Who Arted: Weekly Art History for All Ages

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Akira Yoshizawa and Origami Jun 26, 2023

Show notes

Origami is the Japanese art of folded paper sculpture. It is a tradition that is basically as old as paper. In the 6th century CE, Buddhist monks brought paper from China to Japan. While origami has been practiced for hundreds of years, it has gone through some drastic changes in the way it was perceived by people. Early on when paper was really expensive and labor intensive to produce, origami was for the select few and for special occasions. As paper became more affordable, ordinary people made origami models as gifts or folding cards and envelopes for correspondence. It was used as I said to illustrate concepts like geometry in school and became associated with school children. For a long time, origami remained at a relatively low status dismissed as a children’s craft rather than fine art of a mature artist. Akira Yoshizawa probably elevated the art form more than anyone else. 1954 his first book was published Atarashii Origami Geijutsu (New Origami Art) this established the system of notation for origami folds which is basically the standard for origami instructions today. That same year, he founded the International Origami Center of Tokyo.

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Romare Bearden (encore) Jun 23, 2023

Show notes

Romare Bearden grew up during the Harlem Renaissance. He enlisted in the army during World War 2 and in addition to painting, he made collages, he wrote and he loved music. One of my favorite works of Bearden's is based on a Renaissance painting imagining the return of Odysseus. In his work, Bearden puts black people into classic mythology because representation matters and he wants a diverse audience to be able to truly embrace the work and see themselves in the story.

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Hilma Af Klint | What a Human Being Is (encore) Jun 19, 2023

Show notes

Hilma Af Klint was making abstract paintings before Kandinsky and Mondrian. She was exploring automatic writing and drawing guided by the subconscious decades before the surrealists. The term avant-garde literally refers to those going ahead of the rest. Hilma Af Klint was among the greatest avant-garde artists in history. Hilma Af Klint’s long time in relative obscurity is partly due to the stipulations of her will. She stated that her works should not be shown until 20 years after her death. She was medium who said that her abstract paintings were guided by otherworldly entities. She was a part of a collective known as The Five and the women would hold seances which guided their artistic practices. Hilma Af Klint said her works could not be understood or appreciated until decades after her death because while most artists are chasing trends, Hilma Af Klint was using her intuition to create paintings that would blow the minds of future generations.

My guest this week was Natalie for the podcast, Reframables. Click here for the link tree showing all the places you can find her podcast.

Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Life Imitates Art - The Stockholm Art Heist Jun 16, 2023

Show notes

It was early evening just a few minutes from closing time at the National Museum when suddenly the normally peaceful museum took on the aesthetic of an action movie. An armed intruder walked in yelling at the guards and patrons to be still and calm which I have to assume had the exact opposite effect. He had two accomplices already in the space and they apparently were trained on the guards. Meanwhile, the thieves detonated explosives in two cars parked in front of hotels across town. The thieves were working under the assumption that exploding cars would create panic and chaos drawing the attention of the police leaving fewer officers to chase after them. They also threw nails into the road to blow the tires on any police cars that tried to chase after them. Of course, it seems like a bit of overkill throwing out the nails to stop police cars because the thieves didn’t escape in a getaway car. The National Museum in Stockholm is next to the water, so they fled the scene in a speedboat.

Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Yayoi Kusama - Narcissus Garden Jun 12, 2023

Show notes

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most popular contemporary artists with her infinity rooms drawing massive crowds wherever they are installed. In the infinity rooms, the walls are covered in mirrors creating reflections of reflections that seem to go on forever. This idea of playing with reflections was a fixture in Kusama’s work pretty much from the start. As I covered in my previous episode about Yayoi Kusama, she grew up in Japan where her family owned a nursery. She was surrounded by plans and looked at nature around her imagining not only what was beyond the mountains in the landscape, but what was inside the plants, the rocks, the dirt. This is where we get her signature polka dots. She refers to the repeated dots as Infiniti nets, a visualization of the structures that make up all of the things in our world and even our universe. It seems fitting that in 1966, she created Narcissus Garden to catapult her career to the next level. The piece consisted of an installation of 1,500 reflective spheres. It feels both personal to Kusama and simultaneously generic as the woman who grew up at her family's garden nursery installed a garden of mass-produced mirrored spheres. In 1966, she accompanied the installation with a performance as she dressed in a gold kimono and sold the mirrored balls for $2 each.

