A shopper at a Goodwill thrift store in Alabama bought a flower sculpture for $39.99 that is now being put up for auction with a starting price of $2,000.
$2,000 sculpture bought for $39.99 at Alabama thrift store
Stowmarket Food Museum hosts dog sculptures ahead of auction
Labrador statues from a Suffolk Libraries campaign will be at Stowmarket Food Museum.
MFA student named creative director for Center for Craft art installation
Master of Fine Art student Jeannie Regan was chosen as the creative director for the
Center for Craft’s newest art installation in Asheville.
By Julia Duvall
For Western Carolina University second-year Master of Fine Art student Jeannie Regan,
being chosen as the creative director for the Center for Craft’s newest art installation
is an opportunity made possible by faculty and peer support from the MFA program.
“Krafthouse 2023: Forest of the New Trees” is an immersive art installation made for
and by the Asheville community that will evolve and change each year in its historic
building at 67 Broadway in downtown Asheville. This year’s installation will be open
to the public from Sept. 28 to Oct. 13, on Thursdays and Fridays from 5-8 p.m. and
on Saturdays from 2-4 p.m. and again from 6-9 p.m.
“The Center for Craft is Asheville’s leading force in craft advocacy and education,”
Regan said. “Krafthouse is an event that they’ve imagined running every year and wanted
to consider it as the flip side of what they do during the day in the light and airy
upstairs gallery. The installation downstairs will be edgy, contemporary and a little
risky.”
Jeannie Regan
Regan, originally from Australia, said the art installation will be an interactive
experience that is full of different art installations and guests can explore the
space in any way they choose.
“In the spirit of immersive performances and installations like ‘Meow Wolf’ and ‘Burning
Man,’ guests and artists will make up their own story and adventure as they go through
the installation,” Regan said. “The theme for this year’s Krafthouse will be this
imaginary post-major event in Appalachia where craft is how we thrive and interact
with each other through a night market setting.”
Regan and selected local artists will interpret the theme in their own way. The end
result will be the creation of a small, self-sustaining community that has made itself
anew. A night market atmosphere will welcome visitors, who will be able to make, gift
and trade goods with the artists and each other.
Regan was introduced to Marilyn Zapf, the head curator at the Center for Craft by
a graduate of the MFA program, Lex Turnbull, which led to Regan to be selected as
the creative director for the project.
“Lex was incredibly generous in making that connection, which I think speaks to the
strength of the MFA program at Western,” Regan said. “We are looking out for each
other and I am super grateful for the support throughout this process.”
Tom Ashcraft, WCU’s MFA program director and Distinguished Professor of Visual Art,
shared that the generous community within the MFA program, which is housed in WCU’s
David Orr Belcher College of Fine and Performing Arts, is vital for its students and
alumni to be successful.
“It is really great seeing current MFA students and also graduates out in the field
doing the work and then reaching back to help other students within the program,”
Ashcraft said. “This speaks to the strength of the program and the quality and expertise
they bring to projects like these.”
One of the benefits of the program’s small cohorts is it allows visiting artists to
work with the MFA students on a more personal level.
“Tom and the rest of the faculty committee have been amazing about bringing local
and international visiting artists to campus,” Regan said. “With our cohorts being
smaller than other university programs, these visiting artists get to spend a ton
of time with us and that is an incredible luxury we don’t take for granted. We get
to know these artists on a personal level and gain additional professional development
experience.”
Ashcraft said another highlight of the program is the diversity of the artists admitted.
“We admit a variety of students with backgrounds in areas such as traditional contemporary
painting to community-oriented social practice,” Ashcraft said. “We really try to
build a cohort that gives students different perspectives and ideas to draw their
inspiration from. My job is essentially being a ‘baseball manager;’ you just feel
out the talent and think about who would complement the others in the cohort and be
a good fit for the program.”
Regan’s journey to the MFA program was a non-traditional one, but turned out better
than she could have imagined.
“I did my undergrad a long time ago in Australia and I have been in the states for
the past 13 years,” Regan said. “I have an 11-year-old daughter which explains the
big gap in education, but Harriet got to a point where I felt like I could take time
to work on my MFA and I began researching programs.
