Another Artist Does Spots

Before the entire world was seeing spots thanks to Damian Hirst, another artist, Yayoi Kusama, filled (with some help) just a small room with them, and achieved an entirely different effect.  In a current exhibit at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia, children visitors are invited to place colorful dot stickers on any […]

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My Life in Art

Some of the most important objects by which I track my life are works of art.  They represent where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, what has interested me, who I was with, etc. I’ve been very fortunate to have traveled a good amount and to have seen some of the most amazing art collections in […]

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Read. Make art. Repeat.

After art, my next great love is books, so naturally I was drawn to this collection of works of art inspired by literature.  They are part of a long tradition of different media influencing one another, from plays based on books and operas placed on plays to current movies based on novels, video games, and […]

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Looking at art, up close and on my screen

When I look at paintings in a museum, I like to get so close (if the guard will let me) that I can see the texture of the paint on the canvas.  I like to understand the physicality and dimensions of a sculpture, and I like to walk into a gallery and feel completely overwhelmed […]

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Murals for a modern world: Diego Rivera at MoMA

When I saw the Diego Rivera frescoes at the MoMA, what immediately came to mind was the timeliness of the exhibit.  The frescos were originally commissioned by the museum in 1931, during the Great Depression and a time of great social unrest in Rivera’s native Mexico.  And here we are, looking back at these frescos […]

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Light Up My Life

Between LED screens, shop windows, and the tip of the Empire State Building, New York City does not exactly lack nighttime illumination.  However, through “video mapping” technology, lights are now animating the city streets in new ways.  Though I haven’t witnessed any of these projections in New York, I’ve come across them in various other […]

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Ever thought about collecting art?

Though I’ve never collected art (yet!) and cannot claim to be knowledgeable at all about that world, this seemed like a handy little guide for getting into art collecting. “Tips to Starting a Collection” from The Wall Street Journal Several of the author’s points here on collecting ring true to me.  For instance, “buy what […]

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What is Outsider Art?

I love this piece about outsider art, written after the Outsider Art Fair hit New York the weekend of January 28th-29th.  If we need a pithy definition of outsider art, it refers to “art created outside the boundaries of official culture” (Wikipedia), such as art by self-taught, mentally disabled, or folk artists.  But as the […]

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When Art Goes Viral

Artists have been the image-makers of all of history; the internet is greatest image-purveyor of today.  More than ever, the two are going hand-in-hand.  Not only is art being shared and written about on the internet, it is now becoming a meme in its own right.  And while I won’t deny my love of hipster […]

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Photography of the Now: The Radical Camera at the Jewish Museum

Photography is an artistic medium that we entirely take for granted.  Today, anyone with a cell phone can be a photographer.  Anyone with Facebook or Flickr or Instagram can share their photos with the world.  The world as we know it has never been so thoroughly documented in images. Recently, I viewed The Radical Camera, […]

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A Gallery Tour on 57th Street

Truth be told, as much as I love art, I’ve never been much of a gallery-goer.  I have always constantly visited museums, but galleries are an entirely different monster.  A gallery’s primary purpose is to sell artwork, and usually its client base is a very limited group of people.  Even so, their showrooms are free […]

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Everybody’s talking about Damien Hirst

Contemporary artist Damien Hirst is no stranger to provocative art.  He’s displayed dead animals, some preserved in formaldehyde (such as “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”) and others left out to rot.  He made a platinum cast of a human skull, and encrusted it with 8,601 diamonds—the piece cost $23.6 […]

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How to appreciate art

via The New Yorker, 1/16/12   Having dragged my friends along with me to museums many times despite their protests of “I don’t get art,” I was excited to find this cartoon as a model to show them how to appreciate a painting. …Okay, so maybe this isn’t the secret to understanding art, but in […]

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Artists use facebook just like us!

For most of us, Facebook is just a fun way to keep up with friends.  But for some artists—especially for those whose subject matter is contemporary social issues—Facebook provides endless fodder for their work, acutely illuminating the way we interact with each other and with the world.  Based on these artists’ observations, we may be […]

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(Yarn) Bombs Away

As both a fiber and street art enthusiast, I absolutely love the concept of yarn bombing (if you’re not familiar, prankster knitters and crocheters stealthily cover objects in public places with a yarn sheath). The work of artist Olek takes the movement to a whole different level, and makes me downright giddy.  Last year, in […]

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Art, According to Me

To me, understanding art is a way of understanding the world.  It is about being imaginative, curious, and open to life’s possibilities.  It’s not about accepting the world as it is, but envisioning how it could be.  As an artist and an art lover, this is way I approach my work and the things I […]

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