Today, Sept. 25, is the final day for Exhibit Darfur at Harvard’s CGIS Concourse Gallery.  The exhibit will travel to Merrimack College (North Andover, MA) where it will be on view from Tuesday, Sept. 29 through Thursday, Oct. 1.  Exhibit Darfur will be part of Merrimack’s Darfur Week and will be hosted at the Sakowich Campus Center.  Other events included a screening of The Devil Came On Horseback and a workshop led by Eric Cohen, Chairman of Investors Against Genocide, that will increase awareness of avoiding complicity in genocide-related investments.

For more information, visit http://exhibitdarfur.com/

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Today – a brief survey of a few art/culture magazines.

The following websites are a good introduction to the respective publications, but of course there’s no substitute for the physical, printed object itself.  And, because most of these magazines are produced with extensive attention to detail, and printed on high quality material, it’s worth making a trip to your local bookstore to browse them.

BOMB | interviews between artists, new portfolios

http://www.bombsite.com/

Corduroy | ‘part gallery space and part storybook’

http://www.corduroymag.com/issues/current-issue

Photoworks | ‘celebrate photography and encourage critical debate’

http://www.photoworksuk.org/about/default.asp

FOAM | international photography magazine

http://www.foammagazine.nl/index.php?pageId=2

Beautiful Decay | ‘a go-to, first exposure sourcebook’

http://beautifuldecay.com/mission/

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Exhibit Darfur will be on view beginning Sept. 3 in the Concourse Gallery at the Center for Government and International Studies, Harvard University.  The exhibit, “a photographic journey of Darfur”, opened Sept. 3 in the Concourse Gallery.  Hosted by the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur, the exhibit has numerous sponsors, including GRI Studios, Investors Against Genocide, the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College, the Sudanese Education Fund, and Spyderlynk.  Links to the websites of these institutions can be found at the end of this post.  More information about Exhibit Darfur at http://www.exhibitdarfur.com

Harvard CGIS Concourse Gallery  |  1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA.

Center for Government and International Studies, Havard University  http://cgis.fas.harvard.edu/

Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur  http://savedarfurma.googlepages.com/

GRI Studios  http://www.gristudios.com/

Investors Against Genocide  http://investorsagainstgenocide.net/

Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations, Merrimack College  http://www.merrimack.edu/academics/JCR/JewishChristianRelations

Sudanese Education Fund  http://www.sudaneseeducationfund.org/

Spyderlynk  http://www.spyderlynk.com/

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A few things have changed with the Harvard exhibit.

Due to popular demand, the opening was delayed.  Exhibit Darfur is now being shown Sept. 3-25.

A reception will be held sometime during the exhibit’s run at Harvard’s CGIS Concourse Gallery; its date is TBD and will be announced on this blog, on Exhibit Darfur’s website (http://www.exhibitdarfur.com), and on Twitter (@exhibitdarfur).

After Harvard, Exhibit Darfur will be shown at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts from Sept. 29 – Oct. 1.

Stay tuned for more updates about the exhibit’s national tour!

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Call for Design: Calling talented artists to create a design for change.

As you may know, we lead an art exhibit called Exhibit Darfur. Exhibit Darfur is a journey through the lenses of 6 notable artists/activist to shed light on the genocide and slavery in Darfur and throughout Sudan. Through raising awareness, we are calling on all citizens to act on behalf of humanity to end the suffering. (http://www.exhibitdarfur.com)

Although our day jobs are with GRI Studios, we volunteer significant time scheduling, managing, and marketing a national tour of the exhibit. In building out the exhibit, and thanks to the support and collaboration of some amazing people we have been able to sell books, shirts, and art to support the expenses of the tour. Exhibit Darfur is a non-profit project through the Colorado Non-Profit Development Center, and all proceeds and donations from t-shirt sales will go towards the exhibit tour, and continued advocacy efforts.

We have a new design idea that we want to explore. We believe that a “hip” t-shirt design can cross-over from cause related activism to main stream, while prompting discussion about the Darfur conflict.

The vision of this shirt is to create a design in Tattoo art representing the core exposures of the exhibit:
• Tragedy
• Slavery
• Refugee
• Hope
We understand the difficulty of embodying these broad concepts into a design, and why we have asked you to create it with your talents.

To give you a little background, Darfur is in the western region of Sudan, and it’s the size of France. In 2003 a group of rebels representing an extremely oppressed and tortured region led an offensive attack on a military base in Northern Darfur. This attack was the catalyst of a dictator to declare annihilation of Darfuris, by any means necessary. Through systematic rape, torture, and murder of innocent civilians at the hands of Sudanese soldiers, and hired militia, the “Janjaweed” (Arabic for Devil on Horseback), 400,000 people have been killed, and over 3 million people have been displaced. The UN is trying to feed the 3+million people in refugee camps, throughout Darfur and Eastern Chad, and the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Dictator of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir, and his henchman. The recent indictment of the dictator has prompted him to expel all major aid organizations that were serving the refugees with medical care and food, leaving the helpless to die in the dessert. In addition Bashir is commanding air attacks to continue the slaughter. Bashir has made statements that he wishes to finish what he started and kill the remaining survivors.

