Foot in the Door 4 @ MIA

The evening of the 18th was the opening reception at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for the "Foot in the Door 4" exhibit, held in conjunction with MIA's regular "Third Thursday" event (I didn't post then because I forgot to take pictures of a few areas of the exhibit and wasn't able to get back until this past weekend). For all the times I've been to MIA (though I must admit I usually go on weekdays during light hours, not at night for gala events) I've NEVER seen so many people there! It was exciting, fun, and claustrophobic all at the same time...fortunately, my sister and a friend came with me so I didn't have to face the crowds alone.

The exhibit is set up on the 2nd floor of the Target (west) Wing of MIA and runs through three exhibit rooms and out into the central atrium. Because of the sheer volume of people present to view the exhibit a line extended from the first room back into the regular section of the museum...fortunately for us, we arrived fairly early in the evening and the wait to get in was minimal....by the time we came out of the gallery space, the line was extended all the way from the Target Wing to the center of the museum (I would assume about a 45 minute wait to get through).

I had no idea what to expect given the number of pieces on display (over 5,000 Minnesota artists are involved...their highest count ever) but my first impression - other than not being able to move my arms more than six inches away from my body on account of the mass of humanity jammed around me - was of a sophisticated rummage sale set-up; sculptural pieces appeared to be laid out haphazardly across vast platforms while the walls were a veritable jigsaw of paintings, photographs, and other 2-D works.

Rather than being able to walk freely around the space, the crowd moved in a more-or-less compacted mass (as you can see from the picture) around each table before surging through a doorway into the next room (I was terrified some of the pieces were going to be knocked over by people crowding the tables...one actually did (a ceramic piece I liked) by a woman carrying her coat over her arm, but fortunately nothing was broken). I found my piece on display in the first room, which was very exciting; I didn't see anything else quite like my work, either, which was nice (uniqueness is always good).

Despite the cramped viewing experience and jumbled displays, the exhibit was still incredibly impressive and I had a great time picking out pieces I admired and explaining different (possible) creation techniques to my party. (Going back this last weekend was even better because I was able to go through the rooms at my own pace and pause to admire individual items without fear of being trampled...) The museum has now also finished photographing each individual piece and uploading the images (along with artists' names, of course) into their computer database, so you can search (and vote!) for work throughout the exhibit (everything is numbered, so work is suprisingly easy to find).

The exhibit runs through June 13th and is completely free, so if anyone happens to be in the area, I strongly suggest stopping by to check it out.

The link to the exhibit site is: http://www.artsmia.org/foot-in-the-door-4/

Art in the Cities

A new post! Finally! You know when you move to a new location and in the hassle tend to be a bit forgetful about things? Well, I moved to my new house in Minneapolis back in November and between work, cleaning up the house, traveling between here and Wisconsin, and getting used to driving around (city driving is scary to a small-towner...just saying) more-or-less completely forgot about my blog...fortunately, there hasn't been much going on since the move art-wise, so I haven't missed much.

HOWEVER, a new year brings new opportunities and, as a friend of mine back home would say, my art karma seems to be on the rise. I'm still associated with the Edina Art Center (which, if you've never checked it out, you need to) and actually just received my confirmation e-mail today for my spring/summer classes...I'll be continuing to teach hand-building as well as a NEW smoke firing class! (Open flames...always exciting...) My muse has also returned from a two-month-or-so hiatus and I've been filling sketchbook pages with new design concepts just itching to be brought to life (hurry up, warm weather! I can't smoke-fire in the snow!) I'm also putting the finishing touches on my application for Ceramic Monthly's "2010 Emerging Artists" issue as well as one for a studio fellowship at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, but more on those later if they're accepted (keep your fingers crossed).

Most exciting, however (and most recent seeing as I just got back to house from dropping off my work), is my participation in the Minneapolis Art Institute's "Foot in the Door 4," an exhibit offering any artist living in Minnesota the chance to display a single piece of work (no more than 1 foot in any direction) at a major art museum. MIA only offers this opportunity every ten years, so I'm psyched that it happens to coincide with the year I moved here (I didn't even mind the hour-and-a-half of standing in line to register my work as I got the chance to meet/speak with some lovely local artists who offered some great advice to the "Minneapolis newbie").

The show "officially" opens on the 19th, but there is a premier the evening before which I'll be going to/posting about (if I remember my camera, there may even be pictures). Here's the official link for the event:
http://www.artsmia.org/index.php?section_id=284

From what I saw at registration there is going to be a glorious conglomeration of work from across the state, so if you like art definitely try and make it here sometime between now and June when the show comes down.

And summer keeps flying by...

Once again, the evils of dial-up internet have thwarted my recent attempts to post, but it seems as though the server is cooperating tonight so I can finally update!

