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

My World Tuesday

 
Finally, an art post!  I have been very lazy with composing art posts lately. Part vacation wind-down, part lack of inspiration, I have had more fun posting photographs from my summer travels. The inspiration for seeking out and enjoying art is always there. Visits to four art museums this summer, two if not three of which are world class museums, have been fantastic and given me much to think about and to explore further. But narrowing down what I want to focus on for posts has been difficult for me and I've avoided trying.

It's not easy to separate out what interests me and what may be accessible and interesting for others.  But just yesterday and practically up the road a ways, I visited one of my favorite museums The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. There is an exhibition titled Picasso Looks at Degas going on at The Clark through mid-September. It was packed with visitors; a testimony to the wide popularity of both Picasso and Degas. Perfect, I thought, for a post that reveals a little something of what the exhibition content held in store. If you are interested to learn more about the exhibition, please follow the links. Better yet, if you live in the area or are visiting, check out The Clark in Williamstown.The grounds are beautiful, with views of Mount Greylock and a tiny but very nice little downtown near Williams College, which boasts a fine little museum of its own.

 By 1904, when Picasso settled in Paris, he had already responded to some of Degas's celebrated pictures—such as In a Café (L'Absinthe) and Woman Ironing—

Picasso:  Portrait of Sebastià Junyer i Vidal, 1903

Degas:  In a Café (L'Absinthe), 1876

 


  A few more shots of  my favorite works in the permanent collection at the Clark. You may recognize one or two of them, if you visit here frequently!

Degas (and a whole wall of impressionism)

Lautrec

 Gaugin

Thank you to the hosts of My World for providing this opportunity to brag about my surroundings! 

 

My World Tuesday

Shadow Shot Sunday - Eye Shadows

Front of William College Museum of Art, featuring Eyes (nine elements), 2001, by Louise Bourgeois.
Commissioned on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the museum.

Louise Bourgeois is a French-born American Abstract Expressionist Sculptor, born in 1911

 To see a couple of truly professional photos of this sculpture series go here

Shadow Shot Sunday is brought to you every week by Tracy at Hey Harriet from Brisbane, featuring photography from around the world.

Window Views and Doors

 The Green Door

October, 2009

Behind the Green Door? I didn't venture in, I'm not lying! In the tiny town of Rowe in the Massachusetts Berkshires, the only action behind that green door probaby has way too much to do with mice for my liking! This is the basement door of a former church now housing a non-profit. I liked the shadow-play and

I like windows and doors as a theme, so for Thursday fun, I like to play Mary the Teache's photo game:

Window Views and Doorways, too

Shadow Shot Sunday

I did not take note of the title or creator of this sculpture. I was too busy being fascinated and delighted by the shadow of the holiday wreath hanging on the window behind it; covered by a shade.

Taken in mid-January at The Clarke Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. This is straight out of the box; no enhancement. After playing with it a bit, I decided that for this shot, "as is" is the best take.

Thanks, Tracey of Brisbane for hosting Shadow Shot Sunday.

I like to post my entries for SS here, rather than the photo blog because Tracey is also an art lover and is the author of one of my favorite blogs Hey, Harriet. This is a high-quality photo meme, folks. Not only because Tracey is such a talented photographer and she is so artistic in the way she puts together Shadow Shots, but also because of her ability to attract so many great photographers who submit entries weekly.

Ruby Tuesday

This week's Ruby Tuesday features several photos of paintings I saw on a recent visit to the Clark Art Institute. For this Ruby Tuesday post they were, of course, chosen for their use of red.

I've been posting to Ruby Tuesday from my photo blog The Pagan's Eye but because this post has an art theme, I thought I'd place it here instead. I hope you enjoy it. And come by "the eye" sometime. Once in a while I get lucky and post a half-way decent picture. ;-) You can always just say hi if you don't have time to leave a comment.

An hour west of us in The Berkshires, this smaller museum has a lot to offer: samples of American painters such as Remington and Homer and a pretty good sized collection art by Renoir, Degas, Sisley, Cassatt and Manet, among others. Add to that furniture, glass, silver and sculptures and you have a very eclectic mix of works amassed by the William and Francine Clark, the art collectors who established the museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Here is a bit about them taken from the website:

In 1910, after a distinguished career in the United States Army, Sterling Clark settled in Paris and began collecting works of art, an interest he inherited from his parents. When he married Francine Clary in 1919, she joined him in what quickly became a shared passion. Together they created a remarkable collection of paintings, silver, sculpture, porcelain, drawings, and prints with complete reliance on their own judgments and tastes. In 1950 the Clarks founded the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute as a permanent home for their collection, and the museum first opened to the public in 1955. Since its conception, the Institute has had a dual mission as both a museum and a center for research and higher education. It is in this spirit that the Clark has expanded over the last five decades to become the influential institution it is today.

The museaum allowed photography without flash, so I was allowed to go shutter-happy. I was pounced upon by a guard only once when I accidentally let the flash go off. I demonstrated the requisite profuse apologies but he still kept a strict eye on me after that.

The light there is quite dim, so many of these have been balanced and enhanced. I also cropped most of them to some extent.

They are much better in person, firstly. Secondly, they may be better images of these on the net but having taken my own pictures helps me to recall better what my appreciation was in person. If that makes any sense.

Coming up on Friday, is a set for The Friday Evening Nudes, of photos I took at the Clarke. I hope you'll join me then.

Love and peace,
Pagan

Renoir, above and below

Sleeping Girl with Cat

A Young Woman Reading Lucio Rossi 1875
The Guitar Player Boldini

Offering the Pinale to the Bullfighter Mary Cassatt 1873
Musical Group
Francois Joseph Navez
1821

Apples and Grapes in a Basket
Sisley
1876



Thanks to Mary for hosting Ruby Tuesday. That gal is red-hot! ;-)

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