Sunday, November 29, 2020

Great fun! Very interesting viewing at the Haines Gallery: JUST ONE WORK | DAVID MAISEL's Air Force Target Grid Building photography.

JUST ONE WORK | DAVID MAISEL
In this ongoing series, Haines Gallery invites you to slow down and focus on a single artwork, which we’ll consider from a variety of perspectives. Today, we proudly present:
Air Force Target Grid Building
David Maisel, Air Force Target Grid Building, 2014
Six archival pigment prints, 2017
47 x 93 inches overall, framed

David Maisel’s Air Force Target Grid Building is a single work comprised of six black-and-white photographs depicting a mysterious, stepped architectural construction seen against a vast desert. Shot from a variety of angles at ground-level, this ziggurat-like structure, with its evocative open door, remains both inviting and inscrutable, even as the landscape gradually unfolds around it.
“These sites reflect back the psyche of the society that made them, revealing something at the core of who we are.”
In fact, Maisel’s pristine, compelling images are part of Proving Ground, the artist’s 2015 series investigating the uncanny architecture and scarred terrain of a classified military site in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. Established in 1942, the Dugway Proving Ground serves as a center for the development and testing of weapons and defense programs. Maisel was granted access to the site after more than a decade of inquiry to the Pentagon. The resulting body of work continues the artist’s longstanding interest in documenting humanity’s transformation of the landscape, as well as raising questions surrounding military power, land use, and national security. Maisel recently spoke to the BBC about the series here.
“It became a kind of enigmatic structure that condensed a lot of my interests in how Dugway uses the landscape in this hyper-rational way.”
The hauntingly beautiful images that make up this work depict a building that beckons viewers without affect. With its stark, matter-of-fact approach and gridded structure, the lineage of The Air Force Target Grid Building can be traced back to the work of photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and others who would famously become associated with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. This approach to photography focused on the seemingly mundane aspects of our built environment, transforming subjects such as track housing and water towers into evidence worthy of study and imbued with a surprising allure. 

The Air Force Target Grid Building is at once an abstraction, a marker, and a system of measurement, built to be seen from above by Air Force pilots as they make their way over Dugway at extreme speeds. Maisel chanced upon his subject while driving and was immediately struck by its potential. He photographed the building from each side, just short of a full revolution: “There’s always some part of it that remains hidden,” the artist observes. 
“Proving Ground is a complex examination of the choices we have made on how to use our Western lands and the implications of those decisions.”

Dr. Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography
#hainesgallery#fineartmagazine#artfun

Morgan Lehman Flat. File Friday! Fun Viewing!

FLAT FILE FRIDAY
New artworks from Morgan Lehman's flat files in your inbox every Friday morning
Click here to inquire
A graduate of UCLA (MFA) and the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (BFA), Kim McCarty's solo exhibitions include Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY;  David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, CA. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including LA Emerging Artists at the Dominique Fiat Gallery, Paris; Liquid Los Angeles: Contemporary Watercolor at The Pasadena Museum of Art, CA; and Erotic Drawing at The Aldrich Museum of Art, Ridgefield, CT. McCarty's work is in the permanent collections of The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and the Honolulu Academy of Art, HI.

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Soyona Clark launches the “SOLIDARITY BOOK PROJECT,” at Amherst College


AMHERST COLLEGE ART PROFESSOR SONYA CLARK LAUNCHES

“SOLIDARITY BOOK PROJECT,” AN ART AND ACTIVISM INITIATIVE

ADDRESSING RACISM, HISTORY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

 

(Amherst, Mass., November 20, 2020) — As Amherst College approaches its Bicentennial in 2021, Sonya Clark ’89, award-winning professor of art and the history of art, has launched the Solidarity Book Project, a collaborative, community-based artwork and activist initiative that invites participants to stand in solidarity with Black and Indigenous communities. There are several ways to join the project, including by sculpting social- and racial justice-related books with the iconic raised fist symbol. The public will be invited to do so via an extensive social media campaign. The project will culminate in an exhibition of the books at the College in fall 2021.

 

The Solidarity Book Project (SBP) encourages each of us to think deeply about what solidarity means personally and to make that commitment material through art. In honor of those participating in the project, the College will make gifts of up to a total of $100,000 to non-profit organizations that serve Black and Indigenous communities, with a focus on those that support access to book knowledge.

 

There are three ways to take part. First, participants may contribute brief audio recordings of themselves talking about what solidarity means to them. Second, they are invited to record short readings from books they believe have something to teach us about solidarity. And third, as the centerpiece of the project, they are encouraged to sculpt “solidarity books” which will be exhibited at Amherst College in fall 2021 as part of an immersive art installation produced by Professor Clark.

