Happy Friday...

This photograph, by artist Rosemary Laing, was on the cover of my issue of Artkrush today. A nice way to begin the weekend. Read more about how Laing creates her work here.

I'm not sure what I'll be up to this weekend. I had a minor surgical procedure yesterday and am milking it for all its worth today: sitting in my boy's ugly brown recliner watching back to back sex and the city dvds. Yes, I'm feeling better.

So what are you up to? Let me know if you've got any artsy plans for the weekend. Leave me a comment.

also...

Over the weekend, somewhere, I lost my new fountain pen! Because I'm now addicted to writing with these fine instruments, it needed immediate replacement. The replacement, by Lamy, has a much stronger clip, so when I attach it to my canvas bag, I think it'll stay put, unlike the Waterman, which I'm pretty sure slipped off somewhere Saturday or Sunday: I had it at a Friday meeting, and by Sunday, it was nowhere to be found.

Weekend in Review

Hi everyone. So I hope you all had a good weekend and did something artsy. I did a few artsy things and a few non-artsy (but fun) things. First, the artsy.

David Matysiak's premiere of his Telephono Project at the Bemis Underground on Thursday nigh was a) packed and b) really cool. The overflow crowd drained all the red wine from the BU before we even got there - a first! - but we still managed to enjoy watching Jadon Ulrich create images for Matysiak's collaborative songs. After the show, I bought one of only 250 Telephono box sets, which include record albums of all the songs and a CD featuring all the tunes for your ipod or car stereo. Nice.

Saturday night's MUNNY Party, also at the Bemis Underground, was another packed event. The MUNNY dolls designed by local artist were very cool -- I especially liked Renee Hoover's bird MUNNY. A satellite Kidrobot store sold some groovy goods and my sister and I both popped for some keychains and zipper pulls. I got the cute coffee cup, part of the Yummy Breakfast Keychain series pictured at left. So appropo, right? What's fun about it is that you buy one sight unseen and don't know what you get until you open the box. Very Cracker Jack, grab-baggy, but I like the result of my purchase.

In non artsy news, I saw the new Batman movie this weekend. I'm a closeted comic lover and I always look forward to anything in the Batman franchise as he's definitely my favorite superhero. This latest incarnation of darker, grimmer Batman movies have been great, and Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is as notable as all the talk says it is. Even if you're not into blockbusters or comics, I'd recommend seeing it for Ledger's performance alone.

Yesterday, Alyssa Schukar (who donated her image for the site banner art) had a pool party/BBQ at her parents' house in Lincoln. She and her family were lovely hosts, and the steamy 90 degree weather was perfect for pool partying and grilling. I made two types of veggie burgers for the party, all of which were a real hit (if I do say so myself, they really were good.) So if you're wanting to try something new in the food department, I highly recommend either of these recipies, both courtesy of Martha Stewart. Enjoy.

Mediterranian veggie burgers with mint yogurt sauce

Veggie burgers with tahini mayonnaise

On e-newsletters

I just finished going through some emails and read the latest issue of Artkrush, a bi-weekly arts email newsletter put out by the fine people at Flavorpill. If you like/love/practice art, you should subscribe to this well written, thought provoking, relevant web-magazine.

(If you're also a fashionista, I recommend subsrcibing to Flavorpill's JC Report, which is similiar to Artkrush but covers the fashion world. I subscribe to both and they're equally well done.)

Artkrush led me to this review from the New York Times, beautifully written by Holland Cotter, of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at the Guggenheim. I blogged about the show already in the New York posts from when I was in the city earlier this month. This review made me wish I could see this show again.

Ok. Carry on.

The importance of writing

So I type much faster than I write, and when I do put pen to paper, the pen had better be nice. This of course doesn't have anything directly to do with art, but surely, a nice pen can turn the simple act of writing into an art form.

A few weeks ago, I bought a couple disposable fountain pens and I like them a lot. They're by Pilot and called the Varsity. Here's what they look like. Cute, right?

