CyndyAh

Nurturing Creativity – Elizabeth Gilbert

2011-10-01T15:23:00.000-05:00

The movie was good, I need to read the book to get all the aspects of her enlightened qualities. I think her idea of genius is actually dead on. No question in my mind:::

Thank you JPC for this find. You are always right on.

600 Anniversary Clock Mapping

2011-05-31T13:30:00.000-05:00

Steve McCurry: Closeup Photographers at Work

2011-02-13T20:20:00.004-06:00

Sarah Moon Master Photographer

2011-02-13T20:10:00.002-06:00

The Original Original Original Major Tom

2011-02-10T11:56:00.006-06:00

This is great to see in its simplicity. Kind of an indie film/vid~

2011-01-17T10:53:00.001-06:00

"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late."--Martin Luther King

Joel Meyerowitz on Street Photography

2011-01-03T20:03:00.000-06:00

The Sandpit by Sam O'Hare:: Still Story Telling

2010-04-30T22:29:00.002-05:00

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Over 35,000 stills°°°

2010-04-14T14:00:00.000-05:00

Bert's Red Book by cyndy allard | BOOK INFO

The Mona Lisa Curse- Robert Hughes

2010-01-02T13:43:00.004-06:00

Now this is a meditation on art. Robert Hughes clearly sees the bigger picture, but with an immersion few of us can know. Something about it reminds me of the Tulip Wars of the late 16th-17th c. Netherlands, and perhaps an economy running its course? Anyway it is very good, and a must see. Long, but do watch it all.

What are your thoughts?

Fantastic short film~~°°°°°::::: ¡Ataque de Pánico!

2009-12-19T13:35:00.004-06:00

Apparently this film maker in/from Uruguay made this film for $300(?). directed and animated by Fede Alvaraz.

Help-Portrait.com check this out, really lovely thing to think about for the holidays. Really lovely. I am reposting from the terrific JPCapongro.

2009-12-12T13:46:00.002-06:00

A Visual Artists story°°°°°°°

2009-12-09T14:01:00.001-06:00

The 'panic' drawings of Roland Topor

2009-11-22T00:20:00.001-06:00

Bert Long's eyes.

2009-11-21T15:05:00.002-06:00

"FIELD OF VISION" installation

Project ROW Houses, Houston

ARt is ABouT SolUtionS~ No Sharp Line Dividing Life and Art

2009-09-27T11:51:00.004-05:00

A story about an amazing Living, Growing and deeply Meaningful Art Piece.

Project Row Houses endeavor branches into laundromats

By LISA GRAY Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Sept. 24, 2009, 4:24PM

Karen Warren Chronicle

Artist Bert Long's Field of Vision in a Project Row Houses art park near the corner of Dowling and Elgin.

‘‘Did you ever think you'd be running a laundromat?” I asked Linda Shearer, Project Row Houses' new executive director.

I asked because Shearer's résumé is heavy with art-museum names. As a curator or administrator, she's worked at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art and Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center. Recently she finished a stint as interim director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

And now here she was, five days into her new job, considering what might be one of Row Houses' next big pushes: a laundromat to serve its Third Ward neighborhood.

“That I would be running laundromat?” she repeated, as if trying to understand the question. She paused for what seemed a long time.

And finally, she laughed. “No-o-o-o-o,” she said. “That definitely never occurred to me.”

Art about solutions

Rick Lowe, Row Houses' founder, grew up in Alabama, the son of sharecroppers. He decided in college that he wanted to be an artist, and moved to Houston in the mid-'80s. His art was big — billboard-size, sometimes — and concerned itself with subjects such as the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1990, a group of high school kids came to tour his studio. One of the kids said that sure, Lowe's work reflected problems in his community — but that it wasn't what the community needed. The community already knew about its problems. What it needed were solutions.

That comment got under Lowe's skin. And a few years later, Project Row Houses was born: a “social sculpture,” an artwork whose medium isn't clay or paint, but a neighborhood and its people.

