Flowers by calligrapher Gail Brill.
(Provided photo)

SARANAC LAKE — While the leaves are gearing up for peak color, some Adirondack artists are gearing up for the annual ArtWorks Studio Tours, which return this Saturday and Sunday.

Studio Tours offer art lovers the opportunity to visit and have conversations with artists, see works in progress as well as the finished products, and to purchase pieces.

In Saranac Lake, there will be hand-outs with a map and artist addresses available, as well as ArtWorks brochures, at most art venues.

Tour hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., but some business have their own hours. Most of these are walkable from anywhere downtown. At Berkeley Green on Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., there will be a mini art market featuring Caper Tissot, Martha Watts, George Bryjak and Shane McIntosh.

There is no charge to take a studio tour.

For more information and to learn more about the Studio Tour artists, visit saranaclakeartworks.org.

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For 13 years, Nikon’s Small World in Motion has celebrated the most alluring footage captured through a microscope that spotlights a range of biological processes, from viral infections to blood flow. The 2023 competition garnered nearly 400 entries from photographers and researchers in 41 countries with Dr. Alexandre Dumoulin winning the top prize for his 48-hour timelapse of neurons developing in a chick embryo.

Featuring colorful beams of light streaming across the frame, the video magnifies axons, which connect neurons, as they “traverse the nervous system before eventually forming synapses.” In neurological disorders like autism and schizophrenia, axons are impaired and unable to move in the way shown in Dumoulin’s timelapse. “By studying these organisms, I aim to enhance our comprehension of how the nervous system functions and identify potential factors contributing to neurodevelopmental disorders,” he says.

Find a few of this year’s videos below, and head to Nikon to peruse an archive of winners past and present.

Benedikt Pleyer, hydra

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 Stunning Footage of Neurons Forming Inside a Chick Embryo Wins Nikon’s Small World in Motion appeared first on Colossal.

How do our bodies communicate? Jennifer Crupi prods this question as she designs metal contraptions fit for limbs and torsos. Following her unconventional collection that considered gesture as embellishment, the artist’s new Tools for Reassuring Contact series similarly focuses on hands while exploring the power of human touch.

Born out of lockdown-induced isolation, the prosthetic-like pieces curve and press the fingers and palms down, presumably into the shoulder or arm of a companion. “Each work implies an empty space where a second user is encouraged to place his or her hand,” Crupi shares. “Once engaged with the piece, a clamp-like mechanism exaggerates the contact and pressure.” Made of sterling silver, the Tools outline and emphasize the value of the touch itself, with common blue rubber serving as a facilitator.

Other series include Guarded and Unguarded Gestures, comprising pieces that hang from wearers’ necks and place their limbs in either defensive, reserved positions or open and welcoming ones. These companion works reflect Crupi’s profound interest in psychology and human behavior, particularly the way we use our bodies to communicate confidence or for protection. She shares:

All frontal-covering gestures are supposed to be subtle but meaningful acts of self-protection. They work to varying degrees, of course, but even slight movements can be all the security we need. Apparently, most everyone locks ankles or crosses their legs when in the dentist’s chair, for example—I have tried a few times myself not to do this, but it is not easy! Likewise, at times when we need to show we are open to someone’s ideas or need to take charge we will adopt open postures. The “hands-on-hips” posture is supposed to have its roots in the animal kingdom, evolving from the way animals fluff their fur to make themselves look larger when in a threatening situation.

Some of Crupi’s works are included in the group exhibition Gestures: Past, Present and Future on view through November 5, 2023, at Koblenz State Museum Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. She will also open a solo show on March 25, 2024, at Indianapolis Art Center. Until then, follow updates to the ongoing Tools for Reassuring Contact series on her site.

