Art news

Pheasant And Whisper White: hummel HIVE Release LX6000 Drop 1

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 10:00:00 +0200

hummel HIVE announce the arrival the brand’s S/S21 footwear collection in the form of a newly updated roll …

Watercolour Paper vs Paint vs Brush: Getting the Best Value for Your Money

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 09:27:16 +0200

This article is for those who want the best watercolour painting experience but have limited budget.

If you have no problems with budget, then you just buy the best watercolour supplies you can afford. With art supplies, you usually get what you pay for. But that does not mean you can't find good and affordable supplies. This article will show you which art supplies you should focus your money on.

To paint watercolour, we need paper, paint and brush. The order of importance is also paper, paint and brush.

Watercolour paper

The best watercolour paper is usually the 100% cotton watercolour paper, and these are usually significantly more expensive than non-cotton cellulose paper.

Not all 100% cotton paper are good because paper has to be treated with sizing before the paper can work well with water, before the paper becomes watercolour paper.

For beginners, it's alright to start out with cheaper paper. What's more important is you have to get paper that allows you to practice proper watercolour techniques.

Good watercolour paper will allow you to use wet on wet techniques easily, thereby allow you to create gradations, colour blends easily.

Good watercolour paper should also have proper sizing so that paint and water can remain the the paper surface and blend easily. When paint is on the paper, colours will appear more vibrant compared to paint that's soaked into the paper.

The paper shown on the right isn't the best paper because the painted horizontal strokes did not blend nicely and disappear. With some work, you can create smooth colour blends but it's easier on good quality paper where the water will do the work for you, rather than have you push the paint around with brush.

With lousy watercolour paper, the paint will sink in to the paper and won't move much. It also affects how vibrancy of the colours, making the colours dull.

Good watercolour paper unfortunately is expensive.

The alternative is to get more affordable paper for practice basic painting techniques, and then get better paper when the paper quality starts to limit your progress. Usually when you're learning watercolour and you can't replicate certain techniques, it's usually down to the paper you use. Paper is the suspect when colours don't blend well, colours are dull or your work appears patchy.

Watercolour paper recommendation

Below are some watercolour paper recommendations for beginners with limited budget. Whenever possible, I've selected those available in jumbo pads AKA with lots of sheets. On average, each sheet is US $0.50 or less, depending on size of course. If that still sounds expensive, note that 100% cotton watercolour paper is usually $1 or more per piece at the same size.

1. Strathmore Visual Journal Watercolour (Blick Art Materials | Jackson's Art)
This is available as a wire-bound sketchbook. The paper handles watercolour surprisingly well considering it's not made with cotton. If you want to save money, go with the thinner 200gsm where each piece is US $0.30. Just clip the paper to prevent the paper from buckling too much. This paper is noticeably better than Fabriano Studio and Daler Rowney Aquafine mentioned below.

2. Fabriano Studio (Blick Art Materials | Jackson's Art)
Fabriano Studio has 200gsm and 300gsm paper option, and thickest pad has 75 sheets. That's a lot of paper for practice. I kinda like this paper.

3. Daler Rowney Aquafine (Jackson's Art)
Daler Rowney Aquafine is a brand for watercolour paper and paint from UK and should be easy to find in UK and Europe. Daler Rowney Aquafine Paper is available in jumbo pads with 50 sheets.

Two other brands to consider are Bee Paper and Fluid.

100% cotton watercolour paper
If you have more budget, there's a huge variety of good quality watercolour paper to choose from, namely from Arches, Fabriano, Saunders, Lanaquarelle and Legion. You can see all the paper I've reviewed at https://www.parkablogs.com/tags/watercolour-paper-review

Personally I prefer Arches, Fabriano Artistico and Lanaquarelle.

Paint

Watercolour paint is available in student and artist grade quality. Student grade paint is obviously cheaper and is good for beginners. One area where you can save money is actually with watercolour paint.

The best paint on lousy paper can still make the look colour dull, and make it difficult to use proper watercolour techniques because the paint and water just won't move on the paper. That's why paper is more important than paint.

You can just get a few tubes of primary colours of watercolour paint. Some brands to consider are Winsor & Newton Cotman, Schmincke Arkademie, Van Gogh and Jackson's Art. You can get the first three from Blick Art Materials (US) and Jackson's Art (UK) from, well, Jackson's Art

Definitely get watercolour tubes instead of pan because you'll get more paint.

If you have more budget, consider the better quality paint I recommend at https://www.parkablogs.com/content/best-watercolor-sets-beginners

Brush

There are certainly too many types of watercolour brushes to choose from. And there are different types of watercolour brushes made for different purposes.

Generally speaking, a good brush should hold enough water so that you don't have to reload constantly, and it should produce a sharp point so that you can paint details when required. A good size to start with is a size 6 or 8 which is good for paper sizes A5 or 10 by 7 inches.

Synthetic brushes are usually cheaper than natural hair brushes. You can just start with synthetic round brushes to save money, and get better brushes in the future.

Some good synthetic brushes to consider are Escoda Perla, Da Vinci Casaneo, Da Vinci Cosmotop and Silver Black Velvet. Just get whatever that's within your budget.

Consider getting brush sets too that have a few brushes at different sizes.

Regardless of which brush you get, make sure to get one that's big enough and is sharp.

Conclusion

If you need specific recommendations, do let me know in the comments section below, and be sure to let me know the type of work you want to create.

And check out all the art product reviews I've written at https://www.parkablogs.com/content/list-of-art-products-reviewed

De Stijl

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 04:46:49 +0200

De Stijl akwong Tue, 04/13/2021 - 19:46

The images below are photographs of the model apartment and stained glass window on the
facade of one of the buildings.

Above: Rietveld, set of furniture for model apartment, Spangen, Rotterdam, 1920. Reproduced in De Stijl: The Formative Years catalogue (need to get caption and credit line)

Above: Image from the catalogue Theo van Doesburg: Oeuvre (need to get caption and credit line)

Tombstone

The chaos and trauma of the First World War produced in many European artists and intellectuals a desire for utopian order and harmony. In the Netherlands, a movement known as De Stijl set out to define a liberating visual vocabulary free of ornamentation. Piet Mondrian, Gerrit Rietveld, and Theo van Doesburg are among the best known of the De Stijl artists. Mondrian developed a form of rigorous abstraction in which he limited himself to straight horizontal and vertical lines, using only five colors (black and white plus the three primary colors)--as evidenced in his painting Composition in White, Red, and Yellow on view in this gallery. He believed that this extreme asceticism would create visual equilibrium and spiritualism. Mondrian also devised frames for his works that were designed to bring the pictures forward “to a more real existence,” as he described it. This way, he reinforced the notion of the painting as an object in its own right.

On the platform, you’ll see a geometric chair and sideboard designed by Rietveld. The chair was meant to convey freedom from mass and volume, and the prototype became an avant-garde icon almost immediately after its 1919 publication in De Stijl magazine. The sideboard was first exhibited in a model apartment for a working-class housing project in the Spangen quarter of Rotterdam. Look above the doorway to the right of the platform. The stained glass window mounted in the wall was designed for the same project. Architect J. J. P. Oud invited van Doesburg, the designer of the window, to collaborate on two of the apartment blocks by creating the color palette and the windows for the buildings.

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5 Fun and Easy Earth Day Projects!

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 03:43:00 +0200

Hello, friends!

Earth Day is next week and I thought I would share 5 fun and easy projects for the occasion! I created these lessons last year during the shutdown. So if you are teaching virtually or homeschoolin' and limited supplies, you might find something here! Each one has a video that I've added. You can also learn more about what supplies you'll need by clicking on the link. Have fun!

More lesson details right here!

More lesson details on this project here!

Creating your own salt dough clay is super easy! Learn all about it here.

Make your own pop up Earth here!

Make a fun Earth Day poster by following along here.

Mulholland Drive: The Road To The Studio (1980)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 02:59:07 +0200

Mulholland Drive: The Road To The Studio (1980) akwong Tue, 04/13/2021 - 17:59

Tombstone

David Hockney
England, b. 1937
Mulholland Drive: The Road To The Studio (1980)
Acrylic on canvas
M.83.35

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The story of David Hockney, an artist who is adamant about living life in the now. Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the ART+FILM series.

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Booooooom Shop: Tomorrow’s Talent Book Vol. II (Pre-Sale)

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 01:15:30 +0200

The special pre-sale for our new book is only available until Friday — if you want the deal you gotta be quick!

Flowers Mutate into Peculiar Blossoms in 18th-Century-Style Paintings by Laurent Grasso

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:08:00 +0200

“Future Herbarium,” distemper on wood, 33.5 x 24 x 4.2 centimeters. Photo by Claire Dorn, courtesy of Perrotin. All images © Laurent Grasso, shared with permission

In Laurent Grasso’s Future Herbarium, small bunches of flowers evolve into bizarre forms with doubled pistils and petals sprouting in thick layers and tufts. Painted in distemper or oil, the transformed blooms are depicted as typical studies of specimens common in the 18th century. The mutations bring together historical aesthetics and transformations from an imagined future, provoking “an impression of strangeness where beauty and anxiety are mixed,” the Paris-based artist says.

Grasso works in multiple mediums, from painting to sculpture to film, and the themes of time and transformation permeate many of his projects. Future Herbarium stems from “ARTIFICIALIS,” a film slated for screening at the Musée d’Orsay, that considers the liminal spaces between nature and culture in relation to images. In its presentation at Hong Kong’s Perrotin (which is up through April 24) and the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang (which is on view virtually and in-person through June 30), the series is paired with another project dealing with the impacts of solar wind on the earth. “The Future Herbarium’s flowers are thus subjected to an imaginary catastrophe, which would have produced mutations but also to these solar winds,” the artist says.

In addition to the two exhibitions in Hong Kong and Gwangyang, Grasso’s work will be on view at Aranya Art Center in Qinhuangdao, China, through May 16, at Artspace in Sydney from April 28 to July 11, and at Musée de l’Armée in Paris from May 7, 2021, to January 30, 2022. Explore more of his multi-disciplinary practice on Instagram. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

“Future Herbarium,” distemper on wood, 34 x 24 x 4.5 centimeters. Photo by Claire Dorn, courtesy of Perrotin

“Future Herbarium,” oil on wood, 33.6 x 24 x 4.8 centimeters. Photo by Claire Dorn, courtesy of Perrotin

“Future Herbarium,” distemper on wood, 34 x 24 x 4.5 centimeters. Photo by Claire Dorn, courtesy of Perrotin

“Future Herbarium,” distemper on wood, 34 x 24 x 4.5 centimeters. Courtesy of Perrotin

“Future Herbarium” (2020), white bronze, 135 x 20 x 20 centimeters. Photo by Ringo Cheung, courtesy of Perrotin

“Future Herbarium” (2020), white bronze, 135 x 20 x 20 centimeters. Photo by Claire Dorn, courtesy of Courtesy Perrotin

The Best Adaptive Scissors for Support and Comfort

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:01 +0200

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

Most of us take for granted the ability to pick up a pair of scissors and cut. But the fine-motor skills needed to use scissors are learned through practice, and often children need extra support while mastering this important skill. Adaptive scissors are designed with that in mind, requiring less strength to work and featuring important safety features. They help ensure that young children gain skill, strength, and confidence while they learn to cut. While many are made for small hands, you can also find scissors for adults who experience weakness in their hands or want to reduce hand fatigue. Adaptive scissors are also an ideal option for special needs users or those with physical impairments. To choose the best pair of adaptive scissors, peruse our roundup of favorites below.

