Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Views: Inside The Studio Of A Glass-Blower Sculptor

Victoria and Albert Museum (March 28, 2023) – Inspired by traditional oil paintings, sculptor Elliot Walker works with molten glass at exceptionally high temperatures and speed to create unique 3D still life sculptures. Step inside his studio to see each stage of this extremely challenging process, as he creates a new work made up of three-dimensional sliced fish, in response to a tiny fragment of a Middle Eastern glass beaker in our collection.

Video timeline: 00:00 In the studio 01:10 Elliot’s still life series 01:45 Design inspiration from the V&A collection 03:03 Hot workshop: gathering molten glass with a blowpipe 03:30 Building up layers of clear and coloured glass 03:56 Spiralling the coloured glass 04:15 Shaping the glass with different tools 04:50 ‘Swedish’ or bubble overlay technique 05:57 Creating the fish shape 06:41 Adding surface texture, fins and a metallic finish 08:14 Cold workshop: cutting and polishing 09:17 The finished piece

Art: ‘Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism’

gallery view of Near East to Far West with wall text and two paintings
Left to right: Gerald Cassidy, Cui Bono?, about 1911. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art: Gift of Gerald Cassidy, 1915 (282.23P). Gerald Cassidy, Midday Sun, North Africa, 1920s.

Denver Art Museum (March 27, 2023): Artworks in Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism (through May 29) present a range of representations from sympathetic to stereotyped. Indeed, racialized stereotypes such as the “Noble Savage” and odalisque (a woman in a female-only domestic space, or harem, who is often overly sexualized in European art) circulated throughout French Orientalism and western American art.

Acknowledging the ongoing harm of such representations, we knew that we needed to make space for diverse perspectives: essentially, to make room for the voices too often repressed or ignored in the artwork.

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Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 3, 2023

A woman drinks coffee and sits on an armchair that is stacked on another chair and a table in order to reach rays of...

The New Yorker – April 3, 2023 issue:

The Data Delusion

A threedimensional pattern of books turning into transistor boards.

We’ve uploaded everything anyone has ever known onto a worldwide network of machines. What if it doesn’t have all the answers?

How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?

An American flag concealing a cross underneath it.

Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?

The Wild World of Music

The illustrated head of musician and scientist David Sulzer sits at the center of a network of symbols for the brain...

What can elephants, birds, and flamenco players teach a neuroscientist-composer about music?

International Art: Apollo Magazine – April 2023

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Apollo Magazine – April 2023 issue:

• The cosmic visions of Hilma af Klint

• Canova comes in from the cold

• Is Vermeer worth queuing for?

In his room – the retiring art of Giorgio Morandi

A show of paintings belonging to his most important patron reflects the artist’s quietly spirited side

Apollo Magazine

31 minutes ago

April 2023 | Apollo Magazine

Classical Music Concerts: The Young Virtuosos At St. Mark’s In San Francisco

Omni Foundation (March 26, 2023) – The Omni Foundation presents 4 rising young stars of the guitar in concert for its 2nd edition to the Young Virtuosos Live from St. Mark’s series.

Program:

  • Sonata, op. 101 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
  • Concerto, BWV 972 by J. S. Bach (1685-1750
  • Fugue, BWV 997 by J. S. Bach (1685-1750)

Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Spring 2023

Kenyon Review – Spring 2023 issue includes a folio of literature in translation guest edited by award-winning translators Jennifer Croft, Anton Hur, and Jeremy Tiang. The issue also includes poetry by Kwame Dawes, Timothy Donnelly, K. Iver, and Danusha Lameris; fiction by Sam J. Miller, Michael Tod Powers, J. T. Sutlive, and Lindsay Turner; nonfiction by A. J. Bermudez; and the winner of the 2022 Short Fiction Contest, judged by Karen Russell. The cover art is by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.

“A Field Guide to the Bear-Men of Leningrad” : a rare non-speculative thing from me, about boyhood & masculinity & human monstrosity in 1930s Russi… https://instagr.am/p/CqDkW1jsCI5/

The New York Times Book Review – March 26, 2023

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The New York Times Book Review – March 26, 2023:

Margaret Atwood Is Still Sending Us Notes From the Future

A photograph of Margaret Atwood, who is wearing a green scarf and green button-down shirt.
Margaret Atwood’s new book is “Old Babes in the Wood.”Credit…Arden Wray for The New York Times

Her new story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” offers elegiac scenes from a marriage plus a grab bag of curious fables.


