Every once in a while, we survey what artists are doing with chess. Following is a roundup of recent stories with chess and art as themes. We especially like the stories on chess parks. Every city should have one!

• Sculpture

  The player of games • 'Gabriel Orozco sculpts in lint, draws with toothpaste and fills his own socks with papier mache. He once spent six months drawing a checkerboard of black squares over a human skull.'

  Chess on a global scale • 'Inventor János Borbely from the Slovak village of Bátka has moved the game of chess into a new dimension. His idea was to create a 3D chess game using a magnetic ball.'

  Young kings and queens get creative with chess • 'It was a chess-themed night, complete with plenty of strategy and ultimately a checkmate. Some 124 students in the Talented and Gifted (TAG) program at Sayreville’s four elementary schools and their families packed the Sayreville Upper Elementary School gymnasium Monday night to show off the personal chess tables they created as part of a school project.'

  Sculptural chess table presented in Winston Square Park • 'A sculptural chess table, designed and built by a Wake Forest University art professor and two Wake Forest students in cooperation with the Winston Salem Scholastic Chess Association, will be presented to the city. The chess table, called "Lateral Thinking," is located on the sidewalk adjacent to Winston Square Park '
  
  

• Chess Parks are a magnet for the arts. Washington Square, Greenwich Village, New York City, is one of the best known.

  Players pawns in park plans? : Renovations in Washington Square may displace chess corner • 'For some, chess is a hobby. For others, it's a sport. In the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, chess is a way of life - one that might soon be threatened. '

  Artist Brings Chess Board To Life In Washington Square Park • 'Pawns in the game of life? Not exactly. Public art in Greenwich Village? That's more like it.'

  Chess and whimsy lighten up Washington Square • 'Saturday night, as part of a new public art exhibition, Washington Square Park was subtly transformed into a magical metropolitan center of chess and the romance of light.'

  Pricey chess park has critics, finally getting some use • 'Sean Guillory of Los Feliz stumbled upon the city's $540,000 chess park [Los Angeles] on a recent weekday while waiting to get his car fixed at a nearby shop.'

  Outdoor chess comes to East Falls • 'In New York City's Central Park there is a pentagon-shaped pavilion covered in wisteria known as the Chess and Checkers House. The pavilion is filled with heavy concrete chess tables that are often occupied by shrewd chess players contemplating their next move. Philadelphia now boasts a similar escape, albeit on a much smaller scale.'
  
  

• Film and Theater

  Farndale Murder Mystery • 'The Farndale Avenue Housing Estates Townswoman's Guild Dramatic Society Murder Mystery is the full name of this hilarious comedy. This play within a play is a satire of all that can go wrong in a provincial amateur production by a bunch of middle-class English housewives. Havoc would be the catch word for the hapless, inane, mindless production called "Murder at Checkmate Manor," that the townswomen of the dramatic society are attempting to put on. '

  Fit to Kill • 'Adrian, a charming but self-indulgent chess master, lives a life of luxury thanks to his marriage to Janice, an older, but still sexy and vibrant woman who has made her fortune as the CEO of an exercise empire.' • Former Women's World Champion Susan Polgar served as the chess consultant.

  Psychological chess match in 'Kings' • 'Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings and Queen" has everything you could want in a French art movie'

  Checkmate for Chess • 'Musically it is a nightmare – many think Les Mis is the hardest show music around but [the Chess, the musical] score makes Les Mis look like a set of nursery rhymes'.

  Finally, what does That Game of Chess have to do with chess? We'll find out when the film is released.
  
  

• Chess Sets

  Very, very geeky chess set • 'You’re not seriously going to throw money buying a chess set at a store when you could just make one out of whatever spare 50 ohm BNC, SMA, and N terminators with various BNC, SMA, N, APC7, F, UHF connectors and inter-series adapters you have around the house, are you?'

  The Dog Artlist Collection Chess Game • 'Includes 32 specially sculpted The Dog chess pieces with removable head gear, so you can make each breed the game piece of your choice.' • The set is offered by several online stores. We picked the first to appear in the search results.

  Archaeologists tackle chess puzzle • 'A grubby green cousin of the world's most famous chessmen is puzzling archaeologists. The little knight on horseback, recently found by an amateur using a metal detector on farmland in north Nottinghamshire, is startlingly similar to chess pieces found hundreds of miles away in 1831, on a beach on the isle of Lewis.'
  
  

See also Elsewhere on the Web Chess and the Arts, 10 July 2004, for our previous report.