DIY Making and Materials Part 2

Sandy French (background) hooking away on her bracelet, and my finished product (foreground).

Guest blogger Lydia Regalado is an arts educator, crafter and blogger who writes about people who gather to make things.

My experiement continues…

Second Stop: Beading Dreams

Beading Dreams, another beading boutique in Dallas, offers some of the most interesting classes beyond basic wire wrapping and silk knotting around: Rosary 101, Dream Catcher Earrings, Lovely Lariats, just to name a few. Most classes are $35. This cozy spot is where I found an Introduction to Wire Crochet class. Crocheting with wire is a simple technique that requires few tools with a funky, eye-catching outcome. There is no need to be perfect or pattern-specific, as the jumbled design hides any flaws, making it a very forgiving piece — great for the crochet beginner. Beading Dreams offers a great selection of beads and findings, supplies and classes. Its schedule of classes is packed with several options, but they do offer private lessons in case you can’t attend or want to learn a technique that’s not offered. The staff is patient and helpful, which is a good thing as beading can sometimes string you out. Project photos are available on the store’s Web site, or stop by to see the samples for yourself. Classes and supplies are affordable, and the best part is the 15 percent discount offered to students for the yearly quarter that the class was attended. That means if you take a class now, you can save money on needed supplies for holiday gifts!

DIY Dialogue:
Knitting and crocheting is “knot“ necessarily tied to the past idea of feminine tradition. Contemporary art often incorporates traditional handicraft with non-traditional materials. Local artist Lanie Delay’s interactive installation made of crocheted telephone wire and working phones intrigued me last January at 500x’s EXPO 2008. Artist Oliver Herring is shown knitting mylar sculptures with protective gloves in the “Play” episode from Season 3 of the PBS series Art21, “Art in the Twenty-First Century.” There is a connection between art and craft, but what is the difference? Please share your thoughts by posting a comment.

Next Up: Urban Street Bazaar

If you missed this event in May, Urban Street Bazaar is happening again this Saturday, Oct. 11 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.. Meet and shop with 40 DIY vendors, showcasing and selling their handiwork, fashions and art in Bishop Arts District. More information.

See you there!

DIY Making and Materials Part 1

Fashion knitwear designer Wenlan Chia at The Woolie Ewe in Plano.

Guest blogger Lydia Regalado is an arts educator and blogger who writes for Art&Seek about people who gather to make things.

Inspired by the ReadyMade lecture at the Dallas Museum of Art a couple of weeks ago, I decided to explore the use of materials in one craft, specifically needle arts: knitting and crochet. There are many shops and classes that support this kind of exploration in our community, and for this experiment I took advantage of two one-of-a-kind boutiques here in North Texas: The Woolie Ewe in Plano and Beading Dreams in Dallas.

First Stop: The Woolie Ewe

Family owned and operated in Plano since 1989, The Woolie Ewe is North Texas’ central supplier of yarn and supplies for the needle arts. A candy store for the yarn enthusiast, the selection of colors and textures is extensive and tough to wrap your head around. There are yarns from all over the world, wool, cotton, silk, tons of patterns and books. Walking into the store can be mind boggling, but the staff is there to help with “purls” of wisdom and patience for everyone no matter their level of experience. Additionally, The Woolie Ewe carries the yarns and patterns of international knitwear designers and suppliers such as Debbie Bliss, Sally Melville and Wenlan Chia to name a few. But, The Woolie Ewe is doing more than stocking these designer’s products, it is bringing these designers in for workshops and events for 2008 – 2009.

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Memo to Mine Owner: Most of the Canaries Are Gasping

A quick roundup of news items about the economic meltdown and the arts:

• The Telegraph (London): Bad for British theater

• Hollywood Reporter: Bad for media companies

• Bloomberg: Bad for art auction houses

• Bloomberg: Bad for art galleries

• Bloomberg: Bad for the whole entire art market

• Washington Post: Bad for high fashion

• The New York Times: Bad for New York theaters

• Boston Globe: Bad for Masschusetts art groups

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Bad (maybe) for Seattle Art Museum

• Orlando Sentinel: Bad for Central Florida art groups

• The Independent (UK): Great for an online satiric series

• Bloomberg: Great for a French comic book

• Bloomberg: Great for movies — if you like Depression-Era Hollywood

Take a Piece of Tut Home

Part of any major museum exhibition is the array of collectibles tied to it in the gift shop. You can bet that the Kimbell is selling plenty of pretty Manet posters and Van Gogh mouse pads tied to “The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago.”

