This mural by James Bullough was created for the 2022 edition of SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida. It replaced the previous one by Joram Roukes from the 2017 edition.
For more work by Bullough, also check out his Instagram.
Dec 062024
Dec 062024
As part of their programming for PST: Art & Science Collide, Getty Museum is showing Lumen: The Art & Science of Light. The exhibition includes a collection of European medieval artwork, along with several contemporary works, that focus in some way on the science and concept of light.
From the museum about the show-
Through the manipulation of materials such as gold, crystal, and glass, medieval artists created dazzling light-filled environments, evoking, in the earthly world, the layered realms of the divine. To be human is to crave light. We rise and sleep according to the rhythms of the sun, and have long associated light with divinity. Focusing on the arts of western Europe, this exhibition explores the ways in which the science of light was studied by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers, theologians, and artists during the “long Middle Ages” (800-1600 CE), when science and religion were firmly intertwined. Natural philosophy (the study of the physical universe) served as the connective thread for diverse cultures across Europe and the Mediterranean, uniting scholars who inherited, translated, and improved on a common foundation of ancient Greek scholarship.
This story is equal parts science, poetics, and craft. By bringing together a variety of media that materialize light and objects that communicate how medieval people understood the lights of the heavens and of the eye, this exhibition demonstrates how science informed the artistry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. To convey the continuing sense of wonder inspired by starry skies or moving light on precious materials, the exhibition includes several contemporary works of art placed in dialogue with historic objects.
Below are a few selections-
“On the Construction of the World”, in “Book of Divine Works (Liber divinorum operum)” (text in Latin), Rupertsberg, Rhineland, Germany, about 1210-40 CE by Hildegard of Bingen (German, 1098-1179 CE), Tempera, gold, and ink on parchment
About this work from the museum-
The nun and philosopher Hildegard of Bingen is known for her deeply religious visionary experiences in which she communed with the fiery “living light” (lux vivens) of God. Yet her evocative spiritual imagery reflects the language of science and cosmology. Shown at lower left, Hildegard, an illuminator as well as author, recorded her dazzling vision of the human at the center of nested elemental spheres. The figure is ringed by heavenly bodies, the clouds, and the winds, all encircled by the figure of flaming Caritas, or Divine Love. As a way to understand humankind’s relationship to the Godhead, Hildegard’s imagery emphasizes the correspondence between the body and the cosmos; just as the four humors affected health, the four winds controlled the earth, and the vivifying power of divine light nourished both.
“The Glorification of the Virgin”, attributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Haarlem, northern Netherlands, about 1490-95 CE, Oil on panel
The painting above by Geertgen tot Sint Jans has so many fascinating details and was part of a section titled Divine Darkness.
The wall text from that section-
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all associate God with light. In the Creation story told in Genesis, when light was created, so too was darkness. As medieval optical theorists understood that sight was contingent upon light and that bodily vision was not possible in darkness, theologians of the time equated the unknowable, invisible aspects of God with darkness. According to a medieval “negative theology,” God exists beyond human perception and poses a challenge to vision itself. The fifteenth-century Christian theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote that “God is found when all things are left behind; and this darkness is light in the Lord.” Such contradictory associations between God and both light and darkness were fundamental to the verbal and visual expressions used to elucidate the nature of the divine.
And about the painting-
Golden light surrounds the glorified Virgin Mary and Christ child at the center of this intimate and absorbingly detailed devotional painting as a luminous host of angels fills the heavens with eternal music. Their brightness contrasts with the dark perimeter that envelops this apocalyptic vision to suggest the ineffable darkness in which God dwells.
Constellations from a Hebrew Translation of Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, In an astronomical anthology (text in Hebrew), Catalonia, about 1361 CE, Tempura, gold, and ink on parchment and Astrolabe (with Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic Script), Iberia (Spain) or Italy, 1300s CE
From the museum about these two items-
In the Muslim and Christian courts of Europe, and particularly in Iberia, highly educated, multilingual Jews held important positions as physicians and astrologers. Jewish practitioners of these related fields contributed original works on astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy, drawing from and improving on Greco-Arabic sciences. At left, the Hebrew translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest (a work that was little known in Europe before 1200) updated the ancient text with the addition of astronomical tables that guided religious observance. Only a small number of European astrolabes with Hebrew inscriptions survive. This exquisite example lists the names of twenty-four stars in a combination of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The centermost circle marks the ecliptic, or the sun’s path, and is labeled with the zodiacal signs in Hebrew.
