We featured the mud stencils of Milwaukee artist Jesse Graves in the November-December 2009 issue of Utne Reader:

There are no laws against playing in the dirt, the messages are no less powerful than those from a can of paint, and if the neighbors don’t like it—well, they can just apply water. The technique is also non­toxic, an eco-advantage those hauling aerosol cans down alleys or atop buildings can’t claim.

Graves was generous enough to let us share a few photos of his work and the group stenciling he's done on issues of environmental plunder and the criminal justice system. Enjoy!

The state mental hospitals of the 19th and early 20th centuries—originally known as “lunatic asylums”—often operated within massive, majestic buildings, most of which are now abandoned or operating at a fraction of their former capacity. Christopher Payne spent several years meticulously photographing 70 of these architectural marvels, and his haunting images are collected in the beautiful new book Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, just out on MIT Press.

“For more than half the nation’s history,” Payne writes, “vast mental hospitals were prominent architectural features on the American landscape. Practically every state could claim to have at least one.”

The location of the hospitals, in the countryside, away from the city, afforded ample privacy and an abundance of land for farming and gardening, which were integral to the patients’ daily regimen of exercise. . . . The grounds provided relief from the indoor sights and sounds of the asylum and also served as a dramatic setting for the buildings, enhancing their grandeur. As visitors to the asylums never penetrated beyond the public lobbies of the administration buildings, it was these spaces and the landscapes that acted as the chief agents of propaganda to exert a positive influence on public perception.

Neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks, who worked for 25 years at Bronx State Hospital (now Bronx Psychiatric Center), pens the book’s introduction, a lively tour through the history of these asylums’ philosophies, inner workings, and patient populations as they shifted over the years.

Source: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals

Images copyright © Christopher Payne.

A typical fighting season in southern Afghanistan begins in spring and continues through fall. This photo essay by photojournalist Louie Palu in the summer issue of Geist documents last year’s fighting season. It finds the region’s Pashtun people, who know little of life without seasonal warfare, living day to day on the fringes of battle.

As the 2009 fighting season began this past May, Palu returned to Afghanistan to capture what could be the worst season the Pashtun have seen. He writes:

The longer I stay in Afghanistan and the more I see, the fewer answers I have about what is going on there and what the future holds. Back in Toronto I can’t even talk to anyone in a bar, because conversations with people who think they understand Afghanistan just end as heated arguments on the sidewalk.

Source: Geist 

 Image by Louie Palu.

Two years ago, visual artist Collin Sekajugo established an arts center where there weren’t any before: Kigali, Rwanda. The Ivuka Arts Center (ivuka means “rebirth”) provides studio space and workshops, and helps artists “make a living from their art,” Sekajugo tells Peace Review—no easy feat in a country that doesn’t have any art supplies shops or galleries. “We mostly exhibit our art in public buildings, in hotels or in coffee shops—in places where foreigners may go,” Sekajugo says.

Perhaps most surprising is that 15 years after the genocide, Ivuka’s artists tend to avoid the subject. Here’s Sekajugo’s explanation:

Some of our artists address genocide in some works. Most of them don’t though. Some of our artists are genocide survivors, you see. Developing art about the genocide is very hard for them. It’s difficult for viewers too. It elicits bad feelings, feelings of pain, grief, or guilt. Who were the culprits? Or the victims? It creates division. Rather than representing genocide, the artists here would rather paint about reconciliation.

I suppose, if you wanted to, you could read genocide themes into their works. For instance, you could read genocide into this painting of people fleeing. Or you could relate the red color in this abstract painting to blood. Painting directly about genocide is delicate, however. It discourages people from coming to terms with the genocide, from reconciling. People here are very sensitive to these issues and emotions are very raw, especially during commemoration time.

I have a lot of ideas about the genocide that I’d like to put on canvas, but then I think of the repercussions, of how people are going to view it, of how it’s going to affect them. Some people might respond well to it, but others might become emotional, bitter, or angry. Genocide is still a very sensitive subject here, perhaps too sensitive.

The Peace Review interview is not available online, but if you’re at all interested in Rwanda, go out and buy the whole issue (July-September 2009)—it’s packed with essays and reports from that country, and Sekajugo’s interview is just one in a series of chats with artists working on amazing, inspiring projects in post-genocide Rwanda.

Source: Peace Review 

Image courtesy of Collin Sekajugo.

The new issue of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies has arrived in the Utne Reader library, and the work of award-winning editorial cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz graces the cover. Inside, Alcaraz, who is the creator of the syndicated comic strip La Cucaracha, talks about his efforts to create images of Obama that would resonate with the Hispanic community during the 2008 campaign:

I was angered by the mainstream/right-wing media's attempt to again divide the brown and black communities by spreading the racist talking point: "Latinos will NOT vote for a black man.  ...Obama's national field director Cuauhtemoc Figueroa, who visited forty-two states during the 2008 campaign, reported that he would inevitably find a ... Viva Obama poster in even the most remote Midwestern towns, hanging in the mercado window or an activist's living room. Viva Obama was a grassroots runaway hit. Voters wanted it. Campaign workers distributed it far and wide. Youths would snap cellphone photos of it at my signing events and email the photos to their friends.

Source: Aztlán

A German environmental organization called Oro Verde produced this knockoff on naturalist illustrations. The message here, if you didn’t catch it when it hit you over the head, is stated explicitly

The destruction of the rainforest comes in many shapes. And there are all kinds of animal and plant species which suffer as a result. Every hour three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct. Help us to save the rainforest: www.oroverde.de

The blog No Caption Needed has posted a large image of the poster, called Diversity of Species in the Rainforest.

