Blog Posts by Subject: Sculpture

In her January/February exhibit at the Ottendorfer Branch longtime Lower East Side resident and artist Anne Stanner showcases some of her sculptures which were created from recycled scrap metals. You can view three of her pieces here (The Bear, Horses and Antelope, and The Bull) from her series "Dreams of Lascaux."  You can view the rest of her exhibit on the first floor of the branch until the end of February.  I sat down with Anne to discuss her work:

Katarina Bishop grew up all over Europe, but she isn’t an heiress. She has a Faberge egg, but she isn’t a Romanov. Kat is used to looking at a room and seeing all the angles, but that was before she stole a whole other life at the Colgan School only to walk away from it months later without a trace.

That was before everything went sideways.

Fourteen-year-old Miri wants a lot of things. She wants to be useful to her family. She wants to be taller and stronger. She wants desperately to work in the quarry and understand quarry speak the way everyone else on Mount Eskel does.

What Miri doesn’t want is to be a princess. At least, she doesn’t think she does.

There isn’t much room on Mount Eskel for princesses anyway. The mountain landscape is as beautiful as the linder stone the villagers mine for their livelihood but life there is hard. Lowland traders come to buy the mined linder, but it’s barely enough to secure food for the winter.

Be that as it may, the lowlander priests of 

Included among the books I brought out for last month's Handmade Crafternoon was one that I've been slow to return to the shelves because I want to try my hand at so many projects within it. The book in question is Kenneth Ody's Paper Folding and Paper Sculpture, and I'm a fan because it contains a really broad range of projects--from cute little projects like dog scuptures to some seriously elegant lacy paper globes.

If you were one of the nearly 80 crafty book artists-in-training who came out for Handmade Crafternoon last weekend, thanks for joining us as we folded and glued and cut our way to unusual pop-up paper garland book structures.  And speaking of books, a number of guests asked about getting a list of the Library books I brought along for browsing that day.  Your wish is my command.  Here are the titles I gathered to inspire us; each title links to its record in the Catalog, so you'll know where to go to see it yourself.  Enjoy!

(Yes, it's made of soap. From Lester Gaba's On Soap Sculpture.) I first came upon the subject heading soap sculpture in the Library Catalog a couple of weeks ago, and I just had to investigate. And what I found more than confirmed my love of the serendipitous nature of research.

I learned-—in looking through a few books on the subject as well as articles in Proquest's Historical New York Newspapers database-—that soap sculpture as a fashionable hobby was launched by Proctor & Gamble as a means of promoting brand loyalty for Ivory soap. The man behind this campaign was Edward L. Bernays, who has been called the Father of Spin. Proctor & Gamble 

Debuting at this years Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will be a 48-foot tall balloon titled Figure with Heart by the late artist Keith Haring. The balloon is based on Haring's ink on paper drawing, Untitled (Figure with Heart), 1987 and will be part of the Macy's Parade's Blue Sky Gallery series, which aims to "inject contemporary art into a pop culture phenomenon". (Pop Art In The Sky) The Blue Sky Gallery series began in 2005 with Humpty Dumpty by Tom Otterness, preceded by “Rabbit” by Jeff Koons in 2007. To learn more about the artist Keith Haring visit the Library and look through our books in the online catalog, as well as go to the Keith Haring Foundation 

If you like Japanese anime and manga you should see the new © Murakami exhibition (April 5-July 13, 2008) at the Brooklyn Museum. This is the first major retrospective on the works of Japanese artist/designer Takashi Murakami, who is known as the Warhol of Japan. It focuses on his work from 1991-2000, “when the artist began exploring his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity." From "© MURAKAMI: Brooklyn Museum Photo Gallery”

I came across an interesting article in the Art Newspaper titled “Statues in Britain are revolting—and so are we: The British art world has had enough of “Frankenstein monster memorials”.” (2.7.08, issue 188) It discusses the backlash or “fightback against “bad” public sculpture in the UK” toward the “unprecedented number of tasteless statues that have appeared across the country.” The editor of The Burlington Magazine, Richard Shone complains that “the infestation of public places...by statues and memorials...is now of serious concern.” He goes on to describe a statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square 

Walking into the Modern Art wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I came across what I thought was a shark tank. For a second I had to step back thinking I entered the American Museum of Natural History by mistake.

But what I encountered was “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by English artist Damien Hirst. A tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde encased in a glass cabinet.

“Hirst created work that brought together the joy of life and the inevitability of death…A shark in a tank of formaldehyde presented a once life-threatening beast as a carcass: the glass box, half hunting trophy, half homage to the 

According to an AM New York article “Guerilla artists don’t want bench back“, an 8-foot-tall bench mysteriously appeared on Houston Street about two weeks ago. It goes on to say, “All this work, once it’s installed, it’s kind of just left to the fates,” said Tod Seelie, who collaborated with street artist Brad Downey on the bench and photographed its stealth installation in the middle of the night. “The idea is to see how time changes it.”

It would have been interesting to see people’s reaction walking/driving by the bench. Unfortunately, it appears that the bench has been taken down and since the artists 

Would you want a commemorative figurine of Norman Mailer or Germaine Greer? Would Tom Wolfe look good fired in clay?

Our postmodern era has banished the time-honored desire for such celebratory decorative arts. The ancient Romans placed busts of their ancestors in household shrines. The Enlightenment era saw the rise of the great English and European potteries that produced commemorative likenesses of monarchs and generals.

The Romantic Revolution, however, instigated a real demand for such objects with its celebration of the cult of the individual. Bonaparte and Beethoven busts adorned the mantelpieces of the well-to-do, the artistic, and the arrivistes. 

Did you visit the Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years exhibition at MoMA? The museum’s website continues to offer the exhibition in audio and video. Most of show’s audio was Richard Serra’s voice supplying histories of the process of the art.

Starting on the sixth floor I was captured by the choice of the first piece overhead. Look up or you miss it and I think some did miss it: a huge steel plate imbedded in the ceiling. Further on, the materials such as vulcanized found doors evoked a lost industrial New York as well as the artist’s opportunistic eye.

The room quartered by "Circuit II", composed by four 10ft high sheets of