Regan first looked at distance programs but felt that was not a good fit and longed
for the in-person, collaborative atmosphere she had at her art school in Australia.
“I looked at the program here in Cullowhee and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh the studios
are gorgeous, it’s not that far from my house and it is a great program,’” Regan said.
“I loved that it was a comparatively small university with smaller classes and more
one-on-one faculty interactions. I went for a visit and knew it was the right fit
for me. Everybody has a ton of space to work, a lot of access to faculty and the fact
that faculty have studios on campus that students can stop by anytime; that’s not
everywhere you go and that’s a special thing because you can see them doing their
work.”
For more information about the Krafthouse installation and to purchase tickets, visit
centerforcraft.org.
Art Cashin says the market will bottom this month and this could be the unusual catalyst to cause it
Photograph captures moment RAF jets appear to have a near miss – but all is not what it seems
An amazing photograph has captured the moment two RAF Typhoons appear to narrowly miss each other during a practice dogfight.
The picture was taken while the two pilots performed their manoeuvres at up to 18,000ft in the skies over West Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire.
However, a Ministry of Defence (MoD) source said there was “no near miss” and the photograph was an optical illusion caused by the angle of the camera.
A spokesperson for the MoD said: “RAF Fighter aircraft practice air-to-air combat on a regular basis to ensure our pilots have the relevant skills for global combat operations.
“During this type of training, a strict 1,000ft bubble in height or distance between our aircraft is enforced and was observed during this sortie.”
The picture was taken by Anthony Helcoop, a hobby photographer from Spalding, Lincolnshire, at around 5pm on Thursday.
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The photographer said he regularly sees planes from RAF Coningsby practising – but that this incident appeared “quite close for comfort”.
“They did appear to get very near on this occasion,” he said.
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“Obviously from the ground due to the angle you can’t tell how near it was for sure – but from my perspective, they certainly looked in close proximity.
“I shared the photos online and people just can’t believe I was so lucky to get that moment on camera.
“I’m not a professionally-trained photographer at all, I just do it as a hobby, so I was just in the right place at the right time really.”
He added: “I love watching the pilots from RAF Coningsby practice combat manoeuvres.
“They are Top Guns. [It] makes you feel secure that these pilots are protecting our skies.”
The photograph is likely to be an incident of forced perspective – a technique that uses optical illusion to make an object appear further away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is.
The technique is famously used by people to allow them to seemingly hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy or pinch the top of the Eiffel Tower in France.
Micaiah Carter’s Debut Photography Book Is All About Family
On the first page of Micaiah Carter’s debut photography book, “What’s My Name,” there is a picture of three men in ’70s garb—high-waist slacks, black leather vest, round sunglasses—posing on the checkered floor of a photo studio. One of the men sits on a stool, while the other two are standing, dapping each other up. Carter, who has made a name for himself as one of the most in-demand celebrity and fashion editorial photographers, did not shoot this particular image. It comes from a trove of family pictures he sprinkled throughout his 230-page book, which is being published by Prestel and will be available for purchase on October 3. The tome features images of superstars like Zendaya and Megan Thee Stallion rendered in Carter’s signature artistic style: soft, colorful, and cozy, lending the distinct feeling that you know the subjects personally. In the case of the photo of the three men, Carter knows them better than most: the guy on the right, who’s biting down on a wooden pipe and holding up his fist, is Carter’s father. “That’s an image of him and his friends in Vietnam,” the photographer says. “It’s part of a series of shoots they did at a local portrait shop. My dad had these in his scrapbook and let me use them for my projects while he was alive.”
When Prestel approached Carter to create a book of his photographic works, the photog instantly knew he wanted to include images from his family’s archive. In college, he’d leaf through pictures of his grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles—which reminded Carter that a penchant for style and having a great eye was in his blood. “This series of images guided me,” he adds. “When looking at my family album and my own, I realized there were a lot of subconscious juxtapositions between the two.” Among them: “a viewpoint of where things are today, especially compared to the photos of the past,” he says. “It gave me a real look at my parents’ endurance during the Civil Rights era and into the Black Power movement. Comparing them to my images tells the story of where we are now, and the expression and revolution that still exists since the ’70s.”