 

“The Solidarity Book Project encourages us to think deeply about the books and experiences that have shaped our social and political perspectives and forms of solidarity,” said Amherst President Biddy Martin. “It also compels us more fully to realize Amherst‘s educational ideals by ensuring that a 21st century Amherst education prepares our graduates to bring about a more just and equitable world.”

 

“Books transform lives; many books I read as a student at Amherst changed me,” said Clark. “Wielding that power, the Solidarity Book Project manifests as a sculptural and audible archive of book knowledge, a work of activism, and a fundraising model. It yields an opportunity to reflect on Amherst’s own place in the forms of Indigenous oppression, systemic racism, and anti-Blackness that have shaped the country as a whole. Together we can build solidarity, mark progress, and look to the future with an emphasis on reparative and restorative justice.”

 

Clark is a professor of art at Amherst College. Before that, she was Commonwealth Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow in the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited in more than 400 museums and galleries worldwide and has received favorable reviews in The New York Times,  Huffington Post, Sculpture, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Artforum, Time, Mother Jones among other journals and newspapers. In addition to being the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Amherst College, she has received the Rappaport Prize, Jackson Pollock–Lee Krasner Grant, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, and Anonymous Was a Woman Award. She has worked alongside creative individuals at many international residencies from Red Gate in China to Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation in Italy to Yaddo in New York to the American Academy in Rome to Black Rock in Senegal.

 

The SBP will not be the first work of Clark’s to tackle the issues of race, oppression, history and justice. For Black Hair Flag, for example, she stitched black cotton thread through the Confederate battle flag with Black hair styling techniques to make the US flag. For her performance piece Unraveling, she invited viewers to pull a Confederate flag apart thread by  thread with her and talk about the experience while doing it. And for Monumental Cloth (sutured) she reproduced the Truce Flag, the small white towel that the Confederate Army Gen. Robert E. Lee used to surrender at the end of the Civil War.

 

Clark encourages participants to purchase their books from independent bookstores, and bookstores owned by Black and Indigenous people as well as people of color. The sculpted books that are received will form an exhibition in the College’s Frost Library in fall 2021 as part of the Bicentennial commemoration.

 

The Solidarity Book Project is managed by Amir Denzel Hall ‘17 and Andrew Smith ‘18, and supported by a large community of Amherst alumni. The project is intended to be a replicable model that can be implemented across educational institutions, prisons and public libraries, and other places where book knowledge and collaborative art can serve to heal injustices perpetrated against marginalized communities.

 

Amherst College's Bicentennial also marks the 50th anniversary of the Black Studies department's formation and the fifth anniversary of Amherst Uprising, a sit-in protest led by Black women in the College’s Frost Library. For 200 years, the College has inhabited Indigenous land; as it heads into its third century, the Solidarity Book Project looks to acknowledge this historical moment with a call to stand in solidarity with Black and Indigenous communities.

 

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Amherst College prepares students to use ideas to make a difference in the world. Since its founding, in 1821, in Western Massachusetts, Amherst has demonstrated steadfast confidence in the value of the liberal arts and the importance of critical thinking. Today, its financial aid program is among the most substantial in the nation, and its student body is among the most diverse. Small classes, an open curriculum and a singular focus on undergraduate education ensure that leading scholars engage daily with talented, curious students, equipping them for leadership in an increasingly global and complex world. The College marks its bicentennial in 2021.

#amherstColledge#fineartmagazine#artfun 



Friday, November 20, 2020

I am a big fan of the Bronx Zoo! Hope you are too!

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Since mid-March, our Education Department has been developing online programming to be able to safely serve our community during the pandemic. We've created The Bronx Museum at Home, a collection of video and other virtual offerings to help bring our collections, exhibitions, and activities into your home! Join us at our next virtual event this Saturday, Family Affair: Bring Home the Museum!

Check out all of The Bronx Museum at Home at www.bronxmuseum.org/education, updated regularly as we add more content--we've selected a few below:

FAMILY AFFAIR: BRING THE MUSEUM HOME!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Join us for an afternoon filled with art making activities you can do from your home! You must register to attend. We will send a link and password to enter this online event to all registered families.

Recommended for ages 4 to 12 with parent/caregiver

FREE recommended art materials will be available for pickup during the museum's open hours on Friday 11/20. You must reserve free tickets to visit and pick up materials -- more information HERE.

Please pre-register to receive link!

#bronxzoo#fineartmagazine#animialfun