Title: Spoon Feed
No one really want to say it but a life without some kind of art form embeded in the psyche of an individual is a dark place where little joy dwells and stress finds its permanent home.
Toni Anita Gray, June 6, 2012
Toni Anita Gray, June 6, 2012
Drawings
Works on Paper
The Georgia Museum of Art has an exemplary collection of works on paper ranging from the 16th through 20th centuries, representing artists whose works are cogent, masterly and innovative expressions of their times. The collections of both prints and drawings are especially strong from the period of the 1930s and early 1940s. Other important holdings are 19th-century European prints, including a very rare, complete set of L’Estampe Originale and William Blake’s Book of Job; a survey of early Italian drawings; and Japanese prints by such masters as Hokusai and Hiroshige.
The Georgia Museum of Art has an exemplary collection of works on paper ranging from the 16th through 20th centuries, representing artists whose works are cogent, masterly and innovative expressions of their times. The collections of both prints and drawings are especially strong from the period of the 1930s and early 1940s. Other important holdings are 19th-century European prints, including a very rare, complete set of L’Estampe Originale and William Blake’s Book of Job; a survey of early Italian drawings; and Japanese prints by such masters as Hokusai and Hiroshige.
Peek-A-Boo!
Peek-A-Boo!
Toni Anita Gray
Born: Chicago, Illinois 1954
Ink on Watercolor Paper
sheet size: 21 x 14 1/4 in. (53.3 x 36.2 cm)
2004.P
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Toni Anita Gray
Born: Chicago, Illinois 1954
Ink on Watercolor Paper
sheet size: 21 x 14 1/4 in. (53.3 x 36.2 cm)
2004.P
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Wig Heads
Wig Head, 2005
Artist: Toni A. Gray
Charcoal on Charcoal Paper
Dimensions:
2004.W
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni A. Gray
GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago
All images above © John Waters
John Waters, photography by Greg Gorman
Two Studies of a Seated Nude with Long HairGustav Klimt
Austrian, about 1901 - 1902
Black chalk and red pencil
12 1/2 x 17 13/16 in.
2009.57.2
John Waters: Change Of Life
October 30 - January 15, 2006
In a career that now spans forty years, John Waters has moved from the margins of culture to the mainstream, applying his iconoclastic perspective and aesthetic to filmmaking, writing, and now to photography. From October 30, 2005, to January 15, 2006, the Orange County Museum of Art presents John Waters: Change of Life, a retrospective of recent photographic and sculptural works and three early, unreleased films by the maverick filmmaker. Encompassing images from the recognizable to the obscure, John Waters: Change of Life brings Waters's uncensored "dreamland" images out of the cinematic realm and into another cultural domain, offering us an opportunity to explore our most basic human impulses together in public. Waters began producing still photographic works in the early 1990's, scrutinizing videotapes of movies—first his own, and then over-the-top Hollywood movies and forgotten art films that have long fascinated him—and then photographing video images off of his television screen. The hilarious, erotic, rude, revealing and sometimes poignant moments that he captured became the raw material for artworks that Waters dubbed his "little movies." In these novel photographic sequences, Waters skewers cultural symbols and stereotypes, and elaborates on the cultural and subcultural themes that have been central to all his work: race, sex, sanctimony, glamour, class, family, politics, celebrity, religion, the media, and the allure of crime.
In his artworks, Waters uses still photography to reflect on the visual vocabulary and the emotional and psychological power of filmmaking. The act of extracting images from films that takes place in these photographic works allows Waters to emphasize the multitude of ways in which we respond to both moving and still photographic images. Through his insistent allusions to the editing process, Waters encourages viewers to consider how each of us creates our own personal narratives as we decode, interpret and re-contextualize the plethora of images that constantly bombard us.
"All movies are too long," Waters has commented. "Let's go back and reduce all movies to just the good parts." His impatience with a drawn-out narrative leads him to reduce an entire film into a single frame that, in his mind, sums up the entire film. This and other "little movies" proscribe Waters's selective vision onto our own, allowing us to look at the films and at ourselves in a new light and from a new perspective.
Exploring the fetishization of celebrity by fans is another way in which Waters exercises the ability to manipulate images. In Farrah (2000), the hairstyle that inspired a million salon visits is symbolically torn off of the head of the original and pasted atop those of eight other performers, prompting the viewer to contemplate the power of an iconic feature once amplified by the media in a different context. In contrast to this, Grace Kelly's Elbows(1998) calls attention to a feature not normally associated with the actress, though seen as worthy of appreciation and even fetishization by Waters nonetheless. In this way he diverts the viewer's attention to his own particular obsession with finding surprising expressions of beauty in what is often overlooked.
The increasingly blurred distinction between criminality and celebrity is another personal obsession that surfaces in Waters's photographs. Manson Copies Brad Pitt (2003) juxtaposes an image of Brad Pitt with one of Charles Manson, each sporting similar hairstyles and beards, bringing into question the fine line that emerges between what is real and what is fiction. Questioning the nature of celebrity and fame, Waters is also reminding us that every aspect of human nature holds the potential to become its opposite.
In addition to approximately 80 photographic and sculptural works, three short films directed by Waters in the 1960's will be publicly shown for the first time on the West Coast. Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964), made while Waters was a senior in high school, features Mary Vivian Pearce, Mona Montgomery and Bobby Chappelle in a Theater of the Absurd influenced narrative interspersed with scenes of racial tension and dance. Roman Candles (1966) marks the screen debut of Divine and Mink Stole in a filmic montage of staged tableaux involving sex, drugs, and religion, shown on a screen divided into three parts. In the most narrative of his early films, Eat Your Make-Up(1967), a disturbed couple kidnaps three models, chains them in the woods and forces them to eat makeup and model themselves to death. A highlight of Eat Your Make-Up is a scene in which Waters recreates the historic Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, with Divine playing the role of Jackie Kennedy. All three films will be continuously screened in the gallery space during the exhibition.
In addition to Waters's artworks and early films, the exhibition features an installation by his longtime production designer, Vince Peranio. This pop-up photographic environment includes representations of selected tableaux, objects and images from Waters's home that contextualize his work and suggest the eclectic breadth of visual influences that shape his cinematic mind and photographic eye.
About the Artist
John Waters emerged as a controversial filmmaker in the late 1960's, when he began producing short films with an entourage of actors and crew known as Dreamland Studios, a diverse group that characterized the marginalized figures of society highlighted in Waters's films. His exaggerated but loving depiction of people living on the fringes of normal American life persisted well into the 1980s and 1990s, when he began producing popular films such as of Hairspray and Serial Mom. The fact that his shock value tactics could withstand his transition from margin to mainstream and that his cultural themes still resonate with audiences worldwide underscores Waters's continuing relevance and iconic status.
In addition to making films and artworks, Waters has contributed essays and articles to national publications such as Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Vogue. His social commentaries cover a broad range of topics, from bad hair to juvenile delinquency. Waters has published six books: Shock Value, Crackpot, Trash Trio, Director's Cut, Art: A Sex Book, co-authored with Bruce Hainley, and most recently, “Hairspray, Female Trouble and Multiple Maniacs.” His photographic works have been the subject of gallery exhibitions and included in group exhibitions internationally; he is represented in New York by Marianne Boesky Gallery. John Waters was born in 1946 and has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the majority of his life.
Catalogue
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated book published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., including essays by Lisa Phillips and Marvin Heiferman, as well as contributions by Gary Indiana, Brenda Richardson and Todd Solondz, discussing Waters's style and influence not only in film but on contemporary American culture.
Funding Credits
John Waters: Change of Life was organized by New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and co-curated by Marvin Heiferman and Lisa Phillips. John Waters: Change of Life is made possible through a generous grant from New Line Cinema with additional support from Harvey S. Shipley Miller.
The Orange County Museum of Art presentation ofJohn Waters: Change of Life is supported by New Line Cinema.
Media sponsorship is provided by KCET, 89.9 FM KCRW, 89.3 KPCC, and OC Weekly.
Click here to download the John Waters: Change of LifeAudio Tour
Gustav Klimt's favored working practice was somewhat unorthodox: he employed a number of nude models who lounged around his studio striking spontaneous poses, which he captured with a few exquisitely economical strokes of chalk or pencil. Many such life studies remained independent works of art, but others inspired paintings.
These sketches of a kneeling woman, her generous buttocks thrust toward the viewer and her luxuriant hair cascading around her head as if caught by a current of air or water, ultimately served as preparatory drawings for the foreground figure in Klimt's painting Goldfish (now in the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland). In the finished painting, the nude retains this pose but turns her head to gaze impudently over her shoulder; Klimt initially titled it "To my critics" in reference to the controversy over three highly erotic murals he painted for the University of Vienna which had been attacked by the conservative press. The fluid, stylized treatment of the model's body and hair, which verges on abstraction, suggests his enduring identification of women with water--unbounded, immaterial and elusive--a common motif in his work.
Although this drawing served as a study for another work, Klimt seems to have considered it a work of art in its own right. Not only did he sign it, he also published a reproduction of the right-hand figure in the Vienna Secession periodical Ver Sacrum in 1902; faint red pencil marks--cropping indications for the photographer--frame the figure.
The drawing is housed in a facsimile of a frame designed by Klimt himself, exemplifying his commitment to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).
