Salon des métiers d’art de Montréal Montreal Annual Arts and Crafts Show December 11 - 20, 2015 This year, Salon des métiers d’art de Montréal (SMAM) is
celebrating its 60th anniversary. More than 420 professional exhibitors from many corners ofQuebec,
as well as other parts of Canada and even from France
are participating and showcasing their one-of-the-kind creations. This is a very much anticipated Quebec arts and crafts show which takes place annually at Place Bonaventure just before the winter holiday season and offers an excellent
opportunity for the visitors to acquire some unique holiday and
Christmas presents.
All works of art at Salon des métiers d’art de Montréal are recognized as "fine crafts" in accordance with the
norms and standards of Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec (CMAQ). This makes sure that every piece has
been designed and made by artisans in full mastership of their craft.
There is a number of works from the MANO a MANO project (photo just below and above on the right), Artisans sans frontière, in Bolivia. You can read about it here.
And there is also a number of excellent works by the students from the Le cégep du Vieux Montréal, a few examples of which you can see in the four photos below.
Old fashioned dresses made entirely out of paper make people stop and admire them.
There are also stone carvings with traditional Canadian motives, as well as vases made out of glass and wood.
And in view of the approaching Christmas and holiday season's home comfort, one will find at the show beautidul blown glass Christmas decorations and colourful warm light shades and lamps.
Click on images to enlarge them. The admission is free. For more information, visit the Salon des métiers d’art de Montréalwebsite.
On the right, just above, work by Kristine
Girard and Annie Pilote,Éclosion, mohair and other
animal fibres, cotton, paint, mineral pigments, and synthetic matter.
December
8, 2015 - April 17, 2016 Pointe-à-Callière, the Montréal Museum of Archaeology and History,is presenting an original exhibition focusing on Agatha Christie, an exceptional woman
whose unusual life and widely acknowledged and read novels left their mark on international
literature. The exhibition looks at Christie through her work, her imagination, and her world, including archaeology. It is one of the major international
events being held to mark the 125th anniversary of the famous novelist’s birth
on September 15, 1890.
A world exclusive produced by Pointe-à-Callière,
the Montréal exhibition features a total of some 320 items from such
world-renowned institutions as the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It also
includes a number of Christie’s own belongings, still in her family’s
possession, graciously provided by Mathew Prichard, her grandson
and trustee of the Christie Archive Trust, and John Mallowan, the nephew of her second husband Max Mallowan. The National Trust, which manages Greenway House, one of Agatha’s
houses that today is a historic site, also co-operated with Pointe-à-Callière.
Few people are aware that the life and work of Agatha Christie, an imaginative and adventurous woman, were intimately bound up with
archaeology. It played an important part in her personal and professional life,
since she was married to Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, a famous archaeologist.
Between 1930 and 1960, she witnessed some major finds at ancient Mesopotamian
sites in what is now Syria
and Iraq,
the birthplace of writing, agriculture and other innovations.
Agatha Christie was no
passive spectator. In addition to underwriting some of her husband’s digs, she
cleaned, classified and documented the work with her own photos and films that the visitors
can see at the exhibition. Some of the artefacts handled by Agatha Christie, from dig
sites managed by her husband Max Mallowan or archaeological sites she herself visited in Egypt and the Middle East,
are on display.
The BritishMuseum loaned the PAC museum a number
of priceless archaeological items, some of them unearthed at digs led by her
husband, where she was also present. A relief representing a sacred tree and a
winged genie, engraved in the stone wall of the Assyrian palace at Nimrud,
ivories, a headdress and necklaces of gold and lapis lazuli, along with other
treasures from Ur, and a calcite vase, an alabaster statue, stone “eye idol”
figurines and tablets with cuneiform characters, are all on loan from the
prestigious British institution.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, for its part, loaned PAC museum a relief of Nefertiti and Akhnaton, a bust of
Akhnaton and several cuneiform tablets, while the RoyalOntarioMuseum provided ivories,
a relief representing Assyrian archers, and numerous cylinder scrolls, vases
and cuneiform tablets.
