For hundreds of years, typography was an innately physical medium, beginning with ornate metal designs followed by mass-produced wood varieties that were cheaper and could be scaled up or down. In the 21st century, we think of typefaces and fonts as things that come in digital packages, but artist and designer Will Mower aims to bring interaction and tactility back to the art form. His BlockFace Kit, a modular stamp set, plays with elemental shapes that invite creativity and imagination without requiring the space for large sort drawers or expensive presses.

Produced in collaboration with Open Press Project (previously), BlockFace relies on a combination of 3D-printed and laser-cut pieces that attach to the stamp pieces, which you can choose to make yourself with provided instructions or purchase fully constructed. The complete kit comes with a magnetic case, black and red ink pads, and a printed manual that teaches six styles: Bauhaus, lowercase, slab serif, Grotesque, Standard, and curved. The real joy, of course, is in creating your own!

BlockFace is in its final couple of days on Kickstarter, where you can view a demonstration video and pre-order your own. Find more updates on Instagram. (via Creative Boom)

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 an Open-Source Stamp Kit, ‘BlockFace’ Gets Tactile With Type appeared first on Colossal.

Sotheby’s has emerged victorious in the battle to secure the collection of the late Emily Fisher Landau, the noted art patron who died in March at the age of 102.

The trove will be the premiere single-collector offering of the fall auction season in New York this November. Christie’s and Sotheby’s had been vying for the consignment.

The star lot of the group is Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre (Woman With a Watch), a 1932 portrait of the artist’s young lover Marie-Therese Walter, which is estimated to achieve “in excess of $120 million,” according to a statement from Sotheby’s.

The year is considered Picasso’s “annus mirabilis,” a year so important for the artist that an entire exhibition dedicated to it was mounted at the Tate Modern in 2018. Major Picasso works from 1932 are now all worth between $100 million and $200 million, according to a dealer who staged another exhibition comprised solely of them. No such pieces have come to auction since 2010, when a large-scale painting, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, from the collection of Los Angeles patrons Sydney and Frances Brody, fetched a record-setting $106 million.

All told, the Emily Fisher Landau collection is estimated at as much as $500 million, people familiar with the trove told Artnet News in August.

Other notable works from the collection include a major Mark Rothko from 1958, an Ed Ruscha (Landau had the largest assemblage of his work in private hands and visited his studio often), a Jasper Johns Flag work (one of only four ever to be offered at auction), and an Andy Warhol self-portrait, completed just months before the artist’s death.

With the art market in contraction, all eyes will be on the Landau sale. The calamitous Gerald Fineberg salethis spring inaugurated the correction when it totaled $153 million on an estimate of $163 million to $235 million, falling short of its presale target range even after Christie’s fees were added to the hammer result of $124.7 million.

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RICHFIELD — Holy Hill Art & Farm Market, 4958 Highway 167, will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sept. 16-17.

Over 200 Wisconsin artists, farmers, bakers and makers will be on the 165-year-old family homestead’s 80 acres .

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Meet Market Folks, see their work and talk with them about custom work.

Admission is $4; parking is free. Enjoy coffee, hot sandwiches, bakery, and other refreshments. Visitors are also encouraged to bring family and friends to enjoy lunch and live musicians while taking time to shop, relax and create.

Arts, crafts, creatures and a laneway party!

Saturday 14 October, 10am – 7pm

Northern Rivers Community Gallery & Ignite Studios Creative precinct, Cnr Cherry St and Crane St, Ballina

Free event

www.ballinacontemporaryartmarket.com.au

The Ballina Contemporary Art Market is a one-day, fun-filled arts and cultural event taking place on Saturday 14 October 2023 from 10am – 7pm at the Northern Rivers Community Gallery (NRCG) & Ignite Studios creative precinct, showcasing the creative talent of the region.

Free to attend, the event will feature over 50 arts and crafts stalls located within the Gallery, Ignite Studios, and surrounding gardens, selling a range of artworks, products, and wares by artists and artisans from across the Northern Rivers.

