The Visual Artworker

On Home Turf

2012-01-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

Sculpture and paintings by
Len Urso

Time to stroll the blocks around Art Walk on a First Friday and you encounter a real social swirl. I am heartened to see so many people out on a Friday evening to view some art and engage with friends and family. I even noticed that some sales were made and that should make everyone's New Years list more cheerful. To make matters even more interesting some of the artwork one encounters on a gallery night really is worth the effort it takes to get up and go.

Len Urso has a show at The Arts & Cultural Council gallery that is refreshing, giving us a spare aesthetic that is both colorful and very engaging. Maybe you are not used to seeing a disembodied crimson hand
at such a large scale? The drawing of the elongated fingers could come right out of a Botticelli portrait of Venus. This a hand that was made to wave mildly or hold flowers - not one to grasp a hammer or steer the plow.

I was surprised to see so many paintings from an artist who is more known for his metalsmithing. It seems as though Len Urso has taken a page from the Cy Twombly notebook - so many of the works have a word or two just barely legible, but enough to create some very rudimentary poems. Len says that he spends just as much time with the paintings as he does with sculpture, and that they are all made in the same room so it is apparent that form building and color are fundamental to this artist's life.

A few doors down, Gallery r has opened in a new space with a show titled "Prologues" by three women who have an association with R.I.T. Robin Cass, Karen Sardisco, and Elizabeth Kronfield look remarkably copacetic, each artist's work seems to echo the others in some way. The Gallery r space is bare concrete floors, and simple boxy rooms, which let the art dominate and speak for itself. Robin Cass's glassworks have a touch of Dale Chihuly in them, but the color is more serious and has the effect of an autumn cornucopia. Elizabeth Kronfield contributes interesting floor sculpture in the first room that look like basketry, but in this case they are not woven from reeds or straw but rather from steel cable cast metal on heavy weathered wood work. Karen Sardisco, who was featured last year in a show at Nazareth College, continues her explorations in painted forms that have the effect of carefully scaled simple organisms of muted ochres and pale greys, almost as if they were seen on a slide under a microscope.

Next door at the Spectrum Gallery, Bill Edward's bring's us a selection of photo and digital works by
Stephen Foster. Mr. Foster has many things going for him: the early black and white silver prints have a crystal clear approach to trees and landscape that gradually gives way to a more tempered scale - all in a modest, easily scanned format. In the more recent work the human presence is felt as a ghost or momentary vision, the "walking man" of Giacometti, less tortured than Francis Bacon but rendered none the less into a form of abstraction. Which brings us around to the essence of color and geometry found in the most recent digital prints on view, we have come a long way in Mr. Foster's career at that point.

Finally, on a sad note - the passing of a friend and colleague from my early R.I.T. days. Norman Williams. He leaves behind his family and colleagues who still hear his voice...

Western Swing

2011-12-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

Herzog & de Meuron
architects
de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

San Francisco is a city with charm; it's a cultural oasis. Our last time here, we wanted to visit the de Young Museum but it was under construction. Upon my return a few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised by the new building with its pointilist copper facade designed by the team of Herzog and de Meuron. About the only thing that remains of the previous incarnation of the de Young Museum are the old palm trees. Now there is a large outdoor cafe with a giant bobby pin (pop sculpture) and indoors there was an opulent traveling exhibition of Venetian painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna as well as a historical overview of Anatolian Kilims.

On top of the educational tower is a ninth floor observatory with panoramic views of the city. A wonderful place to stop and take in the scene. People reach for their cameras and snap away, and I did too. You can see up the coast to the Golden Gate Bridge and beyond, when it is sunny and clear - not always possible on a point of land frequently fog-bound.

The lower level is entered by a long gently sloping staircase.
At the entrance to the show of Venetian painting the gallery visitor finds mural size images of San Marco as well as photos from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Among the first paintings we encountered was a portrait of St. Sebastian by Mantegna. This iconic painting was amazing in detail, and moving by way of the passion and pain it portrays. Mantegna and Giotto were pivotal figures bringing perspective to spatial arrangement in two dimensional art, and the St. Sebastian portrays this new found structure.

Andrea Mantegna, 1470
St. Sebastian

Around the corner in the next gallery we come upon a trove of paintings by Titian, which are so sumptuous and mysterious at the same time. I try to fathom the personalities portrayed, as Titian paints in such a way as to reveal his subject's very nature. A great colorist, Titian follows in the footsteps of Giorgione who also has paintings on view in this exhibition. Old favorites are here including Titian's
"Danae" and the shower of gold, and another one of Titian's last paintings which is much rougher in texture and darker in temperament.

Titian, circa 1575

We enjoyed Tintoretto, and Veronese also in this show. Tintoretto's Susanna ( and the elders) presages Manet, and the arrangement of bodies in space still seems so odd and staged to me. The impression left from visiting this show is one of grand opera and drama, an archaic and poetic realm full of human foibles and longings.

In The Loop

2011-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

painting by Jim Mott

Jim Mott is the itinerant painter traveling around the countryside bartering his talents and creating his life's work. Years ago, when I first met the artist, he had just come back from painting outdoors and I looked over his small plein air panel paintings ( which I just couldn't resist). Jim's project is to travel and paint what he sees. He has been around the United States, and even ended up as a subject for a "Today Show" broadcast featuring him scouting out locations and doing what he does best: landscape painting.

The Center at High Falls is hosting a selection of his panel paintings made on Jim's most recent excursions around the Inner Loop here in Rochester, and out in the suburbs. He and I share many interests including looking for birds, painting from nature, and making observations along the highways and byways if one has the time and the inclination.

Jim is not afraid to paint outside on the snowy days as well as the balmy afternoons, and his postcard sized paintings create mini-environments and containers of light that are very convincing, but not labored. When the paintings are at their best, they have a guileless approach to matter-of-fact realism that reminds me of the late Fairfield Porter, and the panoramas of Rackstraw Downes.

In order to fulfill his vision, Jim reaches out to people who will let him spend a few days and nights at their home; he finds the challenge of painting in a new neighborhood that is fresh to his eye. In return for room and board, Jim leaves his hosts a signed original painting, - and then it is back to the road for his next engagement with the land. Is this a kind of Johnny Appleseed complex?

In a way, this is a grassroots activist at work - returning to the landscape that has nourished us, and by calling our attention to the surrounding beauty ( and which we oftentimes fail to acknowledge ) we are nudged towards responsible stewardship of our country and countryside.

But Jim is not all birds and flowers; in fact some of my favorite images in the present show are of Rochester's landmark factories, signs and symbols, including the Little Theatre marquee, and the Rochester Art Supply store.

Thanksgiving Rush

2011-11-27T17:47:00.000-08:00

Cy Twombly
at MOMA

Thanksgiving car traffic going into New York City is world class, and so it seems that all those people on the road were going to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) - just when we wanted to. So we waited in line outside on a brisk day in Manhattan for the privilege of getting into the building to be able to wait in line to buy a ticket. Then we waited in line to hang up our coats and before you knew it two hours had passed and the only art we glimpsed was a titanic sized Cy Twombly in the entry. I felt a heavy dose of dread in the bus station that was the MOMA that day. How did they ever spend so much money to get so little by way of public amenities for the museum-goer? We look in vain for a place to sit after waiting in line so long.

I only glance at the Diego Rivera mural on the way up to the sixth floor to see the retrospective of Willem DeKooning. The Rivera dovetails nicely with the social consciousness of the early DeKooning "portraits" of everyman, often dressed in ill-fitting clothes staring with distant looking eyes. I like the cool declaration of Elaine DeKooning drawn to icy perfection in a near-Ingres like graphite drawing near the entrance of the show. I went to see early DeKooning - before he commenced with his signature works. I was curious to see what revelations could be found in the earliest paintings. Could you really tell what he would become from the start?

The answer is yes, but you really must pay attention. Even though DeKooning would try a variety of strategies to derail his natural dexterity ( he draws sometimes with his eyes closed, or while watching television ) his artwork is all about the hand and the marks it makes. DeKooning's art has little in the way of narrative, unless you think of the story being told is an analysis of the artist's nervous system with all its characteristic ticks, jumps and jots.

In 1939 abstraction followed on the heels of the portraits, and the jump may have been precipitated by DeKooning's interaction with painters Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis, both of whom were working on organic or biomorphic forms in their influential art.

DeKooning spends part of the late 1940's teaching at the progressive Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Tucked into the hill country of western North Carolina, Black Mountain would prove to be the spawning ground for a truly modern art movement that had far reaching effect in American cultural history. Although DeKooning was there for only a short while, something happened to his paintings that brought all of his energy together with a deep gravitas that still looks terrific today.

Paintings on canvas in black and white enamel may have been my favorite things among the early work in the show. For two or three years, DeKooning made the most of limited color, attached to severe shapes that knit together "Painting", and "Dark Pond", "Attic" from 1949, and "Excavation" from 1950. An instructive collage nearby was put together with cut out shapes and thumbtacks, and one can guess that this process helped hone the consummate draftsmanship that enables the artist to be so convincing.

Fall Opens

2011-11-05T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Johnson Museum
on the Cornell University campus
early November, 2011

I drive down along Lake Cayuga during the day in early November thinking that I have never seen the water look so blue! So, like a tourist, I pull over to take a picture - this kind of marvel has been going on since I moved upstate from New York City. Back in Manhattan there didn't seem to be any distinct seasons, you would just notice that it gets warmer in the summer. For a few years in Brooklyn, I had a painting studio with no natural light, and I began to yearn for daylight. I wanted to have those large picture windows that my neighbor Alex Grey had for his studio space.

So what a joy it is to be on my way down to an opening at The Ink Shop, a cooperative printmaking space on State Street in downtown Ithaca, NY. The show, opening on the first Friday in November is titled " In Tents" - and represents seven printmakers who show their art at outdoor art fairs around the country - they travel a circuit setting up a booth to sell their prints.

The artists, Ann Eldridge, Johanna Mueller, Christopher Plumber, Jenny Pope, Daryl Storrs, Marina Terauds and Heinrich Toh make a pleasant company and their work has a broad appeal. Many of these names were new to me, and I found the monoprints of Heinrich Toh to be very intriguing - incorporating hand drawing, photo, and decorative digital elements along with lots of color and space.

Later, I went up the hill to the Johnson Museum on the Cornell University campus to view the new addition and I really enjoyed the visit. The Johnson Museum collections have been moved around making a new open storage study gallery where you can view anything from a suit of armor, to pre-columbian pottery. The opening of a new addition a few weeks ago adds levels underground, as well as a mini Japanese garden replete with moss and stones and gardeners at work.

Palampore, block printed and hand colored
early Chintz fabric from India

Inside the Johnson Museum I found a cross section of Indian Textile art in an exhibition called "Essence of Indian Textiles" from the Parpia Collection. Here you find the origins of Chintz fabrics in the marvelous Palampore which usually portrays a magical flowering plant that the Indian artisans made for export. Indian textiles defined deluxe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, we look at the rich colors of their carpets, wall hangings, and even the common Banjara folk arts and we are moved by their sense of detail, high level of design and terrific craft.

How's That?

2011-10-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

Extreme Materials 2
courtesy of The Memorial Art Gallery

Two new exhibitions will help start a discussion not likely to be resolved any time soon. Let me address fans of traditional painting, drawing, and sculpture - Things Have Changed - so why not try something new? Some may resist change because of the values that new media seem to encourage. If you found deep resonance with traditional art forms, can you find that in the video and installation art so often encountered in contemporary museums and gallery space? Are the artists featured at Rochester Contemporary Art Center and the Memorial Art Gallery just reflecting our own culture back to us?

I don't think you can easily dismiss a whole category of fine art - say video - if it doesn't fall into your comfort zone. Video artists are working within a tradition that goes back over half a century. The fact that fine art video has to compete with other time based media like movies or television is part of the underdog equation, and part of the gallery and art investment complex.

The equation will change when the average person can dial up your experimental video ( or other art ) and have it in front of them on their iPad or wall screen to contemplate, savor and either accept or trash. The internet is a great equalizer. The internet can present a common - if very crowded - forum for a population of would-be fans.

However, problems abound with a proposed business model that now seems to turn away from the purchase and ownership of an art object. On the side of the collector or fan - they have the experience or own a reproduction - this is the truth behind the notion of the simulacrum for the non-practitioner. For a working artist - how will you support yourself? Are you only there for the entertainment?

Into the breach of this curious transition are two exhibitions which focus our attention on what artists want us to see: Rochester Contemporary Art Center presents "Scapes" and the Memorial Art Gallery has 'Extreme Materials 2". At the Art Center we have video presentations from Debora Bernagozzi, Jason Bernagozzi, and Sterz - all of whom live and work in Rochester, and Jamie Hahn from Spokane, WA - all in a provocative show about human-landscape interactions.

