theartofchalkboards:

Tate Modern| Past Exhibitions | Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments

Blackboards 1972 and 1978

Beuys regarded teaching as an essential element of his work as an artist. He was a profoundly charismatic and inspirational professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where he taught a generation of German artists. Beuys’s relationship with the authorities at the academy was always stormy, and he was dismissed in 1972. However, by then he was expounding his theories of sculpture, democracy and green politics at conferences and art galleries around the world. These lectures were closer in spirit to Actions than to traditional academic practice, and the blackboards that he invariably covered in idiosyncratic diagrams and Beuysian slogans have come to be regarded as works in their own right. Several of the blackboards shown here are preserved from Beuys’s lectures at the Tate Gallery in 1972, which were described by the critic Caroline Tisdall as ‘a blend of art, politics, personal charisma, paradox and Utopian proposition’.

I love the idea of chalkboards as preserved artifacts from lectures. See one of the chalkboards here.

MoMA has a pretty great site on Picasso’s printmaking

“Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell,” by John Baldessari, 1966-68.

Charles McNulty on Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids:

“Smith’s story serves as an antidote to the trend of the last few decades in which artists have become arguably more proficient in the technical aspects of their disciplines through formalized training but often at the expense of a natural connection to a thriving cultural community.”

I liked Just Kids quite a bit.

(via alanchristopherlee + sashafrerejones)

Artist Anastassia Elias’ worlds inside of toilet paper tubes

Will Leitch on a cab driver who asks his passengers to draw:

My cab driver coming back from LaGuardia this afternoon handed me a clipboard and a pen and said, “Will you draw me a painting?” I am quite obviously not a skilled artist, but I obliged.

His name is Fabio Peralta, and he asks everyone in his taxi to “paint” when they get in. (I am not the first person to write about him.) He has been driving a cab for 41 years, but the picture requests have only been going on for 3 1/2 years. He said he was inspired by then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who made him feel like “I could be and do whatever I wanted.” He has collected 35,000 “paintings” — he refers to them exclusively as “paintings” — and he sells a book of his favorites to riders for “whatever you think it’s worth.” I gave him 10 bucks, though it was clearly worth a lot more. I hope you are lucky enough to hail him down someday.

(via vizthink > mikehudack > mattlehrer > leitch)

“a brief history of art” by pictures for sad children

“May the bridges I burn light the way.” by Mike Monteiro

Robert Gober, “Untitled,” 1991

Lithograph on newsprint with hand-torn edges, printed on both sides and folded three times, hand-colored with coffee by the artist

I love the way this looks. Gives me all kinds of ideas for Newspaper Blackout originals…

(via defacedbook)