STUDIO-ONLINE

The Great Tangka at Drepung
Photo by Eveline Yang; courtesy of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (www.thdl.org)

This exhibition presents the largest objects from the Rubin Museum’s collection and explores the reasons why artists living in the Himalayas produced the even larger tangkas (Tibetan scroll paintings and textiles) that are majestically draped over mountainsides and in valleys. In Himalayan cultures, these large works are the focus of community celebrations and accrue merit for all who participate.

Rubin Museum of Art
150 W. 17th St. (off of Seventh Avenue)
New York, NY
Telephone: (212) 620-5000
Web site: www.rmanyc.org

Featuring examples of pottery made by North Carolina craftspeople, this exhibit includes pieces from a surprising variety of folk traditions including Native American earthenware, Moravian lead-glazed earthenware, salt-glazed stoneware from the eastern piedmont and alkaline-glazed stoneware from the Catawba valley. Connections are made between the forms, influences and styles and their relationship to northeast Georgia folk pottery and the museum’s collection.

Visitors will see several pieces by Burlon Craig, a surviving link to the utilitarian pottery production made by the small farmers of the south. North Carolina potters settled where clay deposits and markets took them, and and the stories of these people can be traced through the pottery they made. A resident of Vale, North Carolina, Craig was one of the last North Carolina potters to work in alkaline glaze. A potter since 1928, Craig died in 2002 at the age of 88. In 1984, he received the prestigious National Folk Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is known for digging the clay he used from the banks of the South Fork of the Catawba River, and his examples of his work are part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

Folk Pottery Museum
Sautee Nacoochee Center
Sautee Nacoochee, GA
Telephone: (706) 878-3300
Web site: www.folkpotterymuseum.com

Fifty years after the end of the Civil War, artists in Charleston began to focuse their energies on making art to inspire a sense of unity and appreciation of their city among those living there. Through their art, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Anna Heyward Taylor, Alfred Hutty and others shared their love of Charleston’s physical environment and lowcountry character. In the Gibbs Museum’s newly installed Explore Gallery, visitors will see many examples of art works that figure prominently in the Charleston Renaissance, a period of artistic ferment dating from 1915 to 1940. This exhibition combines computer resources, library materials and works of art to offer a multi-dimensional, educational experience.

Gibbs Museum of Art
135 Meeting St.
Charleston, SC
Telephone: (843) 722-2706
Web site: www.gibbesmuseum.org

For Infinite Canvas: The Art of Webcomics, curator Jennifer Babcock, who draws the syndicated webcomic C’est La Vie, brought together work that explores three aspects of online comics: the unique format and design of webcomics; their appeal to niche audiences; and the transitions between web and print comics.

Visitors will view original artwork, prints of finished art and digital displays that first appeared in Penny Arcade, PhD, Sluggy Freelance, User Friendly, Diesel Sweeties, Goats, Questionable Content and other Web venues.

MoCCA Gallery
594 Broadway, Suite 401
New York, NY
Telephone: (212) 254-3511
Web site: www.moccany.org/

Sundaram, Vivan, Re-Take of Amrita- Remembering the Past, Looking to the Future, 2001

This exhibition of contemporary photography and video art is the first one of its kind in North America. More than 100 works by 29 artists were gathered to reflect the Indian psyche in the twenty-first century. The internal and external conditions of the land and its inhabitants are reflected in contributions made by such established atists as Raghu Rai and the late Raghubir Singh and emerging talents, including Tejal Shah and Shilpa Gupta.

A 164-page full-color exhibition catalogue has been produced containing original essays by the exhibition co-curators; Gayatri Sinha, independent curator and art critic in India; Paul Sternberger, associate professor of art history at Rutgers University; Suketu Mehta; and Barbara London, associate curator, department of film and media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Newark Museum
49 Washington St
Newark, NJ 07102
Telephone: (973) 596-6362
Web site: www.newarkmuseum.org

Tony Matelli, Abadon, 2005, Bronze, brass, stainless steel, and paint,dimensions variable. Collection of Mark Vanmoerkerke; Courtesy Leo Koenig Inc., New York, and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm

In Undone, the perceived completeness of form, space, or identity is defined by its own fragmented, unfinished, or unraveling condition. Commissioned for this exhibition, the works subvert viewers’ expectations about medium and exhibition space. By employing often contradictory content, scale, materials, and representation, the artists—Tom Holmes, Tony Matelli, Eileen Quinlan, and Heather Rowe—create work that draws on the context of the Whitney Museum at Altria Gallery and Sculpture Court to construct moments of unexpected transformation and “undoing” of sculpture, photography, and architecture.

