Archive of September, 2008

The print suite “The Twenty Views of Dundas” has been accepted into a charity auction at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Organized by the 85-year-old “Friends of the Institute” group, the September 26 Art Perchance event raises money to bus kids to classes and events at the Institute. ArtOrg is very proud that the set made it through the acceptance process and has been chosen to be sold at silent auction. Through this event, the set will be seen by many people, and bring well-deserved regional attention to the project and its artists. (ArtOrg has donated similar projects in the past–for example the large Northfield Governor’s Ball Lithograph raised $4600 for the Northfield Sesquicentennial, and $2000 for the Laura Baker school.)

In the field of printmaking, there is one technique that hold a particular mystique–and that is called lithography. To make a long story short, this printing method uses huge slabs of special limestone. Traditionally, this limestone has been mined in the quarries of Bavaria near a town named Solnhofen, and because the properties of that stone are quite unique, most of the stone in the world comes from this source. However, right near the Minnesota border in Iowa, there exists an outcropping of a limestone with similar properties, and in 1914-1915 a town sprung up with the the name “Lithograph City”. A nice review of that history can be found here.

This October 18, a field trip is being organized by the “Society for Sedimentary Geology” to these locations of this special limestone, and a printmaking professor will be the speaker at a dinner that evening. Here is a pdf file announcing the field trip. Only printmaking or geology geeks need apply!

Further information from the pdf file follows: Continue Reading…

ArtOrg has received several requests for information and resources on the important Dia De Los Muertos holiday. This post is designed to collect a bit of that information for easy access. These are the events that ArtOrg organized in 2006 and 2007.

1) Day of the Dead Steamroller Print Video. Viewed over 13,000 times on the web already, this video is 7 minutes long and shows the creation of the 13-artist, 104-foot-long steamroller print.

2) Ray Gonzalez Dia De Los Muertos poetry reading. This video is about one hour long, and shows the great Latino poet reading from several of his works. This is a must-see for everyone interested in learning more about the holiday.

3) Juanita Garciagodoy on “Reading Calaveras, Pushing Limits”. This one-hour talk draws from Juanita’s book on the subject, and offers a good look at imagery of Day of the Dead.

4) Photosets from Day of the Dead events and activities. This is a group of photos from the ArtOrg archive.

Enjoy!

As posted to the UnConvention website, we see a small bit of ArtOrg’s 1000 Print Summer Project starting about 30 seconds into this video: