Tag: museum

Chihuly I

Dale Chihuly

Born in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, Dale Chihuly was introduced to glass while studying interior design at the University of Washington. After graduating in 1965, Chihuly enrolled in the first glass program in the country, at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he later established the glass program and taught for more than a decade… more

Click any image to see them all enlarged.

Cloacal Captures

While in Seattle we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island and visited the historical museum. Bainbridge Island was host to a vibrant Japanese community and was the source of the first internees during WWII. They had an exhibit of portraits by Ansel Adams who later felt like his work had been misused for propagandist purposes.

Also, an exhibit of a local portrait photographer’s work in the bathroom… (space was at a premium, I guess)

Bainbridge Island, Washington

The Apotheosis of the Absorption of the Ambient

Dia:Beacon, New York
Dia:Beacon, New York

Gerhard Richter.

“…Purged of all evidence of the maker’s presence, they absorb as their content the ambient world before them in all its transitory serendipity. Subsuming spectators into that fluctuating matrix, depriving them of any clear, fixed, stable relationship to space and place, his mirrors seductively undermine the viewers’ authorial independence and autonomy by dissembling traditional hieratic perspectival systems of perception.” Read more…

Cold, Northern Self-Portrait

Dia:Beacon, New York
Dia:Beacon, New York

Joseph Beuys.

“…Besides the panels of photographs, he incorporated three panes of colored glass—two in royal blue, evoking the cold northern sky, and one in golden yellow, redolent of the southern sun—that might be thought of as filters through which the remaining panels are seen.”

A Shimmering Collapse of Decreated Sharpness

Dia: Beacon, New York
Dia: Beacon, New York

I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” said Smithson. The countless fragments of shattered glass that form Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) (1969) are layered both literally and figuratively. As the title implies, the sculpture is to be seen
 not simply as a pile of sharp, transparent fragments but also as a map of a legendary lost continent. “It is a shimmering collapse of decreated sharpness . . . arrested by the friction of stability.” Similar to other fictive territories, Map of Broken Glass foreshadows Smithson’s most ambitious realization: a spiral-shaped artificial peninsula made out of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rocks named Spiral Jetty, which he built in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, in 1970. Read more…