The New Yorker Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil will never read all three volumes and 1,928 pages of “On What Matters,” but she knows how to draw them.
Tag Archives: Women
Interviews: Ballet Dancer Misty Copeland (Podcast)
Was the first black principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre earlier denied roles because of her skin colour? She tells host, Anne McElvoy, how dance saved her from a difficult childhood and about her first performance in a classic Christmas production. And, which ballets would she remove from the repertoire?
Misty Danielle Copeland is an American ballet dancer for American Ballet Theatre, one of the three leading classical ballet companies in the United States. On June 30, 2015, Copeland became the first African American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in ABT’s 75-year history
Video Profiles: Asha Deliverance And Her ‘Fabric-Welded Domes’
In 1979 Asha Deliverance sewed her first geodesic dome on an old Singer sewing machine, finishing it in time to become her eldest child’s first home. Motivated by the work of Buckminster Fuller, she continued to build dome homes for friends until she responded to increasing demand and opened the country’s first retail dome company in 1980.
Today, Asha has stopped sewing and relies on her team at the Pacific Domes headquarters in Ashland, Oregon to fabric weld her domes. The company provides shelters for families, glamping sites, greenhouses, climbing, events (e.g. Coachella) and extreme outposts. “To test some of the possible challenges of living on Mars, NASA joined forces with Pacific Domes in early in 2013 to erect a 44-foot geodesic-engineered dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa, Hawaii.”
The company offers DIY dome kits starting at $5,500 for a 16 foot (5 meter) shelter that can be erected with their manual in a couple of days (instructions for the deck are included). When we asked Deliverance about the frustrations of some dome builders like Shelter Publications’ Lloyd Kahn she explained that in the ‘60s people were building domes out of wood which required sealing multiple joints, but that using fabric has made all the difference.
Interviews: Design And Architecture In 2020 – Ilse Crawford & Julia Watson
A look back at the year that was in design and architecture, featuring conversations with creative director Ilse Crawford and designer and author Julia Watson.
Plus: Venice Biennale 2020 curator Hashim Sarkis.
Home Tours: ‘Tree House’ In Bronte Beach, Sydney, Australia’ By Madeleine Blanchfield Architects
Tree House by Madeleine Blanchfield Architects is a light-filled family home near Bronte Beach in Sydney. As the architect’s own home, the project exemplifies the studio’s experiential design approach, which sees light, form and materiality coalesce to create an experience of place.
The architecture and interiors evoke mood and respond to the changes in light over the course of the day, while the elevated position within the treetops that gives Tree House its name creates a calming atmosphere. With the living space located at the top floor of the architect’s own home, a journey is created through the architecture via a sculptural staircase.
The sculptural forms created by the spiral staircase are balanced by the more pared back interiors, which take their cues from the natural setting. Pale timber, concrete and terracotta tiles, along with the careful approach to both natural and artificial light, reflect the design’s connection to the garden that surrounds it and the nearby beach. This use of few materials detailed to create a highly refined architectural response is characteristic of an architect’s own home.
It highlights how Madeleine Blanchfield Architects has created an experiential home in which simple elements such as materials, details, and changes in light can enhance the mood of a space, resulting in a family home whose architecture, interiors and garden work together to create a sense of lightness and calm.
For More from The Local Project: Website – https://thelocalproject.com.au/
Profile Video: French-English Textile Artist ‘Valerie Wartelle’
My main fascination lies within the manipulation of fibres and textiles as an expressive art form. Taking the rural environment as my inspiration,I explore long-term interests of texture, colour, layering and process to create contemplative and ethereal artworks.
My primary technique is wet felting; a traditional craft technique using wool tops, hot water, soapsuds and friction to interlock the fibres together. The making is muscular and rhythmic as I lay, pour, roll and squeeze again and again. It seems repetition nudges me into a semi-meditative space – it invites me to trust myself, and let the haptic connections sinuously paint a new space for the viewer to contemplate.
The compositions are built in layers, hinting at what may lie beneath, and use translucency and light to create absorbing moods. These are highly textured felt pieces in which cloth is embedded, prints disguised, and threads unravelled as a painter with her brush. The analogy with painting is significant throughout, making the viewing inquisitive, and challenging people’s perception.
Brought up in France and French Polynesia, I originally came to the UK to study textile design and am now a widely exhibited artist working and living in West Yorkshire. In 2015, I was awarded the Embroidery Magazine’s Best Emerging Textile Artist at SIT Select Showcase, as well as Best Picture in Show at theGreat North Art Show.
Video Profiles: American Conceptual Painter Lee Lozano (1930-1999)
Jo Applin gives an insight into both Lee Lozano’s life and her work, contextualizing her practice and highlighting her response to the constraints of constitutional systems, gender dynamics, power, money, and politics.
Created in 1962–1963, the early paintings and drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset use airplanes as a central image and can be considered as examples of the artist’s passionate exploration of creative energy in its purist form. This focused body of early work exposes a complex and deeply intimate inner life grappling with one-sided gender and societal dichotomies, while other works display a form of ferocious humour and playfulness, exploiting the rhetoric of exaggeration to its most cogent effect.
Her raw expressionist brush strokes create powerful works imbued with a very personal iconography, including genitals, religious symbols, tools and body parts. Lozano’s short lived but influential career remains a source of fascination, lauded by Lucy Lippard as the foremost female conceptual artist of her era in New York. Jo Applin is author of ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ and ‘Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture.’ She teaches modern and contemporary art at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Video Profile: ‘Elsie De Wolfe’ – America’s First Professional Interior Designer (1859 – 1950)
The year 2020 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted millions of women in the U.S. the right to vote.
The Frick is celebrating with a series of videos honoring the stories of women who made, appeared in, collected, and took care of art in this collection. In the second-to-last episode, meet Elsie de Wolfe, America’s first professional interior designer, who decorated the Frick’s Fifth Avenue home. #WhatsHerStory
Elsie de Wolfe, also known as Lady Mendl, (December 20, c. 1859 – July 12, 1950) was an American actress and interior decorator.
Born in New York City, de Wolfe was acutely sensitive to environment from her earliest years, and became one of the first women interior designers, replacing heavy Victorian styles with light, intimate effects and uncluttered room layouts. Her marriage to English diplomat Sir Charles Mendl was seen as one of convenience, though she was proud to be called Lady Mendl, and her lifelong companion was Elisabeth Marbury, with whom she lived in New York and Paris. De Wolfe was a prominent social figure, who entertained in the most distinguished circles.
Landmark Profiles: ‘The Woman Who Built The Brooklyn Bridge’ (Video)
New York’s Brooklyn Bridge only exists today because of the determination and resolve of one woman. This video was powered by Bluebeam.
Art: The ‘Dangerously Independent Women’ Of Italian Painter Vittorio Corcos (1859-1933)
He went on to become a highly respected portraitist, counting Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Benito Mussolini and opera star Lina Cavalieri among his subjects. In Coy’s view, however, his portraits were relatively conventional offerings — and Corcos’s ‘best work’ was his turn-of-the-century imagery of ‘dangerously independent women’.
Compare the biographies of Vittorio Corcos (1859-1933) and Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), and a remarkable number of similarities become apparent. Both were born into Jewish families in the Italian port city of Livorno in the second half of the 19th century; both would settle — and artistically come of age — in Paris. Both would even excel at the same type of paintings: their provocative depictions of women.
Their reputations, however, have suffered widely different fates. Modigliani, who struggled to sell much work before his death at the age of 35, is today regarded as a master of Modernism. Corcos, by contrast, who enjoyed a long and prosperous international career, posthumously became a rather forgotten figure.
