Earlier this week, as I struggled to open a package from the mail, I sighed and wished that boxes were better designed. But with it being almost Thanksgiving here in America, I knew the stores would already be full of Christmas wares. And, accordingly, some very interesting boxes!
Dan Mills is, in addition to being a very talented painter, a wealth of piercing information: 31 states are named after indigenous words, one in 113 people worldwide are displaced from their homes, one in five Syrians are refugees, Maine is the state with the smallest number of incarcerated people per capita in America yet is only the median for this statistic among countries worldwide, and New Hampshire is considered the “most free” state.
Afton Love’s artwork opens up the possibility of self-examination. “We cannot know the fullness of the rock, but we can strive to know ourselves better and to live a meaningful life,” says Love. “By considering that there are things we do not and will never know, we grasp how small we are, and upon pushing into that idea we realize that we are vast as well.”
Tucked away on the outskirts of Roswell, NM, far away from the daily bustle of the alien museum, lies the Roswell Artist in Residence Program. The residency hosts six artists a year and each, near the end of their residency, has a solo exhibition. Each exhibition is followed by a dinner, which is prefaced by a handmade invitation from the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art's Director Nancy Fleming. She has been making these special invitations since 2004, and here is a peek into these small treasures.
John Stezaker’s surreal, handmade collages—comprised of film stills, publicity portraits, and postcards collected from thrift stores and bookshops—are masterful studies in contradiction. They are familiar and nostalgic, but also unexpected and strange. Like a Coen Brothers film or Flannery O’Connor short story, they walk that compelling line between comedy and tragedy.
The 1819 Edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales (Photo: Andreas Berthel © Stadt Kassel / Kulturamt) Murder. Infanticide. Mutilation. Incest. While true love intermittently raises its pretty head, Grimm's fairy tales are far darker than the Disneyfied versions so many of us know. [...]
Sometimes you have to leave home to discover surprises right in your own back yard. Such was the case with artist Angus McCullough, a Vermont-based artist I met this spring at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The town of Bennington, Vermont, [...]
"There’s nobody living who couldn’t stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall...," wrote Agnes Martin. "Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it...as you would cross an empty beach to look at [...]
An installation view of Rachelle Beaudoin's Conversation Lashes. Laser cut paper, digital photographs, 2013. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge) On Thursday I attended the opening for Rachelle Beaudoin's new show, Let's Work it Out, at the Carroll House Gallery in Keene, New Hampshire. Rachelle investigates feminine iconography and identity [...]
Doug + Mike Starn, from the series alleverythingthatisyou, 2006-2007. (Photograph Doug + Mike Starn courtesy dmstarn.com) Doug + Mike Starn, Big Bambú: You Can't, You Don't, and You Won't Stop, 2010. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images North America via [...]
As an ex-librarian and book collector, one of my favorite things to do is to ferret out new publications and share them with readers. Whenever I'm traveling, I scour local bookstores and museum shops for interesting books. (Carting heavy art tomes home on an airplane is a familiar [...]
(Drawing by Kate Holden) If there is one piece of advice I could give to artists of all disciplines, in all stages of their careers, it would be this: make art. Period. Writer and art critic Sigrun Hodne posted this simple, but brilliant drawing on her blog, Sub [...]
A detail of Olive Ayhens's hand-tinted etching, Moorish Architecture. This 30" by 22" artwork is available to only one Gwarlingo donor for $800, less than a third of the cost of the gallery price. A Membership Profile is also included with your donation. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge) "I [...]
James TurrellAten Reign, 2013Daylight and LED light, dimensions variable© James TurrellPhoto: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York "My art deals with light itself," says 70-year-old artist James Turrell. "It's not the bearer of the revelation---it is the revelation." While frequently lumped together with minimalist artists Robert Irwin [...]
Director Jem Cohen and Pieter Brueghel’s 1559 painting There are times when art criticism can illuminate a specific art work---expand on it, put it into context, or communicate details too easily overlooked. But there are other cases when a given art work, film, book, or piece of music [...]
Joseph Bernard, Maze, 2008. Acrylic Paint on Wood Panel. 22 inches x 24 inches Artist Joseph Bernard in Conversation with Mary McNichols (Note: This is a guest post by curator and art historian Mary McNichols) Detroit-based artist, Joseph Bernard, once described a toy he had made as a [...]
Concrete Sound (Photos courtesy Audra Wolowiec) There is no new Sunday Poem post today because of the holiday weekend, but I do have Sunday Poem news to share.... Back in April, I featured the one-of-a-kind artist and poetry book Concrete Sound---a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Audra Wolowiec and poet, [...]
Jeff Tweedy of Wilco performing at the 2013 Solid Sound Festival at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (Photo by Michelle Aldredge) Last weekend around 8,000 festival-goers gathered at Mass MoCA under the supermoon to participate in Wilco's sold-out Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts. Attendees come [...]
Yesterday, I stopped by the Montague Bookmill ("Books you don't need in a place you can't find") and came across this little number: a Poetic License. The license is the brainchild of Kenspeckle Letterpress in Duluth, Minnesota, which created the item at the request of a friend who [...]
Wang Quingsong, Beggar, 2001. (Photo courtesy of AW Asia, New York. Click to Enlarge) A few weeks ago I had a chance to see Hot Pot: A Taste of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont. It was photographer Liu Bolin's The [...]
Bill Traylor, Runaway Goat Cart, c. 1939-42. Opaque watercolor and graphite on cream card, 14 x 22 inches. (Photo by Will Brown courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection) "I painted pictures in the gutter," the African-American artist Purvis Young once remarked, "and [...]
James Crews’ poetry collection, The Book of What Stays, is full of evocative landscapes and secret lives. There is the old woman in Chernobyl who refuses to leave, ice fishing with Patsy Cline, and the moving poems about artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Liu Bolin, Hiding in the City No.93 -Supermarket No.2, 2010. Photographs by the Chinese artist are on view in Brattleboro, Vermont, through June 23rd. (Photo Courtesy Eli Klein Fine Art © Liu Bolin. Click to Enlarge) The summer art scene in New England presents a special challenge. [...]
Concrete Sound (Photos courtesy Audra Wolowiec) Last year Gwarlingo readers responded enthusiastically to Mary Ruefle and Jen Bervin's erasure poems. Today's Sunday Poem features another unique project that defies categorization---a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Audra Wolowiec and poet, critic, and artist Christine Shan Shan Hou. In conjunction with [...]
Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice, 1943. Oil on canvas, 18 x 14" (Image courtesy of The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Matthew Moore) Last summer I was strolling through the galleries of the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, surrounded by the exquisite paintings of Matisse, Modigliani, [...]