Very interesting. Construction of the Medicine Buddha sand mandala at the Ackland Art Museum.

Original and very interesting website.

The first material of Arabic books, papyrus, was used from the 7th to the 10th century, primarily for administrative documents and less frequently, for literary or religious texts.

Many of his works are strange, but with a lot of imagination…

Todd Schorr’s artistic journey is one that hardly conforms to the time-honored stereotype of Bohemian artist. It is rather a post-war tale bracketed by an America infatuated with the limitless potential of consumerism. His formative years were spent in a world surrounded by the atomic and space ages, by Saturday morning cartoons and racks of comic books at the local drug store, a land populated by Revell models, Mad Magazine, Testors glue, Mickey Mouse and Rat Fink. Further fueling his developing image bank were the seemingly endless icons from television’s early years: Robbie the Robot, Mighty Joe Young and reel upon reel of animated toons from the likes of Tex Avery, George Pal and Max Fleischer The compulsion to replicate these characters led to a formal art education and exposure to a new set of influences drawn from the world of advertising and commercial art.

Born in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, Dale Chihuly was introduced to glass while studying interior design at the University of Washington. After graduating in 1965, Chihuly enrolled in the first glass program in the country at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he later established the glass program and taught for over a decade.

In 1968, Chihuly was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to work at the Venini factory in Venice, Italy. While in Venice, Chihuly observed the team approach to blowing glass, which is critical to the way he works today. In 1971, Chihuly co-founded Pilchuck Glass School in Washington. With this international glass center, Chihuly has led the avantgarde in the development of glass as a fine art.

These are interesting, but again they seem too morbid sometimes…

I learned it first from my Brother. He didn’t teach me; I watched it. They will pin a word on your chest and use it against you. They will create a word that’s excuse to take your humanity away. I saw it happen to him.

And everyday, this: A word to make you serve, and one to make grateful for it. There is a label out there just for you. This will make you easier to catergorize, and sell to. There is a word for the man next to you that makes you comfortable with the fact that you have so much more than he does. There is a word for you that tells you what to settle for.

There are the voiceless, who cannot speak for themselves. These are the easiest ones to shrink down. There are words for the non-conformers, simple words that can be quickly acknowledged by those that buy in. Crazy. Faggot. Gang. Rich. One is sinful, one is lazy, one is violent by nature and one is always, always good enough.

Interesting approach…

Don’t let the less-than-fancy front page fool you: There’s art in here. NASA’s Landsat has taken some remarkable pictures of our earth and given us views that would be at home on the walls of your local gallery. Browse by continent, or look through the index of all the photos at once.

This assembly of images presents a fascinating and beautiful cross section of the arts and sciences at Princeton. It celebrates the aesthetics of research and the ways in which science and art inform each other.

Malmo Konsthall was opened in 1975 and is one of Europe’s largest exhibition halls for contemporary art. Architect Klas Anshelm has created an exhibition hall with great flexibility, generous space and fantastic light. The construction materials are light and simple: concrete, glass, wood and aluminium. Most of the gallery has a ceiling constructed like a latticework of 550 domes with both natural and artificial light sources. The height of the ceiling varies. The light well - with the higher ceiling - has a big sloping skylight towards the north. Klas Anshelm got inspiration for the construction when visiting the sculptor Constantin Brancusi in his Paris studio. The result is a gallery that is both functional and aesthetic. An exhibition space that presents the artist with endless possibilities.

Malmö Konsthall arranges exhibitions with an international focus which encompasses both the classics of modern art and current experiments.

Artist Patrick Hughes was born in Birmingham, England in October 1939. His first exhibition was in 1961 and his first reverspective was made in 1964. He has been exhibiting with Angela Flowers Gallery since 1970. He has written and collated three books on visual and verbal rhetoric.

Hughes’ work is full of irony. By creating a world solidified into perspective he makes pictures that come alive before our eyes. In the myth of the sculptor Pygmalion makes a stone woman, whom Aphrodite brings to life as Galatea. Hughes makes wooden lumps of space and you bring them to life by looking at them. It is sculpted painting, solid space.

Here’s a website with nice arabic calligraphy.

Hassan Massoudy was born in 1944, Irak. Before he arrived in Paris in June 1969 where he studied at Les Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts School), he was a calligrapher in Bagdad. His mastering of the traditional art of calligraphy combined with his encounter of contemporary art, have allowed him to draw a new path for the art of arabic calligraphy.