“Tools for Reassuring Contact, #2,” sterling silver, plastisol rubber dip, and acrylic, 17 x 17 x 6 inches

“Unguarded Gestures, #2,” aluminum, painted wood, and acrylic, 24 x 24 x 12 inches

“Guarded Gestures, #3,” sterling silver and foam, 27 x 6.5 x 3.5 inches

“Unguarded Gestures, #3,” aluminum, painted wood, and acrylic, 28 x 18 x 13 inches

“Unguarded Gestures, #1,” aluminum, painted wood, and acrylic, 28 x 18 x 10 inches

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 Jennifer Crupi’s Sculptural Jewelry Embellishes Human Touch and Emotion appeared first on Colossal.

Art is an essential part of science. And for Nick Navin, Ph.D., it’s a succinct way to share important scientific discoveries.

“Art is how we communicate information, how we visualize data,” says Navin, chair of Systems Biology.

Back when he was a graduate student in Molecular Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Stony Brook University, Navin developed some of the first single-cell sequencing methods.

“Breast cancer has always been an area of interest for me,” he says. “I developed some of those early methods because I wanted to understand diversity and heterogeneity within tumor cell populations in the breast. It ended up becoming a technology that’s now very widely used, with a huge commercial market. Before that, all methods were based on bulk sequencing, which means you look at the whole tissue at once and you don’t understand the diversity of the cell types that are present and the different clones of tumor cells.”

Navin’s art, which is always computer-generated, reflects his work. He creates abstract images to accompany news stories, talks, lectures and articles about his research. Occasionally, his art will appear on the cover of a journal.

“I like to sketch things out first,” he says. “On my whiteboard, you’ll see pictures I’m going to draw. Then I go to the computer. I’ll try out a million different things until I find something that works. Often, I have a student or postdoc in the lab with good artistic skills and we bounce ideas back and forth.”

Using single-cell sequencing technologies to plot scientific data

Since joining the MD Anderson faculty in 2011, Navin and his colleagues at the Navin Laboratory — which is focused on cancer genomics and computational biology research — have built on his early single-cell sequencing technologies to gain a better understanding of different aspects of breast cancer, including early progression, metastatic disease and resistance to various therapies.

“We generate very large data sets,” Navin explains. “Millions and billions of numbers. You can analyze with statistics and mathematics, but I always like to plot things and look at them to understand relationships.”

That’s where the art starts. Plotting scientific data allows researchers to visualize variation or show relationships between variables.

“It’s always a big challenge because you really want to make the right plots to understand the relationships between data,” says Navin, also a professor in the departments of Genetics and Bioinformatics & Computational Biology. “This is an important skill I try to teach all my students.”

Art inspired by research data, imagination and aesthetics

Navin’s art springs from this plotting. Although the art is inspired by research data, it also reflects Navin’s own imagination and aesthetic sensibility.

One of his illustrations, depicting six circles composed of smaller circles in multiple colors on a black background, responds to discoveries made while working on the Human Breast Cell Atlas — the world’s largest and most comprehensive map of normal breast tissue, created by researchers at MD Anderson, University of California, Irvine and Baylor College of Medicine.

“The circles represent a cross-section of the ducts in human breast tissues that transport milk during lactation to feed infants,” Navin explains. “The different colors represent the diversity of different types of epithelial cells that were discovered in the Human Breast Cell Atlas project, many of which still have unknown functions.”

Another of Navin’s renderings is reminiscent of stained glass, with six main blocks of color and multiple variations within each color.

“The mosaic of cells and colors represents a tissue section that has been barcoded and labeled with a new technology developed by our laboratory called spatial nucleus barcoding (SNUBAR),” Navin notes. “The different colors represent different groups of cells that have been barcoded across distinct spatial areas within the tissue, to identify spatial differences that they may have at the molecular level using downstream single-cell sequencing technologies.”

A cover illustration he created for a January 2018 issue of Cell shows multi-clonal invasion in premalignant breast cancer, in which multiple clones indicated by different colors escape the ducts and invade the surrounding tissues of the breast.

Navin’s goal is always the same: to create art that communicates something essential about the data for a broad audience.

“You try to give a higher-level interpretation of the data, especially for a more general journal like Nature,” he says. “A physicist might read it. Or a chemist.”

