Friday, May 5, 2017

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ French-born, now Seattle-based, Armelle Bouchet O'Neill is an award-winning glass artist whose recent work draws on her interest in topography. Her Winds and Currents series is extraordinary; see several pieces from the series at Blue Rain Gallery; other images of her work can be seen at Piece Art Gallery. See a "Meet the Artist" video (2011) with O'Neill.

Armelle Bouchet O'Neill on FaceBook

✦ Would you pay up to $2,000 for a painting by Pigcasso?

✦ This year's "Documenta", usually held in Kassel, Germany, will also be held in Athens, Greece. Now in its 14th year, the art exhibition opened in Athens on April 8 and continues through July 10; it will be in Kassel from June 10 to September 17. Watch a preview video.

A concurrent exhibition, running from May 19 to September 17, is "Luther and the Avantgarde", an exhibition of contemporary art in Wittenburg, Berlin, and Kassel.

✦ In The World Made New: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century (Thames & Hudson, 2016), art critic, art historian, and painter Timothy Hyman offers a reassessment of 20th Century figurative painting by examining the work of such diverse artists as Balthus, Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, James Ensor, Lucien Freud, Alex Katz, R.B. Kitaj, Alice Neel, Picasso, Paula Rego, and Stanley Spencer. The 256-page book has 142 color illustrations.


Cover Art

Read a review of The World Made New at Hyperallergic.

✦ The work of fine art photographer Isabelle van Zeijl, who digitally composes her portraits, will leave you in awe. See a selection of van Zeijl's work at her Website. (My thanks to Sophie Ploeg from whom I learned of van Zeijl.)


✦ If you find yourself in Morningside Park, in New York City's Harlem, take time to see "inHarlem: Kevin Beasley's Who's Afraid to Listen to Red, Black, and Green". On view through July 25 are a trio of large sculptures that Beasley calls "acoustic mirrors", each one featuring one of the colors of the African-American flag in the form of found T-shirts cast in resin. 


Keven Beasley, Who's Afraid to Listen to Red, Black and Green? (Detail), 2016
Morningside Park, New York, New York
Photo Credit: Liz Gwinn

The New York-based Beasley works in sculpture, performance art, and sound installation. His recent exhibition at Hammer Projects closed April 23.

✦ Released in 1971, the documentary embedded below, M.C. Escher: Adventures in Perception, features the work of M.C. Escher (1898-1972), a master printmaker. The 20-minute film, directed by Han Van Gelder as part of the Living Art in the Netherlands series, also shows the artist at work. (My thanks to Laughing Squid, where I first saw the film.)




Exhibitions Here and There

✭ As part of its NJ Emerging Artists Series, Monmouth Museum, Lincroft, New Jersey, is presenting through May 28 "Daniel Sroka: Nature from a Different Angle". The exhibition features Sroka's immersive abstract photographs of flowers, leaves, sticks, shells, ice, and seeds. Sroka photographs only what he finds while out walking and only what he can hold in his hands. Read about Sroka's artistic process.


Monmouth Museum on FaceBook

✭ Thirteen paintings by South American artists from the 17th through 19th centuries are on view in "Doctrine and Devotion: Art of the Religious Orders in the Spanish Andes", at the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, continuing through June 25, introduces images promoted by the Dominican, Franciscan, Mercedarian, and Jesuit Catholic orders and examines how each group developed its iconographies to gain converts and political dominance in the region. See images at the exhibition link above.


Bernardo Bitti (Italian, Active in Perus 1548-1610)
Virgin and Child, c 1592-1605
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Collection

ARTIC on FaceBook, Instagram, and YouTube

✭ Drawing from its permanent collection, Mulvane Art Museum at Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, is exhibiting in "Americans At Home and Abroad" approximately 45 paintings responding to the theme of "Identity and Engagement". Among the artists represented are Frederick Stuart Church and Albert Bloch.

Mulvane Art Museum on FaceBook

✭ The first exhibition in North America devoted to the portrayal of wakashu ("beautiful youths"), "A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints", at Japan Society, New York City, features more than 65 woodblock prints, paintings, luxury objects, and personal ornaments from the Edo period (1603-1868). On view through June 11, the exhibition critically appraises both the artistic and historical contexts for rigidly governed gender performance and sexual expression. See the preview below:



Curator talks focusing on highlights from the exhibition, an audio tour, and a catalogue (Royal Ontario Museum, 2016) are available.


Exhibition Catalogue Cover Art

Japan Society on FaceBook, Instagram, and YouTube

✭ At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, you'll find "Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross". On display through July 30, this extraordinary trove of more than 200 images gives us a rare look at life inside Lodz Ghetto in Poland from 1940 to 1944. Ross himself was confined to the ghetto and forced to work for the Nazis as a photographer for the Jewish Administration's Statistics Division. His photographs were used on Jews' identification cards and also by the Nazis as propaganda. As the exhibition information states, he also documented, at great risk to his life, the horrors of Nazi rule. Various artifacts, including Ross's ID card, ghetto notices, and an album of contact prints supplement the photographs. A preview slideshow is available at the link.

The exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, where Ross's collection resides.


MFA Boston on FaceBook and Instagram

No comments: