Lisa Sivess Johnson

Reoccurring characters in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s shows; Gilmore Girls & Bunheads!

Marisol passed away yesterday. She was an iconic sculptor in the New York art world and beyond who, as she explained in the above artist’s statement, sometimes made “horses and dogs and cats.”

Marisol appears throughout our collections including: Eva Lee Gallery records,  Hans Hoffman papers, Helen L. Kohen papers, 1978-1996, Leo Castelli Gallery papers, Robin Forbes slides of SoHo, Rudi Blesh papers, Sidney Janis exhibition catalogs, 1951-1998, and Stable Gallery records.

Leo Castelli Gallery announcement for an exhibition of sculptures by Marisol, 1957. Stable Gallery records, 1916-1999, bulk, 1953-1970. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

THIS. Stephen Colbert hosts The Guerrilla Girls, further proving how smart he is. Almost any host would have made a mess of this interview, but he takes them seriously and asks great questions. 

Click image for 785 x 1000 size.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gatochy/283780913/in/album-72157594350839068/

Scanned from The Golden Age of Advertising - the 60s.

When flour mills realized that poor women were using their bags to create clothing for their children during World War I, they began using flowered and patterned sacks for their products, and designed the labels to be able to wash off. 

Pictured above are just some of the textile patterns that they used for the bags.

Happy Birthday Corita Kent!

The artist, nun, educator, and activist was born on this day, November 20th, in 1918!

Today we are flipping through Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent (N6537 .K435 A4 2013 Quarto) in celebration.

Corita Kent entered the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles in 1936, and took the name Sister Mary Corita. After recieving her MA in Art History, Corita became the head of the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College. 

She worked almost exclusively with silkscreen, or serigraphy, helping to establish it as a fine art medium. Her artwork, with its messages of love and peace, was particularly popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

Her classes at Immaculate Heart were an avant-garde mecca for prominent, ground-breaking artists and inventors, such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Cage, Saul Bass, Buckminster Fuller and Charles & Ray Eames.

Buckminster Fuller described his visit to the department as “among the most fundamentally inspiring experiences of my life.”

Enid Yandell was a Kentuckian sculptor who was commissioned to create a monumental sculpture of Athena for the 1897 Nashville World’s Fair. Read more about her on our blog today.