Reading List: Photography

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The Society for Photographic Education will have it’s 2014 national conference in downtown Baltimore next month, the weekend of March 6-8. Here’s some recent articles addressing some of the issues to be raised in their conference and in photo exhibitions around the city.

LED streetlights and the changes in nighttime photography in cities.

Images from Chris Morris’ series of New York City subway photos in 1981.

Jerry Saltz’s history of the selfie.

NY Times review of What is a Photograph? at the International Center of Photography.

Short (15 minute) video about Thomas Demands’ work and methods.

Justin Quinnell’s pinhole photography in the Washington Post.

 

 

 

NEW Station North CSA

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Station North Arts and Entertainment District is pleased to announce the launch of a new project: Community Supported Art (CSA). Based on the same concept as Community Supported Agriculture, the Station North CSA will provide participating shareholders with the freshest art that Baltimore has to offer. We’ve assembled a jury of Station North art celebrities to select artists to produce work for the first season.

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At each presentation event (see below for dates), 4 CSA artists will give short presentations on their work and shareholders will rank their preferred artists. Ranking is used to ensure that shareholders aren’t getting a box full of kale at pick-up when they’d rather have beets. These events are also an opportunity to network, mingle, and meet CSA artists. Presentation and pickup events will be catered by the Chesapeake.

The goal of the Station North CSA is to create an engaged community of local arts supporters by establishing relationships between gallerists and local patrons and creating an exciting new model of art support and distribution. Shareholders will each receive work from 6 of the 12 participating artists; art distribution will be determined by shareholders’ preferences.

http://www.stationnorth.org/projects/stationnorthcsa

Baltimore Meetup for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon!

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https://www.facebook.com/events/205005429694260/?ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular&source=1

“Wikipedia’s gender trouble is well documented: in a 2010 survey, Wikimedia found that less than 13% of its contributors are female. The reasons for the gender gap are up for debate: suggestions include leisure inequality, how gender socialization shapes public comportment, and the contentious nature of Wikipedia’s talk pages. The practical effect of this disparity, however, is not. Content is skewed by the lack of female participation. Many articles on notable women in history and art are absent on Wikipedia. This represents an alarming aporia in an increasingly important repository of shared knowledge.

We invite you to help address this absence at a Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Saturday, February 1, 2014.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism

Stop by the Decker Library from 1:00pm to 3:00pm for an informal edit-a-thon on the theme of art and feminism this Saturday!

Call for Artists: Civil Society Institute Fellowship

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Civil Society Institute Fellowship: Apply by February 15th!

Please help us spread the word about this exciting fellowship opportunity:

Civil Society Institute Fellowship: One award for an east coast minority artist with demonstrable financial need; preference will be given to artists from New Haven, Jersey City, and Baltimore. Award includes a $500 travel stipend.

These is just one of the 43 fellowships available at our February 15th deadline–including 25 merit-based fellowships open to all artists and writers anywhere in the world. Learn about all of our current fellowship opportunities at: www.vermontstudiocenter.org/fellowships.

Applications must be received by February 15th, 2014.

Apply at www.vermontstudiocenter.org/apply or vsc.slideroom.com.

Contact David Grozinsky at david@vermontstudiocenter.org or 802-635-2727 with any questions.

Reading List: Public Art

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Vik Muniz, Chuck Close, Sarah Sze and Jean Shin have been commissioned by the MTA to beautify the 2nd Ave subway.

List of temporary public art projects in Boston, via the Boston Art Commission.

In an effort to promote bike-friendliness in Roanoke, VA, the city is getting its very own piece of intriguing cycling art in the form of a giant wooden comb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In San Antonio, Texas, a duo of artists created a community gathering space with the installation of elegant chandeliers built out of recycled bicycle parts, transforming a dingy, dark freeway underpass into a rather charming space.

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With strict regulations on murals only recently lifted in Los Angeles, you might think that the artists and public art facilitators who fought so hard to make murals legal again would be playing it safe to start. You would be wrong.  (via Hyperallergic)

 

 

Reading List: Failure and Art

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The nature of failure in art is a topic that seems to rise to surface every few years or so, and most of these articles can have a pop psychology feel to them, but these are some of the more recent articles and worth an artist’s time, even if to make you rethink your approach in the studio.

Interview with Sarah Davis at Art21.

Barry Schwabsky write about art schools and the nature of failure in the Nation.

Tony Kushner on “failure art” and writing in the New Yorker.

Learning to embrace failure can help artists succeed, Sarah Lewis argues in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Carol Becker on art, research and failure.

Why Failure Is the Best Friend of Creative Innovation, by Liz Chavez in Huffington Post.

The Gift of Doubt: Albert O. Hirschman and the power of failure, by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.

 

 

 

Public Art Blog

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From the Walters Art Museum’s ART BITES program last weekend, there is a new blog, http://bmorepublicart.dreamhosters.com/, intended to function as a crowdsourced site to collect images of our city’s murals, sculptures, monuments and artworks and help to make them more accessible. More info to come soon but definitely worth taking a look at!