The exhibition is organized by Howie Chen, Branch Manager/Senior Curatorial Coordinator, Whitney Museum of America Art at Altria, with Shamim M. Momin, Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Branch Director and Curator, Whitney Museum of America Art at Altria.

The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria is funded by Altria Group, Inc.

Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria
120 Park Avenue at 42nd Street
Phone: 1 (800) WHITNEY
Web: www.whitney.org

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, modeled in 1880, reduced in 1903. Cast number and date of cast unknown. Bronze. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation; promised gift to the North Carolina Museum of Art

This traveling exhibition presents 68 of Rodin’s bronzes, ranging from monumental works to maquettes, along with a selection of photographs, works on paper and documents. The exhibition explores Rodin’s creative and technical processes and offers an interdisciplinary and multi-media approach to in-gallery interpretation. All works in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection and Cantor Foundation Collection are original Rodins. Some of them were made during Rodin’s lifetime; others were made after he died to his explicit wishes and instructions to the government of France.

In 1945, just out of the army, B. Gerald Cantor wandered into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he Rodin’s marble sculpture, The Hand of God, captured his imagination. Soon after, for the equivalent of two months’ rent, he bought his first Rodin, the sculptor’s bronze version of the piece he had fallen in love with at the Met. Subsequently, Cantor put together an impressive collection of the artist’s work.

The William Benton Museum of Art
School of Fine Arts, Univ. of Connecticut
245 Glenbrook Road
Telephone: (860) 486-4520
Web site: www.thebenton.org

Women with fire masks, Downshire Hill, London, 1941. Lee Miller.
© 2007 Lee Miller Archives. All rights reserved

The Art of Lee Miller. V&A, London

By CHRISTIANA s c SPENS

Lee Miller was the darling of the Parisian avant-garde, the golden girl of New York City as it fell from dizzy heights into an unprecedented Great Depression, a Vogue contributor of fashion and war stories alike, in London, Paris and Manhattan, a flapper with a talent, and a Jazz Age heroine. The first woman to make it as a model and photographer in American Vogue, Lee Miller broke boundary after boundary and set the cameras rolling and the stars talking. She was the pupil and lover of Man Ray and Picasso’s muse, a party girl and a professional. She was born a hundred years ago and died seventy years later, and the present exhibition at the V&A, lit up in neon, celebrates her life and great contribution to the bohemian and glamorous art world of the early twentieth century.

(more…)

The 2008 Hobooken Fall Art and Music Festival will take place on Sunday, Sept. 30, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and feature three stages of live music and more than 300 artists, sculptors, photographers and craftspeople. A highlight of this year’s musical events is music by members of many rock bands that helped create what was known in the early 1980s as the “Hoboken Sound,” including the Bongos, who have recently reissued their critically acclaimed debut Drums Along the Hudson with new tracks produced by Moby. This will be their first performance in Hoboken in 20 years. Other featured bands include Glenn Mercer of the Feelies, Chris Stamey of the dBs, the Health & Happiness Show with James Mastro and many others.

Visitors to the festival can walk through a wide variety of displays, including Green Street, with 20 organizations promoting environmentally friendly products or raising awareness about global warming and other environmental issues; a children’s area on Third street with rides, games, creative activities, ponies, a petting zoo, a magic show, face painting, clowns, balloons, live performances and more; and such crafts as pottery, metalwork, wood items, furniture, blown and fused glass, quilts, household items made from recycled materials, cementware, batik clothing, hand-painted furniture, candles, jewelry, dried florals, and soaps and other bath products. Area restaurants will set up street cafes offering an eclectic variety of international foods.