September Final Fridays Party Pics

 At the Pig

 At Wonder Fair

 At Wonder Fair

 At  Love Garden

 At Love Garden

 At Love Garden

 In Front of the Arts Center

 Invisible Hand

Invisible Hand

Karen'sTop three Picks Downtown Final Friday

100 Ghost Stories
Wonder Fair
803 1/2 Massachusetts
Wonder Fair is one of our favorite galleries for Final Fridays, as they always have new surprises up their sleeve.  This month, activities are around a new work and an installation 100 ghost stories, just in time for October spookiness.  The event includes artists and story tellers and a tunnel that will lead visitors to a special room of film screenings.
Wonder Fair will have events through the month, and we will, of course, keep you updated on these events.

For Final Friday, Wonder Fair says we should be at the gallery at 6 p.m. sharp for a an evening of ghost stories.Here is the Facebook Invite for more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/498915630138240/

Jessica Wohl: Dark Inside
Invisible Hand
846 Pennsylvania

Another haunting exhibit is at the Invisible Hand with works from Jessica Wohl.   Wohl embroiders on old photos; and although photo manipulation with old photographs is nothing new, we think the effect is very creepy.

Read more at Wohl's work and process at the Invisible Hand Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/464566346917244/

Check out more of Wohl's work here:

The Recessionists
Lawrence Arts Center
940 New Hampshire Street

We will check out the small ceramics that are at the Arts Center;  Cups and Orton Cone Box Show. However, one of our favorite bands, The Recessionists, will be playing outside the Arts Center.  According to Add Dean, this band and other music will start at 7:30 in front of the Arts Center.

Photo of the Cups show from 2010 Review Magazine

Be sure to check our blog on Saturday for our party pics for these events!

Top Picks for Campus Art Walk for Final Friday

The Campus Art Walk is added to this month’s Final Friday, making it a special mega marathon Final Friday. The Campus Art walk officially starts at 1:30 p.m and includes 14 venues and activities.   Promotions encourage people to tweet about what they see with #KUartwalk.

Here are our top picks for the Campus Art Walk: 

1. Auxiliary Power; Visual Art Adjunct Faculty Show: Art and Design Gallery 2:00-5:00
Included in this show is work by local scenester and photographer Luke Jordan, who has photographs of unsuspecting items found in a museum, like a light switch and railing.

Also at the Art and Design building, the ceramics club will be giving demos under the bridge on the north side of the building.

Pitcher's Blew by Joseph Meinecke

Railing Rijksmuseum Luke Jordan, Photo

 Members of the printmaking department will be selling  hand printed t-shirts with their designs.  One shirt has an image of a slice of pizza and says "Stay Cheesy." 

Earlier this week, we took a pic of Solace hanging prints made in the printmaking department.  These prints will be shown right outside the Art and Design Gallery.

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2. Overflow: Installation by Darin White 
Student Union Gallery 5:00-7:00

We went to an early preview of this show.  The installation looks fantastic in the gallery.  One work includes ashes gathered from Teller's.  We asked White to describe his work, and a simple reply is it is "about the Life Process.”

3. Paintings by Justin Bergin Wescoe Underground
Justin is a graduate student in Painting at KU. 

4. Celebration: Wrap, Tap, Snap: Level 4 Lobby and East Terrace: Kansas Union 5:00-6:00.

This is like a yarn bombing (they are calling it a wrap) of the iconic Jayhawk.  Potential for a tribal experience, as the African Drum Ensemble plays during the wrap.  

Top picks for Tuesday: PBR Book Club and Adam Lott at Teller's

 Please Take Seriously, by Adam Lott at Teller's

 

Art by Adam Lott

We're happy to see that Adam Lott will be showing work at Teller's on Tuesday from 6:00-8:00.  Adam is a favorite bartender at the Pig and a regular at Nerd Nite.  Here is the Facebook invite:https://www.facebook.com/#!/events/446129572096583/

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PBR Book Club at Frank's North Star

The book clubbers will be discussing this month's book, Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell,  at Frank's starting at 8:00.   It will be prep for the Thursday event where Woodrell himself will be at Liberty Hall starting at 7:30 to discuss his book.  

Final Friday Marathon: How long is our attention span for looking at art?

Final Friday has expanded this month to include the Campus Art Walk at KU which has 14 different venues plus events, starting early at 1:30-6:00 p.m.  Final Fridays Downtown is 5:30-9:00.  This is potential for a lot of time looking at art! and will test our art going stamina (In order to catch the highlights, we’ll post our picks for both downtown and campus later this week).

Realistically, what is our maximum attention span for the activity of looking at art?  One hour?  Two hours?  How long do we spend looking at each art work?

