Atlanta’s Youngblood Gallery, Part 3

This is the final installation of my (incredibly frank–thanks ladies!) interview with Young Blood owners Maggie White and Kelly Teasley. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here. In part 3, we learn about Young Blood’s community events, how the gallery navigates corporate sponsorship and finally, the long-awaited True Hollywood Story of Jolene-the-three-legged cat!

Cheree: So what about Jolene? What’s Jolene’s story?

Kelly: I’m a big animal person and I’m involved in rescue, and we all ganged up on Maggie and convinced her that we needed a shop cat. We went to the county shelter here, and we actually wanted to get a kitten but they didn’t have any, so we picked a black cat because there was like seven black cats there, and she only had three legs, so we decided she needed a break.

Maggie: So we brought her onto the island of misfit toys.

Keep reading at Juxtapoz.com.

 

Ginger Williams’s Nesting Dolls

Ginger Williams-Cook, the Jackson, Miss. artist, interviewed on my Juxtapoz blog a few months back, is blowing up the blogsphere with her pop-culture nesting dolls. Besides a slew of design, art and personal blogs, she’s been featured on Current TV and has upcoming spots in the New York Daily News and MSNBC.

For more on Ginger’s work, check out her website. Here are some pics of her latest rock stars:

The Golden Girls

Armsrock & Imminent Disaster in Juxtapoz, Ming Donkey in Numbers

Just mentioning that I have a piece on Armsrock & Imminent Disaster’s Thinkspace show in the current print edition of Juxtapoz (opening next Friday, March 12–definitely try to make if you’re in the LA area), and a story on Ming Donkey’s multidisciplinary approach to creativity in the Spring edition of Numbers:Inc.

Imminent Disaster

Armsrock

Ming Donkey, video still

Also, my ArtWeLove headlines of the week are here.

Sand Animation

Two things.

1) I started a daily photoblog, which means I’ll try to post a photo I took THAT day, everyday.

2) And this, from the 2009 winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent…

Kseniya Simonova’s sand animation is visually haunting, and the impermanence of her pieces lend poignancy. Beyond the beauty and grace of her marks, her hypnotic, balletic performance is stunning. The entire affair becomes more fascinating when you learn that she’s telling the story of how the Nazis invaded the USSR in what they call the Great Patriotic War and Americans think of as WWII, the Eastern Front.

Yarnstorming London with Knit the City

Recently I interviewed five of the seven agents of the London Yarn Corps over at Knit the City. It would have been all seven except that Knitting Ninja has taken a 1000-year vow of silence and, apparently Shorn-a the Dead has been at the “sheep dip” again, which is fine with Knitshade—“More cake for us!”

It was all very clandestine, since the Yarn Corps self-professedly operate “from a secret underground wool-lined bunker in the heart of the busy metropolis” and spend most of their lives knitting under the guise of normalcy. But they’ve accomplished some heavy-duty yarnstorming projects (think street art with string), and they agreed to let me (and the BBC!) in on a few of their more loosely held secrets.

Among their initial influences, the Yarn Corps mention a Nan (must be Brit for grandmother), the Stitch and Bitch Nation book and a herd of knitting nomads. (Apparently, said herd found a tiny, distraught Knitshade after her parents forgot her in a haberdashery—Brit for men’s store—and those wandering knit-folk taught her all she knows.

First off, check out this video on their Nutcracker-themed Knitmare Before Christmas, and…

…without further ado.