“Untitled (Mugarnas)”, 2012, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mirrors, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood
One of the most impressive contemporary pieces in the show was the sculpture pictured above, by Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian, which captured and reflected light so beautifully.
About the work from the museum-
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was deeply inspired by a visit to the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz, Iran. The vaulted domes and walls of that site are covered in dazzling, intricate mirror mosaics that fracture and dematerialize space while reflecting light and amplifying movement and activity in the shrine below. Farmanfarmaian began exploring these mosaic techniques, eventually collaborating with master artisans to produce sculptural and wall-mounted works that incorporate mirror mosaic and reverse-glass painting. Untitled (Mugarnas) adopts the sacred and decorative forms that are common in Islamic architecture, and expresses the perfection of creation.
This exhibition closes 12/8/24.
Dec 052024
Chris Marker’s 1983 poetic travelogue Sans Soleil brings something new with every rewatch. The film consists of footage, some stock and some of Marker’s own work, taken around the world, with a focus primarily on Japan and Guinea-Bissau. Along with these images, a narrator (Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reads from the letters she received from the fictitious cameraman. Within these letters are his thoughts on memory, history, culture, and life itself.
On this viewing it was his mention of Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting to Princess Sadako in Japan at the beginning of the 11th century, and her lists, that stood out for me.
He says:
“Do we ever know where history is really made? Rulers ruled and used complicated strategies to fight one another. Real power was in the hands of a family of hereditary regents; the emperor’s court had become nothing more than a place of intrigues and intellectual games. But by learning to draw a sort of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thundering of the politicians. Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of ‘elegant things,’ ‘distressing things,’ or even of ‘things not worth doing.’ One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of ‘things that quicken the heart.’ Not a bad criterion I realize when I’m filming…”
Finding things, however small, that “quicken the heart” is a lovely criterion for life in general and this film is certainly on the list.
After watching Sans Soleil, and researching Marker, I watched one of his earlier works, the science fiction featurette La Jetée. Constructed using still images, it contains only one brief shot made with a movie camera.
Using voice over narration, the short film takes place after World War III and tells the story of a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic Paris forces to time travel to the past and future in the hopes of saving the present. The man has a vivid memory from his childhood before the war of a woman he had seen at the airport, just before witnessing a man’s death. Through his time travel he is able to meet and develop a relationship with her as an adult. Time and memory, themes also present in Sans Soleil, were subjects Marker retained an interest in exploring in many of his films throughout the years.
La Jetée would go on to influence many artists, musicians, and filmmakers over the years. One of the most famous examples is Terry Gilliam’s movie 12 Monkeys which uses several of the film’s concepts of time travel.
Criterion Collection has released both movies together along with Marker’s six minute film Junktopia, and other extras. For more information on his filmography, Catherine Lupton has written a very informative essay on their website.
Nov 292024
Jeffrey Gibson’s stained glass work above, WHOSE WORLD IS THIS? IT’S YOURS IT’S MINE, 2019, was part of his 2020 exhibition, When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at Brooklyn Museum.
From the artist about the work-
The stained-glass piece “WHOSE WORLD IS THIS?” uses a modified lyric from Nas’s 1994 song “The World is Yours“. This traditional stained-glass work proposes that this world is both yours and mine. It’s ours. I want to address the question of who owns one’s identity. I believe that identity is made up of elements of our selves that we want to share and make public and also the public’s reaction and responses to our presented identity. We need to remain in communication and show respect and even celebrate both the differences in our backgrounds as much as we do the similarities. We are stronger together than we are working against one another. Although this can be challenging, the end result is a more peaceful and accepting world where we can all thrive, support one another, and be supported. I chose to work in stained glass because the words and colors can emanate from the materials when light is shown through the piece and reflect onto the floor and surrounding walls-becoming larger than itself.
Recently the US State Department chose Gibson to represent the country at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is the first Indigenous artist to be selected for a solo US show at the international art exhibition. For more on this exhibition, the BBC has an informative article that also includes quotes from the artist discussing the challenges of being selected for this honor.
Nov 292024
Leon Polk Smith is one of the artists featured in Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, on view until July 2025. His work was the impetus for the exhibition which is located on the walls of the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court.
