An artist travels the world studying ancient techniques and translates her knowledge into evocative contemporary works. Magdalene Odundo, OBE, is in residence at The Clay Studio until April, 2017. Artblog contributor, Kitty Caparella interviews the artist, who will speak about her work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Saturday, April 8, 2017.
Read MoreChip Schwartz ruminates on a group exhibition that parodies a birthday party. The morose and irony-tinged paintings and sculptural objects suggest the artists have long since taken off the rose-tinted glasses of childhood.
Read MoreArtblog’s newest contributor, Ephraim Russell, writes about a highly-researched and thought-provoking exhibition by Tyler Kline, that asks how and whether art can respond to present-day technological advances that are changing our environment and may be changing our very humanity.
Read MoreIn Unwritten Wills, Nandini Chirimar uses still life drawings explore the themes of memory and loss. The objects profiled in these works belong to Chirimar’s late father and her nanny, before they both passed away within a span of a year in 2015. Through these meticulous illustrations the artist has formed an intimate connection with her father and nanny’s life histories. The creative decision to present some of these personal items in their original form, like one of the metal trunks and its contents belonging to her nanny, alongside their two-dimensional renderings in pencil made me feel like I was sharing in a tangible and immediate experience with the departed. The artist transforms the solitary, contemplative act of drawing itself into an act of commemoration and remembrance of her departed loved ones.
Read MoreChicago-based painter and sculptor Himmelfarb’s recent projects consist of drawing, painting and assembling trucks–both toy-sized sculptures and actual vintage pickups loaded with an assortment of rusted objects and found detritus. His works are a kind of history on wheels, sojourners in time. And Venice, with its pronounced absence of cars–and wheels in general–proved an interesting place to uncover the essence of our attachment to motion and John’s current interests.
Read MoreArt made of “trash” is a concept that has both political and social meaning in Material Memory. As the product of Olanrewaju (Lanre) Tejuoso’s time at The Village of Arts and Humanity’s SPACES residency, Material Memory represents several firsts for the organization. It is first time a SPACES artist’s residency has aimed to provide an intangible (rather than concrete) social impact, and the first one that has resulted in an exhibition.
Read MoreElizabeth Taylor-Mead of Frieda wrote to say the cafe at 320 Walnut Street, is celebrating the art of octogenarian, Jean K. Hamburg, who has never shown her works publicly but agreed to show a selection of her life’s work and to speak about her work for one afternoon, Sunday, March 19, from 3PM – 4:30PM. The conversation will be between the artist and Anthony Latess.
Read MoreThese tessellated paintings are naturalistic by an abstractly-expressive-mimetic process, a reconciliation of the human creative impulse with the superior natural forces of creation that encompass it. In other words, Whitten’s work seems to be at an ethereal place, where art production rhymes with the ebb of creation at its highest state.
Read MoreThis year’s Schomburg Symposium will be in Taller’s brand new building. If you haven’t been up to see it, be prepared to be impressed. The topic is Sports and Blackness, a topic fraught with a difficult history that continues to the present. More information below.
Read MoreFjord’s gallery is brimming with Freedman’s assorted colorful papier mâché and found object sculptures that exist in constant dialogue with his ideas, stories, and sketches; they are the physical manifestations of his ceaseless cerebral exercises.
Read MoreDescendants of trash pickers and connoisseurs of the found object, wearing overalls and hard hats, and “interrupting the waste stream,” the RAIR artists turn trash into artwork of one sort or another, and challenge our perceptions of the discarded.
Read MoreArt that wants to be small – how intriguing. But isn’t it a strange notion, one that you would probably not consider unless you were thinking about extremes of size?
I want to say that art works (or not) based upon a myriad of factors, size being only one of many. But here we have eighty-five works of art — a multiplicity of viewpoints, media and materials – that actually work well together and, for reasons that I think are idiosyncratic, want to be small.
Read MoreBy controlling the atomizer, the thing that makes paint into microscopic droplets, the street artists were fighting the atomization of modern man. It was a rebellion against the psychic colony—f–k your copy! It’s what EKG touches on his “Technologies of Human Nature,”a wall-sized hierarchical chart created on black paper with orange oil sticks. He attempts to summarize street art’s ideological foundation, when he writes “bomb the semiotosphere!”
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