Festival Displays A Tapestry Of Arts

The Shoreline Arts Festival opens Saturday, June 27 for a two day celebration of community arts.

This year, the Festival's theme, "Weaving a Cultural Tapestry," features the arts and heritage of many local cultural groups.

A diverse range of music, dance, theater, and all of the visual arts are included in the festival, which takes place on the grounds of the Shoreline Center.

Performing artists on the Shoreline Room Stage this weekend include Rhys Thomas and Jugglemania, the Shoreline Senior Singers, Baile Glas Irish Dancers, Filipiniana Dancers, Deaf Dancers, Melody Institute Chinese Dance, Hokulani's Hula Studio & the Kupunas, Eclectic Cloggers (Appalachian Folkdance), Lakota traditional music by Cindy Minkler and Rhythms of India dancers.

Festival attendees can explore the Juried Art Shows and the booths in the Artists Marketplace. Adjacent to the offerings of the Food Court, the Showmobile Stage features popular bands and danceable music with acts like the steel drums of Panduo, blues with the Dented Trucks, Spirit of Ojah's African rhythms and funk, rock 'n roll classics with Timeslip, the indie pop rock of Kris Orlowski and lively Latin music with Cocoloco.

Art projects in the popular Children's Hands-on Art Arena will relate to the theme this year. Again this year, the Northwest Collage Society will sponsor an exhibit and collage making workshop using recycled materials.

Read complete article in EnterpriseNewspapers.com

Spanish Royal Armor, Portraits, Tapestries At Washington’s National Gallery

For first time ever, magnificent Spanish royal armor will be shown alongside Old Masters’ portraits of Spanish emperors, kings and their horses wearing the regalia that dates back to the time of Columbus.

Washington’s National Gallery of Art perfectly named the exhibition (June 28 through November 1) “The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain”.

Armor is an extraordinarily exquisite art form, a sort of wearable sculpture. Great artists such as Albrecht Dürer drew designs that were elaborately etched, engraved, or embossed on armor.

The portraits of armor-clad rulers are by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, among other masters. And of course, Spain built one of the world’s most powerful empires ever, from late 15th century into the 18th century.

Also, royal armor and such portraits enhanced and exalted rulers' power and chivalric image, so-called “gods in uniform”. This dazzlingly ornate armor was used less for military purposes than for parades, pageants, jousting tournaments, and other Renaissance rituals.

Armor enhanced the power and image also of diplomats who presented these hugely expensive, prized gifts to Spanish rulers. Talk about influence-peddling -- a full suit of armor could “cost the equivalent of today’s executive jet”, said exhibition curator Alvaro Soler del Campo, Director of Madrid’s Spanish Royal Armory.

Read complete article in Examiner.com

Debbie Croft: Tapestry of an Artist

Thomas Hill was a landscape artist in the 19th century who favored monumental vistas. Done in soft, expressive tones, many of his paintings are of the awe-inspiring landmarks within Yosemite National Park.

Born in England, he and his family immigrated to the eastern seaboard of America when he was 15. After attending art school and then visiting Yosemite for the first time, he kept coming back. Eventually he opened a studio at the Historic Wawona Hotel. Some of his works have cost as much as $10,000.

Several of Hill's paintings have been reproduced on canvas, and are now hung "salon style" (covering the wall from floor to ceiling) in an exhibit at the Wawona. For hours of operation and other information, please call the Wawona at (801)559-4884, or visit the Web site: www.yosemitepark.com.

And in the Sonora area, which is only a hop (to Snelling), a skip (over to La Grange) and a jump (through the hills and up to Columbia) away...

The Sierra Repertory Theatre is featuring the lively musical "Sisters of Swing," a tribute to the Andrews Sisters. SRT Artistic Director Scott Viets says, "This show celebrates not only their music, but also appreciates their impact on our country and why their accomplishments have given them an honored place in history."

Read complete article in MercedSunStar.com

Redevelopment Changes The Tapestry Of Quilting Capital

PADUCAH, Ky. - Dressed in black, smoking cigarettes and disaffected by youth, 22-year-old Reuben Gearhart is one of the few people who doesn't like what he sees in his rejuvenated hometown.

