Curio Cabinet

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

These portraits may not feature any eye of newt or black cat bones, yet what Francis Denny has captured is equally mystical. Shine (New York, NY) above is part of the New York-based ClampArt gallery's exhibit Major Arcana: Witches in America, which chronicles Denny's exploration of contemporary witches. For each portrait, Denny asked the women to wear an outfit or bring items which represent their practices: for some it was elaborate jewelry or decorated walking sticks; for others, accoutrements were foregone for rich natural surroundings. The women who are portrayed self-identify as a range of mystical beings including "self-proclaimed green witches, white witches, kitchen witches…." With such a variety of characters shown in these photos, Denny has tried to move away from stereotypical depictions of witches as green-skinned villains and towards a confluence of individuals who operate outside of conventional ideals of femininity and power. Are some of the images a little spooky? Maybe, but that's perfectly fine for Halloween!

 

Below: more witch portraits from Denny's project, including Bloody Mary (New Orleans, LA), Deborah (Nyack, NY)
, and Karen (Brooklyn, NY).
 

Image credit & copyright: Francis F. Denny
 

It's Flashback Friday! Enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives.
 

Title: untitled
Artist: Tim Burton (b. 1958)
Created: c. 2019
Medium: mixed media
Current location: The Neon Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada
 

Just in time for the holiday season, Nightmare Before Christmas director Tim Burton brought his macabre and kooky artworks to the Neon Museum in Las Vegas in 2019. The exhibit, titled Lost Vegas, features familiar faces from his films like the above brainy aliens from Mars Attacks!, and others who were designed to uniquely inhabit the Neon Museum space, a historical preservation site for Vegas signs and memorabilia. "The weird thing about Las Vegas is your perception and the illusion of it," Burton said, recalling how his fondness for "Sin City" grew as his family took weekend vacations to it in the '60s and '70s. As a kid, he would sneak into the Neon Museum at night; now a famous director, he contacted the Museum in the hopes of creating a large interactive art space for visitors. The outdoor "Neon Boneyard" area features installations from his films like the Beetlejuice sign and other interactive works like the "Stain Boy Sing-A-Long." Indoor works include a colorful carousel projector and holographic shadow boxes. This theme park-like exhibit will definitely be a once in an afterlife experience!

 

Below: more installations from Lost Vegas including the towering Alien Ex, a piece called Carousel, and Betelgeuse Sign, a suspicious allusion to the ghost with the most!
 

Image credit & copyright: L.E. Baskow / Las Vegas Review Journal
 

Mateo

2020

spray paint on carpet

86.6 x 59 in (220 x 150 cm)

Montreal, Canada

This isn't your grandma's Perisan rug! French artist Mateo, who lives and works in Montreal, Canada, has recently gone viral, thanks to his highly detailed, spray painted portraits on Persian rugs. In the untitled painting above, a woman wearing a head-covering looks down, with closed eyes. The intricate yellow, blue and red patterns of the rug frame the woman's face and mouth. The painting is detailed enough for viewers to see lifelike creases on the woman's eyelids and lips. Mateo became interested in various cultures' traditional crafts after studying ceramics in Barcelona. He began incorporating patterns and other elements of these crafts into his street art, and developed a particular love for hand-woven carpets. According to Mateo, "Carpets are one of the most ancient, visually rich, and meaningful traditional arts that can be found. They are traditionally weaved by women, which is why I chose to represent women's portraits on them." That's one modern way to pay homage to the past!
 
Image credit & copyright: Mateo
 
Written by: Maria C.
 

Below: two more of Mateo's untitled paintings on carpet
 

This certainly looks like frightful fun! As Halloween draws near, so do Halloween festivals, like the Historic Irvington Halloween Festival, in the Irvington neighborhood of Indianapolis, Indiana. The event draws thousands of visitors each year. In the photo above, The Black Hat Society, a nonprofit group of theatrical witches, prepares for the festival's parade. The gathering features one member dressed as a pumpkin-headed monster, while most wear black witch costumes. The Historic Irvington Halloween Festival has been called both the oldest and the largest Halloween festival in the U.S. (though this is difficult to measure and a few other festivals also lay claim to these titles). When it began in 1927, the festival was a one-night event, featuring music and a parade. After spending several years on hiatus, the festival returned in 1946, and became a week-long affair, featuring vendors, food, performances, and even a ghost tour. The festival celebrates its 74th year in 2020, and while the street fair won't take place due to the pandemic, some attractions that can work with outdoor social distancing and PPE mask will still take place, like the ghost tour, ensuring attendees still have a spooo-ky good time!

