Here is your last color-themed Photo Hunt assignment:

• Capture something that reflects  “Neon”
• Tag your work on Instagram with #CMAPhotoHunt and #Neon
• For this Color assignment you have until Tuesday May 28, 2013.
• Please note: images must be your own.

Once again our Photography Curator Catherine Evans will select her favorites (based on the most creative entries, and ones that best represent the color theme), and your creation could grace the walls at Columbus Museum of Art.

This series of CMA Photo Hunts are all about color.  Since our Photo Hunts began we have received nearly 3,000 submissions from hundreds of photographers from Seattle to Ohio to Paris. With our first exhibition last fall, we were first museum in the world to present a curated, crowdsourced installation based on the popular photo sharing app Instagram. The second CMA Photo Hunt exhibition is on display now through June in our Community Gallery, and features work selected by our William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography Catherine Evans.

This next round of assignments is inspired by color as the theme. Our new color-themed exhibition in our Big Idea Gallery this Spring features artists such as Frank Stella, Ed Ruscha, Edward Monet, Childe Hassam and more.  Watch for additional biweekly Photo Hunt assignments here on our blog, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with for this next Photo Hunt assignment. Happy shooting!

(Photo: Schokko with a Red Hat by Alexej Jawlensky, CMA’s Sirak Collection).

Here is your second color-themed Photo Hunt assignment:

• Capture something that reflects “Golden”
• Tag your work on Instagram with #CMAPhotoHunt and #Golden
• For this first Color assignment you have until Friday March 15, 2013.
• Please note: images must be your own.

Once again our Photography Curator Catherine Evans will select her favorites (based on the most creative entries, and ones that best represent the theme), and your creation could grace the walls at Columbus Museum of Art.

This series of CMA Photo Hunts are all about color.  Since our Photo Hunts began we have received more than 2,000 submissions from hundreds of photographers from Seattle to Ohio to Paris. With our first exhibition last fall, we were first museum in the world to present a curated, crowdsourced installation based on the popular photo sharing app Instagram. The second CMA Photo Hunt exhibition is on display now in our Community Gallery, and features work selected by our William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography Catherine Evans.

This next round of assignments is inspired by color as the theme. Look for a new color-themed exhibition in our Big Idea Gallery this Spring featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Ed Ruscha, Edward Monet, Childe Hassam and more.  Watch for additional biweekly Photo Hunt assignments here on our blog, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with for this next Photo Hunt assignment. Happy shooting!

(Photo: Basket of Grapes by Claude Monet, 1883, Columbus Museum of Art, Gift of Howard D. and Babette L. Sirak)

Pierce’s Long Street barbershop became a gathering place for the local African-American community as well as a gallery for his work. In the late 1960s, Pierce was discovered by an art world newly interested in the work of folk and self-taught artists. He quickly became something of a celebrity both locally and nationally. In 1982, Pierce traveled to Washington, DC, where he was honored at the Corcoran Gallery of Art at the opening reception of a landmark national exhibition recognizing African-American folk artists. Later that year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Pierce the National Heritage Fellowship.

In the year following his death, the Columbus Museum of Art acquired more than one hundred Pierce carvings for its permanent collection. This unique trove has been growing steadily as collectors continue to donate important Pierce carvings to the Museum making CMA’s collection of carvings by Pierce the largest in the world.

See Pierce’s work in person in The Essential Elijah Pierce exhibition now on view at CMA through Spring 2013.

Pierce was an inspiration and mentor to many in the community. Do you have a wonderful memory or story to tell about Pierce? Please share it here in the comments!

It was an absolute delight to see the creative variety of the more than 200 entries for the first Columbus Museum of Art Photo Hunt assignment. We challenged people to capture something that reflects the phrase “sign of the times.” See all the wonderful submissions in the CMA Photo Hunt Gallery.

CMA Photo Hunts are inspired by our The Radical Camera show and the Photo Leaguers, who challenged themselves to capture a word or phrase, and then they’d have a big party to critique and celebrate. Each week through the run of The Radical Camera we’ll be posting new photo assignment challenges.

For the second CMA Photo Hunt assignment here is your challenge:

• Capture something that reflects the word “Resourcefulness.” How you capture it is up to you.
• Tag your work on Twitter, Flickr or Instagram with #CMAPhotoHunt and #Resourcefulness, plus your #city.
• For this next assignment you have until Friday June 8, 2012.

Catherine Evans, our William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography, will select a few of her favorites, and your creation could grace the walls at Columbus Museum of Art come this fall.

Looking forward to seeing all your good work, and happy shooting!

(Photo: Lower East Side by Rebecca Lepkoff.)

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

In the next of our 12 for 12 series in celebration of the Columbus Bicentennial, we feature Columbus photographer Abdi Roble.

