Friday, December 21, 2012

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights

✦ Need a last-minute gift that's art-related? Pick up a copy of  Jerelle Kraus's All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't), a collection of op-ed art printed in The New York Times between 1970 and 2008. This review takes a peek inside the 280-page book published by Columbia University Press.

✦ In a series of Art Talks, Vassar College professors, student docents, and curators and educators offer interpretations of works at the college's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Poughkeepsie, New York.

✦ You'll find a number of brief and interesting videos in the "Meet the Artists" program with art critic Adrian Searle.

✦ Below is a 3:35-minute excerpt from The Toxic Camera, a film commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster and shown for the first time last month at Whitworth Art Gallery at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. The film was made by British video artists Jane and Louise Wilson, who were inspired by Vladimir Shevchenko's film Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks. (Shevchenko's on-site filming resulted in his death.) The gallery's exhibition of the Wilsons' recent works is on view through January 27, 2013.



Adrian Searle, "Post-Atrocity Exhibition: Jane and Louise Wilson's Disturbing Films", The Guardian, October 22, 2013

Selection of Wilson Sisters' Works at 303 Gallery

✦ The site Facing History and Ourselves, devoted to eliminating racism, antisemitism, and prejudice through educational programs worldwide, is offering an online exhibition "Illuminations: The Art of Samuel Bak", featuring images of 20 original works by the internationally renowned artist (b. 1933) and Holocaust survivor. Analysis and interpretation are provided in audio, and the online show is accompanied by resources for educators to facilitate discussion of the extraordinary artwork. At Facing History's Brookline, Massachusetts, headquarters, the paintings have been placed on view. Bak, who enjoyed his first exhibition at age nine, resides in Boston. He published his memoir Painted in Words (Indiana University Press) in 2001 and is the subject of several documentaries, one of which is below and well worth your  time. Bak was awarded the German Herkomer Cultural Prize in 2002. He is represented by Boston's Pucker Gallery.


A second documentary, Samuel Bak: Painter of Questions, is available through The National Center for Jewish Film



Samuel Bak: Painted in Words (3:32-Minute Video) (Additional videos are available on YouTube.)


Facing Ourselves and History on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

Exhibitions Here and There

✭  In Wheaton, Illinois, the Billy Graham Center Museum at Wheaton College is showing through March 24, 2013, "Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe". The exhibition features 50 original momigami (wrinkled paper) and washi (plain mulberry paper) prints, cards, and calendars from private collections. Watanabe (1913-1996), who enjoyed an international reputation, was a master of the traditional folk art of hand-cut stencil dyeing, katazome. He considered it his mission "to create Christian art for the Japanese people." The book Beauty Given by Grace (Square Halo Books, October 2012), available through the Christians in the Visual Arts store, features essays by Sandra Bowden, John A. Kohan (an excellent essay by Kohan about the life and art of Watanabe appears in Image Journal, No. 74), and Makoto Fujimura.

A selection of images from the exhibition is here and here (scroll to bottom of screen).

Note: The exhibition is available to other galleries and museums through CIVA's exhibition coordinator (exhibits@civa.org/); information is here.


Ann P. Brannen, "Beauty and Faith: The Art of Sadao Watanabe", Essay, ArtWay (This article originally appeared in Radix Magazine in 1982.)

ArtWay Visual Meditation, "Terrified", Sandra Bowden on Sadao Watanabe's Boat in the Storm 

Christians in the Visual Arts on FaceBook and Twitter


✭ Running through February 24 at Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., is "Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII". Produced between 2008 and 2011, A Living Man Declared Dead, according to the photographer, aims to show how "the external forces of territory, governance, power, and religion collid[e] with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance." For her project, Simon, the Arnold Newman Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Photography, traveled around the world to research and record bloodlines and their related stories; she documented, among others, victims of genocide in Bosnia, feuding families in Brazil, and the "living dead" in India.

Artist's Statement About A Living Man Declared Dead and Images

In this TED Talk, Simon talks about the generation-spanning stories behind the bloodlines she documented and how she constructed the images and their narratives:


You'll find other videos with Simon, a number of which are interviews, here. A selection of articles and essays about Simon's work is here. Four of Simon's photographic projects, including A Living Man Declared Dead, have been published as books.

Taryn Simon at Gagosian Gallery

Notable Exhibitions Abroad

✭ The Museum of London has mounted a fascinating exhibition that is on view through April 14: "Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men". The show, featuring not only anatomical models and drawings but also original artifacts and human and animal remains, follows on a 2006 discovery of a burial ground at Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, excavation of which produced evidence of autopsies, amputations, bones wired for teaching, and dissections of animals for instruction in comparative anatomy. The video below, "The Ballad of the London Burkers" ("burkers" were body snatchers), featured in the exhibition, offers a sneak peek; see other videos at the YouTube link below. Tickets are required for entry.


Museum of London on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

No comments: