Artist Birthdays in February

At the beginning of this year I had a goal for the blog that I would try to post about artists' birthdays each month. So before the month of February (blasted February, I tell you) is over (can't wait),
Here are some artists, all American, who have birthdays this month. I am very patriotic about the arts, if not at all about most other things! 

One of my favorite American artists, Grant Wood's birthday was the 13th.  He was born in 1891.

American Gothic

1930

this one lives in Gallery 263,

The Art Institute of Chicago

Winslow Homer's birthday will be tomorrow, February 25. 

Sleigh Ride

1890-95

Sleigh Ride lives in my neck of the woods, at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.


And another neighbor, Norman Rockwell, born in New York on February 3, 1894.

Another good Norman Rockwell bio here

The world of these men isn't anything like what I've experienced as a naturalized American. But having lived in The Berkshires (Norman Rockwell country), I can easily imagine the postcard quality of that era applied to the place.

Rockwell's son Jarvis does the Berkshires no justice but his artworks are mildly amusing.  Here is a video of Jarvis Rockwell playing with the small plastic toys which made a pyramid "sculpture" entitled Maya, at Mass MoCA. The Girls loved it! A collection, yes but art, hmmm, not sure!

Linking to a lot of Photo Memes

Our end-of-the-year trip to Mass MoCA

Up the Mohawk Trail from Greenfield up through the foothills over the Berkshires and into the town of North Adams, home of the Mass MoCA - the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Above is the Sign, Signs contribution

In the Building 5 Gallery:

Above images:

Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly

 Tobias Putrih

Re-Projection:  Hoosac

2010

And coming on January 4, a new photo meme called Signs Signs, hosted by Lesley, to which I will be linking. 

 Alyson Shotz

The Geometry of Light

2010

What is the red thing behind the door in the photo above, you ask?

Orly Genger (b. 1979, New York)

Big Boss, 2009–2010
Rope, paint

Created with 100 miles of knotted rope Orly Genger’s installation commands the space
with a towering wall that bursts through the architecture and falls into a riotous spill
of material. Forcing viewers to rethink their path, the distinct elements articulate
the structural potential and strength of the rope as well as its softer side. Genger’s
work often grapples with a male-dominated history of sculpture and with the legacy
of artists such as Tony Smith and Richard Serra. Hand-working her industrial material
in an adapted crochet stitch, Genger introduces a traditionally female-identified
craft process into an artistic idiom associated with a certain muscular bravado. Yet
Genger’s own process — which has her wrestling with large amounts of the heavy
material — is overtly physical. (Images of body-builders are pinned to Genger’s studio
wall). The “Big Boss” of the title might refer to the labor the rope demands of Genger,
or perhaps to her mastery over the material. Painting the rope a vivid red, the artist
matches the material’s presence with an equally forceful color.

Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen

(b. 1979, Portland, Maine, and b. 1976, Little Falls, Minnesota)
White Stag

2009–2010

Paper, wood

Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen have been working with paper since their
first collaboration in 2005. The versatility of the material — which can be flat or
volumetric, smooth or textured, buoyant or heavy — allow the artists a wide range of
possibilities for their large-scale installations which they describe as “investigations
of the uncertain territory between imagined and physical space.” At MASS MoCA the
duo has responded to the museum’s industrial, brick architecture with its imagined
opposite: a fantastical, old growth forest fashioned from twisted, crumpled, and
draped rolls of paper. The ghostly image of the decaying natural landscape, however,
mirrors in some way the fading industrial landscape embodied by the museum’s
repurposed factory spaces. Spanning two floors, the installation appears to grow from
one gallery to the next, joining the separate spaces and providing viewers a different
perspective on the labyrinthine building.

My World

Weekend Reflections

Ruby Tuesday

Signs Signs

Window Views and Doors

Wordless Wednesday

 click to enlarge

Katharina  Grosse: One Floor up More Highly

My daughter interacting with the art at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, yesterday.

 Pagan Sphinx Photo © All Rights Reserved

Shadow Shot Sunday

This week's Pagan Sphinx Shadow Shot Sunday entry features my photographs of the works of Robert Taplin taken at an exhibition of his work at Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams.
 Everything Real Is Imagined (After Dante) consists of nine sculptures or dioramas (a sampling of which are depicted here, each referencing scenes from Dante's Inferno as modern allegories of political strife. Taplin's story begins as Dante's does with the uncertain sense of whether or not we are in a dream or reality

Everything Real Is Imagined is part of the larger group exhibition These Days: Elegies for Modern Times 

From ArtsBoston:

George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver, Robert Taplin, Sam Taylor-Wood and Pawel Wojtasik In 1967 Jackson Browne penned the lyric: "These days I seem to think about/ How all the changes came about my ways/ And I wonder if I'll see another highway." As the world shifts around us in ways that are profoundly disorienting, Browne's song resonates. Bringing together six artists whose work is infused with that lyric's sense of wonderment, and with the poetic and musical tradition of the elegy, These Days: Elegies for Modern Times responds to today's changing world with installations, photographs, painting, sculpture and video. The exhibition is at once an extended lamentation, but also full of a revelatory sense of possibility and hope. Opening Saturday, April 4, 2009 the exhibition features work by George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver, Robert Taplin, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Pawel Wojtasik. Two of the artists will exhibit works from the past year while the other four have created new installations specifically for the exhibition including two room-size works: a 12' tall, 36' diameter video panorama and a full-size chapel-like environment.

 Robert Taplin 

Everything Real Is Imagined (After Dante)

(click on photos to enlarge to a better viewing size)

 

Thus My Soul Which Was Still In Flight 

(The Dark Wood)

 

Across The Dark Waters 

(The River Acheron)

 

Shadow Shot Sunday is hosted by Tracy at Hey, Harriet in Brisbane

Shadow Shot Sunday

A little Note: I created a photo blog a while back called The Pagan's Eye, where I posted photos I've taken: a slight nod to my creative side and a wink to my flirtation with  digital polaroids.  I haven't been taking many in recent months due to busy-ness with work, school and family. I just noticed that the last photo I posted at The Pagan's Eye was from November 11. The space from that past-time has given me time to think about whether I want to keep a photo blog just for those photo themes (or memes).

It got to be addicting with a different theme for every day of the week:  Ruby Tuesday, Mellow Yellow Monday, SkyWatch Friday, etc. (My apologies for not linking to the bloggers who host them weekly.)  I think I am going to leave up that blog as a diary of what has caught my eye but resume posting entries to the photo memes on this blog. Only less of them. Mary the Teach's two memes - Ruby Tuesday and Window Views and Doorways, are really fun and Mary is a very cool lady. And SkyWatch Friday because it is just as vast as its name-sake, with skies from all over the globe, represented. And last but not least, Shadow Shot Sunday, which is hosted by Hey Harriet - the Photo Surrealist of the blog universe!  Thanks Tracie!

Contemporary Art Shadow Shots
taken at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
Mass MoCA
the wall drawings are by American artist Sol Lewitt

for Shadow Shot Sunday

 

Annual Winter Visit to Mass MoCA

WP and I headed west to the Berkshires, with my mother and Lovely Stepdaughter #1 along for the cold, sunny ride over the mountain (which was hazy) and into the hamlet of North Adams, Massachusetts. We walked into the factory buildings turned large museum spaces...and into several other planets and universes and galaxies of the creative and neurotic contemporary mind...

 Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams

Mass MoCA

This is Killing Me 

exhibit of eight artists; a few of whose works I photographed and noted 

 

(pagan sphinx photo 2009)

detail from a text work by

Sean Landers

(pagan sphinx photo 2009)


Whitney Bedford

My mother standing in front of Whitney Bedford's "broken hands", her favorite art pieces at MoCA.  I was impressed by her ability to grasp the cutting-edge art, ask lots of questions about it and be okay with not having exact answers. It blew me away.