Abdi Roble was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in 1989, first to Washington, DC and a year later to Columbus, Ohio. Self-taught in photography, Roble has been engaged for many years in the Somali Documentary Project, an ambitious mission he founded to create a visual archive of Somali populations outside of their native country. He has traveled to Dadaab, Kenya, to photograph life in the refugee camps, capturing the ethos of the diaspora from an intimate perspective. Working under unpredictable conditions, with available light and a hand-held camera, Roble has been building a photographic record of and for a globally dispersed people.

Roble has had several exhibitions in Columbus including shows at the MPX Gallery the Ohio Art Council’s Riffe Gallery. His one-person presentation at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2007, entitled Stories of the Somali Diaspora, also traveled to the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine; the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. All of the venues for Stories of the Somali Diaspora have significant Somali populations. In 2008, The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away by Roble and Doug Rutledge was published by the University of Minnesota Press.

(Photo by Abdi Roble, First Day of School Portland Maine. From Columbus Museum of Art permanent collection).

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

Do you love learning, have a passion for art, and like talking and sharing with others?  The Columbus Museum of Art is recruiting a new docent class for the 2012-2013 year.  Docents are volunteer gallery teachers who guide visitors in thinking, talking, and wondering about art.  They are instrumental in ensuring great experiences for 15,000 K-12 students and many of CMA’s nearly 200,000 annual visitors.

Becoming a docent involves nine months of rigorous training where candidates research and study art in the Museum’s collection, learn touring strategies to match various age groups, and explore educational philosophies. No previous art knowledge is necessary, but curiosity and commitment is required.

Docent candidates must commit to two years of touring and continuing education after successfully completing the nine-month study program. Graduates will join one of the most passionate and dedicated group of volunteers in central Ohio.  Benefits of becoming a docent include curatorial and guest lectures, interactions with contemporary artists, social events and art-focused trips, access to unique museum resources, discounts at the Museum store and cafe, and more.

To learn more, attend one of two docent open houses held on Thursday, June 14 6:00-7:30 pm and Saturday, June 23 10:00-11:30am.  Current docents and museum staff will be on hand to talk more about the program, answer questions, and tour you through the galleries.

For more information and to apply, download the 2012-2013 CMA Docent Information Sheet, then complete a Docent Program Application.

Applications will be accepted through June 30, 2012.  Interviews will commence in mid-July. Individuals accepted into the program will be notified by August 25, 2012.

Please contact Rachel Trinkley, Educator for Docent Programs, at rachel.trinkley@cmaohio.org with additional questions about the program.

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

Rachel Trinkley, Educator for Docent Programs

In the next of our 12 for 12 series in celebration of the Columbus Bicentennial, we feature native Columbus glass artist Christopher Ries.

While bow fishing as a child in Little Darby Creek, glass artist Christopher Ries was fascinated by the optical illusions created by light underwater. Ever since, Ries has been seeking to share his discoveries into the mystery of light as revealed through the medium of glass. Guided by this “inner necessity,” a phrase borrowed from Wassily Kandinsky, Ries sought material of increasing optical purity for his sculptures. Having found a lead crystal that transmits 99.8 percent of the light that strikes it, Ries has worked to create larger and more ambitious pieces.

Clearly Ries takes pride in his ability to create monumental pieces from cast crystal blocks. But there is a more profound reason for his fascination with scale. With a grander, more ambitious scale, the viewer can more readlily “enter” the piece and can set up an “I-Thou” relationship with it, eliciting the desired aesthetic and spiritual experience. Through the reflective power of glass, Ries combines his love of nature with his technology skills to create breathtakingly beautiful, deceptively simple, yet complex forms that pull the viewer into an intimate world of images that dance and soar within the sculpture.

Ries grew up on a farm in Central Ohio. He attended OSU and earned a BFA in ceramics and blown glass works, before he went on to earn his MFA at the University of Wisconsin where he assisted Harvey Littleton, the founder of the American Studio glass movement. Ries’ works have been displayed around the world. His major glass piece, Opus, greets travelers at Port Columbus International Airport as they are flying out or coming home. Currently Ries serves as the artist in residency for Schott Glass Technologies in Pennsylvania.

Ries’ work will be part of our upcoming exhibition Celebrating Glass: The 50th Anniversary of the American Studio Glass Movement, which opens at Columbus Museum of Art on May 11, 2012.

Above image: Lotus by Christopher Ries, 1987.

Find out more about our major exhibition, The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936 – 1951, which opens this Thursday April 19, 2012 in Columbus. We co-organized the exhibition with The Jewish Museum, where it premiered this fall to rave reviews. The New York Times calls The Radical Camera “a stirring show.”