Agatha Christie drew heavily on archaeology and history
as inspiration for many of her famous novels, including Murder in Mesopotamia,They
Came to Baghdad,Appointment
with DeathandDeath Comes as the End. She
also described daily life on dig sites in a memoir playfully entitled Come,Tell Me How You Live. In fact,
she said that an archaeologist and a detective have much in common: both must
come to understand an event (recent or in the distant past) using their
observation skills and clues that are brought to light, piecing them together
and relying on a bit of luck, too! Investigating Agatha Christie is an
intriguing journey to a time when many of the treasures of mankind’s heritage
were discovered. It is also an encounter with a passionate woman, a brilliant
individual who invented a new literary genre, the historical whodunit.
Click on images to enlarge them.
Hover your mouse over images for description and credits.
Except for the very top and the very bottom images, all other photos in this article are courtesy of the PAC museum.
Read my previous article about this exhibition here.
Visit the PAC Museum website for the upcomingAgatha Christie exhibition activities information. Video Preview: Investigating Agatha Christie - Sur les traces d'Agatha Christie
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has an ongoing policy of bringing together art and music. Keeping up with this policy, the museum is presenting
the Canadian premiere of from here to ear v.19by French artist Céleste
Boursier-Mougenot. The artist represented France
in the 2015 Venice Biennale. His 19th edition of this installation at MMFA's Contemporary Art Square, transformed into a giant aviary, is the largest one. In this unusual pairing of birds and electric guitars, the installation presents more than seventy zebra finches. The little birds are native to the Australian grasslands. The birds produce sounds (music) by perching on electric guitars and basses that are plugged into amplifier. The live sounds on instruments that have either open blues tunings or rock power chords create an ephemeral piece of music. Itchanges as visitors walk around the gallery, the aviary, or rather, in the MMFA's Contemporary ArtSquare.
The first version of from here to ear was presented at MoMA PS1 in 1999. Since then, various works have been exhibited under the generic title from here to ear. While these installations share a common principle—an aviary where visitors can get close to the birds, whose activity creates a live piece of music—each installation is to be considered as a unique work determined by the circumstances of the exhibition setting. After New York, Paris, Milan, Linz (Austria), and Brisbane (Australia), this is the nineteenth presentation of the installation. Although this is a unique concept to create music using live
birds and musical instruments, I felt quite uneasy about this piece.
The Australian birds need natural sun and open air, and also the
sounds they are familiar with in the Australian grasslands. At the museum,
they looked to me hopelessly encaged, at times spooked out by their limited spatial
setting and people, and especially by the type of sounds and sudden strong audio vibrationsthey created. Although ornithologists
approved of this exhibition, and the birds receive the appropriate care, I
still could not help but feel that it was not entirely above the board to
express one's artistic intellectual concepts using living beings - animals
or birds - in an intellectually contrived, unnatural setting for those
birds or animals.
2015 / Colour, Black & White/ USA / 96 min. / English
When one hears the name Guggenheim, what first comes to mind is the renown New York's art institution Guggenheim Museum, the full name of which is SolomonR.GuggenheimMuseum. What is much less known is that the first art collector in this very rich extended family was not Solomon, but his rather eccentric (by the standards of those times) niece Peggy Guggenheim.
The film narrates Peggy's biography and, most importantly, it presents an in depth look on how and why she became interested in art and in collecting art. It tells the viewer about her art galleries in Europe, New York, and of her openinglater in her life an Art Museum in Venice, Italy.
Peggy Guggenheim had a very keen eye for the avangard modern art of her time. For instance, she was the one who first promoted Jackson Pollock and commissioned his works. She also knew and associated with all the who-is-who of the emerging new art in the beginning of the twentieth century. She was even married to the surrealist German painter Max Ernst.