So it should come as no surprise that King Tut — the person whose own collection of stuff has generated “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at the Dallas Museum of Art — comes with plenty of trinkets for sale. The museum gift shop offers the usual array of calendars and coffee mugs, but whoever is in charge of merchandising the Boy King didn’t stop at just the traditional items.

My favorite so far is the $100 hookah for sale on the left just as you enter the shop from the end of the exhibit. Not sure how many of those will sell, but at least it is out of the ordinary.

The exhibit also has an online store if you want so grab that Tut T-shirt to wear ahead of your visit.

If any of you took in the show during opening weekend, drop us a comment on this post and let us know what you thought. And if you bought something on the way out, by all means, tell us about that, too.

Photo: The Official Store of the King Tut Exhibition

Serenity

I’ve often thought that few people could improve on Dallas Morning News photographer David Woo’s classic shots of the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth. He quickly latched on to the reflecting pool, letting Tadao Ando’s design shimmer like hammered gold at night or emphasizing its perfect geographic order in the day. But now MAMFW has posted a shot of its own from a different angle. And it’s lovely, too.

How is it that Fort Worth has two of the most serene spots in North Texas — the Japanese Garden and the Modern Art Museum?

Arts on Campus: There, but Not There

Marjorie Garber, author of the superb Vested Interests:Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety as well as Patronizing the Arts,  writes in the Boston Globe:

This is an era of what could be called the “visual intellectual.” Students on college campuses and members of the general public flock to hear - and see - addresses by filmmakers, artists, and performers. Cultural attention, and cultural primacy, have shifted to encompass art installations, the moving image, technology, and performance. Phrases like “visual literacy,” “aural literacy,” “digital literacy,” and “media literacy” are increasingly common.

But although artists and performers are highly prized as visitors to colleges and universities, the kind of work they do has not reached a comparable importance in the curriculum.

Art and higher education might seem a natural fit in many ways, but they have a long and uneasy relationship. The arts are often still consigned to a secondary role within universities, sometimes viewed as not intrinsically intellectual, or not intrinsically academic. Even when a university invests significantly in the creative arts, and offers an array of courses in painting, sculpture, creative writing, and performance, many scholars and academic administrators remain unconvinced: Arts do not seem to lend themselves easily to the “tenurable” standards of other university subjects.

Tut’s Here: So What Do We Think?

Following Wednesday’s press preview of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs,” the Art&Seek bloggers participated in an e-mail round-table discussion on all things Tut:

JEROME WEEKS: Setting aside, for the moment, the content of “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at the DMA, what struck me immediately about the exhibition was its highly theatrical nature. That’s not intended as a criticism (not entirely). On recent visits to European museums, I’ve been struck by how some of them use much more technology than art or history museums in America seem comfortable using (or can afford to use) — TV displays, lasers, computer screens, digital re-enactments.

To give those readers who haven’t seen Tut some idea: The exhibition is basically split in two, with the first half devoted to Tutankhamun’s general period and immediate predecessors. It’s a mini-history of the 18^th dynasty, so that visitors may understand better such things as Akhenaten’s revolutionary monotheism, his banishment of hundreds of the old gods for his new sun god (Aten), with whom he was identified. Akhenaten may have been Tut’s father or his older brother; the precise lineage is still a matter of dispute. In any event, Tut grew up under this revolution (it meant an overturning of the dominant priesthood), and then, for some mysterious reason, Tut turned around and restored the old gods, the old priestly caste.

That first half is presented more or less like a typical museum exhibition – brightly lit and open, although with the walls and information displays designed to evoke Egyptian temples, and there is an introductory film with voiceover by Omar Sharif. But then we turn a corner and seem to enter King Tut’s tomb. Everything that follows is deliberately sunk in blue-black darkness, the better to evoke the tomb itself and, I should add, the better to highlight the gold and jewels, which are given pinpoint illumination. Tut discoverer Howard Carter’s famous remark about seeing wonderful gold glinting in the darkness is prominently posted several times (actually, there’s some dispute about whether he ever uttered those words; his own diary entries do not contain them). The ceiling has giant wood beams across it, the mummy itself is not there but recreated with a large platform in the middle of one “chamber.”