An homage to his lineage can even be found in the title of the book, whose foreword was written by Tracee Ellis Ross (she and Carter have been friends since he shot the photographs for her inaugural Pattern campaign). “‘What’s my name’ is a saying that my family uses all the time. It gives a sense of identity to who you are.”
Below, browse through a sampling of the photos in “What’s My Name.”
Micaiah Carter, Curiosity, 2021.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Melina Matsoukas, 2020.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Untitled, 2021.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Sisters, 2022.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Untitled, 2018.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, American Black Beauty Vol. I.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Untitled, 2019.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Untitled, 2020.
Courtesy of the artist
Micaiah Carter, Untitled, 2020.
Courtesy of the artist
Man who faked Native American heritage to sell his art in Seattle sentenced to probation
A Washington state man who falsely claimed Native American heritage to sell his artwork at downtown Seattle galleries was sentenced Wednesday to federal probation and community service.
The U.S. attorney’s office said Lewis Rath, of Maple Falls, was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court to two years probation and 200 hours of community service. He was charged in 2021 with multiple crimes including violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which prohibits misrepresentation in marketing American Indian or Alaska Native arts and crafts.
An investigation started in 2018, when the Indian Arts and Crafts Board received a complaint about Rath, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Rath falsely claimed to be a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona and sold carved wooden totem poles, transformation masks and pendants to Seattle retail stores, the attorney’s office said.
Agents searching Rath’s residence also recovered feathers from birds protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to results from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Lab.
“Counterfeit Indian art, like Lewis Anthony Rath’s carvings and jewelry that he misrepresented and sold as San Carlos Apache-made, tears at the very fabric of Indian culture, livelihoods, and communities,” U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board Director Meridith Stanton said in a Justice Department statement. “Rath’s actions demean and rob authentic Indian artists who rely on the creation and sale of their artwork to put food on the table, make ends meet, and pass along these important cultural traditions and skills from one generation to the next.
Stanton also said his actions undermine consumers’ confidence in the Indian art market in the Northwest and nationwide.
Jerry Chris Van Dyke, also known as Jerry Witten, 68, of Seattle, also pleaded guilty to violations of the IACA in March. He was sentenced on May 17 to 18 months of federal probation.
Winners of the Nature TTL Photographer of the Year 2023
This year’s nature-photography competition attracted more than 8,000 entries in different categories celebrating the natural world: Animal Behavior, Camera Traps, Landscapes, Small World, The Night Sky, Underwater, Urban Wildlife, Wild Portraits, and an Under-17 award. Organizers at Nature TTL were once more kind enough to share some of the winners and runners-up below. Captions were written by the photographers and lightly edited for style.
In Two Major Exhibitions, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA Celebrates African Aesthetics and Cultural Hybridity
“Sun Dance Kids (Boy and Girl)” (2023), fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, wooden mask, brass, and steel, 133 x 148.5 x 75.5 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery. All images © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, shared with permission
In a celebration of global cultural fusion, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA upends Western art historical portrayals of African customs in vibrant mixed-media collages and sculptures (previously). Merging textiles with fiberglass, brass, raffia, wooden masks, and more, the artist highlights our associations with specific materials, pairing them with elusive narratives.
In his series of Decolonised Structures, for example, Shonibare reinterprets memorial statues of figures like Queen Victoria by painting them head-to-toe in vivid patterns based on Dutch wax fabrics. The artist incorporates the colorful designs into backgrounds, like in the Modern Spiritual series of woodcuts, or clothes dancing figures in a variety of of styles, like in “Sun Dance Kids (Boy and Girl).” His use of the distinctive cotton textiles, common in West and Central Africa, reference complex colonial histories, alluding to “the legacy of African aesthetics and the history of modernism while conceptualising his sculptures as ritual objects with power in their own right,” says a statement for his exhibition Ritual Ecstasy of the Modern at Cristea Roberts Gallery.
