seasons greetings!
Art21 is grateful for your support of its films and education programs this year. Many thanks to all of you who hosted or attended screenings, bought DVDs or books, or made contributions to Art21’s 2007 Annual Fund.
There is still time to make a holiday gift to Art21 by donating online HERE. If you’d like to give the gift of the Art:21 series, DVDs and books can be purchased online at Shop PBS HERE.
All of us at Art21 wish you a peaceful holiday season and joyous new year! The Art21 blog will return in January. 
Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Donations to Art21 support the production of Art21’s PBS series, multimedia and internet-based education resources, film archive, and public programs.
The Dallas Museum of Art presently hosts an installation by Season 2 artist Gabriel Orozco. Gabriel Orozco: Inner Circles of the Wall premieres one of his sculptural installations from 1999. Orozco, who uses multiple media including installation, photography, video and sculpture, has a keen interest in geometry. The exhibition highlights the circle motif that recurs throughout the artist’s work in both literal and compositional forms.
Orozco is known for blurring the boundaries between the conceptual and the formal, suggesting complex systems and ideas that re-imagine everyday objects and images. He has been extremely influential on a younger generation of artists in Mexico and internationally.
For the Dallas installation, Orozco had masons cut a plaster wall in his Paris gallery into numerous parts. He then drew precise graphite circles that just touch the irregular edges of these pieces, and then placed the pieces on the gallery floor and against the walls. Inner Circles of the Wall suggests the here and now of bare matter, as well as the beauty of the infinite realms of a perfect and perfectly logical geometry.
Taschen, the German publisher specializing in art, design, and architecture, has released a new monographic masterpiece on Walton Ford, an artist featured in Season 2 who creates naturalistic and consistently surprising animal illustrations. Entitled Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra, this book is the first in-depth exploration of Ford’s body of work. It includes 12 horizontal and 4 vertical foldouts, along with dozen of details, Ford’s bio, an appendix with substantial excerpts from textual sources for Ford’s paintings, and an introduction by Bill Buford, writer and former fiction editor of the New Yorker (he is still a staff writer), where he often used Ford’s work to illustrate his stories. Pancha Tantra is hand-crafted and limited to a 1,600-copy limited edition signed by the artist.
In addition, for the exclusive Art edition, limited to the first 100 copies, Ford worked with master printer Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, New Hampshire, using the traditional techniques of line etching, aquatint, drypoint, and spite-bite aquatint to make Limed Blossoms, an original six-color intaglio print.
As the Spanish magazine El Pais Semanal points out, Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra is not just a luxury book, but a discovery of the artist himself, as is work is less familiar in Europe.
For more information about Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra and prices, visit Taschen’s website.