Tag: craft

Posted on , by Natasha Chuk

The Artist, the Loom, and the Microchip: Marilou Schultz’s Replica of a Chip

Installation view from Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz

A microchip replicated in hand-spun Churro wool sounds like a conceptual provocation, but the actual object is even more compelling. The title of Marilou Schultz’s exhibition, Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz, refers both to the artist’s feat and an unlikely pairing between computer architecture and Diné (Navajo) weaving. In 1994, Schultz was commissioned by Intel to reproduce the company’s Pentium microprocessor as a textile, translating its intricate geometry into interlaced threads. She followed through, replicating a device associated with the precision and abstraction of computing through the material intelligence of the loom. The success of this artistic translation inspired the replication of other chips in wool thread — Nizhóní AMD (2008), Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving (2024), Popular Chip (2025), and Golden Computer Chip Diné Weaving (2026) are included in the exhibition — and to a body of work translating complex systems and new ideas into color and pattern.

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Posted on , by Michal Gavish

Imagines Antiques, “Clocks” by Pablo Bronstein at Olney Gleason gallery

Pablo Bronstein, Classical Triumphant

London-based Argentinian painter Pablo Bronstein draws a fantastic series of porcelain mantel clocks that he invents from period pieces and antiques. He renders each drawing meticulously, building it up with carved decorative extensions into a curious, fantastic object. In Emporium, for example, the pagoda roof ends in elongated curls, with four red dragons whose extremities are exaggerated. At the same time, he distorts these objects in space, partially flattening them into wide geometric projections that make them even more convoluted. The series is fascinating in its originality and in the many historical and contemporary interpretations it invites.

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Cutaway at Brandeis University

For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.

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Posted on , by Claire Haik

Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in January 2025

HIGHLIGHTS
Naoko Serino’s Generating 9, in Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences at Wayne Art Center, photograph courtesy of Wayne Art Center

Out on the Main Line, the world of craft takes center stage at Wayne Art Center in two distinct but complementary shows. CraftForms 2024, 29th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft and Japandi Revisited: shared aesthetics and influences, together invite viewers to contemplate the power of form, material, and cultural aesthetics. In Old City, at the Museum for Art in Wood, Mark Sfirri explores the many definitions of family through his exquisite woodworking in La Famiglia. Cerulean Arts Gallery and Studio in Center City pairs the dreamy drawings and paintings of two Philadelphia artists, Gary Grissom and Louise Vinueza, in A Day in The Life. Together, these four exhibitions offer a diverse range of artistic viewpoints from the global scope of contemporary craft to the exploration of family and nostalgia.

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Posted on , by Amy Brady

Tempestry Project: Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly with Amy Brady

hot air

Amy Brady published in her newsletter Burning World a conversation with Emily McNeil and Asy Connelly, a knitter and data scientist who founded the Tempestry Project, a fiber art collaboration that uses yarn and other fibers to create artful representations of climate data. This summer, they are partnering with Colossal Magazine and the Design Museum of Chicago in two different ways: first, their “Paleo New Normal Tempestry” will be exhibited in the museum’s group show, At the Precipice. And secondly, they’re collaborating with the museum to develop a Chicago Tempestry Collection that will be exhibited along with the Paleo piece. Amy Brady asked Emily and Asy about their work and what they hope viewers take away from their art. 

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Posted on , by Etty Yaniv

Amanda Thackray: Surface Tension at NJCU

Featured Artist

A person standing under an umbrella Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Amanda Thackray with A Tangle; A Swarm; A Precondition of the Plastisphere, 2021

In her solo exhibition at the Lemmerman Gallery in NJCU curated by Doris Cacoilo, Amanda Thackray presents her handmade paper installations, prints and sculpture which altogether comment on plastic pollution and the fragility of marine environment. The artist creates an allegorical environment which both reflects and distorts an aquatic world.

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