A few months ago, Extreme Craft brought you word of American Craft's extensive redesign (at the hands of ex-Dwell Magazine editor Andrew Wagner and former Dwell creative director Jeanette Abbink). Issue 2 hit the newsstands a few weeks back (dig the Extreme Craft excerpt in the blogs section!). Now, they have a website to match. You can check out piles of content from the new issue, as well as reviews and an insanely complete calendar at americancraftmag.org. American Craft....it's not just for your turquoise-wearing maiden Aunt from Santa Fe anymore!
December 26, 2007
November 26, 2007
Monster Art!
It's officially Christmas time....that time of year when Crafty folk turn their attention toward fanatical gestures of devotion for their loved ones. It's time to knit Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer out of your belly-button lint. It's time to craft a life-sized Santa out of Yoo-Hoo bottlecaps and dragonfly wings.
Lizette Greco knows creativity....and children. She, along with her two children function as a craft powerhouse, turning out illustrations and plush dolls based on the drawings. Check out the "Sixfoot Cyclops" pictured above. It's made out of recycled materials, and based on a charming drawing by one of the little Grecos. Most of us have a little human in our life who is a prolific artist, and Lizette can immortalize their artwork as well. For a small fee, she will "collaborate" with a drawing that you send her. In the meantime, you can check up on her progress via her FLICKR site.
September 12, 2007
Craftive Audience
Hooray! Maria Elena Buszek created a mini-site for the Raised in Craftivity exhibition at Rockhurst University. As usual, her curating and writing are spot-on, and she has brought together a group of artists who share her worldview about craft. The participating artists include Bren Ahearn, Jon Bonser, Elaine Bradford, Orly Cogan, Maggy Rozycki Hiltner, Garth Johnson, Claire Joyce, Kate Kretz, Allyson Mitchell, Heather Nameth-Bren, Morgan Price, Karen Reimer, Ben Schachter, DeAnna Skedel, and Laura Splan. Many of whom have appeared in this very weblog. My wife Claire and I are pleased to be in such amazing company. The range of attitudes about craft in this show reflects attitudes that can be found in the art world--from rah-rah cheerleading to a standoffish distance, messy and codependent relationships with craft are on display.
In Michel Gondry’s 2006 film, Science of Sleep, the director’s alter-ego Stéphane summarizes his attraction to the female protagonist Stéphanie when he says: “She makes things with her hands. It’s as if her synapses were connected directly to her fingers.” Like Stéphane and Stéphanie falling in love as they play with Stéphanie’s cloth and yarn sculptures, audiences have fallen in love with Gondry’s works through his spectacular manipulation of these very “low-tech” materials in films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and music videos for artists such as Björk and the White Stripes, which present worlds where teddy bears come to life and musicians play knitted instruments. The work on display in Raised in Craftivity suggests that it is unsurprising that such old-fashioned, handmade images and objects should resonate with artists and audiences in our hi-tech world: in today’s “information age” the sensuous, tactile “information” of craft media speaks, as Stéphane does, of a direct connection to humanity that is perhaps endangered, or at the very least being rapidly reconfigured in our technologically-saturated, twenty-first century lives.
If you missed the opening, you can still catch the show, which is on display through September 29th at Rockhurst University in Kansas City.
July 10, 2007
Imitation of Life
Other than Amber Boardman's great quilt and a few other interesting pieces, this year's Atlanta Biennial (renamed "the talent show") is a bust. The assembled work fails to capture the vibrancy and imagination of Atlanta artist, who I've found to be waaaaaaaay more talented and ambitious than Atlanta deserves. I did want to mention one artist that stood out to me, though. Suellen Parker creates clay figures in everyday tableaus, then meticulously photographs them and tweaks them with digital details lifted from real humans. The results are extraordinarily creepy. When I dug through her website, I realized that I had seen her work several weeks before, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.
Parker's empathetic portraits manage to catch something touching about human beings striving to improve themselves. The figures are often caught in moments of introspection, which adds to their otherworldy, voyeuristic quality. The New York Times made a great video on her process, which involves creating a clay figure around an armature, photographing life models, then combining the two into an eerie digital print. Parker likens the digital tweaking to painting--she is literally digitally painting the surface of the clay using Photoshop. Finally! Digital ceramics!
