Archives for November 2010

We can not let November fade into history without returning to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which last Thursday gave people the opportunity to visit its galleries, before or after their turkey dinners.

 

Which sure beats settling down on the couch to watch football or sitting at the computer to work, play or post on Facebook. And, let’s face it, except for going to the movies or a few miscellaneous stores, there’s not much else to do on Thanksgiving. It’s a time when family members are supposed to enjoy each other’s company, after all. Going to the art museum en famille is an idea that imho is ripe for spreading throughout the land.

 

To recap: When, last spring, the VMFA reopened in an expanded version, Alex Nyerges, the director, declared that the museum would be open 365 days a year. On Thanksgiving, it was open from noon to 5 p.m. and its restaurant – “Amuse” – offered Thanksgiving lunch (roasted turkey, pork loin or shrimp for entrees).

 

What happened? About 100 people came to eat at Amuse, and some 500 came to view the art. Mr. Nyerges was among them: he ate his meal with his wife, son and deputy director, and then roamed the galleries. Afterwards, he told me, “The museum seemed busy. It is a family day.”

 

Does 500 people sound scanty to you? Consider this: On an average weekday, without a special event or exhibition, the VMFA attracts about 1,000 visitors. It spent nothing to market the Thanksgiving hours, only sending emails to members and posting the hours on Facebook and Twitter. It offered no lectures, films or family events.

 

What’s more, when the VMFA was open last Memorial Day and July Fourth, it drew “a couple of thousand” visitors.

 

Nyerges thinks the VMFA can do better, so for Christmas, he’s giving visitors a gift: free admission to the museum’s special exhibitions. Normally, the permanent collection galleries are free, but admission to the current Sally Mann exhibition, for example, is $10 and admission to the American Quilts show is $15.

 

VMFA is also open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. Nyerges says he knows of no other museum with such late and 365-day access. Neither do I.

 

He also says that when he first brought up these hours, his chief financial officer said the museum could not afford it. “I said we can’t not afford it,” he replied. Six months into his experiment, he says that people stop him all the time and express their delight that “the museum is open all the time. They love it.”

 

So do I. BTW, Nyerges said he had no trouble attracting staff for Thanksgiving; they were paid at the premium overtime rate.

 

Art museums all over the country are constantly talking about making themselves “more accessible.” Not enough are taking what should be among the easiest steps: staying open at night and on holidays, when people actually have time to go to museums.

 

They might even be forging some new family traditions that revolve around art.

 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (bottom)

 

The sprawling art extravaganza that is Art Basel Miami Beach and its satellite fairs begins on Thursday, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, an hour north, is responding with a new, great idea. It’s planning exhibition called Now WHAT? — put together via a kind of “Amazing Race” for the art world. The exhibit will be curated and put on display for all to see on Dec. 15, ten days after the fairs close.

As the headline of the Norton’s email to me put it,

Take two curators, add five days, mix in tens of thousands of works of art, yield: one exhibition encapsulating what’s happening now in art.

The curators, Cheryl Brutvan, the Norton’s curator of contemporary art, and Charlie Stainback, the curator of photography — pictured at right — got the assignment.

Curious about the project, I sent them five questions, and Stainback replied. Here are his answers:

1) It’s practically impossible for anyone to make the rounds of all the art fairs without the experience becoming a  blur. What’s your plan of attack? Will you go separately or together?

We are going to make every effort to view every fair possible. We are well aware of the difficulty in seeing so much visual material at once and we continue to discuss the logic of how to approach the largest fairs (with repeat visits – as typical) and what can be achieved daily.  We will plan sessions to discuss what has been most memorable, interesting, etc.  routinely.  We will view most of the fairs as a team.

2) Have you done any pre-fair perusing (online, say, or via press releases), and have dealers sent you advance information or lobbied for their artists?

We are receiving the wealth of unsolicited information that you’re probably receiving as well; there have been efforts by individual and collective artists about their location when not associated with the fairs. But overall, the typical sharing of information. We have both experienced queries from galleries when visiting them and have received very enthusiastic responses about the concept from artists, collectors, colleagues.

3) You’ve said (in a press release) that the number of works chosen, media mix, etc. is open — but realistically, what are your goals?

We recognize the space we have available in which to present Now WHAT? and will continually bear that in mind.  We propose 30 – 50 objects of a variety of media; no restrictions really.

4) Your assignment assumes that the works chosen will be lent to the Norton (until Mar. 13, 2011, when the exhibition closes). But if a buyer won’t part with his/her new purchase, won’t that affect your view of “art now”?

Most collectors are very respectful of an artist’s work and feel a responsibility to make it available for a serious project that is to be viewed by the general public. We understand the potential for missing something mutually desirable and will expect that there will be many, many choices. Few exhibition checklists are the original ideal envisioned by the curator.

5) Do you and Cheryl have the same artistic sensibilities, or will you probably disagree, and if so, then what?

We are respectful of each other’s sensibilities but may, indeed, disagree.  We are confident that we will be able to create a smart and thoughtful exhibition together. 

I had a sixth question, wondering if the Norton intended to acquire any of the works at ABMB and beyond that they are rounding up for the exhibit. “Very possibly,” Stainback said, “but it isn’t the overriding objective of this project.”

Excitement is, I think. Being part of the conversation. Wags may say that this show will have little, if any scholarship behind it, and there’ll be no time to research and write a thoughtful essay about it. But I’ll be still eager to see if Brutvan and Stainback can choose and display a coherent exhibition, one appropriate for a museum, one that doesn’t look like an art fair.

