Press release form Toni Robin Public Relations on tomorrow’s unique art event in San Diego.

MEDIA ADVISORY
NEA Public Forum, March 13, 2 pm

March 13 is a big day for our arts and culture community.

Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), will make San Diego the first California stop in his national tour promoting the NEA’s “Art Works” initiative. Landesman is touring major American cities to promote the role of art in creating vibrant communities and spurring economic development. Learn more about Art Works here. The chairman’s public schedule will be posted in the Newsroom on the NEA web site at www.arts.gov

NEA ART WORKS FORUM
SATURDAY, MARCH 13, 2 PM
Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse
2910 La Jolla Village Drive
Free Parking and Directions

Please RSVP directly to Toni Robin, tr@trprsandiego.com, 858.483.3918

MEDIA is invited to attend a public forum featuring Rocco Landesman and some of our community’s most engaging leaders who will share how Art Works here in San Diego. This is a chance to hear remarks from one of our nation’s leading arts advocates and a vigorous defender of arts funding.

The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture is thrilled and honored that San Diego has been selected and provided this opportunity to showcase our vibrant arts and culture community.

Toni Robin
public relations / marketing
964 chalcedony street
san diego, california 92109
www.trprsandiego.com
e: tr@trprsandiego.com
t: 858.483.3918
c: 619.997.3918

Gustaf Rooth, artist, owner of Planet Rooth Studios and founder of San Diego’s only uninterrupted and nationally noted monthly art event for the last eight plus years, celebrates the 100th running of his signature Ray at Night with his final show tonight in Noth Park, San Diego.

Gustaf will be taking his new green design company Barelly Made It and Planet Rooth Studio down University Avenue to Hillcrest in a much larger space and friendly parameters to accomomdate his growing body of work.

Tonight’s show in the Planet Rooth Gallery will feature Barrelly Made It’s lines of recycled and repurposed furniture, featuring Gustaf’s gorgeous wine barrel chairs, a gorgeous clean-lined Adirondack style chairs that are exactly what they claim to be: one of a kind artisan furniture pieces constructed entirely from recycled wine barrels and finished in one handcrafted limited edition at a time.

San Diego Art journal video on Chelsea at her art show at Losina Art Center. Read the full article by Heather Weatherly at www.sandiegoartjournal.com. Photography – Jamie Le Dent

Earlier this month, one of my favorite artists featured recently at MCASD, Richard Wright, was awarded the Turner Prize, Great Britain’s best-known art award.
 
Known for painting “intricate, large-scale patterns” directly on walls and ceilings, Wright is a meticulous craftsman who uses very traditional methods to create very modern abstract images.
 

To make his untitled wall painting for the Turner prize exhibition, Wright employed the painstaking techniques of Renaissance fresco-makers – drawing a cartoon on paper and then transferring it to the wall in what he called “an incredibly medieval way” by pouncing – piercing the cartoon with holes and rubbing chalk through it to create “the ghost of a work” on the wall. The image was then painted with size (adhesive) and covered with gold leaf.

 
Because I use many of the same methods in my not-anywhere-as-innovative mural work, this appeals to me ina kindred spirits kind of way, as well as his insistence on working at such large scale.
 

Turner Prize winner Richard Wright

 
Another aspect of Wright’s work that resonates with me is his “insistence that his work be destroyed after the exhibitions end.”
 
Working as I have in theater and film and performing in public chalk painting festivals, many of the things I have painted and laboured over have been immediately destroyed after their designed user experience ends. Similarly, many of my private commissioned murals and custom finishes will never be seen by the greater public, nor would they make much sense outside the context of the home the were designed for.
 
When questioned about this, particularly at chalk festivals, people ask me if I am bothered by the “loss” of the work, to which I usually reply that it makes sense to me as most of my work is “lost” to me upon completion.
 

Wright said he sometimes felt a sense of loss at the destruction of his work.

