Matters Of The Art

Our friends at 20x200 have shared 11 of their favorite artists from January with us--just in time for Valentine's Day! There's some heart-warming prints in here, including We Are So Good Together by Dylan Fareed; which hanging in your home is the art equivalent of common law marriage.

1. D.W. Kellogg // A Map of the Open Country of a Woman's Heart

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Daniel Wright Kellogg, known as D. W. Kellogg, was the principal partner in the Hartford, Connecticut-based lithography firm D. W. Kellogg & Company from about 1830 to 1842. The Kellogg brothers published and sold the second largest number of decorative prints intended for the American public. These lithographs, most of which were hand-colored, were colorful, affordable and covered many subjects: portraits, historical events, scenes of daily life, views, religious themes, politics, sports, animals, sentimental images. In 1842, two of Kellogg’s brothers succeeded D.W., renaming the company E.B. & E.C. Kellogg.

2. Michelle Hinebrook // Encrusted

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Michelle Hinebrook received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in painting and her BFA, with honors, from the College for Creative Studies. She has an established studio practice, active exhibition record and engagement within the art community. In addition to her studio practice, she frequently lectures and teaches studio courses at numerous institutions. Her work has been internationally exhibited, commissioned, collected, published and reviewed. She’s exhibited works with 101 Exhibit Gallery, Florida; David Klein Gallery, Michigan; Islip Art Museum, New York; Helene Nyborg Contemporary, Denmark; Foley Gallery, New York; Marlborough Gallery, New York; and Cranbrook Museum of Art, Michigan.

3. Aili Schmeltz // Urban Storm

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Aili Schmeltz is a Los Angeles based Sculptress and Installation Artist. She earned her MFA from the University of Arizona, holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and has exhibited widely throughout the United States. Schmeltz has also been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY), Raid Projects (Los Angeles, CA) and Around the Coyote Gallery (Chicago, IL).

4. Laura Plageman // Response to Print of Kudzu, Texas

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Laura Plageman is an artist and educator who lives and works in Oakland, CA. Her images explore the relationships between the process of image making, photographic truth and distortion, and the representation of landscape. She is interested in making pictures that examine the natural world as a scene of mystery, beauty and constant change—transformed both by human presence and by its own design. Plageman has exhibited her work in San Francisco, New York, Portland and Galway, Ireland. She earned a BA at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and an MFA from the California College of the Arts (San Francisco, CA). She was also a First Edition 2011 winner in the Hey Hot Shot! photography competition, another Jen Bekman Project.

5. Eadweard Muybridge // Animal Locomotion: Plate 596 (Horse)

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Eadweard Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904) was an English-born pioneer in photographing motion and in motion-picture projection. An eccentric man who used several aliases—Helios, The Flying Studio; several variants of his birth name, Edward Muggeridge—he first received worldwide acclaim with his landscape photographs of Yosemite Valley, which he developed from large negatives in a mule-driven darkroom.

Muybridge is most remembered for his contributions to the understanding of human and animal locomotion. In 1872, he was hired by railroad magnate Leland Stanford to find the answer to a popular question of the time: whether or not all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground during a gallop. Muybridge determined the answer by utilizing a series of large cameras. He repeated this practice of stop-motion photography with other animals and people, in effect preceding motion pictures and modern cinema.

Muybridge bequeathed his equipment, including his Zoopraxiscope projector, to the Kingston Museum in Kingston upon Thames, in southwest London. His works are part of the collections of such major institutions as the Smithsonian. Additionally, a large collection of his photographs and correspondence are in the archives at the University of Pennsylvania. A major exhibition of his works, entitled Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, was held in 2010 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and at the Tate Britain in Millbank, London. The exhibition then went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 26 through June 7, 2011.

His artistic legacy influenced such artists as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Bacon, while many of his photographic sequences have inspired cartoonists and filmmakers—Muybridge is referred to as the Father of the Motion Picture. Muybridge’s personal life was also fodder for original works by poets, composers and playwrights.

6. Michelle Marie Murphy // Shadowscape, from the series Perceptual Beauty

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Michelle Marie Murphy is a contemporary artist using human perception and representation to create visual rhetoric. Michelle’s portfolio includes photography, painting and video. The material process shifts, but the questions remain the same: How do you perceive yourself? What are the current expectations? Do you/I/we fit into the “image” of success?

Michelle received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2004. Her artwork has been published and exhibited internationally; she has shown work in Switzerland, San Francisco, Chicago and the Midwest. Michelle works as a professional photographer at NASA (Glenn Research Center), as faculty at the Cleveland Institute of Art and is the co-curator of MAKE8ELIEVE magazine.

7. Austin Kleon // Grab You

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Austin Kleon is a writer and artist. He’s best known for his Newspaper Blackout Poems—poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker. His first book, Newspaper Blackout, was published by Harper Perennial in 2010. New York Magazine called the collection “brilliant” and the New Yorker said the poems “resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead.” He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Meghan, and their dog, Milo.

8. Taca Zhijie Sui // Awaken

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Taca Sui (b. 1984) is a fine art photographer from Qingdao, Shandong Province, China. He went to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2003 and moved to the United States in 2005, where he studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology (2007-2008). His work has been shown at multiple exhibitions in both China and USA, including the Chambers Fine Art (2011), Three Shadows Photography Award Exhibition (2011) and the Lianzhou Photo Festival (2010). He has won the Top 20 Chinese Contemporary Young Photographer Award (2011), the China New Photography Award at the Xiaobing Xu National Photography Contest (2010), and the Photographer’s Award.

9. Dylan Fareed // We Are So Good Together

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Dylan Fareed lives in warm and sunny Brooklyn, NY. He builds software, builds furniture and produces letterpress print editions.

As a printmaker, Dylan’s practice focuses on formal experimentation, collaboration and documentation. In addition to making his own prints, he works closely with artists to produce and distribute letterpress editions of their art. His press, Cairn Co., publishes complete real-time records of costs, revenues and time spent producing and distributing the editions online.

10. Sam Taylor-Wood // Jonathan

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Sam Taylor-Wood makes photographs and films that examine, through highly charged scenarios, our shared social and psychological conditions. Sam was born in London in 1967, and she has had numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997) and The Turner Prize (1998). Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Zurich (1997); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (1997); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1999); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2000); Hayward Gallery, London (2002); State Russian Museum, St Petersburg (2004); MCA, Moscow (2004); BALTIC, Gateshead (2006); MCA Sydney (2006); MoCA Cleveland (2008); and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2008). In 2011, she was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE).

11. Aaron Straup Cope // prettymaps (amsterdam)

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Aaron Straup Cope is Canadian by birth, American by descent, North American by experience et Montréalais au fond. Aaron spent five years as a senior engineer at Flickr, focusing on all things mobile, geo and “machine tag” related, before leaving to join Stamen Design in 2009. Once upon a time, he was still a painter. Aaron does not normally speak in the third person.