Experiencing the creative work of architectural brothers, Greene & Greene, is like sipping a rare, richly-made wine—offering sensory delights from the firm of two authentic American Arts and Crafts masters. As the brothers Greene—Charles and Henry—worked primarily in California, they created the ‘gold standard’ for the Arts and Crafts design style. Their work, both as entire projects and in the detail found there, serves as an exquisite example of design, presented in clear, concise and elegant terms. artes fine arts magazineMore
Kathleen Elliot’s new series of flame worked glass botanical sculptures are both unexpected and intriguing. She achieves rich surface textures and pure luminous colors in imagery that spans natural form from flowers, fruits, pods and nests, to complex entwined linear vines. The artist accentuates details that are often overlooked when one confronts nature, providing a wealth of visual information that captivates the viewer’s imagination. Elliot’s feeling for nature transcends the ordinary; she creates an amalgam of heightened spiritual feeling with a California awareness of animation that imbues her works with a refined otherworldly subtext.
Left: Kathleen Elliot, We’re All On the Same Tree (2008) Glass, 12″ h x 11″ w x 3″ d, (display base). artes fine arts magazineMore
Gisele Amantea, Democracy (2012), flocking. On display in Hunter Hallway, Mass MoCA
The sprawling, dense, complex, exhilarating, confounding Oh Canada, which opened recently at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), will remain on view for the next ten months, is the visual equivalent of a polyglot menagerie evoking Noah’s Ark.
No, it has not rained in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts for forty days and forty nights. But curator Denise Markonish has so jammed the museum with every possible species of creativity, garnered through some 400 studio visits covering the length and breadth of Canada, that there is the need to release a dove to find dry land and return with an olive branch of productive critical discourse.
Her accessible, enjoyable, well written and daunting 38-page essay for the catalogue is crammed with a synthesis of an odyssey, with thorough archival and documentary research. It is fair to state that she is on the short list of notable, non-Canadian scholars/curators of contemporary Canadian art. artes fine arts magazineMore
At some point in all our lives we have grappled with the assumption that there is a place for nature and a place for culture. One is located in the rolling hills of ladybird books and biscuit tin lids, the other in the smoggy sprawl of the city. But there is somewhere in-between. It is outside, on the edge, elsewhere, over there. Montaigne, Darwin, Maybey, Sinclair, Quinn and Shoard are some of the many who have championed the overlooked, rain-soaked edge lands of small, sometimes fragile communities in the periphery. Places where both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ intersect, overlap and endure. artes fine arts magazineMore
“Pictures must not be too picturesque.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Illustration (left): Pablo Picasso, Grande Tete de Femme au Chapeau Orne (1962), block print. Private collection
Eye on the Future: The Pottery Wheel-of-Fortune
Click on image to enlarge
All of us at ARTES, fine arts magazine, wish you a happy and healthy New Year. There has been so much strife and discord in the world in recent years, we can only hope-against-hope that those deep political divisions, cultural and ethnic biases will ameliorate in the months to come. This is an election year in the U.S. and we can certainly count on the vitriol and accusations to be flying in every direction. One consolation is that some politicians speak for only a small minority of us when they stake out their extreme positions on various issues. With claims from the right and the left proclaiming that the country faces ruin unless they are elected, remember this: they are wrong. The solid middle ground remains the ‘high ground’ when it comes to anticipating a meaningful fix for our economy and our future as a nation. Shovel-ready, labor-based infrastructure jobs are a short-term band aid; high-tech training for another segment is useful in the long run, although it will never be a sufficient replacement for the loss of vast numbers of manufacturing jobs to foreign markets. Self-reliance and personal initiatives aimed at creating and building your own future, developing your own business, product or service—working at the edge of pure creative inspiration and self-sufficiency—has never been more crucial.
Take heart in the fact that American cultural enterprises are alive and well. Understand that the odds of ‘trickle-down’ economics affecting your future are remote to none! Wall Street is out for itself; Capitol Hill is mired in partisanship; Main Street has moved to the Big Box stores at the suburban mall. Our job is to put aside our indignation and rage and roll up our creative sleeves: paint, decoupage, design and build, spin, weave, bake something wild and delicious that everyone will want to taste. Come on…turn on your creative juices!