(Thanks Eyeteeth, No Caption Needed.)

I must admit, I am a big fan of the popular genre of documentary photography known as “Urban Decay.” Images of abandoned buildings or city blocks gone to seed can make for some strange and beautiful photos. And if urban decay photography has a capital city, it’s Detroit.

Vice magazine is critical of photographers and journalists who visit Detroit and come away with the same old stories and post-apocolyptic Detroit photographs in this cheeky article by Thomas Morton. He talks to Detroit photographer James Griffioen, who says he frequently fields phone calls “from outside journalists looking for someone to sherpa them to the city’s best shitholes”:

 You get worn down trying to show them all the different sides of the city, then watching them go back and write the same story as everyone else. The photographers are the worst. Basically the only thing they’re interested in shooting is ruin porn.

Not every story coming out of Detroit is bad news, check out Bloggers Versus Blight from our Nov.-Dec. 2008 issue, a story about the feisty newspaper Detroit News.

 (Thanks, Coudal.)         

Image by John in Mich, licensed under Creative Commons.

Somebody teach me Dutch now! The formula for a fabulous new Dutch internet series is simple: a visual artist is seated at a table with a work of his or her art, joined at the other end of the table by a parent. There is a brief explanation of the piece (with constant parental interruption) which leads into a sometimes rambling, sometimes heated conversation. There is just one problem: the producers of this brilliant experiment only inserted English subtitles into the first episode. Still, I keep watching. The universal language of a parent attempting to understand their spawn is universal and mostly consists of some variation of: "huh," "okay," or "nah." Enjoy!

(Thanks, What Alice Found.)

When you think of “hair art,” you probably don’t imagine the beautiful, delicate jewelry of Melanie Bilenker, who creates tiny line drawings using locks of her own hair, then casts them into brooches, pendants, and rings. The new issue of Broken Pencil hipped me to Bilenker, whose inspiration lies with the Victorians, who “kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of a lost love,” she explains on her website. “In much the same way, I secure my memories through photographic images rendered in lines of my own hair, the physical remnants.”

One of the most striking things about Bilenker’s work is what memories she chooses to capture—“quiet minutes, the mundane, the domestic, the ordinary moments.” Moments like stepping into the bathtub, rifling around in the fridge, buttoning a shirt, tending to plants. It’s moving, somehow, to see such mundane moments so lovingly rendered.

Source: Broken Pencil

Images courtesy of Melanie Bilenker.

Frustrated that her neighborhood seemed to function as little more than a “giant hotel of passing strangers,” artist Candy Chang created a public installation meant to get residents talking.  Her goal was simple: use public space effectively and engage residents.

Chang’s New York City installation featured post-its that asked for basic information about residents’ living situations.  Passersby were quick to participate, sharing the kind of information we often keep to ourselves. One 43-year resident of a Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn studio boasted of paying just $146 a month in rent.  A resident of Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood reported paying $3,720 for a four-bedroom apartment. For more results, check out Chang’s website. 

 (Thanks, Visual Culture.)

 Image courtesy of Candy Chang.

Here’s a twist on the traditional artist residency program: Spend a week or two in the woods, camping out in a vintage trailer-turned-studio, with the sights and sounds of Oregon’s beautiful Mount Hood National Forest as your primary (only?) inspiration.

That’s how the new Signal Fire residency program works, reports The Bear Deluxe, a quirky magazine of arts and the environment published by the Portland-based nonprofit Orlo (article not available online). Husband and wife Amy Harwood and Ryan Pierce—a program director for a forest conservation group and a visual artist, respectively—dreamt up the project, and bought and refurbished a trailer to get things rolling. Thanks to her work, Harwood knows all the best spots at Mt. Hood, and "promises to place artists in a cozy room with an exceptional view of nature."

And what a cozy room it is: an "8-by-18-foot Road Ranger trailer, vintage 1975, sporting the era's requisite sun-bleached yellow and orange racing stripes." Harwood and Pierce have fixed it up, though, sprucing it up with "custom workbenches and cubbyholes to complete the feeling of a studio."

"What I'm hoping," Harwood tells the Bear Deluxe, "is that by putting the trailer as far out as we can get it into the wild places around Mount Hood, we'll be able to capture a little bit of that inspiration and still offer the incubation of a space."

Source: The Bear Deluxe 

Image by Darren // DA Creative Photography, licensed under Creative Commons.

The art of graffiti: you either see it or you don't. Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab drags us out of that tired debate and shows us the science of tagging. His Graffiti Taxonomy project has just posted its Paris findings and a transfixing interactive demonstration of the lettering of 180 Parisian taggers. Individual letters were extracted using a process that looks something like this:

Here's a short video about the project:

You love fonts, you love cars, and you've always wondered how to marry the two. A Belgian ad agency called Happiness Brussels (seriously, that's their name) has done it. Two typographers and a pro race car driver have created a font called iQ. Here's how they did it, with apologies for the atrocious music:

Source: Creative Review 

Using the View-Master as her medium, Portland-based artist Vladimir weaves intriguing “28-picture tales of train chases, missing steam shovels, disastrous dinner parties, and overly adventurous cockroaches.” She crafts each scene using teeny toys, objects, and random paraphernalia.  When set to music and narration, a Vladmaster performance has more potential for magic than any movie theater. Instead of staring at a screen, audience members click through the story as one, each using their very own View-Master.

Vladimir is not currently touring, but you can experience the whimsy at home. Visit her website for information on how to buy reels of her Franz Kafka parables and other thoughtful tales.

(Thanks, NUVO.) 