Image credit & copyright: Michael Sullivan Photography/Historic Irvington Halloween Festival
 

Written by: Maria C.

Below: entrants in the festival's pumpkin-carving contest
 

Title: After the Attack. Dressing station near Plevna

Artist: Vasily Vereshchagin (1842-1904)
Created: 1881
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 72 x 15.8 in (183 x 40.2 cm)
 

They say "art reveals truth," but the truth isn't always pleasant. Especially in After the Attack. Dressing station near Plevna, wherein Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin shows the grim aftermath of a battle in the Russo-Turkish War on the Balkan Peninsula. White medical tents overflow with wounded soldiers, most of whom lie on the ground, outside. Many have visible wounds, and some are wrapped in bandages. Having fought in the war himself, Vereschagin dismissed the popular practice of portraying battles as glorious or fanciful. He instead committed himself to realism, using his art to protest war and violence. This unique perspective helped make Vereshchagin one of the only Russian artists to gain international fame during his lifetime. It goes to show that when art has something important to say, people are often compelled to listen.

Below: Another of Vereshchagin's war paintings, At the Fortress Walls Let Them Enter, and a video explaining Vereshchagin's artistic approach.

A cubist unraveled.

Many consider him the most important artist of the 20th Century, though others in his lifetime would ridicule and scorn his seemingly primitive style. Born on this day in 1881, Pablo Picasso helped invent a new cubist art style and became a larger-than-life public figure—in spite of his many personal struggles to develop a wholly unique artistic identity.  

Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, to a homemaker mother, María Picasso y López, and a painter father, Don José Ruiz y Blasco. By the time Picasso was seven, his father was training him to sketch and paint, and Picasso completed his first painting, Le Picador, at age nine. Picasso's mother even said that her son's first words were "piz piz", a shortened version of lápiz, or "pencil", in Spanish.  

Picasso's family moved to Barcelona, when he was 13, and his father took a teaching job at the School of Fine Arts, and convinced school officials to let his son take an entrance exam, despite his age. Picasso got in, and just a few years later, at age 16, struck out on his own for Spain's most prestigious art school: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. There, his paintings began slipping from traditional realism into a modernism, in which striking colors and exaggerated features were meant to convey specific emotions.  

At age 19, Picasso moved to Paris, rented an apartment with a friend, and co-founded a small magazine, contributing his artwork. In 1901, one of the most famous periods of Picasso's career—his "Blue Period"—began. Paintings he created during this four-year period were rendered in shades of blue and green with somber subjects, such as starving people. Picasso's own poverty greatly influence his Blue Period, as did the suicide of his friend, Carles Casagemas.
 

By 1907, Picasso shifted into his "Rose Period," marked by a use of warmer colors. He caught the eye of prominent art collectors, like Gertrude Stein, and art dealers, like Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who owned a gallery in Paris. Kahnweiler praised Picasso's work even as the artist's style became more experimental. In 1907, influenced by African artifacts and Iberian sculptures he had viewed in museums, Picasso painted one of his most important works: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The oil painting portrayed five nude women on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona famous for its brothels. The figures were composed of multiple flat planes, with mask-like faces. The image was immediately controversial. Fellow modern artist Henri Matisse (with whom Picasso had a lifelong rivalry) famously mocked the work, calling it crude.
 

There was no stopping Picasso's artistic experimentation, however. By 1909, he and his artist friend, Georges Braque, developed an entirely new style: cubism. Marked by an amalgamation of geometric shapes, cubist paintings were like nothing the art world had ever seen. Some looked almost three-dimensional, with images "popping off" the canvas. Picasso and Braque began using pieces of cut paper to create cubist pieces, thus elevating collage into the fine art world for the first time. By the time he married, in 1918, Picasso's art had made him rich and famous.  

Some of Picasso's personal beliefs shone through in the pacifist art of his later years. One of his most famous paintings, Guernica, portrays the aftermath of a Nazi bombing on the town of Guernica, in Basque. The painting's screaming figures include a terrified horse and a mother cradling a limp child in her arms. Guernica is considered one of history's most powerful anti-war artworks.
 

Picasso remained a prominent public figure for the rest of his life, passing away at age 91. Today, he is remembered for his breaking and redefining of the art world's rules. As Picasso himself said, "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."  

Below: one of Picasso's most famous cubist paintings, Guernica.