tapeworm

The opening of our new gallery has progressed in my mind from 'place to park our inventory while we're not traveling' to 'all I can think about'. Don't tell Genna, he thinks I still have everything in it's proper perspective.

Thursday we moved in furniture. This morning I started bringing in all of what I like to call 'the giblets' (my nonsensical term for accessories). I drug in a full car load of pots, quilts, art books, and rugs and then met with my gallery neighbor Joey Bradley to work out the design for our new signage.

We'll have a vertical 'art gallery' banner hanging above the front door and window vinyl with 'Grushovenko Gallery, fine art and craft' on the window. I picked out this font:



which I thought was really au courant. Joey informed me that OCR A Extended is embarrassingly 2009 and totally gauche (my words, his sentiment). He basically told me that he could not be associated with such a loser, so in the end we settled on the font that Ed Ruscha uses in his paintings:



It's called 'tapeworm'



and Mr. Ruscha refers to it as:



and that's exactly what I was going for, so...perfect. Hopefully it will still be in vogue by the time the signage goes up next week. (I kid Joey. He was very sweet and helpful and I always appreciate his excellent advice.)

I had no idea that designers had such strong feelings about fonts. I did, however, know that most people have grown to hate comic sans with a white hot passion. My good friend Kathrine Allen-Coleman had a fantastic, foul mouthed little movie about the poor fellow on her facebook feed today. Enjoy! (Unless you're not a big fan of cursing, then please ignore.)

I'm Comic Sans, Asshole from joehollier on Vimeo.

triple crown!

Genna and I are back home after nearly a month on the road. This was our longest trip yet...3500 total miles driven. We'd like to say a huge thank you to all of our friends and clients in DesMoines, Omaha, Denver, and Madison that made this our best tour yet.

Here we are at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha:



Same place, Genna with a giant hypno head:



Same place, me riding a pencil:



Genna running from a T-rex on his birthday (I wish I had video of this as right after this moment his funny face turned to a fearful face as he went running out of control down the hill, eating it at the bottom. He wasn't hurt.):



and us in the Rocky Mountains:



I'm also delighted to report that we won an award at all three of our festivals! Genna's calling it the 'triple crown'. Best of show in DesMoines, Juror's Award in Denver, and an Invitational award in Madison. The best thing about this is that we're now jury exempt for those shows next year. All of my festival friends out there will know how much this means. The jury process for these shows is so competitive that it's not at all unusual to have a great show in a city one year and then wait several years to get back in. So, yay!

Our other big news is that while we were away, a full studio opened up at the Flat Iron Studios building here in Greenville. Our good friend and artist Kent Ambler had graciously offered to split his space there with us so we already had plans to join the Flat Iron family, but we're even more excited that we'll now have a full gallery/studio space to play around with. We'll start our move in process tomorrow so I'll have lots more soon about our new partners, future plans, and the before/after of our new place.