From the museum about the artist-
Known for his bold use of color and geometry, the “hard-edge” painter Leon Polk Smith drew from his youth in Oklahoma and later in life immersion into the New York City art scene. Born in what was then Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma the following year, Smith was raised on a farmstead settled among the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations. Although his parents were of Cherokee descent, Smith was never enrolled as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and did not publicly claim his Native heritage until the end of his life. The influence of his Southwest origins and his upbringing among Native American communities can be seen through his vibrant use of color, the abstract implication of landscape and the farmland that he was raised on, and the use of symbolism that reflects the style of artworks produced by those around him.
In his adult life, Smith trained and worked as an educator while continuing to pursue painting. Without formal training in fine arts, he had his first solo exhibition at Uptown Gallery in New York City in 1941. In 1945, Smith settled permanently in the city. The Brooklyn Museum hosted his first and only major retrospective, “Leon Polk Smith: American Painter”, in 1995. The artist passed away the following year, after which his estate bequeathed eighteen works to the Museum.
Nov 272024
Photographs from two projects by photographer and author Peter Menzel, are currently on view at The Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art (formerly Polk Museum of Art), in Lakeland, Florida- Hungry Planet: What The World Eats, and Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Taken in the early 2000s and early 1990s, respectively, they provide a fascinating look at what people in various parts of the world were buying and eating at the time.
For Hungry Planet, Menzel and his wife Faith D’Aluisio visited families around the world to observe, photograph and record what they eat during the course of one week. They worked with twenty-five families in twenty-one countries. The two families in pictured above are the Revis Family from Raleigh, North Carolina and the Casales Family form Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Below is some additional information on the families pictured, including the cost of food for the week and their favorite items.
For Material World, a project created in the early 1990s, Menzel assembled a team of photographers who spent a week living with families around the world who then photographed them outside their homes with everything they owned. Pictured are the Hodson Family, from Godalming, England, and the de Goes Family, from São Paulo, Brazil.
Nov 232024
Both Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Palm Springs Art Museum are showing prints from Henri Matisse’s Jazz. It’s interesting to see the same work but in two different contexts based on the curation.
At Hammer Museum they are part of the group exhibition Sum of the Parts: Serial Imagery in Printmaking, 1500 to Now, on view until 11/24/24.
From the museum-
Printmaking’s capacity for serial imagery was recognized during the Renaissance in Europe and has continued to be explored by artists across centuries and geographies to creative, oftentimes experimental ends. Print publishers had a hand in issuing series, which could be conceived complete from the start, expanded from shorter sets, or even formed from existing bodies of related works. Diverse organizing principles have shaped the serial format, including pictorial narratives, iconographic groupings, formal innovations, thematic variations, and sequences measuring time and marking place, as well as structural, modular, and conceptual progressions. Importantly, the creative act itself is an open-ended serial pursuit, with each gesture, idea, and decision interacting with or informing the next.
While we can appreciate an individual print extracted from a series as a work in its own right, our visual perceptions, intellectual interpretations, and emotional responses shift when we view multiple images collectively: the whole becomes greater-or other-than the sum of its parts. New meanings surface as commonalities, patterns, or differences emerge. Selected from the collection of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, this exhibition presents prints conceived as sets or series and further considers artists’ informal serial procedures and approaches to printmaking across five centuries.
At Palm Springs Art Museum they are part of Art Foundations, which places different works together in from their collection into groups organized in different themes. Matisse is paired with Ellsworth Kelly in a section devoted to “artmaking through the angle of a given concept, with each wall dedicated to a single concept: pure color, automatic painting, text as a motif, or ready-made.”
From the museum about the exhibition-
Art Foundations explores how various art forms have been produced throughout the last two centuries. It presents a succession of artwork groupings across multiple media and disciplines, bringing together works not usually shown in the same space. Meant to be visited clockwise, each gallery provides a different angle on what we consider art, with each grouping questioning how art is made, why, where, and by whom.
This presentation shifts the lens through which we look at art, allowing us to explore gallery after gallery, the conception and the material of artmaking, and the spaces where it is created. Art Foundations brings together academically trained and untrained artists as well as visual arts, architecture, design, and glass, displaying the breadth and interconnectedness of the museum’s collection.
For more on Matisse’s Jazz, The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides detailed information on its website.