Source: Vladmaster.

Images courtesy of  Vladimir .

Afghanistan's epic battle against Soviet occupation spawned an unusual genre of war story: the war rug. It's a tradition that continues to this day, with Afghan weavers telling the story of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent American invasion.

Max Allen is a curator of a war rug exhibit at the Textile Museum of Canada. Here’s what he has to say about the rugs:

During the Afghan wars which have gone on from 1979 to the present the whole country is full of war equipment. You can hardly avoid seeing it. And just like television or newspapers these rugs report what’s going on in Afghanistan. Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan there was nothing anywhere in the world like this. It came out of the blue. Are the rugs pro-war or anti-war? I don’t know. You can read a message into them but whether the message was put there by the weaver, I don’t know.

Hear more from Allen and to see some of the work in this short audio slideshow:

(Thanks, Strange Maps.)

It's the Fourth of July! Buy some fireworks, give them to a group of small children, and just sit in front of your easel and paint what happens next. That's probably not the genesis story of this particular piece of firecracker art. All the same: Wow.

The always linktastic Coudal Partners has added CRACKERPACKS, an archive of firecracker art, to their Museum of Online Museums.

(Thanks, Coudal.)

 An amazing thing happened over at Drawger , a website where illustrators post and discuss their work. Yesterday, artist Tim O’Brien posted the above portrait  he drew of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman whose death has become a symbol of the opposition movement after the contested election in Iran. As usual, other illustrators responded in the comments section. But through the magic of the internet, citizens in Iran also found it, and flooded the post with their own heart wrenching and inspiring comments . According to the artist, what is missing from the site are the hundreds of e-mails he received from people less comfortable posting in public. It makes you ponder the power of visuals, and how one image that strikes a chord can inspire a movement.

(Thanks, Edel Rodriguez .)

Image courtesy of Tim O’Brien

Guy Laramée turned a set of dusty old encyclopedias into a gorgeous replica of Jordan’s Petra, one of the world’s best-known archaeological sites.

The excellent Magers & Quinn blog tipped me off to this stack-of-books-sized rendering of Petra, which Laramée sculpted using a set of sandblasted encyclopedias. The piece was featured in a recent book-art exhibit at Seattle’s Bellevue Arts Museum; you can see more of Laramée’s work here and here.

(I'm sure there's a joke to be made about looking up Petra inside the encyclopedia, but I don't think it merits non-parenthetical treatment.)

Source: Magers & Quinn blog 

Guy Laramée, Pétra (2007). Eroded encyclopedias, pigment, 12 x 11.25 x 8.5 in. Courtesy  Galerie Orange  and the artist.

 When I heard about the new legislation restricting the marketing of cigarettes , I wondered how the tobacco industry would respond. The St. Petersburg Times  asked noted designer DJ Stout of Pentagram  to dream up a solution. He came up with a novel (at least for the tobacco industry) approach: Tell the truth. He explains:

Our marketing advice to cigarette companies in the new heavily regulated era is to fully accept the new aggressive anti-smoking restrictions and wallow in the government’s apocalyptic health warnings. Don’t make excuses or dance around the stepped-up marketing regulations, just transform the whole cigarette pack into a three dimensional warning label.

I think they are brilliant, what do you think?

(Thanks Design You Trust .)

Images courtesy of Pentagram

Fans of street art may be familiar with French artist Invader , who creates 8-bit-inspired mosaic tile art that can be found on city streets and in galleries around the world. He is also credited with originating a style of art called “Rubickubism,” which, as he demonstrates in the video below, uses Rubik’s Cube squares as the medium for a sort of digital pointillism. He has an upcoming solo show at Jonathan LeVine Gallery , one of my favorite galleries in New York, starting June 27th.

(Thanks, Wooster Collective .)

Image courtesy of Invader

Have you ever wanted a bird’s eye view of an ax murder? How about a bear mauling? Or a giant octopus attack? In his series Pleasantville , Jonah Samson creates and photographs tiny moments of either pleasure or pain to hilarious and disturbing effect. His work is currently on view at G. Gibson Gallery  in Seattle, and will be shown at Chernoff Fine Art  in Vancouver this fall.

Images courtesy Jonah Samson and G. Gibson Gallery.

(Thanks, HOW ).

How much does it cost to spread 650,000 pennies on the floor in a delicate wave pattern, atop a bed of oozing honey? Including the tableau attendant and accommodations for the sheep, about $13,791.36. (1989 dollars, of course.) The installation in question is Anne Hamilton’s “privations and excess,” which The Believer details in the latest installment of Creative Accounting, a series that’s plainly perfect for those among us who love both the arts and getting down and gritty with the details. Ahem.

In past issues, the magazine has unpacked the fiscal details of an unnamed Flaming Lips album ($158,338.53); a modestly-made indie film ($15,4800), and a less-modestly made yet nonetheless indie film ($18 million), which kicked off the series last March.

 Source: The Believer 

Image by kevindooley, licensed under Creative Commons.

Matthew Glass has been collecting records for the better part of four decades. In a his Manhattan living space he has a “record room” where 10,000 records live. Framed records are his wall art. For years he sold records at the flea market on 24^th Street. There are times in his life when he was frequently bringing records home by the box.

None of this would surprise you if you were to spend a single short second on LP Cover Lover, the website where he posts strange record covers in daily batches. He’s got a camera on a tripod in his record room and he is forever pulling records, photographing them, and posting them to his site, which boasts a comprehensive collection of “the world’s greatest LP album covers.”

“It’s helped me to spend time with my collection,” says Glass, who works in event promotion, “I appreciate what I have more.”

