Art Quilt Elements 2020

Eyes on the World, by Diana Fox
hand-dyed fabric, 79" x 84"

Follow this link to see an online exhibition of impressive art quilts.  Many different techniques are on display, from digital printing on fabric to thread painting, and even a quilt made of salvaged wood.

The virtual exhibition will be available until July 9, 2021.

Fibre Art Exhibition at the Smithsonian

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art has organized Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: FibertArt by Women, originally scheduled for April 22 - August 28, 2022. At this time the museum is closed, and opening dates are to be announced.

The website reads, in part:

"The thirty-four selected artworks piece together an alternative history of American art. Accessible and familiar, fiber handicrafts have long provided a source of inspiration for women. Their ingenuity with cloth, threads, and yarn was dismissed by many art critics as menial labor. The artists in this exhibition took up fiber to complicate this historic marginalization and also revolutionize its import to contemporary art. They drew on personal experiences, particularly their vantage points as women, and intergenerational skills to transform humble threads into resonant and intricate artworks."

Visitors to their website can see the thirty-four works selected for the show. Artists include Sheila Hicks and Judith Scott, whose work I have profiled here in the past.

Visions Art Museum's virtual exhibition

Visions Art Museum, in San Diego, California, is a non-profit organization with a focus on fibre art. It stages twenty exhibitions annually, and though it is now closed to visitors, four of its shows are currently available on-line.

Octopus and Crab (detail), Beth Blenkinship

Beth Blankenship's solo exhibition, "Connecting Threads", showcases her longtime fascination with marine life. Using thread and beads, she has made a series of vessels celebrating the diversity of aquatic plants and animals.

Meltdown #1 (detail), Sandra Meech

Canadian artist Sandra Meech has a longstanding interest in the people and landscape of the polar regions.  "Polar Expressions" is a masterful display of her use of painted cloth and stitch to create contemporary quilts.

Break Up, Maria Shell

"Shifting Tides: Convergence in Cloth" is a group show, staged by members of Studio Art Quilt Associates. Its 46 varied works focus "on the current state of the Pacific Ocean ecosystem, its marvellous natural diversity, and the human activities that both sustain and threaten oceanic life".

The Wave, Carol Simpson

Finally, small works by local artists, "The Seaside Quilt Group", are on display in the show "The San Diego Seaside".

Fans of contemporary art quilts will have much to explore in this virtual collection.

"We Are the Story": quilt exhibition in Minneapolis

I'll Fly Away,
Susan Brubaker Knapp

An article in The New York Times reviews "We Are the Story", one of a series of quilt exhibitions at seven sites throughout Minneapolis and St. Paul, presented by the Textile Center and the national Women of Color Quilters Network. The first exhibition, "Gone but Never Forgotten:Remembering Those Lost to Police Brutality, is available online, and other shows run through the spring.

Writing on the Wall,
Deborah Fell

Excellence in Fibers VI

Repair (detail), Kevan Lunney, 2016
Aluminum base, neon glass tubes, industrial wool felt,
white electric cord; back fully enclosed with
removable aluminum plate, knitted construction

This virtual show is presented by the New Bedford Art Museum, in Massachusetts. It showcases fifty-two outstanding works, juried from over 1100 submissions, in the categories of 

• Installation
• Sculptural
• Vessels
• Wall and Floor, and
• Wearables.

The exhibition presents a truly astonishing diversity of material, technique, and subject.

"Creative Threads" @ BIG Arts, Sanibel Island

Thank you, Lynda, for sharing news of this 3-artist exhibition of art quilts, currently staged at BIG Arts Gallery, Sanibel Island, Florida. Featured is the fibre-based art of Sally Dutko, Bonnie Langenfeld, and Angela Scozzari.

While we can't teleport to Florida, we can enjoy the virtual version of this show.

Sally Dutko, Dots Without the Polka,
hand-dyed cottons, silk

I particularly enjoyed the larger pieces in the exhibition, one of which is shown above. The physical space of the gallery seems to favour the bigger, bolder works. No doubt the charms of the smaller pieces are appreciated by those seeing the show in person.

Quilts = Art = Quilts @ the Schweinfurth Art Center

With so many of our museums and galleries closed, are you hungry to see some great art quilts?

The annual exhibition at the Schweinfurth in upstate New York is always exciting, and this year (the 40th anniversary year) they have made the show available to on-line visitors, giving them access to a virtual tour through the gallery. Seventy-one quilts, 58 national and international artists.

Well worth a look!

