There’s a great new effort underway to document the everyday fabricators, makers, crafters, and artists at the heart of today’s DIY movement. Its called Makeshift Magazine: A Journal of Hidden Creativity and their first issue is out. If you support their launch by contributing to their Kickstarter campaign, you’ll get a copy! While the magazine [...]

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy”  from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty [...]

One of the delights in taking a meander to – and through – a good antique or salvage shop is the discovery of once functional objects that have been shorn, busted, unmade and unusable. Yet a glimmer of their former utility is there – something to suggest that it should, or once would, do something. [...]

The poem that is the subject of this box – a steamy summery kind of musing, complete with blueberries, olympics, and humidity – is taken from the Fall 2006 ESOPUS magazine. Even though the poems, written in the ’80s by Vincent Katz, are about a breakup, I found them to be much more immediate, intimate, [...]

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. [...]

The German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997 has a large installation of his work that sprawls among the white galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m not terribly familiar with this artist, but impressed that he’d turn a Gerhard Richter painting into a table – he’s as playful and anti-establishment as [...]

Andres Myers is a mixed media artist who’s work stands out from the usual. Its almost otherworldly. Familiar too. Layers of color like lacquer, applied carefully and used sculpturally – paper, cloth, plaster, tape, paint, wire – you name it, its there. Its also deliciously abstract – a lollipop that fell onto a sprinkles-covered ice [...]

Love this idea of the ICE – I just might have to enter for the fun of it:Artists each make 13 collages (more or less), size not bigger than A4 (about 8″ X 10″ or 20cm X 26cm), and send them to me in New Zealand, to arrive by 20th March, 2009. One from each artist [...]

I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed [...]

In memoriam Perhaps more later…

While in New York recently for a “Greening the Arts” symposium [see below], I had the very good fortune to meet an artist, preservationist, and self-described “recycling fanatic” Victoria Romanoff. Touring her converted firestation – which serves as her home, studio, and office – I was struck by how full and well-lived her life is, [...]

MixedMedia is all about appropriation – the process of selecting, manipulating, integrating “found” works into new arrangement, compositions. So when I came across the Walker Art Center + Soap Factory = Festival of Appropriation, I was intrigued! On Thursday November 29, Walker Art Center will host a film collage presentation and Circuit Bending Workshop with [...]

In getting ready for a small show I am putting up locally, I’ve been obsessing over the archetypes of journeys – and how any “journey” has a beginning, middle, and an end. Rather Oedipal: four legs, two legs, three legs… Anyway, its all a big swill right now though some gems are beginning to emerge. [...]

The title of a song from Porgy and Bess caught my eye. I began with a piece that was to explore, using pulpy, sumptuous tones and textures the tied up lustrous bundle of desire that a woman is when at her powers full.  I had selected a diaphanous image of my “Venus” of pale blues [...]

This time of year, my thoughts flit from mystery cults to “Venus” by Rubens in the Uffizzi, not unlike the sparrows in the front yard that make their way between our cranberry tree with its first timid buds and the seed feeder on the porch. As I work the soil with my hands and scrub [...]

Just back from a wonderful two nights in Montréal where the wash of history, art, and commerce never ceases to reinvigorate my satisfaction with Canada. Of course, coming from a Vermonter, that might not sound so special: what expectations of culture can one hold for the least significant state in the Union? Quips aside, Montréal [...]

3 exhibitions: Ingenious3. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Feb10 – Apr22.07. Jean-Pierre Gauthier | Jérôme Fortin | Guy Ben-Ner I always like to go to the musée d’art contemporain here in Montreal, on Wednesday evenings. Not only because it’s free after 6pm, but because the atmosphere is electric. The place is crowded, mostly with young [...]

I’m looking forward to visiting Montreal this weekend with my family. In particular, looking forward to a visit to the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal where three quirky exhibitions are on view. One of them is a showing of recent large-scale works by the Canadian assemblage artist Jérôme Fortin, who has been on a swift [...]

Thanks so much, Lars, for that beautiful welcome, I really appreciate it. I’m thrilled to be joining this quickly growing, enthusiastic group of mixed media art aficionados. I wanted to write a bit about my process in creating the 13 pieces, called “Madonna & Child OR Re-parenting My Inner Child”, series #3, which were meant [...]

Among my fondest memories from my time running the Center for Collaborative Art and Visual Education in Washington, DC are my encounters with founding Washington Color School artist Sam Gilliam.  During the time I knew him, living as my wife and I were at the time, out of a studio apartment in his studio building [...]

Footnote: Today’s “Gallery” section of the Times-Argus covers a new show of mixed media works by Vermont artist Jane Horner. Here’s the blurb from the Green Mountain College website (I haven’t been able to make it over the mountains yet!): Green Mountain College invites the public to an opening reception for an exhibit by Vermont [...]

During a family outing to the lovely town of Sutton in southern Quebec, we happened into the Galerie Farfelu de Sutton. The four of us – Cathleen, Isabel, Wyva and I – trooped into the compact space and browsed around. In a small nook behind the cashier I discovered a “shrine” to the artists Brigite [...]

Janet Van Fleet, an extraordinary multidiscipliary “tactile” artist who lives in Cabot, Vermont will have a solo show at the Lazy Pear Gallery on Main Street, Montpelier. The show will open March 15 and run through May 14. Included in the exhibition “Curious Life Forms” are Janet’s new wire frame figures that recall some of [...]

I am really thrilled to open this blogspace with the news that a local (Cabot, Vermont) artist who has been working for half a century from her home here, South of the Northeast Kingdom, has finally got her work online. The artist is Wilma Lovely, a beautiful human being who has more salt in her [...]