What he has is an eye for the beautiful and the beautifully absurd. There are plenty of websites showcasing goofy album art. Glass’ eye is well calibrated. “My tastes tend towards the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he says. “The art of the ‘80s was mostly just sort of gross.”

I asked Glass to suggest a few choice stops for anybody who spends some time with his site and wants more from the music blogosphere. His suggestions: Stupefaction, Show and Tell Music (check out their DIY cover gallery), and If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats (don't miss this forgotten piece of history).

How do people relate across racial and economic boundaries in post-apartheid South Africa? Cape Town artist Bryan Little designed a temporary public installation that broaches the question, based, he says, on “the names we call each other in the new South Africa.” Culled from the country’s 11 official languages, the names are both epithets and endearments, reflecting the divisions that persist as well as the connections being forged. Kees Jan Husselman used the installation as a backdrop for a poignant short film that gathers South Africans’ views on race, class, and the future of their country:

(Thanks, Wooster Collective.)

Artist Lawrence Yang responds to the much-maligned Pepsi logo redesign.

(Thanks, Coudal Partners.)

UPDATE (2/24/09): I think PepsiCo may be learning the difference between “rebranding” and “reblanding” the hard way. The New York Times reports that the makers of Tropicana orange juice have decided to scrap their recently redesigned OJ packaging and go back to the original design due to customer complaints. Ouch.

Check out these amazing “Handimals” by multimedia artist and body painter Guido Daniele.

 (Thanks, Design You Trust.)

Make bills itself as the magazine for “technology on your time,” and its blog spotlights all manner of DIY tech projects. But the site’s eye for creative, unusual work, and its tone—cheeky, accessible, and infinitely curious—makes it one of my favorite web destinations for art. The blog presents pieces with the exploratory ethos of a science fair, reveling in the geeky pragmatics of process and construction. Here's a sampling of projects that Make has covered recently:

Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener built a voice knitting machine that translates vocal frequencies into knitted patterns:

Robert Wechler's public art relies on the natural curve in a line of shopping carts:

Chris O’Shea and Cinimod Studio’s kinetic light installation “Beacon” interacts with visitors as they move through a gallery space:

The Czech Republic, in celebration of its new appointment as temporary head of the European Union, commissioned Czech artist David Cerny to spearhead a sculpture to commemorate the distinction. His assignment was to create a sculpture mosaic in collaboration with an artist from each country in the EU (27 in all).

However, he soon figured that such a project could not be completed on time and under budget. So he and his team, without telling the government agency that donated the funds, “decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes."

The result is Entropa, a mosaic of giant snap-together plastic parts, with each piece depicting the stereotypes of a particular country. Romania, for example, is shown to be a Dracula-themed amusement park, while France is draped with a banner reading “On Strike!"

Needless to say, the uproar has been considerable. Czech Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra has since apologized for the incident, but Cerny remains adamant that Europe simply needs to lighten up. According to the artist, the aim was to raise the question “What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. … We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.”

In the end, Cerny agreed to return the Czech government’s ₤300,000 grant for the project, but there’s little chance the sculpture will actually be removed from its display at the EU Council in Brussels

View more pictures of the work and read the official brochure, complete with the fake artists’ explanations.

(Thanks, BoingBoing.)

Image courtesy of centralasian, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the art world, graffiti is sexy, the subject of fawning attention from galleries, museums, and collectors. Tagging, though, largely resists the limelight. Photographer Martha Cooper’s book Tag Town, released last year, celebrates its stubbornly unglamorous aesthetic and documents the rise of tagging in 1970s New York. The art website Fecal Face recently sat down with Cooper to discuss the collection.

Sadly, the interview doesn’t break much new ground. The questions conflate Cooper’s interest in tagging with her interest in graffiti more generally, so we never get to hear what makes it a worthy photographic subject. It’s disappointing, because there are intriguing hints of insight. At one point, asked if she’d ever tried tagging, Cooper observed she’d never mastered it—she “found out how hard it was to repeatedly write with style.” Her respect is apparent in her photos, and I wish Cooper had been given a chance to elaborate. 

It’s still worth a look, if only to hear Cooper talk about her experiences documenting a piece of budding hip-hop culture and to get a look at some of the Tag Town pictures.

In a clever example of life imitating art, one Flickr group gathers images in which people photographically re-create "The Far Side" cartoons. The results are often accurate, detailed, and humorous.

(Thanks, Quipsologies)

Image courtesy of Kevin Steinhardt, licensed under Creative Commons.

Normally, art reaches us as a finished product. We see nothing of an artist’s process, of the tentative first steps, the mistakes, the experiments and abandoned ideas. I found two blogs that make me think we’re missing out:

Jonathan Burton documents the evolution of his drawings, from their scribbled seeds to final drafts, in The Unreachable Itch. He keeps pretty tight-lipped, providing little comment on his process, but he includes enough drafts to let you register his shifts in thought yourself.

In Salamunic Illustration, Tin Salamunic posts pages out of his sketchbooks, many of which never develop into polished, full-fledged pieces. But these images possess an immediacy that’s even more compelling than his finished work. He layers doodles with more meticulous studies and snippets of text, creating unfiltered peeks into his day-to-day musings.

(Thanks, Drawn.)

(Thanks, Lost at E Minor.)

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art is in dire financial straits, having dug itself into a hole through rampant overspending. Billionaire Eli Broad has offered $30 million to the museum, but only if the museum raises an additional $15 million itself. Artists David Weiner and Angie Lee tried to help out the old-fashioned way: by holding a bake sale.

Almost all of the treats were based on pieces from the museum’s collection, including Giacometti-shaped baguettes and Jasper Johns-frosted cakes. But the most coveted treat was definitely the financier cookies, selling for a cool $1 million apiece.

In the end, the bake sale made just over $300. Alas, that means none of the high-roller cookies were sold, but the sale still drew quite a crowd to see the wares and watch Weiner dole out Claes Oldenberg-esque slices of fruit pie.

(Thanks, CultureGrrl.)

Image courtesy of douglemoine, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the wake of the worldwide financial crisis, is art still an investment worth holding onto? Or is the payout from selling a valuable work too tempting to refuse? As the economy teeters and budgets constrict, museums and institutions around the country are considering the dilemma of selling art to pay the bills—setting off heated debates about  the moral and social pitfalls of viewing art as an untapped financial resource instead of a priceless public good.

Such was the case this summer, when, just weeks after flooding destroyed much of the University of Iowa’s campus, Iowa Board of Regents member Michael Gartner asked for an appraisal of Mural, Jackson Pollock’s 8’x20’ painting and the crown jewel of the school’s museum. (The piece was donated by Peggy Guggenheim herself.) Media outlets from the Des Moines Register (article not available online) all the way to Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal caught wind of the affair and sounded the alarm. Could a sale be on its way? How dare university officials sniff around this magnificent piece as if it were a piggy bank waiting to be smashed open! Were they seriously considering selling part of the public’s property when insurance and FEMA funds were already on their way?

After almost two months of silence, the Board of Regents finally stated once and for all that the painting would not be sold; no further explanation was given. It could have been that the administration was merely curious about the painting’s value, and looked into it at the most inopportune time possible—or that the condemnation was so vehement that the regents retreated, tail tucked between their legs.

The idea of selling, trading, or auctioning parts of a collection—a practice known as deaccessioning—is more common than we think. Museums often look to clear out lower-quality works in order to purchase new ones or to simply free up space for the rest of their collections. As art buyer Lisa Hunter said on her blog, “If you could trade four mediocre Renoirs for one great Matisse, wouldn’t you do it, too?”

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), which establishes moral and ethical standards for its 190 member museums, has set down guidelines for museums wishing to trim or adjust their collections. Art should be sold or auctioned only for the benefit of the rest of the collection, and proceeds from that sale should be used only for the augmentation of the current collection. These practices ensure that mutual benefit is extended to the museum and the public, for whom the art and the museums exist.

The association is adamant that deaccessioning not occur “in reaction to the exigencies of a particular moment”—a moment like, say, flood damage to the museum’s governing institution.

But the idea of selling Mural did actually find some support. Felix Salmon, financial and art writer for Portfolio.com, reasoned that “some paintings belong not to ‘the people of Iowa’ so much as to the people of the world, and belong in a world-class collection. Which, frankly, the University of Iowa Museum of Art isn’t.” Does such an important work really belong in a small community? On the other hand, isn’t it unfair that a handful of art elitists should decide who has access to great art?

Somewhat less snobby was the reasoning of Gilbert E Schill Jr. and Jacob H. Rooksby, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription or online pass required). “If colleges were not allowed to sell what they own ... institutional progress and the fulfillment of the colleges’ missions would be impeded ... The [public property] argument necessarily fails because it knows no end.” Schill and Rooksby consider a school’s mission to be that of education and overall well-being, not of holding onto art collections as untouchable holy relics.

A case in point is the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Last year the gallery's administrators decided to auction off several of its priceless antiquities, saying that they fell outside the gallery’s “core mission” of modern and contemporary art. The gallery made a killing; its prize piece, the early Roman sculpture Artemis and the Stag, was projected to sell for around $6 million. The final bid was for more than $28 million. In total, almost every Albright-Knox piece sold made at least three times its pre-auction estimate, netting the gallery more than $90 million.

A short time later, the museum announced a campaign to expand its facilities that included designs from a “world-renowned architect.” According to the AAMD guidelines, it isn't allowed to use its auction earnings for the new building, though the timing is suspicious to some observers. But the most disturbing facet of the sale wasn’t the possibility of padding out the building fund. It was that Artemis and the Stag, a rare masterpiece, was purchased by a European private collector, meaning that it would perhaps never again be in the public eye.

It’s reasonable to assume that the same thing could have happened to Mural had it been put on the auction block. But due to the surrounding circumstances, the backlash against the Iowa Regents was so virulent that, in the words of Press-Citizen columnist Bob Elliott (article not available online), regent Michael Gartner was “verbally tarred and feathered as if he’d come out against baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.”

Paradoxically, Elliott goes on to name Gartner as the most important figure in the Iowa City art scene precisely due to the emotional rhetoric in support of the Pollock’s place in the community. Even Gartner conceded in the Chronicle (subscription or online pass required) that very few people were even aware of the painting’s existence before this controversy cropped up: The publicity for the museum and for the painting itself was priceless.

But all this analysis may be moot in the face of the world’s current financial crisis. Many of the museums that opted for deaccession were lured by the art market’s out-of-control prices paid for even minor works. For the past 10 years, the art market has been driven onward and upward, with many buyers coming from the financial field. (Lehman Bros. was a particularly enthusiastic collector.) Now that so many companies are tightening their budgets and the United States is in the throes of an official recession, the breakneck buying has dropped off. The art world’s previous feeding-frenzy atmosphere, which threatened to suck works off the wall like a vacuum with its promise of easy money (and lots of it), has lost some of its power. Some remaining art dealers and even gallery owners find the slowdown beneficial overall. For so long, the dominant dialogue had been about art as an investment: Now the talk can return to the art itself.

