If you haven't picked up The Art Association's 2010 Winter/Spring Schedule, you'll still find plenty of them at the Center for the Arts. And you really ought to pick it up, because besides the usual schedule of classes and exhibits (newsflash: "Whodunit?" returns in May, and Dave McNalley will hang work on the walls of the Theater Gallery in June), there's some news you might not want to miss.
For example, if you sign up for winter/spring classes before Friday, Jan. 8, you'll enjoy an Early Bird 10 percent discount. That's Jan. 8, which is nigh, and getting nigher every day.
If you're unsure of which art class to take, The Art Association will host another Free Art Class Sampler 5:00-6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 13. Come by and sample the many classes offered – meet the teachers, tour the studios and try something new. For free!
Also, when you sign up for a class, you can receive a free Open Studio Pass, good for the duration of the class. That&rsquo...
Remember Shannon Plumb? The film artists whose hilarious "Paper Collection" screened around the clock all February in the Center for the Arts' ArtSpace Main Gallery? How could you forget?
Well, she's back in her hometown of New York City where she's up to her old tricks, this time presenting "The Park," a series of 12 short films that will screen in Madison Square Park in New York City March 19 through April 23.
Prepared for the Madison Square Park Conservancy – a nonprofit dedicated to keeping the historic, 6.2-acre park bright, beautiful and active – for its 2009 season of Mad. Sq. Art, a "free gallery without walls," Plumb's new series captures the diversity of Madison Square Park itself – its flora and fauna, its people, and its myriad uses – as well as the comedy and, at times, tragedy that comes with living our private lives out-of-doors.
New York's parks are among the city's most treasured public spaces. In...
This spring's ArtSpace Main Gallery show has Bronwyn Minton's fingerprints all over it.
An award-winning artist, adult outreach coordinator for the National Museum of Wildlife Art, and past curator of several fun, fascinating, collaborative Art Association exhibitions over the years, Minton has for this event enlisted the assistance of more than 60 local artists for a round of Exquisite Corpse. Adopted by the Surrealists in the early 20th century, the game involves dividing a piece of paper into sections – sometimes by folding it, in this case by cutting it – and having a different artist (or "mortician" as some surrealist wag put it) draw a different part of a human form.
The first, in other words, would draw a head and neck – extending the lines of the neck to the next section so the next artist would know where to start his shoulders and torso – and so forth down to the feet. Or some other bottom-most appendage: Being surrealists, the artists...
The four photographers who signed up for Jon Stuart's class last November are a varied lot.
Kristina Loggia is a professional shooter whose work has appeared in Time, Spin, Detour, ESPN and Fortune magazines. Nancy McCarthy studied graphic arts at the Pratt Institute a while back and has picked up and put down her camera many times over the past 20 years. Laura McWethy considers herself a serious amateur whose interest in photography has likewise come and gone, though she's taken quite a few classes recently. And Jeffrey Kaphan still isn’t sure he considers himself a photographer.
As expected, their individual artistic sensibilities cause their lenses to be turned toward disparate and wide-ranging subjects. How, then, might one go about curating a coherent and cohesive exhibition of images by four unique personalities? That was part of the challenge of Stuart’s class, descriptively titled "Photography to an Exhibition."
Convened in mid November 2008, the ...
The Art Association's Borshell Drawing Studio has always been one of the sleepier corners of the otherwise bustling Center for the Arts. Despite its commanding view of south Jackson and Snow King Mountain, the bright, spacious room on the third floor of the Arts and Education Pavilion often feels forgotten.
But now Travis Walker and a handful of refugees from his art co-op, the Teton ArtLab, have found a new headquarters there, giving Walker's experiment a new charge, and bringing life and activity to the studio. Starting March 1, Walker and seven or eight of his ArtLab cohorts will take the wheel of the studio, offering affordable studio space for artists who, if not quite starving, are at least hungry for the sustenance of regular interaction with like-minded creative types.
To rededicate the space, raise awareness about the changes, and maybe even raise a little money for Borshell Studio activities, the Art Association will host a Print Show and Sale in the Center Theater Lob...
On the spring of 1933, organized squads of German university students, in an early fit of Nazi zeal that hinted at the horrors to come, torched thousands of books they deemed "un-German" and offensive to their ultra-nationalist spirit. At these "ceremonies," high-ranking Nazi officials spoke, bands played music, and youths took "fire oaths."
In the United States, the reaction to these ersatz rites was immediate. Newspaper editorials denounced them, New York City saw some 100,000 citizens march in protest, and writers and intellectuals made portentous connections between censorship and violence. In a political cartoon published in the Daily Worker (Chicago) just a day after the first book burning ceremony of May 10, Jacob Burck evoked the prophetic observation by 19th-century German writer Heinrich Heine – "Where one burns books, one will soon burn people." – with his drawing of two pyres of Nazi victims and condemned books.
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It's hard to believe when you wake up, look at the thermometer and see the temperature in the single digits, but summer IS on the way, which means it's time for artists to start thinking about Art Fair Jackson Hole.
Art Fair Jackson Hole brings two juried, three-day events to downtown Jackson on July 17-19 and August 14-16 in Miller Park. Produced by the Art Association of Jackson Hole, the fairs offer high-end arts and crafts, as well as children's activities and entertainment.
Art Fair Jackson Hole applications are now available online through www.zapplication.org. They will be available through Feb. 28, 2009. For more information, visit www.jhartfair.org, www.zapplication.org or call (307) 733-8792.
Thanks to modern science, we all know once and for all that walking is good for you. It's good exercise. It relieves stress. It can help clear the mind when you’re in the thick of a gnarly project or problem.
And for Jackson photographer Thomas Stimpson, it is part of his creative process.
Stimpson, who helps run the Art Association's photo lab on the third floor of the Center for the Arts, got into the habit of taking walks while attending the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn. It served as a nice break from studying.
Sometime or other, he started bringing his camera – not necessarily with the goal of taking photographs as he walked, but just in case – and discovered he was taking some nice photos as he strolled. Interestingly, he added, he often had no recollection of actually taking them, however.
After making one or two acceptable images each month for seven years, he found himself with a sizeable collection of black-and-white photos on film. He ...
Part of the magic of the Center for the Arts – where 17 arts and education nonprofits live beneath one single roof – are the opportunities for collaboration.
So far, many such co-labors have been merely serendipitous, but this month, the Art Association and Off Square Theatre Company have taken advantage of their proximity (the doors to their offices are a dozen steps from each other) by teaming up for "A Midautumn Art Dream." By coordinating the planning and presentation of their fall programs, the two groups hope gain in marketing efficiencies and audience interest.
Off Square launched the "dream" theme with its 1950s updating of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The language and ideas of the play remain those of The Bard, but the costumes, sets and music are right out of the Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll. Theseus, Duke of Athens, is recast as a Dick Clark-type TV star; Oberon, King of the Fairies, drapes himself in the mantel (...