The Stranger in Me
The Stranger in Me
Portrait of Toni Anita Gray
2004-2005
Charcoal on Charcoal Paper
Dimensions:
2004.B
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
This portrait's bold charcoal strokes, strikes the paper with vicious movement, attitude and softens with light and smoothing out the areas that represent the softer side of the artist. All of it reflects the individual thoughts of the one person that circle around in the minds of us all. None of us is one person; we are many people with many thoughts and our personalities and attitudes can change at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless, most of us have great control of these personalities that sometimes what to break free. I am not altogether sure that it is a good thing to hold back some of these personalities for they might help someone struggling with self identity or a kind of identity crisis. The artist passion and creativity is seen in the differences of the right side of the portrait and the left side of the portrait as if they tell the story individually of two totally different people. The eyes are different on more rounded while the other is more slanted and the bags under the eyes are quite different, the nose is different on each side, one side has hair and the other none, one brow is quite crooked while the other is straighter. The background is filled with light and dark lines representing the brighter times and the darker times in the life of the portrait personality.
portrait |ˈpôrtrət, -ˌtrāt|noun1 a painting, drawing, photograph, or engraving of a person, esp. one depicting onlythe face or head and shoulders.• a representation or impression of someone or something in language or on film:the writer builds up a full and fascinating portrait of a community.2 [ as modifier ] (of a page, book, or illustration, or the manner in which it is set orprinted) higher than it is wide: you can print landscape and portrait pages in the samedocument. Compare with landscape ( sense 2 of the noun).DERIVATIVESportraitist |ˈpôrtrətist, -ˌtrātist|nounportrait ( sense 1)ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from French, past participle (used as a noun) of Old Frenchportraire ‘portray.’
portraitnoun1 a portrait of the First Lady: painting, picture, drawing, sketch, likeness, image, study,miniature; informal oil; formal portraiture.2 a vivid portrait of Italy: description, portrayal, representation, depiction,impression, account; sketch, vignette, profile.
This person is her own best friend who has witnessed the unfair rejection of the world in unusual as well as normal situations. Some viewers may see ugliness while others will preceive its display of one-womans exhibition of life; a sort of World's Fair, where her independence is on display for the world to judge, approve of or dis-approve of. Its a choice, right? Your choice that cannot override the artist choice. This drawing archives everything she is; has experienced;
wants to experience; it is a catalogue of her self seeing the self; its her personal museum of what's inside and outside according to charcoal. Its sprinkled with the written records found in her mind; scholarly portrait of what she is, was, and will be. It is emerged in the dust particles of the charcoals, and is also an outstanding display of a portrait of the artist as a self re-evaluation of her personality, talent, her own celebrity and the personal impact her image has not only on herself but on those who view this work of art. It represents the light and shadows of her life's paths and is stamped with her own approval of herself.
Title: Target
Artist: Toni A. Gray
Title: Target
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-T
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
I have often felt as if the world was making me its personal target. Not the nature of the world but the people dwelling in it. Here we see the person centered in this peace is the heart and soul of someone who loves them and would do anything to keep them from being a target but has not the powers to prevent this action. The butterfly represents the freedom of the individual, Jesus represents the suffering of the one she serves and her own personal sufferings. The gun represent all of humanity who are focused on making the centered person their target for whatever reason. It may not even be the centered persons fault yet they are used as an escape and release mechanism. The entire picture is encased with a decorative frame that encloses the situation and suggest that this centered individual has been framed for many things she has never committed or even considered committing.
This work, "Target" could be anyone of you viewing this website right now, however the artist chose to use her own images but suggest it could be anyone even you!
What is a target?
target |ˈtärgit|noun1 a person, object, or place selected as the aim of an attack.• a mark or point at which someone fires or aims, esp. a round or rectangular board marked with concentric circles used in archery or shooting.• an objective or result toward which efforts are directed: the car met its sales target in record time.• Phonetics an idealization of the articulation of a speech sound, with reference to which actual utterances can be described.• a person or thing against whom criticism or abuse is or may be directed.2 historical a small, round shield or buckler.verb ( targets, targeting , targeted ) [ with obj. ] (usu. be targeted)select as an object of attention or attack: two men were targeted by the attackers.• aim or direct (something): a significant nuclear capability targeted on the US.PHRASESon (or off ) target hitting (or missing) the thing aimed at. • proceeding or improving at a rate good enough (or not good enough) to achieve an objective: the new police station is on target for a June opening.DERIVATIVEStargetable adjectiveORIGIN late Middle English ( sense 2 of the noun): diminutive of targe. The noun came to denote various round objects. The verb dates from the early 17th cent.
targetnoun1 targets at a range of 200 meters: mark, bullseye, goal.2 eagles can spot their target from half a mile: prey, quarry, game, kill.3 their profit target: objective, goal, aim, end; plan, intention, intent, design,aspiration, ambition, ideal, desire, wish.4 she was the target for a wave of abuse: victim, butt, recipient, focus, object, subject.verb1 he was targeted by a gunman: pick out, single out, earmark, fix on; attack, aim at,fire at.2 the product is targeted at a specific market: aim at, direct at, level at, intend for, focus on.PHRASESon target 1 the shot was on target: accurate, precise, unerring, sure, on the mark. 2the project was on target: on schedule, on track, on course, on time.
Oftimes, says artist Gray, I have been the target of female bosses, managers, supervisors and this was either because of personal jealousies over the fact I was thin, ate whatever I desired for lunch including a whole box of Fanny Mae's Pixies, plus a full blown lunch. Other times I might find myself the victim of sexual abuse or discrimination at the hands of some man who was my manager of direct boss. This makes trying to move up the latter of success impossible if you are a Christian and refuse to give in to their personal whims and desires. They will either write you up as being insubordinate, creating a disturbance even when there is not, violating some kind of dress code and of course you have no photo of what you were wearing that day to prove its a lie and a set-up. Live can be quite difficult for females who are somewhat attractive or very attractive and God help you if you have several creative skills and are intelligent based on your college grades.
This world has a way of making you a target. You can be a tax target if you do pay them in a timely manner. A roommate target if a guy selects you as the person he wants to have take care of him in exchange for a relationship that only exist in your head, your personal need (if you are weak in this area) for a sexual partner, someplace where a man can relax when he wants to get away from his family, friends, job, child support (lol) and a host of many of imaginations that live in the minds of "SOME" men! Be advised that not all men are like this but they do exist on this planet.
You can be the target of identity theft, credit card frauds, relationship or spousal abuse, Christian abuse, and abused just because of your intellect which you worked so hard to obtain and master. Some people were abused as children by their parent and this makes them a parental target.
Some people become child support targets and are set up before they can ever realize what is happening. Some women want security so they trap the man with pregnancies just to have more income, to keep the man forever and the whole nine yards. Sometimes this back fires when the man marries someone else or lives with someone else and now she has to watch this forever (God forbid, unless the child dies for whatever reason), which can turn out to be a permanent heart-break and a stress that last until you are deceased.
Either way, there are many ways to be a target, I only named a few of them. If you are aware of other, let us know and we will post them also.
Silence
Title: Silence
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-S
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
This black, gray and white tones of ink come together to express how perfect "Silence" actually is. When we look at this artistic sculpture in inks we can see the peace found in silence, the calm joy in silence, the need for silence, the aire of silence, the affect and effect of silence on the human face.
Silence
Psalm 46:10 ESV / 44 helpful votes“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”
Lamentations 3:26 ESV / 42 helpful votesIt is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Job 29:21 ESV / 25 helpful votes“Men listened to me and waited and kept silence for my counsel.
Romans 10:17 ESV / 20 helpful votesSo faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
Matthew 11:15 ESV / 19 helpful votesHe who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Psalm 62:5 ESV / 16 helpful votesFor God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.
Revelation 8:1 ESV / 14 helpful votesWhen the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
Isaiah 53:7 ESV / 14 helpful votesHe was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
Psalm 62:1 ESV / 11 helpful votesTo the choirmaster: according to Jeduthun. A Psalm of David. For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.
Matthew 12:19-20 ESV / 6 helpful votesHe will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory;
Hebrews 7:13-14 ESV / 5 helpful votesFor the one of whom these things are spoken belonged to another tribe, from which no one has ever served at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests.
Luke 1:1-80 ESV / 3 helpful votesInasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. ...
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
What is the meaning of silence?
silence |ˈsīləns|nouncomplete absence of sound: sirens pierce the silence of the night | an eerie silence descendedover the house.• the fact or state of abstaining from speech: Karen had withdrawn into sullen silence | shewas reduced to silence for a moment.• the avoidance of mentioning or discussing something: politicians keep their silence onthe big questions.• the state of standing still and not speaking as a sign of respect for someonedeceased or in an opportunity for prayer: a moment of silence presided over by a local minister.verb [ with obj. ]cause to become silent; prohibit or prevent from speaking: the team's performance silencedtheir critics | freedom of the press cannot be silenced by tanks.• (usu. as adj. silenced) fit (a gun or other loud mechanism) with a silencer: a silenced .22 rifle.PHRASESin silence without speech or other sound: we finished our meal in silence.ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French, from Latin silentium, from silere ‘besilent.’
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-S
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
This black, gray and white tones of ink come together to express how perfect "Silence" actually is. When we look at this artistic sculpture in inks we can see the peace found in silence, the calm joy in silence, the need for silence, the aire of silence, the affect and effect of silence on the human face.
Silence
Psalm 46:10 ESV / 44 helpful votes“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”
Lamentations 3:26 ESV / 42 helpful votesIt is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Job 29:21 ESV / 25 helpful votes“Men listened to me and waited and kept silence for my counsel.
Romans 10:17 ESV / 20 helpful votesSo faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
Matthew 11:15 ESV / 19 helpful votesHe who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Psalm 62:5 ESV / 16 helpful votesFor God alone, O my soul, wait in silence, for my hope is from him.
Revelation 8:1 ESV / 14 helpful votesWhen the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.
Isaiah 53:7 ESV / 14 helpful votesHe was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.
Psalm 62:1 ESV / 11 helpful votesTo the choirmaster: according to Jeduthun. A Psalm of David. For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.
