Artist eats $120,000 banana art installation

Satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan recently sold a piece, entitled “Comedian” to Art Basel in Miami. The artwork, which consisted of banana bought in a Miami grocery store stuck to the wall by a single piece of duct tape, sold for $120,000. According to the gallery’s founder Emmanuel Perrotin, the banana is “a symbol of global…

Louise Nevelson’s “Atmosphere and Environment XII”

Louise Nevelson’s Atmosphere and Environment XII (1970) was relocated to Penn’s Shoemaker Green this past summer. The sculpture follows the style of Nevelson’s wooden collage “environments,” which consisted of monochromatic wall-like sculptures containing various abstract forms. Atmosphere and Environment XII consists of open rectangular prisms containing abstract geometric shapes and is made of steel, which…

April Soetarman’s Street Signs

Since 2016, designer and artist April Soetarman has been producing and anonlymously installing custom street signs around Seattle. The signs follow the format of typical “attention” or “caution” signs but convey unexpected and heartfelt messages like “ATTENTION: you are wonderful and deserve every happiness,” and “NOTICE: I never stopped loving you. I hope you’re well.”…

Alma Haser’s “Cosmic Surgery”

Artist Alma Haser’s “Cosmic Surgery” consists of a set of portraits of anonymous sitters, with parts of their faces obscured an origami structure made of copies of the original portrait. The manipulated faces appear to be futuristic, a bit unsettling, and dehumanizing, and challenge traditional notions of identity and portraiture. https://www.foldmagazine.com/alma-haser-cosmic-surgery

Andrea Polli’s “Particle Falls”

Andrea Polli’s Particle Falls was a real-time visualization of air-quality data, installed in cities around the world, including in Philadelphia at the Wilma Theater. The piece indicates the various invisible particles in the air, many of which pose health risks, using spots of bright light cascading down a surface. https://www.sciencehistory.org/particle-falls

Cai Guo-Qiang’s “Fireflies”

Last week’s discussion about public art reminded me of a public art project by Cai Guo-Qiang that I visited with my friends 2 years ago called “Fireflies.” The project invited the public to ride customized peddle vehicles adorned with handcrafted Chinese lanterns for free. The rides took place along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on select…

Laurie Frick’s Data Portraits

Laurie Frick is a contemporary artist who uses self-tracking data to create objects and installations. Frick believes that her self-data visualizations paint a picture of her identity, and hence calls her work “data portraits.” Floating Data (2015), shown below, was created based on data she collected from tracking her steps and location. In another project called…

Taiko Studios’s “One Small Step”

I really enjoyed watching this short animation called “One Small Step” by Taiko Studios, which was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year. The animation, which is about a girl pursuing her childhood dream about becoming an astronaut, very much reminded me of Disney/Pixar films with its themes and graphics (and I definitely cried a…

How “Frozen II” Artists Created Believable Emotion Through Animation

I recently came across this interview of two Disney artists on how they animated the characters in Frozen 2. I found several of their comments really interesting, such as how they rely on hand-drawings and acting out the scenes themselves in order to come up with realistic animations. They also noted how subtle motions, such…

Joseph Cornell’s Shadow Boxes

Joseph Cornell’s work features collections of poetically arranged, painted, and collaged objects inside shadow boxes. The boxes often are often surrealistic, conjuring up an inner magical world through the relationships between the items displayed and the memories they evoke. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/joseph-cornell-995