London’s Daily Mail newspaper conducted a study at the famous Tate gallery to find the average time patrons spent with art works.  Surprisingly, the average time spent with most art pieces is around 5 seconds.  The aim of the study by the newspaper was to see if there was a difference between the amount of time people were prepared to give a classic painting and to modern art.

The results of the study showed that people spend more time with classical art.  See a few results:

Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais

Most Viewers: Total viewers: 562: Dwell Time: 1 minute, 57 seconds.  Longest Look: 30 minutes

Monument by Tracey Emin

Total viewers: 177: Average dwell time: 5 seconds; longest look: 2 minutes.

To see more results of this study, go to: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365672/Modern-art-How-gallery-visitors-viewed-work-Damien-Hirst-Tracy-Emin-5-seconds.html

Bonjour Picasso at the Nelson and Open Drawing today

Picasso: Woman with Mauve Hat, oil on canvas, 1939

When we are in Kansas City, we will stop by to see the The Bonjour Picasso exhibition.  It starts today at the Nelson Atkins Museum.  It features two paintings plus drawings, with 18 black and white photographs of Picasso at his home in La Californie. 

Read more about it here: http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/Exhibitions.cfm?id=154

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Open Drawing Today

There is a free figure open drawing session today at KU from 11:00-2:00.  The location is room 405 in the Art and Design building.  Bring drawing supplies.

MCL at the Spencer and Winter's Bone Flow Chart

 Mary Sibande's scultpure Sophie-Ntombikayise

MCL wrote a composition based on this sculpture

Last night, we dropped by the Spencer Museum to hear a live DJ performance by MCL.  As anticipated, the experience was intriguing. Although the crowd was small and subdue, MCL was lively and the electronic synthesizers resonated in the central court.
The performance was in conjunction with contemporary South African sculptures that are on display. 

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Winter's Bone is the current Read Across Lawrence Book. As seen at Nerd Nite,  flow charts were created to help you find similar books.

 More flow charts for Winter's Bone can be found here: http://www.lawrence.lib.ks.us/news-events/read-across-lawrence/if-you-liked-winters-bone/

In the age of cameras, are we seeing better photographs?

If we had a magic ticket to go anywhere to see any art exhibit this week, we would go to the international festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, France, where we could view the greatest photojournalist work from around the world in exhibitions across the city.  Evening screenings are in the dramatic open air medieval enclosure of the Campo Santo.

This exhibition is in an age where photographs are everywhere. Many people have a camera in their phone, and over 380 million photos are uploaded on Facebook every day.

One philosophy on the subject of art is that if you give people the tools, and the artist within will naturally emerge.  Now that virtually everyone has a camera, did this happen? Are we seeing better images on a daily basis?

We like the quote from James Estrin from the New York Times Online "Just as access to pens and paper hasn't produced thousands of Shakespears or Nobokovs, this explosion of camera phones doesn't seem to have led to more Dorthea Langes or Henri-Cartier Bressons.  But it has certainly led to more images of what people ate at lunch....
We are so bombarded with so much visual stimuli via the Web and social media that it becomes almost impossible to rise above the flood of images.  And if everyone likes everything, no one photograph is better than another. "


See info about the festival in Perpignan here: http://www.visapourlimage.com/index.do

Read the entire article by James Estrin here: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/in-an-age-of-likes-commonplace-images-prevail/?pagewanted=all

Field Trip: Smellscape in Kansas CIty

Artist Sissel Tolaas (above) spent five years collecting smells for her "SmellScape KCK/KCMO (2007-2012)" 

SmellScape at the Grand Arts
1819 Grand

Smellscape is the latest project by Berlin-based artist and smell researcher Sissel Tolaas. Smellscape is a game which invites the public to engage as players investigating the smells of Kansas City. Participants are invited to explore downtown neighborhoods on foot and use their sense of smell to find and collect scratch and sniff cards. 
Here is the write up in Inkkc: 

Tolaas spent five years collecting smells in the metro area, extracting some from physical objects and capturing ambient scents by means of the same technology used in the perfume industry.

The firm, which has a lab in New Jersey, is a sponsor of Tolaas’ artworks. She works with the lab, Switzer said, to figure out the component molecules of smells so she can replicate them.

And replicate them she has: Her set of 20 scratch-and-sniff cards can be collected at outposts around the city. The cards are part of a smell game that includes prizes and surprises.

Read more about this project here: http://inkkc.com/content/first-friday-artist-exhibits-a-scent-of-adventure/

Read more here: http://inkkc.com/content/first-friday-artist-exhibits-a-scent-of-adventure/#storylink=cp

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Read more here: http://inkkc.com/content/first-friday-artist-exhibits-a-scent-of-adventure/#storylink=cp

A new website we love and an update on the Warhol Foundation

A site we love is Pixmaven.
If you have ever sat though a pretentious critique of any kind,  you will appreciate this website that generates phrases for such events.
Here are the instructions via the website:
Salvation is here! 
Feeling inarticulate? Critically gauche? Or just verbally impotent?
We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy "insights." With this device you can speak about Art with both authority and confidence. Use this marvellous tool to amaze and confound friends and colleagues. Don't miss this opportunity to menace and dumbfound professors and artists emeriti! 