Well, the first pen is almost already out of ink and I realized, much to my chagrin, that it was awfully wasteful to toss the entire pen once its empty. I mean, that's a piece of plastic that I'm contributing to a landfill that I'd just assume not throw in the trash. So that led to a rather exhaustive ebay search for a fountain pen of reasonable price with replaceable ink cartridges. I settled on one by Waterman, which was less than $40, stylish and refillable. It's called the Phileas Demonstrator and I chose to order it in clear, which I think is pretty sweet. I also ordered some chocolate brown ink: I might as well be stylish with my new, "earth friendly" pen. Anyhow, if you like a fountain pen and fancy being a bit old school, the pens come in lots of colors and the ink refills come in every color of the rainbow. Choose your own sylish combination and put all those stolen Bics back in the supply room at your office. Your notebooks - and the Earth - will thank you.

P.S. Here's my pen.

Telephono

Tomorrow night, David Matysiak will premiere his "Telephono" Project. (read about it here if you're unfamiliar.) The listening and album release party starts at 8 p.m. in the Bemis Underground. Matysiak's limited edition box set of five vinyl records archive the Telephono project, which includes contributions from musicians worldwide. The participants altered Matysiak's recordings before passing them on to another artist. I've never heard this type of "transformative" music project and I'm excited to check it out. Omaha video artist Jadon Ulrich will create some live visuals on site tomorrow night. The Telephono project has gotten some big time press -- it's been in both USA Today and on NPR. The party, of course, is free.

I just finished putting together the list of story assignments for the August issues of The Reader, and summer's art scene is in full bloom. There's some great stories on the docket, and the paper is free every week, so I hope you pick it up.

One other thing: last week I made mention of this blog at the end of my column, Mixed Media, in the paper. If you came to the site via the Reader, please let me know! I am curious if anyone saw that and took the time to visit. You can either leave me a comment or send me an email at boomsbaker@gmail.com.

See you soon.

For your viewing pleasure...

As a farewell to my friend Jake Gillespie, I present to you one of his beard drwaings. You might reognize the person in the drawing. (or you might not. She's incognito.)

Art this weekend

Hello, my three devoted subscribers.

Sorry I've been awol. Big stuff happening outside of the blogosphere in the past week. None of it has to do with art though, so I won't bore you with the details. I'm already looking ahead to this weekend.

My friend Alice Kim, who has a great accessories store in Omaha's Old Market called Trocadero, is playing host along with the Bemis Underground to the MUNNY Party, taking place this Saturday night. I have to say I'm a bit of an imbesil when it comes to the whole fad of Kid Robot and MUNNY dolls, but after a quick tutorial, I got the gist. I stopped into Trocadero and checked out some of the Kid Robot merch for myself, and I have to say, there's a certian appeal to a tiny piece of plastic bacon smoking a ciagarette. (And I think I pretty much need a cute Kid Robot keychain.)

Anyhow, Alice and the BU have pulled together a group of Omaha artists to each design a Munny doll, which will be on exhibit (and for sale, with proceeds benefitting the Nebraska AIDS Project) Saturday night. Check it out. If nothing else, it'll be interesting. The poster for the show, pictured at left, lists all the participating artists. And, like so many of Omaha's cool art events, it's 100 percent free.

Lincoln artist Jake Gillespie is saying farwell to Nebraska to pursue graduate school. His big going-away art show/party took place last weekend, and I wasn't able to make it, but I wish him all the best. I have a few great pieces of his work in my home and couldn't live without them. (At least I couldn't live an artful life without them.) Natalie Linstrom wrote a nice piece about Jake and his work, and it'll be in the Reader next week. Check it out, too.

I'm finally recovering from my travels, which kept me out of town for the whole month of June, and settling back in to my normal life in Omaha. I love traveling, but I have to say: it's nice to be home.

Hope to see you around somewhere artsy this weekend.

New York: part two

So last night I blogged about the museums I visited in New York, and today it's all about New York's public art. The city is rich with public art projects. Almost everywhere you turn there's something to look at. (I count grafitti art among this, even though it's not "sanctioned" most of the time.)

We saw two public art projects of note while I was there: Jun Kaneko's recently installed trio of giant heads on Park Avenue and Olafur Eliasson's four "New York City Waterfalls" installed in the New York Harbor.

