At the Victoria & Albert Museum March 15-July 13.

Right on cue with all the controversey about goods being produced and imported from China, it’s time we see the upside to this country’s progress. The V&A exhibit explores China’s current design, art, fashion and architecture scene. Journeying along China’s east coast, the exhibit moves south to north from Shenzhen, China’s manufacturing centre, to fashion capital Shanghai and architectural hotspot Beijing.

As the country has developed so has its arts, architectural and fashion practices. ‘China Design Now’ covers some 100 designers set to influence the international stage as they establish a new norm within their own shorelines.

For more information, downloads, and to order tickets, visit the V&A’s website or to their online shop for information on or to purchase the above poster, Graphic Design in China by Chen Shaohua, or any one of the Hi Panda collectibles (small versions of the larger ones seen in the show and designed by young urban designers Shirtflag).

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Opening May 7, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s newest show, “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy,” is a “celebration of the body fantastic,” so says Giorgio Armani, the exhibit’s honorary chair.

Clicking through the slide show of some of the costumes reminds me of some of fashion’s better moments both on the runway and on the silver screen. For more, go here.

Image courtesy Style.com. From the Superheroes, “The Doge Knows: Philip Treacy’s futuristic Venetian mask, photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, December 1996.”

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Speaking of bursting with color, might as well show some of Jen Stark’s work which is quite literally a burst of color. Done in construction paper for sculpture pieces and felt tip pen on paper, Ms. Stark’s work has been featured in publications such as Wired Magazine, Ready-Made, Seed Magazine and shown at Art Basel (among other venues). If you have time, visit her website to see more of her work, where you can really appreciate her work even more. She let’s you roll over an image to get a close up of the detail of her work, just awesome (Image: “Cylinder,” 7″ x 14″” construction paper 2005).

“Micropscopic Tangle”
22″x30″ felt-tip pen on paper 2007

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Well by now you all know I am a color junkie….or you can even call me an expert–regardless, I am into it. But tell me what are the chances that all of these museums are having exhibits on the science of color at the same time?

As noted here already, The Color Chart: Reinventing Color 1950-Today, @ MOMA through May 12, 2008.
Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975 @ Smithsonians American Art Museum through May 26, 2008 (the first ever full-scale examination of the sources, meaning and impact of the Color Field movement).
Multiple Choice: From Sample to Product, @ Cooper Hewitt Museum through September 1, 2008.
Jasper Johns: Gray @ the Metropolitan Museum in New York through May 4, 2008 examines the use of the color gray by the American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) between the mid-1950s and the present.

Coincidence? Or Connected? I say the latter……….all of these curators know each other and spoke at a “Topics to put on at a Museum convention.” Just kidding, but who knows. There are the friends of friends who know each other, or associations(wink)who know someone such as sponsors, and so on. Regardless, we the lookees or guests or vistors are the winners. It’s a literal color cornucopia………love that word especially when it comes to color (and food).

((Top intro image is of a ceramic plate sample that represents the colors the plate came in from Cooper Hewitt’s Multiple Choices: From Sample to Product which examines sample books and other sampling formats as tools for marketing or recording designs and techniques in a wide variety of media. The curators propose that sample books or samples for that matter will no longer be used….another 21st century fatality as a consequence of technology.)

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So, discussing color is in the air, it’s not just me. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York the exbhibition opened yesterday through May 12, 2998. Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system.

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