Image courtesy of the  University of Iowa Museum of Art .

With its 25th anniversary coming next year, book publisher 4th Estate (part of Harper Collins) asked design and marketing firm Apt to help with the celebration. The result is “This Is Where We Live,” a stop-animation video with scenery and figures made entirely out of the imprint’s books (more than 1,000 ended up being used).

The video is sweet and charming, and every viewing reveals another clever use of the material: Watch for The Corrections as a crosswalk and The Perfect Storm in the form of a fishing boat. After watching, take a look at the mind-blowing production stills and videos.

 

The single exhibition on display at the Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art illustrates how seriously art museums take their aesthetic commitment through a unique lens: their toilets.

The toilets at the top of the pack fit seamlessly into their museum’s identity. The sleek, contemporary design of the Tate’s urinal (pictured), for instance, is an appropriate companion to the museum’s modern collection. But the photographic evidence gathered from some institutions, like the Russian Museum, is just plain icky.

(Thanks, Design Observer.)

Image courtesy and copyright of Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art.

The past 100 years have seen a dramatic evolution in the world of cuisine and cooking, from traditional techniques to canned goods and space food to nouvelle cuisine (think big plates and tiny food). A current trend is molecular gastronomy, a combination of science and cooking where chefs use chemicals and special equipment to change the physical properties of food.

An essay in The Smart Set addresses the intriguing question, Is this type of cuisine contemporary art? Of course, food is meant to be eaten. But on the other hand, both contemporary art and molecular gastronomy experiment with form and tradition, often eschewing both just because they can.

And, like contemporary art, molecular gastronomy is not for everyone. One of the essay’s profiled chefs has created a dish called “Kellogg’s paella,” a mix of shrimp heads, vanilla mashed potatoes, and Rice Krispies.

Alinea, perhaps the most famous U.S. restaurant practicing the craft, recently released a cookbook with recipes like “Pheasant, shallot, cider, burning oak leaves,” which calls for ingredients like “8 narrow oak twigs with dead leaves attached” and agar agar.

The question of molecular gastronomy as art is ultimately unanswerable, since “there is something poetic and ephemeral about deliciousness," write Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg. "We don't want that property to be reduced completely to synapses and chemical reactions. Yet through a better understanding of synapses and chemical reactions, molecular gastronomists are creating poetry.”

Image courtesy of Zesmerelda, licensed under Creative Commons.

Though several Asian countries practice the art of vehicle decoration, Pakistan takes the custom to a higher level. Across the country just about every kind of transportation, from trucks to fruit carts, has vibrantly decorated examples among its ranks.

Amherst religion professor Jamal J. Elias has spent years researching this form of expression, and has found that the embellishment is not just aesthetic, but also represents the “religious, sentimental and emotional worldviews of the individuals employed in the truck industry.”

This kind of adornment doesn’t come cheap. It costs about $5,000 to decorate a truck completely, most of that money going to structural modifications such as additional levels and extended roofs. (Note that the country’s per capita income is only about $2,000.) Most transport companies will even foot the bill despite the lack of a discernible business advantage, illustrating the importance of the tradition to drivers.

“Since trucks represent the major means of transporting cargo throughout Pakistan," Elias concludes, "truck decoration might very well be this society’s major form of representational art.”

(Thanks, Neatorama.)

Image courtesy of Murtaza Imran Ali, licensed under Creative Commons.

Jillian Tamaki, a Brooklyn-based illustrator and art instructor, recently posted an elegant essay on her personal creative process, explaining step by step how she creates her work and offering advice to those who hope to be effective artists.

Step One, the most important, is "Be interested." Everyone, artists and appreciators alike, should be aware of the aesthetic qualities of the world around you and also of the world that came before. "You might be surprised to learn that your favourite artist is really a knockoff of someone from 100 years ago."

The essay is an excellent insight into not only the creative process of an artist, but also the process behind appreciating art and creativity. Her advice boils down to one straightforward concept: "The viewer should be charmed, intrigued, empathetic, repulsed, provoked. SOMETHING. They should be touched enough to want to cut the illustration out of the magazine." It really is as simple as that.

(Thanks, Drawn!)

Image courtesy of  lumaxart , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

So many websites have run posts on Obama-inspired artwork (Utne.com included, twice) that one blog has taken on the task of reporting daily on new Obama-themed creations. The Obama Art Report gathers images and information on all the candidate’s representations, everything from posters and action figures to sculptures and paintings. The website even has its own eBay store, where the starting bid for all items is 99 cents and all proceeds go to the Obama campaign.

You can also find roundups of Palin art. Fun, although not as organized as the Obama site.

(Thanks, Visual Culture)

Image courtesy of  EricaJoy , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

What has happened to great rock concert photography? Is it part of a bygone era, or has the music industry forgone photographers due to control issues? A mix of both, says Mark Paytress in Creative Review’s article "Three Songs and Yer Out! The Dying Art of Gig Photography" (reprinted from a recent issue of M magazine). The "three songs" refers to an industry-wide guideline that photographers are allowed access to the artists only for the first three songs of a performance. The practice started as a courtesy to performers to keep distracting flash bulbs to a minimum. But then it worked its way around the scene and became the rule at most venues. Artists and their management blame the venues for enforcing the rule, while the venues insist they're just doing what they're told by the management.

Blame game aside, it's difficult to capture great images when you know you're racing against the clock. Paytress points out that some of the greatest photos of rock 'n' roll came from the latter part of the set. For example, Pennie Smith snapped Paul Simonon of the Clash smashing his bass at a show in an image that would later be used as the cover for their classic album London Calling.

