Contribute – 100 Million Knitted Stitches

via Craftivism

 

Did you know that there are 100 million women missing in this world?

When I came across this statistic, I couldn’t believe it. The facts tell a different story. If you take the natural distribution of male/female, there are 100 million women missing from our planet. Why?

Because baby girls are selectively aborted
Because baby girls are killed
Because women are killed
Because women aren’t given an education
Because women do not get the same medical care as men
Because women die in childbirth
Because women are trafficked and sexually exploited

And all of this 100 years after International Women’s Day was first celebrated on 8 March.

100 years of International Women’s Day, one million women missing for every year.

To highlight the inequalities that still exist across the globe and are responsible for 100 Million missing women as well as the continuous gap of women being represented in decision making positions in the government, the workplace and the media, there is a great Scottish-based initiative which tries to create a debate and… a massive blanket, with 100 Million knitted stitches; one for every woman missing. The great thing is that everybody can contribute to this, by knitting a simple square measuring 15 x 15 cm (6×6 inches). 100 million stitches is an awful lot though, as little as one stitch per missing woman does sound, so a lot of helping hands are needed.

So then, I challenge you my lovely readers to support this initiative. How? Simple. Sit and knit a bit. Knit a square, or two, or many. Ask your friends and colleagues to do the same. Blog about it. Follow on Facebook or Twitter. Organise a Sit and Knit a Bit evening – in your home, in a cafe, in a community centre. And while you do all of this, or some of this, remember the 100 million women missing from our world today. There are so many ways to support this, do head over to the website to get inspired.

Please send your completed squares and stories by 8th March 2011 to Jetson and Janssen, c/o Tramway, Albert Drive, Glasgow G41 2PE. If you have any questions, you can email here. If you blog about it, please come back to this post and add a link to your post in the blog hop below (and the blog hop code to your post, to link them all together).

 

I will definitely be doing this — and I have the perfect hot pink plarn to knit for it too!!

Etsy Wednesday: New Shop

This week is a shameless self promotion — I’ve started a new Etsy shop where I am selling a variety of art and craft supplies for cheap. I’ve been collecting so many materials for years, and I just don’t have the room for this stuff anymore. My loss is your gain, so check it out. I’ll be adding more items soon so add me to your circle.

handmade fabric/button flowers

 

 

metal numbers

 

 

25 yard roll of tulle fabric

 

Browse more items at destashartsupplies on Etsy, and add me to your favorites/circle to stay updated about new items!

Join the One Kind Word Project

Just came across this cool project via Aijung Kim (we carry some of her zines at Eclipse) — she did the poster for the One Kind Word Project, which is now accepting submissions for contributions to their upcoming print anthology. What a great idea and opportunity!

Click here for more information on how to submit (stories, letters, poems, drawings, photos).

They are also hosting a giveaway right now for one of Aijung’s zines, We Carry Each Other, which is one of my favorites — so enter that while you’re there!

 

And this I believe: John Steinbeck

Brittany Peterson, Yellow, Blown Glass

I am currently reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck and the following passage really spoke to me. It’s long but worth the read. This meshes with everything I feel about myself, my individuality, my freedom, art, and how important handmade craft, design, and products are to our lives.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then–the glory–so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men. I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing are all born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of the man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

collected quotes

I collect quotes.  Here are some good ones I’ve come across recently that I think you’ll enjoy

“I am not careful to justify myself…but lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my own whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretend to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.” –Emerson

on Public art: “good artists…are going to be frightened away from public projects by correctness, because correctness is a kind of collaboration, and really has nothing to do with art, and in the end the public will have to live with art that is not just wrong but dull.” –Jane Kramer

“Criticality is a strategy for the production of knowledge. Our view is that art should interrogate the social and cultural ideas of its time. Other places might want a work to produce pleasure or feelings” –Charles Gaines

“Talent is a double-edged sword. What you are given is not really yours. What you work at, what you struggle for, what you have to take command of–that often makes for very good art” –curator Paul Schimmel

Nicholas Logsdail likes artists “who are on a slow burn, very good, very serious, not in the fast track, but pursuing their own artistic interests with tenacity, quirkiness, and confidence”. He says, “the art world has no rules. So I attribute the longevity of my gallery to the fact that I wrote my own”

“I found art school to be liberating, but the commercial art world…is there anywhere you could possibly feel smaller? It’s the only place where you can give away free booze and no one turns up” -artist Phil Collins (not the, but a)

“Award-winning art? The category doesn’t apply. You might find a great work of art in someone falling over in a supermarket. That might be the most extraordinary visual encounter of your day.” -artist Phil Collins

“I want the viewer to expect art to be more than stylized leisure and to be ready to exercise eyes and mind, consciousness and empathy” –curator Yasmil Raymond

Mail Art: UR Toy Story

Got this postcard in the mail the other day from my Florida friend Jennifer….

and this morning I actually had a little bit of time, kinda, so I decided to actually make some Mail Art! Haven’t done any for a long time so it was pretty awesome!

you can’t really see the stitching but it says “UR Toy Story”

The theme was perfect for me because I am using broken toys a lot in one of my Process Quilts (which I am done with and will be photographing this weekend YAY!!!)

If you would like to be involved in this Mail Art Call, check out Jennifer’s blog :)

Flickr Friends: Kevin Staniec

What’s better than a cloud Polaroid triptych? Not much. And yes, there’s more.

Also–check out their call for Polaroid 600 submissions for a gallery exhibition in August.

Artist Opportunity: A Book About Death

Whether or not you are an artist into Mail Art, this exhibition opportunity is an interesting one.