“Modern Spiritual II” (2023), woodcut with batik fabric collage on Somerset Satin 410gsm tub-sized paper, 124.6 x 100.6 centimeters, edition of 25 plus 5 APs. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
In another solo exhibition in London, Free The Wind, The Spirit, and The Sun at Stephen Friedman Gallery, Shonibare taps into modern art history, especially the spirit of Dada, an early 20th-century avant-garde movement centered in Zürich that formed in response to World War I, rejecting the bourgeois and capitalist sensibilities of European society.
Dadaists protested traditional values of Western art by expressing nonsense and irrationality through a variety of media, including performance, music, and sculpture. Shonibare’s whimsical pieces parallel this history, which often evoked “African and Oceanic cultures to express animalism, originality, and freedom,” says a gallery statement.
“Decolonised Structures (Queen Victoria)” (2022), fiberglass sculpture hand-painted with Dutch wax pattern, on wooden plinth, 139 x 75 x 57 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery
Both exhibitions continue the artist’s recent interest in the collections of prominent modernists and their portrayals of African artifacts, especially Pablo Picasso and André Derain. Ceremonial masks play a prevalent role in Shonibare’s pieces, affixed to the heads of statues like “Hybrid Sculpture (Pan)” or painted and draped with raffia in the Hybrid Mask series. He draws attention to the ways in which the ritual objects have also been collected and depicted by Western artists. Shonibare says:
I discovered that Picasso had a collection of African art. I know by my art education that many modern artists were inspired by African art, and that Black culture was also very popular and very fashionable in the late ’20s, in Paris. We are going through a kind of African renaissance moment now, too, so I wanted to understand the origins of how Black culture became fashionable in Western modernism. I am kind of revisiting how the power of African aesthetics managed to inspire a whole movement in the west.
Ritual Ecstasy of the Modern continues through November 4 at Cristea Roberts Gallery, and Free The Wind, The Spirit, and The Sun opens on October 6 and runs through November 11 at Stephen Friedman Gallery’s new Mayfair location. Explore more of Shonibare’s work on his website and Instagram.
“Hybrid Mask (Tsogho)” (2022), wood, acrylic paint, raffia, and brass, 74 x 45 x 15 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery
“Modern Magic (Studies of African Art from Picasso’s Collection) X” (2021), patchwork, appliqué, embroidery, and Dutch wax printed cotton textile, 158.3 x 117.5 x 5.5 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of the artist
“Hybrid Sculpture (Pan)” (2021), fiberglass sculpture hand painted with Dutch wax pattern, with hand-carved wooden mask, 152 x 68 x 72 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery
“Hybrid Mask (Ndeemba)” (2023), wood, acrylic paint, raffia, and brass, 78 x 50 x 50 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery
“Decolonised Structures (Frere)” (2022), fiberglass sculpture hand-painted with Dutch wax pattern and wooden plinth, 143 x 49 x 60 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery
“Modern Spiritual I” (2023), woodcut with batik fabric collage on Somerset Satin 410gsm tub-sized paper, 124.6 x 100.6 centimeters, edition of 25 plus 5 APs. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
“African Bird Magic (Crested Lark) I” (2023), patchwork, appliqué, embroidery, and Dutch wax printed cotton textile, 179 x 250 centimeters. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery
“African Roots of Modernism (Gba gba)” (2023), resin, acrylic paint, patinated brass, and carbon fiber, 25.8 x 9.7 x 7.9 centimeters, edition of 15 plus 2 APs. Photo by Stephen White & Co., courtesy of Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Two Major Exhibitions, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA Celebrates African Aesthetics and Cultural Hybridity appeared first on Colossal.