Susan Lapham, Playground #1, a prizewinner

Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism @ MMFA

The Port of Marseille, Albert Marquet, 1916, oil on canvas

More than 500 paintings, drawings, prints and posters have been assembled for this summer's blockbuster show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Amazingly, the works belong to a single private collector, who remains anonymous.

The Flowering Tree, Achille Laugé, 1893, oil on canvas

I was thrilled to visit the show on its opening day, but I plan to return soon, taking the opportunity to listen to the detailed audioguide, available free on the museum's app.

View of London, Maximilien Luce, 1893, oil on canvas

Many of the artists represented will be familiar to the casual visitor (Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Lautrec, Morisot) but other names will be new to many of us. The informative text posted alongside the works outlines some of the artistic and social issues faced by the artists of the time.

Saint-Tropez, Fontaine des Lices, Paul Signac, 1895, oil on canvas

The exhibition continues until November 15, 2020. To manage the number of people in the gallery, visitors are required to book timed tickets, either on-line or by phone.

Cruiser Decked with Flags in Antwerp, Othon Friesz, 1906, oil on canvas

Michael West, Abstract Expressionist, 1908-1991

Michael West in her apartment, c. 1977

I was intrigued to read about the female abstract expressionist, Michael (Corinne) West, on Artsy.net. Little-known, her work and career have recently attracted renewed interest.

Michael (Corinne) West, Blue Figure, 1948

West died in 1991, with no heirs or even a will. The contents of her Upper West-Side apartment were auctioned by the City of New York. Stuart Friedman, an art photographer who had bought one of her paintings in a thrift shop a few years earlier, was the only bidder. Using his garage to store the many canvases he found in her apartment, he began to learn more about her, and to promote her work.

The Hollis Taggart Gallery in New York bought the whole lot last year, and staged a show of her work.

Michael West at Granite Galleries, 1963

an installation shot of "Space Poetry: the Action Paintings of Michael West",
Hollis Taggart Gallery, 2019

A student of Hans Hoffman, West had a number of gallery shows in New York in her lifetime. It is thought her lack of worldly success was, in part, due to her lack of interest in "networking".

You can read more about Michael West in the Artsy article, written by Karen Chernick. An on-line exhibition of her work, titled "We Come Alive and Dream", is also available.

Michael West, Stonington, Connecticut, c. 1955

100th anniversary of Group of Seven

J.E.H. Macdonald, Apple Blossom, York Mills, 1919
oil on cardboard, 8" x 10"

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the first show of the Group of Seven. It is being celebrated on-line by the Alan Klinkhoff Gallery, which has been involved with the Group's artists for many years.

Robert Pilot, The Lane, Peel Street, Montreal, c.1950
oil on canvas, 28" x 22"

Some thirty of the Group's paintings are available for on-line viewing, here. Included in the virtual presentation are works by three Montreal artists who were invited exhibitors at the group's first show. Also included are some historical notes. Many of the paintings are available for sale.

The on-line show will continue until the end of 2020.

"Back to Basics" at BAdA

One of my favourite Montreal galleries is Galérie Beaux-Arts des Amériques, on St.-Denis.

Their current show, all works on paper, is a virtual show, which you can experience through the YouTube video above.  In less than 5 minutes one can tour all the highlights, accompanied by Gershwin's beautiful Summertime melody.

I am a big fan of Lorraine Pritchard's work, so watch for her piece, Listen to the Garden, acrylic on paper.  (I did a brief profile of Pritchard's work in an October post, here.)

And one of the largest works, Karen Thomson's Le Grand Nord, is also worth a close look. It is done with oil, beeswax, graphite and charcoal on paper. I was fortunate to see it on a recent visit to the gallery, with my Text'art friends, all of whom were quite transported by it.

Coming up on the gallery website is their entry into the annual show Papier 2020, which will be staged on-line this year, June 1 - 21.

Estate Sale at the Alan Klinkhoff Galleries

John Little, Rue Beaudry, de la Gauchetière, Montreal, 1963
oil on canvas, 24 x 30

Both the Toronto and Montreal branches of the Alan Klinkhoff Gallery will be involved in an exhibition and sale of the Mitzi and Mel Dobrin collection of Canadian art.

Robert Pilot, The Lane, Peel Street, Montreal, 1950
oil on canvas, 28 x 22 in

More than 90 first-rate paintings will be featured, from artists like Molly Lamb Bobak, Emily Carr, Marc-Aurèle Fortin, Clarence Gagnon, Lawren S. Harris, and A.Y. Jackson. The paintings may be viewed on-line at the gallery website. Also on the site are the reminiscences of the Dobrins' son, Lewis, and of gallerist Alan Klinkhoff, who tell the story of the Dobrins' approach to building their collection.

