Calder for Body and Soul

It was a night of dazzling jewels, with nary a precious stone in sight. Salon 94 is exhibiting 40 pieces of Alexander Calder’s crimped, coiled, hammered, and highly coveted creations of body adornment in “Show and Tell: Calder Jewelry and Mobiles.”

While the sculptor’s work is famously kinetic, the opening celebration had these masterpieces of craftsmanship and engineering bouncing around the room. It took quite a few dedicated pairs of watchful eyes to keep track, as pieces made their way around assorted necks, heads, ears, and wrists. When they were not being tried on and photographed, the pieces were displayed on the original faces and heads made by Calder for a 1940 show of the work. Additional “display” sculptures were created for the occasion by a number of contemporary artists invited by the gallery.

The exhibit, which is presented in collaboration with the Calder Foundation, remains on view through December 20th.

Family members, of course, were wearing amazing pieces of their own.

Andre J. looked fabulous next to one of the unwearable mobiles.

Dangling earrings taken to a a new level. You cannot truly understand a Calder mobile until you wear one. What a total thrill!

Elena Sisto @ Lori Bookstein Fine Arts

Buffalo Check, 2012

Elena Sisto’s paintings are portraits of young women artists. Figures appear in the picture frame fragment-like, as if they are being observed through a wandering camera lens, which stops when a telling gesture or a significant juncture of planes, objects, and patterns comes into view. While this results, occasionally, in traditional head-and-shoulders portraiture, most of the figures are cropped, often to the point of abstraction. These selective glimpses and well-chosen clues are what Sisto offers to skillfully both protect and reveal what she will about her subjects.

You still have a few more days to see “Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow” at Lori Bookstein Fine Arts, 138 Tenth Ave. in Chelsea. Sisto’s idiosyncratic and unconventional portraits are on view through May 25.

See the artist’s Guggenheim Fellow profile here.

Tear, 2012

Red Sweater, 2013                     Blue Shirt, 2013

Snafu, 2011

Hat, 2013                                    Ear, 2013

At Midnight, 2010

Tattersall, 2013

Frank McMahon: Visual Journalist

Talk about witnessing history! The journalistic career of Franklin McMahon, took him everywhere from Mission Control to watch the first moon landing, to the Chicago Eight trial, to the Watergate hearings, the Vatican, and the inner workings of the European Common Market. McMahon, who died Saturday at age 90, recorded it all with a pencil and sketchpad.

In 1955, Life magazine hired McMahon to cover the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi. Till was the black teenager visiting from Chicago who, after whistling at a white woman, was taken from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night and brutally murdered. McMahon recorded visual snippets of testimony and he captured the truly historic moment of Till’s uncle being the first black person to testify against a white person in Mississippi. (The white male defendants, who were acquitted by the white, male jury, later admitted to the killing for a paid magazine story.)

Read about McMahon’s life and the global reach of his journalistic pursuits in his Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame bio.

At the end of the New York Times obit, there is an attempt to define exactly who this man, with no definable job category, was. First there’s a paragraph describing what he was not, and then McMahon gives us what I think, is a perfect definition of a visual journalist.

Mr. McMahon insisted he was not a courtroom artist, although he was widely praised for his coverage of the Chicago Eight … He also said he was not an illustrator, although he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. He was definitely not a portraitist, he said, because he never met his subjects. “I sit in the corner and make drawings of them,” he said.

And he even rejected the label of artist, though his work has been shown at many museums, including the Smithsonian. What he was, he said, was simply a reporter, who used art to tell stories.

Slideshow of Franklin McMahon's work at Chicago Reader