Sterz' projections are centered on textured aluminum panels which influences our perception of what looks like rain falling on a window pane - all in subtle shades of grey in his work titled "Redress".
Beyond that four talking heads on monitors in a work called "Dataspeak" chatter away at each other, decompose digitally and then start all over again after a long pause. In "Form,Data,Form " of 2011 Jason Bernagozzi translates waves of information into patterns that look like a 3D oscilloscope. In the back we have nine monitors showing aspects of a quiet stream with a soundtrack of filtered natural sounds that becomes an odd kind of surveillance film loop.

Contrast this with the new show "Extreme Materials 2" at the Memorial Art Gallery and that will give you something to think about.. So the artwork is not made with paints and brushes or clay - does it really matter? Going through this show I couldn't help but think of the tradition of Hobo, or Tramp Art ( which was actually made by skilled crafts-people ) examples of which can be seen in the Memorial Art Gallery collection. This is especially true for Jennifer Maestre's piece titled "Kraken", 2008 made up of pointy color pencils cut into a spiky cactus-like form, and also for the carefully painted screw head portrait by Andrew Meyers.

A sense of humor pervades the "Extreme Materials 2" exhibit - maybe it is the mocking tone of Sally Curcio's "Garden of Earthly Delights" or the fashionable dress made out of latex condoms by Adriana Bertini in 2006. A wavy wall of translucent Neutrogena soaps creates a corridor that reminds me of Richard Serra, and did I really have to spend so much time looking at breakfast cereal on display as a copy of a Ravenna wall mosaic?

"Extreme Materials 2" turns the art gallery into an amusement park, and what will be next? Maybe a wax-museum, or pin-ball machines.. a real Coney Island of the mind and sensibility. The artworld is fractured and fragmented, and the most we can hope for are threads of sensitivity that we can follow through the woods.

Heating Up The Cool Down

2011-09-20T05:37:00.000-07:00

design by
Bruno Monguzzi
for the Musee d'Orsay
Paris, France
1986

Fall is the season and the leaves begin to turn colors and mount up on my lawn, but I put away my rake to join a social swirl at art gallery openings...and there was so much to see!

You had to be there! Must see exhibitions around Rochester this month include a sterling poster collection by the Swiss-Italian graphic designer Bruno Monguzzi. I had the pleasure of talking with Mr. Monguzzi whose work I have known for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed an illustrated talk he gave to an audience at R.I.T.

Years ago, I taught graphic design and Bruno Monguzzi's signage - particularly for art museums- has stood out at the pinnacle in a world of fast paced visual communications. Those of you who are lucky enough to be in Paris, France would know his graphics for the Musee d'Orsay. (see above ) The unlikely inclusion of J. Henri Lartigue's photo of a manned glider plane getting off the ground is an integral part of the poster for the grand opening, and creates a wonderful parallel in the renewed life of the museum. You will find this all over Bruno Monguzzi's design work - a deep level of communication and pleasure reaching to achieve a harmony with a viewer. These big posters are at the Bevier Gallery, and in the Vignelli Design Center and they can be seen this month at R.I.T.

Brand new gallery space in Rochester is hard to come by but this season there are several major openings, and I found marvelous new art by the New York City mixed media artist Mark Fox at the redesigned Culver Armory. The building is being completely overhauled for offices and retail space and for this month alone go see this exhibition presented by Deborah Ronnen Fine Art. The physical gallery space reminds me of Chelsea where open bays harbor shimmering cut paper works that on first appearance look like scrims of pale vegetation, and on closer inspection become a mesh of written words cut out of paper and suspended over armatures, or hung from metal pins.

Hiding in an entry hallway are grids of silver color in an "Elegy for Jane Jacobs", from 2010, which I saw first, quickly followed by a ingeniously hallucinogenic "Wraith", which is made of large sheets of cut paper suspended in front of mylar sheets that wavered in a slight breeze that made the whole room quiver. The "Elegy", was especially apt as the grids call to mind Jane Jacobs writing about cities and neighborhoods, and the silver grids certainly attain a symbolic reckoning.

Mark Fox was the star of his own movie being projected on one wall, and we can learn a lot more from this interview with the artist. Many of his pieces call to mind the tough wire works of Alan Saret, and also the artist Richard Tuttle. Mark Fox settles somewhere in between - the art is literate, conceptual and not particularly colorful. Mostly, the colors are turned away from the viewer, and they begin to represent (for me) a psychological state of introversion or introspection.

Frances Paley, this month
at the Spectrum Gallery

On a block past the Memorial Art Gallery, around the corner from the Arts & Cultural Council on College Avenue is a nondescript building housing new gallery spaces for R.I.T. 's Gallery r set to pop open in a few weeks, and Lumiere's Spectrum Gallery now open in its new location. On the walls are large pigment on paper prints by Frances Paley, with a emphasis on fashions and reflections. The albino peacock is a key image here, as are the numerous costumes and storefront images which remind me of window shopping on Madison Avenue in NYC, and they are a little disorienting. Here is an art that is quite baroque, with feverish color that blurs the boundary between layers of reflections, so it is hard to pin down just where you are when you look them over.

In another gallery that was new to me, at the Skalny Welcome Center- on the campus of St. John Fisher College I found a quiet reminder of the private vision of smaller scale artwork that has an intimate pull on the eye and mind.

Most of the art in "Interpretation of Site" revolves around landscape traditions that go back a few hundred years to the moors and sky of Constable and Turner. The three featured artists: Constance Mauro, G.A. Sheller, and Elizabeth King Durand have enjoyed travels in Europe, and come home with sketches and reflections on those voyages. Inventive use of printmaking and painting techniques abound in this art as does a light touch with color and atmosphere which encourages gentle contemplation.

A final note to commemorate the passing of yet another artist, friend and teacher - Julie Furlong Williams. Recently, she has had shows of her work both at Rochester Contemporary Art Center, and The Memorial Art Gallery, and her wit and wisdom will be missed.

G.A.Sheller in the Ross Gallery, Skalny Welcome Center, St. John Fisher College

Graffiti With Punctuation

2011-09-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

Some wag said blogs were "graffiti with punctuation". While this might initially get a laugh - blogs do what print journalism seemed to miss, especially when it comes to the visual arts in our community, and that is to get around to see more of what is going on and to address a response that was more than regurgitating a press release.

When traditional newspapers fail to cover openings of shows, or give spotty coverage at best - they cut the links to everyone except the most dedicated gallery goers. If you were an artist who worked on materials for a show for a couple of years, you would want to be recognized. Today, it is all-out competition for your attention, and at the moment the sports-entertainment industry seems to be winning, so why take pot shots at bloggers?

Years ago, I was paid to write about the visual arts, but now I do it on my own - for free- with the help of the First Fridays site as a sounding board. Content providers in the arts are often working on their own- nobody commissions this work, and I hasten to add artists of all stripes say they do it for love, and because they cannot not do it. When questions are raised about how long one can keep this up, I say as long as I am able..

Of Lasting Value

2011-08-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

Waterfall, 2011
by Stephanie Kirschen Cole

The NTID Dyer Arts Center is one of the most beautiful places to show art, and no doubt that
Stephanie Kirschen Cole was looking forward to the way her solo exhibition would look when the exhibition opened.

Stephanie had been planning this show for some time and it does look fabulous, but she did not get the chance to see it finally, as she passed before the work was transported to the gallery. Stephanie had been ill for a while; she was a colleague of mine, and it was only a few months ago that we talked about her artwork, especially in regard to an upcoming exhibition coming to the Memorial Art Gallery in honor of John Ashbery's prize-winning poem "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" which I wrote about earlier this year. Stephanie was represented by the Tibor DeNagy Gallery in New York City, and she had made a few artworks that reflected her interest in this particular poem.

So, it shouldn't surprise a visitor to the show at the Dyer Arts Center, now through August 12, 2011, that Stephanie had a literary bent to her work, which frequently honors philosophers, thinkers like Copernicus and all manner of maps and prints - almost like visiting an antiquarian book dealer - except she is a visual artist who had strong attachments to cultural and scientific artefacts. Stephanie also was a crafter of hand made papers, and I would consider collage as her metier.

My favorite work in this large scale show is above, the Waterfall which when I visited was mildly blowing in a slight breeze in the room - animating everything and looking very Asian. In fact, some of Stephanie's art seems to borrow from Japanese kimono/textile traditions in the sense of patterning and muted colors. I think this work which is made of strips of hand printed ribbon positively dances, and I found it to be extremely sophisticated in its simplicity.

There are certain repetitive concerns in Stephanie's artwork- images are often presented on handmade paper treated with colorfield splashes of transparent color that often frame a geometric shape - which in turn might frame another more detailed object, mask, or tree. One of her most striking images was a tribute to Acupuncture - a form of therapy for pain employing fine needles, it can be seen on the postcard advertising the show.

In this Tribute to Stephanie Cole's Life and Art a special student recognition award is being announced through R.I.T. and The Foundations Department where Stephanie taught for many years. If you would like to contribute please send a check made payable to R.I.T. and mail your check to the Foundations Department, R.I. T., 73 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623

Look! & See! Norman Rockwell at Work!

2011-07-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

Little Girl Observing Lovers on a Train, Norman Rockwell, 1944.

Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, August 12,1944.

Norman Rockwell MuseumDigital Collections; the original painting is now in

the collection of The Memorial Art Gallery.

Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera

at the George Eastman House

When I was in college, students at my art school would make snide comments about anyone's artwork that looked like Norman Rockwell's. Of course, this was at the height of an American romance with abstraction, in the wake of Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning.

Then along came Andy Warhol and the whole argument was upset. Pop Art was a kind of insider's joke about American culture, except that it was seen by the public as a catalyst towards becoming a celebrity artist - taking mass marketing as a subject to capitalize, in Andy Warhol's case.

I can see it now from a new perspective. Teaching art in college as I do, one can see what people's aptitudes allow, among a cohort ( of art students ). For example, students who are learning illustration still respect the ability to draw from life, and they practice that skill. Almost all art students respect the use of the camera, enabling them to build a composition with the requisite amount of "information".

Just as Norman Rockwell achieved widespread appeal as the artist who painted covers for The Saturday Evening Post - he lost the respect of the fine art world as he was catering to his clients and in the process appearing mawkishly sentimental. Fine artists would call this "selling out" or even "buckeye" (keeping your eyes on the bucks $$$).

Maybe today we are all grown up and don't make the fine distinctions which were so divisive about the holiness of fine arts versus illustration. This argument would be lost on the general public, and eventually dismissed - just look at the elevation of an artist and illustrator Maxfield Parrish for example. Norman Rockwell has a lot in common with Parrish, especially on a formal level. This brings me to another point - can you really tell the difference between Norman Rockwell's illustration and, say the paintings of regional artists like Grant Wood?

When Norman Rockwell's paintings begin to sell for a million at auction, people begin to notice, and to collect rather than criticize. I look at the exhibition of Rockwell's art at The George Eastman House from a different angle. When I was younger I spent years as an illustrator and designer; I didn't mind working on commission, and I never missed a deadline. Of course there are differences between illustration and fine art - the first being the intent of the artist. When I look at Norman Rockwell's art on view in the show, I see an artist who goes out of his way to create a pleasing picture suitable for a mass market that tells a succinct story. Rockwell really is a visual journalist who hits his stride in the late 1940's.

Reference photo for NormanRockwell’s Little Girl Observing Loverson a Train, 1944.

Photo by Gene Pelham.Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

Norman Rockwell MuseumCollections.

The George Eastman House presents Rockwell paintings alongside the photos he orchestrated. The focus is on characters, and the gallery visitor can see how closely Rockwell followed his reference photos. His best models were his neighbors - whether it was in Arlington, Vermont, or later in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Rockwell played the role of the director - getting the character's face just right to express the emotion of the story, fixing the lights just so, all with the right props and attitude. And the funny thing was that Rockwell hired photographers to do the camera work, as he said - he had enough other work arranging the shoot and making the paintings.

The interesting thing in this exhibit is comparing the photos to the original art when it is available. I think there are too many reproductions in this show for me, but it goes to underscore the point that this art was created precisely to be reproduced in the hundreds and thousands and millions of copies.

My art students would say that Rockwell was corny, but he was also able to deal with tricky social issues during the civil rights era of the late 1950's and early 1960's.

At the entry to the show, in the short documentary film narrated by Norman Rockwell's son Peter, he mentions the paintings depicting the four freedoms annunciated by F.D.R. ( which I consider to be among Rockwell's finest work) and it is a shame they are not included in the present exhibition. With that exception, we can learn a lot about Americana through the lens and the art of this illustrator.

A couple of funny things hit me as I was leaving the show. I made a connection between Norman Rockwell's use of stencil lettering to sign his name on a painting and the use of that same technique by Jasper Johns. And thinking about Jasper Johns - his flat and frontal approach does have something in common with Rockwell. Then I saw "Merry Christmas Grandma.. We Came In Our New Plymouth"

an advertisement made in 1951 with an accompanying photo of a little boy who looks as if he was straight out of a Diane Arbus photo. With a heightened sense of irony, I left the show and thought about that for a while. It is all about the artist's intent.

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror

2011-06-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by: Francesco Parmagianino ( circa 1523 )

Was this really the first self portrait by an artist gazing into a mirror?

That is the impression one has when reading John Ashbery's amazing poem about the portrait above. The 16th century Italian painter Francesco Parmigianino is the creative mind ( and hand ) behind this famous painting found in the collection of the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Austria. Ashbery's poem is a reflection on a painting which is in itself a painting about reflection with all the subtle and major distortions that one might find in convexity.

Reading Ashbery's poem "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" one finds that the subject is a whole little world full of surface and substance. This past Thursday I had the chance to shake the hand of the poet, and sit among a crowd listening to him read in the Memorial Art Gallery auditorium. Ashbery resembles an old Ted Kennedy ambling onstage after his introduction as one of the world's most honored living poets.

Not only did we have the fortune to hear Ashbery read selections from his anthology but we also came to learn that he is originally from Rochester, and that when he was young he had taken art classes at the Memorial Art Gallery. Ashbery made a remark about the poet William Carlos Williams who also wanted to be a painter but found it much easier to carry around manuscripts than a bunch of wet canvases.

It was no coincidence that Ashbery came to Rochester this week: in the Lockhart Gallery there is a show dedicated to his poem "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" which features eight artists who were asked to contribute images to a portfolio all dressed up for presentation in black circular frames. Marjorie Searl had a dream of putting this show together, and she made a terrific effort to present a stimulating dialog between the literary and visual art worlds.

So here we have a poem about a painting, and painters who made prints around the themes in the poem. Naturally, there are many portraits among the eight prints, though none of them are the masterpiece that Francesco created that inspired this whole affair. The portrait by Elaine DeKooning was interesting ( someone said that the younger Ashbery looked like the actor Stacey Keach), also the Richard Avedon photo was terrific, and the painter Larry Rivers created a work that somehow conveyed the proper literary context showing Ashbery at his portable typewriter.

I should also note that Ashbery operated for years as an art critic, and one should buy a copy of his book published first in the late 1980's titled "Reported Sightings" - it makes a great read if you are especially interested in digging into the New York City art milieu that he covered between 1957-1987.

John Ashbery is also associated with many artists who exhibited at the Tibor DeNagy Gallery in Manhattan. The gallery had refreshing shows of a new kind of representational art at a time when the heights of abstract expressionism were upon us. I made many visits to shows and openings at that gallery during the years that Ashbery was art critic for New York Magazine, so I could say that I have been directly influenced by this corner of the artworld.

I should also note with sadness the passing of a local artist who was associated with the Tibor DeNagy Gallery, and that was my friend and colleague at R.I.T. - Stephanie Kirschen Cole. I was so impressed one day in Washington D.C. to come across her large artwork in the Hirschorn Museum on the mall.
Stephanie will be missed and her art will be remembered.

Every Fiber of My Being

2011-05-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

"Gesture"
by Betty Vera
photo courtesy of The Memorial Art Gallery

In the auditorium at The Memorial Art Gallery, Jeanne Raffer Beck ended her evening lecture on May 12th with a quote from the choreographer Martha Graham. "Keep the channel open", wrote Graham, and it is appropriate to mention that when you visit exhibitions like the Fiber Art International now on view at The Memorial Art Gallery your idea of what fiber art actually is will be seriously updated. Jeanne Beck commented that she was "trying to not make her work look too pretty", but this does not stress the aesthetic sense she brings to her art which is driven by texture and mark making with thread.

Fiber art is more than just weaving of course, but weaving itself is given a major boost in the art of Betty Vera. Weaving is an ancient form of digital art: it works on a grid ( the warp and weft ) and it can be layered. Betty Vera was trained as a painter, but now employs a digital loom to weave images that appear like textured photographs - her art is all about light. At the MAG, Betty Vera won an award for "Gesture" ( see above ) which is a racy blue mixture of cotton and rayon and the complex patterning is an achievement in Jacquard damask. This was the same technique that appeared in two similar works on view recently at The Rochester Contemporary Art Center.

Computer guided looms manage intricate patterns, and we have seen the influx of this in some of the clothes we wear. Once patterns were strictly geometric ( to go along with the warp and weft ), but now a pattern could be anything. I enjoyed "Funny Face" a digital inkjet print on silk satin hanging as a pair in the gallery by artist Hitoshi Ujiie. "5 Generations of Virtue" by Lisa Lee Peterson, also has this photographic look in her woven panels whose focus is on Asian women and their costumes.

Alighiero Boetti, a member of the Arte Povera movement in Italy created many woven works before his death in 1994. Often these woven "paintings" included maps and letters of the alphabet, and this might have been the inspiration for a large colorful creation called "Reconstruction" by the Japanese artist Mami Idei. The visual legacy of ideas and how they travel could be the subtext of the Fiber Art International exhibition. Another example of this would be the delicate batik created for "Kimono Windy" by the German artist Maria Schade. Are those goldfish or fallen leaves in a pond?

Given the events in the world, it is not surprising that the human condition is evoked by award winning art such as Erin Endicott's "Healing Sutra" ( Best in Show ). This delicate work of embroidery looks like a diagram of a heart attack, and it finds correlations to other human forms in the exhibit - most notably the use of x-rays in the "Humanoids" which hang in the main gallery by French artist Brigitte Amarger.

When fiber art becomes truly three dimensional and begins to occupy our space the sculptural impact can be very powerful as with Stephanie Metz's felt work "Muscle Heifer". I also found myself mesmerized by the knotting in Joh Ricci's "Indian Summer" which looks like peas in a pod - and also Rebecca Siemering's suit of clothes "American Made".

Jeanne Beck opened her talk at the Memorial Art Gallery by reciting the parable of the blind men in India describing what they thought an elephant must be like. One blind man hugged the animal's leg and said that an elephant must be like a cylinder, another had the tail and said no - the elephant was like a rope, finally another put his hands on the elephants belly - and said it was like a wall. "Trying to describe art is like that", said Jeanne Beck, it all depends on your perspective. The trick is to keep the channels open.

"Seeds of Compassion" 2008

Jeanne Raffer Beck

photo courtesy of The Memorial Art Gallery

360/365 and 50

2011-05-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Oh, the associations one can bring to the viewing of art does lead down some unique paths. At the 360/365 George Eastman House Film Festival we saw Julie Taymor receive her Susan B. Anthony Award and we heard the gracious comments from Garth Fagan about Ms. Taymor's vision and work ethic. Then we get to see Helen Mirren star as Prospera in an adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest". As the film opens, Mirren raises her staff - and on a distant stormy sea great waves hit a foundering boat, thus setting the scene for marvelous storytelling and poetic alchemy. I couldn't help thinking that Taymor has the eyes of a painter like Joseph Mallord William Turner (think of his "SlaveShip" of 1840, oil on canvas), and in fact the sprite Ariel, in this film version of "The Tempest", is a change agent - who has powers not unlike that of a great artist.

The following day we look in on the introduction of C.Scott's documentary film "The Woodmans"; and stay for the presentation of Francesca Woodman's photos, the testament of her parents - Betty and George, and the episodes that follow leading up to a tragic ending. The epilogue for this family of artists highlights how vulnerable we are, and how we struggle to deal with mental distress. George's artwork changed as a result, from pattern painting to a photographic art that has eerie similarities to his deceased daughter's ouevre. Betty's ceramics get bigger and bolder, and yet she appears not willing to address on camera issues of guilt and regret about her daughter's illness.

Betty Woodman goes on to have major exhibitions at MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then off to Beijing to add her art to the new American Embassy being built there. But the art of their daughter seems to transcend this all - and hold in it some core of enigma, and elusive personality.

Demuth "The Figure 5 in Gold"
courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bill Santelli " 5-0 in Gold"
courtesy Oxford Gallery, Inc.

We are left in a retrospective mood bolstered by the fact that this is the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Oxford Gallery in Rochester, celebrated by the opening of a spring exhibition honoring many of the participants past and present.

I was aware of the reputation of the Oxford Gallery way before I ever set foot there. Artists who I knew in New York City like Morton Kaish were represented by the Oxford Gallery, and an artist and printmaker - Zevi Blum (I was his graduate assistant at Cornell in the 1970's) had many shows at Oxford. What is the Oxford Gallery known for, and why has it had such endurance over the years? First, over all there is enlightened management, a passion for the art it shows with remarkable consistency, and a deep respect for the traditional craft of image making. The Oxford Gallery offers mainly representational art for the wall and some noteworthy sculpture featuring artists from central and western New York.

When you walk downstairs and visit the Oxford Gallery you are immediately ushered into the gallery space by Jim Hall, the present owner. At a distance one sees what looks like Charles Demuth's "The Figure 5 in Gold", now updated by Bill Santelli to commemorate 50 years in business; the painting is clever and eye catching. Demuth made the original in 1928 in response to his friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, in a momentary observation of a ruckus caused by a passing fire truck.

Observation is crucial to the artists at the Oxford Gallery show, so many of the works succeed ( or fail ) at holding your attention - by either presenting you with something commonplace that is beautifully rendered such as the tree in Phil Bornarth's "Wadsworth Oak", or the still life by David Dorsey "Flowers From Another Year", or else giving you something entirely new like Jacquie Germanow's sculpture "Lacuna" .

History was written on the walls and this 50th birthday for the gallery includes a recent find "The Centennial" -by Lilly Martin Spencer, an American painter ( 1822-1902) of genre scenes known primarily here in Rochester for her work "Peeling Onions" usually on view at the MAG. "The Centennial" is a large unfinished canvas depicting age and youth at a party; it was found on the artist's easel at the time of her death.

On the elegiac note one must acknowledge the passing of Nancy Buckett also a former owner and director of the Oxford Gallery who died earlier this month, and the aforementioned Zevi Blum whose print hangs in the entry vestibule. Both were friends and a part of the fabric of the visual arts scene and they will be missed.

Wishing the Oxford Gallery well for all the support that has been given to the artists whose vision is celebrated with this and what one hopes will be many exhibitions to come. Go and enjoy the show.

Made it in New York

2011-04-09T19:17:00.000-07:00

Logo
by Milton Glaser

Something to be proud of - a deep commitment to the arts and the systems that keep it alive and well. The inventor of the I LOVE NY bumper sticker, artist and designer Milton Glaser is profiled in a new film titled: "To Inform and Delight" presented last week at R.I.T. Glaser and partners formed Push Pin Graphics and they were recognized with shows at The Museum of Modern Art, and in Paris at the Centre Pompidou in the early 1970's. Glaser was a Fulbright Scholar studying with Giorgio Morandi in Italy, and soaking up the traditions of color and drawing in Europe before setting his course on "commercial art".
Along the way he founded New York Magazine, co-authored the "Underground Gourmet" with Jerome Snyder, and designed and illustrated his way across a sea of of posters, typography, and books to lasting effect. At the end of the film, Milton said that many factors contribute to success but he could not have accomplished all that he has - without the relationships and the context of New York, New York.

At the Schweinfurth
Memorial Art Center
photo provided by the artist
H.T. Coogan: "Litle Educational Turntable of Misdirections and Ever Shifting Points of Attraction"

If You are an artist in New York, it goes without saying that there is a lot of competition to get your artwork out there to be seen. Each year a gallery show is selected for the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, in Auburn, New York. Part of this series is the current exhibition: "Made in NY 2011" which features 52 artists showing a total of 77 artworks in a wide variety of sizes and media. This is a juried show with awards bestowed by two jurors who had a lot to choose from ( 684 works were submitted).
The resulting exhibition makes for a compelling museum visit which I recommend.

I did not intend this to be a bit of shameless self-promotion (that comes later), but in a measure of full disclosure, my work was selected this year for the show and I am in great company! When you walk into the Schweinfurth Art Center there is a smaller exhibit of paintings by Noma and James Bliss on the right and the main galleries are dedicated to New York artists selected for "Made in NY 2011". As you walk in a fine and funny collection of almost a thousand "handpainted rulers" sit in groups sorted by size in measuring beakers by the artist H.T. Coogan. While this work wasn't given an award, it should at least be recognized for its sense of humor, which also characterizes the other art in the show by Coogan.
"Little Educational Turntable of Misdirections and Ever Shifting Points of Attraction" is a perpetual motion machine of compasses and magnets on top of an old record going round on an old record player- it's a hoot!

Motion seemed to be the salient feature of many of the favorite things seen at the Schweinfurth. Awarded "Best of Show" was another kind of motion machine - beautifully articulated, motorized, multi-winged "flying" gizmo by Bob Potts of Trumansburg, New York. This is kinetic sculpture - in the mode of the early Leonardo da Vinci drawings - inventing a way to fly by studying the shape of bird's wings. Press a button on a pedestal and an electric motor engages and the aluminum wings "flap" in place for a few minutes.

Video installations were given their own rooms. One is a bit of animated anarchy from John Knecht featuring "Mr. Baxter's Trip to a Parallel Universe" which reminds me a little of Keith Haring crossed with "The Yellow Submarine". Another video in the show was a blitz of stills and snippets of live action shot in a "Portrait of Mumbai" by Neal Chowdhury. How can an artist working in traditional sculpture or painting (that just sits still) compete with this eye candy? Mumbai is so rich in texture, with music and people in action, that it is really worth the time to see all eight minutes and 55 seconds of this collage/documentary.

