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Isamu Noguchi, Trinity, 1945, Gregory , 1948, Strange Bird (To the Sunflower) Photo taken from the Hirshhorn's Facebook page Biomorphic and anthropomorphic themes run through quite a few exhibitions of modern artists in Washington at the moment.  The Hirshhorn's Marvelous Objects: Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York has several of the abstract, biomorphic Surrealists such as Miro and Calder.  The wonderful exhibition will come to a close after this weekend. Isamu Noguchi's many sculptures that are part of  Marvelous Objects  deal with an unexpected part of the artist's life and work. Noguchi was interned in a prison camp in Arizona for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Whatever the horrors of his experience, he dealt with it as an artist does -- making art and using creativity to express the experience by transforming it.  Isamu Noguchi, Lunar Landscape, 1944 Lunar landscape comes from immediately after this difficult time period. The ar...

           William Alburger , Forest, 2013, 65" x 108" x 9"  rescued spalted birch, in an solo exhibition at GRACE       Eco-friendly art is meeting the world of high art, if we're to take a cue from what's showing at local art centers and galleries.  It can be stated that the earliest environmental art started with the artists' visions and applied those visions to the environment, with little interest in sustainability.        Quite the opposite trend is developing now.  Several emerging  artists, the “environmental artists” of the 21 st century put nature in the center--not the artist or the idea.  Nature is the subject and the artist is nature's follower. The following artists' creations are about the land and earth; other artists interested in the environment have been more concerned with a world under the sea .   William Alburger, Non-traditional Backwards One-Door, ...

Photo courtesy of Rachael Matthews from the UK Crafts Council "High fiber" usually refers to a type of diet, but High Fiber at the National Museum for Women in the Arts demonstrates how "high art" integrates with the everyday world of a Folk Art.  In the multi-media world of contemporary art, Fiber Art has gained recognition as a serious art form over the last fifty years.  Like the art of glass making , fiber art was invented milleniums ago for utilitarian purposes. Knitting, sewing and weaving developed to meet basic needs of warmth and clothing, but as soon as pattern and design were involved, the process of making art began. Knitted objects are often in Matthews' work When the ancient artists/crafters knitted, knotted, wove or stitched to follow patterns or innate designs in their heads, they tied together movements between the left and right hands, bridging the creative left side of the brain with the analytical right side of the brain. Contemporary fiber ...

   Semen Fridliand, Die kaüfliche Presse (The Venal Press ) 1929 halftone reproduction,  6 1/4 x 8 1/4 in. (16 x 21 cm)   National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund   At least four exhibitions on the Mall, at the National Gallery of Art and Hirshhorn Museum, take a look at printed word in painting and other art forms of the past century.  Chronologically, these exhibits begin with the avant-garde artists of circa 1910 at the National Gallery of Art's "Shock of the News" exhibition.  They end with today's leading provocateur-artist, Ai Weiwei of China, at the Smithsonian's contemporary art museum, the Hirshhorn.   So we search for the meaning of the word in art.    Jean-Léon Gérôme, O Pti Cien, 1902, is an academic style In 1902, Jean-Léon Gérôme, a leading academic artist of the day, painted O PTI CIEN, a puppy wearing a monacle. The letters suggest a reading of "au petit chien" ("at the little dog"), which would...