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© Linda Rose

Something Unexpected Art Gallery in Nyack, NY present Mario Pérez and Linda Rose.

Linda Rose’s pictures explore the legendary relationship between the artist and her muse. Rose combines her love for the creative process and fascination with the body and the mind in her collection of photographs.

© Mario Pérez

Honduras born Mario Pérez, presents “Flight,” black and white photographs of spontaneous movement of classical dancers. Degas dancers come to mind when observing these works. His photographs are spontaneous time capsules of light and movement.

This exhibition is curated by Miguel Benavides

Reception: Saturday, August 4, 5–8PM
and Sunday, August 5, 2–6PM

Something Unexpected Art Gallery
152 Main Street, Nyack, NY 10960
Telephone: 845 358 1196

Vu Thu Hien, Rhapsody in red and gold

Dinh Thi Tham Poong, Floating with lotus

Featuring vibrant watercolours on handmade ‘do’ paper by Vu Thu Hien and Dinh Thi Tham Poong. Graduates of the same class (1993) at the Hanoi Academy of Fine Arts, both painters possess a solid grounding in classical Western art, which imbues their work with a rich texture of East and West, past and present, spiritual and mundane.

Bankside Gallery (next to Tate Modern),
48 Hopton Street,
London SE1 9JH.
Telephone: Tel: 020 7928 7521
Website: www.banksidegallery.com/

Daily 11am – 6pm, admission free. Nearest tube: Southwark / Waterloo.

The inspiration of the beautiful Shawangunk Ridge provides the impetus for this weeklong celebration of the arts at Mohonk Mountain House. For five days, participants at every level can experience hands-on art workshops surrounded by the serene natural setting for which Mohonk is known. The classes include sketching, pastels and watercolors and are led by skilled instructors.

Daily workshop sessions will be held from 10 a.m.to 12 p.m.and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Thursday. A single Friday morning session is scheduled from 10 to 11 a.m. Each session can be attended on its own, or as a continuation of an earlier session.

For more information and to book accommodations, visit www.mohonk.com

Mohonk Mountain House
1000 Mountain Rest Road
New Paltz, NY 12561
Telephone: (866) 666-3146
Web site: www.mohonk.com

El Jaranero (2006). 215 X 215 cms. Acrylics on canvas.

For his first solo exhibition, visual artist, painter and musician Alberto Villa-Lobos will show a series of hand-painted masks and murals celebrating the vibrant cultures of Mexico, particularly the life and people of his native Veracruz.

Affected deeply by both long-held folk beliefs and traditions and evolving social and political realities in Mexico, the artist has created a body of work that, as a whole, pays tribute to his heritage and explores possibilities for harmony in the future. One of Villa-Lobos’s masks, “Marcos,” for example, was inspired by a living legend in Mexico and leader of the Zapatista Movement working for liberation of natives of Chiapas.

A skilled musician and violinist, Villa-Lobos also shows a series of murals inspired by his passion for the native music of Veracruz. In these murals, the artist portrayed a trio of musicians from the region who play violins and the traditional jarana guitars, small, eight-stringed instruments indigenous to Veracruz that are usually carved from a single piece of wood and vary in size.

Curated by El Taller’s gallery director Veronica Aberham, this exhibit is free, open to people of all ages and backgrounds, and reflects El Taller’s commitment to creating exciting, high-quality multi-media events to celebrate Latino arts and culture.

Reception: Thursday, July 26 from 6-9 p.m.

Thursday evening musical performances: August 2 and August 30, featuring Alberto Villa-Lobos and his brothers. The Villa-Lobos brothers have played together for many years in Mexico and at many other venues, including an appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2006.

El Taller Latino Americano/The Latin American Workshop
2710 Broadway, Third Floor (at West 104th Street)
New York, NY 10025
Telephone: (212) 665-9460
Web site: www.tallerlatino.org

Through the long history of art, the relationship between an artist and his or her muse has been examined from many perspectives, but the mystery surrounding such creative collaborations remains. In author Francine Prose’s hands, the stories of nine famous muses take on an added dimension; for the author, these women are of interest in their own right, capable of sparking masterpieces because of their strength, character, talent and intelligence.

For The Lives of the Muses (Harper Perennial, 2003), Prose accessed many sources, including diaries, correspondence, photographs and art works, to reveal the many psychological, pesonal and creative strands that contribute to the complexity of inspiration between artist and muse.

Among the artist-muse pairings Prose looks at are the child Alice Liddell and author Lewis Carroll, model Elizabeth Siddal and Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, model-photographer Lee Miller and photographer Man Ray, and multimedia artist Yoko Ono and music legend John Lennon.

Influenced by the Surrealists, early classic films, 19th-century French literature, the odds and ends he found in shops in New York City, among many other inspirations, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) seemed to magically transform the commonplaces of his life in Queens, NY, into pure poetry.

For Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (Exact Change, 2007), editor Catherine Corman drew on the extensive collection of Cornell’s diaries now at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art to find connections between the artist’s private musings on his art and life and his whimsically but precisely crafted box assemblages that continue to reverberate in the imaginations of Cornell’s many admirers. Childlike and extremely sophisticated, the boxes present as many contradictions as the artist himself. Coman’s artful approach to archival material offers a brief but captivating portrait of a man who dealt in visions and dreams.

Indian War Canoe

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Canada, this exhibit spotlights Emily Carr (1871-1945) with approximately 200 works (paintings, drawings, watercolors, caricatures, ceramics, sculpture, hooked rugs, books, maps, photographs and ephemera), 150 of them executed by the artist.

Considered during her lifetime to be an eccentric woman, Carr was a remarkable person, writer and painter. She is best known for her canvases of the landscape of the northern coast of British Columbia and of First Nations villages with their monumental totem poles. The show examines her legacy and the political and social context in which her art developed.

Carr is the subject of Susan Vreeland’s fascinating novel The Forest Lover (Penguin, 2004). In the book, Vreeland recreates Carr’s life as a testimony to courage, creativity and self-direction. Determined to pursue her dream of capturing indigenous art forms of Indian tribes of British Columbia by painting them on her canvases, Carr was the target of disapproval from her family and social circle.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
1379 Sherbrooke St. Pavilion
Montreal, Canada
Telephone: (514) 285-1600
Web site: www.mmfa.qc.ca/en/index.html

This exhibit of 48 drawings on paper demonstrates the vitality and innovation in American drawing of the past decade. The featured works reflect the diversity of contemporary art as a whole and support the wide range of approaches to format, process, materials, imagery, concept and context. Ranging in size from intimate to monumental, they incorporate various media including watercolor, graphite, colored pencil, conté crayon, gouache, charcoal, collage, pen and ink, and cut and cast paper.

Russell Crotty, Ingrid Calame, Julie Mehretu, Leonardo Drew and Anthony Goicolea are among the established and emerging artists whose works are on view. While some of these artists exploit traditional qualities associated with drawing, others have taken the practice into new territory.

Telefair Museum of Art
121 Barnard St.
Savannah, GA 31412
Telephone: (912) 790-8800
Web site: www.telfair.org

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens opens its gates free of charge on the last Sundays in July, August and September 2007 for a day of free programs and activities for all ages.

Vizcaya is a Miami-Dade County-owned estate and National Historic Landmark.

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens
3251 South Miami Ave.
Miami, Fl 33129
Telephone: (305) 250-2004
Web site: www.vizcayamuseum.org/

Untitled (PH-382), 1940, Clyfford Still. Copyright: Estate of Clyfford Still.

Abstract expressionist Clyfford Still was a major force in modern art, but most of his works have not been seen by the public. Born in 1904 in Grandin, ND, Still had his first solo exhibit in 1943 at the San Francisco Museum of Art. During that year, he met Mark Rothko in Berkeley and then moved to Richmond, VA, where he taught at the Richmond Professional Institute. In 1945, he went to New York, where Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim. As a result of that meeting, Guggenheim gave Still a solo exhibit at her gallery, Art of This Century. Although Still returned to teaching in San Francisco later that year, the exhibit subsequently led to a number of important shows for the artist. In 1959, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, gave Still a retrospective.

After Still’s death in 1980, his estate—which includes the majority of his works—was sealed. “Clyfford Still Unveiled” features thirteen paintings, including a 1940 self-portrait, several works on paper that have never been shown, and five masterworks made in the 1940s and 1950s that follow the development of Still’s mature, purely abstract style.

As a color field painter, Still created works of non-objective arrangements of a variety of colors in different formations. While other color field painters like Rothko or Barnett Newman organized their colors in a relatively simple way (nebulous rectangles in Rothko’s works, thin lines on vast fields of color in Newman’s), Still’s arrangements are more irregular. Still inserted jagged bursts of color that make it seem as if a layer of color has been “torn” off the painting to reveal other colors beneath.

In 2010, a museum devoted to Still will open next to the Denver Art Museum. For more information, go to the museum site.

Denver Art Museum
100 W. 14th Ave. Parkway
Denver, CO 80204
Telephone: (720) 865-5000
Web site: www.denverartmuseum.org