Artes Mundi

Miriam Backstrom The Opposite of Me is

Artes Mundi, Wales’s biggest contemporary visual art show is back for its 5th exhibition in its new home, the National Museum of Art, on the top floor of National Museum Cardiff. For the first time Artes Mundi  is in partnership with organisations such as Cardiff-based multidisciplinary arts centre Chapter, who will provide an additional venue for some of the works.

Exhibition: 6 October 2012 – 13 January 2013
The shortlisted artists were selected from over 750 nominations covering every continent in the world except Antarctica. Their art  has one overriding theme in common; their work explores social themes, telling stories of lived experience and gives a platform for commentary on the world today.

Miriam Bäckström (Sweden)

 Bäckström’s ongoing interests explore how history is told, and processes of creating and recreating memory using photography, text, theatre and video.

Tania Bruguera (Cuba)

Since the late 1990’s Tania Bruguera’s artistic practice has often reflected back on the social, cultural and economic experience of being Cuban.

Phil Collins (England) Informed by the visual traditions of cinema and television, Phil Collins’ diverse practice is based on close engagement with place and community.

Sheela Gowda (India) For Sheela Gowda the social and cultural reality of India has formed the basis of her practice.

TeresaMargolles (Mexico) Teresa Margolles’ work focuses on the collective turmoil of the Northern Mexican social experience where drug-related organized crime has resulted in widespread violence and murder.

Darius Mikšys (Lithuania) For Mikšys, installations provide the opportunity to experiment, conceptualise, and re-imagine processes of making, displaying and engaging with art.

ApolonijaŠušteršič (Slovenia) Artist and architect Apolonija Šušteršič has focused on the social aspects of living environments manifested in art as well as architectural contexts since the 1990’s.

Events are scheduled throughout the duration of the exhibition. http://artesmundi.org/en/news/whats-on-artes-mundi/#

On 29 November an international panel of judges will award one of the artists the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize, the UK’s largest art prize

The House of Illustration

Eric Carle 'What are you like?'

 

TheHouse of Illustration is the world’s first dedicated home for the art of illustration;  adverts, animation, picture books, political cartoons, scientific drawings, fashion design; they are a creative hub for emerging and established artists working in every aspect of illustration.

The House of Illustration put on exhibitions like their most recent UK-touring exhibition, What Are YouLike? on at Bath’s Holburne Museum until October 17^th.

Based on a Victorian parlour game, the exhibition invited 45 people in the public eye to create a self-revealing artwork by illustrating 8 of their favourite things from a list of 12: their favourite animal, book, item of clothing, comfort, food, pastime, place, possession, music, shoes, weather or pet aversion (the thing they love to hate!).

Past exhibitions are here

The House of Illustration  also run competitions and organise events with some of the country’s leading illustrators. They work in schools across London through the  PICTURE IT education programme.

They aim to eventuallycreate a permanent home to celebrate the past, present and future of illustration. Items in the shop go towards funding the dream....

 

 

Ten Environment Books that Changed the World

Friends of the Earth in their print journal 'EarthMatters'  (July 2012)  published a list of ten books that  they believe changed the Earth. Actually there are plenty of other Top Ten Environment Booklists just try Googling it!
There is a Cardiff based slant to this blog entry...I thought I'd check the list against Cardiff Met Library and Cardiff Public Library catalogues-here's the result . Information about how to join Cardiff Public Library is here. Follow the links from the book titles  for more information.

Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher

book on order at Cardiff Met Library

 The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency by John Seymour

book available from Cardiff Public Library

Earth from the Air by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

book available from Howard Gardens Library check the catalogue here

No Logo by Naomi Klein

book available from Cardiff Met Library check the catalogue here

The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock

Books by Lovelock are available from Cardiff Met Library check the catalogue here

 Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber

  the one book neither Library Service stocked

Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world by MarkKurlansky

book available from Cardiff Public Library

Food for Free by Richard Mabey

book available from Cardiff Public Library

Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed by JaredDiamond

book available from Cardiff Met Library check the catalogue here

The Animals of Farthing Wood by Colin Dann

Farthing Wood books available from Cardiff Public Library

 

Getty Research Institute on Facebook

The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts. They now have a Facebook page.