With a Focus on Indigenous Knowledge, 2022 Sydney Biennale Names Artists

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 23:02:40 +0200

With just under a year until its opening, the Biennale of Sydney has revealed the first grouping of artists, collectives, and organizations that will take part in its upcoming 23rd edition that will run from March 12 to June 13, 2022.

Taking the title “rīvus,” which means stream in Latin, this iteration will take the concept of waterways and river tributaries as a jumping off point. In particular, close attention will be paid to acknowledge the Indigenous histories of where the Biennale of Sydney is sited—its main venues are situated along the banks of the waterways of the Gadigal and Burramattagal people.

For this edition of the Biennale, artistic director José Roca and his curatorial team have so far invited 59 artists, collectives, and nonprofit organizations from 33 countries—from Australia to Cameroon, Venezuela to Slovenia, Taiwan to Tonga—to participate.

Among the most high-profile artists that will show work are Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Yoan Capote, Carolina Caycedo, Marguerite Humeau, Caio Reisewitz, Duke Riley, Abel Rodríguez, Kiki Smith, and Barthélémy Toguo.

The Biennale will also include a number of participants that operate as collective organizations that support artists, like A4C Arts for the Commons, Casino Wake Up Time, and New Landscapes Institute, as well as groups like the Embassy of the North Sea, which advocates for all living organisms—from plants and people to animals and microbes—in the North Sea.

“Indigenous knowledge has long understood non-human entities as living ancestral beings with a right to life that must be protected,” the curatorial team said in a statement. “But only recently have some plants, mountains, and bodies of water been granted legal personhood. If we can recognize that a river has a voice, what might they say? ‘rīvus’ will enable aqueous beings—rivers, wetlands and other salt and freshwater ecosystems—to share a dialogue with artists, architects, designers, scientists, and communities.”

The curatorial team also consists of Paschal Daantos Berry, the head of learning and participation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Anna Davis, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Hannah Donnelly, the First Nations Programs producer for the Information + Cultural Exchange (I.C.E.); and Talia Linz, a curator at Artspace in Sydney.

In a statement, Barbara Moore, the biennial’s CEO, said, “This edition of the Biennale will be all about our connections, and disconnections, with water, and as a result, with each other. It will be a beautiful thing to experience.”

The initial list of participants follows below.

A4C Arts for the Commons (Ecuador / Italy)
Ackroyd & Harvey (England)
Robert Andrew (Yawuru, Australia)
Ana Barboza and Rafael Freyre (Peru)
Badger Bates (Barkandji, Australia)
Milton Becerra (Venezuela / France)
Cave Urban (Australia)
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (Turkey)
Tania Candiani (Mexico)
Yoan Capote (Cuba)
Casino Wake Up Time (Bundjalung, Kamillaroi, Australia)
Carolina Caycedo (Colombia / USA)
Alex Cerveny (Brazil)
Erin Coates (Australia)
Cian Dayrit (Philippines)
Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson (USA)
Matias Duville (Argentina)
Clemencia Echeverri (Colombia)
Embassy of the North Sea (North Sea / The Netherlands)
Juliana Góngora Rojas (Colombia)
Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway, Australia)
Senior Craftsman Rex Greeno and son Dean Greeno (Palawa, Australia)
David Haines & Joyce Hinterding (Australia / England)
Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Yanomami, Venezuela)
Dale Harding (Bidjara / Ghungalu / Garingbal, Australia)
Joey Holder (England)
Marguerite Humeau (France)
Aluaiy Kaumakan (Paiwan Nation, Paridrayan Community, Taiwan)
Pushpa Kumari (India)
Eva L’Hoest (Belgium)
Mata Aho Collective (Te Atiawa ki Whakarongotai, Ngāti Toa Rangatira, Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Rangitāne, Ngāti Kahungungu ki Wairarapa, Aotearoa New Zealand)
Clare Milledge (Australia)
Yuko Mohri (Japan)
Moogahlin Performing Arts with Aanmitaagzi Big Medicine Studio (Murrawarri, Biripi, Australia; Ojibway / Mohawk, Mi’kmaq, Turtle Island Canada)
New Landscapes Institute (Australia)
New-Territories _ S/he _f.Roche (France)
Leeroy New (Philippines)
Wura-Natasha Ogunji (Nigeria / USA)
Mike Parr (Australia)
Marjetica Potrč (Slovenia)
Caio Reisewitz (Brazil)
Tabita Rezaire (France / French Guiana)
Duke Riley (USA)
Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu) (Nonuya, Colombia)
Teho Ropeyarn (Angkamuthi / Yadhaykana, Australia)
Diana Scherer (Germany / The Netherlands)
Dineo Seshee Bopape (South Africa)
Komunidad X Sipat Lawin (Philippines)
Kiki Smith (USA)
Paula de Solminihac (Chile)
STARTTS (NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors) and Jiva Parthipan (Australia)
Jenna Sutela (Finland / Germany)
Imhathai Suwatthanasilp (Thailand)
Leanne Tobin (Dharug, Australia)
Barthélémy Toguo (Cameroon / France)
Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi (Tonga / Aotearoa New Zealand)
Hanna Tuulikki (England / Scotland / Finland)
Gal Weinstein (Israel)
Zheng Bo (Bai, China)

New Trevor Paglen Documentary Peers Inside Artist’s Attempts to Watch the Watchers

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:37:20 +0200

Technically, you can’t photograph something that’s nearly invisible, but that hasn’t stopped a number of artists from trying. During the 1960s, Robert Barry produced his “Inert Gas Series,” for which he placed canisters in the mountains, allowed them to disperse their contents, and photographed the results; the argon, helium, and xenon emitted are present, but you can’t see them. Meanwhile, a spread of artists, from Eleanor Antin to Adrian Piper, have used the medium to document the subtle impact of time on the human body, and there is a long tradition of spirit photography, which attempts to image supernatural forces that lie hidden. If you can’t see any of this with your own eyes, cameras can help visualize it for you.

Over the past few years, artist Trevor Paglen has entered this lineage by putting a digital spin on it, cleverly offering up several photographic series that show sumptuous vistas of landscapes, like those seen in Yosemite National Park, with an insidious twist. At first, it may seem as though there is nothing much to appreciate, except for the nature shown. Look closer—or read accompanying wall texts—and you discover there’s surveillance technology hidden beneath it all, whether in the land itself or in the sky, where covert drones, visible only as tiny dots, lurk, inconspicuously surveilling us, often to nefarious ends. His point is to expose the mechanisms of state surveillance, showing how seamlessly integrated into our daily lives they are. It takes a lot of work to image the invisible, though, and a new documentary about the artist called Unseen Skies bears witness to Paglen’s laborious process.

In Yaara Bou Melhem’s film, playing virtually at the SFFilm festival through Sunday, we see Paglen journeying far into canyons in the Southwestern U.S., remote deserts in Australia, and military bases in undisclosed locations. We watch him sail boats through serene rivers; drive across perilously thin roads, even risking a car accident in the process on one occasion; and sleep in his van at night, braving cold nighttime temperatures. In some cases, his journeys only result in one shot that’s up to his standards. Part of this is because of the antiquated technology he uses—for some of the landscape photographs, he relies on chunky camera equipment that refers back to techniques from the 19th and early 20th centuries that put him in line with artists like Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson.

Why does Paglen go to such great lengths to photograph technologies that many accept are part of our daily lives, Bou Melhem asks? With a smile, Paglen says, “It’s my job.” Then he steps under the focusing hood of his camera and snaps a picture.

At another point, Paglen, drawing on his early years as a musician with a punk band, offers a more detailed answer to that query: “I guess when I look at my own life, I guess I’ve just had experiences living with a system that didn’t work for me and made clear to me that there are always winners and losers. Any kind of power is exerted at the expense of somebody else. I’ve been always suspicious of power, and I’ve always questioned that.”

Paglen’s rise over the past decade has been swift. His pictures, some of which border on abstractions, have been shown widely at museums around the world, from the Smithsonian American Art Museum to the Fondazione Prada, and in recent years, and his work has won him various art awards, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, which is considered one of the world’s top photography merits. Bou Melhem’s documentary is not interested in tracing his career trajectory, however, and it elides a lot of the biographical information that most films about artists obsess over. Instead, she creates a more impressionistic portrait of her subject—one that largely features footage of Paglen at work, much of it shot using drones and obscure angles as a way to mirror the paranoiac sensibility of Paglen’s own art.

Unseen Skies lacks a chronological structure, though it is mostly centered around Orbital Reflector, a 2019 project by Paglen for the Nevada Museum of Art that involved attempts to launch a 100-foot-long mylar sculpture into space. With a $1.5 million price tag, Orbital Reflector would have been visible from Earth. When it finally came time to unfurl the diamond-shaped balloon from a SpaceX rocket, the work was ultimately ensnared in Trump-era bureaucracy, with the Federal Communications Commission never officially giving the green light to launch. Paglen said in interviews at the time that the Trump administration had “killed” his project.

Part of Paglen’s project has been to find clever ways of navigating governmental structures, and Bou Melhem thrillingly captures the conversations had in museum meeting rooms about when and whether the Orbital Reflector project would come into being and what kind of security clearance would be needed. In one scene, Paglen is shown chatting with Amanda Horn, then the head of communications at the museum, after being sent back to the drawing board with new technical specifications because the balloon was unlikely to drop out of the spaceship as planned. An exasperated-looking Paglen hangs his head, scrolling on his iPhone as the news is delivered. “Oh, man,” Horn says at one point. “This is what really happens behind the scenes.”

If this sense of boredom is felt when a project goes wrong, Bou Melhem also portrays the thrill when a technically complex art work is executed as planned. Later on, we see Paglen as he prepares for Sight Machine, a performance at the Barbican Centre in London, where the Kronos Quartet is to play a piece by Steve Reich as facial recognition technology attempts to decode the musicians’ behavior. As Paglen sets up cameras for the performance, he and members of the quartet test out the technology, enjoying themselves as terms—like “skinhead” and “black woman”—are misapplied to their faces. When Paglen steps before his own camera, he’s labeled “bad person.”

Although Unseen Skies makes its missteps, particularly in a slapped-on Covid coda that attempts to account for more recent developments in Paglen’s oeuvre, Bou Melhem’s film fascinates because it makes projects like Sight Machine look so difficult to execute. Paglen’s art is often accompanied by a glossiness that masks the work-intensive process that goes into its making. Bou Melhem strips back that facade and offers an incisive look at how difficult it can be to surveil your surveillants.

This is best glimpsed in the film toward its end, in a sequence where Paglen goes to the U.S.-Mexico border to shoot new landscapes. After driving past towers lining the landscape, he’s stopped by an official. In a conversation filmed by Bou Melhem from afar, Paglen tells the official, “We’ll definitely keep you out of it.” The official says he’ll make some calls to determine if shooting pictures near a location shrouded in secrecy would even be possible, which causes Paglen to ask, with a laugh, “What would be the authority under which that would be prohibited or whatever?”

Unseen Skies plays virtually at SFFilm through April 18.

