Artist Ginny Ruffner Reimagines Nature

Smithsonian American Art Museum

A photograph of a person holding an ipad with an image of a flower on it.

Ginny Ruffner with Grant Kirkpatrick, Digitalis artherium (Double art flowers), 2017, sculpture (handblown glass with acrylic paint tree rings), island (plywood, low-density foam, fiberglass, epoxy, sand, pebbles, and acrylic paint), and holographic image. Sculpture: 9 x 13 x 11 1⁄2 in. Installation view at MadArt Studio, 2018. Courtesy MadArt. Photo by James Harnois.

Shanti Boyle is an intern with SAAM’s Office of External Affairs and Digital Strategies.

Internationally renowned artist Ginny Ruffner does not consider herself only a glass artist. “I am an artist… glass is just one of the media I use,” she said in an interview with Nora Atkinson, the Lloyd Herman Acting Curator-in-Charge at the Renwick Gallery. In her latest exhibition, Ginny Ruffner: Reforestation of the Imagination, opening June 28, 2019, at the Renwick Gallery, Ruffner combines glass, drawing and augmented reality (AR) technology to create a multidimensional landscape that calls into question our very notions of reality and fantasy, of concrete and abstract, and of desolation and hope.

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Juli 10th, 2019 · Tags: Contemporary Art · Digi-Arts · Featured Artist · Marcel Duchamp · Nature · SAAM

From the Archibald to Duchamp

Sasha Grishin

Archibald Exhibition 2019

Recently on a visit to Sydney I popped into the Art Gallery of New South Wales and saw the Archibald Prize 2019 exhibition and The Essential Duchamp from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.The only thing that they have in common is the $20 ticket price to enter each exhibition. This year’s Archibald is one of the most forgettable in years and the fairest outcome would have been to not have awarded the prize this year. Tony Costa got the $100,000 gong for a lacklustre portrait of the artist Lindy Lee. It is a particularly shallow painting that may try to engage with Lee’s practice as a Buddhist, but fails to capture any of the profundity of the artist’s practice

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Juli 7th, 2019 · Tags: Australia · Exhibition · Marcel Duchamp

10 Most Controversial Pieces of Art

by Justine Leonhardt

Serving as a mirror held up to the face of the world, one of the primary functions of art is to take a closer look at nature and ourselves, reflecting a hard kernel of truth that “washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, as Picasso said. Whether it’s been the haunting smile of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, which ushered in fifteen minutes of fame for everything, art has managed to shock the public on many occasions, either from a work that has been particularly revelatory and thought provoking or one that seemed to exist for the mere sake of pomp and indulgence.

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Juli 15th, 2016 · Tags: Campbell’s Soup · Damien Hirst · Jasper Johns · Marcel Duchamp · Mona Lisa · Pablo Picasso · René Magritte · Robert Rauschenberg · Salvador Dali