Why not 'Like' them? There are all sorts of snippets there already.

Here’s two of them!

Coveted by Venetian noblewomen and creative inspiration for Parisian lingerie-makers, these 16th-century needlework pattern books are among the rarest of early modern printed books to survive intact.

The new 2013-2014 Scholars Program research theme, “Connecting Seas: Cultural andArtistic Exchange,” explores how bodies of water, far from being barriers, have served as a rich and complex interchange in the visual arts. 
Previous Scholar Projects are linked on this page

 

Places as people, maps by Adam Dant

 

The image above is taken from the Spitalfields Life blog which today describes the amazing work of Adam Dant. Follow this link to see more images. Adam Dant’s map describes a journey through London as if through the human digestive tract from the mouth in Whitehall to the rectum in Whitechapel. You will notice that he has placed the brain in Westminster, the liver in Fleet St, the heart at St Paul’s, the stomach in the City and the genitals in the East End.

This is just one of series of maps of big cities that Adam has depicted in such a way as to portray their essential qualities, rendered as huge ink drawings of double-page plates from volumes in the mythical Library of Dr London  and executed while touring around European capitals this summer . Other volumes in this collection of giant books hold engravings and charts which display Paris constructed from the bones of Liberty,  several alternative versions of Manhattan, and Tokyo's subway system as a tangled knot of 'Shunga print' style figures.

The drawings  will be exhibited in a show which opens tonight at Hales Gallery.

Adam Dant
From the Library of Dr London

7 Sep - 6 Oct 2012

Private view: Thursday 6 September 6-9pm

Hales Gallery

Tea Building
7 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6LA
T 44 (0)20 7033 1938
F 44 (0)20 7033 1939

Conserving an Icon: Traces of Time in The Beanery by Kienholz

After in-depth examination, one of the most popular works in the Stedelijk Museum collection, The Beanery (1965) by Edward Kienholz, will be fully restored for the first time by the museum staff working in its new facilities.

As the installation comprises a variety of materials – for instance, the artist coated the entire installation in a synthetic liquid resin – this will be a complex operation. In anticipation of the grand reopening on September 23, the Stedelijk is preparing and restoring a number of its best-loved artworks.

A short video about this project is available on ARTUBE videos about Art and Design the online video channel for art and design contributed to by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, M HKA in Antwerp, Gemeentemuseum The Hague, De Pont in Tilburg and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The videos will generally be produced by these museums themselves,  and include  interviews with  artists , designers, and makers. Fiction and experimentation are also included, for example in the Boijmans TV series and in a number of unusual animation and remix films.

A Materials Library for the 21st Century

This video, by The Economist, features Andrew Dent, vice-president of Material ConneXion,sharing his thoughts on the evolution of material science.
Material ConneXion's online archive and material libraries, based in seven cities world-wide, feature over 6,500 of the world’s most cutting-edge materials all of them commercially available for use.
Andrew Dent believes Material ConneXion will help bridge the gap between science and design as we move from the “synthetic century” into a “biological century”, where intelligent, nature-inspired materials consume less resources and less energy.
 An international panel of experts review 50 to 60 new materials for the library every month, adding  only the best.
The archive is organized in eight categories (see below)  comprising the largest selection of sustainable materials and the only Cradle to Cradle materials library in the world:
the 8 categories: Polymers, Ceramics, Glass, Metals, Cement-based materials, Natural Materials, Carbon-based materials, Processes
An online Materials Database is available at a price to Universities (not available at Cardiff Met).

NewYork, Bangkok, Beijing, Cologne, Daegu, Istanbul, Milan, Seoul, Shanghai all have physical Material Connexions libraries

Feature articles from Matter magazine (published quarterly by Material Connexions) are available to read online . Each edition of the  journal  follows a specific  theme  like the special issues on  'Wellness' and 'Technology' and  all contain a wealth of information and images relating to innovative materials and their uses.