Best Lighting Kits for Online Art Demos and Video Podcasts

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:30:13 +0200

The lockdowns and closures of COVID-19 forced many teaching artists to move their classes online. What started out as a stricture has become a new format for some, enabling nationwide (or even worldwide) delivery of classes and tutorials. High-quality visuals are key when students have to rely on a video camera’s view, and good lighting is an important aspect of that. Whether you are delivering live classes, making video tutorials and demos, or creating video podcasts, the lighting kits we recommend below will help you raise your game.

Denise Gardner Becomes First Black Woman to Lead Art Institute of Chicago Board

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:22:18 +0200

In a historic move, the Art Institute of Chicago has named art collector and patron Denise Gardner as its next board chair. A longtime trustee of the museum, Gardner will be the first African American and the first woman to hold the position. Her election may mark the first time a Black woman was elected to lead the board of a major U.S. art museum.

“It’s an honor to accept this role,” Gardner said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the institution’s leadership and staff to fully realize our aspiration of ensuring that people of all ages from throughout the Chicagoland area and beyond, particularly children, see the Art Institute of Chicago as a place where they are welcome and truly belong.”

Gardner, 66, has been involved with the Art Institute for nearly 30 years, including a 15-year tenure as a trustee and five years in her current role as vice chair of the board. Robert M. Levy, the current board chair, will remain on the board after Gardner assumes the position in November.

A Chicago native and Northwestern business school graduate, Gardner founded the beauty products company Namaste Laboratories with her husband Gary in the 1990s. They sold the company the following decade, and have since turned their attention to collecting and philanthropy. Their collection of more than 130 works focuses on modern and contemporary Black artists, with works by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Carrie Mae Weems, Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Amy Sherald, Nick Cave, and Elizabeth Catlett.

Gardner has similarly advocated for under-represented artists from her position at the Art Institute. She was the lead sponsor of the 2018 Charles White retrospective and has funded acquisitions to the museum’s drawing and modern and contemporary art departments over the years.

“Denise is at the vanguard of making art and design education more inclusive,” said School of the Art Institute of Chicago president Elissa Tenny. “She is a transformational leader, drawing the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and museum closer to those we serve, while expanding who is in that audience

Wielding Time and Text, Tiffany Sia Documents Hong Kong’s Resistance

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:18:00 +0200

During Hong Kong’s monsoon season, a subtle change in the quality of air is all that separates a sunny day from torrential downpour and gale-force winds. In a city that is constantly shifting and remaking itself, it is fitting that weather patterns rooted in unpredictability are the norm. In Tiffany Sia’s exhibition, Slippery When Wet, on view at Artist’s Space and online through May 1, the artist proposes a “wet ontology,” a study of the city’s never-ending evolution through that which it secretes — “a trail of ink, tears, humidity, logistic flows, and leaks.” Drawing from the text of the artist’s recently published book, Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, Sia excavates Hong Kong’s slippery past, present, and future through the lens of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Protests.

In this exhibit, time is the artist’s medium of choice. The foggy build-up of condensation on a window or the formal yet familiar cadence of the daily weather report are all measurements used to draw attention to how our bodies and existences subconsciously denote the passage of time. Yet, Sia abandons chronology in her works, instead grounding the viewer in a general feeling of time passing, an attempt to emulate the fast and slow of her experience during the protests, both as a volunteer on the frontlines and as a digital spectator, scrolling hungrily through an endless social media timeline.

Installation view of Tiffany Sia, “The Bastard Scroll” (2021), Artists Space, New York (photo by Filip Wolak)

Upon entering the exhibit, the viewer comes face to face with “Thread I [The Bastard Tongue]” (2021), a long, blank scroll of dot paper hung from the ceiling, cascading into a collected stack at the bottom of a stairwell, just out of sight. The piece itself evokes the infinite scroll, the frictionless refreshing of social media timelines to feed the insatiable desire for information and connection to conflict. As the empty, perforated paper sways ever-so-slightly it also feels like a mocking reminder of a city in suspension, a portrayal of the 50-year limbo of “one country, two systems” that has defined Hong Kong’s identity since the handover of the territory from the UK to China in 1997. Here, Sia is able to convey the sociopolitical pressure-cooker that has manufactured Hong Kong’s culture of resistance. With the passing of the Hong Kong National Security Law and the bookend of 2047 looming in the near future, Sia’s words in Too Salty Too Wet, that “Hell is not a place. Hell is a timeline” feel increasingly prescient.

The artist is an archivist consumed with how a movement’s story might survive. Accustomed to navigating a constantly shifting informational landscape informed by censorship and the ephemerality of digital communication, Sia experiments with the dissemination of information, questioning how the contents of a story might change according to the mode of delivery. In Thread VI (Barriers Buy Time), Too Salty Too Wet assumes a book form, with reflective foil-wrapped volumes, printed in Hong Kong, arranged against the wall to create a mylar-coated barrier. This more traditional, and as Sia posits, slower, method of consumption is juxtaposed with the viewer’s second encounter with the text in “Thread I [The Bastard Scroll]” (2021). A “leak” of Too Salty Too Wet, the contents are printed on a never-ending scroll of dot paper — an echo of the digital timeline — unfurled across a wooden table with a singular seat at its head. This same piece takes on a different life in the virtual exhibition, where the scroll is stored as a jpeg, its contents undetectable as text to censorship bots.

Installation view of Tiffany Sia, “A Wet Finger in the Air” (2021) (photo by Filip Wolak)

Sia’s exhaustive documentation of the protests through Too Salty Too Wet — an amalgamation of first person accounts, protest strategy, memes, and critical theory — also serves as a heartbreaking meditation on the grief, trauma, and loss experienced by a city resisting. In this, Sia is hyper-conscious of the movement’s complicated dependence on foreign media as speculator and storyteller. Thread V [A Road Movie is Impossible in Hong Kong] , a short film carefully timed to Hong Kong’s sunrise and New York City’s sunset, seeks to create a portal between cities that interrupts this flow of information, allowing Hong Kong to speak for itself. Taking the viewer on a hike along the coast of Lamma Island, which is the site of the artist’s residency and project space, Sia points our attention to Hong Kong’s natural ecology. A reminder that 75 percent of Hong Kong’s land is protected countryside presents a foil to the skyscrapers and chrome that color the city’s one-dimensional identity as a global business center in the Western imaginary.

Throughout Hong Kong’s recent history of protest the collective’s end objective and the alternative reality it would promise have never truly been clear. Is it a return to a colonized past (as some protestors seemed to want in their hanging of the Union Jack during the taking of the Hong Kong legislature)? Is it a continuation of business as usual, the slow cannibalization of a city in the grip of accelerated capitalism? Is it a long-shot bid for autonomy under new democracy? Slippery When Wet holds space for these myriad realities, choosing to zoom in on protest as an act of mourning for a city by its people.

By blurring temporal and geographic boundaries, Sia builds a bridge for shared feeling, one that might be familiar to the diasporic experience or even for those who come from places like Brooklyn or San Francisco — the unending fight against the fear that one day you might return home to find that there is nothing left for you to recognize.

Tiffany Sia, Hong Kong is a Fictive Process (2021) (still) (image courtesy the artist)

Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet continues through May 1 online and at Artists Space (11 Cortlandt Alley, Tribeca, Manhattan). The exhibition was curated by Jay Sanders, with Stella Cilman.

Slow Bodies, Racing Hearts: Lucía Vidales’s Paintings of Our Changing Selves

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:17:00 +0200

The title of Mexican artist Lucía Vidales’s current exhibition, Sudor Frío (“cold sweat” in Spanish), evokes a paradoxical state: the body is inactive, maybe even immobile, yet perspiring. On view at New York’s PROXYCO are 12 unusual figurations all made in the last year, a time when many of us remained largely confined to our domestic spaces. The artist’s paintings, filled with sluggish, draping limbs, plumb the tension of the show’s titular phenomenon — our pandemic bodies may be moving slower, but our minds and hearts are racing.

Vidales creates complex compositions with simple gestures. In “Shadow sign” (2021), a few lines and forms come together to render the lower half of a sitting figure, its single visible leg folded over a chair. A strikingly angular knee juts out prominently like the bow of a ship, but the thigh’s contours are soft and gentle, and the warmth of the painting’s glowing, orange palette is comforting. It reads like a loving and forgiving self-portrait.

Lucía Vidales, “Ixiptla” (2021), acrylic, oil and charcoal on canvas, 47 x 39 inches.

Immediately across from that work is “Ixiptla” (2021), a much darker painting in which two shadowy characters appear to carry away a woman’s drooping body. In this piece and throughout the show, verticality is the dominant direction. But Vidales’s protagonists are not rigid, upright, self-assured figures. Their extremities are long, languid, and wobbly; the hoisted figure’s hair tumbles down in one big, oily mass like my own unwashed locks.

Lucía Vidales: Sudor Frío, installation view, Proxyco Gallery.

The paintings, ranging in scale from medium-sized to tiny, eight-by-six-inch rectangles, continue along the walls of Proxyco’s spacious gallery. Vidales’s preference for mixing mediums — a single canvas might combine encaustic, charcoal, oil, and acrylic — makes them pleasingly difficult to decipher, as does her audacious juxtaposition of discordant hues. Lulling blues sit next to fleshy and gauzy tones, further disrupted by swathes of fluorescence; fearless, gritty black; and earthy terracotta.

The uncanny compatibility of these colors recalls the chromatic experiments of the artist Maria Lassnig. And like Lassnig, who developed “body awareness painting” — a method of painting only the parts of her body that she could feel — Vidales is keenly attuned to her own physicality. Her works embrace the ways in which we become aware, embarrassed, overwhelmed, and maybe even immensely proud of our bodies in moments of solitude.

Lucía Vidales: Sudor Frío continues through April 24 at PROXYCO (121 Orchard Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan).

Wielding Time and Text, Tiffany Sia Documents Hong Kong’s Resistance

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:16:00 +0200

Installation view of Tiffany Sia, “The Bastard Scroll” (2021), Artists Space, New York (photo by Filip Wolak)

Installation view of Tiffany Sia, “A Wet Finger in the Air” (2021) (photo by Filip Wolak)

Tiffany Sia, Hong Kong is a Fictive Process (2021) (still) (image courtesy the artist)

Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet continues through May 1 online and at Artists Space (11 Cortlandt Alley, Tribeca, Manhattan). The exhibition was curated by Jay Sanders, with Stella Cilman.

Slow Bodies, Racing Hearts: Lucía Vidales’s Paintings of Our Changing Selves

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:16:00 +0200

Lucía Vidales, “Ixiptla” (2021), acrylic, oil and charcoal on canvas, 47 x 39 inches.

Lucía Vidales: Sudor Frío, installation view, Proxyco Gallery.

Artists Breathe New Life into Archives

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:16:00 +0200

For billions of people — those whose lineages are tied to enslavement, genocide, war crimes, or even extramarital dalliances — documentation of personal histories is limited: births and deaths not certified, family trees missing limbs, wedding photos replaced by oral accounts of unions that may or may not have been recognized by governing powers. Archives, or the lack thereof, are impacted by imperialism. But lens-based artists, and emerging technology, stand to breathe new life into these narratives.

In the last few weeks, My Heritage, a genealogy website and app, has used artificial intelligence technology to animate more than 73 million family photos — creating short video clips seemingly bringing two-dimensional images to life. My grandfather is one of those who came to life via the app. When I showed my eighty-year-old father the video he exclaimed, “That’s my father! But, he looks so calm, so I know it’s not him.”