Matthew 12:19-20 ESV / 6 helpful votesHe will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory;
Hebrews 7:13-14 ESV / 5 helpful votesFor the one of whom these things are spoken belonged to another tribe, from which no one has ever served at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests.
Luke 1:1-80 ESV / 3 helpful votesInasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. ...
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
What is the meaning of silence?
silence |ˈsīləns|nouncomplete absence of sound: sirens pierce the silence of the night | an eerie silence descendedover the house.• the fact or state of abstaining from speech: Karen had withdrawn into sullen silence | shewas reduced to silence for a moment.• the avoidance of mentioning or discussing something: politicians keep their silence onthe big questions.• the state of standing still and not speaking as a sign of respect for someonedeceased or in an opportunity for prayer: a moment of silence presided over by a local minister.verb [ with obj. ]cause to become silent; prohibit or prevent from speaking: the team's performance silencedtheir critics | freedom of the press cannot be silenced by tanks.• (usu. as adj. silenced) fit (a gun or other loud mechanism) with a silencer: a silenced .22 rifle.PHRASESin silence without speech or other sound: we finished our meal in silence.ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French, from Latin silentium, from silere ‘besilent.’
SPOON FEED
Title: Spoon Feed
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois,
2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-S
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Spoon Fed, features work by current art and design of Artist Toni Anita Gray, Chicago, Illinois created at DePaul University. Gray's conceptual work here points to her various styles approaches to her own crafts and reflect sthe perspectives and personal idiosyncrasies of an extraordinarily woman with diverse emotional intensity that,characterizes her artistic expression. The artistic work of this American female artist is her form of Contemporary ideas that reveal a young woman being pulled in many various directions driven as she fights against the egotististical ideas, morals as well as immorality and the faiths of those in the world around her.Soppon Feed speaks of financial rewards presented by the world based on your own obedience to what it claims it expect of you. What artist Gray ask in this piece is what will you do to live a life of the "Spoon Fed" individuals. Grays frequent self-portraits portray an uninhibited woman who deals with reality in her own way. Not often shy but extrememly sensitive to the many people in the world around her. Toni, time and personal achievement oft-times identifies a person but she runs from these kinds of views of herself . wAnita's lifetime-- has been a place of approval, disapproval, disappointments financially but great emotional and physical world experiences. The unveiled of her todays self in this exhibition collection of many watercolors, oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings in charcoal, pastel, color pencils, markers, ink, crayon, and pencil on paper and canvas as well as many other materials, presents an artistic display that is an opportunity for her viewing audiences glogally reflect and ponder on as well as envision the markingof Gray's art shown together here on this website of Toni Anita Gray's art.
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois,
2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-S
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Spoon Fed, features work by current art and design of Artist Toni Anita Gray, Chicago, Illinois created at DePaul University. Gray's conceptual work here points to her various styles approaches to her own crafts and reflect sthe perspectives and personal idiosyncrasies of an extraordinarily woman with diverse emotional intensity that,characterizes her artistic expression. The artistic work of this American female artist is her form of Contemporary ideas that reveal a young woman being pulled in many various directions driven as she fights against the egotististical ideas, morals as well as immorality and the faiths of those in the world around her.Soppon Feed speaks of financial rewards presented by the world based on your own obedience to what it claims it expect of you. What artist Gray ask in this piece is what will you do to live a life of the "Spoon Fed" individuals. Grays frequent self-portraits portray an uninhibited woman who deals with reality in her own way. Not often shy but extrememly sensitive to the many people in the world around her. Toni, time and personal achievement oft-times identifies a person but she runs from these kinds of views of herself . wAnita's lifetime-- has been a place of approval, disapproval, disappointments financially but great emotional and physical world experiences. The unveiled of her todays self in this exhibition collection of many watercolors, oil paintings, gouaches, and drawings in charcoal, pastel, color pencils, markers, ink, crayon, and pencil on paper and canvas as well as many other materials, presents an artistic display that is an opportunity for her viewing audiences glogally reflect and ponder on as well as envision the markingof Gray's art shown together here on this website of Toni Anita Gray's art.
Good Hair Days
Title: Good Hair Days
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-G
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Good Hair Days is a story about a woman who has been diagnosed and suffering with Breast Cancer. This woman has shifted her focus from her once large rounded beautiful breast to her beautiful hairs on her head, something she never before gave much attention to. Now she makes it a point to go to the beauty salon every week and sometimes twice a week to take the focus off of her now lopsided and smaller breast due to cancer and surgeries. This beautiful woman who now believes that the only beautiful thing about here is the hair on her head represents the suffering women go through mentally when they are diagnosed with breast cancer, breasts change and are no longer considered normal and become thereby an object that has disappeared or should be over looked. Her now playful spirit has transferrewd and transcended to the areas that surround her brain the organ that appears to be working perfectly with its decorated hairs.
Her huge thighs, beautifully scuplted feet, female organs and toned armes are express in the mystery of the way Gray has detailed the woman in this drawings using graphite and charcoal on paper. Gray's artistic signature is not alway easy to identify as her drawing style changes with each collaborative drawings . These group drawing function as a means to open humanities awareness of what kind of affects and effects breast cancer has on the woman of the world globally. Women in this social inter-circle have each their own ways of making themselves acceptable to their own envirobment but also they find something about themselves that will beautifully bleed themselves in a new way into day-to-day life, bringing with it a new credo, doctrine and theory of what is visually important on their body as a means of attraction among all other humans, while creating a new personal individual style.
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-G
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Good Hair Days is a story about a woman who has been diagnosed and suffering with Breast Cancer. This woman has shifted her focus from her once large rounded beautiful breast to her beautiful hairs on her head, something she never before gave much attention to. Now she makes it a point to go to the beauty salon every week and sometimes twice a week to take the focus off of her now lopsided and smaller breast due to cancer and surgeries. This beautiful woman who now believes that the only beautiful thing about here is the hair on her head represents the suffering women go through mentally when they are diagnosed with breast cancer, breasts change and are no longer considered normal and become thereby an object that has disappeared or should be over looked. Her now playful spirit has transferrewd and transcended to the areas that surround her brain the organ that appears to be working perfectly with its decorated hairs.
Her huge thighs, beautifully scuplted feet, female organs and toned armes are express in the mystery of the way Gray has detailed the woman in this drawings using graphite and charcoal on paper. Gray's artistic signature is not alway easy to identify as her drawing style changes with each collaborative drawings . These group drawing function as a means to open humanities awareness of what kind of affects and effects breast cancer has on the woman of the world globally. Women in this social inter-circle have each their own ways of making themselves acceptable to their own envirobment but also they find something about themselves that will beautifully bleed themselves in a new way into day-to-day life, bringing with it a new credo, doctrine and theory of what is visually important on their body as a means of attraction among all other humans, while creating a new personal individual style.
I'm Not Fat!
Title: I'm Not Fat!
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Graphite and charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-I
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Hat in place, wrist covered in jewels, beautiful perfect body but she thinks she's fat but is constantly denying it. What is fat?
fatadjective1 a fat man: plump, stout, overweight, large, chubby, portly, flabby, paunchy,potbellied, beer-bellied, meaty, of ample proportions, heavyset; obese, corpulent,fleshy, gross; informal plus-sized, big-boned, tubby, roly-poly, well-upholstered, beefy,porky, blubbery, chunky, pudgy. ANTONYMS thin, skinny.2 fat bacon: fatty, greasy, oily, oleaginous; formal pinguid. ANTONYMS lean.3 a fat book: thick, big, chunky, bulky, substantial, voluminous; long. ANTONYMSthin.4 informal a fat salary: large, substantial, sizable, considerable; generous, lucrative.ANTONYMS small.
adjective ( fatter, fattest )(of a person or animal) having a large amount of excess flesh: the driver was a fat, wheezing man.• (of an animal bred for food) made plump for slaughter.• containing much fat: fat bacon.• large in bulk or circumference: a fat cigarette.
Obesity is a medical condition in which excessbody fat has accumulated to the extent that it may havean adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy and/orincreased health problems.People are considered as obese when their body mass index(BMI), a measurementobtained by dividing a person's weight in kilogramsby the square of the person's height in metres, exceeds 30 kg/m2.
Obesity increases the likelihood of various diseases, particularly heart disease, type 2 diabetes,obstructive sleep apnea, certain types of cancer,osteoarthritis andasthma. Obesity is most commonly caused by a combination of excessive food energy intake, lack of physical activity, and genetic susceptibility, although a few cases are caused primarily by genes, endocrine disorders, medications or psychiatric illness. Evidence to support the view that some obese people eat little yet gain weight due to a slow metabolism is limited; on average obese people have a greater energy expenditure than their thin counterparts due to the energy required to maintain an increased body mass.
Dieting and physical exercise are the mainstays of treatment for obesity. Diet quality can be improved by reducing the consumption of energy-dense foods such as those high in fat and sugars, and by increasing the intake of dietary fiber. Anti-obesity drugs may be taken to reduce appetite or inhibit fat absorption together with a suitable diet. If diet, exercise and medication are not effective, a gastric balloon may assist with weight loss, or surgery may be performed to reduce stomach volume and/or bowel length, leading to earlier satiation and reduced ability to absorb nutrients from food.[8][9]
Presented here through artistic creativity, Toni a twentieth century new artist and photograpehr focuses on a different take on the idea of being fat in an artistic work. To capture and interpret her ideas of this ridiculous and unimportant state of being which causes many to never go outside for fear of ridicule, others commit suicide and unforgiveable sin, while others ignore that they may be fat, it can be unhealthy and lead to strokes and death, still Gray uses her visual ideas of this situation to make a few points. When you truly love someone their size never matters, their illness becomes a way for you to illustrate your true love for them. These kinds of collection by Toni Anita Gray reveals the igsignificance or significance beased on individual perceptions, teachings, learnings and overall views of the individual persons one comes in contact with or simply sees in passing. Life is not someones size, looks, wallet, intellect, status, bank account, home, car, pile of jewelry, family or even those they hang around. We are all individuals and we are not what others see, say we are, think we are or even believe we may be.
