Moldmaking and Casting Workshop at NextFab Studio!

Come join us at NextFab Studio on January 7th, 2012 for a moldmaking and casting workshop that Justin and I will be teaching! Check here for more details!

The Ceramic Shop on Living Social

Check out this great deal on Living Social today! The Ceramic Shop (this is where we get all of our clay and plaster!) is featured and is offering $40 worth of supplies for $20. For more info click here.

The Atlantic Cities

Hey! Check us out on The Atlantic Cities blog! Click here for the article about the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym!

Call for Artists: Art in the Open

We are happy to annnounce that Art in the Open is now seeking submissions for the May 18-20^th, 2012 event.  AiO is open to all professional artists (international entries are welcome) working in any medium that can be made ‘outside, on site’. The event will take place on Philadelphia’s waterfronts in celebration of art, nature, urbanity, and the creative processes that are born when all three are in mind. Participating artists will receive extensive coverage through the AiO and AiO partner websites; selected works completed during the program will be exhibited at one of Philadelphia’s leading institutions (International Seaport Museum). For more detailed information and a complete listing of partner organizations please visit our website at www.ArtintheOpenPhila.org. 

Call for Artists: Inliquid Benefit v.12

Call for art: InLiquid benefit v.12 When: Friday, February 10 Where: Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American Street, Philadelphia There's still time to submit a donation for our annual fundraiser. We realize that things weren't a 100% clear in our original call, and there's been some confusion. The first big change to this coming year's benefit all work will be reviewed by three professionals in the local art world listed as jurors. These jurors will be selecting the top 3 artists, who will be asked to produce a limited edition print of their work, paid for by InLiquid, to be given to our top sponsors and patrons of the event as gifts.

The second change is that we have increased our optional cut of the winning bid amount to 50% for each artist, if they so choose to receive money back for their donation. Click here for full details on submitting a piece of artwork. Or click here to download the donation form. Deadline: Friday, December 30, noon

Call for Artists: Tough Art

 

Tough Art 2012 Call for Artists

Tough Art Artist Residency Program sponsored by the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is currently accepting applications for the summer of 2012. This program seeks to connect artists from across the spectrum of all the arts to the resources and visitors at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Selected artists will have time to generate and implement interactive, immersive and/or collaborative projects and connect the art making process to the larger museum context and the museum visitor. Artists will create an entirely new piece to be incorporated into the museum with direct impact on the visitor experience.

 Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is a very public place and art within a children’s museum occupies a unique niche of public art. Artists with demonstrated capabilities for working on immersive, collaborative, interactive, and/or performance art works are encouraged to apply. The program is intended to support emerging artists in their development, although mid-career and established artists are eligible. Out-of-town residents also receive air / ground transportation to and from Pittsburgh and housing. The residency occurs from June through early -September. An exhibition of the works resulting from the program opens in September and runs through early January 2013.

Deadline for submission of application materials is March 16, 2012.

Click here for a link to the prospectus

Call for Artists: Public Art in Lancaster, PA

Bureau of Public Art, Department of Public Works-City of Lancaster, Pennsylvania

RFQ Application Deadline: 5:00pm Jan 30, 2012

Budget $55,000.00

The Bureau of Public Art seeks to commission a qualified artist/team to create an original work of art that will be permanently installed outdoors and integrated in a renovated public park. A pool of fifteen (15) qualified artists will be developed from the applicants and presented to the client, stakeholders, and city officials. 

Three (3) finalists will be invited to submit a formal proposal for the commission.  A $1,500.00  stipend for each finalist will be provided.  Finalists will be provided detailed narrative, context, technical site drawings, timelines, photographs and an opportunity for a site visit.

