San Miguel de Allende

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The Art Of Two Amazing Muslim Women, Making Beauty Of Inscription And Erasure

It has been announced that on May 22 Lalla Essaydi will be awarded the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s Medal Award.    (A retrospective of her work, “Lalla Essaydi:  Revisions,” is currently on view at the National Museum of African Art Smithsonian in Washington.)  I feel like it’s some sort of personal triumph.  No, I do not know Lalla Essaydi and have obviously played no part in her phenomenal contributions to the art world.  However, she is the focus of a disagreement in our household which I like to hold over my husband’s head, so she has become a bit of an obsession.  I’m pretty sure I have told this story before, but to revisit, my husband and I saw a photograph by Lalla Essaydi at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s sale a number of years ago.  I loved the photograph.  There is some disagreement about what the actual price was at the time, but it was under $1,000.  We did not buy it, much to my chagrin, because it was too expensive and too large.  A few years later we saw the same photograph selling for $18,000.  Oops.  So there is really nothing more satisfying than proving to my husband what a horrendous mistake it was not to buy the photograph.

Essaydi was born in Marrakech, grew up initially in Morocco, and then spent a number of years living in Saudi Arabia.  She creates breathtaking large scale portraits of Muslim women.  The story they tell is both beautiful and chilling.  To look at them is to be overcome by an incredible stillness.

Lalla Essaydi at Galerie Protee via arnaudt on Flickr

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A Life Of Consumption – Rachel Perry Welty I Love You

Gotta love it when all of your favorite things come together in one place.  At the Proof of Purchase show on Saturday I was carefully examining every postcard to find one by Rachel Perry Welty, an unbelievable contemporary artist with whom I am absolutely obsessed, and scoring that for $50 would have been a major coup.  Sadly, we learned that her postcard had already sold, and that Rachel herself had in fact purchased one of the most coveted items in the show, a postcard by artist John Baldessari, and from there the conversation drifted to Perry Welty’s spread in the December issue of Vogue magazine.  I had seen the spread at the time but somehow had forgotten about it (which doesn’t make much sense to me given how much I love Perry Welty’s work, but there you have it, yet more evidence of my early onset Alzheimer’s, and led to the mind-boggling realization that I had just thrown that magazine into the recycling the week before).  Now I cannot stop thinking about that spread (and what an a*hole move it was that I managed to throw it away).

Rachel Perry Welty Vogue spread – December 2011

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More Fun With Dick And Jane or I <3 Katherine Desjardins

So, we went to the Proof of Purchase  postcard sale for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  It’s on for one more day, there are a lot of great postcards still available, and all of the details are listed on Thursday’s post.   I am particularly excited about the postcard we bought.  The idea, as I have mentioned, is that you pick the postcard you like without knowing who the artist is until after you pay for it.  That does not, however, preclude you from identifying an artist by recognizing his or her style.  This is the postcard we bought:

Katherine Desjardins, "Train Boy", 2003

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Pocket Sized Art For All

For several years we received, as Christmas gifts from my in-laws, post card sized images by various artists.  They bought the postcards each year at RCA Secret, an exhibition and sale put on by the Royal College of Art in London.  ”Secret” refers to the fact that in the exhibition the postcards are displayed anonymously.  The name of the artist who drew the image on each card is written on the verso, so that it remains unknown until the card has been purchased.  It’s a little bit like The Voice  for the art world, although in this case many of the artists participating are already recognized and established figures.  Still, it can be a lot of fun to view the exhibition, and even more to buy a postcard or two, for a very reasonable price, purely because you respond to the image, and only later to attach a name to that image.  (You can see the postcards from the November 2011 edition of the RCA show here – they’re really fun!)

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The City As The Ultimate Representation Of Twentieth Century Art

To mention Sol Lewitt and leave it at that is to do a disservice to the other artists showing at MASS MoCA since truly each exhibit is more engaging than the last. So, to continue my tour of our visit to the museum, one of the things I find most fun at a museum (and this is part of why I am particularly partial to contemporary art museums) is learning about a new artist whose work I like, but who is not as yet quite so well known. Yes, I’m sure this is only in small part due to an appreciation of the art, and in a large part due to the opportunity it represents to buy art, but I only buy things I genuinely like so I think it’s more or less the same thing at the end of the day.

The show that my husband had wanted to see, and which was the impetus behind our trip to MASS MoCA in the first place, is entitled “Invisible Cities”.  It is actually up until February 4, 2013, so if you have the opportunity to find yourself in North Adams, Massachusetts, within the next year, I highly recommend making the stop.  It was an overall interesting exhibit, not only for the individual works, but for the way in which it was curated and the varied interpretations of how we experience cities by the different artists, not just because each has a different vision, but because they actually appeal to different senses.  Emeka Ogboh’s Monday Morning in Lagos, 2010, consists only of a speaker mounted on the ceiling which plays the sounds of, as the title suggests, Lagos in the morning.  The city is given physical form, is literally mapped out, through the voices of the bus drivers calling out their destinations layered over the voices of other residents of the city.