Rodell Warner, “Augmented Archive 022, Colorized” (2021) still image from video, frame 58 (image courtesy the artist)

My parents were born in Trinidad during World War II, and my father’s father was part of the nearly half a million indentured laborers who left India in the second half of the 19th century to replace slave labor in the British colonies. I have but one photo of my grandfather’s family — because at the turn of the century, photography was a luxury reserved for a privileged class, not for those who worked in cane fields. I treasure this image — seven people dressed in a mix of Eastern and Western clothes, some with bare feet, some in shoes. This curling photo a rare artifact of my family’s fragmented stories — fragmented because of the Atlantic slave trade, because of colonialism, because of “outside” relationships. But technological advancements are filling in some of the gaps, even if my father quickly knew the 15-second clip is not actually a video of his father, and lost enthusiasm once the novelty wore off.

However, since I never knew my grandfather, this fake video (which I’ve watched dozens of times) emotionally satisfies my desire to know this part of my history. In this way, who my grandfather actually was, is shaped by what I want to see. Perceptions of the past are informed by conditions of the present.

New technology is at the forefront of how we reconsider the archive. And for artists like Trinidadian-born Rodell Warner, technology can further help us understand what has expired. The artist, who has shown work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery in Jamaica, is currently showing at TERN Gallery in the Bahamas, where he spoke to me by phone. “I want my digital interventions to point out the role imagination plays when filling out what has been lost,” he says.

Prompted by elders’ accounts of people and places that no longer exist, Warner initially turned to the archive looking for records about life in Trinidad. Often using images from the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean photographs which date between 1840 and1940, Warner’s work asks viewers to remember that the people in the photos lived complex lives. For his Augmented Archives series,Warner creates and lays digital visuals over archival images of the people and landscapes. “It’s like I put an asterisks on the human beings in the photos to prompt the viewer to imagine their internal lives — the parts of these people not acknowledged in these photographs, or by those taking them.”

Rodell Warner, “Augmented Archive 020, Colorized” (2020) still image from video, frame 27 (image courtesy the artist)

During a year of quarantine, as our internal lives have become even more insulated, many creatives are turning to archives when subjects remain at a distance. Platforms such as Assembly are providing a space for lens-based artists who are engaging the past to explore current social and cultural issues. Assembly’s exhibition, Collaging Desire: Archival Interventions, Future Visions, features the work of American artists Alanna Fields and Pacifico Silano who, according to the exhibition statement, “mine queer photographic archives, recontextualizing their subjects in the present moment as a way to not only reflect on the past but also to imagine new futures.” By cutting, reframing, and layering, the artists both (in different ways) encourage a re-viewing of the past — highlighting new considerations, gazes, gestures that might have been overlooked, or unseen, when the images were taken.

Unlike me and the fake video of my grandfather, these artists often work with images of people who are unknown to them. But as Warner describes, “I feel I have personal connection even if I’m not directly related, because these people created and participated in a society that I’m part of. They shape me and the places I from.” In the same way the subjects in Fields and Silano’s work have molded are part of their communities, like my grandfather is a part of me.

Rodell Warner, “Augmented Archive 021, Colorized” (2021) still image from video, frame 45 (image courtesy the artist)

In an increasingly divisive and isolating era, these artists remind us not only that we’re connected to one another, but we are also connected to our collective past and future. I understand that history is slippery and archives can’t capture all that was lost. But in looking to the past, artists are carving out space for historically under-represented narratives, as we all forge ahead.

Tolerance of the Intolerable and the Longevity of Trump Paraphernalia

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:15:00 +0200

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Over the past few years I have been travelling to the Carolinas to spend the winter holidays with my parents who split the colder months between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This year, while traversing the small country roads between these two cities, I noticed a number of pop-up “Trump Centers” sandwiched between the usual CBD boutiques, diversity-targeted military recruiting ads, homemade liquor signs, and lottery ads. These self-proclaimed Trump Centers are typically found in half-abandoned shopping centers, corners of souvenir shops, and surrounded by dying businesses.

During Trump’s time in office I didn’t have the strength to enter these places.

I had experienced firsthand how nasty the media and domestic affairs could be, particularly since I had created together several artworks in reaction to the administration. One artwork, a satirical-anti-monument, ended up going viral, shared by both left-and right-wing users, causing a backlash of hate mail from both communities. The work even provoked anonymous arsonists to burn the artwork down — this event, combined with hateful threats, weakened and depleted me emotionally. But, over the past weeks I decided to retrace my steps through the Carolinas to investigate these centers more closely. This decision took me down a rabbit hole of dark tourism and nationalist identity.

Initially, I was astonished to discover that these shops have stayed open, even months after the end of Trump’s presidency. I was also surprised by the diverse backgrounds of the shop owners themselves. The largest Trump Center I visited was in South Carolina, operated by a family of Pakistani immigrants, while another in North Carolina was run by a couple of Mexican descent. However, the smaller and more sinister-feeling shops were typically manned by older white men or bikers.

As you might imagine, in my conversations with the owners, I found them to be skeptical of the government establishment, pro-gun, anti-media, down on their luck, and growing more paranoid. The topics of the conversations usually centered around the idea that the election was stolen from Trump, or the possibility he is still actually the president. These brief discussions would start with me asking “how do you feel the election went?” to which various employees’ responded:

“Joe Biden is just a corporate president.”
“Joe Biden is a fraudulent president.”
“Trump is still president and still has the nuclear football according to the first constitution.”
“Why is it that president Trump still has Air Force One? Probably because he is still president.”
“Joe Biden was inaugurated 10 minutes before 12noon which means he is not a legal president according to the constitution. “

Supporting Trump and clinging to his presidency has become a kind of alternative-reality game, or a pseudo religion for these Trump supporters. They have a kind of missionary zeal, regardless of heritage. Probing into the depths of denial and cult-like worship, combined with being exposed to so many confederate flags, blatant evidence of racism, and extreme xenophobia has made me feel sick and sad again.

We’ve all seen how Trump’s presidency emboldened radical nationalists and white supremacists. Their numbers grow with a supportive tweet from him, and in return, the horror of their actions diminished, obscured, or recast as patriotism. Even the darkest sentiments casually conserved on racist T-shirt designs, “100% southern grown, picked by yo’ momma.”

They are so very certain of their righteous place in history and their future victory parade that they are still keeping the gift-shop open.

Prismatic Ground. Founded by Inney Prakash, and hosted through a partnership between Screen Slate and the Maysles Documentary Center, this is the inaugural year for the experimental documentary festival. Though it’s a small, new operation, Prakash and his collaborators have assembled an impressive lineup of films, featuring both new directors and veterans like Bill Morrison, Anand Patwardhan, and Ericka Beckman.

The main program is divided into four “waves,” with the shorts and features grouped around shared themes like colonialism and desire. Films previously featured in Hyperallergic include Maat Means Land, Still Processing, and various works by Lynne Sachs (who is the recipient of the festival’s inaugural Ground Glass Award, honoring her contributions to experimental film). All films in the waves and the Sachs program are available to stream for free, worldwide, for the duration of the festival. The centerpiece and closing night programs will be streaming live via Screen Slate’s Twitch channel at 8 pm EDT on April 15 and 18, respectively. Various panel discussions with the filmmakers will also be streamed live periodically throughout the rest of the fest.

When: Through April 18
Where: Online

More information at the Prismatic Ground website.

After Protests, Penn Museum Vows to Repatriate Stolen Remains of Enslaved People

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:11:00 +0200

Responding to pressure from local activists, the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia released a statement yesterday, April 12, apologizing for its Morton Collection, which includes stolen crania of enslaved people. The museum also announced an action plan to repatriate the remains to “descendants and communities of origin” of the deceased.

“The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania apologize for the unethical
possession of human remains in the Morton Collection,” said the museum’s director, Christopher Woods, in yesterday’s statement.

“It is time for these individuals to be returned to their ancestral communities, wherever possible, as a step toward atonement and repair for the racist and colonial practices that were integral to the formation of these collections,” Woods’s statement continued. “We will also reassess our practices of collecting, stewarding, displaying, and researching human remains.”

About 50 UPenn students and activists from Police Free Penn and Black & Brown Workers Co-op staged a protest on the university’s campus.

The museum’s statement came days after a group of about 50 UPenn students and activists from Police Free Penn (PFP) and Black & Brown Workers Co-op staged a protest on the university’s campus, urging the museum to abolish the Morton Collection, end the use of data sourced from the collection, and repatriate all of its contents, among other demands.

The action on April 8 included speeches, prayers, and spiritual ceremonies. The protesters carried signs that that read “Return the Remains” and “Abolish the Collection.” They chanted: “When ancestors are under attack, what do we do? We fight back” while marching to the residence of UPenn’s president, Amy Gutmann.

Timed to coincide with the final meeting of a Penn committee on the Morton Collection, the protest was promoted by recent revelations that the collection includes the remains of enslaved Black Philadelphians, which were robbed from a former potter’s field on the university’s grounds. The new information, detailed in a report by Paul Wolff Mitchell, a doctoral candidate in anthropology and a fellow in the Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery project, adds to a 2019 study by the Penn & Slavery Project. The earlier study had found that the collection includes 53 crania of enslaved individuals from Havana, Cuba, and crania of two individuals enslaved in the United States.

In the summer of 2020, Penn Museum relocated parts of the Morton Collection to storage and formed a committee to examine the potential repatriation and reburial of the remains. At the time, the university called the issue “complicated,” saying that “not much is known about these individuals other than that they came to Morton from Cuba.” To the dismay of activists, the museum’s then-director, Julian Siggers, stated that the collection would still be accessible for research.

“When ancestors are under attack, what do we do? We fight back,” the protesters chanted outside the Penn Museum

According to the museum, the Morton Collection Committee was composed of museum leadership, staff, anthropologists, and students who have been “comprehensively evaluating next steps for repatriation and reburial since last summer.”

The committee released its recommendations yesterday, which started with an acknowledgment that the museum’s collections contain human remains and cultural items that were “collected unethically.”

“The Museum should return ancestors to their descendants and communities of origin
whenever possible as a step towards atoning for the racist, unethical, and colonial practices
which were integral to the formation of these collections,” the committee’s report stated.

The report added that the museum should “reassess its practices of collecting, storing, displaying, and researching human remains.” It also recommended that Penn provide a visitation location for human remains that “provides a quiet, contemplative space for reconnections and consultation visits in its future plans for rehousing the collections.”

In addition, the report recommends forming a “repatriation committee,” which would be “responsible for all repatriations” and led by BIPOC community members. This all should be done in a “transparent, repeatable, and lasting” process that involves community consultation, the report says.

The protesters marched to the residence of UPenn President Amy Gutmann.

“This is definitely a great step for the museum to take, and we’re happy with this commitment to return all remains in the collection,” said PFP in a statement to Hyperallergic. “We want to make sure there is real community participation in this process every step of the way, not just from folks connected with the institution. Let’s not forget what it took to get here: Black community organizers putting themselves at risk to take a stand, and a summer of mass Black Lives Matter protests met with horrific police violence and repression.”

Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, the co-founder of the nonprofit Black & Brown Workers Co-op, told Hyperallergic that while they are “excited and happy” that enslaved people in the collection will get their final rest, there’s still “a lot more to be done.”

