Displaying items by tag: Sculptor

The Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MOCFA) will be closing its doors on December 1, 2012, the date marking the institution’s thirtieth anniversary. Founded in 1982 by craft artist and well-known sculptor, Gertrud Parker, MOCFA is the only folk art museum in Northern California.

After three decades, the Museum’s overseers felt that their mission, to bring recognition and legitimacy to craft and folk art in the contemporary art arena, had been achieved. The poor climate for smaller art institutions was undoubtedly a contributing factor.

Although the art market and leading museums now embraces contemporary artists who borrow from craft traditions, the innovative and daring venues that helped these artists get there are suffering. For instance, this past summer amid financial troubles, the American Folk Art Museum in New York was forced to sell its building on 53^rd Street to the Museum of Modern Art and move to a smaller venue.

The MOCFA has exhibited hundreds of artists and significant local and national craft and folk art collections over the years. The Museum is devoted to collaborating with artists on commissions of new work as well as promoting artist-led projects and public programs. MOCFA has worked ardently to provide a place for makers and artists to come together and create, discuss, and learn. The Museum’s final exhibition, Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers, will be on view from now until December 1.

A new show, "Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective," opening on Wednesday at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, exposes nearly 40-years worth of the artist's drawings, sketches and works on paper.

"My drawings are seen very infrequently ... so I think for a lot of people who don't know the work, it's probably going to be an eye opener," Serra, 71, told reporters on Monday, adding "I don't mean that good or badly."

The show, which progresses chronologically, is the first to gather the whole span of Serra's drawings, all of which are black and white.

In charcoal drawings on paper from the early 1970's, black shapes are either cleanly defined and starkly geometrical, or have erratic smudges and pencil lines. One 18-part series, called "Drawings after Circuit," consists of thin vertical black lines on yellow paper creating the illusion of a wall of irregular matchsticks.

Other works, painted in solid black with a paint stick on thick linen sheets, are stretched across walls in irregular shapes and angles, like giant swatches of ship sails.