Quite a bit has happened since my last post - the Manito Art League juried show has come and gone (and was beautiful....every year the art entered is so different from previous years!) as well as the first two weeks of my last classes as an instructor at Riverrun (which is strange to think about....I've gotten very attached to my students and will miss them greatly when I move). Most highly-anticipated of all, however, was the 2009 Northwoods Summer Art Tour, which took place this past weekend.

If you aren't familiar with the tour, the bare-bones description is that a large number of private studio artists and galleries around north-central Wisconsin participate in what might be called a three-day-open-house where they host guest artists, display new work, and offer demonstrations (some even invite the public to create small projects). At Riverrun, we hosted Betty Christian, a local jewelry artist, and Audrey Hood Hampton, a watercolorist, who created and sold their work in our upstairs gallery for the entire duration of the tour. In the downstairs studio, we worked on demonstrations of hand-building and carving in clay (which resulted in the first collaborative piece Joan and I have ever done together) and Joan also demonstrated various needle felting techniques. (I have various pictures from the tour posted below.)

On the last day of the tour I managed to take an hour during one of the quieter portions of the afternoon to go visit two other pottery studios in the area: Pigeon Road Pottery, owned by the fabulously-talented Amy Higgason , and Bear Paw Pottery, owned by also very-talented John and Vicky Langer. At Pigeon Road, Amy and her guest artist, Katelyn Koester (whom I've known since high school), had a small station set up for visitors to create small sculpted clay heads which will be fired and mounted in a round thrown frame for display at future tours (Amy did tiles with guests several years ago and had them mounted and displayed for this tour). I had time enough to make a small Minotaur-inspired addition before having to zip over to John and Vicky's, where they were just finishing unloading a raku firing. I had done an evening of raku with the Langers two years ago and they graciously invited me to come back to their house that evening after the tour was finished and everything settled at Riverrun to do another firing (again, images are posted below). Obviously and overall, the tour was a great experience...strange to believe it's over now!
Joan's and my collaberative piece...a Master/Apprentice canoe filled with sentimental and symbolic objects and carved with travel/future-related images.

.Joan said, "Hey, Kristen, why don't you carve a little something into the side of the canoe?"
...that "little something" ended up taking five hours to complete and representing three world cultures

.We all started getting pretty goofy towards the end of the last day...I happened to capture one of Joan's better faces :)

.
John Langer moving my scorching-hot raku plate from the kiln into a paper-lined garbage can

.
My piece along with some from John and Vicky (love the red!!)

For more information on the Northwoods Art Tours (there's also one in the fall) or the studios I mentioned in the blog, please follow these addresses:

http://www.northwoodsarttour.com
http://www.riverrunarts.com
http://pigeonroadpottery.blogspot.com
http://northwoodsarttour.com/bear paw.htm

Also, I have some very exciting news regarding this fall, but I'll keep that for my next posting. :)

Dreary days in June are no fun

Fortunately, I've been countering the lack-luster weather by using particularly bright colors on one of my new bodies of work (they make not look like it now since colored slip is usually pretty dull before it's fired, but trust me). Since late fall I've been experimenting with the yin-yang effect of using vivid electric glazes contrasted with smoke firing (did I mention this in my last post? I don't remember and it isn't worth it for me to check thanks to the wondrous world of 52 Kbps); recently, I've begun connecting that with my older interest in foreign decorative motifs and *voila* now have several new bodies of work I'm creating simultaneously.

The body I referenced earlier in particular has been demanding most of my time purely because of the ridiculous (so I've been told) amounts of time I spend decorating each piece. The pieces are simple hand-build forms with patterns inspired by Aboriginal artwork, which means lots and lots and LOTS of dots. The idea came from a book of postcards Joan gave me at the beginning of my apprenticeship and which has been stewing in the back of my imagination ever since; I didn't know quite what to do with them until my recent visit to an exhibit of Dale Chihuly's work inspired by Navaho Trade Blankets where something just *clicked* in my brain (*make a motion to indicate a light going on*). Obviously, the images posted with this blog are a sample of the creating-frenzy that followed.

One of the first pieces I created - the pattern is based on watering holes connected by small streams (a lot of the work I used as reference is depicted as if from a bird's-eye view)

A close-up of the detail on the bowl...the hardest part was "dotting" onto a concave surface without the slip running

This piece is based on a story of how one kingfisher visiting another led people to water; I was in awe at the thought of language as pure imagery with this one*

If you can't tell from the images, all of the pieces are completely rounded; I did this intentionally as putting feet on them just felt like it interrupted something with the form...couldn't put my finger on what. Instead, I'm designed wooden stands for the pieces to be displayed on - should be interesting at the very least. These pieces are also shown in their pre-fired state as I forgot that camera batteries need charging and therefore didn't have pictures of when they came out of the kiln. All I have yet to do in the finishing process is smoking the white areas of the pieces and then coating the exterior surfaces with beeswax to seal them...looking forward to the finished products. :)

*Please note: I was very careful to check copyright laws pertaining to Aboriginal artwork and am abiding by all said laws when it comes to the selection of inspirational pieces and decoration of my work