Too quaint, too many restaurants he can't afford, too many tourists. Especially during quilt week. Paducah is one of the world's quilting capitals, and every April the pre-eminent quilting show more than doubles the town's population.

"The thing about downtown is that it's beautifully tailored to the people they want here: rich, old people," said Gearhart, who plays drums for a band called Vicious Mistress.

Which, funny enough, is exactly right. This town's fortunes have risen during in the last decade by appealing to "rich, old people," - that is, tourists who spend money - and sprinkling in the things most visitors, young and old, would want within about 10 square blocks: quality food, cozy accommodations, art galleries and, of course, a quilting museum. Even the parking is free.

For a town of 26,000, you could call it sophisticated. The key has been two redevelopment efforts - one for the downtown, which sits on the banks of the Ohio River, and the other for the city's oldest residential neighborhood, Lowertown, where dozens of artists have been lured by the promise of cheap or free land.

Where there were blight, drugs dealers and broken sidewalks 10 years ago, there now are art galleries in restored late-19th century brick homes. The city's Artist Relocation Program has been widely hailed and frequently copied.

Read complete article in Philly.com

As A Girl, Gloria Estefan Wore Out Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’ Album

BY RICK MASSIMO

Gloria Estefan comes to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods Resort Casino for three shows next weekend. Platinum-selling artist Carole King shares the bill and the two will perform a set together.

When Gloria Estefan returns to the MGM Grand at Foxwoods (the venue she helped open a year ago) for three shows starting Friday, she’ll have a special guest who means a lot to her: singer, songwriter and fellow platinum-selling artist Carole King.

“She’s probably been one of the most influential people in my career, as a writer and personally as a fan,” Estefan said in an interview.

She said that she and King had spoken on the phone, discussing what songs they would be doing, but that the real rehearsals would begin just a few days before the show. Estefan didn’t want to discuss the set list yet, but said that King would do a set of her own and the two singers would perform together as well.

Estefan remembers listening to King as a girl growing up in Miami.

“She struck a chord. As a teenager growing up, her songs were filled with angst. You could play them on your guitar, which I did, a lot, for my family and friends at school. She was very cool and very young and successful.

And she was one of the first big female icons, and I think that spoke a lot to young women, and I was one of them. I wore out her Tapestry album, for sure, and a lot of others.”

It may seem odd, given her Latin grooves and bilingual lyrics, but the Latin American tour Estefan just finished was her first. “It was my purpose to go back there and perform live,” she says, “and it was a lovefest.”

She describes three-hour shows where they wouldn’t let her leave — “I was able to really pull back and do stuff from 1976, from 1982” — and she “ended up singing a cappella because I ran out of stuff.”

Hey, wait a minute — didn’t she do a farewell tour of the United States in 2004?

“I’m still fare-welling,” Estefan says, “but luxuriously, in bits and pieces.” Her farewell American tour was just that, she adds, adding that her American performance schedule consists only of one-offs and charity shows in major cities. “[This is] still the one; I’m just doing it very slowly.”

Then as now, Estefan’s problem is fitting her career in with the desire to keep her daughter’s life as normal as possible. Her daughter starts high school in the fall, and “that’s going to be difficult,” Estefan acknowledges. “I definitely want to enjoy what’s left of her school career.”

So the touring will end sooner than later, Estefan says, but she’s adamant that she’s not retiring — she’ll continue recording, doing occasional shows and tending to her other business interests, including cookbooks, children’s books and the hospitality industry.

“My husband [Emilio Estefan] and I are both businesspeople, so that’s how we were from the get-go,” Estefan says. “And I always told him — for women in this industry, it’s never like The Stones. Someone like Tina Turner, that’s one in a million, but it’s not natural for [a woman] to survive into her fifties and sixties.”

Estefan is 51. As for music, she hopes to record another Christmas album, and a disc of standards in English, and to continue writing for other artists, as she has done for such as Shakira (“Whenever, Wherever”) and Jennifer Lopez (“Let’s Get Loud”). “At the core, I’m a writer. That’s what makes me the happiest.”

