Performance Artist PABLO CANO transforms antiques, junk and household items into vivacious, mysterious and provocative marionettes. Seven Wonders of the Modern World, a collaboration with writer CARMEN PELAEZ and dancer/choreographer KATHERINE KRAMER currently in performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (www.Mocanomi.org). The interview describes their collaborative process with images from a recent studio/home gallery visit and the from the premiere. Final performances are at 2:00 and 4:00 ET on Sunday, May 29, 2011 at MOCA.

VANESSA SOMERS and LILLIAN SIZEMORE  share a passion for the mosaics of antiquity, but each is intrigued by different aspects of the remarkable Roman-era Lod mosaic that is on loan at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Their scholarship and passion come forth, and each relates the connection of ancient mosaics to her own contemporary studio practice. Tune in Sunday 3pm ET.  Be sure to open the image galleries before the show starts.

Artist Ellen Harvey is in great demand for exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide. She is a highly skilled realist painter and draftsman, with a strong command of art history and a penetrating sense of humor. Much of her work engages the connection between past and contemporary art images and ideas. 
Arcadia, a large installation of her work on engraved mirrors creates an intersection between William Turner's world and that of contemporary Margate outside of London where she is exhibiting. 
Ellen has also designed large scale mosaic murals and worked with fabrication studios to realize these projects. But it was her "Nudist Museum" intervention at the Bass Museum that first caught my attention. We'll explore all of these projects.

Bass Museum of Art Education Director, ADRIENNE VON LATES, is today's guest. In speaking about the artist whose work is featured in the exhibition, Nudist Museum, she says,
"ELLEN HARVEY started out as a lawyer at Yale and decided she wanted to indulge her passion for painting.  She remembers that when she was 10 years old, going to a museum with her parents, she was fascinated by all the nudity. She just fixated on all the flesh and she knew she was being naughty...   The Bass Museum has a substantial collection that features work from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but they like to give contemporary artists the opportunity to create new work in response to the old.     "...so we gave her mostly black and white photographs or jpegs of low resolution... she started working in grisaille or grayscale and only highlighted the fleshy parts that she loved." Learn more about this intriguing project in today's recorded conversation.

This Sunday, we meet Charles Stainback. He is Norton Museum of Art curator of photography and provides a "backstage" account of the pleasures and challenges of the curatorial profession - and eloquently presents his particular style of practice


 

"That's the great thing about museum work, and that's the great thing about this museum. They really do allow the curators to make their statement, to sort of say here's what I think is significant; here's what I think we should be thinking about."
 
In Stainback's view there's a prevalent misconception about the role and power of the art Establishment. 
 
"People think that curators and museums define the art world and define the art, and it really is the artists.  Artists show us and tell us what is significant, and our job is just to respond honestly to what the artists are doing."

A fateful series of fruitful sessions with Andy Warhol and other illustrious Pop artists at the brink of their fame has served as a calling card for WILLIAM JOHN KENNEDY's photographic production, but he has been a prolific, highly talented and successful artist before and since. In this episode of the Mosaic of Art, Kennedy shares stories from this fertile period of his life. LOUIS CANALES, creative director of Miami's Kiwi Arts Group, agents for Bill Kennedy and publishers of a major new collection of work from the 1960s, joins us with his expertise on the forces at work during this critical "changing of the guard." Also on Sunday's show, pastel artist, TOM WEINKLE. I think that one of the things that makes pastels unique is the way that the color reacts with the surface you're working. While if you're painting, you're usually holding a brush or some other implement between you, and it's basically just a bigger distance... I felt like pastel gave me a much greater connection with what I wanted to do and say and record." One of the fun things about being an artist is... Often you're recording, making pictures of things, but at the same time there's a point in every piece of artwork where it sort of takes off and becomes art and not just a recording of what you saw. - T. W.