ARTES has noted that museums are redefining themselves in the face of a constrained economy: artists are responding to declining markets for experimental work and returning to more traditional, studio-based methods of painting; auction houses are noting that mid-range art and antiques are now more affordable than ever; Magnet schools are thriving, in part because an emphasis on reading, music and art offerings enrich their daily curriculum; New York’s Broadway is booming; art fairs are springing up all over the world and are heavily attended; high-quality artisanal crafts—from cheese to silver earrings to lighting fixtures—are finding new markets on the Internet and with recession-fatigued consumers (Web sales up 16% for Christmas `11! ).
Let’s learn from the past. Between the two world wars, precious raw materials were in scant supply for European furniture designers and architects. From this dearth of supplies came some of the most timeless designs for chairs, tables and the spare, beautiful building designs that we now associate with the Internationalist Movement. Molded plywood, woven , spare bicycle parts and other surplus goods became the raw materials of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair (right), Alvar Aalto’s stacking stools and curvaceous Paimo chair and Hans Coray’s bent-metal, hole-punched side chair. As they say: “necessity is the mother…”
The cultural scene tends to thrive when times are rough and people are looking to feel better about themselves and the world. When all is said and done, we will be economically leaner and meaner and we’ll be choosing to embrace the people and things that enrich our lives spiritually and aesthetically.
So, put on your creative hat, have a seat at the ‘pottery wheel-of-fortune’ and become a part of that economic revival!
Looking Good!
Thanks to the hard work of new ARTES advocate Mark Johnson and intern, Katya Popova, our Facebook page has grown to become a state-of-art gathering place for friends from all over the world. There are lots of great reasons to check in to the site and check it out! We’re now offering special incentives if you ‘friend’ us. And there you’ll find our new QR code that lets you instantly download ARTES to your tablet or smart-phone device. ARTES is compatible with all of these tools and will continue to search out ways to improve your reading enjoyment of the regular features of the magazine.
The 'Z'-Chair, a Zaha Hadid design, on view at PMA
On view through spring, 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art features a unique exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion. This show includes furniture and design objects in a space entirely transformed by the prominent female architect. The fluid, site-specific installation is the first of its kind in the United States, assembled by a team of designers from Hadid Architects. The show reflects Hadid’s seamless work methods, as well as her technological breakthroughs in architecture and design. artes fine arts magazineMore
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (Great Salt Lake), 1970. Photo: George Steinmetz (2002)
The Utopian desire of 1970s ‘Land’ artists, who broke away from the stranglehold of the art market by producing earthworks far removed from cities, has given way to new projects that demonstrate a global ecological awareness through cross-disciplinary investigations concerning environmental sustainability. artes fine arts magazineMore
Classical limestone bank buildings line the streets of downtown Wilmington, Delaware; facades that suggest prosperity and life. But until recently, the streetlights shining vigilantly at night exposed nothing but emptiness. And, although Wilmington became a national financial center for the credit card industry – since the Financial Center Development Act of 1981 removed the legal cap on interest rates that banks charge customers – at the receiving end, its population had a median household income of $35,000 in the 2000 census. fine arts magazineMore
Behind the wall! Detail of Anne Ferrer's 'Billowing Beauty' (2010)
Anne Ferrer’s new series of colorful cloth sculptures, curated by Edward Rubin, is reminiscent of inflatable, shaped balloons that wink and bob in a kind of rhythmic modern dance. Up-down movements mingle with in-out ‘breathing’, as air slowly and randomly inflates and deflates each work. The seven pieces are composed as a tightly-clustered group. But each work is affixed with an electronic programmer that keeps its individual rhythmic movement activated. The pieces are anchored in a glass-fronted space that faces New York City’s Lexington Avenue and 47th Street, on a busy corner in the heart of mid-town. They impact their surroundings, breaking the boundary between the plate glass-walled gallery and the curious public on the street, who stop to wonder at the eye-catching array of indescribable shapes and forms, like candy confections just out of reach. Seductive and enigmatic, the works are ideal for attracting the attention of a busy crowd in motion. fine arts magazineMore
In our complex era of sophisticated technology, immediate gratification and the virtual experience of nature on the Internet or television, it is not easy to establish what ‘nature’ is anymore. Today artists in England, Germany, Central Europe and the United States, are increasingly responding to a natural world plagued with environmental problems. Key issues in their work, since the close of the 20th century, include their responses to news about climatic disaster, the extinction of threatened species, the depletion of natural resources and unrestrained squander.