Estefan was one of the first fully bilingual artists, writing and recording in English and Spanish from the beginning of her career. She’s proud to point out that she can do a full show of hits in either language, though she tends to mix it up.

Writing in both languages “really is who I am,” she says; “it wasn’t just recording something in another language to get to a new audience.”

She says songs present themselves as English or Spanish early in the writing process, and she doesn’t write a song in one language and translate it later. “You would think a song like ‘Conga’ would work in Spanish, but to me it doesn’t.

It’s very percussive, and there are a lot of hard consonants in English, whereas in Spanish it’s kind of soft. It really was untranslatable for me. Songs like ‘Mi Tierra’ I wouldn’t do in English, because it’s on the other end of the spectrum. And the subject matter might not have the appeal as it does to people who are Latin who have left their homelands.

“Love songs will work in either language, but in English I have to make them more cerebral, because you get accused of being saccharine and sappy, and there’s no such thing as sappiness in Spanish; you can be as dramatic as you want,” she says with a laugh.

Estefan’s latest album, 2007’s 90 Millas, was a Spanish-language celebration of the music of her native Cuba (she and her family left for Miami in 1959), and she’s guardedly optimistic about the recent loosening of the rules against Cuban-Americans visiting and contributing to their relatives on the island.

It was a good move, she says, but “the only people who can do anything for the Cuban people is the Cuban government. They need to lift their restrictions on the people. … They let tourists enjoy Cuba and they don’t let the Cubans enjoy Cuba.”

Gloria Estefan and Carole King are at MGM Grand at Foxwoods, in Mashantucket, Conn., Friday through Sunday. Each show starts at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $75 to $250; call (866) 646-0609 or go to www.mgmatfoxwoods.com.

rmassimo@projo.com

Taken From Projo.com

Tapestry-A Day for Women

FORT WAYNE, Ind.(WANE) - Tapestry-A Day for Women is designed to provide a day of renewal and self-growth for women of all ages through educational, motivational, and inspirational activities in an atmosphere of camaraderie.

Proceeds raised support the Tapestry Parkview Endowment Fund and provide IPFW scholarships to select women in the field of health sciences. Since its inception, Tapestry has raised more than $200,000 and seventeen women have received scholarships.

Indianapolis native Elliott Engel returned to Tapestry as the morning keynote speaker with his presentation on the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Using anecdotes, analysis, and large doses of humor, Engel recounted their story of engagement, marriage, and poetic contributions. Engel is an international lecturer and professor at North Carolina State University.

The luncheon keynote speaker was Clinton Kelly, co-host of TLCs What Not To Wear. His presentation, Seven Steps to Developing Healthy Style-Esteem, outlined how building a wardrobe for your outside can improve how you feel on the inside.

Kelly has served in numerous editorial positions at major fashion magazines. He received a bachelors degree in communications from Boston College and a masters degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Parkview Health was recognized as Tapestrys founding partner and sponsor. Ruth Stone, Tapestry project manger, thanked all the other businesses and groups who have supported Tapestry with their funds, products, and/or services, and announced there will be 14 breakout sessions at this years event.

A highlight of the afternoon was the announcement of this years Dedication Award recipient. Each year, Tapestry is dedicated to a female role model whose positive activities have encompassed all aspects of her life.

The 2009 recipient is Patty Martone, who for decades has touched and enriched the lives of many as an educator and administrator with Fort Wayne Community Schools, as a writer and chronicler of Fort Wayne, and as a tireless volunteer who is passionate about whatever she commits to.

Martone and her husband, Tony, have been married for more than 54 years and have two grown children. "I awaken every morning with a purpose. My activity has been my salvation, said Martone." As she puts it, I may be rapidly approaching 80, but she hasnt slowed down a bit.

For more information on Tapestry-A Day for Women go to www.ipfw.edu/tapestry.

Taken From Wane.com

Her Tapestry Saga Is No Yarn

In a tiny apartment across from the Hard Rock Hotel, a 72-year-old nomadic artist who goes by the single name Sola has spent the past three years weaving a vibrant tapestry of Las Vegas that will blow your mind.

Embroidered and textured palm trees frame casino properties. Turquoise blue pools dot the landscape. MGM Grand, woven in metallic green, anchors the south end of the Strip. Golden beads mark streetlights that extend north toward the mountains.