Before we leave Auburn, I could mention a few other favorites in the show including colorful abstractions by Kathleen Thum, Bill Santelli, and sculptural pieces of Abraham Ferraro. So you don't have to go down to Manhattan to see first class art, it is right here.

Now, before I go- a little plug for a new show at Windsor Whip Works near Binghamton, New York. It is no secret that I grew up in a family of practicing artists, and at various times we have had the opportunity to share an exhibition space. In Windsor, New York you will find the Whip Works Art Center, now hosting a show with art by my father Arthur Singer, my brother- Paul Singer, myself, and another guest artist, the sculptor Donna Dodson. It is also no secret that I learned a lot from watching my father paint and when I was at an impressionable age - my brother's artwork spurred me on to lead the creative life. Like Milton Glaser say's " We LOVE New York".

Alan and Paul Singer
at The Windsor Whip Works
photo credit:
© Roberta Grobel Intrater 2011

The Artist and the Astrophysicist

2011-03-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

photo by
Sue Weisler
R.I.T. photographer
at an illustrated talk by Steve Carpenter
on the left and Adam Frank on the right

With artwork, an interesting question arises about collaborations - who gets to sign the work?
There are historical precedents to consider, and the business of giving credit where credit is due has to be addressed. How do you determine whose contributions you are looking at?

Sometimes more than one artist signs the work, and in contemporary art we are seeing many more collaborations. In the past we had the products of the atelier system, master artists then had the services of students and assistants who brought the art to life. In this system we only knew who these assistants were if they went on to make a name for themselves later for their own artwork.

In the 1970's and1980's I worked as an artist with my father, Arthur Singer, on images that often found their way into publications - either books, collectibles, and even postage stamps. Whenever possible, we both signed the actual artwork.

Controversy surrounds some collaborations - witness a court case mentioned in a recent New York Review of Books over the validity of an Andy Warhol silkscreen work. Determining what is an authentic print can involve a lot of detective work, - but is a collaborative work somehow less original? Does it matter that the Warhol Factory made the print and the artist signed the image? Hasn't that process been part of the artworld for decades?

Our understanding of what the practice of fine art really is - changes and expands like the universe that astrophysicist Adam Frank talked so passionately about. He came to R.I.T. to give an illustrated talk with painter, Steve Carpenter late in March. When they speak about deep space and star formation, they talk about a creative process, full of light, violence, and extreme beauty. This was a collaborative venture between the artist and the scientist - to try to find and touch the reality of these grand events and see some reflection of humanity and how we are a part of this astonishing array. Paintings start as printing on canvas, employing yet another artist - Tony Dungan - to make digital files that develop a foundation that will accept thick paint. Equations try to give mathematical explanations for the phenomena of star formation. The equations are etched like hieroglyphs in the paintings and only hint at the intellect at work trying to decipher distant hot spots in the universe.

Collaboration in the visual arts was unusual, if it fought with expectations of the solitary figure at work - alone in a studio creating work of value. I think we are beginning to see a greater emphasis and resonance with ideas that are brought about by collective spirit, and aggregate talents.

Adam Frank
at R.I.T.
Photo by
Sue Weisler

Saturation

2011-03-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

Skyline from Pier 92
by Anna Sears

For artists, a shakeout is underway. This screening process determines whether you have a network that will sustain you - or sidetracks you if you've set unreasonable goals that can't be maintained. A recession tests your mettle. Most of the artwork from artists that we know comes from a broad middle class (raised with ambitions and aspirations) - but will that demographic cohort be able to ride out the slow times ahead? We worry that the visual artworld has become complacent, and conservative. A case could be made that the Armory Show which we visited this week fell flat even though many of the old stalwarts lined the miles of booths along Pier 92 and Pier 94 in Manhattan.

We really paid attention to everything - looking for some rewards in and among the newcomers from
Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. One goes to the Armory Show to catch up to what is happening around the globe, and this year a lot of minor art failed to grab me or make an impression.

Maybe the dealers were playing it safe, or maybe it was the cold pristine weather outside, but the crowd was thin on the Modern side of the Armory Show. Small paintings from a 35 year old Brit named William Daniels caught my eye. The two on view vibrated with delicious color and buoyancy. John Walker had a large collection of small paintings from the "Harrington Road Series" - a real temptation to buy #52-54 but I couldn't scrounge up the $28K.

Tony Cragg

There seemed to be many Tony Cragg amalgamations which come in many materials ( the one above in a rustyish color had some appeal ) but even here, this art seems to be repeating itself. Hybrid artforms like the constructions by Zach Harris at the Meulensteen booth holds some promise for the future.

Zach Harris

As in past years, you might have stopped to look at the metallic wall hangings from El Anatsui, a sculptor born in Ghana - who now has an international following. His work, made from pieces of tin cans and bottle caps is seductive and flows like satin curtains of red and gold. The handiwork is obsessive and unusual and makes a case for recycling!

At the end of a long row, in a quiet space, the work from Egyptian born Susan Hefuna glowed. Her simple geometries were moving, as were her methods of using translucent tracing paper. This work which is very architectural exists in the same spaces that Julie Mehretu seems to inhabit- manifest layers of linearity conjure up mental structures; and suitable spaces for art.

There was a lot less photography of any consequence this year. I was amused by James Casebere's upscale model homes, and there was a dynamic large leaf from the Starn Twins, but I found a gallery of real flowering trees more attractive. And what was that neon fence about? As with the show last year, Pierogi of Brookyln featured a Patrick Jacobs mini diorama made with unworldly skill and amazing patience.

But we had to move on, and get up to New England. Foster + Partners designed and built a new world for the MFA in Boston, and this is a much needed revitalization for a grand old museum. You can still seek out your favorite Winslow Homer painting, or troll for beauties among the Hudson River School, but my favorite works in Boston came from the Near and Far East. Japanese prints make up part of my personal collection, so I like to see what is on view in the special exhibition titled " Flowers and Festivals". I was knocked out by a Kuniyoshi diptych showing a tree grafted with 100 varieties of chrysanthemums -all in bloom - from 1843. This is a form of horticultural prowess that is truly spectacular!

Also on view were Japanese baskets - the likes of which you have never seen - to delight the eye. From Turkey I was pleased to see the Iznik tiles and bowls and my curiosity was piqued by Qajar metalwork from 19th century Iran.

Many parts of Boston's Museum of Fine Art were still under construction, so we didn't get the full impact of what they had to offer. Stopping for a cup of tea on the main level, we relax in a spacious, comfortable meeting area under skylights that let in afternoon rays which we soak up before we hit the road.

Weather vanes at MFA
photo by Anna Sears

Transformation and Transcendence

2011-02-06T18:43:00.000-08:00

The Freedom Place Collection and the Frederick Douglas Resource Center Gallery

Alma W. Thomas
"Snoopy Sees A Day Break on Earth, 1970, oil on canvas

I grew up in a household with a deep respect for African American art, and also art of indigenous peoples from around the world. My father was a collector, my parents both working artists. The music we heard at home: spirituals, blues, jazz or soul had a transformative aspect for us. The music and lyrics took common local occurrence and cast it as universal experience, and the best art does this seemingly without effort.

African American art had the power to deal with years of oppression and turn it into something expressive, positive, and motivational - looking for a way to become an agent for change; seeking a better life. The aspirations of a people can be seen and felt in artwork collected by Stuart and Julia Bloch in their exhibition: The Freedom Place Collection" now on view at The Mercer Gallery located on the campus of Monroe Community College.

Five artists contribute paintings, drawings, and collage that fill the modest gallery space with light, life, and surprising detail. The majority of this traveling collection however remains unseen in the present venue because of space restrictions, but we are still very lucky to have the opportunity to see this art that prior to this show remained in a vault.

These artists, all people of color, faced rejection - and the effects marginalized them in the art market which skews all cultural output. Nevertheless, artists put their heart in their work, and that makes a difference. When you walk into the gallery you might expect overt political statement, but what you get is often the solitary, poetic side of human nature, and personal observation. At the door, the art of Benny Andrews conveys this light touch even if the subject is an elegy to a life lost ("Hero's Ascension") or a portrait of the artist's mother ( "Viola Study"). Andrews favors collage and quirky pen and ink as in the drawing of fellow artist Raphael Soyer, and in the big book cover for "The Ribbon Dance".

Robert Freeman recounts in a television interview the frustration he felt at trying to find gallery representation; the effects of lingering racism clouding the future for the visual artist. Freeman paints big and bold expressive strokes of color on larger size paintings that remind me of David Park and Emil Nolde. Freeman's concerns are figurative, with perhaps biblical reference in "Eve and the Serpent", and a party in "Garden Encounters ll" painted in 1988, while he was a teacher at Harvard in Boston.

Richard Yarde's "Front #2/ Back #2 works on a grand scale for watercolor on paper. There is a signature style in evidence that looks like patches of cloth on a quilt, and an imposing figure built this way confronts the viewer. Watercolor portraiture is not easy to achieve, but I especially liked Yarde's distorted pointilist painting of the Erskine Hawkins big band painted in 1983.

Years ago, I had the chance to shake Romare Bearden's hand in congratulations at his opening at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery (in Manhattan) and I remember a soft spoken big man who wasn't looking past you when he spoke (an especially annoying habit in the New York City artworld). Bearden often cut collage materials from things that arrived in the mail, and I found one of my illustrations glued to part of a composition he made. So we shared something in common as he related his interest in birds, especially in the tropics where he spent part of the year.

Bearden's imagery has a classic balance, even when he is recalling "Memories of High Cotton - Picking Cotton" a collage from 1977. This intensely felt work of art focuses as much on the green hills, as it does on the folks ( almost abstractions) with patterned bags picking cotton under bare trees. During his working life, Bearden was a social worker, and jazz aficionado, who painted and made prints with
Robert Blackburn in New York City. Bearden was among a very few African American artists who had achieved national visibility, and this year there will be a set of stamps honoring his life and art.

Even though there is an element of abstraction in Bearden's art (see his radiant watercolors "Highway" and "Indigo Night"), he doesn't strip his art of recognizable imagery as occurs in the paintings of Alma Woodsey Thomas. My cousin, Michael Rosenfeld has featured Alma Thomas' paintings at his gallery in New York City for many years, and I was happy to re-acquaint myself with the three works on display in the Mercer Gallery. "Snoopy Sees a Day Break on Earth" an oil painting from 1970 is a most striking example, with each tangible stroke of color applied without a second guess.

Alma Thomas lived most of her life in Washington, D.C. and I would like to think that her presence there was a model for younger artists to follow. She was the first African American woman to be given a solo exhibition at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and also the first to earn her MFA from Columbia University. The paintings on view in the "Freedom Place" exhibition suggest that she should take her rightful place among the other Washington Color Field painters like Morris Louis and Ken Noland.

Across town, at 36 King Street, a modern art gallery snuggles up to quaint homes along the park near the Susan B. Anthony House. What a find! The Frederick Douglass Resource Center and Gallery offers a wide-open space to view Pepsy Kettavong's show "Lynching in America". Not squeamish, Pepsy Kettavong takes on the most difficult subjects, this being the first of three exhibitions dealing with murder, starvation and sex trafficking. Not shy of the controversial images, Pepsy rivets your attention to a larger than life size noose which hangs ominously in the middle of this cavernous space. Accompanying the noose, are tableaux with a picnic table full of goodies, above which hangs a photo of a dead African American. Imagine the grotesque notion of having a meal in the midst of such a horror.

Pepsy Kettavong has been the author of public sculpture honoring Rochester and in his new series he promises to open a dialog and address issues that other artists can't or won't deal with. Art in this case offers a path to transcendence by dealing squarely with issues that are an attack on all of humanity.

Representations from Six Nations

2011-01-20T15:14:00.000-08:00

The Haudenosaunee territory is comprised of almost two million acres of central and western New York, established with the signing of the Canandaigua Treaty of 1794. From this area, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy emerge to include Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga and the Tuscarora.Among their number are many skilled craftspeople, and gifted fine artists. Now long overdue, an effort is being made to introduce the contemporary visual arts of the Haudenosaunee people in a gallery setting.

Until now, with a few exceptions, these artists of central and western New York have been overshadowed by more popular arts from tribal regions in the southwestern U.S. Think of the distinctive pottery of Nampeyo or Maria Martinez. Perhaps, because there is a history of trade goods made for sale in the southwest (that was lacking in the east) there was a public perception that not much was going on in the eastern part of the country. From the west, traditional crafts, primarily weaving and ceramics were elevated in the minds of collectors. Then one must factor in the past relationship of "ethnographic" arts from Native American peoples and the place they were usually given (if at all) in museums and galleries. Here in 2011, there is a growing awareness and acknowledgement of the contributions, both past and present, of indigenous peoples - and what better place to start looking at this issue than here and now.

