Friday, June 6, 2014

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ I was delighted to have an opportunity to see Elzbieta Sikorska's evocative, highly expressive mixed-media drawings on papers. Many are standouts; among her landscapes, I especially like Boat, Beaks, and Whip. View Sikorska's online Portfolio (don't miss the installation Hanging Moose). The artist recently exhibited in "Nature and Culture: Drawings by Elzbieta Sikorska" in McLean, Virginia, at McLean Project for the Arts.

✦ For fans of "outsider" or "visionary" artists: Greg Bottoms's The Colorful Apocalpyse: Journeys in Outsider Art (Chicago University Press, 2007). Read Garrick Allen's "Review: The Colorful Apocalypse" at Transpositions.

✦ The lovely, almost delicate digital paintings by Seoul-based Jiwoon Pak carry numerous narrative possibilities. Also see the charming drawings. Jiwoon recently was featured in Frrresh, a visual arts magazine. (My thanks to Hannah Stephenson for the link to Jiwoon's work.)

Jiwoon Pak on FaceBook

✦ The wonderful artist Rebecca Kamen is the subject of a PBS NewsHour article, "Portrait of a Dyslexic Artist, Who Transforms Neurons Into 'Butterflies'", which includes images of her work. Also see the Art/Science section of Kamen's Website. The atrium of The John Edward Porter Neuroscience Research Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, is a public gallery space where Kamen's neuroscience-inspired sculptures are on view. Kamen was NIH artist-in-residence in 2012.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ Work by painters Irene Hardwicke Olivieri and Jo Hamilton is in the spotlight in "Contemporary Oregon Visions" at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon at Eugene. Olivieri populates her canvases with images of the natural world, while Hamilton gives working-class Portland a whimsical twist. The exhibition, which runs through August 3, includes selections from Olivieri's sculpture series Paleogirls and Hamilton's industrial landscapes and full-figure nudes.  

Hardwicke's new book is Closer to Wildness (Pomegranate).

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube 

✭ Continuing through June 29 at Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi, is "Rebels With a Cause: American Impressionist Women from the Huntsville Museum of Art". The exhibition showcases some 55 works — landscapes, still lifes, paintings, genre scenes, and portraits — by artists who are women, all strongly influenced by French Impressionism.

Lauren Rogers Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ "The World at War, 1914-1918" is on view through August 3 at Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. One of many world-wide observances of the centenary of the start of World War I, the exhibition draws on letters, drafts, and diaries, memoirs, novels, photographs, drawings, and propaganda posters to illuminate experiences of the war by the men and women who witnessed it. 

The exhibit is organized thematically and presented to mirror the eastern and western fronts of the war. The individual sections are "The War Begins", "A Lost Generation", "For Ever England", "Ireland and the Easter Uprising", "Women and Children in Wartime", "Opposing the War", "The Weapons of War", "Animals", "Treating the Wounded", "Over There", "African-American Soldiers", "The Italian Front", "The Lost", "Reporting the War", and "Lawrence of Arabia".

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibit.


Catalogue Cover

Harry Ransom Center on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Harry Ransom Blog, Cultural Compass

Notable Exhibitions Abroad


✭ Canada's Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, is presenting Francis Bacon and Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty" through July 20. Drawing on the artists' experiences during the London Blitz, the Second World War, and other conflicts to illuminate the artists' treatment of such themes as violence, trauma, and personal and social conflict, the exhibition includes more than 130 artworks: paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and archival materials; among the latter are 30 archival photographs by Bill Brandt. It is the first Canadian show of Bacon's work and features a number of rarely seen works by Moore from AGO's own collection and the collections of MoMA, Tate Britain, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among other institutions. The show is ticketed.



AGO on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Juliette Bates is exhibiting in "Histoires Naturelles" at Galerie Esther Woerderhoff in Paris, France. Bates is a photographer with a distinctive signature. Her beautiful Lambda prints are as mysterious as they are surreal. The exhibition continues through July 12.


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