Life is the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death: the origins of life.• living things and their activity: some sort of life existed on Mars | lower forms of life |the ice-cream vendors were the only signs of life.• [ with adj. or noun modifier ] a particular type or aspect of people's existence: an experienced teacher will help you settle into school life | revelations about his private life | his father decided to start a new life in California.• vitality, vigor, or energy: she was beautiful and full of life.2 the existence of an individual human being or animal: a disaster that claimed the lives of 266 Americans | she didn't want to die; she loved life.• a biography: a life of Shelley.• either of the two states of a person's existence separated by death (as in Christianity and some other religious traditions): too much happiness in this life could reduce the chances of salvation in the next.• any of a number of successive existences in which a soul is held to be reincarnated (as in Hinduism and some other religious traditions).• a chance to live after narrowly escaping death (esp. with reference to the nine lives traditionally attributed to cats).3 (usu. one's life) the period between the birth and death of a living thing, esp. a human being: she has lived all her life in the country | I want to be with you for the rest of my life | they became friends for life .
Artist: Toni Anita Gray
Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Graphite and charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-I
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Hat in place, wrist covered in jewels, beautiful perfect body but she thinks she's fat but is constantly denying it. What is fat?
fatadjective1 a fat man: plump, stout, overweight, large, chubby, portly, flabby, paunchy,potbellied, beer-bellied, meaty, of ample proportions, heavyset; obese, corpulent,fleshy, gross; informal plus-sized, big-boned, tubby, roly-poly, well-upholstered, beefy,porky, blubbery, chunky, pudgy. ANTONYMS thin, skinny.2 fat bacon: fatty, greasy, oily, oleaginous; formal pinguid. ANTONYMS lean.3 a fat book: thick, big, chunky, bulky, substantial, voluminous; long. ANTONYMSthin.4 informal a fat salary: large, substantial, sizable, considerable; generous, lucrative.ANTONYMS small.
adjective ( fatter, fattest )(of a person or animal) having a large amount of excess flesh: the driver was a fat, wheezing man.• (of an animal bred for food) made plump for slaughter.• containing much fat: fat bacon.• large in bulk or circumference: a fat cigarette.
Obesity is a medical condition in which excessbody fat has accumulated to the extent that it may havean adverse effect on health, leading to reduced life expectancy and/orincreased health problems.People are considered as obese when their body mass index(BMI), a measurementobtained by dividing a person's weight in kilogramsby the square of the person's height in metres, exceeds 30 kg/m2.
Obesity increases the likelihood of various diseases, particularly heart disease, type 2 diabetes,obstructive sleep apnea, certain types of cancer,osteoarthritis andasthma. Obesity is most commonly caused by a combination of excessive food energy intake, lack of physical activity, and genetic susceptibility, although a few cases are caused primarily by genes, endocrine disorders, medications or psychiatric illness. Evidence to support the view that some obese people eat little yet gain weight due to a slow metabolism is limited; on average obese people have a greater energy expenditure than their thin counterparts due to the energy required to maintain an increased body mass.
Dieting and physical exercise are the mainstays of treatment for obesity. Diet quality can be improved by reducing the consumption of energy-dense foods such as those high in fat and sugars, and by increasing the intake of dietary fiber. Anti-obesity drugs may be taken to reduce appetite or inhibit fat absorption together with a suitable diet. If diet, exercise and medication are not effective, a gastric balloon may assist with weight loss, or surgery may be performed to reduce stomach volume and/or bowel length, leading to earlier satiation and reduced ability to absorb nutrients from food.[8][9]
Presented here through artistic creativity, Toni a twentieth century new artist and photograpehr focuses on a different take on the idea of being fat in an artistic work. To capture and interpret her ideas of this ridiculous and unimportant state of being which causes many to never go outside for fear of ridicule, others commit suicide and unforgiveable sin, while others ignore that they may be fat, it can be unhealthy and lead to strokes and death, still Gray uses her visual ideas of this situation to make a few points. When you truly love someone their size never matters, their illness becomes a way for you to illustrate your true love for them. These kinds of collection by Toni Anita Gray reveals the igsignificance or significance beased on individual perceptions, teachings, learnings and overall views of the individual persons one comes in contact with or simply sees in passing. Life is not someones size, looks, wallet, intellect, status, bank account, home, car, pile of jewelry, family or even those they hang around. We are all individuals and we are not what others see, say we are, think we are or even believe we may be.
Life is the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death: the origins of life.• living things and their activity: some sort of life existed on Mars | lower forms of life |the ice-cream vendors were the only signs of life.• [ with adj. or noun modifier ] a particular type or aspect of people's existence: an experienced teacher will help you settle into school life | revelations about his private life | his father decided to start a new life in California.• vitality, vigor, or energy: she was beautiful and full of life.2 the existence of an individual human being or animal: a disaster that claimed the lives of 266 Americans | she didn't want to die; she loved life.• a biography: a life of Shelley.• either of the two states of a person's existence separated by death (as in Christianity and some other religious traditions): too much happiness in this life could reduce the chances of salvation in the next.• any of a number of successive existences in which a soul is held to be reincarnated (as in Hinduism and some other religious traditions).• a chance to live after narrowly escaping death (esp. with reference to the nine lives traditionally attributed to cats).3 (usu. one's life) the period between the birth and death of a living thing, esp. a human being: she has lived all her life in the country | I want to be with you for the rest of my life | they became friends for life .
5AM/9AM
Drawings
Self-Potrait of Toni Anita Gray
TITLE: 5AM/9AM):
Toni Anita Gray, USA
1954 - Present
Created in Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Graphite and charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-5
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Image and sheet (irregular): 8 3/4 x 7 1/8 inches (22.2 x 18.1 cm)
GrayGirlGalleria Gallery
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Gray is a Young Woman who is more than a handful professionally, artistically, personally and socialbally. She's a surviver of her Grandparents death, Fathers death and the ridicule of him by some of her immediate family while other believe everything about him must remain secret or unspoken. A carbon copy of this man in whom she adored faithfully although there were many attempts to change her mind on this matter none succeeded. Gray decided she would draw herself first thing this morning as her father was in her dreams that night. Looking at herself she not only sees a duplicate of him but also how she is visually changed as she prepared to meet and greet the world outside of her apartment doors. She recalls the days of her youth when she did not need glasses and now must use them dialy. He lips become more made up and pronounced as she created the woman to be viewed once she leaves hone with makeup. Hair goes from wild and frizzy to tamed, structured and stylized. Cheeks are not only highlighted but contoured and accentuated and changes the look of her physical bone structure. This surviving portrait drawings from an early time very early in the morning to the person that comes home at the end of a long day looks outward with a fixed point of view, and is a newer person from the one who rose up and sat up in her bed at 5am. She uses the mirror to draw and to meet the gaze of her viewing herself while her eyes . His eyes, become more magnetic with eyeshadow powers, more mystical and egyptian like, and become a new projections of her own personal self image. She leaves home self-assurance. The artist uses makeup to carve little lines made parallel with the light andn shadow of a contoured nose, cheeks, eyebrows and lips. This is her self-potrait of herself. She is the mirror image--in the mirror watching, judgding and viewing her own self-portrait. This fashionable self profile depicted with pencils, charcoals, graphite and white chalk is styled on and earlier younger Anita Gray that has been established from this exhibited work organized into a self-potrait of stylized art. She considers this her individual masterpiece. and a graceful portrait witl flavor and is considered one of the captivating pieces of her personality-day images versers the evening or night image.
Self-Potrait of Toni Anita Gray
TITLE: 5AM/9AM):
Toni Anita Gray, USA
1954 - Present
Created in Chicago, Illinois, 2005
Graphite and charcoal on charcoal paper
Dimensions:
ID#: 2005-5
All images above © Toni Anita Gray
Image and sheet (irregular): 8 3/4 x 7 1/8 inches (22.2 x 18.1 cm)
GrayGirlGalleria Gallery
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Gray is a Young Woman who is more than a handful professionally, artistically, personally and socialbally. She's a surviver of her Grandparents death, Fathers death and the ridicule of him by some of her immediate family while other believe everything about him must remain secret or unspoken. A carbon copy of this man in whom she adored faithfully although there were many attempts to change her mind on this matter none succeeded. Gray decided she would draw herself first thing this morning as her father was in her dreams that night. Looking at herself she not only sees a duplicate of him but also how she is visually changed as she prepared to meet and greet the world outside of her apartment doors. She recalls the days of her youth when she did not need glasses and now must use them dialy. He lips become more made up and pronounced as she created the woman to be viewed once she leaves hone with makeup. Hair goes from wild and frizzy to tamed, structured and stylized. Cheeks are not only highlighted but contoured and accentuated and changes the look of her physical bone structure. This surviving portrait drawings from an early time very early in the morning to the person that comes home at the end of a long day looks outward with a fixed point of view, and is a newer person from the one who rose up and sat up in her bed at 5am. She uses the mirror to draw and to meet the gaze of her viewing herself while her eyes . His eyes, become more magnetic with eyeshadow powers, more mystical and egyptian like, and become a new projections of her own personal self image. She leaves home self-assurance. The artist uses makeup to carve little lines made parallel with the light andn shadow of a contoured nose, cheeks, eyebrows and lips. This is her self-potrait of herself. She is the mirror image--in the mirror watching, judgding and viewing her own self-portrait. This fashionable self profile depicted with pencils, charcoals, graphite and white chalk is styled on and earlier younger Anita Gray that has been established from this exhibited work organized into a self-potrait of stylized art. She considers this her individual masterpiece. and a graceful portrait witl flavor and is considered one of the captivating pieces of her personality-day images versers the evening or night image.
