Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 23 Aug 2016

Art for Architecture: Kent Bloomer

Tucked inside a brick factory complex in New Haven, Kent Bloomer’s studio exhibits the mix of casual disarray and studious intensity typical of a college art workshop. Scattered about the lofty space are metal stools and waste bins, hand tools, power cords, bottles of glue, and scraps of wood. Models of current projects, rendered in chipboard, wood, and clay, rest on sturdy tables, each an iteration toward the goal of making ordinary architecture extraordinary. “We do hand sketches and build models for everything,” explains Bloomer, who oversees the eponymous studio dedicated to architectural ornament. “It’s a process of discovery, and it can take time.” It also leaves behind in the workshop a landscape of past projects: a prototype of a capital for a tennis facility blooms from a ceiling support; a delicate web of lattice clings to a wall. The full-size realizations of these models, reproduced in stone, aluminum, bronze, or steel, dot the country, where they make the experience of walking into libraries, schools, or homes an artistic encounter. The studio’s award-winning installations include a leafy trellis that scales a wall at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., seven massive sculptures adorning the roof of Chicago’s Howard Washington Library, and a magnificent set of aluminum stallions leaping through feathered wings atop the Great Platte River Road Archway near Kearney, Nebraska. Not all of the studio’s work is large-scale, however—New Haven in particular is the beneficiary of a number of smaller projects that include graceful lampposts illuminating the Yale University campus, and leafy archways and intricate gates at city schools. On a still smaller scale, the studio’s private commissions include a painted mahogany lattice that adorns the side of a pavilion on a Long Island estate, and a staircase in a Guilford home encrusted with bronze forms patterned after…

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Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 16 Aug 2016

Personal Attention: Artist Ann Mallory

Ann Mallory can’t imagine a life without clay. There’s a photo of her, age eight, sitting under her family’s lemon tree making adobe-mud

Art and Style, Artists and Makers / 19 Jul 2016

A Higher Calling: Artist Alex MacLean

  Stunning. Breathtaking. Mesmerizing. These are just a few of the words that have been used by art critics and fans alike to describe Massachusetts-based photographer Alex MacLean’s unique body of work. After more than forty years of shooting strikingly beautiful scenes from out the windows of small planes and being honored with scores of photography awards and one-man shows, he has become, as the UK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper recently noted, “one of the world’s greatest aerial photographers.” “That’s flattering,” says the soft-spoken, widely collected photographer as he sits in his comfortable Lincoln, Massachusetts, studio. “But I’d really be satisfied if my photography pleases people and, just as important, makes a difference.” Collectors are drawn to the incredible variety of geometric shapes, patterns, landscapes, and scenes MacLean shoots rom 1,000 feet in the air. His artistic eye has captured the elusive beauty in everything from neatly patterned fields of wheat to people crowding a Cambridge poolside to scores of lobster boats floating lazily in the waters off Maine. His photographs are in collections ranging from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography to Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum to Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou. MacLean’s work is valued for its content as much as its form. He focuses on the world’s ever-changing landscape and has made a point of capturing images that reflect emerging social and environmental issues such as urban blight, sprawl, pollution, clear-cutting, climate change, and more. As the noted environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote in his introduction to MacLean’s book OVER: The American Landscape at the Tipping Point, “Alex MacLean’s pictures are an irreplaceable document bearing testimony to the precise forces now undermining our only planet. May they help give us the insight to make the changes that we must.” MacLean trained as an architect at Harvard and worked as a landscape…

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