“The report meets one of our demands about the repatriation of the remains but does not address other demands around reparations to communities harmed by the university,” Muhammad said, adding that Penn had made considerable profits from the Morton Collection throughout its history.

The activist also stressed the need for the inclusion of community representatives in the planned repatriation committee, saying, “I don’t necessarily trust a committee staffed entirely by Penn representatives.”

“This is just the beginning,” Muhammad added. “It’s useful that the university is listening to the demands of the community and its students, but there’s more work to be done.”

Ancient Cave Painters May Have Limited Their Oxygen for Creative Inspiration

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 22:10:00 +0200

French artist Marcel Duchamp once scorned the painters of his time as “intoxicated by turpentine,” mocking their outdated adherence to the medium. The artists of the Prehistoric era, it turns out, may have had a similar problem. A new study found that history’s earliest painters created their works on the innermost walls of deep, dark caves that required lighting by fire, deliberately reducing their oxygen levels to induce “altered states of consciousness.”

The paper was published by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. They focused primarily on caves in Spain and France from the Upper Paleolithic period (between 40,000 and 14,000 years ago) to investigate why humans sought to decorate their most cavernous spots.

By simulating the effect of torches on oxygen concentrations in comparable settings, the authors found that oxygen levels decreased to a state of hypoxia — a condition that boosts the release of dopamine in the brain, potentially resulting in hallucinations and out-of-body experiences.

“Entering these deep, dark environments was a conscious choice, motivated by an understanding of the transformative nature of an underground, oxygen-depleted space,” the paper concludes.

Hey, whatever works to get those creative juices flowing, right?

Figurative Wool Sculptures by Nastassja Swift Explore the Memories and Narratives of Blackness

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 21:23:28 +0200

Detail of “Passage, when momma lets my braids flow down my back,” wool, synthetic braiding hair, wood, plaster, resin, satin. Collaborators are Kiki Jewell, Nyja Amos, Grace Jewell. Photo by David Hunter-Hale. All images © Nastassja Swift, shared with permission

In her salient text, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, scholar Christina Sharpe delves into the multiple definitions of “wake,” which span from “the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, (to) coming to consciousness.” “In the wake,” Sharpe writes, “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.” Largely focused on conversations around anti-Blackness and continued violence, the book is rooted in the afterlife of slavery and what sentiments, practices, and memories linger into the current moment, questions that similarly ground the work of artist Nastassja Swift.

Through fiber-based figures often arranged in larger gatherings, Swift explores various narratives tied to Blackness, particularly those that relate to water and ancestral presences. “I’m interested in taking those things as starting points and imaging a space or happening that involves my sculpture and allows me to think through a hypothetical rooted in that memory or history,” the Virginia-based artist says. She derives these stories from texts like Sharpe’s, discussions with friends, and in one instance, a conversation with an older Black woman at a Toni Morrison film screening.

“Freedom Whispers in the Sky,” wool and wire

While there are multiple narrative threads in each of her pieces, Swift doesn’t strive to disclose each one, preferring explicit gaps in the connections. “I love knowing that there’s more to what’s being made and imagining other characters or continued happenings around what’s being made,” she says. “That’s not something I’m attempting to convey, rather information that I’m okay not sharing.”

Many of the faces evoke imagined subjects, not relatives Swift has met or seen in photographs, but rather somewhat of “an ancestral presence that allows my hands to make the face in any particular moment without my mind being aware of it.” She always begins with the supple shape of the face and then sculpts the facial details and hair from dyed wool and felt, a process that’s intimate and that’s evolved with two more recent works.

“Your Banks are Red Honey Where the Moon Wanders-Self Portrait,” wool, cocoa butter soap, black sand, resin on wood. Photo by David Hunter-Hale

“With ‘Passage, when momma lets my braids flow down my back’ (2021) and ‘Your Banks are Red Honey Where the Moon Wanders-Self Portrait’ (2020), everything changed,” Swift says, describing the shift in the process to that of a ritual. The first of these two works, “Passage,” is a bubblegum pink figure sporting a collar marked with smaller heads arranged in a gradient. Long braids descend down the torso and pool on the floor. Second is Swift’s self-portrait, which features a calm face shaped in deep red wool that’s silhouetted by braids and figurative tendrils. Both interpret specific subjects as West African masks and sculptural forms in order to question “what it means to worship someone, and how that word could be reshaped to allow us to honor those around us,” the artist says.

Swift will have a satellite exhibition titled Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice at the Contemporary Arts Network in Newport News from June 5 to July 3, 2021. Thanks to the Art as Activism Grant from the Black Box Press Foundation, the pieces will then travel for a stay at the Galveston Arts Center. The artist sells some felted dolls and other goods in her shop, and head to Instagram for glimpses into her studio and a larger collection of her sculptures.

“A Party for Sojourner,” wool, natural dyes, and tulle. Photo by Marlon Turner

Passage, when momma lets my braids flow down my back,” wool, synthetic braiding hair, wood, plaster, resin, satin. Collaborators are Kiki Jewell, Nyja Amos, Grace Jewell. Photo by David Hunter-Hale

“Inner City,” indigo-dyed wool and felt fabric. Photo by David Hunter-Hale

“Concealer,” wool and wire

Swift working on “Passage, when momma lets my braids flow down my back.” Photo by Nalan Smart

Why You Need to Have an Artist Newsletter

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 21:00:28 +0200

From building a subscriber list to email marketing services, our tips will get you up to speed on creating your own artist newsletter.

The post Why You Need to Have an Artist Newsletter appeared first on Art Business Journal.

The Best Portable Projectors for Artists

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 21:00:24 +0200

A projector can be an excellent alternative to a video monitor, and it can also be a great tool for artists. You can use one to enlarge drawings and project them onto your work surface, where they can be easily traced. Projectors are also handy for mural painting, video art, and showing your portfolio. Portable projectors are particularly convenient if you’re short on space or need a unit you can easily travel with. Small enough to pop into a tote bag, these devices aren’t as powerful as full-size machines but are certainly capable enough for everyday studio use. Find the portable projector of your dreams in our picks below.

ArtYard’s New Arts Complex Houses Exhibition Space and Theater

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 21:00:00 +0200

ArtYard, a non-profit contemporary art center and residency is set to open its newly completed 21,000 square foot home with two floors of exhibition space, and a 162 seat state-of-the-art theater. This arts complex is located in Frenchtown, New Jersey, a beguiling small town perched at the Delaware River’s edge within a little more than an hour’s drive of Philadelphia and New York.

With the inauguration of its new arts complex this May, ArtYard aims to create a welcoming communal resource and deploy the power of art to unsettle, engage, bridge divides, and provide occasional moments of arresting beauty.

Three major exhibitions per year anchor a program of related offerings in theater, poetry, dance, and film, as well as idiosyncratic communal celebrations such as ArtYard’s Hatch, a New Orleans-inspired parade of giant birds. An artists residency program is also in development and will launch in 2022 with an inaugural collaboration with the Baryshnikov Art Center in New York.

Architects Ed Robinson and William Welch collaborated on the design of the new building, embedding a sophisticated modern art center within a structure that respects the architectural idioms of a once-industrial town. ArtYard’s Managing Director Kandy Ferree, with assistance from architectural advisory board member Bob Hsu, managed the project with builders William S. Cumby.

ArtYard’s inaugural year in the new space will feature two major art exhibitions: Girl You Want, opening early May, a meditation on gender in America curated by Bennington College professor and art historian J. Vanessa Lyon, and Going to the Meadow, a collaborative installation curated by Ulla Warchol and Robin Hill, in which teams of artists working with the same original materials will reinvent the exhibition repeatedly over a three-month span. The coming year will also feature an outdoor installation of monumental sculptures by the South African artist, Ledelle Moe, and a program of artists talks, performances, workshops, and films predicated on the theme of A Year of Mending.

Visit artyard.org to learn more.

Sarah Williams’ “Southeast of Home” at George Billis...

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 20:59:19 +0200

Sarah Williams’ “Southeast of Home” at George Billis LA.

Currently on view at George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles, California is artist Sarah Williams’ solo exhibition, “Southeast of Home.”

From the gallery: “We are both the product of and creator of our environs. Over time, ways of life shape and define us and we, in turn, shape our spaces which then shape our memories and histories. Strong emotions can be prompted by a place. Sarah Williams is drawn to structures that show the character acquired over those long histories and to the emotional ties we feel to these places we are connected to through our personal histories. She has spent years trying to capture rural Midwestern identity but she is also interested in finding ways to give a sense of perspective for her understanding of these small rural areas in Missouri.

Taking herself out of the “home” environment and applying her way of visually exploring another locale was the next step in expanding her work. Before the pandemic, Williams did an artist residency in Key West, FL. This new body of work came out of that experience and is about the similarities and differences between that region and what she recognizes as her “home” in Missouri.

Williams writes of her work, “I love seeing how people from other regions and backgrounds relate to my work. I’m finding the more specific I can be, the more universal the work somehow becomes. I hope my work allows people to think about where they come from and take pride in the collective identity of their home region.”

Williams is drawn to light sources and the play of light on surfaces. This led her to paint nightscapes of these familiar yet isolated and unremarkable buildings and scenes in rural areas. She uses the darkness to edit out extraneous information and provide the viewer with the essence of the place.

While Williams’ paintings are representational, she fractures the form and accentuates the light through her unique painting technique. Working wet on wet in oil, Williams accentuates the luminous glow of the lights and creates these velvety fields of color. The final effect is simultaneously inviting and eerily mysterious.

The viewer starts to unravel the mood of the painting not only with the primary area of focus, but through the combination of the secondary and even tertiary areas of focus. In much the same way our eyes adjust to the dark, upon deeper inspection, the viewer finds more details shrouded in darkness in the distance in Williams’ work. Using this nuanced visual language, Williams transforms the common place and makes the insignificant significant and in so doing, creates paintings that are mysterious, slightly familiar and hauntingly beautiful.”

Be sure to follow Supersonic Art on Instagram!

Augustine Kofie’s “State of Mind” at Hashimoto Contemporary...

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 20:27:19 +0200

Augustine Kofie’s “State of Mind” at Hashimoto Contemporary NYC.

On view by appointment only starting on April 17th, 2021 at Hashimoto Contemporary in New York City is Augustine Kofie’s solo exhibition, “State of Mind.”

Made over a period of nine months under quarantine, the collection is part of Kofie’s ongoing industrial approach to fine art, which incorporates techniques such as overspray, tape blocking, detailed handwork, deconstruction, and draftsmanship drawn from architecture, graffiti and California car culture.

The particularities of quarantine shaped the process and thus the work itself. Unlike the usual linear development of paintings from start to finish, the State of Mind collection took a much more circuitous route.

“Some of these works were very frustrating to manifest. On the one hand, I had all this extra time, but on the other, it took much longer than usual for things to take shape. Emotionally and tonally, the works run the gamut from angst to harmony. My feelings are in the brushstrokes, the movements, the process of repeatedly adding and taking away, the layers of time it took to complete these paintings,” stated the artist.

The circular form, always prominent in Kofie’s earlier work, appears here to be breaking down.

“Where your eyes want to continue to complete the circle, you are stopped. With painting, I am in control. The pandemic was a stop, an interruption, a loss of control. So these interrupted circles, which break off and take new paths, are life interrupted,” Kofie elaborated.