I'd never seen Kaneko's heads installed anywhere but Omaha, so it was exciting to check them out in a new place. New Yorkers seemed to walk by them without much notice (that's what you'd expect from New Yorkers, though, I'd guess.) But for anyone paying attention, they're a nice distraction. Kaneko's assistants sent me some photos. Take a look.

The "Waterfalls" exhibit in the New York Harbor was simply outstanding. I took some photos but they don't really compare to some from the New York Times. Check it out via this slide show. I'll post some of my less impressive images later this afternoon.

New York: part one

I just got back from New York a few hours ago and the weekend was great. The weather (hot and steamy: welcome to the city in July) didn't deter my friend Brad and me from having a fantastic time. We spent most of our time shopping, art viewing and eating during the day and going to fun restaurants and Broadway shows in the evening. For the sake of this blog, of course, I'll focus on the art. Oh, the art.

I had a long list of museums I wanted to visit but a limited amount of time to do everything, so editing was a must. Brad and I narrowed our visits down to two museums and four shows: The Guggenheim's Louise Bourgeois retrospective and the Brooklyn Museum's trio of shows: Ghada Amer's Love Has No End, the Takishi Murakami show and Judy Chicago's iconic (and newly installed) piece "Dinner Party." We also saw Jun Kaneko's recently installed trio of giant heads on Park Avenue and Olafur Eliasson's four "New York City Waterfalls" installed in the New York Harbor.

It was an art filled trip. I loved seeing the Bourgeois show, and Brad and I started at the top of the Guggenheim spiral and moved down -- we started at most recent work and went to earliest -- but were glad we did. It proved even more intriguing to look at the work and then read the wall labels. What was most interesting? The way the work made us feel often corresponded closely with the artist's intent. At left is an image of one of my favorite pieces from the show: "Le Défi" from 1991.

I'd never been to the Brooklyn Museum, but the building is an imposing one and we chose it because three shows there wet my whistle. I wanted to see the much touted ©Murakami exhibit, and I have to say it was the least impressive show I saw, and also (Brad and I concurred) the creepiest. For me, I think Takishi Murakami's hyper-sexualized, life size anime figures in various states of arousal were the least desirable; for Brad, it was the room filled completely with a wallpaper featuring thousands of eyeballs; the piece is called "Jellyfish Eyes." (I felt this pink and green scheme pictured at left must have come from someone's demented childhood fantasy.) What both turned us off the most? The gift shop smack in the center of the show where two white shirted Louis Vuitton employees stood at bored attention to hawk the latest collaboration between Murakami and Marc Jacobs: a mix of the iconic LV symbol against a camoflauge background (called Monogramoflauge.) I have to say as an aside, I did enjoy seeing a case full of the original Jacobs-Murakami handbag collaboration, though seeing them in an art gallery context was a little bit too weird. Also, after seeing so many terribly ugly knockoffs on the arms of teenagers everywhere, the excitement wasn't what it would have once been, and it stood to reaffirm my hatred of chintzy knockoffs of all kinds. But I digress.

The other two shows we saw at the Brooklyn Museum were fantastic. My friend (and former Omahan) Peter Fankhauser is one of New York-based artist Ghada Amer's studio assistants, and it was a can't-miss opportunity for me to check out Amer's show, Love Has No End, while I was there. It was fantastic. It's the first United States survey show of her work, and the fifty pieces in the show include some of her most iconic work. She's a self-described painter, but some of the most stunning works featured her singular embroidery work. I also greatly enjoyed her thought-provoking performance pieces, captured here in photographs and words. The image at right was one of my favorite pieces: "Barbie Loves Ken" and "Ken Loves Barbie" are doll shaped straitjackets embroidered with the titles of the pieces. Brilliant.

If you've never seen (or heard) of Judy Chicago or her famous 1970s work "The Dinner Party," I highly advise you to learn about it online, or else check it out if you're planning a New York visit. It's simply wonderful. The Brooklyn Museum's new installation of the piece does it justice, and the historical context makes it seem more current than ever.

Tomorrow, I'll blog about the two huge public art projects I saw while I was in the city.

Happy Monday!

photos courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.