The outstanding pool will be incorporated into a database for future potential projects commissioned by the Bureau of Public Art and the City of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Digital portfolios and web links with “NEA/Sprite” in the subject line to; jlustig@cityoflancasterpa.com

Submit physical portfolios with CD and support materials to:

John Lustig-Public Art Manager

120 N. Duke Street

Lancaster, PA 17603

Weekend Recap

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to see us at Greensgrow this past Saturday! It was great to see everyone and to meet new people who were interested in the project! Here are a few photos of our set up:

This Saturday! Greensgrow Farms!

Don't forget to come check us out this Saturday from 10-4 at Greensgrow Farms! We'll have a table set up and will be selling Philadelphia Sculpture Gym T-shirts, Totebags, Mugs, and Membership passes! Have a special someone who loves building stuff but has nowhere to do it? Then get them a Philadelphia Sculpture Gym Gift Certificate! You'll be giving someone a fun and fabulous gift, while supporting a local, family owned business...yay!

And remember, we'll have home made Vegan Gingersnaps for you...(if we don't eat them all beforehand!) Hope to see you there!!!

Google SketchUp

Justin has been using Google SketchUp for a few months now...It began (I think) when he started designing our tiny house (more on that in a future post). He obsessively taught himself everything he could find in online tutorials and has gotten pretty damn good. Above is a snip of the future Philadelphia Gym space that he created to help us figure out the layout. Below are tools that he imported from the 3D warehouse (they aren't exact brands and whatnot...just generic tools to be used for placement.) At first I questioned him using this program...it seemed everything took longer to lay out than it would if he'd just drawn it, but he's gotten really quick and it proving to be a great tool for things like this. Anyone else using it? Love it? Hate it? Have any tips and tricks?

Random...Ginger Snaps...

 

Olivia is the type of kid who sleeps until 10 or 11am and stays up late, which is fine with me because I can get alot done before she gets up. What's hard is keeping her entertained at night, when Justin and I are exhausted. So last night we made cookies together...at 10pm! I needed to try out this Ginger Snap recipe to see if they would work out for the Greensgrow Bazaar this Saturday, so I figured this would be, well...maybe not the BEST time...but a decent enough time to give them a shot. Anyway, they came out great and Justin managed not to eat all of them so there was even some left for me to have this morning (cookies before noon...!) Olivia's thoughts were "Mmmmm...Beautiful! Cute!" to which I fully agreed.

NextFab Award Two

Check out NextFab Award Two! Create a fascinating and innovative project for a chance to win a $1,000 NextFab Gift Card! Visit their website for details and contest rules.

Greensgrow Farms Holiday Bazaar...This Saturday!

 

 

This Saturday we'll have a table set up at the Greensgrow Farms Holiday Bazaar from 10-4pm! If you've never been, Greensgrow is an amazing place...a little farm right in the city! They grow veggies, have chickens and a pig named Milkshake! They also offer an amazing CSA and have farmer's markets...and fabulous events like this Holiday Bazaar! So come on out to say hi, meet us, pick up some fabulous and wonderful Philadelphia Sculpture Gym items for yourself or people on your list...we'll have PSG mugs, T-shirts, Totebags, Gift Certificates and some art too. Please stop by and introduce yourself! 2501 East Cumberland Street!

 

In the studio...

Ummmm...?!

Wow...so apparently this beast is real and was created by Wenger "to celebrate 100 years of innovation". So if you happen to have an extra $850 lying around and need to get a little holiday something for the guy or gal who has it all, they probably don't have this!

More info from ThinkGeek.com:

This unique special edition knife contains all 85 tools currently produced by Wenger (Maker of the Genuine Swiss Army Knife). These 85 tools can be used in over 100 functions and it's the World's Largest Swiss Army Knife. It's not exactly going to win any awards for lightest, smallest or most efficient tool but it probably will win you the title "King of All Gadgets". And even though this knife is a monster, weighing almost 3 pounds, don't worry - it does have a key ring so you can carry it on a belt loop.