With art supply stores and estate sales—Kofie’s two primary sources of tools and materials—shut down, a new technique emerged. Three of the works in the collection have a textural wood support, created by collaging found materials from the artist’s archive onto hand-made wood panels. This underlying structure, painted over entirely, comes through nonetheless, adding a hidden layer of meaning, a pentimento that also speaks to our varying, overlapping states of mind this year.

For every solo exhibition, Kofie creates a soundtrack. The music is assembled as part of the work process, which is both sonic and pictorial. This mix blends experimental hip hop with chill wave, including extended, up-cycled sophisto-pop saxophone, 80s synths, new wave breaks, lo-fi telefilm intermissions and poignant dialogue relevant to the exhibition theme and tone.

Be sure to follow Supersonic Art on Instagram!

In the New Digital Economy, Are Artists Creators?

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 20:15:03 +0200

It’s possible to chart phases of Internet culture by which words are used to describe its main participants. In the 2000s there were “bloggers,” the first public protagonists of the mainstream Internet, then during the early 2010s’ rise of social media notoriety was measured by “friends” and “followers.” In the latter half of the decade, “influencers” were the people everyone alternatively obsessed over and then blamed, the YouTube or Instagram users who amassed enough of an audience to sell ads or sponsored content to them.

Now, in the nascent 2020s, we have “creators,” a term that encompasses vloggers, podcasters, writers, and even visual artists as a catch-all for anyone who makes money from their content online. The money could come from ads, but lately it’s more often from direct payments, like paid newsletter subscriptions via Substack or Patreon; tips via Twitch or Clubhouse; or branded accessories sold via TikTok. The word is nebulous — what are creators creating, exactly? It echoes the buzzword creativity, calling to mind art-making, craft-based hobbies, and dance or performance — the kinds of visual culture that the Internet has embraced as it has become more multimedia.

But creator has none of the glamour of artist, nor the appeal of other terms for people who make things: choreographer, DJ, singer, producer, painter. Each of these signify a particular craft or practice, a discipline that takes years to develop, an identity that one doesn’t just become overnight. A painter is supposed to have drafting skills that must be trained, learn color theory and master materials; a DJ must develop a deep knowledge of music and an archive of records to choose from. These terms have meaning because of their established history in culture, a legacy of practice and practitioners. Creator, by contrast, is generic. It is vague and deprofessionalized. Unlike amateur creativity — making pottery as a hobby, for example — it is commodified, because being a creator is defined by the ability to monetize online.

Anyone can be a creator of webcomics, artworks, NFTs, audio documentaries, or tweets. It’s not restricted to a particular kind of content, but rather to who makes it and how it’s distributed. Similar to influencers, creators tend to be big personalities, people who audiences want to feel close to not just because of their content but their presence through the screen. As much as they discuss and promote their art, creators talk about themselves: their apartments, skincare routines, and self-help practices. Cloaked in the guise of a highbrow cultural product, what they really offer is presence and intimacy. “Parasocial” is another increasingly popular term for the kind of one-sided emotional relationships audiences develop with actors or podcasters — the creators who have kept us company during the pandemic.

The four hosts of The Death Panel podcast— from left, Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Philip Rocco, Vince Patti, and Artie Vierkant—speak at the 2019 Creative Time Summit.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Artie Vierkant is a visual artist whose work developed on the Internet as well as the co-founder of Death Panel, a podcast about healthcare and capitalism. Death Panel is funded by a Patreon, where subscribers can support it, but it’s limiting to label the project a podcast when it’s something more like institutional critique in the form of media. Death Panel is community, group therapy, and political organizing at once; Vierkant is a creator because it’s his presence that helps unify these forms. It also reinforces his art practice, as he has previously noted, providing a deeper context for his work.

A less compelling case of artist-as-creator might be Amanda Palmer, the media-savvy musician turned artist and blogger who launched her Patreon in 2015. It now has over 13,000 patrons with donation levels ranging from $1 to $250, charged each time Palmer posts something. The tiers offer content like “photos, musings, voice memos,” as well as art prints, comics, and personal phone calls. She publishes new content multiple times a week, usually headed by a selfie, with blog posts addressed to “My Dear Ones.” Rather than art, it’s about selling the parasocial relationship with the creator, the advertised access to her daily experiences and innermost thoughts.

Brad Troemel, another Internet-fluent artist and the co-creator of the influential blog The Jogging, has become a Patreon creator, too. Rather than art, exactly, his page offers semi-ironic art-world hustle porn, guides to writing artist statements, podcast interviews, virtual studio visits, and a Discord server for real-time chat amongst the community. If this comprises an art practice it gets lost amidst the commodified content.

Judy Linn’s 1969 photograph of Patti Smith.

The rock star Patti Smith, lately perhaps more famous for her memoirs than her music, has similarly launched a newsletter on Substack, where subscribers can pay $7 per month or $70 per year for “The reader is my notebook,” a series of dispatches and jottings like her memories of meeting the novelist Haruki Murakami, with a YouTube video of one of her own songs at the end. The newsletter will also syndicate Smith’s next book, called The Melting, about her experience during quarantine. Monetarily, the Substack will surely be successful, but it’s a parallel track to Smith’s music and books — less a final product than a loose sketch.

The venture-capital investor Li Jin argued that the creator economy needs a middle class in the Harvard Business Review, describing the ideal of making money on a social-media platform as a kind of new American Dream. These platforms often replicate the overall economy in their rampant inequality, however: a very small number of creators earn most of the revenue. Jin lists various strategies for expanding the possibilities of a middle class, like creating passive income streams in the form of content sales; capitalizing on super-fans with expensive products like NFTs; and offering investment for creators.

Yet all of these methods ignore the flawed basic premise of creatordom: that all creativity should be monetizable and monetized. The creator economy leaves little room for the kinds of projects and practices that don’t fit its preexisting digital structures — in other words, anything that doesn’t come out on a daily or weekly basis; creators who aren’t personally charismatic or willing to be parasocial targets; or material that is too challenging or specific to net the immediate embrace of an enthusiastic audience. That is what the art-world system of dealers, galleries, and curators was designed to supply — artists are insulated and able to work alone in their studios because other people are working to contextualize, promote, and sell their work, however challenging it might be. The kind of art that takes decades to understand or become popular is not fit for the creator economy.

Artists are not inherently creators, at least in the context of the new digital economy: The art market is too abstract, too obscure, and too difficult to provide the real rewards of intimacy and connection that creators promise. Certain artists might support themselves as creators, if their work and personality is a fit for the job, but most are likely to find it just as onerous and exhausting as the gallery system.

The story of Abel – Part 3

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 20:00:00 +0200

Abel Hernández is a dancer, choreographer and model from Barcelona, Spain. He’s been dancing and choreographing around Europe …

Eye Candy for Today Carl Thomsen’s Arranging Daffodils

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 19:23:11 +0200

Arranging Daffodils, Carl Thomsen; oil on canvas, roughly 16 x 12 inches (41 x 32 cm); link is to image file page on Wikimedia Commons, zoomable image on Bonham’s. (My assumption from the auction listing is that the painting is currently in a private collection.)

This 1894 painting by Danish artist Carl Thomsen is a perfect image of bringing spring indoors. The vase of blossoms and the young woman and her white dress are illuminated highlights in the dark room, giving a feeling of the bright promise of spring making an advance into the darkness of fading winter.

Thomsen’s painterly approach makes the bright subjects stand out even more against the almost flat background.

“Botanicus” at Roq La Rue Gallery.Currently on view at Roq La...

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:32:55 +0200

“Botanicus” at Roq La Rue Gallery.

Currently on view at Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle, Washington is the group exhibition “Botanicus,” featuring work by artists Peter Ferguson, Madeline Von Foerster, Whitney Lewis-Smith, Caroline Weaver, Bella Ormseth, Sam Wolfe Connelly, Sarah Best, Travis Louie, Scott Musgrove, Dewi Plass, Roxanna Walitzki, and Lauren Levato Coyne.

Learn more at Roq La Rue.

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Rare Seurat Studies to Be Auctioned After Being Held Privately for Nearly a Century

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:20:41 +0200

Two studies by Georges Seurat that have been in private hands for almost a century will be auctioned at Christie’s next month during the house’s New York 20th century art evening sale on May 11. Paysage et personnages (La jupe rose), 1884 and Le Saint-Cyrien (1884) are together expected to fetch $10 million–$15 million.

Both done in Seurat’s signature pointillist style, the works are studies for his widely recognized painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86). The two studies are now being sold by the relatives of Robert Treat Paine II, a Boston-based collector and philanthropist, who amassed holdings of Impressionist and modern art with works by Monet, Degas and van Gogh, which he later gifted to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is a descendant of Robert T. Paine I, an American politician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

According to Christie’s statement on the works, more than half of the oil studies Seurat produced for La Grande Jatte are in museums collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery in London.

Both panels were in the artist’s possession until his death in 1890. Paysage et personnages (La jupe rose) was then acquired by Belgian painter Jean de Greef, and later, it would pass through the collection of Symbolist poet and art dealer Charles Vignier. Likewise, Le Saint-Cyrine was gifted from Seurat’s estate to painter Henri-Edmond Cross, who later passed it on to French art critic Félix Fénéon. The two studies were reunited to 1929, when an American dealer sold them to Paine.

Teagan White’s “Things As They Are & As They Could Be” at...

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:14:05 +0200

Teagan White’s “Things As They Are & As They Could Be” at Nucleus Portland.

Currently on view at Nucleus Portland in Portland, Oregon is artist Teagan White’s solo exhibition “Things As They Are & As They Could Be.”

Teagan is an artist and outsider naturalist devoted to the flora and fauna of a planet in decline. Their delicate gouache and watercolor paintings and intricate line drawings lament the fraught relationship between humans and the rest of the Earth, and explore the tenderness and brutality that coexist in all of Nature. Teagan’s work is influenced by years of living in the bleak Midwest and Great Lakes region, burying roadkill, traveling by bike, and working with wildlife. They recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest, where savage coasts lined with dead seabirds and mossy old growth forests are creeping into their paintings.

Be sure to follow Supersonic Art on Instagram!

The Best Laptop Stands for Working with Visual Information

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:00:54 +0200

Maintaining a proper eye level when viewing your laptop screen is key to reducing eyestrain, which is especially important if you work with images. Ergonomics experts recommend that the top of the screen be between eye level and 30 degrees below it. This can help improve your posture and reduce neck pain and backaches, even if you get lost in your work. To achieve your optimal viewing angle, purchase a laptop stand. At the very least, these accessories lift your device off a tabletop or desktop; more complex ones feature adjustable heights and tilting angles for precise positioning. Eliminate sore eyes and hunched backs with one of our picks below.

Passion Painting: Marc Molk

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 18:00:00 +0200

I was on the phone with painter and writer Marc Molk a few weeks ago. He was in …

SupersonicArt.Shop.Don’t miss out on the incredible, rare prints...

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:09:10 +0200

SupersonicArt.Shop.

Don’t miss out on the incredible, rare prints and original artwork available on SupersonicArt.Shop!

“InstaFame Phantom Art / Volume 1: The Nic 707 Collection” Brilliantly Preserves the Legacy of Bronx-Based Style Master and Visionary

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:08:31 +0200

Not only was the late legendary writer Fernando Miteff — known to most of us as Nic 707 — a master of multiple styles, but he was also the founder and curator of one of NYC’s most distinctly impressive public art projects, InstaFame Phantom Art.