Maybe you have a worthy cause you would like to assist through an arts event. Are you considering an auction? If so, what's involved? How do you go about recruiting participants, and what are the next steps? If you've been approached by an organization and asked to donate artwork, how do you know they're legit? These are among the issues we'll explore with artist MARCELO HOLZINGER, T.E.A.M. administrator, NELSON DELGADO and CHERYL MOODY, partner in see pr services. Also on the show, NOELLE THEARD, co-founder of FotoKonbit, an organization that leads photo workshops in Haiti and the Diaspora. They provide tools for self-expression and provide a means to create and present an alternative vision of the country and its citizens.

Last week's show was ALL about mosaic art. This time we feature a range of artistic endeavors. DINORAH de JESUS RODRIGUEZ creates animation the old fashioned way: painting and scratching on film, cell by cell. Hours of painstaking work are required to create a few seconds of screen time.
French born artist, ULTRA VIOLET reveled in the juiced-up atmosphere of Andy Warhol's Factory scene during her youth, but will also describe how her orientation toward life and art took a sudden turn.
We won't leave mosaics out of the mix, however. Two distinctive snippets from the SAMA conference convey the rewards of participation. Artist CAROL SHELKIN describes the challenges of teaching a workshop in stained glass mosaic portraiture within a compressed time frame.
Then JESSE WOZNIAK relates the experience of staffing the booth for his family's mosaic supply companies, Wits End Mosaic and meeting their customers face to face.
Please tune in to www.blogtalkradio.com/MosaicOfArt -3-4pm on Sunday. (register if you like, so you can join the chat room).
These conversations that I will air Sunday are pre-recorded, but if you would like to phone in during the show to comment on the interviews or your experience at the mosaic conference in Austin, please do so. The number is 646-721-9843

The 2011 Society of American Mosaic Artists conference in Austin, Texas has recently concluded, and there's lots to review. This Sunday, SAMA exhbition committee head, KAREN AMI will join me to talk especially about this vital aspect of the organization's mission. Featured conference presenter, Pamela Irving will share the perspective from "The Antipodes" (look it up) - and more. Mosaic artist of the opus sectile persuasion, Brooks Tower will bring his passion and analytical skills to discuss just what is a mosaic - and why should we care. Brooks certainly cares. If you have opinions and questions, you're welcome to call in during 2nd half of the show. 646-721-9843

Art History department chair at the University of Mary Washington, JEAN ANN DABB is an enthusiast of mosaics - past and present. But her sense of the medium is evolving. "If my working definition now includes a composition of separate distinct elements which having been combined into a larger matrix, then I've given up the notion of some kind of adhesive element and permanence and stability, so I think it's whatever the artist may want to use as their defining definition..."


AMY KUPFERBERG began as a metal sculptor. "While fabricating an armature for another sculpture, I became intoxicated by the beauty and grace created from arc welding. In order to fabricate the armature to an exact likeness, I bent the steel and clamped it down directly on top of a drawing of the armature and welded the steel at the cross points. When I lifted the armature up and saw the marks that were left on the paper, I knew that something important had happened." A.K.

LISA SILVERA and CHERYL MOODY help Amy - as well as many other artists - find the appreciative audience of collectors and institutions that provide the "air" in which AMY can take flight. "So we do PR, branding and marketing for the contemporary artists whose work we're passionate about."

DINORAH DE JESUS RAMIREZ creates animation the old fashioned way: marking on film, frame by frame. "When you hold a film in your hand it has a head and a tail. I can look at this (strip of film) and see movement in the same way that a composer can look at a sheet of music and hear notes - a symphony. ." D.R.

After 30 years behind the camera and cultivating his market, PAUL MORRIS has the commercial side down: the corporate portrait, the romantic backlit smoke coming off a cigar, the money shot of golden light on a downtown high-rise, but his heart is in the landscape aesthetic of his early 20th-century heroes, captured on film - not digitally. Stone sentinels in a remote Scottish meadow. He'll talk about it all.