Confusion
Drawing
Title: Confusions
2004
Artist: Toni Anita Gray, 1954-Present
Dimentions: (22.2 x 16 cm) Sheet: 9 x 6 1/2 inches (22.9 x 16.5 cm)
2004-C
Graphite, Charcole, White Chalk and Pencil, 23 5/8 x 17 11/16" (60 x 45 cm)
© Toni Anita gray & GrayGirlGalleria Gallery, Chicago, Il.
Confusion in our life as human beings confronts and sneeks up on us all. It represents uncertainity, doubt, unsureness, ignorance, bewilderment, baffelment, puzzlement, mystification, shock, dazeing, wonder, astonishment, disorder, chaos, disruption, upheaval, shambles, stumbling blocks and just plain messes in our personal, professional and social lives.
In this work focus is not so much the individual but how much this individuals head and thoughts are spinnning in a mental confusion but what is the confustion. The artist Gray never says. It's your personal interpretation, you view, your perception of what could possibly be sending a person who seems so serene into a place where his head is spinnning so much that it has begun to hurt and cause pain. To releive the pain he attempts to place his warm hand on top of his aching head and close his eyes for relief from everything that could possibly be in view. His headache and confusion is trapped in his own personal identity; disorder; memory of recall that cannot be erased. He is trapped in his own inability to lose his focus on the things that grab his attention and affect his own mental judgment in a normal brain. this is not a mild degree of confusion but a previous frustration that has resurfaced without warning or clues. it is not evere yet but on its way to disorganized and bizarre thoughs. Agrivation; an inabilyty to solve pro blems that have re-surfaced. Its a kind of drowsey agony. Its not from the effect of any kind of drug but a kind of life dysfunction or delirium. Yet, its temporary and will pass, but when? Confustion can be a kind of mental illness that leads to physical illness. When we become locked into and un-understanding of what we are, where we are, where we must be, disorder that becomes so jumbled that you just want out, coupled with a kind of bewilderment that the mind itself cannot control then we are vuneralbe to the errors of reason where confusion takes over. Where are you in your mind?
Title: Confusions
2004
Artist: Toni Anita Gray, 1954-Present
Dimentions: (22.2 x 16 cm) Sheet: 9 x 6 1/2 inches (22.9 x 16.5 cm)
2004-C
Graphite, Charcole, White Chalk and Pencil, 23 5/8 x 17 11/16" (60 x 45 cm)
© Toni Anita gray & GrayGirlGalleria Gallery, Chicago, Il.
Confusion in our life as human beings confronts and sneeks up on us all. It represents uncertainity, doubt, unsureness, ignorance, bewilderment, baffelment, puzzlement, mystification, shock, dazeing, wonder, astonishment, disorder, chaos, disruption, upheaval, shambles, stumbling blocks and just plain messes in our personal, professional and social lives.
In this work focus is not so much the individual but how much this individuals head and thoughts are spinnning in a mental confusion but what is the confustion. The artist Gray never says. It's your personal interpretation, you view, your perception of what could possibly be sending a person who seems so serene into a place where his head is spinnning so much that it has begun to hurt and cause pain. To releive the pain he attempts to place his warm hand on top of his aching head and close his eyes for relief from everything that could possibly be in view. His headache and confusion is trapped in his own personal identity; disorder; memory of recall that cannot be erased. He is trapped in his own inability to lose his focus on the things that grab his attention and affect his own mental judgment in a normal brain. this is not a mild degree of confusion but a previous frustration that has resurfaced without warning or clues. it is not evere yet but on its way to disorganized and bizarre thoughs. Agrivation; an inabilyty to solve pro blems that have re-surfaced. Its a kind of drowsey agony. Its not from the effect of any kind of drug but a kind of life dysfunction or delirium. Yet, its temporary and will pass, but when? Confustion can be a kind of mental illness that leads to physical illness. When we become locked into and un-understanding of what we are, where we are, where we must be, disorder that becomes so jumbled that you just want out, coupled with a kind of bewilderment that the mind itself cannot control then we are vuneralbe to the errors of reason where confusion takes over. Where are you in your mind?
Self-Portrait
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
The readily available materials of stylus and paper have been used by self-taught artists to express themselves for a very long time. Regardless of economics, geography, education, or other conditions (confinement, for example), the beauty of line and the eloquence of the mark dominate the visual experience. Adolf Wölfli, Madge Gill, and Edmond Monsiel, all well-established artists in the canon of art brut, exploit line in their highly mysterious and obsessively detailed compositions. The compulsive, accumulative quality of much of this work, what is known as horror vacui (the need to fill the page), sets the stage for artists working today. Although contemporary versions of obsessive drawing can be more reductive, even quite minimal, the drawings are labor intensive and painstakingly precise, mirroring the methodologies of some of the best art brut.
“Obsessive Drawing” highlights contemporary interpretations of line by five emerging self-taught artists. This is the first museum exhibition in New York to showcase this international group: Eugene Andolsek (USA), Charles Benefiel (USA), Hiroyuki Doi (Japan), Chris Hipkiss (England and France), and Martin Thompson (New Zealand). The immediacy of the art masks painstaking processes, and the act of drawing becomes a surprising necessity. The artists’ motivations for making art are married to their self-taught survival skills to help them cope with illness, loss, loneliness, fear, and regret. Inevitably, though, the process of drawing eventually dominated this motivation, and making marks on a page became captivating, so that it is now an obsession for each man. The lust for line trumps everything. Each artist thus discovers what John Ruskin (1819–1900) said about drawing years ago, that one purpose of drawing was to record things that could not be described in words.
Drawing conventionally has been associated with pen, pencil, and paper, but artists have drawn lines on walls, earth, ceramics, fabric, film, and computer screens, with tools ranging from sticks to scrapers to pixels. Looking beyond institutional definitions of the medium, On Line (on view from November 21, 2010 to February 7, 2011) argues for an expanded history of drawing that moves off the page into space and time. Comprising the work of more than one hundred artists, the exhibition charts the radical transformation of the medium between 1910 and 2010, as artists broke down drawing to its core elements, making line the subject of intense exploration: as the path of a moving point or a human body in motion (the dancer tracing dynamic lines across the stage, the wandering artist tracing lines across the land), as an element in a network, and as a boundary—political, cultural, or social.
On Line is organized chronologically in three sections: Surface Tension, featuring the artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane; Line Extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space—that is, into social space; and Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significance to the space between lines. In following the development of the meaning of line over the last one hundred years, the exhibition traces it in movement, across disciplines, and as it has been drawn out and rewoven in time and space—inevitably reflecting the interconnection and interdependency that are increasingly both shaping and emerging from a globalized society. Line, like thought, once understood as linear and progressive, has evolved into a kind of network: fluid, simultaneous, indefinite, and open.
On Line is organized chronologically in three sections: Surface Tension, featuring the artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane; Line Extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space—that is, into social space; and Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significance to the space between lines. In following the development of the meaning of line over the last one hundred years, the exhibition traces it in movement, across disciplines, and as it has been drawn out and rewoven in time and space—inevitably reflecting the interconnection and interdependency that are increasingly both shaping and emerging from a globalized society. Line, like thought, once understood as linear and progressive, has evolved into a kind of network: fluid, simultaneous, indefinite, and open.
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Surface TensionThis first section explores artists’ drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane, including examples of the Futurist exploration of speed and movement in form around 1910, and the advent of Cubist collage, originating in 1912— considered a first attempt to move from the imaginary surface of representation to the space of the real world. The desire for space in the plane of the surface was further explored in the open-form concept of the Russian Constructivists, who, by the early 1920s, expanded the notion of sculptural form through their exploration of new materials. At the same time, Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (begun early 1920s, destroyed 1943) is a critical example of an investigation of form and space; the artist occupied several rooms on various floors of his house in Hannover with abstract forms.
Line ExtensionWorks in this section play with lines that extend beyond flatness into real space—that is, into social space. Alexander Calder’s three-dimensional forms are drawn in space with wire lines. Luciano Fontana’s famous holesand linear cuts allow line to escape from the prison of the flat surface. In the early fifties, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Cy Twombly focused attention on the dynamics of the line itself, removed from authorship. Whereas some artists were interested in the absence of lines as gaps that activate a surface, others, like Anna Maria Maiolino and Pierrette Bloch, became increasingly preoccupied by the material presence of the line in actual space, refocusing on the dialogue between the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space. Concurrent with this radical and non-formal experimentation was the work of artists such as Edward Krasinski and Karel Malich in Eastern Europe and Lygia Clark in Latin America.Confluence of Line and PlaneIn the exhibition's final section, artists push their lines, both literally and conceptually, out into the “real” world: onto the walls of buildings (Giuseppe Penone’s site-specific drawing Propagazione), into the earth (Michael Heizer’s large-scale works in the landscape), and into the spaces of our daily life (Joelle Tuerlincxx’s sculptures of found materials). Another common theme, grids and networks of overlapping lines, can be seen in works by Agnes Martin, Cildo Meireles, and Mona Hatoum. The works in this section ultimately stress interdependency—between surface and space, between present and past, and primarily between the line and the support. These works prove that a single mark can articulate and alter the understanding of the ground itself, an idea implicit in every day of lived experience.