G. Peter Jemison "Albino Crow", 2011

A good primer on the state of these affairs was found in Victor, New York last week in the Town Hall when G. Peter Jemison gave an illustrated lecture for the Friends of Ganondagan. Jemison is not only a preserver of traditions, but also an active contemporary artist who has long been instrumental as a curator of exhibitions featuring Native Americans. Jemison is a member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, and he is a manger of the Ganondagan Historic Site near Victor, NY.

When you appreciate art, you bring your experience and culture along with other baggage. So, it is refreshing to see things from a different angle, and it can also be challenging (art does that directly and sometimes obliquely). Jemison highlighted the artwork of living artists and guided the listener with stories and anecdotes that helped profile the present state of Native American art in this region.

Last year, at Nazareth College, and more recently at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, G. Peter Jemison helped organize exhibitions with many of the same artists that he featured with his Power Point demonstration in Victor. Coming from outside the Native American culture however, this viewer needs to have a guide to better understand the creation stories, and layers of cultural tradition that is part of the fabric of the Haudenosaunee arts. There is a history to deal with and a current situation that presents itself.

A history lesson is summoned forth through the power of the "documentary" video by Shelley Niro. Titled "The Shirt", this short video runs about six minutes but captures your attention with acerbic humor, and truth telling - spelling out a position as clear as day. Intercut with scenes from the Niagara River and Falls, an Indian woman stands her ground, wearing her white shirt and an American flag bandana.

She hardly moves and the camera slowly pans, the only things that change are the slogans you see on her shirt. The shirt then narrates a history of deceit and murder, and after all these calamities have happened, all she is left with is her shirt, and in the last frames of the video - even that is taken away. The pain and humiliation is compounded with injustice; the feelings are palpable.

The Native North Americans who invented the game of Lacrosse might never have imagined how popular their sport has become. Recently, in July 2010, an Iroquois team of athletes were invited but were unable to compete in an international tournament because they were denied an opportunity to travel on their own nation's passports. This is commemorated in two works at The Everson Museum, in the exhibition "Haudenosaunee: Elements". There, the artists Tracy Thomas, and Frank Buffalo Hyde fashion graphic statements that dramatize this incident.

Co-curators Deborah Ryan of The Everson, and artist Tom Huff received some assistance from Aweeneyoh Powless, an intern and student currently getting her master's degree in studio art at R.I.T.
Aweeneyoh is also an award winning dancer, and her performance paintings are documented in another video, as well as on the walls of this compact exhibition. Ms. Powless's art bridges the realms of culture crossing over boundaries between European painting traditions and North American rituals and celebratory dance modes. Like the painter, Yves Klein, Aweenyoh Powless makes expressive use of her body; her footprints make a mark for each movement as she carries herself across the canvas.

There are some powerful statements in the exhibition, some that are three dimensional, some two dimensional paintings, and other hybrids created for the show using video and casts of figures in encaustic (a pigmented wax), or a work like Jolene Rickard's corn pounder with music, printmaking and wood sculpture.

Tom Huff has a suite of carvings on the ground floor, and other sculptures placed amongst his fellow artists above on the second floor. These are more traditional carvings which embody a mythology that reaches back in history, but projects a vision forward of strength, protection, and unity. Haudenosaunee:
Elements, an exhibition featuring 21 artists, representing Six Nations continues at The Everson Museum in Syracuse for the month of January.

The Print Club at 80

2010-12-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

Satan's Camaro
a printmaking collective
at the Lockhart Gallery
in The Memorial Art Gallery
part of an exhibition
celebrating
The Print Club of Rochester's
80th anniversary

The Print Club at 80

Walk down the hall to the Lockhart Gallery inside The Memorial Art Gallery this winter and inspect the works on paper. No, this is not a show of octogenarian book collectors, it is an exhibition titled "Great Impressions" honoring The Print Club of Rochester as it turns 80 years old. The Print Club is dedicated to fine art printmaking and fosters interest from artists, print collectors and students of this widely varied artform. It also sponsors, through membership dues, the creation of signed limited edition hand pulled prints that are among the benefits of joining this engaging group.

Of course there are other art clubs in the city of Rochester, but none have such a specific focus, as you will see from this show. "Great Impressions" is made up of 33 presentation prints which were selected to represent various techniques and highlight the accomplishments of some of this country's greatest printmaking artists.

I guess it is fair to disclose that I have been on the board of The Print Club for a number of years, and I have worked hard to raise the level of recognition for printmaking through my art, and through my work for this non-profit organization.

A new generation of artists is coming up to rejuvenate printmaking, -witness the materials in the vitrine around the back of the show and read all about Satan's Camaro. Here, techniques used to make their prints are as delicate as smoke and as hard hitting as a steamroller (no, literally!).

It is not easy to summarize this small show, and as the sign says in front, it is almost impossible to define printmaking today. Traditional printmaking usually employs an artist who creates an original image on a block or a plate that is then transferred onto paper or other substrate, but that would leave out silk-screen, photogravure, Solarplates, and much more.

"Great Impressions" is not a tutorial on how prints are made, but rather a greatest hits show of beautiful art that can be had for the price of a membership. You can start a collection on a tight budget and still get world-class art for your home or office.

Some of the artists you will encounter go back to the initial days of The Print Club. Thomas Nason and Henry C. Pitz may not be familiar names to the gallery goer, but one of my favorites, James D. Havens should be known to a wider audience especially for his wonderful woodblock print " Blackberries".

In the early years of The Print Club, most prints - etchings or wood engravings were printed with black inks on white paper and Claire Leighton's "Cotton Pickers" is a good example of this. If the artist had a particular knack for a medium like lithography you might find evocative light and shadow, giving a print graphic impact in a work like "Adirondack Cabin" by Rockwell Kent. Today, art by Rockwell Kent is among the icons of early 20th century American art. But it is hard to predict whose art will be elevated to this status - you just have to look for the gems among this collection.

Among the prints on view you will find major names in the field like Clare Romano who wrote a book with her husband John Ross called "The Complete Printmaker" (it was her artwork that got me started making prints when I was ten). Our local talents are not left out of the show and you will find a colorful photo lithograph by Joan Lyons, and graven images by Ron Netsky and Jerome Witkin in the Lockhart Gallery show.

The Print Club has commissioned modern artists to make an edition each year to be distributed to club members, and some recent highlights include Carol Wax's mezzotint, Gregory Amenoff''s print "Arcadia" and Paul Resika's color etching of a boathouse. Seeing this bounty of terrific images makes me want to know more about each artist's work, and maybe even take one home to hang on my wall.
If you want to know more about The Print Club look at the web site: www.roc-printclub.com

Take a look at this new resource:
http://culturehall.com/resources.html

Re:Vision

2010-11-18T04:46:00.000-08:00

Photo by John Pfahl
Cedar Mesa, UT
from the show "Metamorphoses de la Terre"
at Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has been looking around museums and galleries for contemporary art these days, that the energy revealed is so scattered, the focus is so personal, and the methods so diffuse, that this era could be summed up for its ephemeral art.

The aesthetic of early 21st century art is more ambiguous than let's say the irony of the 1960's. Maybe I can catch a thread of a story first told by Marcel Duchamp and carried forward through Robert Rauschenberg and made manifest in the art found in the shows titled "Alternating Currents " presented in venues around Buffalo.

I do find an art of sublimation, an art of aura, with an atmosphere of indirection in the exhibit which is celebrated under the larger aegis of "Beyond, In Western New York" when I recently visited the Albright Knox Gallery.

The show does touch on a few real experiences, one of which I found in a drawing by Joan Linder of an office (at a mortuary?). Joan sets about trying to create a match between her drawing ( all those obsessive little lines) and the rather mundane equipment found in the outer office with notes tacked up on shelves -highlighting cremation services- amid boxes of latex gloves that serve as bookends.

Kai Althoff contributes a menagerie of sculpture on a circus theme - a large lady made of wire bends over backwards - and immediately my mind reverts to Giacometti's "Woman With Her Throat Cut". Maybe it is the grim atmosphere outside the museum that clouds my vision, I just can't feel the necessity of the cage with the playful lion, except that it gives a friendly nod of recognition to Sandy Calder.

Sheldon Berlyn's colorful abstract paintings remind one of the formalist days, but these paintings sometimes are too thin, and I really prefer David Reed for a good gestural sweep, or even someone like Polly Apfelbaum for a new color-field experience. Victoria Bradbury on the other hand did sound a deeper note of history; of nostalgia, and employs today's technology to revise our notions of what a photograph can signify. The painterliness of this installation is informed by processing software - which is the magic lantern projection of today, here using images of a bygone era conflating past and present.

James Carl's sculptural presence is welcome in the present company because of its primary focus on form. Overlapping and creating woven patterns of plastic window shade/blinds isn't a unique idea ( I think of Martin Puryear) but at least Carl's sculpture lends tangible form to a very understated exhibition.

Richard Huntington's paintings mingle with the old masters of modern art to a great and subversive effect, especially as a next door neighbor to Matisse. A funny "Our Lady of Perpetual DeKooning Shapes" at least got me to chuckle, a rare thing in this dissolute gathering of regional art.

Leaving that all behind me, I travel down Elmwood in Buffalo to Nina Freudenheim Gallery, and walk into an oasis of photography by John Pfahl. I have been following his work for years and recently I see that he has revisited his "Altered Landscape" series with experiments taking old images and reworking them by applying blends, and digital blurs; making the earth malleable and "plastic".

Suddenly, photography is an expressionist canvas in which anything can happen. In a few instances this concept is almost indistinguishable from reality, as in the lava forms found and photographed at the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii. Some images have been subtly exxagerated, other images like "Lower YellowstoneFalls" verge on kitsch. My favorite images from Cedar Mesa in Utah, remind me of color field paintings, very frontal and tactile.

Carl Chiarenza in the Dean's Gallery
at R.I.T.

Unless you work at Rochester Institute of Technology, and happen over to see Dean Frank Cost of the College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, you probably would never know of the Dean's Gallery. It isn't much more than a modified hallway that allows Zerbe Sodervick and her Gallery Management class to mount shows mostly of alumni art. This season we have been treated to a wonderful showcase for Carl Chiarenza which he aptly titles "Ephemera" ( which comes full circle to my earlier characterization ). You may know Carl's work from his many books and exhibitions ( some of these books- lavish portfolios- are included in the exhibit). Carl says of his work, " My process creates form and subject simultaneously", which might sound like a formula but really isn't. What Carl does is create collages (which are later thrown away) and photographing his artwork at very close range - leaving only the photo as evidence that a collage ever existed.

So, there is a dynamic and a value placed on what remains; the photo is the final state of affairs for the performance of this art that owes a debt to the cubism of Picasso, Braque, Schwitters and Anne Ryan. Carl's artwork is so intimate, so improvisational, and also at times presented on such a monumental scale ( especially for something so humble in its origins) that it is viewed as completely transformational- and for that, it simply must be seen.

Karma Comes To See You

2010-10-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

Alex Grey
1985
"Journey of the Wounded Healer"
Psychedelic
Optical and Visionary Art

"Psychedelic Optical and Visionary Art, Since the 1960's" is a slowly opening time capsule with a provocative premise: can an art exhibition hold together polar opposites? My experience as an artist, looking at this show, is one of amusement and wonder- this is an effort at revisionist art history in the making. When a minimalist Frank Stella can hang on a wall in close proximity to Albert Alvarez "Karma and Death" - they do seem to pervade my consciousness.... What kind of story is this show trying to tell? Is it extolling the virtues of recreational drugs? It certainly takes me back to the old mantra of "sex,drugs, and rock n roll".

Outlined here for the viewer: there once was a time when all the rules were challenged and a few were broken (but this might also be read as over-the-top indulgent and narcissistic). Is that the point? Is this show a cautionary tale? I would have loved to be in the room when the ideas for this show were developed..

Then again, what need does this show answer? It is a cabinet for the curious, and maybe it will also pull in some of the baby boomers who actually lived through the experience of the 1960's. Looking back, if the 1960's brought a period of self-indulgence, it was also a period of the civil rights movement and the birth of feminism, plus an anti-war movement that swept the country. Social activism, and heightened consciousness for every living thing seemed to co-exist, thank you very much. That is the background providing a foundation for the art on view at The Memorial Art Gallery.

If you believe the philosophy professor and art critic Arthur Danto, then the historical narrative of progress in art came to an end with Andy Warhol's "Brillo Box" - and what we see here in this show is an implosion - where the practice of art fragments and consumes itself. Zap Comix - popular underground reading material from R. Crumb (not represented in this show - but tonic for the 1960's) is sorely missed as is the anarchic painter Peter Saul, and the optical art of Bridget Riley ( just to name a few missing links).

Enter the exhibit under the theatrical lights that create a swirl on the walls and floor ( and in your mind) and you find the sophisticated in a dialog with the self-taught. Years ago, many of the paintings on view would have been considered Folk Art, but maybe these distinctions are disappearing. This is part of my impression that this show is a tug-of-war between various art world factions.

