Alexa Meade

Alexa Meade creates "living still lifes" by painting live bodies and incorporating them into installations with found objects. These are photos, not paintings!
Also check out her flickr.

RIP Jeanne-Claude

I've been remiss in not posting this sooner. Jeanne-Claude passed away last November after a life making beautiful "environmental art" with her husband, Christo. I will never forget seeing The Gates (pictured above) in Central Park my senior year of high school. It was breathtaking, and one of my first introductions to site-specific art. I wish I could have seen when they wrapped the Reichstag in billowing fabric here in Berlin. Jeanne-Claude, you will be missed.

San Jose Art Museum

Went for the first time today...
They have an exhibit up on Andy Warhol that I wanted to check out. The actual selection of pieces was blah--a couple rooms of screen prints that I've seen a million times before. But there was an interesting blurb about his "fascination with fame" on one wall and an informative documentary playing in one corner. The best part, though, was the little craft table in the middle of one gallery where you could combine Warhol's images (soup cans, a self portrait, and flowers) printed in black on clear plastic with your own compositions of colord paper cutouts and crayon drawings. It was neat.
Upstairs they had an exhibition called "Process as Paradigm" with works from the permanent collection and it was a great smattering of things, including Tony Oursler's Slip (2003), seen above. It's an S-shaped fiberglass sculpture with a video of a woman's mouth and lips projected onto it. Her skin looks green and there's a soundtrack of various phrases, some more intelligible than others, all emphasizing the 'sss' sound. It was both creepy and alluring; I really liked it.
There was also an exhibition of works by female printmakers, where these two aquatints:

by Pat Steir (whose work I just realized I also saw at Crown Point Press last year) really reminded me of my own work:


Other standouts:

Edward Corbett Untitled (Black Painting), 1950
(part of an exhibition on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism)


A detailed Franklin Williams 1972 thread and fabric canvas kind of like the one above.

Tree Print

Bryan Nash Gill made this print by inking a tree stump:

Pretty frickin awesome. Brings new meaning to the term "woodblock." I'd like to try it sometime.
(via A Cup of Jo)
This is the closest I've come:

It's a four-block woodblock print called 'Antlertree'...the antler image was the inspiration for this blog's name.