The film is a fascinating kaleidoscopic presentation of life and accomplishments of this very unique woman. I highly recommend it especially to all the art and art history lovers.
Film's Official Synopsis
"She discovered Jackson Pollock and married Max Ernst. She exhibited the works of a very young Lucian Freud in her London gallery, and those of Robert de Niro’s mother in her palace in Venice. Her father died on the Titanic, she was photographed by Man Ray, played tennis with Ezra Pound and had a passionate love affair with Samuel Beckett. In the 20th century, she witnessed and assisted with the making of the greatest contemporary artists, while developing an eccentric, endearing personality. Using rare archival images, interviews with experts and recordings of her interviews with biographer Jacqueline B. Weld, filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland lays out the fascinating, stranger- than-fiction life of the most remarkable Peggy Guggenheim."
PRIX QUÉBEC/WALLONIE-BRUXELLES 2015 For Children's Literature
Le Salon du livre de Montréal 2015 was marked yesterday by the Awards Ceremony for the prestigeous PRIX QUÉBEC/WALLONIE-BRUXELLES for Children's Literature. The prize is given every two years concurrently to authors or illustrators from Quebec and also to those belonging to the French Community in Belgium.This award comes with a cash prize of $ 3,500 for the winners and an additional financial assistance of $ 6,000 to their publishing houses so that they can ensure the books'promotion and marketing in their respective region. This year, the award specifically targeted the category "First novel for beginning readers".
Mélanie Rutten andAlain M. Bergeron
The winners for PRIX QUÉBEC/WALLONIE-BRUXELLES 2015 were: For Wallonie-Bruxelles, author and illustrator Mélanie Rutten for her book L'ombre de chacun (éditions MeMo). For Québec, author Alain M. Bergeron and illustarator Pierre-Yves Cezard for the book Le géant qui sentait les petits pieds (éditions Québec Amérique).
Le Salon du livre de Montréal 2015 November 19-23, 2015 If you like books and reading, you will once again enjoy the annualLe Salon du Livre de Montréalbeing held, as always,at the Montreal's Place Bonaventure. There are many rows of shelves with books of various kind, directed to divers age groups, interests, fields of knowledge, and all presented and promoted by a great number of different publishing houses.
Some books at the Salon du livre are arranged in truly scupturesque manner.
A special tribute is being held at this year's Salon to Agatha Christie, whose exclusive exhibition will open at Montreal's Pointe-à-Callière (PAC) Museumon December 8, 2015. You can read more about it in my post here.
Find the time to visit the Salon du livre, especially keeping in mind the quickly approaching holidays season and thus the upcoming traditional presents exchanges.
Mister Rabbit’s Circus November 1, 2015 - April
17, 2016 The exhibition is the latest edition of the McCord Museum's annual toys
exhibition for children aged 3 to 9. The Museum has partnered for this event
with the publisher Les 400 coups – which is celebrating its 20th anniversary –
and the successful children’s book series Monsieur Lapin, written by
Pascal Hérault and illustrated by Geneviève Després.
Parents and children will
explore the circus and discover toys from the Museum’s collection in a setting entertaining for the whole family. In addition,
visitors will have a chance to take part in an investigation with a long-eared celebrity Mister Rabbit during activities for the Holiday Season and also the Spring Break.
Visitors will have
a chance to see more than 200 artefacts from the McCordMuseum’s
toy and decorative arts collection, several of them on display in public for
the first time. Among them are fortune-telling deck (1919), animals and
characters from the Humpty Dumpty circus (around 1920), a mechanical toy
inspired by the roller coaster in Coney
Island, New York
(1945-1949) and the clown puppet Clarabell (around 1950). Further
information about the toys is provided with each display.
The circus
tent also includes photographs from the Notman Photographic Archives
that recall moments in the history of the circus in Montreal. A reading area, a space dedicated
to costumes and games, was also added to the route.
Admission is always free for children 12 and under.