I have my arguments with Fred Tomaselli (about copyright issues) but I like his constellations of pills in "Ripple Trees" that is one of the keystones of this show. Within his work there is an interest in nature and geometry,abstraction, silhouette and reality all rolled into one. I think a hallmark of late 20th century art is a layering of representation and meaning, in several paintings in this show such layering creates a busy surface which takes time to read properly.

Sometimes the reading of the painting is not as logical as one might expect. An example might be the Cartesian spaces described in the painting by Al Held ("South of West 1") that lead to visual paradox. The wall label mentions string theory, but my guess is that Al Held is trying to subvert the strict logic of geometry which he obsessively constructs.

I had the good fortune to be present at the creation of one of the major paintings on view, so I can remember it first as a drawing on canvas, and then remember the process that Alex Grey employed (great clarity and sense of purpose). His "Journey of the Wounded Healer" has attracted many who come to marvel at this triptych that describes three stages of life (and death). Alex was my neighbor for a while, and he learned his craft while working as a medical illustrator and a preparator of cadavers for dissection. A follower of Tibetan Buddhism, Alex and his wife Allyson are building a museum in Wappinger's Falls New York for their artwork.

I mentioned obsession before, and that seems to be another characteristic of this exhibition - excessive detail( gone is the modernist slogan "less is more"). Exceptions are made for artists Phillip Taafe, Stella, and Victor Vasarely - who are more attentive to a stricter premise and give little attention to embroidery.

George Cisneros provides "Cascades of Jubilation" - a video presentation complete with dark room and round mirrors that is the equivalent of Pac-Man( a prototypical video game) built with a primitive computer from the early 1980's. In those days even the photo on this page would have required more memory capacity than what was on board that old Apple ll. Boy, have we come a long way in such a short time! ( or is that an illusion too?).

Moving Image

2010-10-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

Life is fluid
photo by Alan Singer

A great photograph can bring tears to my eyes; I am subject to the force of images - as I suspect many others are too. Today the pace of image making must break all speed records, pictures come at us from every angle, demanding attention - and I am caught in their spell.

The first exhibition I attended - where photography was given respect as art - was "The Family of Man".
It was arranged by Edward Steichen, and it was the culmination of his life's work as a photographer and spokesperson for a movement. I was with my parents, I was not more than five years old, but I clearly recall the images from that show, now more than half a century ago. Most if not all of the photos were in black and white, though some of the prints were very large. I imagined myself, even at that young age, as a photographer having my show at The Museum of Modern Art.

Even though I am known as a painter and printmaker, my first exhibition in New York City was a photographic performance piece. At that time I was a college student who shared a dark room with Joel Peter Witkin at The Cooper Union. We took classes with Roy DeCarava ( who passed away recently ) who was known for his portrayals of jazz greats in smoky clubs. Before I got to college I had my own pantheon of photography heroes, and within a few years I would get to meet most of them.

Walter and Naomi Rosenblum's daughter, NIna, was in my class at The Cooper Union. Nina as I remember painted my portrait one year. Her father, Walter, was a teacher and skilled photographer responsible for lifting up the reputation of Lewis Hine, who was himself a great photographer of American grit and determination. Dr. Naomi Rosenblum has written a classic history of photography; her research and clear thinking are essential.

Before I left college I was awarded a scholarship to Yale/Summer at Norfolk, and by coincidence Walter Rosenblum was teaching the photography classes there, so I had a chance to learn from the best. My dark room technique improved, and I was beginning to feel self-confident - enough to get into an argument with the visiting artist Walker Evans ( who happened to be someone I had great respect and admiration for ). At first, I didn't recognize him ( he had a white beard ) but he did speak with a voice of authority. I knew his work with James Agee in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", and I had collected Walker Evans photos which I cut out of old Fortune Magazines.

The following summer I had the good fortune to be on scholarship to Boston University at Tanglewood, and once again, Walter Rosenblum was there to introduce us to Paul Strand who was there for a screening of his movie "The Wave". Paul Strand was quite old at that point and loosing his eyesight, but for me he was the Corot of early 20th century photography.

I had to make up my mind about what I was going to do with my art, and I felt my photos would never match up to these great masters, so I took another path towards painting and printmaking. I made large paintings that had a hard time fitting into small gallery spaces in New York City. One such place on east 69th street was The Carlton Gallery. Carlton Willers' contacts in the photography world ran deep and wide. I met Helen Gee of Limelight, Helen Levitt, and Josef Koudelka, but the absolute high point was when I was introduced to Henri Cartier Bresson who was having a show at Carlton Gallery, not of his photos, but of his drawings! It was at that show when Carlton offered me a signed Bresson photo of Matisse drawing a white dove... but I couldn't scrounge the $500. to buy the print. My great regret!

The Carlton Gallery closed after a few years, but I had a chance to meet many interesting photographers and artists there. Now it is my turn to be the teacher, and as I work at R.I.T. I can reflect on how paths cross, and I can speculate on who the future artists will be and the stories they will tell.

Stepping Out For Art

2010-10-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

Andy Gilmore in "Geometries"

The sponsor for this blog deserves a lot of credit - First Fridays is a new incarnation of what was once called "Gallery Night", but now it should be called a hit - and credit can be given to all those who come out to the venues to see what is new, and support the visual arts. Enthusiastic crowds of people who jam the parking lots, and maneuver their way to the gallery venues - make all this effort worthwhile. For the artists who are on view - their work would not be seen in such large numbers were it not for the collective effort of gallery owners who stay open a few more hours on a Friday evening once a month.

The Design Gallery at RRCDC is a few steps up from the parking lot at The Hungerford Building on Main Street. The lot is full and First Friday ( Oct 1, 2010 ) is getting underway. "Slow and Steady" is a photography show that celebrates the slow food movement and is a testament to the produce and the people found at public markets in and around our area. Our public markets, where farmers and their customers meet, are uncut gems just for the finding. Christin Boggs presents a suite of photos as her MFA Thesis exhibition and they have a tinge of nostalgia around the edges; maybe it is the belatedness of the color or the casual cropping of the images....

A recent closing of their Park Avenue location has meant that R.I.T.'s student run Gallery r has to look for temporary space to stay with its schedule of exhibitions, and it has gotten off to a rousing start with a friendly amalgam of art and music in a rambling show capitalizing on the same spirit of enterprise that brought Black Mountain College to national prominence over fifty years ago. At The Hungerford Building the show is called PORCH, and there is interactive art being produced - the notion of collaboration is alive and well. Installations, and separate works of art indicate a lively, inquisitive student body, which holds much promise for the future.

Recent graduates take over the Joy Gallery on Rochester's west side for a two person essay on the state of abstract art in a show titled "Hard Work". Here lyrical layers of color in deeper tones by Bradley Butler rub shoulders with hard edge grids of color by Rick Minard. Butler has a knack for improvisation and the experiments can be dark, poetic and oceanic. Minard on the other hand is more analytical, precise and buoyant in his color choices.

The whole notion of analysis is paramount in the show titled " Geometries" at Rochester Contemporary Art Center. This show also catches the wave of journalism that informs many contemporary art projects, in the sense that artists keep track of the days they work, and are conscious of the passage of time. You could say that the art of Christopher McNulty is cumulative, and embodies meaning, even makes meaning manifest in the content of his art (marking time). A circular work on paper is created by making 20,193 little burn marks to commemorate each of the days that an actuarial table predicts that the artist has left to live. Some artists have that ability to make the notion of time palpable, and I think of the delicate drawings of Vija Celmins, and the many photos of Muybridge - who literally demonstrates the duration of actions and reactions on bodies.

Perhaps most telling are the prints left by an auto exhaust pipe in common use by the artist. Set up like pages from a diary, I began to wonder if the marks made were more than Mr. McNulty had hoped for - this is literally your carbon footprint. For gallery goers looking for beauty- this kind of exhibit can get you to think but also reward you for your efforts. "Geometries" contains experiments in color by Andy Gilmore who is a designer/illustrator passionate about form and making eloquent use of the inkjet print.
Max Bill had his way with primary colors in the old analogue days, and Mr. Gilmore updates this pursuit with digital blends and layers that are simple, clean and elegant.

Mitch Messina, and Karen Sardisco had their opening reception in Nazareth College's Arts Center Gallery, and they look like two artists who grew up together. This juxtaposition of cast metal sculpture alongside mixed media paintings in frames makes the space of the gallery vibrate with figuration. Karen Sardisco's art contains fragments and diagrams of plants and cell structures, grids and other accumulations usually in dark marks on a light ground, in some ways reminding me of art by Terry Winters. Messina, a popular teacher who now heads the department at Nazareth College is an active sculptor with a social message: the figure found in groups or singled out - is vulnerable, and maybe won't fit into the machines that are built for them.

Remarkably, I saw all these shows in one evening with a return to the Hungerford Building to see an installation by my neighbor, Sterz. He is a sculptor of light and action - in this iteration we have two florescent pink sheets of acetate hanging from the high ceiling, they dance in a breeze from an electric fan - through which a theatre spot light casts its ethereal glow on a white wall. The thin sheets hanging from a thread move about within a small circumference, the effect of the dance of light and color is mesmerizing. I am reminded of a line from William Carlos Williams: "so much depends upon a red wheel barrow".. and I am thankful for an art that merges into poetry, into psychology, into simplicity, into life.

Art & Engineering & Biennial

2010-09-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy of Memorial Art Gallery and A.E. Ted Aub

A parade of people are coming to Rochester this month to praise the Erie Canal as the engineering marvel that changed our land and spurred growth throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The World Canals Conference will be meeting to discuss the future of canals and what their role will be in the 21st century and beyond. "Re-Inspired" an exhibition of art will accompany the World Canals Conference and travel to New York City and Troy after the conference has concluded. The Oxford Gallery will extend that vision with a show titled "Waterway West", and both invitational shows will begin in mid September.

As a frequent visitor to the Erie Canal, I am pleased that there is a trail for biking, running and walking, and along the extent of the canal you can find vestiges of American history and feel a heightened sense of space. The canal may be New York's most prominent landmark ( next to the Empire State Building) and yet its public purpose can be renewed and should become a vibrant feature once again.

Claude Fayette Bragdon ( 1866-1946) was someone who had a lifelong experience with art and engineering and a small collection of his work is on view in the Lockhart Gallery at the Memorial Art Gallery. A collaborative and friendly relationship between Fritz Trautmann and Claude Bragdon is celebrated in this little show that highlights their accomplishments as artist and architect respectively.

Years ago I would have thought that mathematics had nothing to do with art, but seeing the work of Charles Bragdon could change all that. His mathematical abstractions from the late 1930's anticipate much of computer/digital modelling and his sense of color ( aided by his friend, the painter Fritz Trautmann) softens his Modernist tendencies. In the end, these two American artists are nowhere near as extreme as their European counterparts coming out of the Bauhaus, nor as visionary as a Frank Lloyd Wright or Buckminster Fuller, even though the vocabulary is so similar.

Stepping across the threshold of the Main Gallery at MAG, the visitor is greeted by A.E. Ted Aub's sculpture as part of this year's Biennial honoring six mid-career artists. Ted Aub is a teacher at Hobart William & Smith College in Geneva, New York and his five works in bronze and one in Hydrocal (pictured above) have a kind of cartoonish streamlining that reminds me of Art Deco and Elie Nadelman.
Like toys that are knocked off balance, Ted Aub's figurative sculpture brings an element of discomfort
along with the playfulness of his topsy-turvy world.

The spirit of play and light fills the next room with Anne Haven's contributions to this exhibition which include my favorite artwork in the show which is titled "Grace". Such simple pleasures, but also eloquent and ethereal in the sound and movement of dangling silverware!

Should you be having too much fun looking around Anne Haven's mixed media pieces, you can always temper that with Alberto Rey's mural size paintings of dead fish from his series "Aesthetics of Death",
or watch his documentary video "Biological Regionalism". I think that the temper of this Biennial is summed up in a little statement from Anne Haven's: between the priest and the jester.

There are appeals to our collective conscience in the mixed media art of Julianna Furlong Williams. The human condition's of illness and mortality is never far away in the rugged statements made in a series of modestly sized works which can include handwriting, photos and gritty paint-handling.
Photos by Rick Hock, also communicate through iconic statements augmented in typographic
headlines: "NOIDEASBUTIN" (2010), and "WHAT I SAY GOES"( 2009). There are some paralells here to the work of Barbara Kruger but without the sting of her confrontations.

Lawrence M. "Judd" Williams taught at Rochester Institute of Technology and has been a contributor to many shows in Rochester. He was one of the artists featured last spring at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in "Makers and Mentors". Here "Judd" Williams relief constructions of wood and mixed media comment on rhythm and number, titled "Increment" ( One, Two, or Three), and these works have a craftsman's sense of specific detail, while not being too fussy, trying to overwhelm us with technique. The paintings of Sean Scully, and maybe cross hatch paintings of Jasper Johns come to my mind as I look at this work, but then I look away at the free standing complex called "Stacked Land"
and I am in a realm that neither of the aforementioned artists could have created.