Marquees announce Elton John, Danny Gans, Cher. Air-conditioning units sit atop the Sands Convention Center. Hotels, civic buildings, Hard Rock guitars, motel signs, office parks and side streets all clamor for attention.

She put more than 8,000 hours into the piece, working alone in her tidy, sparse apartment, sometimes measuring buildings and counting windows at night from the tops of parking ramps and Strip towers. If a hotel has 54 stories, she wove 54 stories from the ground up.

Holidays, birthdays, weekends, every day.

“I’ve reduced life to the simplest focus — my tapestry,” she says, glancing at the 11-by-7 1/2 foot work that leans against her living room wall.

Today, with the help of Marty Walsh, owner of Trifecta Gallery, the tapestry moves to Atlantic Aviation, the former Las Vegas Executive Air Terminal, where it will hang until it is sold. As she has with her other tapestries, she will donate the profit to arts and other organizations.

Sola has been weaving cities since the 1980s, when she wanted to create a portrait of Vancouver, British Columbia, for the 1986 World’s Fair, but didn’t know how to draw or paint. Textiles were her only sure terrain.

She mostly weaves Olympic cities, traveling to different countries, then moving on. She plans to be in London for the 2012 Olympics. She’ll know in October where she’ll be for the 2016 Olympics — Tokyo, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro or Chicago. She hopes it’s Rio.

She came to Las Vegas after reading about Strip implosions and felt an urge to document the city before the buildings were gone. Already, her piece is outdated — the Stardust (imploded March 2007) is on the Strip in her tapestry, and the Tropicana marquee lists “Folies Bergere” (closed last month after 49 years).

Recycling yarn from thrift store sweaters, Sola literally wove Las Vegas from the fabric of the community. Stretching a swatch of a coal gray Gap sweater, she says, “See, that’s parking lots.”

She’s friendly, chatty. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend all of your time alone, creating and building a city from yarn and string — you feel like talking again.

She has no valuables, aside from what will fit into a rolling suitcase, and buys furnishings at thrift stores and gives them back when she leaves. She wants to own nothing: “I wear the same clothes every day. I just wash them. It frees up income and imagination if you don’t have a lot to take care of.”

Fleeing is her history. As a child during World War II, she was sent away from her family in London during the blitz. She stayed with a host family in a village in Wales, roaming the hills and picking wool off fences, then returned to London after the war. In the ’60s, she settled in Toronto and opened coffee shops and other venues for folk singers and rock stars passing through.

Her daughter lives in Vancouver. Her mother, 96, lives in London. Friends are spread across the globe. Her income comes from knitting hats that sell for about $40 in Vancouver. “Thank you, Gap, for using such incredibly beautiful materials,” she says, stretching a stylish hat, one of hundreds stacked in her bedroom.

Sola shows no sign of fatigue. Trim and fit, she talks about wanting to live to 100.

“If I can touch yarn for 10 hours a day then I am in absolute heaven and I want to do it for as long as I live.”

She heads soon to Vancouver, where she’ll stay through the 2010 Winter Olympics. A cartoon map of Vancouver is taped to a door. When she leaves her apartment for the last time, she will peel it off, fold it up and tuck it into her suitcase. It will be the last item removed.

Taken From LasVegasSun.com

Temple's $1m Tapestry Helps Save Costs

by DARYLL NANAYAKARA

A TAPESTRY - sewn with threads made of gold - was on display at Ngee Ann City Civic Plaza as part of a thanksgiving and prayer ceremony by the Singapore Seu Teck Sean Tong Yiang Sin Sia temple.

The session for the Taoist temple at Bedok North, which ran from last Friday to yesterday, saw close to 240 devotees chanting prayers for three days and drew a crowd of more than 10,000.

The tapestry, which is about 5 by 10 metres, adorns altars at the temple's religious ceremonies and costs more than $1 million.

But could the money have gone to better use in the current economic climate?

Not necessarily.

Mr Joe Lim, the temple's spokesman, told my paper that the temple already donates more than $200,000 a year to various charities and the new tapestry is more durable.

