Gwarlingo is a place where creative people can connect, explore, and share challenges, ideas, and resources. Gwarlingo is different because of its personal perspective, accessibility, and unique curation. Our articles offer you quality over quantity, clarity over clutter, and stories over sound bytes. At Gwarlingo, we share real conversations with real artists about ideas and process, as well as some of our own exciting discoveries. Our goal is to bring you the best work, period—regardless of its genre or popularity, while also having some fun along the way. Browse articles by category or just pull up the most recent in the list below.
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Design Articles
The Beauty of Book Spines
With the advent of online bookstores, the cover of a book has become our first visual interaction with unknown tomes. Still, though, in bookstores and libraries and our friends' shelves at dinner parties, we are most often greeted by the spine of a book. It is, despite that familiarity, maybe a bit neglected as a design form—more like the edge of a cassette tape case than the front of a record sleeve.
An Unfinished Paint by Number
When you wander across an unfinished paint by number for sale, what are you to make of it?
Six Books’ Stories with Denise Markonish
MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish shares her stories of experiences with selected books featuring Nick Cave, Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, Barbara Bourland, Carl Belz, J.M. Arms Sheldon, and Camille Flammarion.
Book from the Ground: Point to Point by Xu Bing
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.
An Invitation to Dinner, from Roswell with Love
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.
On Home Turf: A Creative Spaces Interview with Artist Angus McCullough
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, [...]
Skyscrapers: A Cure For Loneliness & Overconsumption? Judith Dupré on the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings
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 [...]
Gwarlingo’s 26 Favorite Art, Photography, Film & Design Books of 2013
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 [...]
Writer Howard Mansfield on Clutter, Home Improvement & the Most Hated House on the Block
Lisa Dahl, Suburban Export, household cardboard, 1.5 x 2 x 2 inches (each), installation variable, 2011-12. View the finished installation Suburban Export here. (In-Progress photo of installation by Lisa Dahl courtesy the artist) "Everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul." -Samuel Mockbee The [...]
Minka: How a Japanese Farmhouse Changed the Lives of Two Men
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 Turrell’s Ambitious Light Installation Leaves Wright’s Guggenheim in the Dark
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 [...]
Architect Says: Less Is More. Less Is a Bore.
Tadao Ando, Church of the Light, 1989. Osaka, Japan. Philadelphia is a city awash with memorable architecture, so it's fitting that I stumbled across The Architect Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's store, which offers a well-curated assortment of books inside of [...]
The Cleveland Art Scene: Be Prepared to Be Surprised
Barry Underwood, Archimedes. This installation was created at the construction site for the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. (Photo © Barry Underwood. Click to Enlarge) As New York artists search for the next affordable, urban frontier in Bushwick and Queens, a renaissance of sorts is taking [...]
Why Design Matters: Imagining the Future of the Rockaway Waterfront
The wreckage of Rockaway Boardwalk after Sandy (Image via CNN.com) A few months ago I shared Eve Mosher's piece, High Water Line, a public art project in Manhattan and Brooklyn that brought the topic of climate change directly to the city’s residents. Mosher's inventive project showed what [...]
Soo Sunny Park & Spencer Topel Transform a Chain-Link Fence into Art
Artist Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne studies "Capturing Resonance," a piece made of chain-link fencing on view at the deCordova Museum. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge) On my recent visit to the deCordova Museum, one of the artworks I found most compelling was "Capturing Resonance" by sculptor [...]