Number Nine- The Sabatini Art Gallery is free.  That’s right!  This is free entertainment, free education and a free experience all rolled into one.  The art classes, programs and workshops are free and all supplies are provided.

Number Eight- The Sabatini Art Gallery has something for all everyone.  Our gallery team considers the wide variety of ages and learning abilities of our visitors and something for each.  For example, we might have hand-outs or a Make-it-&-Take-it area for children (and the young at heart!).  Teens enjoyed our last workshop, Wearable Art: Amulets.  For those who like to read, there is additional text to explain different aspects of the exhibit in further detail as well as short, concise information for those with fewer reading skills.

Number Seven- The Sabatini Art Gallery is a great way to spend time with family and friends.  Art provides a common denominator to interact, express opinions, and discuss your own insights.  A great way to talk and spend time with one another in a relaxed, cool atmosphere.

Number Six- The Sabatini Art Gallery helps bring change and development to communities. This is true of art in general and, specifically, because we make the effort to have a wide variety of exhibits with topics such as art that expresses the inexpressible (ideas, philosophy).  Art can also be a record of history from which we learn so much.  Social issues are another source of inspiration for artists that help us to visualize contemporary concerns and issues.  Art can also bring people together by giving them “common ground” or a common topic.

Number Five- The Sabatini Art Gallery inspires.  Visitors comments: “I could do that!”, “I would like to learn to make art like that”, or “How do they think of these ideas?”  We work hard to plan exhibits that will bring new ideas and/or types of art to our community.

Number Four- The Sabatini Art Gallery is a community center.   As part of Topeka Shawnee County Public Library, we are central to a diverse population that visits here.  People who come in for meetings stop in on breaks, for instance.  Also, we are one-stop-shopping for those who are also coming in to the building to use the computers, check out books, eat lunch or attend a program or workshop. A visit to the gallery is right on the way!

Number Three- The Sabatini Art Gallery provides an effective way of learning.  Art helps us see the world in new and innovative ways.  The Sabatini Art Gallery also offers FREE workshops and programs such as World, Art and You, an art making program for teens-adults.  The next exhibition is our annual children’s show with great programming.

Number Two- The Sabatini Art Gallery makes you smarter.  Our goal in the gallery is to help people get art through object exploration, discovering how art is made and why, exploring the creative processes, and personal expression through participation, collaborative and interactive learning opportunities.  One participant in World, Art and You drawing class commented that she enjoyed gaining an “understanding of what goes into different types of art creation.”

Number One- The Sabatini Art Gallery makes you feel good.  Art can be beautiful, interesting or thought-provoking.  We aim to help each visitor tailor their visit to their own needs.  Some like to have a little introduction to the current exhibition and then quietly spend time with the art.  One such visitor remarked, “I like to come here to look and think in a different way.”  Recently, I had the pleasure of giving an impromptu tour to a large group of Girl Scouts and Daisies.  Their excitement at each discovery was hard for them to contain.  The Touching Table was an especially big hit.  Come on in and let us show you around!

But I have an addiction, a museum addiction…I collection exhibition catalogs. There I said it! I collect those heavy, glossy image, long essay-filled tomes the way a boy (or grown man) collects baseball cards! It’s an addiction – a very heavy one if you have ever tried to lift a box full of them. (My husband always hates when we move because somehow he’s always left carrying those heavy, back-breaking boxes.)

I just can’t help myself, I want to enjoy the exhibition again and again, long after they are gone. I want, no I need, to revisit the image and relive the stories the curators have woven.

Let me share with you how bad my addiction is. Last month I was fortunate to spend some time in London. While there I tried to get into the Damien Hirst exhibition at the Tate Modern. Unfortunately everyone in London had the same idea. Needless to say I couldn’t get a ticket. So what did I do? You guessed it, I marched myself right into the gift shop and bought the catalog, all 5 lbs. of it!  (I then had to carry it the rest of the trip as a reminder of my habit.)

So, now you know my art addiction – what’s yours?  Share some of your “art addictions” – your favorite work of art, the best exhibit you’ve seen, or your favorite museum to visit.