This means the temple need not spend more to replace or maintain it in future.

The money for the tapestry came from the temple's sponsors, devotees and donations collected at the temple's seven branches in Singapore and Malaysia.

Mr Lim added: "In the past we used regular fabric, but it was damaged very easily due to wear and tear over the years.

"With this gold-threaded embroidery, we believe we can use it for the next 50 years without having to replace or repair it."

The temple had commissioned the tapestry in the early 1990's to "preserve the reputation and image" of the temple.

It would be inappropriate "if the temple holds religious ceremonies using cloths that are torn and dirty", Mr Lim said.

In 1992, temple devotees came up with $600,000 from their own pockets and arranged for a group of villagers in Shantou, China, to sew the gold-threaded tapestry by hand.

The finished product was completed in 2000 and bears motifs of mythical creatures and other symbols of worship.

Mr Lim added that donors were aware of the temple's decision to invest in the embroidery.

Devotee Jeffrey Eng, 49, said: "The temple announced its plans to members. Such a project is good because the art of putting together such a tapestry is rare."

This is because very few craftsmen now know how to sew it. "This is a dying trade. If we tried to get this done again, chances are it would be almost impossible because it would be hard to find people who are still doing this by hand."

Taken From AsiaOne.com

Tapestry Of Picasso's Guernica Marks Whitechapel Gallery Reopening

The Whitechapel Gallery in London's East End has marked a £13.5 million expansion by welcoming a version of Picasso's anti-war work Guernica, 70 years after the original was shown there.

Turner Prize-nominated artist Goshka Macuga helped convince Margaretta Rockefeller to lend the Whitechapel the 20ft long tapestry for a year, which has been on long-term loan in the United Nations building in New York since 1985.

It was commissioned by tycoon Nelson Rockefeller, Margaretta's late husband, in 1955.

Seventy years ago Picasso's monumental painting, which depicts the 1937 Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, was shown at the Whitechapel for two weeks, attracting 15,000 people.

Polish-born Macuga, 42, said she was inspired to revive the spirit of that event.

Knowing that the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid would not agree to let the painting travel, the Whitechapel approached the Rockefeller family.

Macuga said the tapestry had been given extra significance as an anti-war symbol since Colin Powell delivered his flawed evidence on the apparent existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run-up to the invasion in early 2003.

Then the Guernica tapestry, which normally hangs outside the UN Security Council chamber, was covered by a blue cloth - apparently to make television pictures of Powell clearer.

The excuse fooled no one.

Macuga said: "If you are starting a war you are not going to do it in front of an anti-war symbol."

To accompany the tapestry, Macuga created a hollow round-table for people to hire for discussions, filled with war and anti-war propaganda. She commissioned a bronze cubist-style bust of Powell, which she said represented "a figure who is falling apart morally". In 2004 Powell admitted the evidence he submitted to the UN on WMDs could have been wrong.

The commission, sponsored by Bloomberg, marks the gallery's reopening after its £13.5 million Heritage Lottery Fund-sponsored refit, which has almost doubled its exhibition space.

Iwona Blazwick, the Whitechapel's director, said: "The expansion enables us to be open all year round so there will always be something for free to see."

It reopens to the public on April 5.

Taken From Telegraph.co.uk

A Stitch In Time As Work Continues Ahead Of Ros Tapestry Exhibition

THE DEDICATION of the Ros Tapestry voluntary embroiderers is currently being put to the test as they eagerly focus on finishing the tapestry panel 'ExVoto Tintern Abbey' on time for the opening of Ros Expo on April 3.

Ros Expo, a permanent exhibition of the Ros Tapestry, is a dedicated exhibition centre at Priory Court on the quay in New Ross, opposite the Dunbrody Famine Ship.

The 14 tapestries will have taken a decade to reach completion, a remarkable achievement realised by an extraordinary group of people from all over the county and beyond.

Over 100 voluntary embroiderers – some of whom have been dedicated to this mammoth task since 1999 – and their expert tutor, Alexis Bernstorff have never been anything other than committed and positive to the task in hand.

Ros Expo will be open all year round to visitors after its opening on April 3.

Taken From NewRossStandard.ie