January 2005 Archive

White out inside

Photographs by Cate Fallon Before the snow storm began last week my sister Cate and I, visiting family in Milwaukee, actually got out to see some art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. I’ve told you about the Santiago Calatrava addition to the museum in a previous post but since I just can’t get enough of it I’m going to treat you to a few more images and say a little about the art inside. (top image shows the moveable wings (brise soleil) of the building. They’re wide open — weather permitting, they open them each day.) Here’s some “Fun Facts” ... More » »

Repositioning art

Post from Rob Matthews Well I haven’t found a mention of the artblog in the new Art in America (Feb 2005) but Virgil Marti did get a good review. There’s also a nice (but very late) article on Vincent Desiderio’s work from his last Marlborough show. By the way, you mentioned a while back that Tristin Lowe has a sculpture up at the PMA (his chair piece)[image, Lowe's "Disfunctional"]. What most museum-goers don’t get to see is that once every week or two, the chair gets “repositioned”. The chair is sliced up along the legs in different places and somehow ... More » »

A painters’ question

Every mark we make is somewhere in space, somewhere on a surface, and that seems to be the question behind “Field Questions,” a show at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery. I was led a little astray by the gallery notes, in which curator Sid Sachs wondered about the relevance of abstract field painting in a world of war and tsunamis. It seems to me a red herring. These abstract field paintings do not speak directly to war or disaster. What they speak to are the issues of being alive (in states of war, peace, disaster, joy, misery, belief, doubt and cynicism) and humanity’s ... More » »

More on the Americas North by South

Post from Tamara Kostianovsky [Editor's note: Kostianovsky is one of the artists in The Americas--see post] The pillow piece “Ah…Felix” by artist Marisa Telleria-Diez (Nicaragua)(image left) pays homage to artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (image right) and references his untitled photograph of two pillows that was displayed on billboards in NYC in the early ’90s. I was looking for more info on the original piece by Gonzalez-Torres to include in this email and I came across a website that analyzes it very smartly. –Tamara Kostianovsky is the curator of exhibitions at Esther M. Klein Art Gallery

Barnes musings around the Internet

For a hilarious take on the Barnes’ move to Center City, check out John Perreault’s Artopia post (image, Dr. Barnes, his puppy and his art). You may not be able to last the course–Perreault never heard about our short attention spans online; I confess to skipping a paragraph or two–but the highlights were: 1) the virtual museum proposal near the end 2) the cynical suggestion that the inhospitable, yawning spaces along the Parkway defy the kind of art-museum hopping that tout le monde keeps yakking about (thank god someone said this; I’ve been thinking about it all along; the prospect ... More » »

Snow day

Wind, snow and Eagles. Who wants to post? (Image, our let’s-go-to- the-movies party in the driving snow, yesterday afternoon.) Then again, if you haven’t read today’s art story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Barry Le Va, you might want to. It’s really good. (Here’s our sign-in info: name, lrrf; email, libby@rosof.org; password, lrrfartblog).

America North by South

The proof that North and South America are not so far apart is in “The Americas,” a group show at the Esther M. Klein Gallery that includes 12 contemporary women artists born somewhere in the Americas and living in the U.S.–for the most part practicing art in New York. We’ve got artists from Canada to Chile and points inbetween, but it’s tough to tell who’s from where just by the art. Video is a strong presence, as it is everywhere in the U.S.; we’ve got your encaustic and paint abstractions and your cartoony paint on canvas, your assemblage and fine ... More » »

Home movie

It’s a perfect day to noodle around the Internet and see what art stuff is up there (image from Douglas Witmer’s “Fruitville” series). With that thought in mind, I pass on this note, which I got today, from Vincent Romaniello, he of the online videos of Philadelphia-area artists in action (see post): The new video for artist, Douglas Witmer has been posted. Douglas is truly a multi-talented artist working in sculpture, painting, works on paper, photo prints and also composed and played all the music on the video. In Part 1, he talks about his 3D wood sculpture in his ... More » »

Talk #2: Curating the world

David Graham‘s talk to nearly 50 students at Penn, yesterday, was a “how I found my way in life” charmer, with a list of multiple influences and an artistic agenda that was kinder than I had imagined (right, “Leonard”). Graham, who has a sense of humor about himself and the long road he hoed before he figured out what he was doing, seems to genuinely love the people who he photographs, including the impersonators. I had always assumed that there was a snicker in these photos, but after listening to him talk I had to change my mind. In Bush’s ... More » »

Talk #1: Keeping technology in its place

Digital cameras may have seduced most of us, but Sarah McEneaney, in her talk at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts last week, mentioned a way that she uses the computer that keeps her vision and hands-on approach intact (this is McEneaney, before her talk). She goes outdoors and makes a lot of little sketches, then starts the painting, taking a picture of the painting in progress. She prints out the picture, goes outside, and makes corrections on the paper, ultimately transfering the changes to the painting. While half the art world is madly borrowing and collaging images with ... More » »