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Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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The Ultimate Lego House Jun 09, 2023

Show notes

For this week's fun fact friday, you can learn about everyone's first and favorite modular building material Lego, and how in 2009 on man (with the help of corporate sponsors and a few thousand volunteers) built a livable house out of Lego complete with working plumbing.

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Gustave Caillebotte | Paris Street Rainy Day Jun 05, 2023

Show notes

The Impressionists are probably best known for their loose brush work, that painterly style that allows reminds us paint is not only a noun, but a verb. The Impressionists had great ideas and tremendous talents, but ideas and talent alone won’t pay the bills. When Caillebotte joined the movement, he not only learned from the other painters, he supported them. He was a good friend and engaged with them intellectually, being emotionally supportive and all that, but also financially supported a good number of them. He bought paintings from Degas, Renoir, Monet. He even paid the rent for Monet’s studio for some time.

Related episodes:

Claude Monet

Auguste Renoir

The World's first Photobomb

Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Forgers Forging Forgeries (encore) Jun 02, 2023

Show notes

The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in southern China had over 140 works stolen from their collection, but nobody noticed for years. This is because the thief replaced every item he stole… with his own paintings.

Now some guy working in a museum quietly helping himself to the collection of artworks then replacing them with his own copies seems pretty strange and bold, but this next bit brings the story to next-level bananas territory. According to Xiao theft and forgery were rampant. He said he noticed that people were stealing his forgeries and replacing them with their forgeries. It kinda makes you wonder if he was getting the originals or if he was forging a copy of a forgery. I mean he did steal and copy work by Zang Daqian, a landscape and still-life painter who was also considered to be a master forger himself. Xiao plead guilty in court, but warned that the lax security was causing big problems for the university’s collection. He said that he noticed fakes in there from his first day on the job and obviously quite a few more of them popping up throughout his time there.

Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Satoshi Tajiri | Pokemon (encore) May 29, 2023

Show notes

This is an encore presentation of my episode about Satoshi Tajiri and Pokemon is one of the biggest games in modern history. For over 25 years, hundreds of millions of people around the world have enjoyed videogames, card games, cartoons, and movies. But how did it all get started? For that we need to go back a little further than the 25 years of Pokemon, back to the 1960s and 70s in Machida Tokyo Japan, and a little boy named Satoshi Tajiri. Even though Tokyo is obviously a big city, the area where Satoshi grew up was still kind of rural. He loved exploring nature and in particular, he liked catching bugs. The other kids took notice of his love of entomology and called him Dr. Bug. The thing is, Machida didn’t stay rural. Satoshi saw Tokyo’s urban sprawl pave over the space where he grew up and he felt a sense of loss.

As an adult in the 1980s, he started a gaming magazine, then decided that making his own games would be more satisfying than writing about other people’s games. He and his friends started the video game company Game Freak with some modest success early on. In the early 1990s, Satoshi came up with an idea for a game inspired by his childhood. He thought about all the kids growing up in cities who wouldn’t get the chance to enjoy exploring nature and collecting bugs as he had. He thought it would be great to build a game around this idea with a kid collecting fantasy creatures he called pocket monsters.

Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Putty Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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Fallen Astronaut, 1971 May 26, 2023

Show notes

Fun fact: almost as soon as people started walking on the moon, they started to put art on the moon.

In 1969, Nasa landed the first astronauts on the moon. It was a relatively short stay given the distance they had traveled to get there and the years of work preparing for the voyage. Most people don’t know this, but just a few years later, the Apollo 15 crew left an astronaut behind to remain on the moon since 1971.

It all started here on earth at a dinner party. Paul van Hoeydonck a Belgian artist known for his paintings and prints, was attending a dinner parity where he met David Scott, one of the astronauts slated to go to the moon on the Apollo 15 mission. As they were talking they started thinking about the monumental achievement of putting people in outer space and on the moon, all the teams of scientists working for years building off the work of previous generations and of course those who had made the ultimate sacrifice losing their lives in the pursuit of advancing space exploration.

Check out my other podcast Art Smart | Rainbow Puppy Science Lab

Who ARTed is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com

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