pannwitz family collection through descent. It then went to the prominent Old Masters collector Alfred Bader in 2004, and from there it came into the hands of veteran dealer Otto Naumann, who is now Sotheby’s senior vice president and client development director. The present owner acquired it in 2006.

According to a 2005 report from the New York Times, the painting also appeared on loan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from a New Jersey collector, who bought it from Naumann privately for just under $20 million.

The painting is poised to reach the second-highest price for the artist. The current auction record for the Dutch master is $33.2 million for Portrait of a man with arms akimbo, which sold at Christie’s 2009. The second-highest auction price for Rembrandt is Portrait of a lady in black costume and a cap and collar, which sold at Christie’s London in 2000 for $28.8 million.

The news comes on the heels of Sotheby’s sale of Rembrandt’s 1632 self-portrait in July for $18.7 million, a record for a self-portrait by the artist. Saint James the Greater (1661) was the last biblical Rembrandt scene to come to auction in 2007. It sold for $25.8 million at Sotheby’s. More recently, in 2018, the Louvre Abu Dhabi purchased Rembrandt’s Head of a young man, with clasped hands: Study of the figure of Christ in a Sotheby’s London sale for $12.1 million.

Sotheby’s will showcase Abraham and the Angels in Hong Kong starting on October 3. The work will then travel to Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and London before heading to its final destination in New York.

Photographer Spotlight: Rodrigo Oliveira

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:22:09 +0200

Illustrator Spotlight: Ana Miminoshvili

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:20:20 +0200

Ana Miminoshvili

Ana Miminoshvili’s Website

Ana Miminoshvili on Instagram

Featured Artist Rachel Perls

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:00:42 +0200

Rachel Perl shares a collection of colorful pet portraits that express the joy and personality of each animal. Learn more about this artist by visiting her website.

“Karoo” pastel, 8″ x 8″

I am fascinated by the psychology of color, what it silently communicates, and how it makes people feel.

“Mint Cat” pastel, 10″ x 10″

I studied studio art in college and was deeply influenced by my professor Wayne Thiebaud and his mastery of color. I was just beginning to understand that color theory is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Happy Dog” gouache, 10″ x 8″

While living in upstate New York several years later, I picked up pet portrait painting as a way to ease the homesickness I felt for California, my home state.

“Ziggy” gouache, 20″ x 16″

I never considered using natural fur colors like browns and grays; they didn’t do the animals any justice, and they certainly didn’t bring me joy.

“Ivan” gouache, 17″ x 11″

I painted in gouache, an opaque watercolor, using turquoises and tangerine, lemon yellows and hot pinks. My tag line was, “Capturing the colorful personality of your pet.”

“Chili” pastel, 12″ x 10″

I still craved a deeper understanding of color psychology, so I went searching for more education. It took some digging, but I finally found the International Association of Color Consultants and Designers. Their accreditation program, focusing on the multi-disciplinary approach to color, gave me a much broader and deeper understanding of the value of color and its impact on people, especially in the built environment.

“Serenity” pastel, 11″ x 8″

My mind was officially blown. I began exploring color for interiors and exteriors, and I pivoted to focus on building an architectural color consulting business. Fifteen years in, my color consulting business was thriving, but I missed the tactile nature of expressing myself with painting and vibrant colors.

“Honey” pastel, 8″ x 10″

Due to limited time and space, I gravitated towards soft chalk pastels as my new, dry painting medium. I could work on a piece for minutes or hours without the lengthy set-up and clean up time needed with tradition wet paints.

“Nesta” pastel, 8″ x 9″

Once again, cats and dogs seemed the natural subject matter to imbue with colors. Our pets are all unique individuals—quirky, goofy, soulful, affectionate.

“Cinnamon” (artist’s dog) pastel, 10″ x 8″

When I am able to translate those personality traits through color into a painting that truly represents someone’s beloved pet, I feel joy.

Artist Rachel Perls invites you to follow her on Instagram.

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The post Featured Artist Rachel Perls appeared first on Artsy Shark.

