annie's paris blog frog

hey friends!!

Hope you're having a most restful break. I just wanted to let you all know that I will be keeping a blog of my Paris adventures. You can find it at yellowchairs.blogspot.com. It's called "The Chair is Yellow." Go to the blog to find out why!!!

I will miss you all dearly.


love, annie

guerilla art nun

Sister Corita Kent, a member of the order of the Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles (the now ex-nuns who run my former high school which used to also have a college), made some pretty cool graphic serigraphs in the 1960s. She's pretty baller. Check it out.

p.s. that procession you see? i think we should re-create it.

Ray Johnson, Mail Art and the NYCS

The New York Correspondence School was established by Ray Johnson in the early '60s; it was singularly the most important contribution of Ray Johnson to the history of art, a point missed by leading newspapers and art magazines reporting Johnson's death. It was Fluxus and Ray Johnson's NYCS that birthed mail art, the largest international art community and movement in the history of art. Membership into the NYCS was bestowed upon anyone Johnson chose to correspond with and the exchanges were wonderful, intimately engaging verbal and visual play. Throughout the 1960s til his death, Ray Johnson was the conduit, the server, the proto-internet dada daddy surfing the mailstream, invading mailboxes everywhere with bunnies, imaginary Fan Clubs, and correspondance wordplay.

Mail artists around the world embraced Johnson's notion of making ordinary mail an art of extraordinary wit and beauty. Johnson's legacy lives today in numerous gatherings of mail artists such as the NYCS Salami Chapter which paid homage to Ray's passing at Katz' Deli. On Saturday, April 29 over 200 of Johnson's friends and members of his NYCS gathered at Friends Meeting House (Rutherford Pl. betweeen 2nd and 3rd Ave.) where he established the first NYCS gathering in April 1962.

And:

What is Mail Art?

Correspondence art (Mail art)

Term applies to art sent through the post rather than displayed or sold through conventional commercial channels, encompassing a variety of media including postcards, books, images made on photocopying machines or with rubber stamps, postage stamps designed by artists, concrete poetry and other art forms generally considered marginal.

John Held Jr. The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, Macmillan Publishers Limited 1996

All text courtesy of Artistamp Gallery.

Best of luck with all the mail art projects on their snail mail journeys this break.

Site Specific Prints!

The print elective moved their prints outside for the final project of the semester. Pictured above: Hannah Ireland (top two pictures: intaglio) Aaron Bos-Wahl (deer: intaglio and relief) Felicia Chen (construction site: trace monotype, intaglio, mixed media). Each student chose a site and then made their prints relate to the space or history of the area. Get your prints out of the studio!

Flux Factory

Art is moving. Moving off the wall, off the paper, and into the streets. What's your take on collective living? Can you silkscreen a map of imaginary places? Are you and a group of artists working on a collaborative project? I hope so and you should be.

When art gets tired and life gets boring-take it to the street. The cure for your ills is not in the google image search. You should wrap a building in prints, or write a proposal for Flux Factory. Get beyond your own head and into the future!

Call for Proposals

Flux Factory, an artist collective and artist-run center in NYC, is currently accepting proposals for collaborative art projects for our 2009 programming. Projects must commission new work that is collaborative in nature. We create projects in which artists can interact and experiment in ways that produce new works, either as thematic group shows or as giant collaborative works within themselves. Projects must be structured to accommodate an open call to local and international artists.

click for more info…


About Flux Factory
History
Flux Factory began as a collective living space in 1994, in an old spice factory in Williamsburg, New York City. Its original members were undergraduates at the New School For Social Research (now New
School University). About four years later, with a new stage built and twice as many members, the Flux Factory living room evolved into a site for art events and performances of all kinds. Flux became an official 501 (c)(3) nonprofit in 1999 and moved to 43rd Street in Long Island City, Queens in 2002.
After six wonderful years, we’re looking for a new home. Our projects will be taking place all over our fair city and beyond. Please check back for project-specific details.

Mission
The mission of Flux Factory is to support innovative and collaborative art works. It is thus primarily an incubation and laboratory space for works that are in dialogue with the physical, social, and cultural
space of New York City (though collaborations may start in New York and stretch far beyond). The goal of the Flux art collective is to create a forum where Flux artists can collaborate with each other as well as others in an experimental lab that produces new works. These new works force participants to work with people they’ve never worked with before, or with unfamiliar media, or formal constraints. Flux Factory supports work that reflects upon and alters public space in dynamic ways. Flux Factory is also a public and community space in itself. It provides a computer center, darkroom, performance space, musical recording space, publishing equipment, and a weekly Thursday night dinner and salon that has become a well-known venue for artists and intellectuals to present both finished pieces and, more importantly, works-in-progress.