With grant money, the fledgling organization bought 22 little wooden houses in a section of Holman Street previously ruled by drugs and prostitutes. Those row houses — or, as they're sometimes called, shotgun houses — had been built in the '30s, as rentals. Lowe had seen those houses in the murals of one of his heroes, John Biggers, who in the '50s dignified the everyday lives of Houston's African-Americans by painting them on a grand scale.

But Lowe had another artistic forebear in mind, too: Joseph Beuys, a German artist who contended that the whole world was an artwork, a “social sculpture,” to which every human being contributes.

To illustrate the principle, Beuys made a giant pile of basalt stones in Kassel, Germany, and directed volunteers to take a stone somewhere and plant an oak tree at that spot. It's said that 7,000 of those oaks now dot the city.

Art, Beuys contended, could transform the world. Lowe set out to transform a neighborhood — to celebrate its history, to help its people, to turn a weedy, dangerous place into something proud.

Blurry boundaries

When Project Row Houses opened in 1994, some of those little white houses held art exhibitions. Others served as homes for teenage mothers trying to get their lives back on track.

Since then, the “campus” has grown from a block and a half to six blocks, from 22 houses to 40 properties. The Young Mothers Residential Program still occupies seven of the houses; now there's a playground behind them. Some of the houses still offer art exhibitions. Some house resident artists. In one park dozens of eyeballs seem to grow on stalks: It's a Bert Long sculpture called Field of Vision.

There's the Eldorado Ballroom, a renovated space where big-name acts such as Ray Charles and B.B. King used to play. There are Victorian-era shotgun houses, moved to their sites from other parts of the city when new development claimed another historically African-American neighborhood. And there are whole blocks of new low-income housing, based on designs by the Rice Building Workshop.

Driving around, this writer found it's hard to tell where the Row Houses campus begins and ends.

That's part accident: Hurricane Ike was hell on the signage, and Shearer intends to repair it. But in part, those blurry boundaries fit with Lowe's philosophy. He doesn't think there should be a sharp line dividing art and life.

He likes the way that Row Houses' effect spills out of its campus, into the surrounding neighborhood. Kids attend its after-school and summer programs at schools and in a nearby church. The Project Row Houses Community Development Corp. — now its own freestanding entity — builds low-income housing in the neighborhood. Nearby, there's Workshop Houston, which got its start as a free bike-repair shop on Project Row Houses' space. Now in its own building, Workshop's arty, laid-back staffers teach the neighborhood kids skills including welding, beat-mixing and algebra.

Cookie Love

But if everything is art, how does an art organization define itself? For the past couple of years, Row Houses' board has been asking itself tough questions, trying to figure out how the organizations should grow up.

Could this most site-specific of artworks expand to other parts of the city? Or to other parts of the country? How can it do the most good in the Third Ward? And in the whole world?

The key, Lowe says, is to focus more tightly on what Row Houses does best: art. To do things such as counseling or work force development, the group hopes either to recruit partners or incubate new organizations.

But Lowe's definition of art — like Shearer's, like Beuys' — remains expansive. That laundromat? It's an idea of Lowe's; he recently exhibited sketches of it at the CAMH.

Cookie Love, he explains, is a big, sweet woman that he met at a Third Ward laundromat. Love makes money by doing other people's laundry, and he sees her in the neighborhood, pushing a cart loaded with big plastic bags full of clothes, to and from the laundromat. But the neighborhood's run-down laundromats are being shuttered, one by one, and Lowe worries that soon, she won't have anywhere to work.

The art? Lowe envisions “Cookie Love's Wash 'n' Fold,” an actual laundromat, a nice clean one, that celebrates a real person, a real life, a real part of the Third Ward.

