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Upon entering Jorge Pardo’s “House,” the viewer is greeted by an intriguing amalgam of art, design and architecture that crosses genres, defies definition and reveals the artist’s personal response to everyday objects. Adopting the premise of a home, this major mid-career exhibition presents over 60 works including sculpture, installations (such as Untitled, 2003) and paintings, organized in vignettes that represent separate areas of a house. A refrigerator and table identify one gallery as the kitchen; beds, a chest of drawers and sexy high-heeled slippers denote a bedroom and an architectural pattern establishes another area as the garden.
Though Pardo, ...
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Muskegon Museum of Art
A Stitch in Our Time: The New Art of Sewing
Muskegon, Michigan
November 13, 2008 –
February 8, 2009
What’s in a stitch? To some artists, everything. For Tom Lundberg, “Stitch by stitch the fluidity of thread is transformed into something layered and dense,” and there’s inspiration in the “symbo- lic intensity of badges and stitched emblems” and in “the storytelling traditions found in historic textiles.” Carol Shinn’s “technique of machine stitching comes from my love of drawing” and her stitches are “like pencil hatching.” For Ilze Aviks, in works like Improved Roses (detail), 2008, “the ...
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Braunstein/Quay Gallery
Peter Voulkos – The Montana, Los Angeles, & Berkeley Years: 1950-70s
San Francisco, California
January 22 – February 21, 2009
It is more than 60 years since Peter Voulkos (1924-2002) became “hooked on clay” taking a required pottery class as a G.I. Bill student at Montana State University, from which he graduated in 1951. It did not take long for him to move from a mastery of clay as a purely functional medium, which he perfected in college and carried over into his stint at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana, where, with Rudy Autio, he established a ceramics ...
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Heller GallerySusan Taylor Glasgow: Love HurtsNew York, New YorkSeptember 12 - October 10, 2009
Susan Taylor Glasgow is known for her depictions of domestic bliss as little more than well-crafted illusion, so her transition from the comforts of needle and thread to the brittle brilliance of fire and glass is a statement in itself. Raised to cook and sew, the sculptor does both, but in a medium that is neither edible nor wearable.
Stitching together glass panels with ribbon and thread, she has fashioned toasters, bras and other feminine icons, such as Chandelier Dress. But in this show, Glasgow ...
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American Museum of Ceramic ArtHarrison McIntosh:A Timeless LegacyPomona, CaliforniaSeptember 12, 2009 - January 9, 2010ceramicmuseum.org
The life and work of Harrison McIntosh, a quiet legend in the rich, often flamboyant history of California craft, is being celebrated in this retrospective covering 60 years of his pottery and sculpture and coinciding with his 95th birthday. Born in Vallejo, California, McIntosh showed a talent for art at a young age and was encouraged by his parents. He was introduced to clay by Glen Lukens at the University of Southern California in 1940. Later, after he had ...
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San Francisco Museum of Craft + DesignFred Ball EnamelsSan Francisco, CaliforniaJuly 24 - October 4, 2009
http://www.sfmcd.com
The inventive spirit of Fred Uhl Ball (1945-1985), one of the great innovators in the field of 20th-century enameling—the art of fusing glass to metal—is celebrated in this exhibition organized on the occasion of the Enamelist Society’s biennial conference in Oakland. The son of two artists—the noted ceramist and educator Carleton Ball and the graphic artist and enamelist Kathryn Uhl Ball—Fred Ball found his way to art, and especially enamels, as a child, and was participating in shows and winning ...
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Brookfield Craft Center
Innovations in Hooking
Brookfield, Connecticut
March 22 – May 3, 2009
Hooked rugs, thought to be an indigenous American art form, likely originating in New England in the 18th-century, utilized worn clothing and other fabric scraps to warm the floors of drafty rural dwellings. The technique involved cutting the fabric into strips and hooking them with a simple bent metal tool into a backing such as burlap, to create a series of loops. Today, many artists are showing interest in this traditional form—always appealing for its texture—and using it for expressive purposes. Liz Alpert Fay, an artist currently ...
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Bellevue Arts MuseumMichael Peterson: Evolution/RevolutionBellevue, WashingtonApril 9 - September 20, 2009bellevuearts.org
The Northwest artist Michael Peterson has shifted over the past 20 years from a masterful maker of turned wood bowls into a sculptor of organic abstract works whose complex forms and textured surfaces are achieved through a variety of processes without the use of the lathe. This exhibition demonstrates Peterson’s progression from turner to carver to sculptor through more than 30 works—some 15 vessel forms shown alongside more than 20 of his most recent sculptures.
Peterson’s chosen material is the burl portion of trees—dome-shaped outgrowths of madrone, ...
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In “Catalyst,” an installation of prints on paper and kilnformed glass, the Chicago artist Carrie Iverson is intent on capturing the processes of memory. Much of this group of work, says Iverson, “deals with states of change, motion and imagery submerged slightly below the surface.” The lithographs and the glass pieces are meant to be viewed as a “cumulative environment” and to complement each other by offering “two slightly different investigations of the same imagery.”
In a group of kilnformed glass panels , the imagery includes a skein of rope, scythes, intestines, fish hooks/lungs, an engineering diagram of a wave and ...
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Israel Museum
Bizarre Perfection
Jerusalem, Israel
December 20, 2008 –
June 6, 2009
The Israel Museum, whose encyclopedic collections include objects of supreme artistic virtuosity from a range of cultures, has organized an interdisciplinary exhibition that celebrates labor-intensive, not to say obsessive, handcraftsmanship in 50 objects by artists spanning the millennia, from anonymous craftspeople in ancient times to contemporary artists from around the world.