Beginning in 2009 until his untimely death last year from Covid, Nic 707 regularly rode the MTA trains with the singular mission of transforming their interiors into a one-of-a-kind pop-up gallery in motion. Having accompanied him on many of these adventures, I witnessed first-hand not only his boundless passion for graffiti, but his deep love for all art, as he showcased contemporary artworks in styles ranging from figurative to abstract, along with his and other writers’ tags, throw-ups and pieces.

And the response of the train riders who viewed Nic’s pop-up shows was almost always overwhelmingly positive. Many posed questions to Nic as they photographed his installations, and in response, Nic would graciously school them on the history of graffiti, its impact on contemporary art, the personal histories of the varied artists and more.

InstaFame Phantom Art (Volume 1): The Nic 707 Collection (NYC Transit Exhibition Catalog) is the perfect tribute to Nic — a paean to his creative energy and vision — and a gift to us all. Penned by his brother, Karim Miteff, it not only features dozens of images of works by Nic and by several other artists that rode the trains between 2009-2013, but it tells the story of graffiti and of Nic’s particular circumstances, including his 27-year hiatus from the culture. Much, in fact, is presented in Nic’s own words, as told to Karim.

Among the key subjects the book covers — in addition to Nic 707’s story — are: the tools writers use, the evolution of their styles, their code of ethics and the development of crews. Nic 707 was, in fact, the founder and first President of the Bronx-based OTB Crew.

And featured, of course, are dozens of images of variations of Nic’s iconic Kilroy character, described by the artist as “a kind of an entity…a presence. Even though he has no eyes, he sees all…but he doesn’t judge. He promotes love and holds the key to a silent and ancient wisdom. He represents the potential for alien intervention to help save mankind.”

Nic 707 was one-of-a-kind. He was, as his brother accurately describes him, a “Style Master. Visionary. Time Traveler.”

Writing about InstaFame Phantom Art back in 2015 in The New York Times, David Gonzalez described the project as one “with hundreds of one-of-a-kind panels that would be the envy of any urban gallery.”

I am already looking forward to the second volume of InstaFame Phantom Art: The Nic 707 Collection (NYC Transit Exhibition Catalog).

Images:

1 Book cover, 2021

2 Black Star Bumper Car on the IRT 4 train, 2013

3 Lollipop$, 2012

4 Souls in Transit, 2013

5 Choose Your Palette, 2012

Photos 1, 3-5 Courtesy Karim Miteff; Photo 2, Lois Stavsky

Book Review by Lois Stavsky

Note: The book is available here.

For the Met Museum’s 151st Birthday, Google Showcases Works from the Institution’s Collection

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:06:07 +0200

Tuesday marks the 151st anniversary of the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Google is celebrating with a special Doodle on its homepage. Created by Google artist Erich Nagler, the animation features a selection of objects from the Met’s collection, and it is viewable in over 20 countries.

According to a representative for the Met, the museum and Google had originally planned for the Doodle to appear last year, which marked its 150th birthday. Its debut was postponed due to the museum’s temporary closure amid the pandemic.

[Read about the Met’s 10 most-visited exhibitions of all time.]

The 18 works showcased in the Doodle span various epochs and geographic locations, and lines connect the pieces to their respective galleries spread out across the museum. Among the ancient pieces are a sculpture of a dancer from China in the second century B.C.E.; a Cycladic marble figure playing a harp from 2800 to 2700 B.C.E.; an Egyptian sarcophagus from 1000 to 945 B.C.E.; and a terracotta neck-amphora that dates to 540 B.C.E. and is attributed to the potter and painter Exekias.

Other featured works include the tapestry The Unicorn Rests in a Garden (1495–1505); a 1789 portrait of the Comtesse de la Châtre by Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun; an elaborately adorned guitar from 19th-century Italy; a beaded Lakota/Teton Sioux dress, circa 1870; a 1941 self-portrait by Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr.; and Vincent van Gogh’s 1887 Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat.

All the pieces in the Google Doodle were drawn from the Met’s Open Access program, through which 400,000 images of objects in its collection are available in the public domain. The Doodle can be found on Google’s homepage until 12 a.m. on April 14.

Impressionist Paintings with Decorated Provenances to Fetch $45 M. at Sotheby’s

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:00:36 +0200

Sotheby’s has unveiled four paintings by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet, all from the same private collection, that will take center stage at the house’s upcoming Impressionist and modern art sale on May 12 in New York. Together, the works are expected to fetch a collected price of $45 million.

Leading the group is Cézanne’s Nature morte: pommes et poires, which carries an estimate of $25 million–$35 million. It is an example of one of Cézanne’s mature still lifes of apples painted in the 1880s and 1890s. The work has remained in the same private collection for almost two decades years.

The seller purchased it for $8.7 million at a Sotheby’s New York Impressionist and modern art evening sale in November 2003. Prior to that, it belonged to American publisher and French art collector Alex Hillman and his wife Rita.

Edgar Degas’s pastel drawing of a ballerina, Danseuse (ca. 1890s), will also be offered. The subject of the work is believed to be Parisian dancer Marie van Goethem, whose image Degas recreated in his bronze sculpture Little Fourteen-Year Old Dancer. For 70 years, the pastel work was in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is estimated at $10 million-$15 million.

Monet’s river scene La Seine à Lavacourt Débâcle (1880), which was once owned by industrialist George Vanderbilt II and hung at the Biltmore estate, is expected to sell for $6 million–$8 million. Another painting by Monet, a rare floral still-life titled Fleurs dans un pot (Roses et brouillard), 1880, is expected to fetch $4 million. Like the other works in the collection, it, too, boasts an impressive provenance. It was once owned by American collectors Odgen Phipps and James F. Sutton, the founder of the American Art Association.

Candid Moments Captured in Vintage Photos Are Magnified in Mohamed L’Ghacham’s Murals

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 16:21:25 +0200

Whether depicting a birthday party or a child’s first steps, the expressive murals by Mohamed L’Ghacham (previously) enlarge sincere, unposed moments into monumental celebrations of everyday life. The Moroccan artist recreates vintage photographs as wall-sized artworks in locations across Europe that portray a woman readying for bed or the chaotic minutes before a family portrait at a massive scale.

L’Ghacham tells Colossal that his relationship to the original images has evolved in recent years from a simple juxtaposition of the site and the quiet, unassuming beauty of the domestic scenes to a more complex understanding. “Those first murals were done in abandoned, demolished places or simply on the outskirts of cities and public spaces. The impact of seeing an image of this type painted with a technique closer to classical painting than graffiti in such spaces created a concept by itself for me,” he says.

Today, the Barcelona-based artist sources reference photographs and home videos from neighbors and city archives to connect more directly with the local culture. While his style is unchanged—L’Ghacham continues to use loose brushstrokes and layers of muted tones to achieve the vintage aesthetic—the streetside works reflect those living nearby. “I think (the murals) can be very symbolic and that many people can feel represented even if they are not necessarily the protagonists portrayed,” he says. “Until now my intention was to pay tribute and give visibility to situations that we all live in and that maybe sometimes we find it hard to value.”

Starting next month, L’Ghacham will be traveling around Europe for a few projects and has a solo exhibition at PDP Gallery slated for this summer, which will be comprised of the smaller paintings he’s been sharing on Instagram.

“Pillando el globo” (2019), Mataró, Spain. Done in collaboration with Ivan Floro

“Matança do porco” (2019), Figueiró Dos Vinhos, Portugal

“Indoor II” (2019), Schiedam, Netherlands

“Dormitorio III” (2019), Mantova, Italy

“La Fondue” (2019), Crans-montana, Switzerland

“Family portrait” (2020), Wevelgem, Belgium

“El dormitorio de Aina” (2020), Torrellas, Spain

Educate Your Ears: NEO GEODESIA

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 16:00:00 +0200

The razor-sharp edge of life, death, and rebirth is explored with an almost hallucinatory intensity in Saphy Vong’s …

Russian Artist-Activist on Trial, Long-Closed Cairo Museum Reopens, and More: Morning Links from April 13, 2021

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 15:47:38 +0200

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The Headlines

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS IN NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA, are facing major funding cuts in budget numbers proposed by the state government, the Brisbane Times reports. For one, the Art Gallery of NSW, which is about to open a new contemporary art venue, Sydney Modern, that will nearly double its exhibition space, would see a drop of AU$9 million (about US$6.85 million). “These are significant and savage cuts,” Walt Secord, an opposition politician, told ABC News. Cecelia Cmielewski, an arts-policy researcher, told the Times that the cuts come in the “context of the continuing decimation over the past years of the more experimental small-to-medium Australian arts companies that stimulate and drive our creative output.” The state arts minister, Don Harwin, declined to comment on the budget.

THE RUSSIAN FEMINIST ACTIVIST AND ARTIST YULIA TSVETKOVA is facing six years in prison on charges of distributing pornography, apparently for posting art featuring women’s bodies, including drawings of vaginas, online, the Associated Press reports. Her trial started Monday. Tsvetkova, a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ rights, has said she is innocent. Human-rights groups allege she is being prosecuted because of her advocacy. She is not allowed to share details of her case, which is being held in private. A show of her paintings opened over the weekend in St. Petersburg. One of her supporters, artist Alexei Gorbushin, told the AP, “The snowball of censorship has started to bother the artistic community very much, and we understood that if we don’t stand up for Yulia, don’t support her, any other person can be next.”

The Digest

More Salvator Mundi news: the $450.3 million painting was housed on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s yacht Serene after it went undisplayed in the Louvre’s 2019 Leonardo show because of a reported curatorial dispute between the French museum and the Saudi government. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Mr & Mrs Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo, which is rich with works of European Impressionism, has reopened to the public, after being closed for more than a decade. It was shuttered in August of 2010, in the wake of the theft of a Vincent van Gogh that has never been recovered. [The Art Newspaper]

A groundbreaking ceremony was held yesterday for a Santiago Calatrava–designed convention center in Taoyuan, Taiwan, that will play host to exhibitions and concerts. Construction is estimated to last three years. Its budget is $350 million. [Taiwan News]

The Cleveland Museum of Art has rehung its contemporary galleries to emphasize women artists and artists of color. Among the artists with work on view are Zilia Sánchez, Lee Bontecou, Simone Leigh, and Robert Colescott. [WKYC Studios]

Watch museums—like all museums—have been working to stay busy (and to stay afloat) during the pandemic, digitizing their collections and renovating displays. “It’s still more difficult getting an audience for a clock and watch museum than for an art museum,” Johannes Graf, the acting director of the German Clock Museum at Furtwangen University said. [The New York Times]

Rapper and artist M.I.A.’s first NFT sold for $52,000. [Crack]

Grimes, another musician who’s gotten involved in NFTs, got a new back tattoo by the artist Tweakt in collaboration with—to quote her—“the alien computer brain” of artist Nusi Quero. [Page Six]

A pair of Nike Air Yeezy 1 Prototypes—shoes designed by Kanye West and Mark Smith—will be offered privately by Sotheby’s with a price tag of more than $1 million. The design was “critical to the development of the Yeezy franchise, which became one of the most important sneaker and lifestyle brands in history,” the auction house’s streetwear and collectibles head, Brahm Wachter, said. [Reuters]

Supreme is releasing a T-shirt with a painting by Dan Colen. The work in question comes from his early candle paintings. [Input]

The Kicker

THE LATEST ISSUE OF T: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE is all about friendship, and a bounty of artistic bonds are surveyed. There are friends united by a love for the queer history and community of Fire Island in New York, by family ties, and by a love for backgammon and films (photographer Nan Goldin and writer Thora Siemsen). There is inter-species friendship, too, between the artist Ai Weiwei and his cats. At one point, Ai said, he had more than 30 in Beijing. “I’ve learned so much from animals,” he explained. “It’s important to be around another species that has a completely different set of instincts and intuitions.”

Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Matthew Wong Ink Works, Never Before Exhibited, Will Alight in New York

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 15:40:16 +0200

When the artist Matthew Wong was just starting his painting practice, in 2013, he said in an interview that he had no fixed schedule for going about his work—with one exception. “The only thing that takes place at the same time every day is when I get out of bed, I have to do an ink drawing before doing anything else, such as brushing my teeth or eating,” Wong told the website Studio Critical. He sometimes experimented in a bathroom at his family’s Hong Kong home, he said later, “randomly pouring ink onto pages—smashing them together—hoping something interesting was going to come out of it.”

Wong kept making inventive ink drawings in the ensuing years, but it was his luminous oil paintings—vibrant, mysterious, melancholy landscapes—that would win him attention, and make him one of the signal artists of the decade. (Collectors now compete fiercely for them.) By the time Wong died in 2019, at 35, by suicide, he had created some 1,000 paintings and drawings. (His New York gallery, Karma, is readying a catalogue raisonné.) Only a fraction of that material has been seen publicly, and his ink works remain little known. However, that may be about to change.

Matthew Wong, Untitled, 2015. Ink on rice paper, 26 5/8 x 21 3/4 in.

On May 5, Cheim & Read will open an exhibition focused on Wong’s efforts in that unforgiving medium—just ink, water, and rice paper—at its Chelsea gallery, which it shuttered in 2019 and leased out, moving to the Upper East Side. “Matthew Wong: Footprints in the Wind, Ink Drawings 2013–2017” includes 24 pieces that have never before been exhibited. It’s a collaboration with the Matthew Wong Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the Toronto-born artist’s parents, Monita and Raymond Wong, to preserve his legacy and pursue philanthropic work. Its mission is currently being finalized.

Wong famously honed his artistic approach in libraries and online—he maintained a blog, where he posted photos of some of the drawings in the upcoming show, and he liked to talk art on Facebook. That’s how John Cheim (Cheim & Read’s cofounder) first got to know him. “In 2015, Matthew and his mother Monita came to visit me in New York for the first time and brought along a tube of large black ink drawings,” Cheim said in an email. “Matthew was a striking presence—tall, handsome, a shock of black hair and large black eyeglasses, all carefully considered. I found the ink drawings to be singular, intense.” He bought one from the unknown artist, and they kept their conversations going.

Matthew Wong, Winter Wind, 2016. Ink on rice paper, 31 3/4 x 27 1/8 in.

As with Wong’s alluring oils, his ink works invite comparisons to some giant names while still being unmistakably his own. They have the swirling energy of a Charles Burchfield, the dense, hypnotic patterning of a Yayoi Kusama, and the uncanny eeriness of a Ralph Albert Blakelock. Without the presence of color, they help reveal how Wong built up his beguiling canvases. In The Watcher (2017), hundreds of quick, short lines radiate from a giant sun as an enigmatic bird perches atop a rock, one eye staring out of the picture. In an untitled 2015 forest scene, at least three figures may or may not be looming amid a virtuosic array of diverse marks. There is always a lot to take in.

Last year, Wong’s parents gave a sprawling ink 2016 work—more than six feet tall (and exhilarating even as a tiny digital image)—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Suggesting a free-floating world within another world, it is potently surreal, and yet tender and intimate in the way it emerges from just simple brushstrokes: black liquid on white paper. “It is as if you can feel the particles in the air,” Cheim said of Wong’s ink works. “The space between the interior and the exterior dissolves—a kind of psychological pantheism presents itself.”

The Best Calligraphy Markers for Intricate Lettering

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 15:00:57 +0200

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, we may receive an affiliate commission.

Calligraphy is traditionally done with a fountain pen, but markers are becoming more popular among those practicing this ancient art. Chisel-tip markers function similarly to fountain pens, with the same type of movements needed for thin and thick strokes. Brush-tip markers, with their paintbrush effects, are also indispensable tools in hand lettering and make wonderfully expressive text. Since markers are usually less expensive than traditional tools and can be found in just about any color you can imagine, it’s no surprise that calligraphers keep them on hand. To help you find a marker with quality ink, colors you like, and a tip that won’t shred, we’ve assembled our picks of the best, below.

Biskit – Concept 2

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 14:00:00 +0200

BISKIT is a Unisex Clothing Label based out of Brooklyn and Madras, India – #breakingtheduality of menswear and …

Craft Conglomeration: 10 Favorites from the 2021 American Craft Council Show

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 13:38:48 +0200

The post Craft Conglomeration: 10 Favorites from the 2021 American Craft Council Show appeared first on BmoreArt.

BmoreArt’s Picks: April 13-19

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 13:33:39 +0200

The post BmoreArt’s Picks: April 13-19 appeared first on BmoreArt.

Featured Artist Michael Ward

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 13:00:40 +0200

Artist Michael Ward shares his love of architecture in this collection of nostalgic house portraits. Visit his website to see more of his art.

“Across From Louies” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

I have had a fascination with architecture from an early age. As a child, I announced I wanted to be an architect, which is why my parents agreed to my request for a dollhouse. I didn’t care about the dolls, but I definitely wanted the house.

“Beulah House” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

In high school, I studied architecture, finding myself especially interested in doing renderings and elevations. Later, in college and beyond, I did pen and ink drawings of houses. I did this first as a favor for a cousin, and eventually for a business selling images of Victorian houses on calendars and greeting cards.

“Kenton’s House” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

When I began painting with acrylics in the mid-1990s, I found myself painting the houses in my neighborhood. This eventually evolved into my Home is Where the House Is series.

“Bozeman House #1” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

The first of these was a house in Bozeman, Montana, near where I spent my childhood. It was a simple mid-20th century house clad in asbestos shingles. Other Bozeman houses joined the series, along with houses from Michigan, California and even Mexico—anywhere I found a suitable subject in my travels. Some were just down the block, waiting for me to find them.

“Bozeman House #2” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

The houses are all painted in a uniform size, 14” x 18.” The views are all front-facing as the house presents itself to the street, like an architectural illustration.

“Hibiscus” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

Some of the houses are neat as a pin, while others are quite shabby. I’ve experienced both. Most are modest. They’re where the middle class lives, or at least where they lived in the twentieth century.

“Pasadena House” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

They have in common the distinction of being the structure where ordinary people, living ordinary lives, can be sheltered and nurtured. There’s a grace in the ordinary which is characterized by these houses.

“It Was Great While It Lasted” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

When I display these houses at shows, I am surprised by the emotional response they evoke in viewers. To people of my generation they are reminders of the places we grew up in.

“Somewhere West of Grayling” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

To younger generations, they are the places their parents or grandparents lived in which were visited on holidays and summer vacations. Viewers often tell me they know exactly where a certain house is. They’re wrong, of course, but in a way they’re right as well.

“New Orleans Duplex” acrylic on canvas, 18” x 14”

I paint other stuff as well—landscapes, cityscapes, signs, cars and people. But houses will always have a special place in my oeuvre.

Artist Michael Ward invites you to follow him on Instagram and Facebook.

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The post Featured Artist Michael Ward appeared first on Artsy Shark.

CREATORS – Morgan N. Marshall

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:35:00 +0200

Name: Morgan N. Marshall

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

The art came first, but the science closely followed. I had always had a love and interest in drawing and painting at a young age, but I grew up with a nurse for a mother who always actively shared with me her love for the medical field. I maintained a simultaneous interest in both art and science throughout college. I majored in biology while minoring in chemistry and studio art. When I graduated, I learned about the awesome field of medical illustration and applied for graduate programs straight away!

Rhodopsin-Transducin Complex by Morgan N. Marshall, created with VMD, 3ds Max, and Keyshot

Glenoid Fossa of Velociraptor by Morgan N. Marshall, created in Adobe Photoshop, an illustrative look into dinosaur anatomy

Which sciences relate to your art practice?

I focus mainly on medical anatomy and procedures. A lot of my work homes in on surgical practice and human anatomy. I mainly cater to e-learning and helping a wide breadth of audiences and users learn complex scientific topics.

Lung Anatomy by Morgan N. Marshall, created in Adobe Photoshop, line drawing to show lungs at 3/4 angle with labeled anatomy

“SciArt is the perfect intersection of science and art, and it shows how one cannot function without the other.”
Morgan N. Marshall

Doctors and Balancing by Morgan N. Marshall, created in Adobe Photoshop, bioethics mockup cover meant to show how doctors are performing a balancing act with patients while trying to give the best treatment possible

What materials do you use to create your artworks?

I mainly use ZBrush to create 3D models, but it is not limited to 3ds Max and Maya. All of the interactive programs I have created are programmed within the Unity Real-Time Development Platform for functionality.

Artwork/Exhibition you are most proud of:

I am most proud of my master’s capstone. I was able to create two deliverables from scratch including 2D and 3D assets in both a 3D desktop application and virtual reality application. The program, Craniofacial Anatomy Reality Learner (C.A.R.L) is very dear to me, and I am very happy with the deliverable results.

Craniofacial Anatomy Reality Learner (C.A.R.L) virtual reality program by Morgan N. Marshall, screen capture of virtual reality space

Craniofacial Anatomy Reality Learner (C.A.R.L) virtual reality program by Morgan N. Marshall, screen capture showing the opacity levels of the program

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

A huge influencer is Diane Nelson, who was my mentor before applying. She convinced me to go into medical illustration, and her illustrations are breathtakingly beautiful.

SciArt is an emerging term related to combining art and science. How would you define it?

SciArt is the perfect intersection of science and art, and it shows how one cannot function without the other. The beauty of science relies on art to be communicated, while art relies on rigorous practice and efficiency, like science, to be created. It’s an amazing symbiotic relationship, and it’s very exciting to see the highlighting of this practice.

Cutting Loose by Morgan N. Marshall, created in Adobe Photoshop, editorial cover mockup

For more by Morgan N. Marshall, visit her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

Thank you for reading, please visit Art the Science's Blog for more amazing SciArt content.

Capture 2021: Emerging Artist Talk with Yumna Al-Arashi, Aaron Jones, and Zinnia Naqvi

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:15:18 +0200

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BmoreArt’s Picks: April 13-19

Featured Artist Michael Ward

Artist Michael Ward shares his love of architecture in this collection of nostalgic house portraits. Visit his website to see more of his art.

Want to stay current on cutting edge business articles from Artsy Shark, plus artist features, and an invitation to the next Call for Artists? Subscribe to our twice-monthly Updates, and get a free e-book on Where to Sell Art Online right now!

CREATORS – Morgan N. Marshall

Capture 2021: Emerging Artist Talk with Yumna Al-Arashi, Aaron Jones, and Zinnia Naqvi