In the first room we entered, full of fantastical three dimensional “cities”, the one set of painted collages mounted on the far wall was the least interesting work — that is until I got close to the images and discovered that they were in fact my favorite things in the room.  Mary Lum’s collages are surprisingly wonderful.  Surprisingly because from a distance I read them as yet another rendering of a certain kind of linear constructivism that has already been worked through in numerous ways by artists over the last century.  And yet, on closer inspection, Lum’s take on the subject is absolutely unique, contemporary and fascinating.  Her collages not only layer images and shapes, but layer a broad range of artistic idiom.  They bring together Constructivism, Cubism, Pop Art, you name it … there are elements Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Picasso, Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, and dozens of others, layered over each other to create an image of the city which is beautiful, but more than that, which has a depth that draws you in with increasing intensity the longer you look.  The modern city is, in essence, the ultimate signifier of the 20th Century, the object which much of 20th Century art struggles to come to terms with, to give form.  And that 100 years of visual culture gets compressed into the space and form of Lum’s collage.  The following images show some of Lum’s collage work that was included in a show at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  The first image is most representative of the work included in “Invisible Cities”.

Mary Lum, "Index 2." Acrylic and photo collage on paper. 10" x 13" (Photo courtesy Mary Lum) - image via Gwarlingo.com

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The Art Of The Anal Mathematician Is Someone Else’s Work

Recently I have come across advertisements and reviews in a number of places for a new book entitled The Art of Not Making.  More recently, I have come across the book itself in a museum gift shop.  I have not yet purchased or read the book, so I get to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes:  theorizing authoritatively on something based on little to no actual knowledge.  Eventually I plan on reading the book, and will likely share what I have learned at that point, but generally I find discussing a book after I have read it to be an overwhelming process since I feel the need to address and answer to every one of the thousands of points made in the book.  Addressing only the simple layer of ideas outlined in the synopsis is a much more manageable, and therefore much more fun, project if you ask me.  The gist of The Art of Not Making is that it addresses the production of art wherein the artist conceptualizes the work, but hires other artisans to do the actual production, and examines the questions raised in this process.  As described on Amazon.com:

Master craftsmen, artisans, and fabricators are just some of the technical specialists who help realize the creative vision of these artists. But when an artist does not make his or her own work, what does it mean for the nature of art and for the status of the artist? What is the relationship between creativity and production?
The book explores these and other questions about authorship, artistic originality, skill, craftsmanship, and the creative act.

No doubt the book is coming out now at least in part because these questions seem to have some contemporary relevance and urgency, so it is not surprising that it seems particularly a propos to a number of artists I have been thinking about lately.  But while it seems on the surface to be an issue raised by conceptual art, the idea of artists hiring assistants, artisans or craftsmen to execute their visions has come and gone as a facet of artistic production for as long as there has been art.

I last ran into this book in the bookshop at MASS MoCA last week.  The museum was all around amazing and we saw a ton of great stuff, but because I had “the art of not making” on the brain, I was particularly drawn to the museum’s exhibit of Sol LeWitt wall paintings.  LeWitt appeals to me almost as much as a neurotic obsessive compulsive mathematician as he does as an artist, but perhaps that’s just me (and my poor beloved son who is, without question, his mother’s child).

Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-2007) 1 2 3 4 5 6, 1978 Painted wood 99 1⁄4 x 29 x 29 inches Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation Photo by Ann Hutchison © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and courtesy of the estate of Sol LeWitt - Image via the Blackbird Journal archive

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Wear Your Heart On Your Sleeve, Or Your Profile On Your Dress

Confirming the notion that the most interesting and creative ideas often come from the most unexpected places (yeah, I don’t know if that’s particularly a notion people have, but it sounds like a good truism), Romania is currently home to some of the more intriguing emerging designers on the fashion scene.  The end of years of repression, and a capitalist economy in its early stages of growth, provide the perfect breeding ground for a flourishing fashion avant-garde.

Lana Dumitru is one of the more exciting members of this front.  “Fashion in Romania is fresh and I can compare it with a newborn — we are starting to discover things and grow,” Dumitru says. “But I can compare it with an old man as well — everything is going really slow.”   Marie Claire magazine offers an eloquent profile of the designer:

However, Lana’s success as an innovative designer is anything but sluggish. Even though she’s still a student at the Design Institute of Italy, she has already become internationally recognized for her collections that fuse camouflage, technology, and old-world traditions together. Her graduation collection at the Bucharest Institute of Art tracked the evolution of women, much through the animalistic and technological interpretations of the female body. In many of the pieces, Lana did not settle for the gimmicks of fancy screen-printing: She altered the proportions of the fabric to give a three-dimensional form to the image portrayed.

Read more: Lana Dumitru Interview – Romanian Fashion Designer Lana Dumitru – Marie Claire

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The Secret Life Of Funghi Part II

The world at a whole new scale … any minute now and the fairies will enter stage left.

The Secret Life of Funghi 1

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I Dare You To Try To Get A Permit For One Of These Projects

Now here’s a guy who knows how to put photoshop to good use.

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