Wait—don’t toss those outdated magazines just yet! They have hidden craft potential. Here’s an activity you can do with just about anyone, but kids especially like it because it’s relatively easy and can kill a few hours indoors during the summer when it’s too hot to play outside.

YOU’LL NEED: A straw or pencil, craft glue or glue stick, scissors, and some string, yarn, twine or ribbon long enough to fit around your wrist or neck.

STEP 1: Find images you like. Feel free to cut them into smaller sizes.

STEP 2: Cut various shapes.

STEP 3: On the back side of your shape, coat well with glue. Not too much, but enough to create a good seal.

STEP 4: Using your pencil or straw, begin to roll your paper around it until it’s wrapped all the way.

STEP 5: Gently slide the “bead” off your pencil or straw. If it starts to unroll, just add a bit more glue and hold it until it sticks. Do this using different types of paper for variety. You can use newspaper, old cards, junk mail—the possibilities are endless.

STEP 6: Once your beads dry, you can string them onto twine or ribbon. When I made mine I thought they would make great Christmas tree decorations. Like stringing popcorn but using beads instead. In Victorian times, women in England gathered in dining rooms to make beads by rolling scraps of wallpaper on knitting needles. They would then string the beads on long pieces of yarn to create curtains that separated rooms. So, lots of ideas!

For those of you looking to make a more sturdy, precise paper bead, this is an excellent tutorial. The beads are gorgeous, but it’s a bit more advanced. Kids could do it but the younger ones might need an adult to assist.

In college, Carter’s art professors had emphasized abstraction, the “high art” forms of painting and sculpture, and had dismissed media like fibers, sewing, and other “craft” media. Carter wanted to do important work, and that was what the men were doing. She worked in painting and printmaking, since those were “important.” Her drawings often used small marks, close together, that Carter thought of as “stitch marks.” It wasn’t until many years later that she began to allow herself to work with cloth, real stitches instead of pencil marks, and turning collage into fully formed three-dimensional pieces.

Carter’s mother made clothes for the family, and embellished the clothes with beads, decoration; she made them beautiful. When Carter started doing that with her work, she felt at home. Including very personal things, things like photographs, letters, postcards, notes and lists, and enclosing them into the art made them even more close to Carter’s feeling of home.

One of Carter’s pieces is called “Multi-Tasking Apron.” It is very long, and would wrap around one’s body several times. Some of the pockets are open, some are sewn shut, some have personal notes or items tucked into the pockets. When we were putting up the display, two young men from Topeka High’s photography class came by to work on their project. They talked to Carter for a while, and she told them about the apron. One of the boys asked “Can you imagine wearing that?” The other responded, “Man, can you imagine going through airport security in that?”

We’re regarding this exhibit as a mini-retrospective, a small version of an exhibit that features an artist’s whole career. Some of Carter’s earliest 3-D works hang from the ceiling, and it is fun to walk through the exhibit and see works in progress, and also works that continue that inquiry into what it means to live with one’s own history. The exhibit is on display through May 18.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I want to show you one of the library’s artists’ books, Admonition, by Sara R. Parr. Admonition takes an excerpt from a Sylvia Plath poem and makes it come alive through the choices Parr makes. I really admire her ability to take a static poem on a page and turn it into a mysterious little package that captures my attention from the moment I open it. Parr gives very deliberate thought to the images, materials and structures she chooses, making each component work together to form a cohesive whole.

The poem:

“If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you’ll cut the chord /articulating song. If you flay the beast / to marvel at the mane, / you’ll wreck the rest / from which the fur began…If you pluck out my heart / to find what makes it move, / you’ll halt the clock / that syncopates our love.” 

The images could be very literal and illustrate the poem with pictures of dissected, flayed beasts. Instead, Parr chose to focus on love. She printed an anatomical heart in red, pink and blue to illustrate the text of the poem. How different would the message be if she had chosen to depict the dissection and flaying?

The artist printed her book on a single sheet of paper. The paper was then folded and cut to create a 10-page “snake book” structure. The book can be read sequentially from front to back, with a couple of upside-down words thrown in. When the book is opened to its full 9″h x 8″w size, the text gets tangled and difficult to read. Some words are vertical, some are horizontal, some are cut in half and some are barely legible. The paper [material] the book is printed on is lightweight and fragile, as if one wrong move will destroy it.