July 05, 2007
Trapped in Amber
My friend Amber Boardman is one of the most amazing all-around artists that I've ever met. For a show four years ago, she produced an amazing body of (obsessive and elaborate) ballpoint pen drawings along with animations elaborating on the themes from the drawings. She was able to parlay that into a job with Cartoon Network, animating for shows like Squidbillies. For somebody with a demanding full-time job, I've always been blown away with how prolific she is.
She's back with a vengeance with a clutch of new work that is playful, funny investigatory and.... deliciously naughty. To the left is Cum Shot Quilt, a new quilt that is the offspring (oooh... bad pun, sorry) of a photographic project that involved photographing ejaculate on a woman's torso. The photographs are almost topographic in nature, and their ethereality has helped translate the photo into other media. Amber is interested in the possibilities created by creating multiple representations of an image that function differently according to their respective environments.
Her other recent work, including abstract(ish) animations drawn from "found video footage" of "bodies inside of each other" is similarly playful, yet serious. Amber embraces her subjects with humor and gusto, yet she is able to frame her investigations inside of serious artistic considerations. Tonight, those considerations will extend to performance and community, as she leads a "quilting bee" at The Contemporary in Atlanta (where the Cum Shot Quilt is part of the "Talent Show" exhibition). The Quilting Bee is tonight (July 5th) from 6-8 pm. No sewing experience is required, and participants are encouraged to bring old clothing and saucy stories.
May 31, 2007
Mott-ly's Crew
Kansas City's and Lincoln, Nebraska's respective hearts broke yesterday when they learned that the artist known as Mott-ly passed away. I've known Mott for more than fifteen years, and I'm stunned by the news. Anybody who knew him reserved the warmest place in their hearts for him. He ran the MoMo gallery in Kansas City's crossroads district, where he curated shows that always seemed to hit the sweet spot that included his interests in activism, assemblage, and street art.
I first met Mott in the late 80's, when he started the band Mudhead with Archer Prewitt (who went on to form the Coctails and Sea and Cake). I've seen noisy bands in my time, but Mudhead made an unholy racket... I unearthed an article that compared Mottly-s singing with Mudhead to "Elmer Fudd being raped by a werewolf on a bad acid trip". That, my friends, is a compliment. Mott-ly moved back to his hometown of Lincoln in the 90's, and ran with a pack of musicians and artists that added considerable spice to sleepy Lincoln.
I started a record store in Lincoln in 1993, and Mott-ly was my first choice to help staff the place when I was away. Visitors to Zero Street could often find Mott's cheery face and incomparable musical know-how livening up the cramped store. Through it all, Mott soldiered through a bunch of medical problems. He was a hemophiliac who had a leg amputated at a young age. Mott spent a lot of time decorating his prosthetic leg, and a favorite trick was to throw it onstage when he was excited about a band. I witnessed plenty of confused/bemused singers like David Yow from the Jesus Lizard trying to deal with this novel tribute.
He spent a lot of his childhood in bed, which he credits with nurturing his interest in art. Mott-ly was always making art--he was the best assemblage curator that I've ever met. He had an eye for reconfiguring the most mundane objects into amazing works of art. Everything he touched benefited from his attention to detail, held together by his loving patinas. Joseph Cornell was a lifelong touchstone for him, but Mott-ly's boxes were something else entirely--courageous in their source material and masterful in their transmogrification.
In 1997, I left Lincoln, and shortly thereafter, Mott-ly moved back to his beloved Kansas City, where he had attended the Kansas City Art Institute. He was one of the pioneers of the Crossroads district, and opened up the MoMo gallery, which also served as his home and studio. Mott-ly was always an activist--it was at the core of his being, and he did things like letting an anarchist collective open up a radical bookstore in part of his space. A few years ago, Mott lost his remaining leg to infection, and was confined to a wheelchair. This didn't stop his mobility, and he could be found rolling through the Crossroads district, patronizing rogue karaoke dive bars, and working at Grinder's. The last time I saw him last year, he had adopted a pesky (but lovable) street dog that was recovering from mange (something makes me think it was part wolf...) that followed him around the gallery gnawing on the tires of his wheelchair.
For those who knew him, visiting Mott always yielded surprises. He was terribly in love with life, and always had something interesting to say or show. Like his boxes, he transformed his mundane surroundings into a thing of beauty. His kindness to others always burned brightly, and he leaves a legacy through his art and gallery that won't be soon forgotten.
