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Rebecca Kamen, NeuroCantos , an installation at Greater Reston Arts Center  Six years ago, The Elemental Garden , an exhibition at Greater Reston Arts Center (GRACE) prompted me to start blogging about art. Like TED talks, the news of something so visually fascinating and mentally stimulating as Rebecca Kamen's integration of art with sciences needs to spread.  GRACE presented her work in 2009 and did a followup exhibition, Continuum , which closed February 13, 2016. Rebecca Kamen, Lobe , Digital print of silkscreen, 15" x 22" Like the Elemental Garden , Kamen's new works visually evoke and replicate scientific principles.  For the non-scientist and the scientist, the works and their presentation are fascinating.  Kamen worked with a British poet and a composer/musician from Portland, Oregon, each with similar intellectual interests. Two prints included in the show create a dialogue between her design and the words of poet Steven Fowler. I like how the idea of gray m...

Isamu Noguchi, Trinity, 1945, Gregory , 1948, Strange Bird (To the Sunflower) Photo taken from the Hirshhorn's Facebook page Biomorphic and anthropomorphic themes run through quite a few exhibitions of modern artists in Washington at the moment.  The Hirshhorn's Marvelous Objects: Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York has several of the abstract, biomorphic Surrealists such as Miro and Calder.  The wonderful exhibition will come to a close after this weekend. Isamu Noguchi's many sculptures that are part of  Marvelous Objects  deal with an unexpected part of the artist's life and work. Noguchi was interned in a prison camp in Arizona for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Whatever the horrors of his experience, he dealt with it as an artist does -- making art and using creativity to express the experience by transforming it.  Isamu Noguchi, Lunar Landscape, 1944 Lunar landscape comes from immediately after this difficult time period. The ar...

"Contemporary and ancient art are like oil and water, seemingly opposite poles....now I have found the two melding ineffably into one, more like water and air."  Hiroshi Sugimoto, Japanese artist Louise Bourgeois, Untitled , 1952, Spring , 1949 and Mortise , 1950 National Gallery of Art Two separate exhibitions in Washington at the moment illustrate the commonality of modern art and prehistoric -- especially in sculpture.  The me, that theme resonates with two sculptors who lived through most of the 20th century, Louise bourgeois and Isamu Noguchi.  The National Gallery has a two-room exhibition Louise Bourgeois:No Exit , and Noguchi (hopefully in another blog) 's works are part of the Hirshhorn's exhibition, Marvelous Objects: Surrealist Sculpture from Paris to New York . Constantin Brancusi, Endless Column, 1937 Three sculptures by Bourgeois in the National Gallery are what she called personages.  As a whole they're not unlike the archetypal images of Henry Moo...