Friday, December 18, 2015

All Art Friday

All Art Friday

All Art Friday Spotlights on Books To Give

Still undecided about art books for Christmas? In addition to the many exhibition catalogues I've mentioned in this space throughout the year, I've rounded up these titles for you:

Miguel de Baca, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture (University of California Press, December 2015) See the UCP page for Memory Work. The book is available in electronic format.




Anne Truitt Website

Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (Knopf, October 2015) ~ This one is in my reading stack now.



John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Verso, November 2015) See the Verso page for Portraits. Watch a 14-minute video (November 2015), "John Berger: Writer, Painter, Art Critic".






Read an excerpt from the book about "My Friend Robert Rauschenberg" (The New York Review of Books, NYR Daily Blog, November 14, 2015).

Michael Kenna (Photographer) and Yvonne Meyer-Lohr (Designer), Forms of Japan (Prestel, September 2015) See the Forms of Japan page at Kenna's Website.



And this one: Charlene Spretnak's The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present (Palgrave MacMillian, 2014). It is highly recommended by my friend, artist Deborah Barlow, whose instincts about superb reading are unerring. Read Deborah's excellent Slow Muse review of Spretnak's book.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ In Reston, Virginia, Greater Reston Arts Center is presenting through February 13 "Rebecca Kamen: Continuum". (I've featured Kamen, a wonderful artist who combines art-making with a deep interest in and knowledge of science, in several posts.) The GRACE exhibition showcases two of Kamen's sculpture-and-sound installations: Portal (2014), inspired by gravitational wave physics and black holes, and NeuroCantos, inspired by "the relationship and poetics of inner and outer space". A keepsake brochure, illustrated with Kamen's remarkable work, accompanies the solo show.

The Portal installation was shown at James Madison University in 2014 and included this talk:


See my post on Rebecca's Divining Nature (2009).


GRACE on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Continuing through January 31 at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, is "Unmasked: A Visual Dissection". Presented by VCU Libraries, in Tompkins-McCaw Library, the show features the work of Nickolai Walko, an alumnus of the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media. Walko's drawings, which includes anatomical pieces, are made with masking tape. Walko's creative process is described briefly at the exhibition link above. (Also see video below.)


Nickolai Walko, The Brain

Here's a video of Walko at work:



View a selection of tape drawings at Walko's Website.

Nickolai Walko at Smirnov Studios on FaceBook

VCUarts on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ The National Ornamental Metal Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, is hosting through March 13 the 2015 Taiwan International Metal Crafts Competition (the show opened December 13). This is the first time the exhibition has come to the United States. For the last eight years, it has been at the Gold Museum in New Taipei, Taiwan. 

Two categories, Jewelry and Objects, were designated for the invitational competition, which involved metal craft professionals from around the world. The international jury received 330 entries and selected 28 (16 in Jewelry and 12 in Objects) for prizes. The prize-winning entries are showcased in the exhibition.

Competition results are to be published in an electronic catalogue.

Metal Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube

✭ Mixed-media and installation artist Gabriel Dawe's large, site-specific installations of colored thread remain on view through January 10 at New Jersey's Newark Museum. An extensive exhibition of Dawe's work, "The Shape of Light: Gabriel Dawe" showcases not only Plexus no. 30 (2015) and Plexus no. 31 (2015) but also smaller sculptural works and abstract works on paper. Images are at the exhibition link.

Here's a video preview of the show in which Dawe talks about his work:


Read Smithsonian Magazine's feature "Artist Gabriel Dawe Made a Rainbow Out of 60 Miles of Thread" (November 17, 2015), about Dawe's work in the "Wonder" exhibit at Renwick Gallery.

Gabriel Dawe on FaceBook and Twitter

Newark Museum on FaceBook and Twitter

✭ Conceptual photographer Kenneth Josephson's images of found and constructed visual puzzles continue on view through May 8 at Denver Art Museum. The show, "Kenneth Josephson: Encounters with the Universe", includes 62 photographs (1959-2003), among them early experimental images, ground-breaking conceptual photographs, and more recent landscapes.


Denver Art Museum on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube


READERS, PLEASE NOTE

All Art Friday will be taking a break on Christmas Day, December 25, 2015, and New Year's Day, January 1, 2016.

Have two wonderful holidays and join me again in the New Year!

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