Art at home

Navin was raised with a deep appreciation for visual and computer-generated art.

His father, Richard Navin, was a well-known artist in New York City, where the family lived. Richard Navin had a sculpture exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum called “The Mycenae Circle” in 1981 and exhibited his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and elsewhere.

“My father was a professor of art at Brooklyn College for many years, and he also taught computer science,” Navin says. “He was really a pioneer in computer-generated artwork and design. He worked closely with some companies, including Adobe, on very early three-dimensional graphics on computers. He tried to develop methods or algorithms to rotate simple objects like cubes and spheres.”

Richard Navin’s work rubbed off on his children, who learned basic art concepts from him at a very young age.

“I think it also influenced my decision to go to a liberal arts school for college, too, because although I loved computer science and biology, I wanted to go to a school with a strong art program,” says Navin, who attended Skidmore College in Upstate New York.

Navin is still steeped in art at home. His wife, Mei Rui, is a concert pianist and an assistant professor in Neurosurgery at MD Anderson. Rui has a D.M.A., a Doctor of Musician Arts, and her work explores how music can impact healing and patient care.

Both Navin and Rui hope to pass their respect and appreciation for art to the next generation.

“We have two children,” Navin says, “and I’m always thinking about how I can expose them to art.”

Learn about research at MD Anderson.

Sept 27 (Reuters) – The S&P 500 eked out a fractional gain on Wednesday after a see-saw session, as investors weighed whether to start bargain hunting following a sell-off fueled by elevated Treasury yields and uncertainty about the path ahead for interest rates.

Investors were also attuned to developments in Washington as divisions among U.S. lawmakers put the federal government at risk of a partial shutdown by the weekend.

A possible shutdown has added to worries for stock investors as they grapple with benchmark Treasury yields that have climbed to 16-year highs after the Federal Reserve last week signaled a hawkish long-term path for interest rates.

At the same time, as the S&P 500 has sharply pared its year-to-date gain, some investors are wondering if the market is close to a bottom.

“At some point people will start to buy stocks for the fourth quarter, and the third-quarter selling might be almost done,” said Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel.

“At a certain level, people are going to get back in thinking the fourth quarter might be a pretty good one.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI) fell 68.61 points, or 0.2%, to 33,550.27, the S&P 500 (.SPX) gained 0.98 points, or 0.02%, at 4,274.51 and the Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC) rose 29.24 points, or 0.22%, to 13,092.85.

During the session, the S&P 500 rose as much as 0.4% and fell as much as 0.8% before paring losses.

Among S&P 500 sectors, the rate-sensitive utilities group (.SPLRCU) fell most, dropping 1.9%. Energy (.SPNY) rose 2.5%, as Brent crude breached $97 a barrel, with the jump in oil prices posing a renewed threat to inflation that has been moderating.

The S&P 500 has fallen about 7% since late July, but remains up over 11% for 2023.

“Investors are looking for a turning point,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth. “Clearly, it is not going to take much of a breath of fresh air in this market for people to chase this.”

In Washington, Republican U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rejected a stopgap funding bill advancing in the Senate, bringing the government closer to its fourth partial shutdown in a decade.

Data on Wednesday showed orders for long-lasting U.S. manufactured goods rose in August while business spending on equipment appeared to regain momentum after faltering early in the third quarter.

Investors are focusing on Friday’s monthly personal consumption expenditures price index for a fresh view of inflation. This week also brings second-quarter Gross Domestic Product and remarks from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

In company news, Costco Wholesale (COST.O) shares rose 1.9% after the retailer topped market estimates for quarterly revenue and profit.

Declining issues were roughly split with advancers on the NYSE. There were 56 new highs and 440 new lows on the NYSE.

On the Nasdaq, advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.1-to-1 ratio. The Nasdaq recorded 35 new highs and 333 new lows.