Has Sara R. Parr created an artists’ book that conveys the meaning of the poem through text, image, material and structure? Would the poem have a different meaning if other images were used? If the book was bound traditionally and easily read sequentially? I’d love to hear what you think.

If you would like to see some of TSCPL’s artists’ books for yourself, contact Special Collections Librarian Brea Black at 785-580-4512 or bblack@tscpl.org to set up an appointment.

For more information, check out these books:

Sylvia Plath, the Collected Poems
edited by Ted Hughes
call # 811.54 PLA

Cover to Cover: Creative Techniques for
Making Beautiful Books, Journals & Albums
Shereen LaPlantz
call # 686.3 LAP

Artists work from what they know, from what they have lived, and from their experiences.  My own creative process is influenced by my childhood observations of the natural world, for instance.

As a kid, I spent as much time as possible outside-climbing trees, exploring the neighbor’s fields and woods or helping my parents with their gardening projects.  I also loved to cook and learned to sew my own clothes.  The process of making was and still is very satisfying.

I also look at art every chance I get.  I have found a wealth of inspiration in visiting museums and galleries.  It is amazing to see artworks up close and personal and spend time with them.

Reading books and learning about other artists and how they approached artmaking is another way that inspires creativity.  The library has a good selection of books and I have watched almost every DVD in the Art Neighborhood.  I especially enjoyed watching a segment on Alexander Calder, the master of kinetic (moving) art.

Watch Calder in this video 

He had a marvelous sense of play and had fun making a sculpted wire circus as well as his famous mobiles.  I used to drive one of my professor’s crazy by calling my artmaking “play” and sketching with crayons!

This winter, I revisited one of my favorite artists, Wassily Kandinsky, to create a series of color studies on fabric.  It was so enjoyable to mix colors and create marks in his Abstract Expressionist style.  Coming back to my own work, I felt a renewed sense of confidence in my own unique style.

Visual artists create from what they see and know of the world around us.  They create artworks to record the world around us and to inspire us to move forward into the future.

A symbol is an object, action, or idea that represents something other than itself, often of a more abstract nature, like the Apple computer “apple” or the Nike “swoosh”. Symbols play a large role in our everyday lives, from the green mermaid on your morning coffee cup (Starbucks logo) to the important red hexagon at your street corner.  Symbols are common to all cultures and are used to communicate messages. For the Chinese, they can represent virtues such as luck, prosperity, a long life, happiness and wealth.

Discover some of the many symbols found in Chinese decorative arts on display at the Alice C. Sabatini Gallery in the Hirschberg Gallery from April 6 through May 18.

Best in Show:

1st Runner-up:

Best Play on Words:

Most Likely to be Devoured:

Congratulations to the winners! You can see all the 2012 edible book entries on our Flickr page.

Thank you to all of our edible book artists, visitors, and voters. It’s audience participation that makes this event so much fun.

Also, a special thank you to Chef Mike Davis for his Thai Fruit Carving demonstration. If you didn’t get a chance to see him in action, check out this video taken by Jaime Meyers.

Want to participate next year? Mark your calendars for the 2013 Edible Book Festival on Friday, April 5, 2013.

First, there’s Bob Swain, owner of Beauchamp’s Gallery & Frame Shop here in Topeka. Rumor had it that he did restoration work, but it wasn’t until we spoke on the phone that I understood how much his shop actually does. They clean and repair paintings, including doing some recent work for the Kansas State Historical Society. It’s important to note that he’s a restorer not a conservator, however he follows industry standards and best practices for reversible conservation. He’s a wonderful local resource who will help you himself or, if necessary, will redirect you to someone if the repair work falls outside his skill set.

What’s the difference?

A fine art restorer will repair the appearance of the work—fixing a tear, retouching the paint, rejoining a frame. This is the oldest way to fix things, dating back to the beginnings of art itself, when artisans with training and experience fixed each others’ work. This can be done with care and precision, but doesn’t necessarily ensure the survival of a work.

