The first day of a new quarter always represents promise: everything's looking up for the moment, and there are slews of new faces and names to remember (something that grows more and more difficult for me every year), as well as new experiences to, well, experience.
To start things off I thought I'd mention some events of potential interest to student-artists occurring around the country and here in Dallas.
The first of these is the Dallas Museum of Art's new exhibit of fifteenth-century funerary sculptures, The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. They provide an unforgettable example of the Renaissance reconciliation between Classicism and Christianity, with exquisite small-scale depictions of grief. I'll work on an extra-credit assignment for those who need a little inspiration to get to the exhibit--but you really shouldn't need to be coaxed.
Of particular interest to anyone studying anatomy and life drawing, The National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) is featuring selections from its library in an exhibit on The Body Inside and Out: Anatomical Literature and Art Theory. The brochure can be downloaded in .pdf format (8 pages) and contains some useful information on the history of visual understanding about the body.
The Meadows Museum at SMU has scored something of a coup in exhibiting El Greco's Pentecost as part of a three-year alliance with the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Meadows collection focuses on Spanish and colonial art, and the new partnership can only prove to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In honor of one of the themes we'll be pursuing in my Humanities class (memory), take a look at the Museum of Modern Art's education pages--this one featuring Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory, with an explanatory video. Although I'm not one of Dali's acolytes, most of my students find him irresistible, and this seemed like a way to acquaint you with what MoMA has to offer. If you find yourself in St. Petersburg, Florida about a hundred days from now, you could also visit the new Dalí Museum, which has been under construction for the past two plus years.
A new feature of this blog will focus on discovered work by new artists: those I didn't know existed until I ran into them on the web, or until my students mentioned them to me. The first of these is Turgo Bastien, a Haitian-born abstract artist whose work reminds me of the scarification designs and Luba memory-boards we'll talk about in the Humanities class. His mixed media piece, Another Call From Africa, opens this post.
Have a great quarter, People. Let's do some good work and have fun.
Image credit: Turgo Bastien, Another Call From Africa, 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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