About 10.9 billion shares changed hands in U.S. exchanges, compared with the 10.2 billion daily average over the last 20 sessions.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou fired the first salvo: in August 2022, the institution, which is backed by a property company, announced the cessation of its exhibition programme. The museum, which opened in the comparably optimistic climes of 2003, is one of the most influential, academic and experimental independent institutions on the Chinese mainland. But, in recent years, it has been forced to operate in an increasingly hostile environment. Its loss, nevertheless, has shaken a Chinese art community already reeling from pandemic restrictions.

Other shocks soon followed: the OCAT chain of property-backed institutions in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an and Shenzhen abruptly closed in 2022, Yuz Museum relocated this summer from its enormous converted airplane hangar in Shanghai’s West Bund to a much smaller facility in a remote suburb, and the Shanghai Centre of Photography (SCoP) will close in November after eight years due to the retirement of its founder, the photojournalist Liu Heung Shing. In August, Shanghai’s Long Museum announced a Sotheby’s Hong Kong autumn sale of almost 40 works from its collection, with a value estimated to be between $95.9m-$135.5m. A sale of further works is planned with Sotheby’s New York.

“It does feel like a boom-and-bust process, which is a reflection of the larger economic situation,” says Colin Chinnery, an artist and curator who this year co-founded Beijing’s Sound Art Museum. “Most private art institutions don’t have a solid financial model, especially if they rely on a parent company to pay their bills. The current model seems to be based on the ‘seven fat years’ premise, without considering the lean years that inevitably follow.”

China’s museums face an increasingly chaotic censorship regime as well as the fallout from zero Covid policies, a global downturn and a collapsing property market. The country’s reopening early this year failed to mitigate the damage done by long lockdowns. “Covid caused economic havoc in 2022, which led to a lot of financial stress,” Chinnery says. “The links of the economic chain seem to be broken, which has brought a lot of economic movement to a halt. You can’t move if you don’t have cash to make things happen.”

In the 2010s, China built new museums with a frenzy rivalled only by its urban construction programme. According to the China Museums Association, 1,563 new museums opened between 2009 and 2014. These figures are likely misleading, commentators say: only a fraction of those listed are recognisable as art museums by any definition, and most of those are public institutions backed by national, provincial, municipal or district governments. China, though, was able to boast up to 100 noteworthy art museums by 2020, each launched by private enterprises, primarily in the property industry, or by individual collectors.

Property crash and political upheaval

But the pace of museum investment slowed well before 2020, and some attrition, like the 2019 closure of Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art in Guangzhou, was due to redevelopment. Then came China’s long-anticipated property crash, starting with the 2021 insolvency of the mega developer Evergrande, which eviscerated the life savings of customers who had invested in never-completed constructions. Evergrande’s share price plummeted this August, an event that coincided with the collapse of another industry giant, Country Garden.

Political upheaval is also taking a toll. Censorship is notoriously difficult to document in China, due to fears of repercussions, but, anecdotally, it has been inching up since 2012 and tightened in particular during the Covid years. Unconfirmed tales are whispered over glasses of wine at openings, suggesting that the old adage of simply avoiding the “three Ts” of Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet—plus sex—no longer holds true. Material rumoured to have crossed the blurred lines now includes even the art market darlings of 1990s Political pop, as well as references to the Belt and Road Initiative, Sino-American relations, the Second World War or even title mistranslations deemed unpatriotic. Private museums have purportedly been instructed to display more pro-government and patriotic shows around anniversaries like the October National Day.

“Now there is no clear red line,” says a former associate director at several private museums, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The mechanism has changed; before, you apply and you are or aren’t approved, officials will say this may not be appropriate, or will tell you to be careful about a certain aspect of the exhibition. Now censorship is based on reports by anyone who comes in and is uncomfortable with anything. It is very tricky.” In June 2021, a public outcry about Song Ta’s 2013 video Uglier and Uglier, ranking school girls, closed OCAT Shanghai for months. In 2022, at UCCA in Beijing, a visitor complaint got Li Songsong’s painting of a Japanese kamikaze jet removed.

