Cutting Color in the Canyons

Multi-talented Wendy Newman of Moab Utah challenges her potential with every jewelry piece she creates. She delights in designing and fabricating each piece, setting and sometimes cutting & polishing her own gemstones. Her designs are animated by lively shapes and textures and bold use of vivid gems...

Colored stones are an important element in my work. I am a lapidary, as well as a metalsmith, and I cut most of my cabachons. I’ve been “rock hounding” since I was a child, and it’s become one of my favorite pastimes. It is always a challenge for me to balance the visual weight of the stone with the complexity of the metal work. It also provides a visual irony between the organic quality of the stone and the industrial quality of the metalwork. This is the balance of my life, hiking in the red rock canyons and working on the computer. >>continue>>

Signature Style in Your Home

First Annual Fine Furnishings Milwaukee Show
Midwest Airlines Center-Milwaukee, WI
September 23-24, 2006

Exciting spinoff of the famed Fine Furnishings Providence Show, this exhibition promises to showcase some of the hippest, most sophisticated, and most honest work from America's best studios.

Each Fine Furnishings Show presents a marketplace for extraordinary custom furniture designed to fit a broad range of styles. Complementing the furniture is an exciting variety of handcrafted accessories and original art.
* Collect finely crafted furniture that will become tomorrow’s heirlooms.
* Take home unique home decor items you will not find anywhere else such as rugs, quilts, lamps, mirrors, paintings, sculpture, and much more!
* Meet the artisans, learn about their design process, and buy direct. >>continue>>

Image:
Joseph Schwarte
Tallboy
Ash, wenge

Luminescent Legacy in the Southeast

The Morse Museum of American Art--Winter Park, FL presents 3 exhibits:
Domestic Treasures: Tiffany Art Glass for the Public
Through January 14, 2007
Windows and Wonders: Tiffany from the Morse Vaults and Secrets of Tiffany Glassmaking
Through September 2, 2007

Jeannette Genius McKean and Hugh F. McKean have devoted their lives to collecting, appreciating and sharing the phenomenal work of designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. Their museum, named after Jeannette's grandfather, holds "the world's most comprehensive collection of the designer's work", as well as the Tiffany Chapel from the 1893 Chicago world's fair.

The variety of the Morse's Tiffany holdings range from his famed leaded-glass windows to glass buttons he fashioned to make even life's most humble objects expressions of beauty available to a broad public. It includes paintings and extensive examples of his pottery, as well as jewelry, enamels, mosaics, watercolors, lamps, furniture and scores of examples of his Favrile blown glass. Among the most fascinating objects in the Tiffany collection are the brilliantly colorful windows, mosaics, Byzantine-Romanesque architectural elements and furnishings of the chapel he created for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The chapel has been reassembled and is open to the general public for the first time in more than 100 years. It was Tiffany's work at the 1893 exposition and especially the chapel that established him as a universally acknowledged member of the small international circle of leading artists/designers of the period - and the only American in that group. >>continue>>

Luminescent Legacy in the Midwest

Electric Tiffany--The Paine Art Center and Gardens--Oshkosh, WI Through October 8, 2006

Briiliant color from a brilliant master, only in the Midwest...

Electric Tiffany features fifty original lamps created by the studios of renowned American artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). Produced at the turn of the century, primarily between 1895 and 1920, Tiffany's remarkable lamps coincided with the development of electricity and signify his quest to bring beauty to American homes. Ultimately, Tiffany developed the lamp into an entirely new art form, pioneering the artistic use of the newly invented light bulb to create decorative objects that were both elegant and utilitarian. Tiffany Studios produced more than 400 different designs for both shades and bases in a variety of forms, ranging from table and floor lamps to hanging fixtures. Botanical themes inspired most designs, but others show Tiffany's interest in Islamic and Moorish motifs, fauna, and geometric patterns. Electric Tiffany demonstrates this immense diversity and celebrates the creativity, innovation, and exquisite craftsmanship of Tiffany's magnificent lamps. >>continue>>

Honoring Clever Haute Couture

Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Sept. 17, 2006-Jan. 7, 2007

Rethink what you wear! Some fashion designers are truly ingenious artists, turning fashion inside-out and upside-down.

Breaking the Mode: Contemporary Fashion from the Permanent Collection will present designers who found traditional criteria and solutions obsolete – designers who challenged the canons of the body’s fashionable silhouette, revolutionized methods of garment construction, rejected the formulaic use of materials and techniques, and exploited new technology in textile production. >>continue>>

Image:
Issey Miyake
A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) Queen
Spring/Summer 1999
Nylon-cotton stretch knit, 160 ¾ x 22 in. (408.3 x 55.9 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Costume Council Fund
Photo by Pascal Roulin, photo courtesy of the Miyake Issey Foundation

Mechanisms and Movies at the Museum

The Mechanical Age
UC Berkeley Art Museum
Sept. 3- Oct. 22, 2006

Fun Fall film screenings from the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive include Metropolis, Modern Times, Edward Scissorhands, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As our culture—cinematic and otherwise—moves ever deeper into digital dependency, we would do well to look back at the period that preceded the digital era: the mechanical age, which also happens to be the age of the movies. From its very beginnings, cinema has been obsessed with the machine. For the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, mechanical motion and speed were objects of formal fascination, paralleling movements in painting and photography of the period, examples of which we invite you to view in the BAM exhibition Measure of Time. >>continue>>