Tom Thomson, Early Spring, Algonquin Park, 1917
oil on board, 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 in

To see this museum-quality collection of art, visit the Alan Klinkhoff Gallery in Toronto, March 12 - 21, 2020, or in Montreal, March 26 - April 4, 2020.

Toronto branch: 190 Davenport Rd, Tuesday - Saturday, 10 am - 5 pm

Montreal branch: 1448 Sherbrooke St. W., Tuesday - Saturday, 9 am - 5 pm

Jean-Claude Poitras @ Montreal's McCord Museum

Recently I had an opportunity to attend a tour with the fashion designer Jean-Claude Poitras, as he led a small group through his current exhibition at the McCord Museum.

Poitras was charming, and he told many stories about his youth and his career, which illuminated the designs on display. Poitras was raised by his great-grandmother in a small Quebec town, and going to mass weekly was a treat for him. He loved to look at the parade of ladies in their finery. Some of his early collections even reference ecclesiastical garments.

Poitras admitted to finding inspiration in the fan magazines he loved as a child. The woolen suit on the left, designed in 1977, was inspired by Diane Keaton's androgynous wardrobe in the film Annie Hall. To my eye, the trench coat on the right is a feminine version of one worn by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. 

I can imagine these frocks, shown above, on Italian film stars of the 50's and 60's.

Poitras attracted a celebrity clientele early on. He was enthusiastically endorsed by local "women of influence", like Mila Mulroney, Lisette Lapointe, and Pauline Marois.

One of the companies for which Poitras designed, Franck Imports, had extensive connections in Hong Kong. Twice a year, Poitras would spend two or three weeks in Hong Kong, learning to work with luxurious silk fabrics.

The tunic shown above is cut from mud silk, a fabric made in Guangdong province in south China, since the time of the Ming dynasty. In a laborious artisanal process, silk fabric is first dyed brown with ju-liang root. One side is then coated in iron-rich mud from the Pearl River delta and the silk is left to dry flat in the sun. The mud dyes one side of the fabric black, while also giving it a slight stiffness and lustre.  This method is not adaptable to industrial production.

You can see some Japanese influence in the garments above.

Find out more about the exhibition here. The show continues until April 26, 2020.

"Griffintown" @ Montreal's McCord Museum

This weekend I had the pleasure of touring a newly-opened exhibition at the McCord Museum.

In this show, Montreal photographer Robert Walker shares twenty large-scale photos of Griffintown, a working-class Montreal neighbourhood, now undergoing radical gentrification. Another hundred or so of his photos are shown as projected images. Also on display are historic photos of the neighbourhood from the museum's archive.

Walker often juxtaposes the slick and glamorous "lifestyle" images used to promote the condos with the reality of their construction, and the consequent deconstruction of the neighbourhood. The viewer cannot help but ask:

• what is lost?
• what is gained?
• what is promised?

You can find out more about the McCord's Griffintown photo exhibition here.

For those of you who appreciate the art of urban photography, have a look at this youtube video of Robert Walker on the job, in which he shares his approach and aesthetic considerations.

The show is the inauguration of an ongoing series at the McCord, Evolving Montreal.

"To document Montreal’s ongoing urban transformation, in the next few years the Museum will be commissioning well-known local photographers to explore the changes occurring in a neighbourhood of their choice."

The exhibition Griffintown continues until August 9, 2020.

The Forgotten Female Art Dealer Who Championed Picasso and Modigliani

An article on Artsy, written by Karen Chernick, has introduced me to an intriguing personality. Her name was Berthe Weill, and I had never heard of her.

In 1901, at the age of 36, the Parisienne Berthe Weill opened an art gallery where she sold the work of emerging artists at modest prices. Writes Chernick,

"Weill bought, exhibited and sold Pablo Picasso's work before he ever moved to Paris or painted any of the works for which he's now considered a modernist legend.... She sold his Moulin de la Galette (c. 1900) for 250 francs to collector and newspaper publisher Arthur Huc.

"Huc made another purchase from Weill that year, a still life by Henri Matisse, for the bargain rate of 130 francs, the first ever sale by a dealer for the young Fauve artist."