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Surface TensionThis first section explores artists’ drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane, including examples of the Futurist exploration of speed and movement in form around 1910, and the advent of Cubist collage, originating in 1912— considered a first attempt to move from the imaginary surface of representation to the space of the real world. The desire for space in the plane of the surface was further explored in the open-form concept of the Russian Constructivists, who, by the early 1920s, expanded the notion of sculptural form through their exploration of new materials. At the same time, Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (begun early 1920s, destroyed 1943) is a critical example of an investigation of form and space; the artist occupied several rooms on various floors of his house in Hannover with abstract forms.
Line ExtensionWorks in this section play with lines that extend beyond flatness into real space—that is, into social space. Alexander Calder’s three-dimensional forms are drawn in space with wire lines. Luciano Fontana’s famous holesand linear cuts allow line to escape from the prison of the flat surface. In the early fifties, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Cy Twombly focused attention on the dynamics of the line itself, removed from authorship. Whereas some artists were interested in the absence of lines as gaps that activate a surface, others, like Anna Maria Maiolino and Pierrette Bloch, became increasingly preoccupied by the material presence of the line in actual space, refocusing on the dialogue between the two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space. Concurrent with this radical and non-formal experimentation was the work of artists such as Edward Krasinski and Karel Malich in Eastern Europe and Lygia Clark in Latin America.Confluence of Line and PlaneIn the exhibition's final section, artists push their lines, both literally and conceptually, out into the “real” world: onto the walls of buildings (Giuseppe Penone’s site-specific drawing Propagazione), into the earth (Michael Heizer’s large-scale works in the landscape), and into the spaces of our daily life (Joelle Tuerlincxx’s sculptures of found materials). Another common theme, grids and networks of overlapping lines, can be seen in works by Agnes Martin, Cildo Meireles, and Mona Hatoum. The works in this section ultimately stress interdependency—between surface and space, between present and past, and primarily between the line and the support. These works prove that a single mark can articulate and alter the understanding of the ground itself, an idea implicit in every day of lived experience.
State Of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970
October 9 - January 22, 2012
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, co-organized by Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), is the most comprehensive exhibition to date to focus on Conceptual art and related new genres in both Northern and Southern California during this pivotal period in contemporary art. Featuring more than 150 works of art, the exhibition includes installations, photographs, works on paper, videos and films, artists’ books, extensive performance documentation, and other ephemera. This includes newly discovered work as well as materials culled from archives that have rarely been viewed.
Some of the highlights of the exhibition include the important early surveillance installationBeing Photographed, Looking Out, Looking In, February 4-20, 1971 by Chris Burden, currently in a private collection and not exhibited since the 1970s; the most comprehensive installation of artifacts, photographs, and the original soundtrack from Allen Ruppersberg’s,Al's Grand Hotel (1971); the most complete documentation ever presented in a museum of Bonnie Sherk’s street performances Sitting Still Series (1970); and archival photographs from William Wegman’s studio, recently discovered at the BAM/PFA and never before seen in California. Other artists featured in State of Mind whose practices deserve greater attention are Gary Beydler, Nancy Buchanan, Adam (the late Paul Cotton), Lowell Darling, Stephen Laub, Darryl Sapien, Susan Mogul, Ilene Segalove, Fred Londier, and Robert Kinmont.
In conjunction with State of Mind there will be public programs that bring together a range of artists, scholars, and curators for opening weekend symposia, lectures, and performances. The exhibition is accompanied by a 250-page catalog with essays by exhibition curators Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, as well as additional contributions by UC Irvine Art History Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson and Anne Rorimer, an independent scholar. The catalog, published by the University of California Press, will feature 70 color plates and more than 125 black-and-white images.
Despite its origins in the frescoes of antiquity, its spectacular propagation in seventeenth-century Europe, and its stubborn persistence through all the cultural changes of the ensuing eras, the still life has generally been dismissed as a minor form of artistic expression and ranked below the traditional genres of religious and history painting, portraiture, and landscape. Throughout the twentieth century, however, artists have challenged, transgressed, and perpetually renewed the still life theme, engaging it as an exemplary and even paradigmatic vehicle for the recasting, but also the subversion, of earlier traditions. Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, organized by Margit Rowell, Chief Curator of the Museum’s Department of Drawings, explores this process through a rigorous selection of 131 works by seventy-one American and European artists. The exhibition is divided into nine sections, which together present an inquiry into the still life as an evolving system of representation that ultimately reflects the relationships between art, society, and its objects, and embodies moral, economic, and social codes of meaning.
October 9 - January 22, 2012
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, co-organized by Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), is the most comprehensive exhibition to date to focus on Conceptual art and related new genres in both Northern and Southern California during this pivotal period in contemporary art. Featuring more than 150 works of art, the exhibition includes installations, photographs, works on paper, videos and films, artists’ books, extensive performance documentation, and other ephemera. This includes newly discovered work as well as materials culled from archives that have rarely been viewed.
Some of the highlights of the exhibition include the important early surveillance installationBeing Photographed, Looking Out, Looking In, February 4-20, 1971 by Chris Burden, currently in a private collection and not exhibited since the 1970s; the most comprehensive installation of artifacts, photographs, and the original soundtrack from Allen Ruppersberg’s,Al's Grand Hotel (1971); the most complete documentation ever presented in a museum of Bonnie Sherk’s street performances Sitting Still Series (1970); and archival photographs from William Wegman’s studio, recently discovered at the BAM/PFA and never before seen in California. Other artists featured in State of Mind whose practices deserve greater attention are Gary Beydler, Nancy Buchanan, Adam (the late Paul Cotton), Lowell Darling, Stephen Laub, Darryl Sapien, Susan Mogul, Ilene Segalove, Fred Londier, and Robert Kinmont.
In conjunction with State of Mind there will be public programs that bring together a range of artists, scholars, and curators for opening weekend symposia, lectures, and performances. The exhibition is accompanied by a 250-page catalog with essays by exhibition curators Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, as well as additional contributions by UC Irvine Art History Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson and Anne Rorimer, an independent scholar. The catalog, published by the University of California Press, will feature 70 color plates and more than 125 black-and-white images.
Despite its origins in the frescoes of antiquity, its spectacular propagation in seventeenth-century Europe, and its stubborn persistence through all the cultural changes of the ensuing eras, the still life has generally been dismissed as a minor form of artistic expression and ranked below the traditional genres of religious and history painting, portraiture, and landscape. Throughout the twentieth century, however, artists have challenged, transgressed, and perpetually renewed the still life theme, engaging it as an exemplary and even paradigmatic vehicle for the recasting, but also the subversion, of earlier traditions. Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, organized by Margit Rowell, Chief Curator of the Museum’s Department of Drawings, explores this process through a rigorous selection of 131 works by seventy-one American and European artists. The exhibition is divided into nine sections, which together present an inquiry into the still life as an evolving system of representation that ultimately reflects the relationships between art, society, and its objects, and embodies moral, economic, and social codes of meaning.
g Woman. 1912. Oil on wood. 16 3/4 x 13 3/8"
Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna comprises more than 150 oil paintings on canvas, wood, and cardboard; gouaches; watercolors; and pen-and-ink and pencil drawings on paper. It represents the nucleus of The Leopold Collection, amassed by private collector Dr. Rudolf Leopold, which is soon to be housed in a new museum in Vienna. Encompassing the full breadth of Schiele's extraordinarily prolific career from 1905 to his premature death in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, it includes portraits, self-portraits, allegorical compositions, landscapes, and powerful images of male and female nudes in various contorted poses. Presented together for the first time in the United States, these provocative and profoundly moving works reveal the radical aesthetic innovations, aligned with existential explorations of the human condition, that make Schiele's art so compelling for contemporary viewers.
Publication: Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna.
Written by Magdalena Dabrowski and Rudolf Leopold.
Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna was organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, Senior Curator, Department of Drawings. The exhibition is sponsored by Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Additional generous support is provided by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Central Bank of Austria), the Austrian Mint, and the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York. An indemnity for the exhibition has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna comprises more than 150 oil paintings on canvas, wood, and cardboard; gouaches; watercolors; and pen-and-ink and pencil drawings on paper. It represents the nucleus of The Leopold Collection, amassed by private collector Dr. Rudolf Leopold, which is soon to be housed in a new museum in Vienna. Encompassing the full breadth of Schiele's extraordinarily prolific career from 1905 to his premature death in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight, it includes portraits, self-portraits, allegorical compositions, landscapes, and powerful images of male and female nudes in various contorted poses. Presented together for the first time in the United States, these provocative and profoundly moving works reveal the radical aesthetic innovations, aligned with existential explorations of the human condition, that make Schiele's art so compelling for contemporary viewers.
Publication: Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna.
Written by Magdalena Dabrowski and Rudolf Leopold.
Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna was organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, Senior Curator, Department of Drawings. The exhibition is sponsored by Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Additional generous support is provided by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder.The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Central Bank of Austria), the Austrian Mint, and the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York. An indemnity for the exhibition has been granted by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Corporate America
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Language through Art: An ESL Enrichment Curriculum EvaluationThe J. Paul Getty Museum's innovative English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum, Language through Art: An ESL Enrichment Curriculum, provides important resources to formal educators, while engaging adult learners and reaching out to nontraditional audiences. A research project was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of both the beginning and intermediate/advancedlevels of the Language through Art curriculum, by speaking with 160 teachers who had implemented these materials in their classroom.
Download the evaluation report:
Language through Art: An ESL Enrichment Curriculum Evaluation (45pp., 852KB)
Findings:
- Many teachers felt that they did not have the background or confidence to implement arts-based units on their own. The workshops and curriculum format had a positive effect on teachers' skill-acquisition and implementation of arts-based content.
- A high percentage of teachers attending workshops implemented the curriculum in their classroom (88.5%).
