Aarhus Gallery is pleased to feature the established and prolific, bold experimentalist Stew Henderson as their first guest artist of the summer season. The show will run from July 1st through the 20th, with an opening reception on Friday July 4th from 5-8pm. Stew will be debuting works from his colorful Graphica series, as well as the engaging muted Corplast assemblages.

In addition, Stew will be giving a talk about his work on Tuesday July 8th, at 7:00pm.

The Graphica series started as a material driven idea; Large scale, commercial castoff rolls of Moss paper, previously printed with images of corporate logos, advertisements, and other designs, are rolled out on the studio floor, cut into sections and painted or printed with linoleum blocks. The result, he explains, "displays a tangible middle space between my crude hand work and the highly polished imagery produced by a computer driven press".

Stew Henderson has been exhibiting his artwork since 1977. He has had numerous one-person exhibits throughout Maine including; Waterfall Arts in Belfast, Icon Gallery in Brunswick, Caldbeck Gallery and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland.

The work of Kevin Johnson, Mark Kelly, Annadeene Konesni, Richard Mann, Wesley Reddick and Willy Reddick will also be.

"Variations" is a group exhibit by ARTDOGS studio artists Karen Adrienne, Ian Blethen, John Carnes, Kerstin Gilg, Sarah Miller and Scott Minzy.

The "Variations" exhibit investigates the ways in which six artists viewed and responded to six undisclosed objects that were selected and then exchanged.

The chosen objects were viewed by each artist for two weeks at a time and then passed to another artist for the same amount of time. The artists could respond in any medium and in any way that inspired them.

The inspirational results of this artistic contemplation can be seen at the Circling the Square Fine Art Press Gallery, Gardiner, from July 11 to August 2.

There will be an artist reception from 4:00 to 5:30pm on July 11, where everyone is welcome to attend and to meet the artists involved in this exciting exhibition.

Gallery 170 opens for the season on Saturday, June 28 with an exhibit of paintings by Winslow Myers at the gallery's new location in a historic church at 123 Borland Hill Road in Damariscotta Mills.

A reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. on opening day.

Gallery 170 and the Mason Studio present the exhibit of Myers paintings from 2005 to 2008. Included are several large diptychs, studies drawings and smaller works done in the past three years.

Myers, a native Mainer, has this to say about his latest work,

"In a book on Braque, it pleased me to find this statement by Pierre Reverdy: "The poetic image is born of the bringing together of two more or less distant realities, between which only the spirit grasps the relationship." Some works of Braque embody this principle literally, by means of a bisected canvas, which helped inspire my series of diptychs. I call these diptychs 'Passages' because the word has a multiplicity of meanings associated with voyages, change, death, and contrast, like the contrast between tropic and temperate out of which Wallace Stevens made poetry."

He continues,

"Two conditions or weathers or lights can be juxtaposed in a way that they become one, something greater than the sum of their parts. I'm interested in whatever can help me to discover the "poetry" within the "prose" of everyday appearances, at which point the representational becomes the "presentational." When a painting reads more as an image or sign than a resemblance, its autonomous life derives as much from the uninhibited application of paint itself, from discovering something in the very act of making, as it does from the ancient impulse to mimesis."

Myers has had exhibitions in galleries and museums in Barre, Shelburne, Marlboro and Stowe Vermont, Worchester. Andover and Boston MA, Guilford CN as well as in New York, Rhode Island and Maine.

Publications include: "Alumni Drawings," Boston University, 1995, "Sixty American Paintings," catalog, Kennedy Galleries, April 1980, "Four Figurative Painters," catalog, Fitchburg Art Museum, 1975 ,"Three Object Painters," catalog, Lamont Gallery, April 1971.

"In addition to our featured artist we will be showing gallery artists throughout the summer." says Gallery 170 owner Yvette Torres.

Gallery hours will be 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.

Gallery 170's new exhibition space is at 123 Borland Hill Road.. From Route 1 take exit 129-130 and continue straight onto Route 215 about two miles to Damariscotta Mills, left on So. Main Street (215), the first right is Borland Hill Road. From the north take the Newcastle exit and turn right onto Route 215..

Hawkesbury Regional Gallery will be closed for re-painting from 21 to 31 August, and will re-open at 6pm on Friday 1 September. With 10 exhibitions, a number of functions and events and approximately ten thousand visitors since its opening in June 2005, the gallery is in need of minor refurbishment in order to continue to meet the high standards required of a Regional Gallery.

Once the re-painting is completed the major exhibition 'The Windsor Group' will open. In the 1930s and 40s, these Sydney-based artists painted in and around Windsor, which by then offered a different kind of landscape to the pastoral scenes that characterised the work of many of their predecessors.

