The Artblog and The St.Claire are excited to announce the 2016 New Art Writing Challenge – a FREE region wide contest to find the best new approaches in art writing. The goal of this competition is to get more people writing about art and foster a culture of art writing that incorporates a wide spectrum of methods, styles and ideas. The best writing will not only address the art in question, but also progress the conversation into unexpected and underrepresented territories.
Read MoreFor me, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of our artist-run projects felt most urgent when fed into a rightly inescapable question of: but for whom? Or more specifically, what is the responsibility of an artist project? To whom are we responsible?
Read MoreHoning in on the small body of work left to us by Hieronymus Bosch (some 25 paintings in museums across the world), the film opens with a series of luscious details of paint. Although cracking with age, the surface of the paintings still bears witness to the agile brush and even more agile mind of the artist. Lovingly detailed brushwork brings an almost jewel-like precision to the perverse devils and monsters that populate Bosch’s paintings, their forms dissolving into abstractions of color, line, and shape through the magnifying lens of the camera. The film is a paean to close looking, the sort of slow and deep observation that so few people seem to engage in–after all, recent studies have suggested that the average museum visitor spends about 15–30 seconds looking at a work of art.
Read MoreArtblog contributor, Donald Hunt emailed about his participation as an Artist Scholar at the Marian Anderson Historical Society. Donald, who writes about music for Artblog and was our graduate assistant on Artblog’s Artist and Social Responsibility (ASR) project, will perform in a special concert Aug. 27 at the Ethical Society–congratulations, Donald! And for you Daniel de Jesus fans, Donald says Daniel will be playing in the concert as well!
Read MoreI’ve been watching a lot of The Office (U.S.) lately. The heavy heat and caustic politics of the summer demanded a light touch and comedic reprieve. For me, the driving conflict of The Office was always the quiet struggle of the Dunder Mifflin employees to remain human in an inhuman environment. Their work world is formed by a toxic and invisible atmosphere designed to suffocate any and all aspirations to dignity, compassion, and individuality.
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