- A large majority of teachers who attended a curriculum workshop later participated in a self-guided museum visit (73.7%).
- Overall, the beginning level of the curriculum was too advanced for lower level ESL students. It was recommended that this level be broken into two units: (1) Beginning Low, and (2) Beginning High.
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
. 1912. Oil on canvas. 71 1/4 x 71 1/4".Schiele began drawing as a child and in 1906, at the age of sixteen, enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Through 1909, he was strongly influenced by Gustav Klimt and the reigning Secessionist style, with its emphasis on flowing line and ornamentation. Klimt became a kind of father-figure for Schiele, whose own father had died when Schiele was fourteen. The two artists met in 1907, and thereafter the older, successful Klimt introduced Schiele to his own models and patrons, found him work with the seminal design collaborative the Wiener Werkstätte, and included him in the 1909 Internationale Kunstschau, an important exhibition of foreign and Austrian artists.
Toward the end of 1909, Schiele became disillusioned with academic traditionalism and, with fellow dropouts from the Academy, formed the Neukünstler (New Artists) Group. The following year, financially cut off by his family and plagued by feelings of alienation and a degree of narcissistic self-pity, Schiele embarked on a series of self-portraits using a new, Expressionist vocabulary of exaggerated gestures, startling color combinations, and jagged contour lines.
Lovers. 1914-15. Gouache, watercolor, and
pencil on paper. 18 5/8 x 12".Through 1913, Schiele explored his highly individualistic idiom in a multitude of drawings of female models, either nude or semi-nude, which endure as his best-known pictures. Schiele constructed oddly foreshortened poses by positioning himself above or below his subjects, and by eliminating their limbs to reinforce a sense of disconcertion. The women are confrontational in their sexuality, openly exposing themselves beneath raised skirts or sometimes with a surrounding white gouache halo setting off their nakedness.
Schiele's canvases, less well known than his erotic drawings, were often imbued with private symbolism. A pivotal allegorical canvas, the double portrait, Hermits 1912, is commonly thought to symbolize Schiele's breaking away from Klimt. Both artists are shown wearing long black caftans (indicative of Klimt's real habit of dress, also appropriated by Schiele), with the older man, blinded and leaning against and partially concealed behind the younger. In keeping with other self-images as a martyr, Schiele imagines himself and his mentor as existing on the fringes of society, only now he has become the dominant successor, gazing boldly outward.
In 1915, Schiele married Edith Harms, a young woman from a bourgeois family, and was drafted into the military and assigned to various posts outside Vienna. Sensitive portraits of his new wife show Schiele adapting a more naturalistic pictorial language which was also employed in the growing number of portrait commissions he received in the following years.
Kneeling Girl Propped on Her Elbows. 1917.
Gouache and black crayon on paper. 11 3/8 x 17 1/2".In 1917, Schiele was reassigned to Vienna, which allowed him greater time to focus on his art and once again work on large paintings. Whereas the emphasis on contour line to suggest volume stays essentially the same in his works on paper, Schiele's canvases become far more painterly. However, since many of the paintings from 1918 are unfinished, the evolution of Schiele's style is left open to question.
Just as he had begun to achieve a previously elusive commercial success--most importantly in a large exhibition of his work at the 1918 Viennese Secession--Schiele contracted the Spanish flu. His last work is a moving portrait drawing of his wife, who died in the same epidemic the day after the drawing was made; she was six months pregnant. Schiele died three days later at the age of twenty-eight.
This presentation of works from every facet of Schiele's creative development fosters a fuller understanding of the singularity of the artist's achievement. His tortured aesthetic is so aligned with his investigations into the malaise of human existence in modern times that Schiele's art maintains a timeless relevance for contemporary artists and viewers alike.
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
. 1912. Oil on canvas. 71 1/4 x 71 1/4".Schiele began drawing as a child and in 1906, at the age of sixteen, enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Through 1909, he was strongly influenced by Gustav Klimt and the reigning Secessionist style, with its emphasis on flowing line and ornamentation. Klimt became a kind of father-figure for Schiele, whose own father had died when Schiele was fourteen. The two artists met in 1907, and thereafter the older, successful Klimt introduced Schiele to his own models and patrons, found him work with the seminal design collaborative the Wiener Werkstätte, and included him in the 1909 Internationale Kunstschau, an important exhibition of foreign and Austrian artists.
Toward the end of 1909, Schiele became disillusioned with academic traditionalism and, with fellow dropouts from the Academy, formed the Neukünstler (New Artists) Group. The following year, financially cut off by his family and plagued by feelings of alienation and a degree of narcissistic self-pity, Schiele embarked on a series of self-portraits using a new, Expressionist vocabulary of exaggerated gestures, startling color combinations, and jagged contour lines.
Lovers. 1914-15. Gouache, watercolor, and
pencil on paper. 18 5/8 x 12".Through 1913, Schiele explored his highly individualistic idiom in a multitude of drawings of female models, either nude or semi-nude, which endure as his best-known pictures. Schiele constructed oddly foreshortened poses by positioning himself above or below his subjects, and by eliminating their limbs to reinforce a sense of disconcertion. The women are confrontational in their sexuality, openly exposing themselves beneath raised skirts or sometimes with a surrounding white gouache halo setting off their nakedness.
Schiele's canvases, less well known than his erotic drawings, were often imbued with private symbolism. A pivotal allegorical canvas, the double portrait, Hermits 1912, is commonly thought to symbolize Schiele's breaking away from Klimt. Both artists are shown wearing long black caftans (indicative of Klimt's real habit of dress, also appropriated by Schiele), with the older man, blinded and leaning against and partially concealed behind the younger. In keeping with other self-images as a martyr, Schiele imagines himself and his mentor as existing on the fringes of society, only now he has become the dominant successor, gazing boldly outward.
In 1915, Schiele married Edith Harms, a young woman from a bourgeois family, and was drafted into the military and assigned to various posts outside Vienna. Sensitive portraits of his new wife show Schiele adapting a more naturalistic pictorial language which was also employed in the growing number of portrait commissions he received in the following years.
Kneeling Girl Propped on Her Elbows. 1917.
Gouache and black crayon on paper. 11 3/8 x 17 1/2".In 1917, Schiele was reassigned to Vienna, which allowed him greater time to focus on his art and once again work on large paintings. Whereas the emphasis on contour line to suggest volume stays essentially the same in his works on paper, Schiele's canvases become far more painterly. However, since many of the paintings from 1918 are unfinished, the evolution of Schiele's style is left open to question.
Just as he had begun to achieve a previously elusive commercial success--most importantly in a large exhibition of his work at the 1918 Viennese Secession--Schiele contracted the Spanish flu. His last work is a moving portrait drawing of his wife, who died in the same epidemic the day after the drawing was made; she was six months pregnant. Schiele died three days later at the age of twenty-eight.
This presentation of works from every facet of Schiele's creative development fosters a fuller understanding of the singularity of the artist's achievement. His tortured aesthetic is so aligned with his investigations into the malaise of human existence in modern times that Schiele's art maintains a timeless relevance for contemporary artists and viewers alike.
This exhibition, which inaugurates a series of newly opened galleries on Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Museum’s second floor, surveys the widespread impulse toward geometric abstraction in modern and contemporary art. Artists representing various movements and geographical backgrounds are featured: Cubist, Dada, and Russian avant-garde artists of the 1910s and 1920s; artists associated with Minimalism, Op art, and hard-edge abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s; and contemporary artists who continue to exploit the infinite potential of simple geometries.
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Museum’s second floor, surveys the widespread impulse toward geometric abstraction in modern and contemporary art. Artists representing various movements and geographical backgrounds are featured: Cubist, Dada, and Russian avant-garde artists of the 1910s and 1920s; artists associated with Minimalism, Op art, and hard-edge abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s; and contemporary artists who continue to exploit the infinite potential of simple geometries.
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
world's largest and most inclusive collection of modern painting and sculpture comprises some 3,600 works dating from the late nineteenth century to the present. It provides a comprehensive selection of the major artists and movements since the 1890s, from Paul Cézanne's The Bather and Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night to masterworks of toda
The Getty Villa Ever wonder what it would be like to take a museum object out of its case for a closer look? Try the next best thing! Join an educator on select days at the Getty Villa and handle replica objects along with the materials and tools that ancient artists used to create the works of art on display in the galleries.
Currently in the seriesRecently in the seriesCurrently in the series Participants handle the tools and materials used to carve ancient gemstones.Gem Carving TechniquesDate: Saturdays and Sundays through August 26, 2012
Time: 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays
Location: Getty Villa, Reading Room
Admission: Free with your advance, timed ticket to the Getty Villa. Call (310) 440-7300 or use the "Get Tickets" button below.
Drop by this engaging handling session to learn more about the craft and the artists who mastered methods of engraving gemstones. Experience the ancient process by discovering the steps and skills used to create an intaglio (a carving cut below the surface of a gemstone) and cameo (a carving in relief). Touch and look closely at replicas of gems on display in the Museum's collection. Explore and handle the materials and tools in an ancient engraver's tool kit, including drill bits with tips the size of a grain of sand and carving materials like diamond dust and olive oil. Enjoy an array of gemstones used by ancient engravers, including malachite, agate, and rock crystal. Learn about the magical properties these materials were perceived to have. Then experience for yourself the more practical uses of engraved gems as signet rings by creating an impression in clay that you can take home.
Video: Watch a gem engraver demonstrate ancient carving techniques.
Handling Sessions are also available for blind and low vision groups. Learn more about how to sign up.
