After out visit in 2007 i dreamed to come back. And we made it happen. Haunting place in Death Valley.

It’s sad that Desert Flower was destroyed by a strong wind last year. RIP, the strange flower, you’ll be missed!

Last weekend i went to Philly planning to finally visit Frida Kahlo and Juan Soriano exhibitions at Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as couple of shows at Fiber Philadelphia.

First stop was Fiber Biennial at Snyderman-Works gallery. Very interesting including some whimsical basketry by Charissa Brock. Actually i was meaning to visit this gallery for a while so used this as a chance and checked around beyond the fiber exhibition.

Several more picture as usual can be found @flickr, including couple of shots i made at Museum of Arts. The Kahlo’s exhibition was too crowded to enjoy so i wandered around the museum.

i meant to post about our visit to Noguchi museum for quite a while. We went there couple of weeks ago on a windy and grey saturday.

Honestly i knew Noguchi only as a designer so was completely unprepared for his sculptural works – and the museum setting is magical. Though pieces in the open garden were plywooded (apparently for the season) we had plenty to see – and in fact for some sculptures grey skies and naked birches created a perfect backdrop. Besides we had the place pretty much to ourselves.

the are more pix on my flickr

While on our way to Toronto during the xmas time we decided to stop at Corning NY, to visit a famous museum of glass there.

(the rest of pix are flickred here.)

The museum is hosted in an airy contemporary building and has an impressive collection of glass art. Especially interesting were galleries of contemporary as as well as 20th century works.

Nice gift shop worth browsing but by all means avoid the cafeteria for anything beyond coffee.

This became a tradition – we make a ride to GFS every season. Since our last visit in July they added quite a few new sculptures, Day Dream by the prolific Seward Johnson is one of them, a playful riff on Matisse’s dancers.

(originally written on 9/12/07)

We started the day with a breakfast at Primanti Bros to experience a famous Pittsburgh sandwich.

after which we proceeded to explore the Strip.

Though sort of similar to Italian Market in Philly, we enjoyed the Strip much more – it’s cleaner, more diverse and fun – i was thrilled to discover Penzey’s store here, and bought some sour trahana in a greek store…

The afternoon was all high brow cultural. First Carniegie Museum of Arts – for Viva Vetro! Glass Alive. The exhibition is really an eye-opening, and i pick up the William Morris’s bug here.

Then to Warhol.

And of course we can’t miss the view from Mt Washington:

At this point we’re ready for a dinner – in another Pittsburgh landmark no less! The Church Brew Works, a beer brewery and a pub inside a restored original church building.

… i really couldn’t believe we squeezed this all in one day – wow!

Gorgeous early fall weather this weekend – and we hit curvy roads of Bucks county to Doylestown again. The ride is familiar (though never boring) but the destination is new – Nakashima’s reading room at Michener art museum.

It’s a little gem of museum with a meticulously picked collection of works by local artists:

And what a lovely sculpture garden! Nevermind the location – the former site of the Bucks County jail (note the wall):

And then we had a real pleasure to visit just opened exhibition of Philip Pearlstein, The Dispassionate Body . Well pleasure might be a wrong word to describe the emotions brought out by these large paintings of nudes in bizarre indoor set-ups with a toy or some other object or two. Disturbing but riveting!..

Yet the strange compositions felt somehow familiar… when half way through the exhibition it struck me – indeed i read a long and fascinating essay about Pearlstein a long while ago, most probably in New Yorker – but since completely forgot the name. Now i just wish i could reread the essay again (and no, unfortunately neither googling nor direct searching the New Yorker website helped).

We went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see couple of new craft exhibitions – on jewelry and fiber. Instead we spent all the time at just opened Shy Boy, She Devil, And Isis, Conceptual Craft from Wornick Collection. More than 100 objects, mostly three dimensional with some wall art. Wood pieces were especially eye opening… No wonder – it occurs that Wornicks were initially collecting what they would call "sculptural wood vessels" (the interview and some wood works from their collection are available at youtube here).

Art Knowledge News has some pictures and an excellent description of the exhibition (not so much so on the MFA site itself).

Couldn’t resist getting the exhibition catalog – besides excellent photos of all presented objects it contains essays on several interesting subjects – craft vs art, the materialization of arts, the role of private collectors…

And i keep thinking that exhibitions like this seriously raise the bar for craft artists: it’s hard not to measure works we will encounter on the next arts and craft fair we visit against it. 

Quote of the Day:

"What good are the arts? Here’s one stab at an answer. They provide us with powerful pleasures. They expand our imaginative sense. The are windows into historical epochs and into realms of pure fancy and fantasy. They sharpen our intellectual discriminative powers and, for example in music, develop human technical capacities to the highest degree possible. The arts incite emotional experience of an intensity and variety nowhere else available and take us deeply into alternative human sensibilities. They can increase human sociality, for artistic performers and their audiences alike. They record what are some of the most profound ideas human beings have ever had, but unlike advanced science do it in a way that ordinary mortals can understand." (Dennis Dutton)

Just came back from a weekend getaway in Pittsburgh: a basic idea was to catch up some events of Pittsburgh Celebrates Glass, mainly Chihuly, and stop by Fallingwater on our way. Well this trip ended up being a case study on a careful planning: in such a short time we visited every place we were eager to explore, never were in any rush, never had a boring moment, and ate and drank well! 

First rule: identify some place midway worth visiting to break the monotony of a long drive. On the way from NJ we stopped by Harley Davidson plant in York, PA for a insider tour including the assembly line – impressive and touching, all at the same time – a real labor of love and dedication.

We got to Pittsburgh with enough time left for hotel check in and for getting lost before we found our next destination – Phipps Conservatory hosting Chihuly Nights.

Sure thing Chihuly had hell of a time setting up the installations – i imagine the sophisticated design of indoor gardens at the conservatory would offer a creative challenge that Chihuly met perfectly by the elegant and playful matching of his glass pieces against plants of various shapes and color, lush or delicate, everything looking so natural and effortless like they really belonged here.

To be continued…