Throughout the day, an exciting program of free creative workshops will be available for market goers – weaving with Jugan Dandii, collage workshops with Claudie Frock and playing with clay sessions facilitated by local ceramicists. Local visual artist Kate Stroud has developed a range of installations, including a skill testing machine, a cloud corridor and a series of augmented reality portraits for market attendees to engage with and discover.

The Darden School of Business is introducing ten new courses this academic year covering a range of topics, including marketing, entrepreneurship, the entertainment industry and writing. The new courses incorporate writing skill and the study of the arts into some of the department’s offerings.

Asst. Business Administration Prof. Anthony Palomba, who is in his third year teaching at Darden, will be leading a class called “Media & Entertainment Business.” He said the course is designed to help students increase their media literacy, develop critical analytical skills and design business strategies for customers through the use of the socratic method to examine real world examples. 

Palomba’s own tagline for the class is “understanding media audiences and media firm strategies.” The class will start with a discussion about the importance of art and end with a discussion on the importance of artists as creators, according to Palomba.

“As business people, it’s incredibly important that we begin to understand why we do art,” Palomba said. “Every company today is a media company — whether it’s a law firm, whether it’s a doctor’s office, whether it’s a car company.”

Palomba said he advocated for the implementation of this class, referencing the growing relevance of art in business. 

“Why do we need art?” Palomba said. “This is something that I don’t think we spend enough time on as we’re churning out content.”

Evidently, student interest supported Palomba’s thoughts as the class has filled nearly all of its 68 slots.

One of the things Palomba said he plans to implement into the structure of his course is his own research on media consumption behaviors and generative artificial intelligence machine learning techniques, including a data analysis of art’s impact on an audience conducted through language processing.

Palomba said he had the idea for the course when he started working at Darden, but the changes that came along with COVID-19 made it hard to establish. He said he designed the class from the ground-up, implementing group activity and assigning specialized topics pertaining to each week.

First-year PhD program student Abhishek Kulkarni came from a background in stand-up comedy. Kulkarni said he decided to shift from performing arts to business because of the program’s research and professors.

“Innovation comes at the edge of this comfort zone,” Kulkarni said. “All of management theory seems like Darden’s comfort zone, so arts classes would help get to that extra innovation push.”

Steve Soltis, a lecturer at the Darden school, will be teaching a course titled “Writing for Impact and Influence” in the second quarter of this semester. The course will immerse students in hands-on writing instruction focusing on tools used in the business workplace — everything from how to write executive briefs to pitching a business to email etiquette through workshops.

“Virtually every class, we’ll have a quick conversation and we’ll be Zooming in real world practitioners,” Soltis said. “CEOs down to C-suite executives will comment on real time cases that they’ve experienced in writing.”

Soltis was asked to create a class on business writing, as a response to student requests and the implementation of similar classes in other schools — including Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Along with virtual mentors, Soltis said real professionals will come into the classroom to help workshop with the students. 

Some of these ten new classes — including Writing for Impact and Influence and Media & Entertainment Business — still have seats available for enrollment.



“This knob here is a radio switch, but what I see in it is an exploded engine,” says Mohamad Hafez (previously) in the opening of a new short film. The project of Jimmy Goldblum for The New Yorker Documentary series, “A Broken House” is a heartbreaking glimpse of the artist’s life and work and the horrific impacts of the Syrian war.

Born in Damascus, Hafez originally came to the U.S. on a single-entry visa to study architecture. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, travel restrictions changed, and he realized that he had to stay in the U.S. or risk not being able to return to complete his degree. Hafez missed weddings, funerals, and births and an immense homesickness grew. At one point asked himself, “If you can’t get home, why don’t you make home?” That prompted what’s now a mainstay of his practice, which involves constructing architectural miniatures of his native city using found objects. “I wanted to build the Damascus of my memories,” he says.

Although “A Broken House” begins with the artist’s studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the majority of the documentary follows the aftermath of the civil war. Goldblum and Hafez visit a refugee camp and speak with a father living there, and they spend time with the artist’s mother in Beirut, who refuses to leave her home in Syria, because it’s the closest city Hafez can travel to without being ensnared in the war.

