Friday, January 17, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Sculptor Hilary Berseth, of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, can be said to leave at least part of the creation of his artwork to chance; he uses bees in crafting his abstract "Programmed Hives". Berseth fashions forms of thin wax sheets or wire armatures that he then places in specially designed hives, where the bees take over to produce the final works. Berseth also has crafted quasi-organic metal objects grown in chemicals; some were shown in Berseth's 2010 and 2008 exhibitions at Eleven Rivington in New York City. 

Hilary Berseth at All Visual Arts, New York Magazine, Trendhunter (The New York magazine feature offers a slideshow illustrating how the sculptures are made.)

✦ The New York Public Library offers an online exhibition of work by Mary Cassatt: "Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt". Viewers may browse by title,  date, or medium. The prints span 20 years, 1878 to 1898.

NYPL on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) is the subject of this excellent feature at The Public Domain Review: "Time and Place: Eric Ravilious". Ravilious was a wood engraver, book illustrator, muralist, theatre designer, and watercolor painter (his works are now in the public domain). An exhibition of Ravilious's prints was held at Pallant House Gallery in West Sussex, United Kingdom, this past fall. 

James Russell is the author of Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs (Mainstone Press, 2009); Ravilious in Pictures: Travelling Artist (Mainstone Press, 2011), Ravilious in Pictures: War Paintings (Mainstone Press, 2010), Ravilious in Pictures: County Life (Mainstone Press, 2011); and Ravilious: Wood Engravings (Mainstone Press, 2013). Also see Alan Powers's Eric Ravilious: Imagined Realities (Philip Wilson Publishers, 2012) and Eric Ravilious: Artist and Designer (Lund Humphries Pub Ltd, 2013).

✦ If you don't already know, the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and Vatican Library have collaborated on a project to share with us their most ancient texts: Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and 15th Century printed books, both secular and religious. The Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project went live in early December and already is a remarkable resource. By the time the project is completed, some four years from now, 1.5 million pages will be available online to researchers and the public.


✦ In the video below, the marvelous sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard discusses her bonze work Ona, a permanent installation outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. My thanks to Art21 for the video.



Exhibitions Here and There

Diana Al-Hadid's massive sculpture Nolli's Orders, is on view at Akron Art Museum through March 16. Thirteen feet high, the sculpture is made of steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam, and paint and is Al-Hadid's response to her exposure to Italian and Northern Renaissance painting, Gothic architecture, and Helenistic sculpture. 



Akron Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is presenting through March 16 "Flesh and Metal: Body and Machine in Early 20th Century Art". Organized with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition features works by Giorgio de Chirico, Alexander Rodchenko, Constantin Brancusi, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Jean Arp, Salvador Daily, and other modern painters, printmakers, photographers, and sculptors. Thematically arranged, the exhibition has four sections — the human figure, the imagination, the urban landscape, and the object — showcasing featured artists' responses to the rise of the machine in modern life. Various art movements (Futurism, Purism, Vorticism, and Constructivism) are illustrated by the selections, which cover the 1910s to early 1950s.


CAC on FaceBook and YouTube

✭ In Atlanta, Georgia, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University continues its exhibition of photographs of Rome. "Conserving the Memory: The Fratellis Alinari Photographs of Rome", on view through February 2, is drawn from the Fratelli Alinari Photography Firm founded in 1854 by Leopoldo Alinari and his brothers Giuseppe and Romualdo. The images of the Eternal City document both treasured artworks, such as the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum, and architecture, including St. Peter's Basilica, as they appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition selections are drawn from the museum's permanent collection


Michael C. Carlos Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ "Robert Davidson: Abstract Impulse", the first major exhibition in the United States of the Haida artist Robert Davidson (b. 1946), runs through February 16 at Seattle Art Museum. On view are 45 paintings, sculptures, and prints created since 2005, and images of earlier work that help explain Davidson's artistic development. Davidson is considered a highly significant figure in Northwest Coast Native art.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition, which will travel to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, where it will be on view April 10 through September 14.

A considerable number of images of Davidson's marvelous art, including scultpures, jewelry, paintings, prints, and masks and totem poles, may be viewed at Davidson's Website.


Image above to right: Robert Davidson, Green Tri Neg, Acrylic on Canvas, 2009

SAM on FaceBook and Twitter


Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ There's still time to see "KIMSOOJA Unfolding", an exhibition of the Korea-born and Paris- and New York City-based artist at Vancouver Art Gallery  through January 26. This first retrospective of the artist's career covers work created over 30 years, tracing Komsooja's practice in textile-based pieces (she is known for her bottari, objects wrapped in fabrics), site-specific installations, and, most recently, single- and multi-channel video production. Kimsooja, who addresses issues of time and memory, identity, displacement, and humanity and the material world, represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale 2013 (video interview at the Biennale).

Here's a brief video introduction:



A book of the same name, co-published with Hatje Cantz of Berlin, accompanies the exhibition. In addition to essays, it features more than 100 images of Kimsooja's work.


Cover of Exhibition Catalogue

Concept of Bottari (Text and Image)

Kimsooja Website (There's a lot to see and read on Kimsooja's Website. It's well worth a visit.)


Vancouver Art Gallery on FaceBook and Twitter

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