NEWS
Via Friend of Artblog Julie Karabenick, sad news that George Earl Ortman died earlier this month at age 89. Karabenick, who runs the great abstract art website, GeoForm, includes art by George Ortman on her site and she interviewed Ortman in 2010. Below is an excerpt from the interview, and you can read the entire interview here.
“I’ve always felt fortunate being born in the mid 20s and in America. I had the opportunity to be in New York and to work with William Stanley Hayter and a group of outstanding young artists at the Atelier 17. I was in Paris at age 22 when Paris was alive with ideas for a new theater. Then back in New York and the co-op galleries of 10th Street, the Artists’ Club, the beginnings of the off-Broadway theater movement, the young poets, the new young musicians and composers around John Cage. The intellectual and cultural center was now in New York. The 50s and early 60s saw Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop art, Minimalism, Op art, Neo-Geo and Earthworks. The exhibitions and new museum construction from the 60s up to the present have been phenomenal—MOMA, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Morgan, the Metropolitan Museum—all in New York. I think I have seen some of the finest exhibitions put on in the 20th century. I have been fortunate to be part of it all. It’s been a good journey.” —George Earl Ortman (2010)
Great Links
Great Short Read – Stephan Salisbury on Lost Eakinses and Lost and Found Calders
Great Long Read via David Dempewolf – How Art Became Irrelevant
Great Name Change – The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts is now The Delaware Contemporary!
OPPORTUNITIES
Cafe Con Leche and Most Wanted Fine Art are partnering with The Bloomfield Garfield Corporation to present a Latino Artist Residency in Pittsburgh, PA.
…The goal of this artist residency program is to 1) increase Latino artist presence in Pittsburgh 2) support Latino artists in making art inspired by Pittsburgh 3) encourage artistic relationships between Latino artists and non-Latino Pittsburgh artists.The residency will occur March to August of 2016. Applications will be accepted until positions are filled; artists will begin to be notified by February. Local artists as well as artists from all over the country and internationally are encouraged to apply!
…Latino is defined as a person from or identifies with Latin American and Caribbean countries/territories that speak Spanish, Portuguese, or an indigenous language. Note: Artist does not need to be bilingual.
What the artist gets as a part of the residency:
Artist stipend
Place to stay: Individual bedroom with shared bathroom, kitchen, work space. Artist can bring family/close associates to stay with them.
Marketing & Public Relations Support
Event Planning Support
Gift certificates for local restaurants
Transportation Assistance in the city of Pittsburgh
Networking Opportunities with Pittsburgh arts community
Community/family style dinners with artists in Pittsburgh
Possibility of help with travel costs – fill out the travel request form below
As a part of being a resident, the artist is required to:Stay in Pittsburgh for the duration of the 30 day residency except in the case of an emergency.
Gallery Art Installation (if you are a performance artist you will be paired with a visual artist).
Make art inspired by your experiences of living in Pittsburgh.
Be available for a two events – opening event night at Unblurred & an artist dinner hosted by Cafe Con Leche.
Host a third event focused on displaying their work in Pittsburgh.
Artist can be any of the following mediums:Poetry/Spoken Word
Visual Arts
Maker
Musician
Dance
Theater
Media: Videography, Photography
We are interested in seeing artists whose work is influenced by:African Diaspora; Indigenous people; Urban Latino; Pan-Latino; Youth; Pittsburgh; Latinx/Queer Trans People of Color; Immigration; Black Lives Matter; Artivism; Reproductive Justice
APPLICATION
The online application is at their website here.
Via Maria Moller…Mural Arts Program – Tacony Resident Artist Initiative
Deadline January 15: The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program invites visual artists working in any medium to apply for the Tacony Resident Artist Initiative, a residency running March 1 through October 30, 2016. This residency, housed in a storefront library on the Torresdale Avenue Commercial Corridor in Northeast Philadelphia, is a unique opportunity to combine personal practice, community engagement, and the creation of civically-focused public art. The Tacony Resident Artist Initiative is open to visual artists based in the Philadelphia area with experience in public art and/or community engagement. Artists need not have experience in mural-making to be considered.
The two artists selected for the residency will share a studio space in a renovated storefront in the heart of Tacony’s Torresdale Avenue Commercial Corridor. The storefront will also serve as a temporary space for the Tacony Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which will be closed for renovations until 2018. Each artist will receive free studio space, a monthly stipend of $2,000, and will have access to funding that is set aside for civic improvement-focused public art projects along the commercial corridor.
In exchange, each artist will be expected to be an engaged and engaging presence in the studio, the library, the corridor and the wider community. In addition to activating the studio with their personal practice, each artist will design and execute one or two projects on the Torresdale Avenue Commercial Corridor and engage the community in the development and creation of these projects through workshops and events. Artists will also take part in open houses, community meetings, and similar events that will create connections with the community. Artists will be expected to maintain an on-site presence of approximately 20 hours a week.
ARTIST NEWS
Congratulations to Jesse Krimes, whose solitary confinement piece at the one-day Amnesty International program created some good discussion about the important prison issue. Krimes has a solo show opening at Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery opening January 12. More about Jesse at his website
Apokaluptein: 16389067;II Recreation of original installed at Eastern State Penitentiary.
Via Tyler….Dona Nelson in Art in America
Dona Nelson, Professor of Painting at Tyler has recently published a great article in the December 2015 issue of Art in America Magazine! The article, under the magazine’s “Muse” section shares Dona’s thoughts on the well known Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Professor Nelson states, “In the Mercer Museum, as in New York’s Guggenheim Museum, you look up and the entire building is above you. There is no wasted interior space. Twenty years ago, my first impression of the museum was of a structure with a distinctive quality of internalized scale, a tight concrete fortress with windows scattered here and there, rising straight up from a grassy hill.”
and, “I am particularly interested in the Mercer Museum because it is so different in concept and feeling from contemporary art spaces.” Read Dona’s article here.
via Amze Emmons…Serena Perrone at Detroit Institute of Arts
Serena Perrone‘s work is currently being shown at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the exhibition Fifty Years of Collecting: Detroit Institute of Arts’ Friends of Prints, Drawings and Photographs Exhibition, Dec 15, 2015 -June 18, 2016.
from DIA: Since its founding in 1965–66 as the Print and Drawing Club, a support group for the DIA’s then Graphic Arts Department (now Department of Prints, Drawings and Photographs), the Friends of Prints, Drawings and Photographs has commissioned, purchased or given as gifts from members hundreds of works on paper to the DIA collection. This 50th year exhibition acknowledges and honors past achievements of this dynamic group of museum devotees. Among the featured works are Berenice Abbott’s “New York at Night,”Robert Frank’s “Belle Isle Detroit,” Erich Heckel‘s 1908 “Die Brucke” poster, Edvard Munch’s “Lovers,” Richard Diebenkorn’s “Touched Red,” Helen Frankenthaler’s “Tales of the Genji III,”Judy Pfaff’s “Money Tree,” Serena Perrone’s “Through the Periscope” and selections from Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bellini Series.”
Artblog fave, Diane Burko gets a great write up in Numero Cinq magazine.
Artblog fave, Douglas Witmer has an April, 2016, show at Houston’s Gray Contemporary, which just moved into a new space.
University of the Arts’ graduates, the Quay Brothers get a nice write up in Hyperallergic