There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we’re stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it’s Margaret Atwood.

50 Years On, ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’ Still Haunts and Inspires

Michael Lesy’s book of historical photographs and found text offers a singular portrait of American life.

Michael Lesy’s 1973 book “Wisconsin Death Trip” is an American oddity, a cult classic for a reason. In a way that few documentary texts do, it makes us leave the baggage of modernity at the trailhead. It forces us back into the inconceivably long nights in rural and small-town America before the widespread use of electricity, before radio, before antibiotics for dying children and antidepressants for anxiety bordering on mania, when events could make a family feel that some nocturnal beast had chalked its door.

The Prophetic

This illustration depicts a barren landscape, with yellow ground and, in the distance, a low brown mountain range beneath an aqua sky scattered clouds and a couple yellow stars. In the middle of the landscape stands a small figure of a woman in a long green tunic. Above her head, and connected to her body via several pink and red rays, is an enormous human eyeball. At the center of the eye, where the pupil and iris should be, there is a stormy sky: a white moon, half hidden by dark clouds, and streaks of lightning.
Credit…Nada Hayek

The first installment of an essay series on American literature and faith.

I am a child of the church. In an early memory, I am 6 years old, half-asleep in the back of my grandparents’ station wagon on the way home from a revival…

Exhibitions: Inside ‘After Impressionism’ In London

Christie’s (March 24, 2023) – Curator MaryAnne Stevens explains the inspiration for the National Gallery’s new show, which is sponsored by Christie’s. Dominated by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Munch, it also includes lesser-known figures such as Isidre Nonell and Max Slevogt.

After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art

25 March – 13 August 2023

Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation.

The exhibition celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.

Exhibition Views: Shirley Jaffe – Form As Experiment

VernissageTV (March 24, 2023) – The exhibition “Shirley Jaffe: Form as Experiment” at Kunstmuseum Basel is the first retrospective of the American abstract painter in Switzerland. Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016) was born in the United States and settled in Paris in the 1950s.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents 113 works, from Shirley Jaffe’s early abstract expressionist works to the geometric paintings that are characteristic of her late oeuvre.

Shirley Jaffe – Form as Experiment

March 25 to July 30, 2023

Atelier de Shirley Jaffe, Paris, 13 octobre 2008, Kunstwerk im Hintergrund : Shirley Jaffe, "Bande Dessinée en Noir et Blanc", 2009, © 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich, © Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Jean-Christophe Mazur
Shirley Jaffe
Manyness by Shirley Jaffe

Born in New Jersey in 1923 as Shirley Sternstein, in 1949, the artist, now Mrs Jaffe, moved to Paris. Following her short-lived her marriage to the journalist Irving Jaffe, the painter decided to remain in France. Having soon established herself in the city, she held regular contact with the American “art expats” Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell, who had relocated to Paris somewhat later.

Her work dating from this period may be attributed to Abstract Expressionism, a form that sought to draw exclusively from its own resources and which consisted primarily of wildly applied fields of colour and gestures. Although, for the art market at the time, this amounted to a success formula Jaffe nevertheless decided to strike out in a different direction.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 24, 2023: This week: Art Basel Hong Kong bounces back. After cancellations, delays and two years of restricted fairs, the fair has returned to something like pre-Covid normality.

So, as other Asian art centres like Seoul and Singapore become increasingly influential, what is the atmosphere like in Hong Kong? Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, joins us to discuss the fair, the M+ museum and more. It is becoming increasingly clear that social media corporations have become self-appointed cultural gatekeepers that decide which works of art can freely circulate, be pushed into the digital margins or even banned.

Our live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist Emma Shapiro and Elizabeth Larison, the Director of the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program at the National Coalition Against Censorship, about the issue and a project to counter this tendency, called Don’t Delete Art. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), a photographic project by Brenda L. Croft, in which she depicts fellow First Nations women and girls.

The work is part of The National 4: Australian Art Now, a survey across multiple venues in Sydney. One of the show’s curators, Beatrice Gralton, tells us about Croft’s epic series.Art Basel Hong Kong, until 25 March.Visit Don’t Delete Art: dontdelete.artThe National 4: Australian Art Now continues until 23 July.