modern art

“Mary Ellen Mark: Girlhood” at National Museum of Women in the Arts

Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay were a driving energy behind the National Museum of Women in the Arts both financially and contributing to its success in becoming a vital institution. Since opening its doors in 1987, at the renovated historic former Masonic temple on New York Avenue in Washington, DC the NMWA for over three decades has dedicated itself to showcasing works solely by women in its exhibitions and to the collecting of art by women across time.

Stephen Cook, My Disease My Infection (2017), charcoal, oil stick and aluminum paint on paper, 77 ¾ x 61 ½”.

It was one year ago that I first became acquainted with the work of Stephen Cook, and OneWay Gallery. Being in Narragansett, I was not expecting to see much beyond the stereotypical sails and sunsets in any ‘art gallery’, so I was completely taken aback by Cook’s versatility and vigor as a contemporary painter. His one-person exhibition featured a number of varied principles and directions, and I instantly read his art as having been created by an energetic and reactive young mind inundated with expressions of socio-cultural information and imagery. So I began to take notes for a review seeing that moment as a great opportunity to get to know the artist and his work.More

From Nature: An Interview with Val Kilmer, by D. Dominick Lombardi

Val Kilmer, Photo by Hank O’Neal (all images courtesy of Woodward Gallery, NYC)

Val Kilmer, well-known actor, director and producer is also an accomplished poet and visual artist. In all instances, the diversely and abundantly talented Kilmer must manage his creative energies in many different ways, but for him it is in the visual arts, like poetry, where there is more of a need or want for experimentation, chance and enlightenment, as poetry and the visual arts are the ultimate internal process.

Kilmer brings everything to the table, even the very core of our being, as thoughts of God and the origins of the universe vie for his and our attention in his art. I recently had the pleasure of asking Kilmer a few questions to help clarify his process and intent in the following Q & A.More

Contemporary Artist, Michael Zansky and ‘The Saturn Paintings’

What’s attractive to artists about quantum science is that on the subatomic level, matter is in flux. Art is the imitation or the distortion of a thing in another substance. It imagines that all its elements can, if they want, change, swap and mutate characteristics constantly.

Michael Zansky began making art in the late 70s. He showed in Boston while he was at college at For 40 Years his paintings, drawings and models have addressed the protean character of the human condition. From then to his recent show at the Herron Gallery, University of Indiana, Michael Zansky has been mutating.More

At Hartford’s Atheneum: ‘Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008’

“The best show is the people themselves.” –Reginald Marsh

The lights of Coney Island glowed on the horizon like a distant inferno, visible from miles at sea. A modern marvel of the Industrial Age, thousands flocked from the metropolis of New York to this beach-side park to witness the marvel of electricity, a crush of humanity drawn to its magical power like moths to a flame. The trap was cleverly set by its designers, combining the timeless allure of the beach with a garish display of carnival rides and circus-like freak show attractions, pushing the limits of human form and abilities. Towering edifices outlined against the night sky with rows of incandescent light bulbs too numerous to count served as a lure for the curious and seasoned visitor, alike. An acres-long boardwalk traced a line between the natural beauty of the sea and manmade wonders of the park. An ‘island’ in name only, the appellation itself—Coney Island—represented more a state of mind, free from life’s cares, than the physical reality of a narrow strip of real estate tucked along the margins of a sprawling cityscape. xxxxxxMore

Knoxville Museum of Art Unveils Richard Jolleys’ ‘Cycle of Life’ Sculpture

www.artesmagazine.com — Knoxville Museum of Art, with 1982 World’s Fair Park ‘Sunsphere’ rising in the background

Knoxville Museum of Art board member, Kreis Beall, describes this growing East Tennessee city as a “contemplation,” and “the sky is the limit.” And based on the energy being poured into the museum there, as well as the surrounding community (home to the University of Tennessee), she may have her finger on the pulse of the place. On a recent trip, the national press was treated to a whirlwind tour of city highlights, the centerpiece of the visit being the unveiling of a monumental glass and metal sculpture by renowned glass artist, Richard Jolley. xxxxxxMore

Contemporary Ceramics: Porcelain by ‘Hare with Amber Eyes’ Author, Edmund de Waal

A confession: I “read” text and images, but less frequently objects. My last experience with ceramics was a very poor pot I threw in high school, though I came to know Steuben glass about that time through a first girlfriend’s engineer father.

Pottery is pretty old stuff. Legions of archeologists have reconstructed the pre-Homeric world from large and small shards of crockery and crude and elegant drawings on jars I’ve seen. Pottery is craft, a complex mix of ideational design and its physical execution on wheels, “throwing” and then glazing, temperamental kilns and their mysterious temperature swings, and an amalgam of material, equipment, knowledge, experience, and luck. artes fine arts magazineMore

Guggenheim, New York, Highlights Mid-20th C. Avant-garde Painting

The current exhibition of abstract painting at the Guggenheim is an acquired taste. While some European artists returned to figuration and pictorial order after the horrors visited on many by World War I, others strived to reject the formal ordering of colors, curves and context typical of the late 19th century modernists that we have come to love. The avant-garde artists of the post-war period had their sights set on more serious matters; that is, to revolutionize the world of art, and provoke a serious re-working of a broken social order (as they saw it) along the way.

Above: Joaquín Torres-García, b. 1874, Montevideo, Uruguay; d. 1949, Montevideo, Composition (Composición), 1938, Gouache on cardboard, 81.3 x 101.3 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Nelson Pharr. © Joaquín Torres-García. artes fine arts magazineMore

Philly’s New Barnes Foundation with Faithful Interpretation of Collector’s Vision

In July, 1929, months before the stock market crash that resulted in the Great Depression of the 1930s, Albert Coombs Barnes (January 2, 1872 – July 24, 1951), sold his company for some $6 million. He made a vast fortune on the manufacture and sale of the antiseptic drug Argyrol, used to treat gonorrhea. By his thirties, he was a millionaire which in today’s dollars would make him a billionaire. Not only did the timely sale provide him with liquidity, but following the introduction of antibiotics during the post WW II war era, his medicine would have been obsolete.

This allowed him to focus entirely on his great passion–acquisition of contemporary art.

Left: Giorgio de Chirico, Portrait of Albert Barnes (1926). This and all other works pictured are collection: The Barnes Foundation. artes fine arts magazineMore

Winslow Homer and His Newly-Renovated Studio, at Portland Museum of Art

: Winslow Homer, Weatherbeaten (1894). Portland Museum of Art. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson.

Ubiquitous Winslow Homer images of the surf-battered, rocky Maine coastline and pastoral scenes of American life in a simpler time, are so deeply embedded in our sense of national identity that we hardly ‘see’ them any longer. Too many posters of youths in fields and boats, stalwart, wind-swept women gazing out to sea, and gallant sailors reckoning with nature’s wrath have numbed us to the applied skill and visionary genius of Homer’s oeuvre. After a multi-year conservation/renovation process, the Portland Museum of Art has recently opened Homer’s carefully-restored Prout’s Neck studio, just twelve miles from the museum, itself, in Scarborough. To commemorate this important event, a concurrent exhibit features some of his best-known works—38 major oils, watercolors and etchings created during his tenure at the studio—during the last three decades of his life (1883-1910). Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine, is on view through December 30, 2012. The Prout’s Neck Studio is a permanent part of the museums collection and is now available for tours. artes fine arts magazineMore