According to Curator, Kathleen von Witt, identifying themselves as The Windsor Group also gave the young artists a marketing advantage. 'There were fewer galleries and opportunities to sell paintings back then,' said Kath. 'By giving themselves a brand, they helped to promote themselves and their art.'

At the same time, they also helped to brand and promote Windsor, which still prides itself on its number of heritage buildings and rural vistas set against the backdrop of the Hawkesbury River.

Also coming to Hawkesbury Regional Gallery is Fifty Years of Hawkesbury Historical Society, and a range of events and public programs, including a two-day workshop with Patrick Shirvington, who recently completed a residency at Arthur Boyd's former home, Bundanon. The workshop will be held in the Stan Stevens Studio on the last weekend in September.

An unidentified buyer has paid 6.9 million dollars (6.5 million US dollars) for a Picasso at an Australian auction, manufacture it the most costly painting ever sold in the country.

The 1954 oil on canvas 'Sylvette' went under the sledge hammer for 5.75 million dollars on Wednesday night but the buyers' premium, which goes to the Deutscher-Menzies auction house, took the price paid to 6.9 million dollars.

"It's a historic day for Australia in the sense that a very considerable international picture by the greatest artist of the 20th Century was sold at an Australian auction for a record price," said Deutscher-Menzies owner Rod Menzies.

Menzies owned the painting, one of several Picasso painted of model and muse Sylvette David, having bought it at a New York auction two years ago for 4.6 million US dollars.

The buyer was a New York collector, described by Menzies as a friend and client, The Australian newspaper reported.

Menzies auctioned the painting locally because he "wants to show that Sydney is the New York of the art world in the southern hemisphere, and that we can sell to the international community," said spokeswoman Marie Geissler.

The sale of the brilliantly coloured work smashed the previous Australian record, held by Brett Whiteley's The Olgas For Ernest Giles, which went for 3.48 million dollars last year.

Forty-six powerful works by internationally acclaimed sculptor Martin Puryear (b. 1941) will be on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in the artist's first retrospective in the United States in more than a decade. Martin Puryear includes sculptures dating from 1976 to the present, including one monumental work created especially for the exhibition tour. On view June 22 through September 28, 2008, the exhibition is the first in the Gallery's history to be installed in both the West and East Buildings.

"It is a particular joy to present an exhibition celebrating Martin Puryear's extraordinary oeuvre here in his hometown. The elegance of the National Gallery's two buildings, offering both classical and modern architectural settings, highlights the impressive scale of many of the sculptures while allowing our visitors to focus their attention on the handmade aspects of Puryear's art," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.

Tour

Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where it premiered from November 4 through January 14, 2008, Martin Puryear was on view at the Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth, February 24 through May 18, 2008. Following its Washington showing, the exhibition will be seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 8, 2008 through January 25, 2009.

Overview

Puryear's art is grounded in sculpture, architecture, and craft traditions from around the world. It draws on forms inspired by the artist's wide range of interests—including ornithology, falconry, archery, and objects of shelter—and incorporates not only traditional sculpture techniques but processes associated with furniture making, boat building, and basketry such as joinery and weaving. He has used a variety of woods throughout his career, but also has employed tar and wire mesh, rawhide, and found objects, all of which are represented in the works on view.

"Minimalism became a strong clue for me about how powerful primary forms could be," Puryear has said. Nevertheless, his carefully handwrought organic forms depart from the impersonal, machine aesthetic associated with minimalism.

Partners and Support

The exhibition is sponsored by The Exhibition Circle of the National Gallery of Art. Generous support is also provided by Glenstone. Additional support is provided by Lannan Foundation.

The Artist

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, DC, in May 1941, and was educated in the city's segregated public schools and the desegregated Archbishop Carroll High School, a Catholic day school. He was encouraged by his family and mentors to pursue his interest in natural sciences, and he was enrolled in a children's art program at an early age. Puryear studied science in the District of Columbia Teachers College for two years, but transferred to Catholic University, from which he graduated in 1963 with a BA degree in art. His interest at the time was in painting, although he had a history of making useful objects during his youth, including bows and arrows, furniture, and classical guitars.

Puryear joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where from 1964 to 1966 he taught English, French, and biology, and organized the equivalent of an art club. He observed practitioners of the region's indigenous carving, weaving, and pottery techniques. Puryear then spent two years in Sweden, studying printmaking at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm and observing the processes of modern Scandinavian furniture making. By this time his interest had shifted from painting to sculpture. Upon his return to the United States, Puryear earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1971.