Guided by a belief in the transformative power of photography, the Photo League took to the streets in the 1930s and 1940s to record the effects of poverty, war, racial inequality, and social injustice. Artists in the Photo League were known for capturing sharply revealing, compelling moments from everyday life.  Their focus centered on New York City and its vibrant streets – a shoeshine boy, a brass band on a bustling corner, a crowded beach at Coney Island.  Many of the images are beautiful, yet harbor strong social commentary on issues of class, race, and opportunity.  The Radical Camera exhibition explores the fascinating blend of aesthetics and social activism at the heart of the Photo League.

The innovative contributions of the Photo League during its 15-year existence (1936–1951) were significant. As it grew, the League would mirror monumental shifts in the world starting with the Depression, through World War II and ending with the Red Scare. Born of the worker’s movement, the Photo League was an organization of young, idealistic photographers who believed in documentary photography as an expressive medium and powerful tool for exposing social problems. It was also a school with teachers such as Sid Grossman, who encouraged students to take their cameras to the streets and discover the meaning of their work as well as their relationship to it.  The League had a darkroom for printing, published an acclaimed newsletter called Photo Notes, offered exhibition space, and was a place to socialize, especially among first-generation Jewish-Americans.

The first museum exhibition in three decades to comprehensively look at the Photo League, The Radical Camera reveals that the League encouraged a surprisingly broad spectrum of work throughout extraordinarily turbulent times.  The organization’s members included some of the most noted photographers of the mid-20th century—W. Eugene Smith, Weegee, Lisette Model, Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind, to name a few.  The Photo League helped validate photography as a fine art, presenting student work and guest exhibitions by established photographers such as Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Edward Weston, among others.

These affecting black and white photographs show life as it was lived mostly on the streets, sidewalks and subways of New York. Joy, playfulness, and caprice as well as poverty and hardship are in evidence.  In addition to their urban focus, Leaguers photographed in rural America, and during World War II, in Latin America and Europe.  The exhibition also addresses the active participation of women who found rare access and recognition at the League. The Radical Camera presents the League within a critical, historical context. Developments in photojournalism were catalyzing a new information era in which photo essays were appearing for the first time in magazines such as Life and Look.

As time went on, its social documentary roots evolved toward a more experimental approach, laying the foundation for the next generation of street photographers. One of the principal themes of the exhibition is how the League fostered a multifaceted and changing identity of documentary photography, and a move toward a more subjective, poetic reading of life.

In 1947, the League came under the pall of McCarthyism and was blacklisted for its alleged involvement with the Communist Party.  Ironically, the Photo League had just begun a national campaign to broaden its base as a “Center for American Photography.”  Despite the support of Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, Paul Strand and many other national figures, this vision of a national photography center could not overcome the Red Scare. As paranoia and fear spread, the Photo League was forced to disband in 1951. As ARTnews said in their review, “This long-overdue and well-deserved survey demonstrates the extent to which the Photo League influenced our understanding of documentary photography.”

The exhibition was organized by Catherine Evans, William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography, Columbus Museum of Art and Mason Klein, Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum.

Following its CMA presentation, The Radical Camera exhibition will travel to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA (November 15, 2012 – February 24, 2013); and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (March 16 – June 16, 2013).

Photo: Autorama Top Hats, by Dan Weiner, 1950s, © Estate of Dan Weiner, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio-Museum Purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund, John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League.

Paul Hornschemeier from thisartist on Vimeo.

Join us this Thursday April 5, 2012 for an interview with Paul Hornschemeier, Ohio State University alumnus and author of graphic novels including Mother, Come Home and the New York Times bestselling Life With Mr. Dangerous. Hornschemeier is the first recipient of a new Graphic Novelist Residency, a collaboration between Columbus Museum of Art and Thurber House. The three-week residency, supported by a grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, is designed to provide a graphic artist/writer with an opportunity to develop a work-in-progress.

Find out more about Hornschemeier’s creative process during the talk and interview led by comics writer, and blogger Jared Gardner, a professor of English and Film Studies at Ohio State University.

For the past few weeks Hornschemeier has been living in the two-bedroom apartment located in the boyhood home of author and New Yorker cartoonist, James Thurber. He’s given two graphic novel workshops (one for kids and one for adults), as well as continuing to research and produce new work, including some Ohio and Columbus themed drawings.

“We are incredibly excited to be part of this new residency,” said Nannette V. Maciejunes, executive director of the Columbus Museum of Art. “It gives us the opportunity to continue the conversation about the place comic art holds in the art world as we deepen our relationship with Thurber House.”

“CMA and Thurber House share a strong commitment to outreach and education within the Columbus community,” said Susanne Jaffe, executive director of Thurber House. “Connecting the visual and written arts through this residency has been a natural partnership.”

In conjunction with his talk, we’ll be displaying a selection of Hornschemeier’s scripts, storyboards, and sketches highlighting his creative process. The 7 pm talk is free with museum admission.