The video below doesn’t provide any answers, but is an interesting little tidbit about five pieces that “need to be identified as art” at the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis.

I’ll be posting again on the blog too. I just moved it over to it’s own domain, which will allow more freedom over the design and future additions to the site.

Happy New Year!

If you know of any other places in the Valley offering art classes, please let us know and we’ll add them to our list.

 The final webpage of the Guild Studio School is still online at the Wayback Machine. The page includes a letter from the director, Andrew Francis, thanking supporters and it closes with this wonderful paragraph about art and community:

The most powerful organizations are those with the support and participation of their community. The Guild Studio School does not feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or protect a vulnerable population. However, art infuses a soul into a community and is a necessary resource for broadening and enriching the lives of children, families and individuals. Art is an unsung hero that has struggled for millennia for support. Art is personal and public, emotional and political, informative and decorative, as well as wild and crazy at times. Supporting the arts and artists in your community is the most powerful way to make it more than a good and safe place to live; supporting art and artists is the only way to ensure that your community will be a rich, thriving and diverse place to live.

Beautifully put.

Darger lived 1892-1972 in Chicago. A quiet recluse, his enormous body of work was discovered by his landlord, Nathan Lerner, shortly before his death. After his death all of his work and belongings entered into Lerner’s possession.

Darger’s artwork is a mix of line drawing, tracing, watercolor, and collage. All of his art seems based on his 15000-page novel, Realms of the Unreal – a good vs. evil war story in which the heroes are the “Vivian Girls”, young often nude little girls who represent all that’s good, pure and holy. The novel seems to be semi-autobiographical, filled with anecdotes from Darger’s own childhood woven into the fantastical story.

Darger’s work is considered “Outsider Art“. Outsider Art (also called Art Brut or Visionary Art) is art created by untrained artists, outside the mainstream, and often by people who don’t, or didn’t, consider themselves artists. Much outsider art has an obsessive quality – pieces that are enormous, or intricately detailed, sometimes one piece is a lifetime’s work.

The documentary about Darger (In the Realms of the Unreal) was tough to follow, but fascinating nonetheless. The filmmaker may have been trying to mimic Darger’s writing, by drifting the narrative in and out of reality, blurring the boundaries of fantasy and reality, so the viewer is left wondering what is fact and what is part of Darger’s fantasy.

Art note: New York City has an Annual “Outsider Art Fair” in January, as part of The American Folk Art Museum’s Outsider Art Week. Darger’s work is always among the most popular there.

In 2000, Kiyoko Lerner (Nathan Lerner’s widow) donated Darger’s manuscripts to the American Folk Art Museum, which established The Henry Darger Study Center, “to foster open inquiry and multidisciplinary research into the life and work of the Chicago artist,” and recently announced a Henry Darger Fellowship Program.

In a previous post on this blog, we wrote:

Note to artists: put your work online, even if it’s a simple webpage, a Flickr account, or a MySpace page. The web is an incredible place to show your work to the world for free. And you never know who may stumble onto your work. We know quite a few artists, designers and other creative people who have had amazing doors open for them just because someone did a simple Google search or followed a link on a blog.

When we see the work of an artist we like, we usually do a Google search to find more information about them, to see more of their work online, and to link to them from this blog. We’re keen to see more of their work, and interested in info about exhibitions, workshops, work for sale. We’re sure other people are also interested; and those other people can include curators, art directors and buyers.

By all means, register a domain name; your name or your studio name, keep it simple. JaneDoeArt.com looks far more professional than mypage.comcast.com/~pirateyartchick, especially if you’re shopping your work around to galleries.

A custom portfolio-style website can be expensive, especially if you’re just starting out and money is tight. But it is money well-spent, a good return-on-investment because you’re exposing and promoting your work to a huge audience.

If you can’t afford a custom-designed website, there are many other options: design & build your own site, or take advantage of free accounts on sites like Flickr, Saatchi Online, Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace, ArtistSites, etc. If you take the free-account route, you can still use your own domain name. Most domain name registrars let you point, or “redirect” your domain name to any online location.

Take advantage of the web and get your work out there!

Happy New Year & wishes for more art for everyone.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
—George Bernard Shaw

If you’d like us to add a link, please email us: theartparlor@yahoo.com, or put it in a comment to this post.