Puryear had his first solo museum exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1977, the same year he received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. International recognition of his art includes commissions for monumental public works in Europe, Asia, and the United States, a Guggenheim Foundation grant to study landscape and domestic architecture in Japan in 1983, a MacArthur Foundation Award (1989), the Grand Prize at the São Paolo Bienal (1989), participation in Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany (1992), and two residencies at the American Academy in Rome (1986, 1997). His last retrospective in the United States was organized by The Art Institute of Chicago in 1991, the year he created stage designs for Griot New York, a three-way collaboration with choreographer Garth Fagan and musician Wynton Marsalis. In 1997 Puryear had his first European retrospective, at Fundación "la Caixa" in Madrid. In July 2001, Time magazine critic Robert Hughes declared Puryear "America's Best Artist."

Exhibition Layout and Object Highlights

The classical geometry of the West Building, where 40 of the works are on view, provides a striking contrast to the artist's organic anthropomorphic forms; as do the modern triangulated forms of the East Building where six works are exhibited.

At the center of the West Building, in the Rotunda visitors will encounter Puryear's 36-foot-tall Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996). Other works are installed in twelve contiguous galleries, organized in related groupings that highlight ideas, forms, and structural procedures that play a recurring role in Puryear's work. Visitors may begin their visit at either of two exhibition entrances on the main floor, one off the East Garden Court, the other at the far east end of the building.

Six works from Puryear's important, wall-mounted Ring series are installed together in one room to highlight the distinctive nature of each object in the group. They include Cerulean (1982), crafted in blue polychrome pine, and Big and Little Same (1981), in which two elliptical ends, nearly identical except in size, meet and seem to contemplate one another across a small divide.

Comprising six horizontal wood segments of varying length and width, Some Tales (1975–1978) is a wall-mounted piece with formal associations to tools and musical instruments. Other early works in the show include the artist's iconic Self (1978), which Puryear constructed by covering an armature with a half-inch thick sheath of red cedar and mahogany, and then removing the armature, leaving only the wooden "skin." For Beckwourth (1980), constructed of oak, turf, and pitch pine, is one of two sculptures on view whose titles refer to the 19th-century African American explorer James Beckwourth.

Old Mole (1985) is one of several works that suggest animal forms. Constructed of woven strips of red cedar, the sculpture alludes to a burrowing animal, as well as a claw, a beak, or someone blind or bandaged. Sharp and Flat (1987) is a squat, bird like polyhedron. The pine planks that form the sculpture's surface are left raw, strengthening the wood's associations with the natural environment from which it was harvested. Other works are painted, including the Gallery's graceful Lever No. 3 (1989), made of carved and painted Ponderosa pine.

Among the several pieces that reveal Puryear's concern with forms of shelter and the interplay between interior and exterior form are Bower (1980), an open hull-like construction made of Sitka spruce and pine, and Confessional (1996–2000), a tar and wire-mesh construction.

Desire (1981) is the largest work on view in the West Building. Composed of a gigantic wooden wheel made motionless by a 32-foot-long, gently shaped beam attached to a tall, inverted basket woven from wooden slats, it stretches across an entire room.

On the Mezzanine and Ground Levels of the East Building, visitors will encounter six works, including two that were completed in 2007 and employ found objects: Ad Astra and C.F.A.O. The latter is constructed from an old wheelbarrow found by Puryear in 1993 while he was an artist-in-residence at Alexander Calder's studio in Saché, France; an oversized impression echoing a mask by the Fang people of Gabon, West Africa; and wood slats that suggest a ritual headdress. The initials in the title allude to the Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale, a French trading company that sailed between Marseilles and West Africa. During his Peace Corps years in Sierra Leone, Puryear discovered an abandoned warehouse bearing those initials. In the 63-foot-tall Ad Astra (2007), a sapling reaching to the stars is supported by a 6-foot-wide polyhedron mounted on wagon wheels that Puryear also brought home from France.

The U.S. government has issued new rules designed to protect children from exposure to lead-based paint during repairs and renovations to homes and buildings.

Starting in 2010, construction workers must follow "lead-safe work practice standards" that are designed to reduce potential exposure to dangerous levels of lead while renovating houses, child-care facilities and schools built before 1978, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.

"We are serious about eliminating childhood lead poisoning," James Gulliford, the EPA's assistant administrator for Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, said during a Monday teleconference. "Exposure to lead-contaminated dust is the most common way children get lead poisoning," he added.

Exposure to lead, especially for children under 6 years of age, can affect the child's developing nervous system and cause developmental and learning problems. Young children are particularly vulnerable, because they are likely to ingest lead by putting paint chips in their mouth.

