Please inform any art students you know about this free to enter competition. It involves $16,000 in cash prizes.

First Prize:$5000 for undergraduate student, $5000 for graduate student

Second Prize:$2000 for undegraduate student, $2000 for graduate student

Third Prize:$1000 for undergraduate student, $1000 for graduate student

Myartspace recently launched a student art scholarship competition for undergraduate and graduate students. The competition is free to enter and is open to art students throughout the world. In order to enter and submit a portfolio/gallery students must be a member of the myartspace community.
Membership is free.

The scholarship program is intended for students who exhibit exceptional artistic excellence in their chosen medium. Including photography and video, both contemporary and traditional in nature. Myartspace is providing 3 scholarship prizes for undergraduate students and separately 3 scholarship
prizes for graduate students. Creating a portfolio and gallery is quick and easy using the Gallery Wizard on the site.

The deadline for submission is November 21, 2008. Scholarship winners are announced on December 19th, 2008. Students interested in signing up for the myartspace scholarship competition can find out more details by clicking visiting– www.myartspace.com/scholarships

via The Independent:
We may be living in the era of the email, but one young illustrator has proved that the art of correspondence is far from dead. While working for her degree at Glasgow School of Art Harriet Russell decided to find out exactly what lengths the men and women of the Royal Mail were willing to go to to ensure the safe delivery of her missives.

To put them to the test she concealed the addresses of 130 letters to herself in a series of increasingly complex puzzles and ciphers. Among the disguises she employed were dot-to-dot drawings, anagrams and cartoons. The answer, it seems, was very far indeed. Amazingly, only 10 failed to complete their journey back to her.

In another pleasing twist to the story, Ms Russell was unwittingly resurrecting a family tradition first begun by her great-great grandfather Henry Ponsonby, a private secretary to Queen Victoria and a veteran of the Crimean War. This eminent forebear embellished letters to his children at Eton with a series of illustrations in which he concealed the school’s address. It was a family quirk continued by his son, Arthur Ponsonby, a pacifist who went on to be Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside before his elevation to the House of Lords.

However, neither quite set about their task with the degree of invention employed by their 21st-century descendant who over the course of a year went to ever greater lengths to disguise her address.

These, it seemed gripped the imagination of Clydeside Royal Mail sorting workers as much as they did their author. Now the results of this unique and anonymous collaboration form the basis of a new book, Envelopes: A Puzzling Journey Through the Royal Mail, published by Allison & Busby, and hotly tipped as a stocking-filler hit this Christmas.

Ms Russell, 31, who now works from a studio in Wapping, east London, confesses that she had no idea her family had preceded her when it came to teasing the postman. She also admits she is no great letter writer, preferring to communicate by email: all the envelopes she sent contained nothing but blank sheets of paper.

She said: “It is an odd coincidence. We used to get a lot of wrongly addressed mail sent to our home, which was Shulbrede Priory in Surrey and that got me thinking about the postal system. The first one started as an experiment to see if it could get through.”

Among the initial batch of envelopes was a letter with the address written in mirror writing. But it was not until sorting office staff forwarded one in which her street name and number were the answer to a series of crossword clues that she realised someone was taking their job very seriously indeed. Especially when the letter eventually flopped on to her mat with the boxes filled in and bearing the proud message: “Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre.”

She admits there were times when she worried that she might be in trouble for wasting Royal Mail time but still the letters continued to find their way back. “I was really quite amazed. I didn’t know who was doing it. I imagined there was a small group of them and I think they must have caught on because a lot of them were to the same address.” The identities of the sleuthing Royal Mail staff have never been established and Ms Russell, who also counts Hubert Parry, the composer of “Jerusalem” among her illustrious forebears, believes it is most likely they have moved on.

“I have never spoken to anyone and no one has come forward,” she said. “But it is clear they were taking part and involving themselves in it.”

The book, with its periodic tables, colour-blindness test and eye-chart addresses has already caused something of a stir in the United States although it is expected to do even better in the UK. The Bookseller has already described it as “a little treasure waiting to be discovered”.

Ms Russell said: “I started out not knowing anything about my relatives doing this so my family dug out some of their old letters to show me.”

For his part, Henry Ponsonby preferred whimsy to ciphers and cryptic clues. His letters bore addresses appearing as doodled signposts in snowstorms or as huge envelopes shouldered by tiny people.

via Boing Boing:
Russian biker busted for driving a non street legal bathtub.

via Art Fag City:
GEISAI Miami, an art fair hosted by PULSE in which artists represent themselves was pretty weak last year, but if visibility and perhaps a few sales is all you seek it may not be such a bad opportunity. Hopefully the fair can continue to coast on the laurels of PULSE. The application deadline is October 15th, so that’s not a lot of time to put together material. Additional details from the press release below.

Kaikai Kiki is calling for entries for GEISAI Miami, the second U.S. edition of the art fair conceived by Takashi Murakami. GEISAI is an art fair model that allows artists to represent themselves in a professional art fair setting and present their work directly to an audience of collectors, art professionals and art enthusiasts. Artists of all nationalities without gallery representation are invited to apply, with no restrictions on the medium, at www.geisai.us. A jury of art professionals will review all applications and select a limited number of artists to receive free booths. Applicants must be able to present original artworks on-site in Miami during all five days of the fair. GEISAI Miami will be held Wednesday, December 3 through Sunday, December 7, 2008

via Life Without Buildings:
Olafur Eliasson’s Yellowfog debuts today in Vienna on the facade of its new home, Verbund’s Am Hof building. Yellowfog was originally installed at the Jewish Museum in New York way back in 1999, where it was meant to evoke the Icelandic artist’s homeland, but I prefer to think that the building is slowly—and beautifully—dissolving in some sort of fantastical toxic haze. No stranger to architectural collaboration and intervention, Eliasson has previously worked with architects such as David Adjaye and Snohetta.