The three-song rule is a symptom rather than the illness. For the past decade or so, musicians have increasingly gone from being entertainers to being corporations. Case in point: Both Madonna and Jay-Z left their longtime labels to sign with concert promoter Live Nation. The PR departments of these corporations try to control images of their clients all costs, shunning the raw candid shot for staged, vetted images. Add the limited opportunities to the ever-shrinking medium of music imagery (the evolution from LP to CD and CD to digital thumbnail image), and you can see why Paytress and many photogs call concert photography a dying art.

All that's really left for rock photography are studio shoots, where the photographer and the artists can explore their creativity, albeit without the delicious spontaneity of a live show. But with the music industry continuing on a downward spiral, who knows how far budgets for those shoots will stretch.

Although the outlook is bleak, there are still great photos out there. You can find some of them at: Rock Archive ( rockarchive.com ), Redferns Music Picture Library ( redferns.com ), Rex Features ( rexfeatures.com ), Photographic Youth Music Culture Archive ( pymca-library.com ), and Steve Gullick ( gullickphoto.com ).

Image courtesy of flashbacks.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

Dorothy Polley, New York expat and owner of Dorothy’s Gallery in Paris, has commissioned 30 artists to create paintings, sketches, videos, and other media inspired by Barack Obama. The artists are mostly French, with a few notable Americans (like cartoonist Edward Koren) featured as well.

Inspired by the Manifest Hope gallery in Denver, Polley organized the show in less than a month, paying the artists out of her own pocket. In addition to the art, Polley has organized several events designed to raise awareness and funds for Obama’s campaign like a fundraiser cocktail party, a roundtable discussion with members of Democrats Abroad, and an evening of music conceived with Obama in mind.

The show runs from October 3 to November 17, with a portion of the proceeds from the sale of works going to the Obama campaign. It’s unclear if Obama actually needs more money, but with so much art, music, fashion, and even poetry coming out of the presidential race, the national trend of political creativity was bound to catch on overseas sooner or later.

Image by Cyril Anguelidis, courtesy of Dorothy Polley.

The American Society of Magazine Editors has announced the finalists for its third annual “Best Covers” competition. The covers are indeed gorgeous, but the judging smacks of bias. Even though the organization’s website says that entries are considered “based on excellence in design/creativity, not on circulation figures,” the nominees are almost exclusively high-circulation and fairly New York-heavy. (The New Yorker is nominated four times, New York magazine six.) It prompts the question: Can they really call it a “Best of” competition when only a small slice of what’s out there is represented? Or are high-profile magazines the only ones with the artistic talent that makes the grade? The winners of the eight categories will be announced Monday, October 6.

Thanks, Quipsologies.

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show that premiered last month at the Bumbershoot music and arts festival is an enlightening mashup of graphic design sensibilities in which Western motifs and techniques meet Persian script, and the hipster rock world intersects with ancient Middle Eastern culture. The show’s approach is to pair up posters, one by a U.S. artist alongside one by an Iranian, based on their styles and imagery.

Although the Iranian posters are not explicitly political, their design choices are more loaded with meaning than meets the Westerners’ eye. “In Iran, graphic design is viewed by many as a creation of the West and is met with skepticism,” Mark Baumgarten writes in Seattle Sound (article not available online). The use of Persian script itself is guided by cultural strictures.

“Graphic designers in Tehran are expected to treat it with a respect that does not allow for using the language’s characters creatively,” he writes. “Still some artists are rebelling against that orthodoxy.” One is Shahrzad Changalvaee, whose work (above) is paired with a Spoon poster by Jeff Kleinsmith in the show, which is being billed as the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian posters in the United States.

Curator Daniel R. Smith, who traveled to Tehran to find poster artists, tells Seattle Sound the search was a challenge—he had to escape his “tour guide” minders to do it—but that state censorship was more a chilling effect than a death-sentence scenario.

“There’s just this general sense of what you probably shouldn’t be doing in terms of imagery and definitely in terms of political stuff and poster design,” he says. “But what I also hear is that whatever you want to do in private is not a problem. If you want to have a private exhibition of nudes, you can have it in your own house.”

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show will be on exhibit through October 15 at Design Commission in Seattle. Next year it will travel to Tehran, where its organizers aim to share it with Iranian designers who are often prohibited from visiting the United States.

Images of posters by Jeff Kleinsmith and Shahrzad Changalvaee courtesy of the  Seattle-Tehran Poster Show . 

Most of us think of postcards as the glossy tabloid of correspondence: pretty pictures, trivial statements, all easily forgotten. But California-based artist Julianna Parr had a different idea: Why not use the postcard as a legitimate artistic medium? Starting 10 years ago, she set out to draw or paint one work of postcard art each day. The result is Time Stamp: A Diary in Postcards, now at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's Advocate and Gochis Galleries. Parr’s postcards are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes abstract, but all take well to their tiny medium, where the confined space paradoxically makes them more expressive and accessible than would a bigger canvas of a similar work. According to the exhibit’s press release, Parr wanted not only to showcase her creations, but to remind the viewers that they could easily do the same thing and explore their own creativity. “One of the underlying themes of this show is that I did all of this, and you can too,” she says. The entire exhibit (over 1000 postcards) is also available to browse online, where you can search by keywords and order prints of your favorites.