Love, like the rundown row houses he once saved, deserves the attention that art demands.

lisa.gray@chron.com

Belgo "the Chelsea of Montreal"

2009-08-27T15:36:00.002-05:00

This is a JEWEL--

2009-08-13T10:46:00.004-05:00

I am so excited to have found this, quite possibly the most incredible thing I have seen and very touching. Photographer Hans Silvester spent several years in Ethopia documenting these 'primitive' people of the Omo River Valley in Ethiopia. They have access to incredible pigments from the earth, the local flora are just as incredible and they decorate their bodies in the most sophisticated ways. The music is beautiful too, Ryuichi Sakamoto an other favorite discovery I made probably 20 something years ago totally by chance. Enjoy this video over and over as I will...

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

2009-07-25T11:51:00.001-05:00

I like this photographer-- Yann Arthus-Bertrand. This video is wonderful and a must see. check it out.

2009-07-10T16:17:00.002-05:00

WEDNESDAY, JUL 08

Quote of Note | Luc Tuymans

"The financial crisis will trigger a more content-driven way of dealing with art. The crap will detach itself from something that is really far more interesting, because people will think twice before they buy. And so I think the level will be heightened. You will have less money but more culture."

-Artist Luc Tuymans, in an interview with J.S. Marcus for The Wall Street Journal

~from media bistro Unbeige

Marfa, Texas – Wanderlust/NY Times Magazine

2009-06-07T12:05:00.015-05:00

Update on this amazing little jewel of a town that is hours from anywhere. I've stayed in the classic mid-century Thunderbird b4 the update, the luxurious Hotel Paisano (one of my most favorite hotels anywhere), in a silver airstream in Terlingua (that belonged to the now Mayor of Marfa) and the Gage in Marathon. All were great fun, some fantastic. The time to be there is in October when the Chinati Foundation has its open house. Hundreds converge from the international art galaxy and everything is open, including Donald Judd's fantastic living spaces and studios in Marfa, and many related high art events. It is a very unique and rarified experience.

New York Times -- T Magazine Marfa Article

check out these links: the Chinati Foundation website, the Prada Shop in Marfa, the West Texas Weekly (see the Flatlanders Vid: blast from my austin past, the lovely Lyle Lovett vids for his $10,000 min ticket fête), the Big Bend Sentinel local newspaper, and of course the mysteries Marfa Lights.

Nowhere but Texas...

honestly

Power Pathology, Creativity, Individuation (in Relation to Organizations and/or Religions)

2009-05-23T12:15:00.002-05:00

Power pathology may have some crucial consequences for those involved in Buddhist practice, both personally and collectively. Disciples often have unaddressed power issues in relation to their teachers. When we endow traditions and their spiritual leaders with power and authority, we unwittingly give away a vital aspect of our individual responsibility, at great cost. Organizations often have underlying patterns of power and control that make some disciples remain relatively disempowered and dependent, while others actually become the agents of the teacher's parental authority. Denying and disowning personal responsibility for our power is welcomed in charismatic religions where devotion to the teacher is paramount. The dangers of this process, however, are that we leave ourselves open to abuse, exploitation, and dependency.

Reclaiming responsibility for personal power is vital if we are to grow and individuate, but the path is fraught with confusion. Many of us fear our power because we think it will be destructive and dangerous if released.... When someone asserts her own wishes and needs or firmly stands by her own "truth," this assertiveness can easily be viewed disapprovingly as selfish and ego-centered. This in turn can lead to intolerable feelings of guilt. Those who suffer the sense of disempowerment that results from a failure to express their truth often find that their assertiveness lies buried in anger and resentment...there is also some confusion about how those engaged in spiritual practice should relate to anger.

