The simple, strong palettes of negative space virtuoso Noma Bar.

This selection of work is from his two books, Guess Who? The Many Faces of Norma Bar & Negative Space, both are published by Mark Batty Publisher and are available for purchase on the publisher's website.

At the completion of French artist Pierre David's residency last May at the Modern Art Museum of Bahia in Brazil, he left behind a interesting and thoughtful exhibition celebrating color and the uniqueness of multiracial cultures. In Naucier, Pierre, commenting on racism, photographed 40 people, employees of the Musuem and art students from El Salvador, and displayed their images in classic color swatch fashion. Each individuals color was also formulated into a paint.

"Because I think that both France and Brazil are multiracial societies where skin color is an important social divide," explains Pierr (Google translation), "The local society is openly multiracial.  The genesis of these two countries is very different, but in both cases, the problem of racism exists across society.  Here, as in France, the skin color is an important social brand. Reducing the interest shown by an individual solely on the color put in an immediate way the issue of racism."

Art

The Color of Art by Joshua T. Nimoy

Portfolio

The color of art is #A79F94.

An average color was calculated from more than 26,000 images in the MoMA art collection. The result was this brownish gray.

Via today and tomorrow

East Side Gallery

Vimeo

The East Side Gallery is the longest preserved stretch of the former Berlin Wall.
It is the largest open-air gallery in the world with 106 original mural paintings on 1.3 km-long created by artists from all over the world after the collapse of East Germany.

It is being renovated for the Commemorations of the 20th anniversary of the "Fall of the Wall"

A nice collection of Polish book covers from the blog A Journey Around My Skull.

"Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature."

On the suggestion of caori, we're looking at the work of Victor Vasarely (Official Site), an influential Hungarian French artist.

Best known as the "father" figure of Op Art, Vasarely went through a number of styles to get there. During his start as a graphic designer, he was influenced by the artists of the Bauhaus and early Abstract Expressionism. He unstintingly took these principles to new levels of geometric precision and fostered the Op Art movement. His brilliant works went mainstream, in the forms of posters and fabrics. Not lacking in confidence, Vasarely used the proceeds to design and build his own museum.

1951-1955: Kinetic images, black-white photographies: From his Gordes works he developed his kinematic images, superimposed acrylic glass panes create dynamic, moving impressions depending on the viewpoint. In the black-white period he combined the frames into a single pane by transposing photographies in two colours. Tribute to Malevitch, a ceramic wall picture of 100 m² adorns the University of Caracas, Venezuela which he co-designed in 1954 with the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, is a major work of this period. Kinetic art flourished and works by Vasarely, Calder, Duchamp, Man Ray, Soto, Tinguely were exhibited at the Denise René gallery under the title Le Mouvement (the motion). Vasarely published his Yellow Manifest. Building on the research of constructivist and Bauhaus pioneers, he postulated that visual kinetics (plastique cinétique) relied on the perception of the viewer who is considered the sole creator, playing with optical illusions.

Books

Designing Obama

Design Obama | KICKSTARTER | Twitter

"The Obama presidential campaign was innovative. For the first time in American politics, a candidate used art and design to bring together the American people—capturing their voices in a visual way."

"The Design Director of the Obama campaign, Scott Thomas (who is, like me, a member of The Post Family *editor disclosure), has collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art and design from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters."

"The Obama campaign was successful because it was powered by small donations from supporters. We believe this is the right model for things other than political campaigns, so to fund Designing Obama, we have teamed with KICKSTARTER, whose mission it is to assist the funding of creative ideas and endeavors. We believe the Obama-like fundraising model is the perfect way to ensure the book's integrity and quality. Support the project; fund its creation. Our goal is the amount needed for a minimum run. We will order as many books ordered. No overstock and wasted paper. We hope you support our approach."

"The 360-page book is full-color and hardbound, highly crafted with an embossed sleeve. Forewords written by Steven Heller and Michael Bierut."

The HTML Color Codes exhibition features a selection of internet based artwork that address the topic of digital color. The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a “ready-made” color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed. The rationale for this question stems from theories of perception that argue that color is a not ready-made object found in a paint set or machine, but rather it is an experience that results from a complex process of light interacting with the retina and human nervous system.

The exhibition begins and ends along a polemic. On one extreme, color is viewed exclusively in terms of its “ready-made” code, indicated by the programming language that the artist has used. In order to use color on the internet, one must adopt the standardized hexadecimal system of color values. This system involves designating a six-digit code combined of letters and numbers (such as 0000cc for a deep blue), which is then interpreted by HTML for online visualization. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a programming language conventionally used for coding and structuring the elements on a web page. Software applications such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe Flash automate coding so that designers or artists can manipulate the space and plug in graphics without memorizing code. The first four artists featured in the exhibition (Chris Ashley, Michael Demers, Brian Piana, and Owen Plotkin) demonstrate the some of the possibilities for hexadecimal values in color-based, visual, internet art.

Look, See by Chris Ashley

Project

Look, See is on an ongoing series of HTML drawings that Ashley begun in 2000. The drawings are made using HTML tables in the WYSIWYG editor in Dreamweaver, a software application used to create websites. The WYSIWYG editor (What Your See Is What You Get) is a tool used for editing a web content that, unlike writing source code, allows for the direct manipulation of the colors and shapes that will appear online. The HTML table is a grid with a designated number of rows and columns. After making the selections for the table, Ashley assigns a hexadecimal value to each square in the grid, giving it its color and code. A new HTML drawing is made every day. The selections for this exhibition are the set of drawings from April 2009. All the images vary to some degree. However, a general aesthetic is at work throughout---solid and mostly opaque colored squares and rectangles that create a larger square shaped image. At the same time, the trick is that there is no image. It is solely code and its execution. If a user tries to click on the “image” to save it, she will find this impossible. Look, See plays with the intrinsic grid that structures most content on online (vector based images are the exception). While still retaining reference to this constraint, Ashley also manages to make each drawing visually elegant.

A wonderful set of bird prints from Josh Brill.

The Flora Fauna collection is a cataloging of the design identities of plants and animals from around the world. Examining the visual character differences and similarities of species. A field guide of discovery, beginning with birds.