Nevertheless, some museums report that room for negotiating with local censor bureaux remains more open than it seems from the outside. At Beijing’s Sound Art Museum, censorship is “not such an issue for us”, Chinnery says, with a museological, knowledge-based permanent exhibition. “Our contemporary shows are more abstract than visual art. Things have certainly become tighter in recent years, but it changes all the time.”

Even before the bust, short-term profit motives have proved to be the most limiting form of self-censorship. Nikita Cai, the chief curator of Guangdong Times Museum, who has remained with the now-downsized project, highlights the popularisation of solo shows and imported package exhibitions. “Wherever you see this model of less curated, mainly painting exhibitions, it is a sign of a market turning more conservative,” she says. “China has another model of exhibition, of imported package exhibitions without any local conversation or mediation. It’s dominant now.” She describes a loop where “people think imported art is good art, museums think this is the kind of exhibition visitors are willing to pay for, what they think is the Western canon. It’s more welcome and digestible, and with the opinions and histories already written it is easy to translate without any challenges”.

“Never independent entities”

As in Western museums, the need for money reigns supreme. “Behind those two models is income, a certain thinking of art as a potential investment and speculation,” Cai says. “It is completely taking over.” She has observed this trend for the past five years, escalating during Covid as art became more popular as an investment vehicle.

“Private museums are never independent entities,” says the anonymous former director. These museums often have licences tied to a parent company that guarantees funding of around $275,000 a year. “The regulation defines it as a parasite, because it has to have someone feeding it every year,” the former director says. Some museums set up as holding groups, with sub-companies for things like education and gift shops, but end up with “the logic of commercial companies” focused on profits to the expense of the institution’s original mission and vision, they say. Those with deeper pockets think little else is needed in terms of staffing or strategy. “These larger institutions think they can compete with Tate, the Met or MoMA with just an out-of-the-blue plan and some money,” they say. A few of the museums are notorious, locally, for ‘flipping’ works to private collectors. While these are outliers, most Chinese museums welcome gallery-funded exhibitions and auction house partnerships and often turn a blind eye to private sales of works on show in an exhibition, often on site. “Meanwhile curated, academic, professional shows get increasingly squeezed out,” the former director says.

Private museums do get some state support, sometimes substantial, but it tends to flow to the flashier institutions that need it least. Cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen have introduced new legal categories for fine art exhibition spaces, legalising less conventional and dual-use projects, “like exhibitions in airports, or wine bars”, the former director says. “It is an attempt to offer more support for these kind of spaces”—and, invariably, more control.

The Beijing Municipal Government has started offering a special “Category Museum” status to projects like the Sound Art Museum, Chinnery says, “which isn’t quite the same as full museum status, but it does mean we are part of a system of institutions recognised by the government”. The status allows the museum to collaborate with state environmental federations to record audio footage, for example, in national parks, or to conduct research in hospitals or universities. “We need official status to work with these professional bodies,” he says.

Despite the losses of gems like the Times Museum and SCoP, most leading boom-era private museums are plodding away through these lean years, including the Ming Contemporary Art Museum and the HOW Art Museum in Shanghai, and UCCA and M WOODS in Beijing (with branches in other locations), as well as public institutions like Shanghai’s Power Station of Art and the Museum of Art Pudong. The private Shanghai venue Rockbund Art Museum, under new leadership from Liu Yingjiu and X Zhu-Nowell, has rebounded this year from a renovation closure with a series of bold solo shows by emerging queer Asian women such as Tosh Basco and Evelyn Taocheng Wang. Projects such as the Start Museum in Shanghai and the TAG Art Museum in Qingdao launched recently after long delays, while the photography institution Fotografiska will open a Shanghai branch later this year. The anonymous former director believes a new model of smaller, more specialised, grassroots entities will emerge.

“The 2008 financial crisis was a good thing for the Chinese art world,” Chinnery says. “It got rid of the investing froth poisoning the situation and cleared the way for a new situation to emerge.” Something similar is now happening, he says. “I hope this will force institutions to think of new financial models, and we can create a new art ecosystem.”