Some Buddhist teachers accuse the therapy world of promoting and cultivating anger. They will often deny any validity to anger, viewing all anger merely as a cause of suffering to be overcome and controlled.... As long as we live with the view that anger is to be condemned, we can easily fall into the habit of repression. We will also fail to hear what truth lies behind it that is not being voiced. When we ask questions such as, "What do you really want to say?" or "What are you really wanting that is not being heard?" we will begin to hear what is at its root. This becomes a healthier way of living with anger, rather than creating a regime that fears it and tries to disown or suppress it. If our capacity to be assertive or to feel heard has become blocked and distorted, when we listen more deeply to what lies beneath or behind the anger, we will often discover some inner truth that needs to be asserted more clearly and creatively.

--from The Wisdom of Imperfection: The Challenge of Individuation in Buddhist Life by Rob Preece, published by Snow Lion Publications

Miru Kim: Making Art in NYC literal underground

2009-05-06T13:38:00.003-05:00

THIS is so interesting. I wanted to post it right away, even though I need to watch it again. It totally reminds me of something I would do, and did do when i was teenager, actually always- exploring these kinds of places. It is also something like a dream. I like it...

found on ArtBistro.com

Virgil Grotfeldt

2009-04-26T21:01:00.015-05:00

I have not been more thrilled than when I have been given the opportunity to look at any original work of Virgil Grotfeldt, usually by chance. Magic and other worldly. I was very sad to learn that he had passed away. Here are two, no three wonderful reads about Virgil and his work:

"What these extraordinary efforts normally hold in common is a brilliant melding of technique and expression that is so individual that it constitutes the core of an artist’s emotional being." Jim Edwards

“Not since the early Pollock or the late Arshile Gorky have I seen the dimensionally modeled forms as in the biomorphic abstraction of Virgil Grotfeldt. Nature and abstract form define Grotfeldt’s art as well as sustain its value as a personal meditation upon essential life forces” Walter Hopps

http://tinyurl.com/dj5ofv

from glasstire.com

with Waldo Bien, Walter Hopps & Free International University (Joseph Beuys), story of the first 'real' Modern Art collection in the world. (great details on process)

http://tinyurl.com/czj8f3

2009-04-26T17:52:00.001-05:00

"The prostituting of talent is something we have come to associate with contemporary art, with its seven-figure prices, its desperately competitive dealers and collectors, and its career-minded, media-savvy artists."
"But in truth, critics have been accusing artists of "selling out" ever since pictures were first exchanged for money." from Art News Blog

NeoHooDoo-- Show curated by Franklin Sirmans @ PS1

2009-04-19T11:27:00.006-05:00

http://tinyurl.com/cab5vo

“NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith,” at the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

2009-04-15T13:05:00.000-05:00

I also really enjoy Andy Goldsworthy’s earth work. I love how he creates in the moment using materials he stumbles across in nature, and then lets the artwork fall apart and change as it returns to where it came from—it’s a good exercise in not holding on.-- Penelope Dullaghan

Jasper Morello: Animation Short

2009-04-15T12:59:00.001-05:00

Murakami <3 from Ovation TV

2009-04-14T20:59:00.002-05:00

Julian Schnabel on 60 minutes--

2009-04-11T11:24:00.001-05:00

Yes!

HULU: Art 21 Series

2009-04-09T11:04:00.002-05:00

Fantastic News: The Art 21 Series is now on Hulu! (Thanks PhotoEye...my favorite website btw.)

MARLENE DUMAS

2009-04-08T10:20:00.003-05:00

Marlene Dumas' incredible show is at the Menil Collection in Houston, March 27-June 21, 2009 + complimentary show "Face Off"

Sarah Balinskas Beloved dog Louis---

2009-04-03T17:04:00.004-05:00

Okay thanks for your concern, Louis was found and taken straight away to the Alabama Vet Clinic. He will be getting microchipped on monday. Today he was a lucky dog and we are more lucky to have him returned quickly!

Everyone in Montrose near Taft and W. Gray-- Please look for this dog. He is missing from Sarah Balinskas' shop on Taft since about 1:00 pm this afternoon (Friday April 3rd.) Everyone who has been to Sarah's shop has been greated by this terrific little guy and family and friends will be crushed if he isn't found.