A fine art conservator thinks about the appearance of the work as well, but they approach the repair using science, art historical research and artistic requirements of the work. For example, rather than beautifully filling in bare spots in a painting with a quality oil paint from Hobby Lobby, a conservator would research the chemical structure of the paint used by Michelangelo in the 16th century and attempt to re-create the exact formula. He or she would also use their extensive art history background (usually a specialty) to research Michelangelo’s brush technique and style in hopes of applying the paint as closely as he might have were he restoring the work himself.

When might you pick one over the other? 

For starters, cost. You need to ask yourself if the artwork that needs fixing is something you simply want to improve upon appearance-wise so it looks better or more in tact when displayed, or if it needs to be preserved for all of history. I might take a damaged painting I did in college to a fabulous, quality restorer. If I found a dirty, but original Andrew Wyeth at an estate sale, I’d call a reputable conservator. But that is up to the individual to decide. Your grandmother’s sampler might be valuable enough to you to call a conservator.

Conservators in the Kansas City area

There are certainly more out there, but these are the three I recently “discovered”. Sutton Greene Art Conservation, LLC has a “case studies” section on their website showing before and after pictures, as well as the challenges each piece presented before work was started. Van Witt Fine Art Conservation, LLC has a tab on their website menu for “examples: before & after” that walks you through the fixin’, too.

There’s a third place I found—Heugh-Edmonson Conservation Services, LLC—that specializes in paper and photography conservation. Their website is under construction, but should you need them, Tom Edmonson’s e-mail is tom@heugh-edmondson.com.

Conservators outside Kansas

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (I know, it’s a mouthful), is an absolutely invaluable resource. They have so much going on and available on their website, but what I love most is how they’ve set things up to make finding the conservator that’s right for you super easy. Also, the good old Smithsonian has the Museum Conservation Institute. The webpage is vast and full of wonderful specifics about how to care for your art as well as extensive resources for conservation issues.

If you have artwork that needs attention and you don’t know where to begin, we’re here to help find resources. Call us anytime at the Gallery: 785-580-4515, or email us here.

Opening reception will be 5:30pm April 6 during Topeka’s First Friday ArtWalk. The exhibit features a mix of new and previously exhibited artwork and a “touch table” so visitors can actually feel what Carter feels as she’s creating. Learn more about the artist and her artwork during Carter’s Artist Talk Sunday, April 29 at 2pm in Marvin Auditorium 101A.

Carter, a mixed media artist and University of Kansas art professor, is nationally known for working within and across disciplines in the arts. One of her themes is the issue of recovery, represented in the torso forms inspired by breast cancer survivors. The majority of the artwork leaves plenty open to interpretation.

The pieces exhibited fall into three main categories: mixed media construction, painting/drawings and digital drawings, the latter of which depict bags, bodies and books. Visitors who look closely will see surprises tucked into the works, like a hand-scribbled to-do list from the artist or an inspirational quotation.

“One of the habits of my art practice is to look around me and notice what things surround me and how they are connected to me and to others,” she said. “I draw from the patterns of what I observe in the environment, one’s behavior, recurring things.”

Carter is adept at re-circulating items that most people would think of as trash and elevating those items’ status to art, said Sherry Best, Sabatini Art Gallery director.

The interdisciplinary artist grew up surrounded by decorative objects, antiques, statuary, cloisonné and Asian art that her father would acquire through his independent delivery service. “Our home was like a mini-gallery,” she said. She was fascinated by her parents’ collection and developed an affinity for her mother’s stitchery, decoration and notes. This set the stage for the craft Carter would hone as an adult.

Enthusiasts of Carter’s technique can hone their own skill at two classes on wearable art, offered on a registration-only basis, May 10 at 7pm and May 14 at 4pm. Attendees will create their own small piece of wearable art. Supplies provided. Call 785-580-4515 to register.

The exhibit ends May 18. For more information about this project, visit the exhibit’s webpage.

The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library is a 21st-century, landmark library, and features the Alice C. Sabatini Gallery, the Millennium Café, Chandler Booktique, meeting rooms, and free computer and Internet access and training.

Gallery hours are the same as library hours: Mon. through Fri. 9 am to 9 pm, Sat. 9 am to 6 pm and Sunday 12 pm to 9 pm.