Cook, Camilla. Jill Freedman Hello + Goodbye, essay for exhibition catalog. Chroma Fine Art Gallery, Katonah, NY. Spring 2022
Cook, Camilla. Fresh Pics: Contemporary Art in Connecticut Ridgefield Guild of Artists Exhibition Catalog. 2010
Cook, Camilla. Fresh Pics: Contemporary Art in Connecticut Ridgefield Guild of Artists Exhibition Brochure. 2010
Cook, Camilla. Pioneering the Genetic Revolution: Eduardo Kac and The GFP Bunny Project. Graduate dissertation. 2009
"House Parties! 'First Blush: The Joy of Beginnings' Opening Reception at SM Home Gallery, Greenwich AtHome Magazine, July/August, 2018.
Villarreal, Alexandra"Ushering in Fall Season with 'Punch and Sizzle' Art Show." Greenwich Time, October 4, 2017 (cover story)
Hodara, Susan. "Liza Lou's Handmade Sea of Sparkling Glass" New York Times January 2, 2016. (Camilla appears seated, second from left)
"Mark Making: The Collaborations of Alanna Fagan and Nomi Silverman", Laura G. Einstein. VENU Magazine, September/October 2013 (p 68,69, 80)
"Hope Now Hangs on The Walls of Preemie Unit." Ariela Martin. New Haven Independent, November 2, 2012
"Get It Fresh! New RGA Shows Ready for Their Closeups." Laurel Tuohy. Ridgefield Patch, January 24, 2010
"'Fresh Pics' Featuring Local Artists Opens Jan. 23." Rita Papazian. Norwalk Citizen, January 15, 2010
"A 'Fresh' Look at Connecticut Art - Ridgefield Exhibition Features 52 Local Artists." Rita Papazian. The Westport News, January 13, 2009
"Exhibition Celebrates Connecticut Art." Stamford Plus Magazine, December 22, 2009 and Norwalk Plus Magazine, December 22, 2009
"Fabulous Fairfield: Meet Some of Fairfield's Most Fabulous Women" Fairfield County Business Journal, May 11, 2009
"Pens and Paintbrushes: Consultant is in the Business of Art." Harold Davis. Stamford Advocate & Greenwich Times, November 14, 2008
"Annual Holiday Show and Sale Opens November 25 at Silvermine in New Canaan." Westport Minuteman, November 18-24, 2005
"For Some Students, A Local Museum Became the Ideal Classroom." Shannon Hicks. Newtown Bee, August 25, 2000
Calder: Master of the Line
By Georgette Gouveia
The Journal News • November 30, 2008
Three museums this season pay tribute to an artist beloved even by babies.
Alexander Calder - inventor of the mobile and creator of equally dynamic sculptures, paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestries and jewelry - is the subject of new exhibits at Purchase College's Neuberger Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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They go beyond the artist of iconic stabiles (abstract sculptures) - like those on permanent display locally at Kykuit, PepsiCo and Storm King - to reveal a lively draftsman, who used a continuous line in his art.
"He had an early career as a mechanical engineer," says Camilla Cook, a masters of fine arts candidate at Purchase College, who organized "Focus On: Calder's Circus, the Lithographs" as part of the Neuberger's Curatorial Fellowship Program.
"That treatment of lines, movement and how things work is apparent in his two-dimensional works."
In the Neuberger show - a sampling of 1964 prints that Calder made of drawings from 1931 to 1932 - the artist captures the kineticism of the aerialists and acrobats in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus with spidery lines and transparent forms that meld into others so that there is no sense of perspective. Performers and audiences alike lie on the same plane.
"He doesn't form mass and volume in traditional ways," says Cook. "There's no light and shadow in his drawings."
Not that he couldn't do chiaroscuro, creating the illusion of depth as the beautifully shaded nudes attest in the Whitney's "Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933," which chronicles the artist's move from painter/illustrator of gritty urbanism to beguiling abstractionist.
Calder, however, seems to have been more interested in playing with two and three dimensions than with shading.
"When he's talking about two dimensions, he's thinking in three and vice versa," Cook says.
Just as the very flatness of the circus prints forces the viewer to supply some depth, the very insistence of the spiraling, slithering line in the wire sculptures that dance overhead and on pedestals in "The Paris Years" requires the viewer to consider sculpture's relationship to drawing.
"He called his wire sculptures 'drawings in space,' " Cook says.
There are few more amusing examples of this in "The Paris Years" than "John D. Rockefeller" (circa 1927), which imagines the Standard Oil titan as coiled golfer (quite literally); his club raised high in perfect concentration as he prepares to hit the ball. But for the wood base, you would think the sculpture were two-dimensional.
There is a relationship between some of the Whitney's wire sculptures - theatrically lit by Jennifer Tipton - and the approximately 90 necklaces, bracelets, brooches, tiaras and rings that comprise The Met's upcoming "Calder Jewelry," arriving Dec. 9.
"Some of the forms - the spirals in the figures of (cabaret performer) Josephine Baker - are similar to the spirals in the jewelry," says Jane Adlin, associate curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Met, where she organized "Calder Jewelry."
As with the Neuberger and Whitney shows, you can see Calder the onetime mechanical engineer, sometime toymaker and longtime lover of motion in The Met exhibit.
"He never soldered the jewelry together," says Adlin. "He always used hooks and attachments fashioned out of more wire so the jewelry always moved like body sculpture."
That body sculpture, she adds, has more in common with African and pre-Columbian art than it does with traditional Western jewelry.
Adlin hopes that the jewelry exhibit will complete the picture of a bewitching line-man who was never without a pair of pliers and a bit of wire in his pockets in an effort to capture movement in space.
"Calder's art," his friend, artist Marcel Duchamp, observed, "is the sublimation of a tree in the wind."