sculpture

Isamu Noguchi on Reality as a Sculptural Experience

At the Noguchi Museum’s instagram, we saw a quote from Isamu Noguchi that changed our view of sculpture AND reality. It accompanied photographs of blind art students who toured the Museum with the sculptor in 1987. Their transformative effect surprised us.

Phyllida Barlow’s Fearless Embrace of Chance

One of the best things to come out of the months of Covid-19 lockdown has been extraordinary films from art galleries and museums. One of the best of is about the English sculptor Phyllia Barlow. It provides an illuminating counterpoint to the many life questions that the virus has thrown into relief.

Günther Uecker: creating an instrument with which we can eat art

Artist Günther Uecker, whose work we did not know, gave us a new view of art, that we somehow have felt all these years, but couldn’t name…

Ruth’s Asawa: Art is doing. Art deals directly with life.

Sculptor Ruth Asawa’s work became more moving for knowing some of her life story. Then an astute psychotherapist friend shared his insight into her use of wire in her remarkable sculptures.

Beatrice Wood’s Sweet Perspective on Mistakes

We were wondering how we might illustrate the late centenarian ceramic artist Beatrice Wood’s extraordinary statement: “My life is full of mistakes. They’re like pebbles that make a good road” . Then we came upon the work of artist Richard Long, who for decades has made remarkable path works that seem to echo Wood’s words…

A Bookmark for Compelling Bathroom Reads (+ What We Didn’t Want to Forget)

We hunt for ideas everywhere, walking around, scrolling through websites, leafing through books and magazines often…in the quiet of the bathroom. A compelling article in the New York Time’s T Magazine made us hunt for a bookmark there. Et voila: we discovered that toilet paper is thin enough to not make a mark on any publication, wide…

A Pile of STUFF That is Really an Artwork

(Video link here.) Viewed one way, artist Bernard Pras assembled a random scattering of STUFF —chairs, stools, dolls, a tub, a violin…—at the Palais du Facteur Cheval in Hauterives, France. But viewed another, it becomes something totally OTHER. (…after our own hearts.) via Jody Lotito Levine. Thanks Jody!

Hugo Franca makes furniture from fallen trees

fallen trees become cool park furniture

Ever since we saw Brazilian sculptor Hugo Franca‘s wondrous furniture hewn from fallen trees, we view the occasional fallen tree the many trees blown down by Hurricane Sandy in our nearby park as POSSIBILITY. Franca has turned the big trunks into places for people to lounge, read, hangout, play in Sao Paulo. We want to “beam”…

Cedro di Versailles, a sculpture by Giuseppe Penone

giuseppe penone’s tree + ‘the hidden life within’

We were knocked out when we saw this picture of sculptor Giuseppe Penone‘s sapling within a tree that he says is about “the hidden life within.” We thought of many things at once, many of them corny, but true nevertheless…of the origins and emergence of ideas, and the little kid that remains within each of…