Good luck.   

   

Lowery Stokes Sims (at right) set herself a rather impossible task when she decided to organize an exhibition called “The Global Africa Project.”

She wanted to illustrate the idea that African artists have had a global impact, even as they have been influenced by their colonial past — “cultural fusion.” More daunting still, she did not want to stick with design, craft and fashion — her initial charge — but rather broadened out her search as curator to painting, sculpture, photography and installation work too. She believes all those lines separating design from fine art are a blurry mess.

The result, which she describes as “big and chaotic,” in now on view at the Museum of Art and Design, and the subject of my article and interactive feature in this weekend’s Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times.

Sims thinks most of the work in this exhibit will be new to most people, though it is sprinkled with a few well known names, like Yinka Shonibare and Sheila Bridges.

As one of the artists I interviewed, Kim Schmahmann said, “I think many things wil come out of it. Her focus is showing that Africa is more than the stereotype, and the work coming out of Africa has incredibly wide range and it reflects on the history Africa has with many different colonial powers and many different cultures coming and going — and that has never been done under one roof.”

Schmahmann, a South African who left decades ago and has settled in Cambridge, MA., has a very interesting, complicated, and quite beautiful work in the show called “Apart-Hate: A People Divider” (at left).

I’ve posted a few additional pictures of some works in the show on my website.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Museum of Art and Design (top); of Kim Schmahmann (bottom)

“Believe.” That was the sign on Macy’s 34th St. today (and until past Christmas, presumably), clearly visible in you watched the Thanksgiving Day parade.

And that’s what many people would like to believe about Rocco Landesman’s campaign, from his perch as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, that creating arts districts all over the U.S. will lead to economic development. 

Sadly, it’s not always true, as an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Greater New York section outlined. It’s about Peekskill, N.Y., which for the last two decades or so has been courting artists with low-cost loft spaces. Here’s the lede:

During better times, this city in the Hudson Valley hoped the construction of combination living-and-work loft space for middle-income artists would give a boost to its commercial center and help bring back the shoppers lost to nearby suburban malls.

A decade later, Peekskill’s experiment–one tried also elsewhere around the country–hasn’t turned out to be the economic engine some had hoped. Local officials recently eased rules for occupying the lofts in an effort to attract more artists.

The article, here, is far from definitive. It suggests that some artists love the spaces, but not enough have moved to Peekskill, and that those who have not created spillover economic activity, like people browsing local shops and galleries, has had been hoped. It’s not, as the author wrote, nearby Beacon, which — with DIA-Beacon — is drawing visitors. 

I would love to believe, too, but putting pressure on the arts to be an economic engine is bound to lead to failure somewhere, and probably in many places. Peekskill is a cautionary tale.

For a local view of the town’s progress, here’s Chronogram Magazine’s 2009 take. And here is Peekskill’s explanation of its policies.

UPDATED, 11/26:

On the other hand, today’s New York Times has an article about Christo’s efforts to create an installation along the Arkansas River in Colorado. Some people in Salida, a key town, oppose it, others are for it, but the relevant paragraphs for this post is:

Many people say that things have changed in the years since Christo proposed the project in 1992. The fundamentals of the local economy, still connected in many ways to the old anchors of mining and freight, have shifted toward service and tourism. An arts community that barely existed has emerged and flowered, with people drawn by low rents and sweeping mountain vistas.

The recession, supporters say, has made “Over the River” more desirable in a community that is bound more to economic engines of tourism than it used to be.

Read that article here. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chronogram (bottom). 

It would be pretty hard for the Guggenheim Museum* to be picky about donations nowadays. As Bloomberg (among others) recently revealed, the Gugg was deep in the red last year, yet that was an improvement:

In 2009, the Guggenheim Foundation’s deficit narrowed to $12.3 million in 2009 from $14.6 million in 2008, as expenses declined more than revenue. Contributions and grants fell 22 percent to $20.3 million. In the first half of 2009, the Fifth Avenue museum cut about 25 jobs, or 8 percent of its positions, after the foundation’s endowment shrank 18 percent in the nine months ended June 2009.

Nonetheless, I was particularly disappointed to read the other day that the Guggenheim is taking another step toward being a corporate billboard (e.g., Google, Deutsch Bank, BMW:

Now it has announced that Samsung, the South Korean manufacturer, has provided a naming gift for curator Alexandra Munroe. She will henceforth be known as the Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art.

But not to me. That will be the last time, if I have control (which I don’t always, as some publications require a person’s full title), that I will use the Samsung reference.

It’s not that I am ungrateful. I well understand a donor’s desire for recognition. But some requests are seemlier than others. Samsung and the Guggenheim could have worked out something else — credit in printed materials, on a donor wall, at exhibitions curated by Munroe, and so on. Instead, Samsung and the Guggenheim seem to be proud of establishing this awful new precedent. Take a look at this sentence in the press release, which did not mention the size of Samsung’s gift:

The Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art will be the first named position in the field of modern and contemporary Asian art at an international art museum in the West.

Bully. Samsung has a Foundation of Culture, bent on fostering appreciation for Korean art. It has sponsored Korean art galleries and exhibitions at many museums, including the Metropolitan. It put its name on Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, in Korea. That’s all fine. But naming a curator this way crosses a line for me. I hope other museums — and other companies — do not follow this course.

Photo Credit: David Heald. © 2006 SRGF, NY

*I consult to a foundation that supports Works & Process at the Guggenheim