Here is a "Prescription For A Healthy Art Scene" by Renny Pritikin (SF). He is a cool guy.

Lane Cooper

Lane Cooper from the Cleveland Institute of Art will be here on the 7th. Her lecture is at 3 in 201 Gatewood. I hope you all can make it!

The Winchester House

Here's a brief 2005 interview with video artist Jeremy Blake about his three channel work, Winchester 2000.

Gyun Hur

Flux Film 007 | Hur from Proper Medium on Vimeo.

Gyun Hur's work came to mind as we discussed mindfulness in a practice, as well as public interaction and influence on a work. This video by Proper Medium gives an inside look at her current project on display at an upscale mall in Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia. You can read more about that here.

Terence Koh

Photo Sam Beebe/Ecotrust, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Although the first artist to come to mind after our discussion about mindfulness in art practice was Wolfgang Laib, I decided to go with this recent performance by Terence Koh instead. It struck me as interesting because it is a departure in tone from his usual practice, and because the location was Mary Boone, which is not the first place I think of when I'm in a meditative mood.

Eddie Martinez

I wish I could find better reproductions of the above painting, The Feast, by Eddie Martinez.  An accompanying article about him and his work is here.

Shadow Shop

http://stephaniesyjuco.com/shadowshop/shadowshop.html

Also - here is a great post in response to the project: ( clickty click ) http://blog.sfmoma.org/2011/03/shadowshop-recipe-for-boiling-water/#comments

A temporary and alternative store/distribution point embedded within the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s fifth floor galleries, Shadowshop will stock hundreds of artists’ multiples, small works, tchotchkes, catalogs, books, zines, media works, and other distributive creative output.

While operating as an actual mom-and-pop style store, Shadowshop is also a platform for exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work. Four themes (1. artwork-as-commodity, 2. cultural souvenirs, 3. bootlegs and counterfeits, and 4. alternative distribution systems) will contextualize selected projects that are both complicit with and also critical of capitalist circulation.

Peter Baldes

Peter Baldes, Associate Professor in Painting & Printmaking at VCU, will be giving a public talk tomorrow at 4pm in the Jarrell lecture hall in Jackson Library. I know it will include YouTube, probably some Legos, and definitely some art. Should be fun.

Call for Entry

FEED is a national juried biennial exhibition organized by 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. There are two tiers to the jurying process. The submissions will first be narrowed down to a list of semi-finalists. Out of this list, five finalists will be selected for the exhibition. Each of the five finalists will be invited to exhibit multiple works and will receive an honorarium of $1000.


http://www.1708gallery.org/feed/index.htm

Janet Biggs at the Mint Museum

If anyone else is interested in seeing this show before it closes in May, let me know... we can hit up Ikea on the way back! http://www.mintmuseum.org/current-exhibition.html

UNCG OPEN STUDIOS

Help spread the word. We have created a Facebook event here.

De Kooning versus Elephant

Take a look at the two images in this post. Which do you prefer? Which do you think is by a professional artist? (See the answer here.) For a paper in press at Psychological Science, Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner of Boston College collected 72 undergrads, 32 of which were studio-art majors, and showed them 30 paintings by abstract expressionists. Each painting was paired with a painting by a child, a monkey, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, or an elephant. The images were matched on superficial attributes such as color, line quality, and brushstroke, and subjects were asked which piece they personally liked more, and which they thought was a better work of art.

While class discussion might go to griping about abstract expressionists doing tenure sit-ins for their whole lives, this study reminds me that in the larger culture--even the larger culture of academia--as staid a thing as abstract painting can still be seen as threatening, childish, or a form of monkeying around.

Nina Berman @ UNCG March 17th and 18th

Many of you know Nina Berman http://www.ninaberman.com/ through the Whitney Biennial a few years ago or have seen her work with veterans. She will be on campus and if you want a studio visit, please contact me asap. Her public talk will be on Friday the 18th @ 6PM in the Weatherspoon Auditorium.

Blinky Palermo at the Hirshhorn

There's a fantastic Blinky Palermo retrospective up at the Hirshhorn Museum--definitely worth a spring break spur-of-the-moment grad student caravan/pilgrimage up to DC to see this weird, funny, surprising, and deeply-important-to-American-artists-though-we-haven't-really-known-it work.  Gabriel, get in the car right now!

Michael Silverblatt in conversation with W.S. Merwin

 I find conversations with writers about their work and process to be immensely helpful to me in my own studio--at times more helpful in truth than reading/hearing visual artists talk about art and working.  The similarities between writing and making art provide the initial connection, but the differences between making a world out of words and making a world out of objects/materials/spaces/ allow for the clarifying distance of a slightly different perspective.  I see what I do anew when viewed a bit obliquely through the thoughts of a writer.  To that end, my favorite source of writer conversations is Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt's (dare I say brilliant) radio program/podcast on KCRW.  I've not yet found a podcast of artist conversations that is this good, though I am happy to be proved wrong if you have any good sources.

Here's part of recent conversation with our poet laureate, W.S. Merwin.  

Michael Silverblatt: I have a final question.  It would once have been impossible for a poet to easily accept the invitation to be a country's poet laureate, this country's poet laureate.  It certainly once would not have been possible for you.  What makes it possible now?
W.S. Merwin: When I was invited to do it the terms of it were--we talked about that--and I was asked whether there was a theme that I would want to have to string the whole thing on, and I said, yes, if I accept to do it that will be one of the main reasons why I would do that, and the theme would be something I want to talk about.  My words won't change anyone's behavior but the connection between the human imagination, which I think is the one really distinctive thing that humanity has, not intelligence or language--both of which are dubious in different ways, but imagination--the thing that allows us to sit here in the Palomar Hotel in Los Angeles and be distressed about the homeless people and Darfur and the whales dying of starvation in the Pacific and elated by a little girl getting a prize for playing Mozart in China when she's seven years old.  Other animals have this quality but it's not primal in their lives.  It's not the center, and it's what makes us.  Each one of us is here in our imaginations seeing the world a little bit differently.  I think this is our great talent.  It's the source of compassion and it's the source of our respect for the rest of life and for our, oh I would say more than that, our gratitude for it, our love of the rest of life.  And if we don't have that, we are in every sense deprived.  We're narrowed down to little selfish blobs destroying the world around us and in so doing destroying ourselves.

Sal Randolph: Notes On Slack

Slack is extra – extra line in the rope. Slack is not keeping things tight. It means not pulling, or at least not pulling so much that you use up all the slack.

In animal training, slack is a reward. When a horse does what you want, you give it slack in the reins... (CONTINUE READING HERE - just copy and cut in your browser. Wasting too much of my "slack" time trying to figure this out.. )

http://salrandolph.com/studio/57/notes-on-slack.html

The Power of Personal Mythology

Just in case you haven't subscribed to all his videos....

Narrative Style in the F#%king 21st Century

While it had the biggest audience among political junkies and other followers of the Chicago mayor's race, this account in the Atlantic makes a good case for the groundbreaking achievement of the epic fake Twitter account @MayorEmanuel. While there have already been a number of interesting works looking at Twitter as a communications medium, @MayorEmanuel is a work of literary art created from within the medium, taking advantage of its brevity, its real-time nature, and its serial distribution to a core audience of followers.

It didn't hurt that @MayorEmanuel was often riotously funny, taking great and inventive advantage of former Obama Chief-of-Staff/next mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel's reputation for baroque profanity.