LINK to Pitch article about Mott-Ly's art
May 16, 2007
Sooner or Later, We All Knit Alone
Boston-based photographer Joshua Dalsimer was the original drummer for The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Luckily, he realized that there was more to life than Dickie Barrett signature plaid Converse All-Stars, and moved on to a career as a photographer. He does commercial and fine-art work, with a keen eye toward collaborating with others. In this series of photos, a melon-colored crocheted wraith moves through urban and domestic settings. There is a sense of isolation and wistfulness to the photos that is heightened by the anonymous-yet-handmade outfit on the figure.
April 25, 2007
You Got Served!!!!
Woo Hoo! Judy Chicago's Dinner Party is officially open at the Brooklyn Museum. I don't know when I'm going to be able to see it in person, but the museum is planning on keeping the installation open long term. For my generation of artists who are soaked in craft, the Dinner Party is spoken of in hushed, reverential tones. It towers as an achievement of art, craft, and feminism.
The question that looms large in 2007, however, is how the work has stood the test of time. In the 30 years since its completion, the "capital-A" Art world has become much more snarky and self-referential. In today's edition of Slate, Mia Fineman revisits the work that she first beheld as a burgeoning 14-year old feminist. I can understand why somebody revisits the fond art of their adolescence with trepidation--I recently experienced something similar with last year's PBS documentary on Andy Warhol. Happily, Fineman concludes that the Dinner Party continues to resonate in today's art world--something that the current craft-savvy generation would never have doubted:
So, is The Dinner Party great art? Well, not by the standards of today's art world. It's too middlebrow, too literal, and its earnestness is out of step with today's endlessly self-ironizing sensibility. And its pudendal imagery, once radical, looks silly and heavy-handed today. But as an emphatically populist work with a clear set of political and educational imperatives, The Dinner Party has held its ground. It's nervy, ambitious, uncompromising, and—unlike most recent art, feminist or otherwise—truly original.
March 22, 2007
Garbage In, Garbage Out
When I was an exchange student in Germany in the early 90's, I was vaguely aware of artist HA Schult's work--he was famous at the time for sculptures of dorky sedans with oversized pegasus wings. I remember seeing photos of the cars being flown around Germany by helicopter--sort of like the opening scene of La Dolce Vita.
Daddy has apparently found a new meme to mine. His new work is just as obvious and in-your-face as the older work, but not entirely lacking in charm. For the past few years, Schult has been traveling to exotic locales (like the pyramids in Egypt) and constructing armies of human figures made out of TRASH! The work attracts attention wherever he goes (and a lot of banal morning show conversation as well). His trash sculptures can currently be seen at the Piazza del Popolo in Rome through March 29th. After that... on to New York!
If people were upset by Christo putting up a bunch of orange fabric in Central Park, what will they say about Schult creating an army of trash warriors...like casting Oscar the Grouch as Emperor Qin in charge of a bunch of trash zombies instead of terracotta ninjas and horses.
March 02, 2007
You Can't Kill Kenney
You love collage. You're probably making a decoupage box out of Hello Kitty stickers and pictures of underwear models that you cut out of a JC Penneys Catalog even as you read this. You worship Rosey O'Donnel's collage efforts, and think that with a little luck, you might just be the next Joseph Cornell.
Too bad. Marcus Kenney is better than you. Now that he totally owns Atlanta's art scene, Kenney, who lives in Savannah, Georgia, has begun his Sherman's March to conquer the rest of the art world. His new show at the Jenkins Connely gallery in New Orleans will be up through March 31st. Kenney's collages are intricate paintings, layered with the sort of detritus that must be stored in the packrat attics of Savannah's spanish moss-covered mansions. He takes green stamps, cigar bands, vintage textbooks...and vinyl flamejob graphics, and mashes them up into concoctions full of warmth and humor.
His own website is a crummy hard-to-navigate flash site, but check out the work that Jenkins Connely has posted, as well as work from his previous Marcia Wood shows in Atlanta. If you're in New Orleans, put your shirt back on, remember that Lent just started, and check out his work.
"Orientation" - New Work From China
- This body of work was created during a Summer 2010 residency at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. These porcelain vessels explore traditional Chinese iconography as refracted through a decidedly Western point of view.