Moulin de la Galette, Pablo Picasso, now in the Guggenheim Museum

Among the artists she championed during her 40-year career were André Derain, Georges Braque, Aristide Maillol, Kees van Dongen, Maurice de Vlaminck, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrilllo, Georges Roualt, Raoul Dufy, Robert Delauney and Amadeo Modigliani. Midway through her career she began to dedicate half of her exhibitions to women artists. As the artists became more recognized, they moved on to better-known galleries, and Weill never achieved much financial success.

Portrait de Berthe Weill, Georges Kars, 1933

Sadly, Weill had to close her gallery in 1941. As tough as she was, life had become too difficult for a Jewish businesswoman in German-occupied France. Ten years later, she died in poverty.

There is a local connection to this story: in 2022, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art will stage a show of some 80 paintings that passed through her gallery.

This year at the MNBAQ

For those who have always meant to visit the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec, this may well be the year to make the trip. Three major exhibitions are planned that will have a broad appeal.

From February 13 - May 18, 2020, the museum will host Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Mexican Modernism. Presented are more than 150 items, with ten paintings by Kahlo, including the well-known Self-Portrait with Necklace, Self-Portrait with Braid, and Diego on my Mind. Also included: twenty works by other Mexican painters and 85 photographs by important Latin American photographers of the period. The show has already traveled widely.

From June 20 - September 27, 2020, Turner and the Sublime will make its exclusive Canadian appearance. Organized by the Tate, it includes 75 paintings and works on paper, covering the biggest portion of Turner's career. Featured will be a Turner painting from the holdings of the MNBAQ, Scene in Derbyshire (1842), bequeathed to the museum by the estate of Maurice Duplessis.

As well, Emily Carr and her Contemporaries will be staged at the MNBAQ from November 5, 2020 - January 17, 2021. Meant to serve as a counterpoint to the one- hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Group of Seven, the show assembles some 250 works by pioneering women painters, photographers, sculptors, architects, and filmmakers, including 50 works by their Aboriginal contemporaries. Names that will be familiar to Montrealers include Paraskeva Clark, Marion Dale Scott, Prudence Heward and Anne Savage. 

Whenever I visit the MNBAQ, I enjoy touring the wing that once housed the city's prison. Four floors of this space are permanently dedicated to four important Quebec artists: Jean Paul Lemieux, Alfred Pellan, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Fernand Leduc. Also part of the permanent collection is the fascinating sculpture The Flux and the Puddle by David Altmejd, not to be missed.

The museum has a great restaurant too, and on a summer's day you can't beat the view from a table on the terrace.

Imagine Van Gogh @ Arsenal

This immersive experience of image and music is currently staged in the cavernous space of Arsenal, an art venue in southwestern Montreal. It has been getting rave reviews, and continues until March 1, 2020.

Originally designed to be projected in the old bauxite quarries of Les Baux-de-Provence, it is now a "must-see" for winter-weary Montrealers.

More than 200 of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings are thematically presented, sometimes in extreme close-up, allowing viewers to appreciate the energy of the artist's brushwork.

The accompanying sound track is replete with well-chosen musical selections from Saint-Saëns, Satie, Prokofiev, and others.

The film portion of the exhibit runs about 30 minutes, but visitors should plan on spending some additional time reading the bilingual explanatory panels about Van Gogh's life.

Even the floor serves as a screen for ever-changing imagery.

For more information, visit the Arsenal website.

Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons

The Westmount Public Library is always obliging about acquiring books I request. Most recently, I suggested they buy "Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons, 1880-1930", the book that accompanies an exhibition of the same name, currently on tour in Europe. This same show will open at Ottawa's National Gallery in the fall of 2020. You can read more about the show on the Gallery's website.

The first of ten essays in the book is the Prologue, written by ex-Montrealer Adam Gopnik. I am a huge fan of Gopnik, who often writes in the New Yorker and occasionally speaks in Montreal.

Here are a few snippets from his insightful essay, titled "Canada and World Impressionism".

 "As modern art becomes for us less a train racing forward than a many-sided landscape to be explored at leisure, and for pleasure, progress becomes a less certain term." 

"Impressionism is a misnamed French movement from the 1860s to the 1880s. Actualisme might have been closer to its true spirit, which was not to record a quick impression of a scene or place but to give permanent form to the ambivalent pleasures of modern life, and in a style shorn of rhetoric and the painstaking pomposity of official art. It was an art about light and life, and how each illuminates the other."