The show’s seemingly oxymoronic title, “Bizarre Perfection,” points to a number of attributes shared by these varied works. Some embody paradox, like the wedding of the mundane and the precious in Susan Collis’s Also Ran a ...
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Ogle
Hilary Pfeifer
Portland, Oregon
September 4–
November 1, 2008
Hilary Pfeifer typically works macro and micro, large and small. Though the Portland artist has a B.F.A. in metals, her preferred form over the last few years has been an installation composed of numerous small one-of-a-kind wood and mixed media sculptures that she paints with bright, cartoonish colors. She believes that site-specific works allow “the same atmosphere of spontaneity” that her working methods in the studio provide. For visual inspiration, she looks to “nature, toys, body parts, food, germs or sex toys to evoke multiple sensations and references.” And she ...
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Hibberd McGrath Gallery
Jim Kraft
Breckenridge, Colorado
August 1–24, 2008
Over a 30-year career the Seattle ceramist Jim Kraft has demonstrated the variety possible in handbuilding earthenware, having created indoor tile murals, vessels and sculptural pieces. Of the evolution of his work, he says, “I take certain elements that ‘work’ in one series and often build the next series based on those elements. These can include the color of the clay body, the colors of the surface treatment, the texture of the surface, the form or the building technique.” Common to many of his works is the idea of smaller parts ...
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American Museum of Ceramic Art
Robert Sperry: Bright Abyss
Pomona, California
August 30 –November 8, 2008
The career of a major figure in American studio ceramics in the Pacific Northwest is revisited in this retrospective of the work of Robert Sperry (1927-1998). The American Museum of Ceramic Art is presenting over 90 works by this extraordinarily prolific Seattle artist, including chargers, platters, wall plaques, murals and sculptures, such as #1001A, 1991, that highlight his role as an innovator, the diversity of his output and the evolution of his signature work.
Although Sperry experimented with many forms and techniques, he was best ...
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Craft and Folk Art Museum
The Contemporary Katagami Works of Jennifer Falck Linssen: Earth, Wind, Wave and Fire
Los Angeles, California
February 9–April 27, 2008 ...
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Francine Seders Gallery
Anne Hirondelle
Seattle, Washington
September 5–October 12, 2008
For more than 20 years of a career spanning three decades, the noted Northwest ceramist Anne Hirondelle (who was a student of Robert Sperry’s at the University of Washington) worked within the vessel tradition, earning a reputation for shapely stoneware functional forms characterized by clean architectural lines and subtle glazes. In 2003 she took a sculptural turn as she began to think about her works as expanding into space rather than containing it. After five years of exploring these sculptural implications, Hirondelle once again addresses the vessel in these recent ...
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Elmhurst Art Museum
Cat Chow: Speak Softly
Elmhurst, Illinois
April 19–July 13, 2008
The artist and designer Cat Chow has made a name for herself by merging fashion and art in works such as labor-intensive dresses made from materials like dollar bills, a single length of zipper, measuring tapes or mobile phone covers. But “Speak Softly,” an exhibition of Chow’s latest work, represents a new direction for the artist. “Her intricate craftsmanship transforms everyday objects into works of art that are elegantly simple, yet also complex in construction and emotional expression,” writes Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum ...
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Memorial Art Gallery A Unity of Opposites: Recent Work by Michael Taylor Rochester, New York April 19 - June 28, 2009 mag.rochester.edu
Any doubts about the possibility of a fruitful synergy between art and science would certainly be set aside as one contemplated the dozen glass sculptures by Michael Taylor on view at the Memorial Art Gallery. These include monumental works composed of hundreds of individual pieces, along with prints and maquettes, and represent the culmination of 40 years of investi- gating light, form and design through glass. A pioneer of studio glass who entered the field ...
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del Mano Gallery
Binh Pho
August 2–30, 2008
For close to 15 years, the Vietnamese-American artist Binh Pho has been creating singular turned and pierced wood vessels vividly painted with images that have symbolic or narrative import. Since 2000, he has introduced elements that reflect his compelling biography. Pho, who now lives with his family outside Chicago, was born in 1955 in Saigon and grew up there during the Vietnam War. He was in college studying architecture and art when Saigon fell, in 1975, and just missed being airlifted out of Vietnam on the last helicopter from the American Embassy. He ...
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Musée-Atelier du Verre
Cenae 9: L’Alchimie du Verre (The Alchemy of Glass) Joan Crous
Sars-Poteries, France
September 11 – December 1, 2008
The scene is spectral—a banquet table after a meal laden with plates, wine glasses, silverware and leftover food, but with color in gradations from white through deep sapphire blue through dark gray, and the whole setting covered with a grainy, ashy crust as if newly excavated from layers of earth and ravaged by time. Yet this is no relic of an ancient cataclysm but a recent work of glass art.
Joan Crous, a Spanish-born artist who lives and ...
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The Center for Book Arts
Illustrated Fine Printing: Whittington & Matrix in America
New York, New York
September 26 – December 6, 2008
www.centerforbookarts.org
www.whittingtonpress.com
The beauty, intricacy and devoted craftsmanship involved in the practice of contemporary fine press printing is on display in this exhibition at the Center for Book Arts. Organized by guest curator Barbara Henry, a book artist and fine press proprietor, the show features leading American and European artists in wood engraving, pa-per marbling, pochoir, type
design and related arts—a community of makers linked by their connection to the Whittington ...
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