Arcadia

2010-07-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

Kurt Moyer
"Frost Pond", oil on linen

With so much rain during this summer, my garden is lush but gets out of hand if I don't give it constant attention. I like to be outdoors and think about how artists' portrayals of nature have helped form my personal aesthetic. Childhood memories include my father packing art supplies on family vacations so we could paint on location.

Great art will stand the test of time. Some subjects (like landscape) may never go entirely out of fashion, it just seems as though some artists' styles get dated. Style is more about what you leave out of a painting; and style also has to do with how an artist structures space in a painting.

If you go outside to paint (en plein aire) - how do you begin to comprehend nature in all its variety? If you can understand what you are seeing, how does that translate into color, shape, and atmosphere? How will you determine what is essential to your art? With that in mind we could begin to look at some paintings in recent exhibitions and have a view into the artists' modus operandi.

At the Arts & Cultural Council gallery on North Goodman Street in Rochester, we have bright new paintings from Kurt Moyer. Roughly divided into three sections, Kurt Moyer's paintings are figurative realism within a classical compass. Nude bathers, calm bosky ponds, and spring flowering are all handled with a painterly, not overly fussy, approach. It seems as if it is a perpetually sunny day in Kurt Moyer's world where people swing in a hammock, go sailing or cavort in the woods. Associations could be made with Manet and Cezanne - but seen through a more contemporary lens - so that these paintings are neither the transgressive fleeting nudity of Manet, nor the heroic near-abstractions of Cezanne. Kurt Moyer's matter-of-fact observations translate with joy and care for his subject.

Scale, the relative size of things, becomes a critical factor in landscape painting - it helps or hinders our "reading" of the artwork and can render a painting more or less chaotic if the artist is not sensitive to it. What is painted with clarity and what is not becomes an issue to be addressed. In photography it is the focal point and the sharpness of edges relative to lighting that can determine how we respond to a scene. Something similar happens in painting.

Windsor Whip Works Art Gallery

Just outside the city boundaries of Binghamton is the village of Windsor, and on Main Street a beautifully renovated store has now become the two story Windsor Whip Works Art Gallery. Bill and Johanne Pesce migrated up from Long Island to create this art center which is becoming a magnet for visitors and artists alike. On a recent weekend, I met George Rhoads at the opening of a show of more than one hundred of his imaginative landscape paintings.

In the 1960's George Rhoads had shows in New York City of his expressionist paintings, but he is known more for his kinetic sculptural installations found in many museums and in collections around the world. Rhoads was educated in Chicago and has been an artworld presence for over fifty years. Curiously, only one or two of his sculptural works were on hand at the Whip Works Art Gallery, and the rest of the space was given over to his and his son Paul's paintings.

The mostly smallish size of the paintings does not mean that George Rhoads is a miniaturist, but it does mean that for the viewer to make the most of the experience- you have to get very close to fully enjoy the work. A typical George Rhoads landscape has a quality that folk art seems to share - unusual brightness of color and unusual clarity in places that make the reading of the work more structured and more uniform than would happen in nature. George Rhoads does not paint on the scene, these are more memories or evocations of places, and at their best they are knit together like a fascinating quilt of color and texture.

George Rhoads
at Windsor Whip Works Art Gallery

Landscape with People

2010-07-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

Landscape with People

Catching up with my summer reading, I am ensconced in the letters of Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) and an autobiography of Marcia Tucker ("A Short Life of Trouble", University of California Press) who died in 2006. I met both of these people when they were forces in the artworld, but that artworld was much more circumscribed than what we have today, which is perhaps more democratic but spread rather thinly. Fairfield railed against the technology that ironically would help make the arts more accessible, but he would also bring his firm intellect down on media and critics who were too authoritarian.

I regularly follow a few writers on art including Peter Schjeldahl ( Let's See) in the New Yorker, Barry Schwabsky in The Nation, Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times, and Sanford Schwartz in The New York Review of Books, among others. When I read their words, it is like I have an extra set of eyes and ears and I am enlightened and entertained. In Fairfield Porter's letters ( "Material Witness", University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor) he details struggles in his life and art that jump off the page. Early on, other artists like Willem DeKooning overshadow him, and he frets but defends his position as a painter of intimate family life ( with some substantial tools that set him apart in the early 1950's). Porter's book of art criticism ( "Art In Its Own Terms") will renew your interest in painting if it has lagged, and any artist who paints the landscape owes him a debt.

Marcia Tucker's book is much more present, and as a curator and museum director she has left a richer legacy that is still being tested. The first few chapters of her memoir could be called the trials and tribulations, as she deals with death and near-death experiences - not the kind of thing you would expect from an art history student, and soon-to-be curator.

I felt her impact when I lived in New York City where she curated shows for the artists Bruce Nauman and Richard Tuttle while she worked at The Whitney. I could have guessed that she was an early feminist, that she was an engaged political activist and she bucked the system which turned her out and away from The Whitney Museum and onto a path towards directing her own museum.

Her show "Bad Painting" sent out ripples in every direction and it was just one of the noteworthy projects she instigated while working at her start-up "The New Museum" before it found a space in Soho. I think I saw every show she produced for a number of years while she was first at an annex to The New School on 14th Street, and later when "The New Museum" moved down to Broadway.
The late 1970's and 1980's brought "pluralism" and efforts to shake the gallery system and the old boys network that so dominated the visual arts in prior decades.

Marcia Tucker provided a role model for women in the arts, she blazed trails that few had taken before she arrived. She had courage and smarts, and stayed on course even when the going was very rocky and she was almost broke. Even if you never knew of Marcia Tucker, you can still feel the repercussions of what she accomplished in the world of visual arts.

Art Cities

2010-06-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

Big Bambu
takes the terrace garden to new heights
at the Met.

We went against the traffic and drove down to the Big Apple, and The City of Brotherly Love.

In NYC, the august Metropolitan Museum of Art is an unlikely place to find an unruly thicket of bamboo, but there it is - taking over the terrace above Central Park. In case you thought that the gardener went berserk, take the time to catch up to this latest artwork from Mike and Doug Starn and buy your ticket in advance for a guided tour of "Big Bambu". Thousands of bamboo poles have been erected to create a kind of floating scaffolding which you can enter on gently sloping paths that work their way upwards and around.

The Starns have been making art in the New York area for over twenty years. I was at their first show in NYC when the art critic for the Village Voice wrote: Run! Don't walk to see their exhibition. Last year
subway riders who stop at South Ferry found that the Starns had revamped the space with wall murals of
fused glass that represent silhouettes of the trees in Battery Park.

Back at the Met, several floors down, a neat little Picasso exhibition of paintings and prints is underway. There are several standout paintings like the portrait of Gertrude Stein, but the balance of the show tilts towards Picasso's graphic art with a room of linoleum reduction prints and a suite of later etchings featuring the artist as an old Musketeer recounting his various conquests surrounded by consorts.

My wife, Anna, and I were art tourists, visiting sites in two cities, and soaking up the sun and fair weather like a magic elixir. By design, we stopped in at the Barnes Foundation down the main line from Philadelphia. Dr. Barnes was a collector without peer in the early 1930's and his specialty was finding great European art and crating it up to send back home in Merion, Pennsylvania.

Ultimately, he wanted his collection to be a teaching tool, and to all this he added a school of horticulture. Surrounding the museum is an arboretum, which on a summer day was verdant and beckoned the gallery goer, so we took advantage of the fresh air to think about what we had just seen.
Acres of Cezannes, Renoir,Seurat, Modigliani, and Matisse. Exquisite metal work, folk art and American Indian art, some of it hiding away in the basement ( what a shame - if you don't use the facilities, you might miss the terrific collection of Acoma and Laguna pottery! ). A new museum is being built to harvest the Barnes Foundation's art, so it will all move to a new location nestled next to The Philadelphia Museum of Art within the next few years. If you want to experience the collection in its original setting - they only sell one hundred tickets per day to visit, so don't put it off.

Monumental sculpture often demands resources that only a team of creative people can deliver. Steve Sears, of Sears Iron Works gave us an insiders look at how he has helped fabricate many of the large scale public art pieces that Philadelphia is so proud of. We were standing in Center City learning the details of how Robert Engman's sculpture "Triune" came to be, and how William Penn was cleaned from his perch atop City Hall.

Around the corner, we inquired at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts ( the school that brought us Thomas Eakins and many others ). Finding our way to the Fabric Workshop we sat down and contributed a drawing on one of Mel Chin's blank bills that he is using for "Fundred" his national interactive art project. Mel is using the leverage of visual art to focus attention on the contamination of our soils from lead and other toxic metals. The idea is a kind of visual testament or petition which will be delivered to Congress from all corners of the country. Read about it online and participate, this form of social activism is both timely and necessary.

Robert Engman's "Triune"

Cut and Paste, Fabricate and Weld

2010-05-14T19:53:00.000-07:00

Ellen Stoll Walsh signs a book at Ock Hee's Gallery, Honeoye Falls, NY

Two very distinctive solo exhibitions opened last week by artists who have had great success with their work. I can't help but draw some comparisons between the art of Ellen Stoll Walsh and Albert Paley even though their personalities are so different and their audiences wouldn't recognize each other.

Along with her garden and her antiques Ock Hee presents an exhibition of childrens book art by a best selling author and artist. Ellen Stoll Walsh makes her home in the Rochester area, but her books will be enjoyed around the world, and those lucky enough to see this rare showing of her select original art from her books are in for a treat.

Ellen Stoll Walsh shares some formal similarities with other author/artists like Eric Carle ( his book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" might be an influence) and their art is designed to be engaging, enlivened by balancing silhouettes of primary color with activated open space of white pages. What you can't see from the printed pages of "Mouse Count" or "Dot and Jabber and the Big Bug Mystery" is that her art is a very sophisticated form of collage. Her art is totally integrated with the story she tells (though it is possible to understand "Mouse Paint" with no text at all).

This is where I begin to think of "Albert Paley in the 21st Century" on view this season at The Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. There are many facets to Paley's artwork and recently he has added a form of illustrative sculpture that is not too far removed from Ellen Stoll Walsh's silhouettes.

Albert Paley bucks trends often found in contemporary monumental art. As if the whole enterprise of minimalism hadn't occured, Paley's art is feathered, fragmented, and maintains alliances with cubism and Art Nouveau. Austerity is not in Paley's DNA - it is more like full orchestra with chorus.

Even though Paley's art is three dimensional, there is a reliance on planes of cut metal that at a much smaller scale could easily be Ellen Walsh's cut paper dandelion leaves. What we see in Paley's work right now is a translation of rhythms in nature displayed with pictorial concern. In fact, Paley's art is rejuvenating a regard for composition -something we haven't seen in Cor-Ten steel in the wake of Richard Serra and Mark DiSuvero.

Albert Paley has accepted commissions from civic boosters, private collectors, zoos and corporations. His reputation has grown steadily which keeps his studio collaborators buzzing with activity. Surprisingly, this is the first large scale exhibition of Paley's sculpture presented in Rochester, his hometown.

"Albert Paley in the 21st Century" contains many drawings ( in distinctive red pencil ) and many models or maquettes for much larger artwork. Visitors to the gallery are greeted with a dashing photograph of Paley handling searing hot metal, forging a new element to be added to a work in progress. Above the photo is a quote " The main function of ornament is to articulate emotion" which seems to preempt questions that are raised by the complexity of Paley's artistic expression.

Portals, gates, and semaphores seem to be the basis or premise from which he builds. The elements of utility and adornment are never far behind. Particularly impressive are the skills needed to forge and fabricate this sculpture. The physics and engineering alone, to balance weights and keep the art stable, must be a daunting task.

I was particularly struck by his most recent art for St. Louis, MO; Trenton, NJ and Monterrey, Mexico.
Albert Paley's show is long overdue, and we can only begin to assess how his art addresses the landscape or cityscape in which it finds a home. It is well worth the effort to keep an eye on Paley's symphony of form.

Museum Building

2010-04-11T14:16:00.000-07:00

I witnessed the Herbert F. Johnson Museum being built on the Cornell University campus in the early 1970's and now I was back to see a new wing being added to this famous edifice designed by I.M.Pei. Upstairs, I found the outdoor sculpture court so agreeable on a stunning spring day, but ultimately it is underutilized. In the near term the collection will be shifted as renovations occur and the fifth floor, which houses Asian art, will be the first to see major changes. Panoramic windows offer a view up Lake Cayuga (still spectacular), and now the art will be given more room to breathe.

On the lower floors new acquisitions are given prominent placement, chief among them are works like Leger''s "Composition With Two Figures" which is marvelously wacky: two flying nudes up in the clouds encounter a Russian Constructivist painting or is that a manual for building your own radio?

Going back to see the Herbert F. Johnson Museum is like visiting an old friend, but one with a few surprises in store. In a basement gallery, artwork from James Siena (Cornell grad from 1979) was on display. His paintings were described as the ones he couldn't part with, but there were also some real oddities like the flattened gilded mouse, and a collection of unusual typewriters. His show "From The Studio" also has some art that Siena collected, including drawings by the irascible Alan Saret ( also a Cornell grad), a wonderful Alfred Jensen painting, and some obscure aerial surveillance photos from World War l.

