Mesh Magazine

Creativity Explored kicks off its annual holiday art sale next week, from Friday, December 7th to Sunday, December 9th (and the sale continues through December 28th). They are selling thousands of pieces of art created by the men and women who work in the studio. Creativity Explored is a great organization gives people with developmental disabilities a venue to create, display and sell their art.

This year, you can get temporary tattoos by one of my favorite artists, John Patrick Mckenzie, and James Montgomery. Also, Imaginationally, the second book by Michael Bernard Loggins will be on sale. The book is a dictionary of made-up words, from ‘hectical’ (very busy at work for 48 hours) to ‘troublemakerhood’ (a neighborhood where troublemakers hang out).

Creativity Explored is located at 3245-16th Street @ Guerrero Street. 415.863.2108

This exhibit at Giant Robot features the work of artist-illustrator-crafter Susie Ghahremani. A graduate of RISD, she’s worked for Nickelodeon, Chronicle Books, and The New York Times. The artwork in this exhibit conists of animals & musical instruments. Check out pictures from the opening earlier this month.

I was introduced to Casey Jex Smith at the Marin Headlands Fall Open House in October and really liked his use of color and geometric shapes. Now he is just one of the artists featured in “The There There,” an exhibition of East Bay artists at the Esteban Sabar Gallery in Oakland. Other artists include Derek Weisberg, Josh Keyes and Crystal Morey and proceeds from the show will help pay medical bills of local writer & curator Theo Konrad Auer.

Cottontail

MUSTN’T is Vasta’s first one-person exhibition.

“The starting point for the series was Angela Carter’s feminist reworking of fairy tales- I wanted to capture the sense of magical realism and the gothic in her storytelling.”

The opening reception will be held November 1st from 5- 8 pm @ the Patricia Sweetow Gallery.

I biked over to GGP this weekend to see a new exhibit at the de Young featuring over 70 sculpture & paper works by American artist Louise Nevelson. She’s best known for filling abstract boxes with discarded pieces that she found on the New York City streets, giving them “a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.” There’s something so romantic about using found objects. The ability and imagination required to take trash and turn it into art is so inspiring.

These pictures simply don’t do her work justice. The size of the artwork is overwhelming and the curators did a phenomenal job arranging, lighting and explaining the works and how they related to one another. I recommend taking the time to watch the short documentary of Nevelson’s work through the eyes of six artist-admirers. Footage of the artist is just phenomenal. Her head wrapped in a colorful scarf, draped in loose flowing clothing, fake eyelashes, extreme makeup, waving her arms around and ordering young men to lift and cut hunks of wood to her specifications, all the while clutching a clove cigarette in her hand. Sensational.

Tim Gaudreau is a New Hampshire artist who documented his trash for an entire year. He turned those 5,000 pictures into collages that will be on display at the CIIS Minna Street Center starting November 9th.

Tucker Shaw used this same concept to make his book, “Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth,” which I highly recommend for its beautiful (and sometimes disgusting) photographs.

This retrospective @ SFMOMA contains 200 works from the 1930s until the artist’s death in 1972. Cornell was an American artist best known for his box construction and collage work. He had no formal training and referred to himself often as a “maker.” How DIY is that… check out the Peabody Essex Museum’s interactive website for some amazing pictures.