Ultimately, the film highlights how the war has caused an immense loss of life and destroyed important cultural and historical sites. Hafez reflects this damage in his miniatures, which often feature dust-coated rubble, chipped paint, and fragments of bombed-out buildings. “If something did not look right,” the artist says about his work, “I took a hammer to it, and I snapped it, and I would throw ash on it, and I would burn it.” Although Hafez is intent on humanizing refugees, he tends to leave the ruins devoid of people to instead focus on the grim aftermath of war without blood or bodily harm.

Learn more about the artist in this conversation with Colossal from a few years back, and explore his latest works on Instagram.

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 A Heartbreaking Documentary Follows Mohamad Hafez as He Processes the Indelible Imapcts of the Syrian War appeared first on Colossal.

Wander into the new Mestiz space in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and you’ll encounter suspended cacti lights made of hot pink wicker, wooden tables shaped like spiky fauna, and wool rugs evocative of mythical animals. Founded by architect and designer Daniel Valero in 2015, the studio is known for collaborating with local artisans and makers to create functional home goods and decorative objects that capture the vibrancy and textures of the surrounding environment. Valero’s pieces reflect the traditions of local craftspeople, and he focuses on using “the same tools they have always used to create new things,” he said in an interview.

Mestiz’s most recent designs include a cherimoya chair, which has dried palm fringe and gouged feet that mimic the fruit’s surface. Follow the latest projects, and take a tour of the new workspace on the studio’s Instagram.

Valero in the studio

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 Mestiz’s Furniture and Fixtures Meld Vibrant Craft Traditions with Mexican Flora and Fauna appeared first on Colossal.

“Historically, books about contemporary Native and Indigenous art have often been composed of academic essays illustrated with artworks by Indigenous makers,” Jeffrey Gibson (previously) says in the introduction to An Indigenous Present. “The writing often references previously published texts that can be problematic and outmoded.” Released by DelMonico Books/Big NDN Press last month, the nearly 450-page volume renders solid a new paradigm of representation and visibility of Native North American art.

Works by more than 60 artists comprise the monumental survey, exploring myriad practices focused on and intersecting contemporary art, music, filmmaking, choreography, architecture, writing, photography, design, and more. The tome highlights the remarkable diversity of media and cultural influences across the continent, from fashion artist Jamie Okuma’s intricately beaded designer boots to Dana Claxton’s elaborate Headdress portrait series to Northwest Coast artist and Chief Beau Dick’s expressive masks. Gibson continues:

For An Indigenous Present, I wanted to make a lavish picture book (“sexy” was a word I used a lot to describe this project) that invites an audience to consider the creative and conceptual spaces artists need to think freely, disrupt the flow, take chances, make mistakes, and even fail in the process of creating something new.

Find your copy on Bookshop.

Melissa Cody, “Dopamine Regression” (2010), 3-ply wool, aniline dyes, wool warp, and 6-ply selvedge cords, 70 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

All pieces by Dana Claxton. Images courtesy of the artist

Wendy Red Star, “Awaxaawippiia (Ominous Mountains)” (2021), acrylic, graphite, kitakata paper, and marble paper in 30 parts, overall: 112 x 183 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, New York

Beau Dick, “Volcano Woman” (c. 2005), red cedar, acrylic, and horsehair, 24 x 20 x 10 inches. Image courtesy of Fazakas Gallery, Vancouver

Both pieces by Caroline Monnet. Images courtesy of the artist

Meryl McMaster, “Dream Catcher” (2015), Giclée print, 32 x 66 inches. Image courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto, and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montréal

Nicholas Galanin, “Never Forget” (2021), iron, paint, and steel, 59 x 360 feet. Image courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Raven Halfmoon, “Hey’-en, Ina, Ika” (2020), stoneware and glaze, 58 x 48 ½ x 19 inches. Image courtesy of the artist

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 ‘An Indigenous Present’ Is a Paradigm-Shifting Illumination of Native North American Art Today appeared first on Colossal.