Recently in the series Visitors explored glassmaking techniques through handling and close looking.Glassmaking Techniques
August 4, 2011–February 26, 2012
In this unique handling session, participants experienced the transformative process of glassmaking from salt and sand to objects of beauty. With hands–on opportunities with replica works of art, participants learned about the ancient techniques used to create works on display in the exhibition Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity. Among samples of metal ores used in ancient glass recipes that participants could touch were also a playful flask molded in the shape of a fish, an ingenious elegant pitcher–within–a–pitcher, and a mosaic glass bowl created by merging lengths of multicolored glass.
Video: Watch a glassmaker demonstrate ancient glassmaking techniques.
Explore tempera and encaustic painting on wood through handling and close looking. Painting Portraits
February 1–July 31, 2011
Mummy portraits provide a human face to ancient life in Greco-Roman Egypt. This drop-in handling session explored how painters created likenesses and the techniques of tempera and encaustic painting on wood. Participants discovered some of the surprising materials ancient artists used, which ranged from gold leaf and honey to rabbit-skin glue. With an educator as a guide, visitors learned about how mummy portraits like those of Herakleides and Isidora were created from start to finish.
Video: Watch a conservator discuss the scientific analysis of the mummy of Herakleides and recent discoveries about its origin, materials, and construction.
Video: Follow the steps of the mummification process in this short animation about the Getty Museum's Romano-Egyptian mummy Herakleides.
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
world's largest and most inclusive collection of modern painting and sculpture comprises some 3,600 works dating from the late nineteenth century to the present. It provides a comprehensive selection of the major artists and movements since the 1890s, from Paul Cézanne's The Bather and Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night to masterworks of toda
The Getty Villa Ever wonder what it would be like to take a museum object out of its case for a closer look? Try the next best thing! Join an educator on select days at the Getty Villa and handle replica objects along with the materials and tools that ancient artists used to create the works of art on display in the galleries.
Currently in the seriesRecently in the seriesCurrently in the series Participants handle the tools and materials used to carve ancient gemstones.Gem Carving TechniquesDate: Saturdays and Sundays through August 26, 2012
Time: 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays
Location: Getty Villa, Reading Room
Admission: Free with your advance, timed ticket to the Getty Villa. Call (310) 440-7300 or use the "Get Tickets" button below.
Drop by this engaging handling session to learn more about the craft and the artists who mastered methods of engraving gemstones. Experience the ancient process by discovering the steps and skills used to create an intaglio (a carving cut below the surface of a gemstone) and cameo (a carving in relief). Touch and look closely at replicas of gems on display in the Museum's collection. Explore and handle the materials and tools in an ancient engraver's tool kit, including drill bits with tips the size of a grain of sand and carving materials like diamond dust and olive oil. Enjoy an array of gemstones used by ancient engravers, including malachite, agate, and rock crystal. Learn about the magical properties these materials were perceived to have. Then experience for yourself the more practical uses of engraved gems as signet rings by creating an impression in clay that you can take home.
Video: Watch a gem engraver demonstrate ancient carving techniques.
Handling Sessions are also available for blind and low vision groups. Learn more about how to sign up.
Recently in the series Visitors explored glassmaking techniques through handling and close looking.Glassmaking Techniques
August 4, 2011–February 26, 2012
In this unique handling session, participants experienced the transformative process of glassmaking from salt and sand to objects of beauty. With hands–on opportunities with replica works of art, participants learned about the ancient techniques used to create works on display in the exhibition Molten Color: Glassmaking in Antiquity. Among samples of metal ores used in ancient glass recipes that participants could touch were also a playful flask molded in the shape of a fish, an ingenious elegant pitcher–within–a–pitcher, and a mosaic glass bowl created by merging lengths of multicolored glass.
Video: Watch a glassmaker demonstrate ancient glassmaking techniques.
Explore tempera and encaustic painting on wood through handling and close looking. Painting Portraits
February 1–July 31, 2011
Mummy portraits provide a human face to ancient life in Greco-Roman Egypt. This drop-in handling session explored how painters created likenesses and the techniques of tempera and encaustic painting on wood. Participants discovered some of the surprising materials ancient artists used, which ranged from gold leaf and honey to rabbit-skin glue. With an educator as a guide, visitors learned about how mummy portraits like those of Herakleides and Isidora were created from start to finish.
Video: Watch a conservator discuss the scientific analysis of the mummy of Herakleides and recent discoveries about its origin, materials, and construction.
Video: Follow the steps of the mummification process in this short animation about the Getty Museum's Romano-Egyptian mummy Herakleides.
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
two Guitarconstructions–one in cardboard, one in sheet metal–bracket a brief but intense period of experimentation in the artist's long career. It is this moment in his work, and the place of these two modest yet revolutionary objects within it, that Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores.
Around mid-December 1912, Picasso pinned up several groups of drawings and papiers collés with the cardboard Guitar and took at least three photographs of his arrangements, likely in a single session. Only the cardboard Guitar, a pot of glue on the bed or sofa, and a 1911 issue of L'Illustration théatraletucked behind Guitar at upper right remain consistently positioned. This issue of the French theater journal is about a play focused on printing and is filled with cut-up, collage-style dialogue. Visible on the bed or sofa are scraps of paper and, in one print, finished works perhaps waiting to be tacked up, details that suggest the temporary nature and rapid execution of these studio displays. Guitar's position at center draws attention to its close compositional relationship to the works that surround it. The presence of the construction also afforded a yardstick of real dimensions and real shadows against which Picasso could measure his drawn and pasted works, in both the studio and in the photographs.
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
two Guitarconstructions–one in cardboard, one in sheet metal–bracket a brief but intense period of experimentation in the artist's long career. It is this moment in his work, and the place of these two modest yet revolutionary objects within it, that Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 explores.
Around mid-December 1912, Picasso pinned up several groups of drawings and papiers collés with the cardboard Guitar and took at least three photographs of his arrangements, likely in a single session. Only the cardboard Guitar, a pot of glue on the bed or sofa, and a 1911 issue of L'Illustration théatraletucked behind Guitar at upper right remain consistently positioned. This issue of the French theater journal is about a play focused on printing and is filled with cut-up, collage-style dialogue. Visible on the bed or sofa are scraps of paper and, in one print, finished works perhaps waiting to be tacked up, details that suggest the temporary nature and rapid execution of these studio displays. Guitar's position at center draws attention to its close compositional relationship to the works that surround it. The presence of the construction also afforded a yardstick of real dimensions and real shadows against which Picasso could measure his drawn and pasted works, in both the studio and in the photographs.
- Picasso mixed different gritty particles into his paints to create canvases with textured or built-up surfaces. He applied these modified paints either as an overall surface preparation or in very discrete segments. Depending on the type and amount of material added, the effects range from very low relief to rough, almost rocky additions.
- DETAIL OF:
- Violin Hanging on the Wall. Possibly begun Sorgues, summer 1912, completed Paris, early 1913. Kunstmuseum Bern. Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation. Peter Willi/The Bridgeman Art Library © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- DETAIL OF:
- Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table.Paris, December 4, 1912, or later. Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris. Gift of Henri Laugier, 1963. CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- This technique, mimicking the patterning of precious marble, has uses ranging from bookmaking to interior decoration. Executed directly on canvas in sharply defined blocks, Picasso's marbleized patches refer to the original material and to the illusionism of handmade versions of it.
- DETAIL OF:
- Bottle and Wineglass. Paris, December 3, 1912, or later. Collection Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
- DETAIL OF:
- Guitar on a Table. Paris, autumn 1912. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, Class of 1930. Jeffrey Nintzel © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Shadows Edges
Toni Anita Gray
USA, Chicago, Illinois
2005
Graphite and Charcoal on paper
30 x 30
Courtesy the artist and GrayGirlGalleria, Chicago, Illinois
Look closely at a work of art and you are likely to uncover clues to a fascinating past and present: an object's intimate connection to people, places, institutions, and cultures.
This exhibition takes four objects from the Museum's decorative arts collection—a silver fountain, a wall light, a side chair, and a lidded bowl—and encourages you to explore their "lives" through an interactive presentation.
Art Together EvaluationsArt Together is a multi-visit initiative with area schools that includes five interactions with Getty educators, family and teacher programming, and a culminating event.
Evaluators first assessed the program in its pilot year, 2009–2010. Evaluators later assessed the program in its second year, 2010–2011. The evaluations make use of creative exercises with participants—free writing, bubble maps and a Plan-a-Tour Activity—designed to assess how well participants learned the purpose, values, and skills of navigating a museum; expanded their knowledge about art; and improved their perception of the museum as a place of fun and learning. For a control group, Art Together students were compared with students from a similar school who visited the Getty Center on a single school trip.
2009–2010
- Art Together students demonstrated greater expansion than the control group in their ability to address concepts about the function and importance of art museums, and increased their ability to think and write about art.
- Art Together students demonstrated personal investment and care when planning their visit to the Getty Museum, and perceived the museum as an environment where looking at many types and styles of art was just one of the many fun things to do.
- Interviews with parents of Art Together students demonstrated that their children talked about their museum experience with excitement, and often in great detail. Parents cited that the program heightened and strengthened their children's existing interest in art, and also increased their interest in going to an art museum.
2010–2011
- The results of the longitudinal evaluation suggest that Art Togetherstudents continued to display a greater ability in some of the concepts and skills that are focused on in the Art Together curriculum than comparison students.
- Art Together students continued to show greater competency in their ability to analyze a work of art than comparison students and showed particular strength in the area of description. They continued to show a higher ability to articulate numerous concepts about the purpose and function of art museums. They included more details about works of art and memories of experiences at the Museum.
- At the end of the program, 63 percent of Art Together students attended the culminating event. Moreover, 36 percent of the students self-selected to return to the Museum. This finding suggests that participation in Art Together increased students' interest in art and art museums, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.