James Siena has a mathematical mind: precise, calculated, methodical and a bit obsessive. The surfaces of this art are rarely out of control, so the paintings can engage you on several levels and are reassuring in their completeness.

But maybe your taste is for something not so compulsive? Well, in the next room see Michael Ashkin's photographs - set up like old stereoscopic prints with one image next to another. His remarkably mundane textures of construction sites bring to mind the truly historic exhibitions of Robert Smithson's ( creator of "Spiral Jetty") art held at Cornell in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Smithson's "Non Sites" are the progenitors of Michael Ashkin's photos. The power of entropy, a favored function in Robert Smithson's universe, details a measure of disorder or randomness in a system and the gradual apparent loss of energy that ensues. Ashkin documents the fall out from a developer''s voracious appetite in historic Long Branch, New Jersey. Will greed overpower entropy? It is not a pretty picture.

Driving to Buffalo and Back

2010-04-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

I am driving a car in a recurring dream when I realize my need to stop or turn the wheel, but I can't because I find I'm in the back seat (no one else is in the car) and my feet can't reach the brake pedal. Some anxiety is associated with this, but the overwhelming feeling that I take away from this experience is not one of being out of control, but a feeling of being infantilized. When was I last in a car when my feet did not touch the floor? When I was a child..This dream is a complex and not so subtle metaphor for some event from my life. In visual art a metaphor could be used to have one image signify another. There is an implicit comparison, just as there is in poetry. This comparative aspect is an organizing principle at work in artistic pursuits (among other things) and seems to run on autopilot in regions of the heart and mind.In the news, researchers are beginning to map out with greater certainty where in the brain our thoughts occur. Which brings me to Guillermo Kuitca, whose exhibition: "Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper" runs through May 30th at The Albright Knox Gallery, in Buffalo.Kuitca conducts his own form of research and diagrams his findings on the walls of the museum. Right away, his art talks about locations where things happen, judging from the seating charts which make up a portion of this show. You know somethings happening, you just don't know what it was, to paraphrase Bob Dylan.Mapping is a hot topic (in some ways more obscure than the amazingGoogle Maps), with Kuitca you are given locations but you have to supplythe substance of what's there. He does this over and over again, and yourealize that this is a form of ritual - a human performance with somehabitual movements that takes you someplace and later returns you tostart all over again.The performative element of this visual art is unlike theatre - the audiencedoes not get to see the painter in the act of creation. So why are all theseworks of art about available seating? Isn't there a paradox here? The artisttakes you to a place, but can't show you what is going on. This sometimesfrustrating feeling is compounded by paintings of nearly empty rooms shownin a childlike style that reminds me of the dream I wrote about at the topof this article.Down a long hallway at The Albright Knox, does anyone notice a mostpowerful tiny drawing from The Dorothy and Herb Vogel collectionby Don Hazlitt? Only a couple of square inches, this drawing from 1977forecasts a plane crash in Clarence Center, New York that I thought aboutas I drove up the Thruway to Buffalo, in full control of my vehicle.

Work in Progress: Mentors and Students

2010-03-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

"Art 21" is not only a series of programs produced for public TV - but it is also the site of an informative blog that has recently turned its attention to art education, sponsoring a competition for art students who want to publish their views online. Wouldn't it be good for educators to know what their students are really looking for when they sign up for art classes? Articulate student artists are going to help shape the future so we better be listening.

If you read Sarah Thornton's chatty "Seven Days in the Art World" you may have suffered through the chapter on "The Crit". An unwieldy but necessary affair, the critique can be a test of nerves for both students and their mentors.. The critique needs to be decoded for the reader, it can be a form of confession on the part of students and a way to deconstruct the process they went through to achieve what is being scrutinized. Teachers can be cheerleaders, while at other times they are the referee and the jury. At art school, perhaps
you believe as James Elkins has recently written in "Why Art Cannot be Taught" that we know very little about how art is taught, and what it is that we expect students to learn.

The art teacher still has the authority to be a role model for students. Visit The Geisel Gallery at Bausch & Lomb World Headquarters during the weekdays to see Don Arday's elegant solo show of digital art now on view through April 30th. Theme and variation is the working premise, with an influence of cubism, Leger and Picabia in kaleidoscopic compositions framed in nearly identical vertical formats. Don Arday teaches digital illustration at R.I.T. and his art has a meticulous craftsmanship and a restrained vocabulary of color and geometric shape.

Students are rarely given the opportunity to have a one person show, often because they don't have a body of cohesive artwork. That is not the case with Robyn Neill in his new exhibition at The Joy Gallery on Genesee Street. "Ascension" is the title of his series of paintings on thick wood panels which have been cut and shaped by jigsaw. These paintings have high ambitions with titles like "Confidence", "Hesitation" and "Heartache", the latter including an interior video screen featuring a palpitating heart.

Themes of contemporary faith, desire, and political instability were arrived at in contemplation which is the artist's prerogative. For some students it is the misapprehension of what their teachers teach that drives them forward, but not so for Robyn Neill. With his new installations he effectively incorporates constructive criticism to make his art more cogent. As Luvon Sheppard (the Director of The Joy Gallery and Robyn's teacher) say's, "the mission of this gallery will enable artists of ability who are relatively unknown to be featured in a professional way". The support and respect that is given at The Joy Gallery most importantly has been earned, so artists and visitors feel the benefit from a high level of commitment; part of process on a path towards achieving artistic maturity.

Image credits:
Don Arday Chair, School of Art "Unresolved Face" digital art
Robyn Neill, paintings in progress

Kimono-matic

2010-03-13T19:39:00.000-08:00

You don't have to be a textile collector to appreciate "Fashioning Kimono: Art Deco and Modernism in Japan" now on view at The Memorial Art Gallery. Just develop a taste for the dramatic, graphic and colorful formal clothing that Japanese artisans have been creating for hundreds of years. Then again, you just might be interested in seeing how an Asian culture reflects on original European and American design.

The lucky people wearing these fashionable garments must have looked like walking paintings, or animated architecture - as the case may be. The argument for making a comparison with architecture comes from the title of this exhibition itself. Would you know what the defining characteristics of Art Deco look like? If it were not for buildings in our midst such as the Empire State Building or Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan ( and even some buildings in Rochester ) we wouldn't have a clue.

The strongest, longest lasting impression we have of Modernism and of Art Deco is that of a streamlining, and simplification of design, and the banishment of embellishment or ornament. Looking at the Kimonos on view at the MAG, you see a sublime craftsmanship, a profound sense of graphic design, and mouth watering color in the best pieces on exhibit.

Bold red and electric blue identifies a great Kimono in the main gallery. A sumptious catalog identifies this costume ( item 77 with a "Wood Assembly" motif ) as "Early Showa period, 1930's-1940's made of silk crepe with hand tie-dyed warp threads". There is no equivalent of these Kimonos in the west, yet I am reminded of the wearing blankets of the Navajo Indians in the late 19th and early 20th century that employ similar designs.

This exhibition also reminds me of the pioneering shows on view at the Japan Society over 20 years ago that sparked an interest in pattern painting. The objects in " Fashioning Kimono.." are drawn from the Jeffrey Montgomery collection of Lugano, Switzerland - known as the most comprehensive collection of Japanese folk art outside of Japan.

Separate sections of the exhibit at the MAG are devoted to children's kimonos ( look for the biplanes and battleships on the 1930's boy's kimono ) and mens ' and womens' garments. Particularly striking are the hand painted men's silk formal jackets with subdued color, the gigantic chrysanthemums on a women's kimono of the late Meiji period, and the wisteria motif of the kimono on your right as you enter the exhibition.

How self-effacing this art form is - I leave without ever knowing who the artists were that created these eye catching, fetching costumes.

In Manhattan, A Sea of Cultural Artifacts

2010-03-07T10:11:00.000-08:00

Early March is the season to sail into port, drop anchor for a few

hours and amble through "The Armory Show". Now, in its

eleventh season, this sprawling show takes over the west side's

Pier 94 and gives the intrepid art lover entertainment for a least

a few hours. Ticket prices were up ( $30 per person ), and sales

may have lagged, but the show goes on and on.

Last year's standouts were back, and the nuevo primitivo

Nick Cave, gives us a set of shaman shrub figures made of red

branches and pearlescent beady wire that look like they got

off at the wrong subway stop when they were really headed for

the Museum of Natural History.

I would say the crowds were light on the first day, so seeing the

art was relatively easy; one could linger in front of the little

porthole at the Pierogi Gallery booth and stare at Patrick Jacob's

green grass meadow diorama and wonder how he could have the

unworldly patience to assemble this marvel.

This year is not one for innovation, or so it would seem.

The gallerists are being cautious but there were real rewards

for those who look closely. International art stars and up and

comers are the order of the day. A wonderfully mesmerizing

ultramarine concavity of Anish Kapoor could stop you in your

tracks as does a bevy of sublime paintings of Giorgio Morandi

on the elder side of the pier show.

Along the way, I stopped for a suite of photos by Sze Tsung Leong

called "Horizons" which have an astringent aesthetic that satisfies, as does the tall collage

of Arturo Herrera at Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

If you weren't swamped by "The Armory Show", there is always a choice to see "Scope"

at Lincloln Center, or "Pulse" along the west side, but I chose to go over to The Museum

of Modern Art and visit the William Kentridge extravaganza. This South African artist

is fixated by what drawing can do for the mind and body and here it is almost palpable.

Visit MOMA to see the unforgettable stage scenes from Kentridge's production of

"The Magic Flute"; stay long enough to get the full impact of this animated set and see

the films projected in this show called "Five Themes".

Before you pull up anchor, go next door to see the one and only showing of

Thomas Chambers ( 1808 - 1869 ) a marine and landscape painter at the Folk Art Museum.

A self described "fancy painter" whose work has great graphic instincts characterized the

Hudson River Valley with a kind of stylization that shows up later in the 20th century in

artists like Thomas Hart Benton.

Going down the "Great White Way", watch out for the changing traffic patterns on Broadway,

but really - what a grand tour we had before heading out to sea!

"A Nice Place To Visit"

2010-03-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

Printmaking is a chameleon art form, always changing its spots. This month a polished selection of provocative prints goes on view in the recently renovated Davis Gallery of Houghton House on the campus of Hobart William & Smith College in Geneva, New York. A place to come and meditate, to experience new art; but what are all those weeds growing up and around the windows and doors?

Nick Ruth ( an artist on the faculty at Hobart ) is the guiding light and curator for "Nice Place To Visit": Printmaking and the Anxious Landscape; he describes Kim Beck's vinyl leaves encircling the doors, as part of nature's revenge, a plant's protest lodged against a local architecture of the gallery space. At least in this instance weeds dominate and the art takes control. Weeds = Art.

A statement of purpose is to explore some of printmaking's new territory where artists make their home ( provisional as that may be ). In the wake of devastating earthquakes, tidal waves and global warming, where you live does matter. At the entrance you encounter Erik Waterkotte's "Over the Drained Lake", 2007. Extending the range of how a print is made (digital, relief, etching, and chine-colle) it is fun to speculate on which technique makes which mark on the paper. What it all adds up to is an image of a battlefield, tiny dark blots on red monuments. The artist writes: "I am compelled by imagery of disaster, broken architecture, voids of space and atmosphere that distort a once decipherable place".

Each of the nine artists presented here has a distinct vision, yet some of the images look remarkably cool and analytical: Kevin Haas' Trent Avenue lithographs are muffled in gray and black - solitary without giving away their location and Sean Morrisey keeps the geometry pure but lets the space collide and dematerialize, as if contemporary building materials suddenly became translucent and started to dance.

Warming up one corner of the exhibition are a suite of Nick Ruth's relief prints with some hot color and a repeating ball motif that is present in each frame. In "Tempest, 2009" we have a red ( explosive ) shower falling into a green cup, symbolic of a simple system where, as Nick says, "our natural selves battle our rational selves".

If seeing is believing, do you know what you are looking at when you see Mitch Mitchell's photo gravure prints? A landscape without horizon results in space without scale, and then there is the bubbling black ooze that is so disturbing. Artists are dreamers, but Mitch Mitchell's art is real and a result of visiting the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada to stage the miniature tableaux he

captures in a gorgeous series of otherworldly images.

Yoonmi Nam contributes lithographs of structures once built and now demolished. This could be a recipe for a transitional existence which is a statement made more poignant in Erika Walker's etchings of finely drawn gears and dials succumbing to primordial forces.

Finally, four of my recent hybrid prints round out a show of places where the unexpected event occurs with greater regularity. There are few images of humanity directly presented here but the effects of human enterprise is all over this exhibit. I think we are all a bit terrified about what we have wrought on this planet.

Also on view is a fine small installation of book art by Sarah Bryant and Big Jump Press.

Gallery Hours are Monday thru Friday, 9-5, and Saturday 1-5

The Anxious Landscape

2010-02-25T18:41:00.000-08:00

The Visual Artworker