• Contains an incredible 85 tools built into a single knife [list]
• Guinness World Record holder for "the most multifunctional penknife"
• Manufactured by Wenger (Maker of the Genuine Swiss Army Knife)
• Special edition knife, perfect for collectors
• Comes packaged in Wenger box [view]
• Weight: 2 lbs, 11 ounces
• Dimensions: 8.75" wide
• Lifetime warranty 

Let it snow!

On my way home from a class this morning, I thought I saw a few snowflakes...Could be...but until they are really coming down, why not make your own? A good friend, Janie Theis, is teaching a snowflake cutting workshop on Sunday, December 18th at 3pm. The workshop is being held at CCE at 706 South Street and it's recommended that you bring your own decent pair of scissors. (When Janie taught me how to do it last year, she had this awesome pair of Fiskars that she had ground down the tips of to be perfect snowflake cutting scissors.) Any good quality scissors with a sharp point will work. Also if you have any fancy punches or tracing paper, bring those too!

The Lion King on Broadway

So, Olivia is a big Lion King fan and yesterday her and I went to New York with my mom, my cousin and some of my mom's friends to see The Lion King on Broadway...we were only in the city for maybe 7 hours tops, just enough time to eat and see the show, but it was amazing and totally worth it. The sets were amazing, with a really elaborate floor that changed to fit the landscape of each scene. The puppetry was very cool, and with alot of the animals, it was hard to tell where the human even was (when the giraffes first came out they looked like they could have been anamatronic!) I kept asking myself the whole time "how was that built?" or "what is that made of?"...As a sculptor it was great to see (...and as a 2 year old as well....Olivia has not stopped saying "Linon Keeeng!" since we left!) Anyone who is interested in scenic work and/or puppetry, I highly recommend it!

Images from here

Artists I'm looking at: Ron Mueck

This is a repost from my personal sculpture blog about the wonderful and fabulous Ron Mueck...Enjoy.

  Of all the contemporary figurative sculptors in the world, I'd have to say that Ron Mueck is my favorite... His attention to detail is amazing and his use of scale is incredible.

This is the first piece of his work I saw and was blown away by it...not just because of the size and detail, but because it took him about a month to finish this piece from start to finish...which is both incredible and insane:

Untitled (Big Man), 2000

This piece is also amazing...she is over 8 feet tall....:

Pregnant Woman, 2002

Here's a 2 part video about how he made her...le sigh:





This piece was at the Brooklyn Art Museum a few years ago and was stunning...

A Girl, 2006

From Wikipedia:

Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in Great Britain.

Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo, and the Jim Henson series The Storyteller.

Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product.

Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1999 Mueck was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. During this two year post he created the works Mother and Child, Pregnant Woman, Man in a Boat and Swaddled Baby.^[1]

Back...

Sorry for the silence here on the blog the end of last week...Anyone who is friends with me on Facebook may have seen that our house was broken into on Wednesday night, which shook me up pretty badly. We are all ok and they didn't take very much, just knowing that someone was in our house and going through our things was unnerving...and they took a necklace that I had had since I was a little girl, which was a bit sad. I needed a few days to recover from it and am finally feeling back to normal. We got an alarm system, cleaned up the mess, got a Christmas tree and I did some work around the house which was great. I even got out to a few events, though not everything I had planned to...leaving the house was harder than I thought it would be but the two openings I went to on Friday night were worth it...
First was the Bloodmilk show at Gallery 309, which looked amazing!

 

Next was Laura Graham's photos at Gravy studio & gallery in Fishtown, which was also amazing (though I was too busy talking that I forgot to take photos!)

Then on Saturday, Justin went to measure the new space (details to come soon! We are still working out the lease details.)

 

Then we went to the Resource Exchange holiday fundraiser and it was so great to see the space! It looks amazing in there and they have tons of fabulous things for sale!

Overall, at this point, I'm feeling very lucky...lucky to have such great family and friends who care about us, lucky that we are safe, lucky that we are able to start this business, lucky that we are healthy and happy...and so much more.