(Thanks to Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog)

Image courtesy of Julianna Parr.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky produced color images decades before color film, but his photos of the Russian Empire didn't go on public display until the 21st century. It's no surprise, since shortly after Prokudin-Gorsky's cross-empire photo survey (between 1905 and 1915), the October Revolution erupted, the photographer's supporter Tsar Nicholas II was executed, and Prokudin-Gorsky fled to France. But the years spent documenting the empire must have been heady, traveling in a darkroom-outfitted railroad car, producing images of miners, prisoners, tea harvesters, and yurt-dwellers. “Using color-filtered glass plates to capture a red, a blue, and a green channel of each image, the chemist-turned-photographer was able to project dazzling pictures onto Russia’s walls long before the advent of Lumicolor and Kodachrome film in the 1930s,” writes Russia! (article not available online), a U.S.-based Russian culture magazine that reprinted several of Prokudin-Gorsky’s images in its summer 2008 issue. The images were quietly bought up by the U.S. Library of Congress after World War II and got little attention until they served as records for church restoration in the post-Soviet 1990s, reports Russia!. The images are available for the first time to U.S. audiences at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, through October 1.

Museum guards spend untold hours gazing at the artwork in their care, so it's unsurprising that an art critics sometimes lurks behind the name tag and the impassive expression.

Or at least that's the assumption underlying Esopus magazine's “Guarded Opinions,” which features an interview with a museum guard in each issue. In its spring 2008 issue, Esopus (article not available online) talks with Corcoran Gallery of Art guard Berhanu Taffa about his work. When Taffa took the Corcoran job four years ago, he dreaded the long days on his feet. Then he started following docent-led tours and reading about various art movements. With new exhibitions opening every three or four months, Taffa has frequent opportunities to study new pieces. “Other than the standing, it’s a really great place,” says Taffa. 

Claude Monet’s Willows of Vetheuil is one of Taffa’s favorite pieces in the Corcoran’s permanent collection. “I guess if you had an extensive knowledge of art, you could say, ‘I like the way he uses his brush here,’ or talk about the texture, that kind of thing,” says Taffa. But it doesn’t take a formal art education for Taffa to enjoy Willows. “I can almost picture myself with the artist, sitting next to him as he’s painting. It makes me feel peaceful, independent.” 

Taffa can’t lose himself in his reverie too deeply, though, since misbehaving visitors abound. “People always try to touch the art,” says Taffa. “They know the rules, they know they shouldn’t, but they do it anyway.” 

Image by Charlotte Claeson, licensed under Creative Commons.

I Love My Life the Way It Is presents the frustration of unrealized potential. For the project, Ali Alvarez collects lottery tickets and leaves them unscratched, causing many of the people who see the collection to go “a little crazy.” Alvarez says it’s designed to explore high hopes, “dreaming, escaping, and then usually being let down.”

Image by Eric E Yang, licensed under Creative Commons.

When a child draws a picture, how can we know what’s really in their mind? Instead of taking your kid to a shrink, get a load of these photos by Korean artist Yeondoo Jung. Jung takes drawings made by children and interprets them literally through photography. While not exactly making fun of children's art (unlike this guy), Jung seems especially interested in presenting how a child’s sense of perspective tends to be flat, with amusing results.

Artists continue to make shocking and sacrilegious art, even after Piss Christ and "dung Mary." Even steering clear of religious subjects, flesh-based projects can still create a clamor. In April, Yale student Aliza Shvarts stirred up a furor by claiming her senior art installation would incorporate blood smears and videos of several of her own self-induced miscarriages. It was a fabrication, but it attracted plenty of ire anyway.

Another woman artist, Chrissy Conant, actually did use her body to make outrageous art. She injected herself with the same fertility drugs in vitro fertilization patients use, an endocrinologist and embryologist harvested twelve of her eggs, and Conant created Chrissy Caviar (a trademarked product). Twelve eggs in flasks were set in jars “similar to those used for commercial caviar,” reports Gastronomica in its spring 2008 issue, and the Chrissy Caviar was placed in a refrigerated deli display case. 

Utne wrote about Chrissy Caviar when it debuted in 2002, and interest has not abated in the intervening years. “One chef wanted to do a tasting of the eggs as part of a media event in his high-end restaurant in New York,” reports Gastronomica, “but Conant has resisted his offer, even though … she was, on a certain level, pleased that the chef made the connection [with sturgeon caviar] so literally. She finds it somewhat shocking that people would actually consider ingesting a part of her.” 

Conant refused the Chrissy Caviar tasting, but she would let the buyer of the installation do whatever he or she wanted with the eggs, according to Gastronomica, for $250,000. Nor does Conant seem to shy away from the possibility that a buyer might want to create little Chrissys. The Chrissy Caviar site includes medical histories for Conant and her immediate family. 

Conant’s project isn’t likely to attract cross-dragging protestors, whereas Shvarts’ might have. Chrissy Caviar is disturbing, but it’s a good example of art that goes beyond provoking simple outrage and disgust to encouraging viewers to think about bigger issues surrounding the ethical limits of art and the use of reproductive technologies. 

Image by Maks D., licensed under Creative Commons.

22-year-old, Vancouver-based artist Melanie Coles has constructed a 2,300-square-foot Waldo, which is now secured on a rooftop in her hometown, waiting to be detected by Google Earth’s satellites. Coles made the Waldo—with a little help from some friends—as a graduation project for the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The school has a knack for nurturing inventive thinking; we reported on another graduate’s clever Urban Binning Unit in our July-August 2006 issue.

Speaking recently to NPR, Coles drew a parallel between moving her generation’s hunt for Waldo from the printed page to the Internet and “what’s happening with magazines and TV and radio all going online.” She also tied the Waldo to ancient traditions of constructing earthly monuments only visible from the sky.

—Julie Hanus

Images by Carolyn Coles, licensed under Creative Commons.