The Happiness Museum Shares Denmark’s Well-being Secrets

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 13:00:10 +0200

An interactive display at the Happiness Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark (all images courtesy of the Happiness Museum)

A Happiness Museum opened in Denmark’s capital city of Copenhagen, because if not in a Nordic country, where else in the world would it be opened?

Denmark, a social democracy that provides free healthcare and higher education to its citizens, ranks high in the United Nation’s annual ranking of the world’s happiest nations (it comes second after Finland.) Now, the Scandinavian country wants to show the rest of the world how it’s done with a museum dedicated to the science and history of happiness.

Inaugurated in July, the Happiness Museum was established by the Happiness Research Institute, an independent think-tank in Copenhagen focusing on well-being, happiness, and quality of life. Both institutions are helmed by Meik Wiking, the author of several bestselling self-help books on the secrets of well-being and happiness.

Denmark is listed annually as one of the happiest nations on earth

The museum includes eight rooms with interactive displays that present different perspectives on happiness. One room features an atlas of the world’s happiest (and unhappiest) countries. Another explores the role of a country’s politics and wealth in the happiness of its citizens. There you can listen to a speech by John F. Kennedy which addresses the shortcomings of measuring progress through the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The UN’s World Happiness Report is based on subjective well-being responses, collected by Gallup World Poll, rather than scientific data. This year, citizens around the world were asked for the first time how social, urban, and natural environments affect their happiness. Finland and Denmark, the two countries topping the list, have increased their average score compared to last year. The United States lags behind at 18th place (a slight improvement from 19th place last year). According to the report, higher “personal and institutional trust” are key factors in explaining why life evaluations are so high in Nordic countries.

Another exhibit displays personal objects, donated by people from around the round, that represent their happiest memories. In an interactive exhibit titled “The Anatomy of a Smile,” guests use a mirror to figure out which side of Mona Lisa’s face is smiling. In another, they are invited to wear headphones and listen to a laughter sequence to test if they’re prone to contagious laughter.

The museum includes eight rooms with interactive displays that present different perspectives on happiness

Guests are invited to wear headphones and listen to a laughter sequence to test if they’re prone to contagious laughter

Other installations outline the history of happiness with texts from the Enlightenment period through modern-day self-help books. There is also a “happiness lab” that explains the physiology of laughter and how it changes with age and an exhibit that explains the Nordic Hygge concept of coziness and comfort.

The premise of the museum is that we tend to look for happiness in the wrong places. To illustrate that point, the museum offers what it calls “light therapy and thought experiments.” For example, guests are asked to choose between an “experience machine” that provides pleasant experiences that are illusions and the real world, which involves loss, pain, and discomfort.

The premise of the museum is that we tend to look for happiness in the wrong places

With these interactive exhibits, the museum hopes to give real value to its visitors beyond passing entertainment. “Our hope is guests will leave a little wiser, a little happier and a little more motivated to make the world a better place,” said Wiking.

And for those who can’t make it to Copenhagen, the museum provides a useful tip on its website from writings of the German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.”

CREATORS – Sharl G. Smith

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 12:57:00 +0200

Name: Sharl G. Smith

Which came first in your life, the science or the art?

I have always loved both. I have clear memories of learning about the body’s biological systems in Grade 2 and also weaving a pair of slippers that went to the National Gallery of Jamaica in the same grade. When my high school art teacher suggested that I study architecture after graduation, it seemed like a good fit because I was always vacillating between the two. It was only relatively recently, after reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, that I realized that I am an artist first. That book brought so much clarity to my soul. So now I would say that art comes first, but for the majority of my life, it didn’t.

WHITE II (2017) by Sharl G. Smith, Czech Preciosa beads. Based on the icosahedron, this project has a feeling of movement between related polyhedra. Each of the 20 triangles invert dramatically at the vertices due to the nature of the beads. The triangle seams disappear into 30 rhombuses, evoking the rhombic triacontahedron. The white pentagon lines of the design are meant to highlight the fact that the icosahedron and dodecahedron are dual polyhedra.

Which sciences relate to your art practice?

