MySelfReliance

Beth Jacob Synagog in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Images:

No More Distractions: Jeff Gibson and Rune Olsen

Rune: “With two artists living together, there’s support and jealousy. I think we influence each other—in the way we talk about art, the way we think about it—but our visual language is pretty radically different. Both of us want the best for each other, but I feel that jealousy is a relatively good emotion. If you don’t care, it would be horrible, but jealousy indicates that there are a lot of feelings. And I like that—a lot of feeling.”

Xu Bing — Tian Shu (Book from the Sky), 1987-1991

Tian Shu is comprised of a display of books spread in a large rectangle across the ground, above which voluptuous scrolls unroll in long, pregnant arcs. The books—four hundred of them—are handmade with reverential adherence to the standards of traditional Ming dynasty fonts, bookbinding, typesetting and stringing techniques. 

To make them, Xu painstakingly carved Chinese characters into square woodblocks, in just the way his ancient printing predecessors would have done, had them typeset and printed, and the printed pages mounted and bound into books and scrolls.

study for a portrait.

Happy Birthday, Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997)

Frederick Kiesler and Willem de Kooning, New York, May 4, 1960, printed June 1982, Irving Penn