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)

House
Shana Lutker 

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)


House 
(interior detail)

Shana Lutker’s works in various media mine her
unconscious and psychoanalytic theory. In House
(1986–1996) with Art That I Dreamt That I Made
Lutker fabricated a scale-model of her childhood
home. The house is then filled with miniature
versions of the art that Lutker dreams she has
made. Lutker often reworks these miniatures
into drawings and large sculptures—making real
works from those she has literally “dreamed up.”

House
(interior detail, #2) 

(Pagan Sphinx photo 2009)


Untitled #3

from the "Disruption" Series

Marco Rios

 Untitled, #3

Detail

Lovely Stepdaughter #1 contemplating the slaughter of a manatee??
This exhibit included eyeballs on the ceiling that rained cold tears on museum-mers. I was getting rather wet and ducked out of there fairly quickly after taking this picture.

Lastly, some new additions to the Sol Lewitt wall drawings, which will be on exhibition at the museum for the next two decades

                                                     

Artist of the Week: Sol LeWitt

September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about my visit to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art - MoCA, here. and here, where I promised a post about the work of Sol LeWitt, whose wall paintings recently went on exhibit there.

Following is a brief biography of the artist.

Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1928, and attended Syracuse University. After serving in the Korean War as a graphic artist, he moved, in 1953, to New York, where he worked as a draftsman for the architect I. M. Pei. LeWitt had his first solo exhibition at the Daniels Gallery, New York, in 1965, and the following year Dwan Gallery, New York, mounted the first in a series of solo exhibitions. He participated, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, in several significant group exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art, including "Primary Structures," at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1966, and "When Attitude Becomes Form," at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1969. His renowned text "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" was published in 1967. LeWitt's work was included in Documentas 6 (1977) and 7 (1982) in Kassel, as well as the 1987 Skulptur Projekte in Münster and the 1989 Istanbul Biennial. Major retrospectives of his works were organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1978, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in 2000. "Drawing Series..." a presentation of LeWitt's early wall drawings was installed at Dia:Beacon in 2006. Sol LeWitt died on April 8, 2007 in New York City.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Mass MoCA exhibit is a retrospective of the artist's famous wall drawings. The project was a collaboration between Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, and undertaken by the Gallery, MASS MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The retrospective spans 105 works by the artist from 1969 to 2007. The walls are installed in Studio 7, which is a 27,000 foot structure within the factory complex turned museum, and take up three stories. Designed specifically to accommodate the LeWitt art works and with input from the artist, the space will feature the exhibit for twenty-five years. New interior wall, stairways and walkways were built to facilitate the viewing of the exhibition between spaces and floors where the walls are displayed.

Mass MoCA is the perfect space for this multi-level exhibition. Previously, there was no place available that could accommodate so many wall drawings at once. If students and art lovers wanted to see LeWitts, they had to travel to many different museums and galleries, far apart from one another.

stairwell (above) and walkway (below) between levels of the exhibition

One of the most interesting aspects of LeWitt's work is that he drafted plans in the form of instructions and diagram for his wall drawings which were themselves the chief representations of his work, to be executed by others. In essense, the concept of the art over the actual process of it, dominates the work of Sol LeWitt. In 1968, when LeWitt began his wall drawings, this was considered radical in the art world.

In this collaboration the executors of the drawings themselves were done over a six month period and included twenty-two of LeWitt's senior assistants and thirty-three college students from Yale University, the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (a state college) in North Adams, Williams College, several local artists and graduate students from several colleges and universities around the country.

The black and white circular patterns were among my favorites

The exhibition was so rich with bold colors and patterns at times juxtaposed at varying angles.
Above is one of my favorites. I've looked at this photo again and agains since my visit. It's wonderful that these installations will be there for so long, as there is still much to discover in them on subsequent visits.

Detail of wall drawing