“It is sad but it’s also a relief,” he said. “Other people make things that don’t survive. If you are a dustman or a reporter you do something that is consumed and passes.”

 
I find this point of view as refreshing as Wright’s work (featured in San Diego most recently in 2007), putting in perspective the “precious-ness” that many artists feel about their work.
 

“I am interested in the fragility of the moment of engagement – in heightening that moment,” he said. To see a work knowing that it will not last, he said, “emphasizes that moment of its existence”.

 
Since this is very close to how I answer the question “Why are you an artist?”, I feel even more affinity for Wright and his work upon reading about his award. Congratulations from San Diego, Richard Wright!
 
As usual I am indebted to ArtDaily.org for some of the details in this article. You can read their original post about Wright here, written by AP reporter Jill Lawless.
 
My other source for quotes and the image above is the always outstanding Guardian UK.Thir article on Wright was written by Charlotte Higgins, and features some great video as well as an excellent photo slideshow on Wright you can see here.

This great post of a trip to artist Kelsey Brookes studio is one of several lushly photographed articles on current contemporary art happenings around the world from another recent art blog discovery Arrested Motion.

For his debut solo show with the gallery, Kelsey has delivered a stunning new body of work that seems to bridge the best qualities of his earlier work with the more detailed work from his bigger shows last year (like his solo with New Image Art).
 
All his best elements are there, from his day glow color palette to the intensely detailed highlights to his stunning use of text and the human form – “Bigger, Brighter, Bolder” delivers on all three statements and then some. The key to Kelsey’s work is viewing it up close, and many of these new works are in the 3 x 3’ and 4 x 4’ range, so in-person viewing is a must….

 

artist Kelsey Brookes in his San Diego studio

 

Kelsey Brookes studio tour, photo by Ross Morrison

 
These photos (and many more great ones on the Arrested Motion world art blog) are courtesy of Ross Morrison.

I found this today on a terrific blog about art goings-on in New York City, ArtAndDesign.LelaLuxe.com. I was looking for more info on artists from/in Baja, but regular readers know I usually mention some of what’s happening in NYC here, too.

Mobile Matrix, a Monumental Sculpture of Reassembled Whale Bones, Is on View for the First Time Outside Mexico, in MoMA’s Second-Floor Atrium

Gabriel Orozco
December 13, 2009–March 1, 2010
The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Gallery, sixth floor

Mobile Matrix (2006), a monumental sculpture composed of a reassembled gray-whale skeleton, is installed on the second floor in the Museum’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. Orozco was commissioned to make the sculpture by Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts for its permanent home in the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City. Its inclusion in this exhibition marks the first time it has been seen outside of that library. After excavating the bones from the Isla Arena in Baja California Sur, Orozco and a team of approximately 20 assistants used some 6,000 mechanical pencils to draw lines on the whale that relate to its structure. Dark solid circles are surrounded by numerous series of concentric rings that overlap and collide with each other.

Explains Ms. Temkin, “Orozco’s transformation of the concept of sculpture—via innumerable mediums and methods—makes him a central figure of his generation.”

Sixteen years after his debut in MoMA’s Projects series, this exhibition explores both the consistency and the surprising evolution of his artistic approach….

Read the rest at ArtAndDesign.LelLuxe.com

Port of San Diego Public Art Department Announces Call for Artists

The Best Western Yacht Harbor Hotel seeks an artist or artist team to create new, site-specific, original artwork(s) which may incorporate multi-sensory and eco-friendly water elements, for the newly renovated hotel. The hotel is located at 5005 N. Harbor Drive.

The process for artist selection is being administered by the Port of San Diego Public Art Department.

The estimated budget is $32,000 and the deadline for submissions is Friday, January 15, 2010, at 5 p.m. PST. For information regarding eligibility and complete details on submission requirements, please contact Christine Jones.

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Stencil art show tonight at the newly reopened Thumbprint Gallery.

Thumbprint Gallery