Driving through the middle of Ohio, somewhere in the small town of Logan you see a small shed with brightly colored pencils painted on the outside. You might think "oh, what a nice space for art classes!" or "my, what a quaint art supply store!" Both excellent guesses. But if you instead said, "I bet that's a pencil sharpener museum!" then you were spot on.
riving through east Cleveland, you might stumble across the abandoned Warner and Swasey Observatory nestled into the edge of a residential community. Constructed in 1920, it was abandoned in 1980 when creeping light pollution had long since prevented it from serving its function of astronomical research.
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.
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, [...]
Julia Jacquette, Blond, Shoulder, 2011. Oil on wood panel. 10 x 7.5 inches (Photo by Jean Vong) It's hard not to be mesmerized by Julia Jacquette 's hypnotic paintings. Their luminous, rich surfaces are intoxicating, and yet there is so much more happening in Jacquette's work than [...]
Rachel Perry Welty, Lost in My Life (receipts), 2011. Pigmented ink print, edition of 3. 91.25 x 60 (Photo courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery) Rachel Perry Welty, Lost in My Life (price tags), 2009. Pigmented ink print, edition of 3. 91.25 x [...]
Kim Uchiyama's studio is located on a quiet, tree-lined side-street in Lower Manhattan. On a crisp fall day in mid-November over tea and brunch, I visited Kim in her Tribeca apartment. We spent the day looking at art and discussing her new painting series, her artistic development and [...]
Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons are Red Heart the Ticker (Photo by Doron Gild) Two weeks after Hurricane Irene I'm wandering the back-roads of Marlboro, Vermont, making my way to Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons, also known as the music duo Red Heart the Ticker. Route 9--the main thoroughfare [...]
Today is the birthday of jazz legend Sonny Rollins. At the age of 81, Rollins is still touring, making new music, and recording records. The long, remarkable career of Sonny Rollins is a good example of how sustaining it can be for an artist to have time alone to think, practice, [...]
Photographer Angela Cappetta has a new show opening this weekend at the Medusa General Store as part of their MGS Projects series. "Medusa: A Love Letter to the Mountains" reflects on the working farm community of Medusa in Upstate New York. The hamlet is tiny--it had a population of [...]
Anna Schuleit creating Room for Five, a collaborative project for the Eastman School of Music (Photo courtesy the artist) Welcome to the first installment of "Creative Spaces," a regular Gwarlingo series that will focus on the creative habits and work spaces of visual artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other [...]
Leonard Bernstein working in a studio at The MacDowell Colony (Photo courtesy The MacDowell Colony) What do Quentin Tarantino's Resevoir Dogs, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and the musical Grey Gardens have in common? All of these works were created during a residency at [...]