The instructions are simple,  Type in any five digit number.
Here is the site: http://www.pixmaven.com/phrase_generator.html

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Warhol Foundation Update

The Warhol Foundation, one of the largest foundations for grants that go directly to artists, announced this week that it will disperse its entire collection of Warhols, donating some and selling others.  Officials say the Foundation will shift exclusively into a grant making organization.  The foundation says it hopes to fill in the void left by declining private and government arts support.

This questions the role that artists’ foundations play.  Originally, these foundations were started by artists as a means to oversee individual artist’s legacies by documenting and protecting work.  The foundations typically sell a few works a year to finance operations.

 The Warhol Foundation, along with the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, was one of the first foundations to make the decision not to fund costly authenticating of work, choosing, instead, to have these funds go directly to artists. In the past, the Warhol Foundation has awarded $250 million in grants to hundreds of museums and other non-profits.

Super Art Openings this Friday

Lawrence has two great art openings this Friday, September 14

The Paper Chase: Invisible Hand: 5:00-9:00

This event will host artists in the print quarterly "The Bitter and the Better” curatedby Lawrence artist Andrew Burkitt. Ten artists from around the country will exhibit works on paper.  The show opens Friday, with prints for sale. The prints will be available for sale on Saturday as well. 

Here is the Facebook Invite for more information on the artists.https://www.facebook.com/events/361364363939939/

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Paintings by Louis Copt and sculptures by Lori Norwood

Landmark Bank 6th and Wakarusa

5:30-7:30.

Louis and Lori are two of Lawrence’s most skilled and proficient artists. They will be showing work at Landmark Bank. Wait…a bank? Landmark is one of our favorite places to view art in Lawrence.  Although not a gallery, the space to view art is better than most galleries in Lawrence.  The bank has installed lighting and created wall space, and they present a nice opening for the artists.

Here is the Facebook invite: https://www.facebook.com/events/221693984626246/

Art Talk: Fred Stonehouse

Art Talk on Thursday:

KU’s printmaking department  hosts visiting artist and Wisconsin scenester Fred Stonehouse.  The print department, with a lead from Micheal Krueger, tends to acquire visiting artists who are trendy scenesters in whatever city they are from.  These visiting artists also often specialize in marginal-type art.  According to the Spencer, "Stonehouse's style reflects outsider and folk art influences. “ Another review of his work says this; “Often encompassing religious or surreal contexts, his paintings are a materialization of his nostalgia for familiar cartoon figures of the past, blended with the artist's own delicate balance of humor, beauty and derangement.”
Stonehouse will also make an edition of prints with printmaking students while he is here. 

The lecture is Thusday at 6:00 at the Spencer Museum Auditorium.

Nerd Nite on Wedesday: Down Home

Wednesday brings another Nerd Nite to the Blue Room at Pachamama’s in Lawrence. It looks to be a good one!  The focus this month is in conjunction with the hillbilly/meth aesthetic of  the Read Across Lawrence Book "Winter’s Bone."  The lectures are:  “Behaving Bad: The Dirty South (mostly) in Literature”; ‘The chemistry and biology of Meth”; and ‘Picking and Plucking: A short history (and demonstration) of the fiddle and banjo.” Seating is limited, and we think this event will fill up fast, so otherwise typically late scenesters must be prompt. Starting time is 8:00, but doors open between 7:00 and 7:30. 

Why did Warhol choose soup for his pop image?

The mundane subject matter of Warhol's soup cans were new and puzzling to the art world when they first were on display 50 years ago in Los Angeles.  A neighborhood gallery stacked a pyramid of actual soup cans in its window along with a sign that said "Get the real thing for only 29 cents."

Why did Warhol choose soup for his now iconic image? Warhol's response is that he ate Campbell's soup every day for lunch.  Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times,  says "Frankly, if you buy that, you might also be in the market to acquire a bridge down in Brooklyn. "

Night has a theory about the subject, and says the soup cans may have a deeper meaning. "Soup was essential studio slang, the conversational lingo among New York School painters when they talked about their work.  Specifically, soup was the metaphor used by William De Kooning-the most successful artist of the era-to characterize his robust Abstract Expressionism.  If soup worked for him, why not Warhol?"

Target tackles Warhol
Campbell's said Wednesday that a new limited-edition line of Warhol-themed condensed tomato soup cans will go on sale at most Target stores across the country.  The cans, priced at 75 cents each and are intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the pop artist's first paintings of Campbell's soup cans. 
We think Warhol would LOVE this!