Color Chart at MOMA

Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today is another of MOMA's really comprehensive exhibit websites.

There are several ways of looking at the exhibit, not all of them immediately apparent. For instance, you might think that "Listen to the audio tour: Full program" is a link to audio files. But, no, it's a link to a slide show which shows 17 slides with audio, most with commentary by the curator, and some by the artists. The link to "Download audio clips" takes you to a list of the audio clips from the slide show with tiny images of the pictures on the slides. This is not the way to go. And the link to the online exhibition on this page is a bad link.

Clicking on the link at the top of this post takes you to the main online website. From there, you can view the works by artist, medium, or timeline, and also see four installation videos. One word of warning - if you look at enlarged images, be sure to click to get back to the list of artists, etc., or you'll be starting over from the beginning.

MOMA has a pretty good presence on YouTube. The following video is one I found there of the the artist Niele Toroni painting his contribution to the exhibit. The video on the website is better quality.

Paul St.Amand's Parallels

This short film has just won the 2008 Short Film Festival at TriggerStreet which "was founded in 2002 by two time Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey ...".

It has won several other awards and appeared at many film festivals, as noted here. And, best of all, Paul St. Amand is from Bedford, Nova Scotia.

As for viewing the film: TriggerStreet wants you to have a free account in order to log in and view their members' work. St. Amand's website has videos of this and other films at the link above. I found a good (larger) copy of the video at Metacafe.

The film is very good and says what I've been thinking - there are a lot of parallels between the U.S. presence in Vietnam and in Iraq. It is also very sad, in that we seem to have learned nothing in the intervening years.

Jessica Stockholder lecture

A few weeks ago, October 24th to be exact, I travelled to Halifax to attend a lecture by installation artist Jessica Stockholder. Since I live a few hours away, and I don't drive, this meant I had to take a shuttle bus, stay overnight in a B & B, and, of course, shop and gallery hop in the time I had left over. The fact that I got hopelessly lost wandering around the city (I finally found someone who said - "Go that way") meant that I visited only one gallery, but I did manage to cram a lot of shopping into the next morning.

The Stockholder lecture was announced on the NSCAD news page and briefly in the local newspaper, but I haven't been able to find any other news coverage of the event. I'm more than a little miffed at that because the lecture hall was packed, and she is an important artist. Her art is probably not everyone's cup of tea, since she uses everyday objects in her sculptures and sometimes the meaning behind the work can be obscure.

I have wondered if she is poking fun at 'serious art' with her sculpture but I felt from what she said in the lecture that Stockholder takes her own work very seriously. She had a very good slideshow to go with her talk, although I would have liked it if she had shown a bit more of her recent work. And she had some really good slides of my favourite piece, which I can't find anywhere on the internet, of a wall of car bodies, and the surrounding landscape which she created.

I actually have some of Stockholder's works, sort of. A few years ago, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago had a fundraising sale and I bought a package of Stockholder's contribution - a hundred paper placemats, which are photos of kitchen gadgets/containers sitting on placemats. In fact, the placemats are on sale again for Christmas this year. [corrections and site added November 16/08] One of these days, I'm going to do my own gadget/placemat photo.

There is a very good site for this artist on PBS's Art:21 website. There she describes her approach to her work. The YouTube video below is from this series.



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El Anatsui at the Fowler Museum at ULCA

In this KCRW podcast from August 2007 "KCRW General Manager Ruth Seymour and Art Critic Edward Goldman speak with Museum Director Marla Berns" about El Anatsui's show at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and his presence at the Venice Biennale.

The Fowler Museum's website is well worth browsing around. Their online archives have links to some amazing online collections. The earliest online exhibits or 'photo tours' I could find are from 2006 but descriptions of exhibits go back to 2000.

El Anatsui's website provides some information about the artist and a few pictures, but I'm guessing it hasn't been updated for a while. A Google search found this exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art which is mentioned in the KCRW podcast. There are some good (but not excellent) images of Anatsui's sculptures and sound files of him decribing three of his works.

I didn't have a whole lot of luck finding good images of Anatsui's exhibit at the Venice Biennale. I did find a good set of images from the October Gallery in London, either here or here - there are different images in each collection.

It's Blog Action Day again

This year the theme of Blog Action Day is raising awareness of poverty. This means looking at not just the abstract concept of 'poverty' but realizing how it effects your neighbour - next door, down the street, on the street corner, around the world.

In the spirit of this blog, when I get around to posting, that is, I'm going to provide some links to organizations which try to put a human face on poverty.

Make Poverty History Canada addresses poverty more as a political issue, pointing to the impoverishment of people resulting from the action (or inaction) of governments.

Oxfam Canada points out a variety of issues that lead to poverty, and shows what you can do. Today, at least, and I hope on most days, the title picture on their website shows a variety of images following the theme "This is what women's rights look like". Women's rights are part and parcel of human rights, empowerment for everyone, and as the pictures show, a sense of community.

Tomorrow, October 16, is World Food Day, an event "established by FAO's Member Countries at the Organization's Twentieth General Conference in November 1979". Their 'History' page has posters going back to 1981.

I did a search on Google using World Food Day 2008 as my search term. The variety of events are quite impressive.

The Stephen Lewis Foundation "helps to ease the pain of HIV/AIDS in Africa at the grassroots level". It goes without saying that if people weren't dying with AIDS at such a high rate, if they had access to health care and food and necessary drugs, then maybe they could think about getting out of poverty.