Derrick Boateng and his Photography Show a Culture
What is a border? A limit, a beginning, but also an end. A constantly moving (in)visible line that demarcates a “this way”, which we know well, and a “that way”, which is other than us and doesn’t belong to us. Characterizing this term has always been its changeable nature. This is how, over time, it has extended to many fields of human experience, changing form and substance. Just think how, each time the border concept has crossed spheres of creativity, it has achieved ever different shades of meaning. An evolution that in some ways would seem to be similar to that of mankind, and perhaps the reason is because it ideally represents that window through which we can observe our actions, that window that offers us the opportunity to get to know ourselves better. Consequently, every time we talk about it, we are talking about ourselves. Here, the shots of Viktoria Andreeva, Loc Boyle, Alessio Bucciero, Sara Camporesi and Gaia Caramellino investigate the elusive nature of the boundary concept from different perspectives.
The Bulgarian photographer Viktoria Andreeva explores in her series Relay the most primordial of boundaries, that of our skin. The project delves into the complex relationship between individuals, exploring themes such as identity, human duality and metamorphosis. Within each composition, the absolute protagonist is the body, which becomes the instrument to give life to a series of contradictions. In her photographs, the subjects can appear close and intimate and at the same time shy and distant. This is because Andreeva intentionally depersonalizes them, capturing their curves in an abstract and surreal way and hiding and revealing parts of their bodies each time. By distorting the figures, the photographer aims to cross the boundary between reality and illusion and, in doing so, makes us realize how this concept depends entirely on our perception and is therefore subjective and undefined, hence abstract.
The distortion of perception adopted by Andreeva returns in Loc Boyle‘s photography. In this case, the Australian photographer imagines new forms of the body and experiments with a different kind of boundary: the ability of a man to “be art”, framing bodies as if they were monolithic sculptures. They are covered in paint, trapped in lycra, stretched and sometimes even folded in on themselves; all the while holding abstract, dramatic or simply bizarre poses. The result is images full of contrasts: powerful, delicate, still, moving, abstract, human. Images that, at the same time, are able to intrigue and confuse the observer, who, stunned, asks himself “Is this a work of art, a sculpture or the essence of something as yet unknown?”.
For Alessio Bucciero, the border should not be understood as a synonym for separation, “For me it means getting closer to something”, says the Italian photographer. This is evident from the first glance in the photo of the two lovers caught in an embrace, which Bucciero makes appear as if they were two parts of a single identity. Here, that threshold that distinguishes – as was said at the beginning of this text – a “this way” and a “that way” is no longer posed as a line of inclusion/exclusion, but becomes increasingly rarefied until it disappears, creating something that has never existed and that must be explored. And so, unintentionally, we forget that ancestral need to feel protected within a delimited space, overcoming the more traditional definition of a border once and for all.
While Andreeva, Boyle and Bucciero investigate the concept of boundary in the body dimension exclusively, Sara Camporesi‘s research focuses on the definition of “presence” that the body occupies in its surroundings. So what the Italian photographer examines is the space that is created between the body and architecture, between fullness and emptiness. “The moment in which everything is still suspended, in which we are and are not, in which we hold something elusive, something that precedes us and without which nothing could begin,” says Camporesi. In the shot taken in the Metaphysical City of Tresigallo, in the plain of Ferrara, we see that border become the beginning of a shared journey to discover a new and unimaginable elsewhere. An elsewhere in which to immerse ourselves and be amazed by what it is able to reveal: something of us that we didn’t know existed, that helps us (re)know or rediscover.
Different, but in some ways similar to Camporesi’s, is the border understood by Gaia Caramellino. In her photographs, this concept suddenly takes shape, becoming that place where you can find yourself again and again. Therefore, it is not an unknown space, but one of which one has experience. A cradle or rather “a safe place, crystallized in time, in which one can be weak, open to blows, to falls. A kind of waiting room aimed at nowhere, a no-man’s land where you arbitrate on an equal footing with your own history”, says the photographer. In front of her shots, the observer therefore finds himself staring at a boundary that does not belong to him.
In the research of the five photographers examined, we have realized that the concept of a boundary is subjective and abstract. However much we try to delimit its perimeter, the result will never be definitive because it is nothing more than an idea that does not exist. An idea that we have constructed, with the sole purpose of narrating it.