Under the "Lead: Renovation, Repair and Painting Program," which takes effect in April 2010, any work practice that creates lead hazards must be changed to eliminate the risk of exposure to lead dust. The new rule is expected to cost contractors about $35 a job, Gulliford said.

The program covers rental housing and non-rental housing where children under age 6 and pregnant mothers are living. The rule applies to renovations, repair or painting where more than 6 square feet of lead-based paint is disturbed in a room, or where 20 square feet of lead-based paint is disturbed on the exterior.

The rule won't kick in for two years, because the EPA expects it to take that long to develop training programs, train workers and get the states up to speed to implement the new requirements, Gulliford said.

Contractors affected by the rule include builders, painters, plumbers and electricians. According to the rule, the work area must be posted with warning signs to prevent occupants from entering the area. In addition, contractors must prevent dust and debris from spreading, perform a thorough cleanup, and verify that the cleanup was effective.

"Even though lead-based paint was banned in 1978, we're still dealing with it," Gulliford said. "For example, two-thirds of houses and half of the schools and day-care centers built before 1960 have some lead-based paint."

The EPA estimates that almost 38 million U.S. homes still have some lead-based paint.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of 2002, there were an estimated 300,000 children with elevated blood lead levels, Gulliford said. "That is a great improvement, but it's not good enough. This new rule is an important step toward halting lead poisoning of our nation's children," he said.

The U.S. government has issued new rules designed to protect children from exposure to lead-based paint during repairs and renovations to homes and buildings.

Starting in 2010, construction workers must follow "lead-safe work practice standards" that are designed to reduce potential exposure to dangerous levels of lead while renovating houses, child-care facilities and schools built before 1978, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.

"We are serious about eliminating childhood lead poisoning," James Gulliford, the EPA's assistant administrator for Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, said during a Monday teleconference. "Exposure to lead-contaminated dust is the most common way children get lead poisoning," he added.

Exposure to lead, especially for children under 6 years of age, can affect the child's developing nervous system and cause developmental and learning problems. Young children are particularly vulnerable, because they are likely to ingest lead by putting paint chips in their mouth.

Under the "Lead: Renovation, Repair and Painting Program," which takes effect in April 2010, any work practice that creates lead hazards must be changed to eliminate the risk of exposure to lead dust. The new rule is expected to cost contractors about $35 a job, Gulliford said.

The program covers rental housing and non-rental housing where children under age 6 and pregnant mothers are living. The rule applies to renovations, repair or painting where more than 6 square feet of lead-based paint is disturbed in a room, or where 20 square feet of lead-based paint is disturbed on the exterior.

The rule won't kick in for two years, because the EPA expects it to take that long to develop training programs, train workers and get the states up to speed to implement the new requirements, Gulliford said.

Contractors affected by the rule include builders, painters, plumbers and electricians. According to the rule, the work area must be posted with warning signs to prevent occupants from entering the area. In addition, contractors must prevent dust and debris from spreading, perform a thorough cleanup, and verify that the cleanup was effective.

"Even though lead-based paint was banned in 1978, we're still dealing with it," Gulliford said. "For example, two-thirds of houses and half of the schools and day-care centers built before 1960 have some lead-based paint."

The EPA estimates that almost 38 million U.S. homes still have some lead-based paint.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as of 2002, there were an estimated 300,000 children with elevated blood lead levels, Gulliford said. "That is a great improvement, but it's not good enough. This new rule is an important step toward halting lead poisoning of our nation's children," he said.

Got paint? If you have cans of paint sitting around your home collecting dust then the City has a proposition for you. The City's Housing and Neighborhood Services Department's Graffiti Abatement Program in partnership with the Solid Waste Management Department is looking for a few good gallons of paint as they kick-off a paint drive next week to collect a minimum of 2000 gallons of paint for their 2008 Graffiti Wipeout event.

The drive begins at 10:30 a. m. on Wednesday, March 19 at the Household Hazardous Waste Drop-Off Site (HHW), 7030 Culebra, as Councilwoman Delicia Herrera and City leaders hold a news conference to encourage residents to donate their unwanted, but usable paint.

Citizens wanting to help can donate any water-based latex paint suitable for domestic application to the HHW during their normal business hours Thursdays 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Fridays 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and the first Saturday of the month 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. The paint should be in its original container, less than five years old, at least a third full, and in useable condition. All colors are welcome.

The 5th Annual Graffiti Wipeout Volunteer Day is scheduled for Saturday, September 27 from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Last year, more than 2700 people volunteered for the City's largest volunteer graffiti removal event. During the event, crews are dispersed throughout the city to paint over tagged drainage channels, bridge overpasses, buildings and privacy fences.