Last year, when the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art  organized and mounted, Declaration of Independence: Fifty Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, a retrospective, I was very fortunate to get to interview the legendary artist on the occasion of her  receiving an honorary degree from Rutgers University. Now, the retrospective exhibition catalog is now available for $40 (payment can be made to: Rutgers University, and on the memo line write: Institute for Women and Art, and sent to  191 College Ave.,  New Brunswick, NJ 08901).

Here’s my interview with her, one of the most inspiring interviews of my career:

“YES we can.” Most recently our President made these words famous, but Faith Ringgold, born in 1930, has been reciting the mantra all her life.

“If one can anyone can, all you gotta do is try,” she has written in a song, “Anyone Can Fly.”

Well-known for her Caldecott Honor-winning children’s book, Tar Beach (Crown Publishers, 1991), Ms. (more…)

For four months I’ve been walking by the recycled tire sculptures of Chakaia Booker on the Michael Graves terrace at the Arts Council of Princeton, thinking ok, I need to find out more about this artist. Then, I spotted her at the gala for the Brodsky Center for Innovative Print and Papermaking, wearing this headdress, and I knew I was a fan. The beautiful cloths and colors and patterns and the way she has arranged them, wearing them so boldly, strikes me in direct contrast to the rubber tire sculptures, but yet of the same family.

Here’s what it says about her on the ACP site (and, by the way, her sculpture will be there through July 10):

“Formally inventive, rhythmic, and imbued with enormous presence, the works are at once lyrical and powerful. Both the scale and the light-absorbing quality of the (more…)

Bisa Butler is one of a few dozen artists who will be a part of the exhibit Wonderfully Made: African-American Fine Art in the Atrium at 6 Court St. in Morristown. On view Jan. 29-March 18, the other artists include Romare Bearden and Curlee Raven Holton, among others.

Ms. Butler has a wonderful, to-the-point artist statement:

“I want to make portraits of people that speak to the viewer on different levels. I want to be able to communicate who my subject is, their personality, and their lifestyle-not just what they look like. Using fiber as a medium allows me to say much more about my subjects. We respond to fiber differently than we do other mediums. When people see my work their first instinct is to touch it. Not (more…)

In her new book of poems, Reviewing the Skull (WordTech Editions), Judy Rowe Michaels has written the following “To Picasso’s Melancholy Woman“:

I want to sink into the deep-blue shadow

that falls across your cheek as you turn away

from us and the window, your throat funneling dark

heavier blue into shoulders that carry sorrow

down to the chest’s concavity. Let me

hide where the gathered blue finally

goes black–in your lap. Empty madonna,

you cradle melancholy, but its shapeless weight

spills out of the frame.

My fear’s distilled

to one dark spot so small, under the x-ray’s blue,

it tells us nothing yet but watchful waiting. Almost

what you and I do here, you nursing

at invisible breasts some loss

not even your painter knows, that can’t

grow less or deeper than the paint allows.

All you can do is watch for me to give

your pooled blues the weight of mortal fear.

I went to the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea over the weekend to see the exhibit The Red Book of C.G. Jung.

“Jung’s fascination with mandalas-Tibetan Buddhist representations of the cosmos used to help reach enlightenment-is evident in these books where mandala structures figure prominently in many sketches and paintings,” according to the museum’s web site. “During the period in which he worked on this book Jung developed his principal (more…)

Talk about fascinating lines of work: Ruth Marshall worked as an exhibit sculptor and fabricator at the Bronx Zoo for 14 years. There, she got to combine interests in art and the natural world and conservation. (Did you know that the real name for the Bronx Zoo is is the Wildlife Conservation Society?)

An Australia native with an MFA from Pratt, Ms. Marshall has knitted hides and skins that are accurate in detail and size. And if you put on your knitted hat and scarf and mittens right now, you can rush on (more…)

This painting by Paul Rickert reminds me of driving to Newark Airport and seeing the oil refineries spewing gaseous chemicals into the sky. Although sinfully polluting and akin to the sinuses of our overly wasteful society, there is nevertheless an incredible beauty to those towers of steam billowing into the purple night. They become the clouds, billowing puffy cottony forms.

I’m sure Paul Rickert had nothing like this in mind when he painted this, but he has created a mood that is identifiable to those who go (more…)

Just before it closes (Jan. 13), I finally got to see the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim. It was so cold, and the lines so long, I debated whether I should buy the catalog or see the exhibit (cost more than the catalog, including transportation). In the end, I wanted to become more intimate with Kandinsky, so I walked from Penn Station to 89th Street to see these magnificent canvases in the spiral of the building.

Vasily Kandinsky was largely influenced by Monet’s “Haystacks” and the musical experiments of Arnold Schonberg. He identified three types of paintings designated by associations with music:

• impressions — based on real-life subjects
• improvisations — spontaneous and unconscious images from the artist’s inner life
• compositions — formally developed through many studies

His involvement as a professor at the Bauhaus gave his work new emphasis on geometry and precision. Using a compass, he created geometric shapes. The triangle embodied active and aggressive feelings; the square, peace and calm; and the circle suggested the spiritual and cosmic realm. He and Paul Klee lived in cojoined housing, and there was a cross fertilization of their work.

Kandinsky invented an extraordinary lexicon of biomorphic forms, incorporating amoebas, embryos, cells, larvae and all kinds of microscopic organisms and created his own kind of Surrealist-inspired ‘automatic writing’ in which the unconscious mind is transcribed onto the blank canvas. For his lectures at the Bauhaus he collected scientific books and botanical imagery. These contained the embryology, zoology and botany that informed his work.

He held a utopian vision that art can take us to a higher place.

Top: “Sky Blue.” Left: “Arc and Point.”

“All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.”
Toni Morrison

New Jersey - home to the original diner, FM radio, the lithium battery, the zipper, the boardwalk, the phonograph and the electric train. The past three governors have literally broken a leg, and it’s been called the clam state and the mosquito state - but, utopia?

“Utopia. New Jersey. For most people - even the most satisfied of (more…)

Here’s a new year wish from Rajie Cook, the designer responsible for the universal symbols.

You see his artwork every time you search for the restroom at the airport. Those little black figures, one with a skirt and one with trousers, originated in the mind of Roger Cook, back in the day when he was president of Cook and Shanosky Associates. The New York-based graphic design firm was hired by the Department of Transportation to create universal symbols for travelers. The cigarette in a circle with a slash crossing over, the capital P with a (more…)