It’s funny that I mentioned biology earlier because I would say the study of math and nature is something I constantly think about. I don’t incorporate biology in a literal way; it’s more that I am inspired by the relationship between nature, beauty, and geometry. I think of my work as organic geometry. It is abstract and determined by the medium. I find it fascinating that there is geometry all around us in the natural world. People often look at my work and say it reminds them of a sea urchin or a blackberry. I am not trying to imitate these things, but I think most people are not fully conscious that so many natural things are geometrical because they are so organic and beautiful. And I am not just thinking of the classic divine ratio in pine cones, for example. I am thinking of more simple and pure things like the perfect pentagons in petunias, the hexagons and triangles in fruits and vegetables, the fractal patterns of leaves and trees. And of course spheres; spheres are everywhere. So I try to make beautiful geometric things, and I love when someone says that one of my bowls reminds them of a sea urchin or anemone.

“I find it fascinating that there is geometry all around us in the natural world.”
Sharl G. Smith

ICOSAHEDRAL MITOSIS (2017) by Sharl G. Smith, Czech Preciosa beads. The project arose from a whimsical question – What would it look like if an icosahedron self replicated? I had been experimenting with creating icosahedrons in different ways and at some point had a flight of fancy.

GREEN II (2018-present) by Sharl G. Smith, Czech Preciosa beads, work in progress. Over 150,000 beads when completed; 24-36″ diameter when completed; based on a geodesic snub dodecahedron.

What materials do you use to create your artworks?

I use seedbeads and fishing line. My artworks are made by stitching tiny glass beads together by hand. I discovered bead-stitching in 2010, a year after my father died. It became a kind of therapy. I experimented with lapidary work too, but the bead-stitching was more portable as my husband and I moved around a lot for some time. Then I turned to it again in 2013 when I was undergoing treatment in New York City for 2 years for a blood disorder I have that is now a chronic illness because it is incurable. I could work on my little beading projects on a laptop tray in bed. As I realized that I would probably never go back to an architectural career, the beading was all I had for a long time. I find it a really unique medium that is both rigid and flexible at the same time. It appeals to both my technical, methodical side and my creative side, much like architecture did. When I discovered that it had sculptural potential, that’s when I became really hooked, and I am driven to take it as far as I can.

Artwork/Exhibition you are most proud of:

My first exhibition at UpTown Gallery in Waterloo in 2016. A lot of things fell into place that year. I found a beautiful and affordable studio to start my practice, my application to UpTown Gallery was accepted, I was contacted by you guys (Art The Science) for an article. I had just moved to
Canada a year before and was trying to carve out a new path for myself. Being identified as an artist for the first time was scary, but I felt like the universe was giving me a sign that I was headed in the right direction.

“Being identified as an artist for the first time was scary, but I felt like the universe was giving me a sign that I was headed in the right direction.”
Sharl G. Smith

PLATONIC SOLIDS LAMP (2017) by Sharl G. Smith, Japanese Miyuki beads, the 5 platonic solids. Early days of cultural experiments. I was experimenting with different stitches and wanted to see how large I could go while maintaining structural integrity with Japanese delica beads.

Which scientists and/or artists inspire and/or have influenced you?

I am not deep into the science world. Popular ones like Einstein and Tesla fire my imagination. My favourite architects are Shigeru Ban and Santiago Calatrava. As far as art and design goes, I often think about L.C. Tiffany and Steve Jobs, in that they actively sought to marry functional objects with beauty. I believe that there is a function to beauty, like a structural principle or a law of nature. When you create anything that combines the principles of nature/science with the principles of beauty—a computer, a bridge, architecture—you have something transcendent that changes the world. That’s what nature teaches us. The golden ratio is not fascinating because it is mathematical, it’s fascinating because it is beautiful, beautiful math. The same with the original iPhone, with Calatrava’s engineering, with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, with Tiffany lamps. I am deeply inspired by these things.

“When you create anything that combines the principles of nature/science with the principles of beauty—a computer, a bridge, architecture—you have something transcendent that changes the world.”
Sharl G. Smith

Is there anything else you want to tell us?

I was recently awarded a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to create digital content during the COVID Pandemic. So I started a YouTube channel.

THE VOID (2018) by Sharl G. Smith, Czech Preciosa beads, based on the geodesic snub dodecahedon, consists of 12,522 beads individually stitched over 350 hours

For more by Sharl G