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH takes its inspiration from the late, underground American artist Ray Johnson (1927 – 1995). Ray Johnson’s unbound “book” of the same title was mailed to his New York Correspondence School “students” and included pages in his idiosyncratic style that were funny, sad and ironic “one-page essays” on death.  With the A BOOK ABOUT DEATH project, artists are invited to plunge into subject in creating their own pages that score the dramatic final dance of death.

How to Contribute: Produce an artwork about death. Make 500 postcards and mail the package to A BOOK ABOUT DEATH c/o Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery 537 Broadway New York City, New York 10012.  All submissions will be accepted if they arrive in time.  Artists may produce more than one card if they wish.

DEADLINE: Postcards should be in the gallery no later than 5 September 2009.

2. Once images are produced, a light-weight jpg should be e mailed to MATTHEW ROSE, along with the artist’s name and URL (artist web site address) for publication on the blog – http://abookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/.  This will allow the organizers to archive the works and artist details. Other artists will also be able to visit the exhibition in progress.

Note: An “official” website is now being created by artist Caterina Verde at the address: A BOOK ABOUT DEATH

TECHNICAL DETAILS
The artist is 100 percent responsible for her/his image and card and delivery to the gallery.

FORMAT: Postcards should be at least 4 x 6 inches or 10 x 15 cm, but can be any size, but no larger than A4 or 8 1/2 x 11 inches.

To help unify the edition, please include the words “A BOOK ABOUT DEATH” on your printed post cards.
Each artist contribution will be displayed in the Emily Harvey Foundation gallery space in New York. Visitors will be free to take cards and create their own book about death. As the cards are removed, the exhibition will disappear.

For detailed information, visit Matthew Rose’s blog, A Book About Death

And of course I will be contributing as well! This is the main image on my postcard:

Three Suicides
Monoprint

Arts = Jobs

Visit this link to get web stickers for your website and blog, encouraging people to make a difference.

And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to join and/or donate to Americans for the Arts!

Click here for detailed information on the economic impact of the arts in America, including downloadable brochures and reports, a downloadable PowerPoint presentation, tool kits, and more.

Artists of Influence: Nan Goldin

C.Z. and Max on the Beach, Truro, MA

I was surprised that Nan Goldin and I are both influenced by the musician Nick Cave. How interesting.

Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC

From an interview:

Some of your pictures are blurred. You did it on purpose?

Actually, I take blurred pictures, because I take pictures no matter what the light is. If I want to take a picture, I do not care if there is light or no light. If I want to take a picture, I take it no matter what. Sometimes I use very low shutter speed and they come out blurred, but it was never an intention like David Armstrong started to do what we call, he and I, “Fuzzy-wuzzy landscapes.” He looked at the back of my pictures and studied them. He started to take pictures like them without people in them. They are just out of focus landscapes. He actually did it, intentionally threw the camera out of focus. I have never done it in my life. I take pictures like in here when there is no sun or light that I think all my pictures are going to be out of focus. Even Valerie and Bruno and whatever I take, because there is not enough light, and so I use a very low shutter speed. It used to be because I was drunk, but now I am not. The drugs influenced all my life. Both good and bad. I heard about an artist in Poland, Witkacy, who wrote down on his paintings all the drugs he was on. Depending how many drugs he took, that is how much he charged for the portrait. I saw his portrait at the National Museum, a kind of German expressionism, and I loved it.

More Nan Goldin at the Matthew Marks Gallery

Spraygraphic Call for Submissions

MINI MINI

DEADLINE MARCH 5th, 2009

Spraygraphic.com is calling for MINI works of art that are exactly 4in by 4in (10.16cm x 10.16cm). Submissions can range from a mounted sheet of paper to a sculpture but it must be able to be hung flat on the wall. Submit paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, graphic design, fibers, clay, etc. We expect to end up with a gallery full of diverse, compelling, and exquisite little pieces of art.

For All Submission Details go to www.spraygraphic.com/minimini or contact minimini@spraygraphic.com

Book Review: Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art

This is a hard one to find online, (i.e. not on Amazon) so I made it easy for you–it’s here for a mere $15.

This book consists of over 60 interviews with contemporary curators. It is meant to be a handbook for beginning curators–and if you are going into the contemporary art field at all I would highly recommend this book. But I think it’s also a good read for artists who would like to get more insight into how curators think and what they feel is their relationship with artists. Also there are tidbits of treasured info scattered throughout the book that artists may find interesting, like “Put yourself in the shoes of an unprepared viewer” and “Be yourself. Don’t try to be different from others; be different by being yourself.” (A couple words of wisdom from Jean-Christophe Ammann (who was a co-curator of documenta 5).

Most of the curators in this book highlight the importance of the artist in building exhibitions and their personal relationship with artists. Bart de Baere describes, “The idea of ‘selecting artists’ to be featured in an exhibition renders invisible the aspect of mutual choice, engagement, communication. The artists who are esssential for the success of the exhibition are those whom the curator believes can realize an undertaking. Their refusal would mean a certain loss. This belief is, for me, at the heart of curatoring. It is no longer just about you and your decisions, but about the collaborative effort by both you and the artist(s) together…To the world, you speak a hypothesis of art; to the artists, a hypothesis of the world.”

What a great attitude, and my feelings exactly. Remember, the art world is full of stereotypes, and it’s not just artists getting stereotyped but curators as well. It’s not fair to either. If I could do one thing in the art world I would banish all the preconceived notions people have. It ruins a lot of really great things. But what we can do is rise above it, live by our own rules, and create our own art world.