Nov 202024
“Untitled”, 1930s-40s, Osamu Shiihara, photogram
The Getty has gathered several innovative photo works made from the 1920s to the 1950s for Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, part of their PST ART: Art & Science Collide series. The exhibition also includes several experimental films and a room dedicated to Thomas Wilfred’s “Lumia Instruments” that produce colorful moving abstract forms.
From the museum-
Light abstraction emerged after the First World War as a preoccupation of photographers and filmmakers in international centers of art production. Many artists began seeing light as something that could be manipulated, then photographed and filmed, like any other physical material. This exhibition offers a selection of works, dating from the 1920s onward, that reveals these artists’ fascination with the formal qualities of light as well as their innovative methods of projecting, reflecting, and refracting its rays to liberate their media from traditional modes of representation. They emphasized the novelty of their varied approaches by inventing new terms-including “Rayograph” (Man Ray), “Light Drawing” (Barbara Morgan), “Luminogramm” (Otto Steinert), “Photogenics” (Lotte Jacobi), and “Lumia” (Thomas Wilfred) -to characterize their work. “More and more artists of our generation have begun to contemplate light with the eyes of a sculptor gazing upon a block of marble,” noted Wilfred, “seeing in light a new and basic medium of expression with unlimited possibilities.”
Below are a few selections.
Edward W. Quigley, “Untitled (Light Abstraction)” 1931-39, and “Vortex”, 1933, Gelatin silver prints
Nathan Lerner, “Car Light Study #7”, 1939, and Hy Hersh, “Untitled (Abstraction)”, About 1950, Chromogenic print
Man Ray, “Untitled (Sequins)”, 1930 and “Untitled (Corkscrew and Lampshade)”, 1927
Francis Bruguiére, “Untitled (Design in Abstract Forms of Light)”, About 1927
This exhibition closes 11/24/24.
Nov 202024
Deana Lawson, “Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi)”, 2021, Inkjet print with embedded transmission hologram in beveled-mirror frame
Detail from the image above- this hologram is of Ron Finley, an LA based food activist and farmer
Matthew Schreiber, “Bowie 1-8”, 2016-23, a series inspired by David Bowie’s death in 2016.
As part of their programming for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, The Getty is showing Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography. The exhibition explains the process and presents the unique ways several contemporary artists experimented with it in their work.
From the museum-
Holograms produce the magical illusion of three-dimensional objects floating in space. They were made possible by the invention of laser technology in the 1960s, and since then, many artists have experimented with the art form. This exhibition presents holograms by John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, and other artists who were invited by the C Project to explore the creative potential of the medium in the 1990s. Deana Lawson turned to holography to expand her photographic practice around 2020. The master technician in both instances was artist Matthew Schreiber, whose work is also featured.
Ed Ruscha, “The End”, 1998 reissued 2016
Louise Bourgeois, “Untitled”, 1998, reissued 2014
This exhibition is on view until 11/24/24.
Ohio Art Events- Cleveland Art Spaces-78th Street Studios- Third Friday
Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Cleveland, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Ohio Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Performance Art, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Sound Art, Video and Film
Nov 152024
78th Street Studios, located in Cleveland, is the largest art and design complex in Northeast Ohio. The building is home to several art galleries, artist studios, performance spaces, and businesses, and is a great place to see local art.
Tonight, 11/15, the complex and several of its creative spaces will be open from 5-9pm for its monthly Third Friday event.
Below are some selections from April of this year.
Work by Mark Yasenchack and paintings by Jenniffer Omaitz
“Love Triangle” by Jenniffer Omaitz
Gallery 202 has a variety of work from local artists for sale and also hosts exhibitions. Above is work from Jennifer Omaitz’s exhibition Where Love Lives and mixed media work by Mark Yasenchack.
Sculptures and installations can be found throughout the building like the light sculpture pictured above by Dana L. Depew.
Rebecca Cross’ installation Rock Cloud, was part of her exhibition Mapping the Sensorial at HEDGE Gallery. The gallery focuses on promoting contemporary artists from Northeast Ohio.
Susan Snipes’ work, pictured above was part of a group exhibition at Understory.
You can also see artists at work in their studios. Above is work by Jessica Mia Vito.
Dawn Tekler encaustic wax paintings like the one pictured above, are on view in her studio.
The painting above is by Laurel Herbold, located outside her studio.
Walking through the halls you can also find artwork hanging outside several of the spaces- like the two paintings below.
David King, “Snow Day”, Oil on aluminum
Scott McIntire, “The Birds”, Enamel on canvas