"Light and life, light as it falls and life as it is. Though truth to local colour is no longer the whole of art, it always will be the heart of painting. Any art that chooses light and life as its object and subject, whatever flag it flies, will shine. The best kind is light on life in a winter house on a snowy city evening, drawing us home, even as we stand outside to look a moment longer."

Maurice Cullen, Winter Night, Craig Street, Montreal, 1899

New exhibition at the MMFA

Another crowd-pleasing show is scheduled for this spring and summer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. "Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism: Signac and the Indépendants" will run from March 28 until September 17, 2020.

Paul Signac, Juan les Pins. The Evening, 1914

The museum's website reads,

"Discover a magnificent body of 500 paintings and graphic works from an exceptional private collection to be exhibited in its entirety for the first time – the largest collection of works by Paul Signac, but also of avant-garde: Impressionists (Monet and Morisot), Fauves (Dufy, Friesz and Marquet), Symbolists (Gauguin, Mucha and Redon), Nabis (Bonnard, Denis, Lacombe, Sérusier, Ranson and Vallotton), Neo-Impressionists (Cross, Guillaumin, Luce, Pissarro, Seurat and Van Rysselberghe) and observers of life in Paris (Anquetin, Degas, Lautrec, Picasso and Steinlen).

For more information, visit https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/upcoming/paris-1900/.

Tribute to Leonard Cohen: opening

Last week was the vernissage of my most recent show, a collaborative celebration of the life, music and poetry of Leonard Cohen. Most of the twelve participating artists were there, and the many visitors took advantage of this opportunity to talk to the artists about their work.

Portrait of Cohen, Eric Mannella

Visitors are greeted by this haunting portrait of Cohen. In the words of the artist,

"This painting explores the idea of light revealing form, using a baroque model of lighting where the light source is a single beam. Emphasis is placed on a veristic likeness of the poet while conveying an introspective portrait of a deep thinker."

When Paper Becomes Poetry, Joanne Keilo

At the entrance to the show, these three large works by Joanne Keilo make a strong impression on the viewer. Made of dried paper pulp, they reference script with their calligraphic shapes. The choice to forego glass in the mounting left the works vulnerable and fragile, in keeping with Cohen's aesthetic of celebrating human imperfection and frailty. Keilo wrote:

"Cohen laments. Rather than bypass the glory and the pain, he permits himself to sink into it. He emerges through his poetry, through his songs, through his prose. In 'Beautiful Losers' Cohen writes 'How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?'

"In my series 'When Paper Becomes Poetry' I beat the fibres for over eight hours in a Hollander beater. The overbeaten pulp is then placed in a squeeze bottle. Songs sung to me as an infant and as a child are formed from the pulp in the bottle and are written and re-written in spiral form. The lullabies and songs are finally transformed by the drying process when the pulp ultimately shrinks and undulates as it wishes, much like memories. This series confronts and transforms the subtle body of the baby's experience from paper into a kind of visual poetry." 

Also by Joanne Keilo were these five works
from her Close to the Bone series,
comprised of large "leaf skeletons" incorporated
into paper pulp. Detail shown below.

Imperfect Vessel, Mona Turner
36 x 24

Writes Mona Turner, about her painting, above,

"Cohen's words, 'There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in' remind me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, repairing cracks in pottery with gold. This art form celebrates a beauty that is imperfect, and impermanent. The crack, the imperfection, becomes the source of new ideas, of growth and change."

Diaspora, Heather Dubreuil
acrylic collage and paint, 20 x 20

My contribution to the original Leonard Cohen exhibition at the Rigaud Library is shown above. The theme of this first exhibition was the fragment of Cohen's lyric, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Diaspora relates Cohen's words to the issue of mass migration and the global crises of refugees.

From the series First, we take Manhattan, Heather Dubreuil

For this current show, I contributed six "radical collages" from my recent series, originally titled City in Ruins. These dystopian cityscapes were made on 10 x 10 wood panels with layer upon layer of collage and paint, each layer altered by sanding to "deconstruct" the image.

I have tried in my way to be free, Heather Dubreuil
hand-dyed linen, cording and stitch, 24 x 24

This final photo, above, shows another of my contributions to the exhibition. It was meant to represent the tension between our needs for autonomy and for belonging. Its title is borrowed from the lyrics of Cohen's song Like a Bird on the Wire.

On a recent weekday visit to the show, I was delighted to see a class of schoolchildren, seated at tables in the gallery, engaged in their own visual interpretations of Cohen's words. The show Inspiré par Leonard Cohen at the Musée régional de Vaudreuil-Soulanges will continue until January 22, 2020.