And so on. It’s all very atmospheric. A little hokey, I thought, especially with the many projected paragraphs hyping the exciting moment of discovery. But still, it’s thrillingly effective.

BETSY LEWIS: I knew this would be a tech-heavy exhibition, but the objects are amazing, and oddly I was not prepared for that. Museum regulars may be put off by the spectacle and the parking issues, but once they finally enter that first gallery – wow. The colors, the detail and the remarkable preservation of these objects will dazzle the most aloof art history major.

I thought the multimedia touches added to it, but then I have an Apple logo on my windshield. Yes, it looks like Disney, but who doesn’t like Disney? High theatricality is only a bad thing when it is intertwined with one’s personality (but I know nothing about that).

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Creativity and Black Children

Guest blogger Vicki Meek, manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center, posted the following item on her blog and allowed us to repost it here.

Well, it’s been a minute since my last post and much has transpired. The South Dallas Cultural Center is extremely active and the community is solidly in here! We completed our summer arts institute, which always has me thinking about children and their innate sense of creativity. Since we typically work with South Dallas children exclusively, I can also say that the aftermath leaves me thinking about the impact of arts and cultural programming on children from low-income households.

Every year we host approximately 70 children and youth in our Summer Arts At the Center Program (SAAC). The children are not pre-selected, that is to say they are not “creamed” from the art stars in the community. Instead, we open our program to all children and it’s first come, first served, making the playing field as even as possible. Over the years we do, however, tend to get families returning, which makes for a wonderful opportunity for sustained learning. I am never disappointed in the outcome of the program no matter how hairy the start-up! In fact I almost always find myself in tears at the end when the children showcase their achievements for their parents and the community. The sight of them exploding with creativity, singing, reciting their poetry, acting, drumming and dancing is often overwhelming, particularly given how many of them have never done these things before. This is why I am so adamant about offering the highest quality program possible to our children. They deserve it and they make me proud every summer with their enthusiastic embrace of their culture. Since the methodology employed is quite intentional, the SAAC staff can see direct results of their efforts correlated with measurable outcomes. So its not just a feel good experience for us but a true measurably successful educational one.

So it is no surprise that I am livid when the first thing to go are the arts programs when public school systems are stretched for money. They are still seen as frills even after years of study indicate their direct impact on academic achievement and self-esteem. We know that children who have a daily diet of arts perform more successfully in their other subjects. They have a greater sense of discipline and understand the notion of team work more so than their peers who do not have the arts included in a meaningful way in the curriculum.

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A Look Behind the Scenes at the Dallas Video Festival

Guest blogger Bart Weiss is Director of the Dallas Video Festival and president of Video Association of Dallas.

As October has arrived, I hope you have gotten some insight into how we work and think here at the fest. But like the fest, there is so much more. So forgive me if I rant a bit …

First, I want to talk about how we are are going to show the videos at the fest this year. We have always been eager to both show you new technologies and use them in the way we go about our bidness. I remember in year one (1987) there was this new thing called desktop publishing. We had no idea how do to it, but we created our first program book with it. We were one of the first festivals anywhere to have a Web site (I really wish I could find that first site ) and to have a database to automate the entry process.

So this year our new thing is iTunes (Yes, that player you are rocking to, probably as you are reading this, unless you are listening to Pandora). Aside from playing music, it can play videos in good resolution, better than playing in Quicktime. We used to dub everything to Betacam or some other tape format; now we will go digital but not DVD (they tend to skip, which is not nice).

So this should be easier to produce, look better, be cool, and, yes, put us on the bleeding edge, where sometime you get nicked, but in all or tests it worked fine. The upshot is you should not really notice any change. And now from reading this blog, you have some inside info, and when you are at the festival (did I mention that it is Nov. 6-9) you can tell the person next you you, “Hey did you know they are running that off of iTunes?”

Another cool thing we will do is talk about our videos on our site. For many years there has been a link on the site where you could just ask Bart what you should see (it is still there). But since pretty much AC and I are the only people who have seen everything, we thought we would share that with you. On the festival site, (www.videofest.org) by the schedule, we will soon have a video in which I will tell you what I like about this film and why I picked it. You sort of get a one-on-one with the director. How cool is that?

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Get the Special ‘Mummy Wrap’ at the Spa

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has compiled a list of the ‘King Tut’ packages and attractions offered by Dallas’ fancier downtown hotels, including the “Bare Bones Package” at the Adolphus and the “Tutini” cocktail at the W Hotel.