So Cal art whirl

When schedules suddenly aligned for an unencumbered week, I seized the opportunity and ran drove to southern California. When I go out of town, I like to know what to see, where to go and how to fit it all in. Monday was an eight-hour drive to San Diego. I laid out an ambitious schedule of exhibitions and venues for the next three days:

• Northern Stars: Twentieth Century Finnish Designs at the Mingei International Museum, San Diego (vintage Marimekko)
• Dyed Elegance: Asian Modernism and the Art of Kuboku and Hisako Takadu at the San Diego Museum of Art (roketsuzome - wax resist dyeing)
• Art Meets Science, Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection, and Magical Mystery Tour: en homage at Visions Art Museum, San Diego (quilts)
• California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (comprehensive view of modern design)
• Breaking Ground: Chinese American Architects in LA (1945-1980) at the Chinese-American Museum, Los Angeles (googie architecture by Helen Liu Fong)
• Folding Paper: the Infinite Possibilities of Origami at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles (mind-boggling folds)
• Claire Falkenstein at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles (she sculpted entrance gates for Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy)
• Pasadena to Santa Barbara: a Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951-1969 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Karl Benjamin's abstract compositions would make great quilts)
• Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch House at University Art Museum University of California, Santa Barbara (he was great at marketing)

I didn't have time to see much more at each venue. I just missed San Diego's Craft Revolution: from Post-War Modern to California Design. It looked great even as the Mingei staff were dismantling it. But I maxxed out and even saved the Eames House in Pacific Palisades for another time. But I did manage to connect with friends in San Diego and LA for dinner.

Making it all possible meant a one night stay each in each city - if it's Tuesday, it must be ___ - and two-hour drives each day in crazy southern California traffic. To cap off the trip I spent one relaxing non-scheduled day in San Luis Obispo before returning home.

You may think I'm nuts, but this was a great vacation - full of art and inspiration. 

Guild show

Very spring-like yesterday. Yet I was indoors clearing e-mails, catching up on paperwork, and cleaning up everywhere. I did manage a late afternoon hour in the garden pulling weeds. Some things can't wait.

My two submissions for the guild show can't wait either - they're due Monday.

Orange Rhyme

lap quilt

EBHQ's bi-annual show, Voices in Cloth, will be on March 17th and 18th at the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, CA. The pavilion is an award winning former Ford assembly plant - a soaring space with skylights and big windows with views of San Francisco Bay. I'm very excited about this new venue - a welcome change from the downtown convention center.

The show is non-juried, but the caliber of work is amazing. Terrific quilters in the guild - award winners too. Am I lucky to be in such a good group, or what? We'll showcase more than 200 quilts. Get a flavor by watching the slide show of November's Show and Tell.

Come for the quilts, for the show, for the view, for the architecture and for the history. Come say hello.

Architectural inspirations

This multi-story building is under construction and has changed the Oakland skyline. I see it from the freeway nearly every day. I can even see it when I'm at the gym a mile away.

Located not far from the San Andreas fault, the new Kaiser Hospital will have lots of structural bracing. Reminds me of Colleen's quilt, Looking Through The Lens.  

Two more views of the skeletal structure. Inspirations for lines shapes motifs colors and compositions.

Simple beauty

The prestigious Pritzker Prize for 2010 went to SANAA architects - Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa - of Tokyo. They've designed buildings all over the world with two in the United States: the New Museum of Contempory Art in New York City and the Glass Pavilion for the Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times architecture critic, writes about them winning the award here. In an earlier review on August 23, 2006 he praised the pavilion. From that review:

". . . Minimalist architecture deserving of the name pares itself down not in the pursuit of style points but in an effort to frame the relationship between solid and void, nature and culture, and color and its absence -- and to explore how the eye sees and the mind understands those differences."

How about applying this poetic definition to quilts? Minimalist quilts.