The people of Darfur have an enduring and strong spirit, although the odds are against them. They want Justice first, and they believe that Peace will follow. This is the first time in history that a genocide has been recognized as it is happening. It is happening as I write this summary. We are hoping to design a t-shirt that not only embodies the tragedy of the ongoing genocide, but to show an incredible strength and hope for the future. We have chosen tattoo art, because of the sharp lines, use of bright colors, and proven acceptance by mainstream America with brands like Ed Hardy. We hope to use a design that can be line art only on some shirts (white on gray/black, or black/gray on white), and full color on others.

We hope to transcend the typical Free Tibet, and Save Darfur genre, and design an awesome t-shirt that anyone would buy, and wear.

Our goal is to have the first shirt printed mid-July.

If your design is selected, you will receive national exposure for your talent and contribution to this charity. The shirts will be worn by our Celebrity Ambassadors, Organization contacts, some Darfuri Survivors, and all the people that purchase them from the charity. 100% of the proceeds go toward the non-profit exhibit.

If you would like to take on the challenge, please email me at jeffs@gristudios.com, and let me know that you will be submitting a design. I am free to answer any questions.

Thank you in advance for your support and creativity.

Cheers!

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Social Media… it’s the buzz, it works, but who has the time.

Myspace has always been a fantastic gathering place for us and thousands of talented emerging artists. Then Facebook came along, and twitter, brightkite, squidoo, etc…

Initially we did a blitz to meet the demand and put a profile on all pages that were geeneric and art related. After we realized that there aren’t enough hours in the day, we paired back to the primary colors – Myspace, Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.

Each site has a different purpose, and allows us to engage with artists and photographers from all over. Myspace reaches into cross cultural communities of all ages, facebook is a network of clients that already work with us, Twitter appeals to an older audience of artists, and youtube fills the need of video. Youtube allows people into the creative process.

Are you into social media networking? Let us know why? what are your top sites and why? What has it done for you lately?

Cheers!

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I recently had a new client contact me and ask me, “How large can you print?”. He explained that he had been doing art prints on his friend’s Epson 3800 desktop printer and was happy with the quality but felt so limited by it’s output size, and the fact that the epson didn’t support the 3800 printing on canvas.
I told him that from what I’ve read, they don’t support printing on canvas but people have done it.
But back to the first issue, he needed to have one of his images printed on canvas, and stretched over a 4′x8′ frame.
You’re in luck I said, at GRI Studios we have the 60″ HP Z6100 UV Pigment printer.
So how large can we print?
For canvases that are stretched over our heavy stretcher bars we can produce a canvas that is 52″ wide x the length of your file. So technically if you have a 52″x 20′ long piece we can make it for you. The toughest part would be making the 52″ x 20′ frame…and of course fitting the finished canvas in your car.
If you just want the printed canvas to either mount to a substrate or to just hang on the wall, we can print 59.5″ wide x whatever the length of your file is.
For paper prints , again we can print up to 59.5″ wide x however long your file is.
The fact is you can do a lot with a high quality desktop printer (whichever it may be) at home. But when you need prints that exceed your capabilities and your clients needs, please give us a call, we would love to help you with your oversized giclees.

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People always ask us “is my file good enough”. Let’s find out.
Ideally your file should be 300 dpi (dots per inch) at 100%, or 300 dpi at your final output size. Of course this is not always realistic. Some folks just don’t have that high of a resolution file. For example, they may have a digital capture of their artwork, but it’s not the best file, and the original painting has been sold and unavailable to recapture. This is not the end of the world. 300 dpi is preferred but we’ve found that you can still get a really nice reproduction with half that resolution. In fact we’ve had artists that the only memory they have of a great piece of art they produced and sold is a 75 dpi file, but they desperately want to have it printed for themselves. This is obviously not the ideal situation, but we’ve done so and had great results. Of course we always examine the file closely and do test prints to be sure the client is happy with the output. So if you have a file that you’re not sure about we’re always happy to take a look at it for you.

The next part of your file is the working space profile. We prefer the file is setup in Adobe RGB 1998, or if the file contains many intense shades of red to use the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile to get the red tones under control.

The final part of your file is the file format, we prefer to print from .tif files. Try to stay away from .jpegs if you can as they will compress the information in the file and can degrade the image quality.
Follow these general guidelines and you’ll have a greater chance of having outstanding giclee prints that will last a lifetime.

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When you order Giclee Canvases one thing to consider is how would you like the edges finished. At GRI Studios we offer four different options. Gallery wrap, which is where the image is printed larger than the face of the canvas and stretched around the sides. The only downside to this option is that you lose image content as it rolls around the edges. The next and most popular option among our clients is mirrored edges. In this option the image size is exactly the finished size, we then take the edges of the image and mirror them around the sides. This way you have a continuous image from face to sides and the overall image is not compromised.
The final two options are to simply have black or white edges. Whatever your image is, we have an appropriate finishing option for your giclee on canvas.

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When handling your fine art paper prints from GRI Studios it is important to handle them with care. Be sure to have clean hands and avoid touching any part of the image. It is best to handle the prints by the edges and if possible wear cotton gloves. The oils that are in your skin can do damage to your prints. Although the finger prints may not be immediately visible they can cause damage over time. Also be sure that any shop that may be framing your prints handles them with the same care as you would.

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