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.”
100 Word Book Review: Book from the Ground by Xu Bing. In the 1920s, a group of scholars in Vienna tried devising a universal picture language called isotype. Today, Shigetaka Kurita has perhaps achieved that vision with emojis. And in 2012 Xu Bing wrote a book without words from emojis and other contemporary symbols.
Jamie Franklin has been the curator at the Bennington Museum in Vermont for almost 15 years. In that time, he has also assembled a personal collection of art from around the world ranging from calligraphic drawings to art created in prisons and psychiatric hospitals—a collection one might label “outsider art.” But Franklin says, “I don't like the term outsider art. There are art worlds; there is no Art World. There are artists working in many contexts, and many never get acclaim.”
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.
Remember, as a kid, when you played with wooden blocks, Erector sets, Lincoln Logs, and Legos? Artists have continued to nurture the impulse of putting parts together to make a more wonderful whole. At Gallery 51's latest show, Babel's Bricks, twenty artists playfully interpret the idea of artwork as building block.
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, [...]
For Proust," Susan Howe writes in her Preface to The Gorgeous Nothings, "a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state; it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present." The fragments Howe is specifically referring to are the envelopes left [...]
"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 [...]
Lewis Wickes Hine, A construction worker at the Empire State Building, 1931. (Photo courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Gallery) Books Worth Reading Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings By Judith Dupré. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 176 pages [...]
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 [...]
The chefs of Sherry's restaurant at luncheon in 1902 (Photo courtesy the Museum of the City of New York, the Byron Company Collection. Click to Enlarge) Wisconsin Death Trip My first introduction to the work of Michael Lesy was a chance encounter many years ago with his classic [...]
Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (detail), 1982–86. Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (Photo by Louis Vest, 2011 via Flickr Commons) Frank Lloyd Wright in his study at Taliesin in Wisconsin. According to the WMF, "the forces of nature...have put the complex at risk." The World Monuments [...]
(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 [...]
"In my personal life, if I don't have a project, I don't have any discipline," says performance artist Marina Abramovic. Discipline and daily ritual were one of the subjects of her 2002 piece The House with the Ocean View. Abramovic spent 12 straight days living on three open platforms in [...]
A still from the film Minka (Image courtesy Davina Pardo & Birdlings LLC) It is rare to find a film that is pitch-perfect in its cinematography, story, pacing, and length, but Davina Pardo's short film Minka is such a gem. (I owe writer Craig Mod a thank you for turning [...]
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 [...]
(Photo via Pinterest. Original Source: ClareNol via Flickr) All good things can benefit from an occasional makeover. Penguin Classics are the perfect example. The publishing imprint is highly regarded in design circles for their book jacket designs. Starting in the late 40s, German typographer Jan Tschichold created the early [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]