A section from “Trace,” part of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz (Photo: Chloe Veltman)

The exhibition of sound and visual art installations by the celebrated Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei is coming to an end this Sunday after many months on display on Alcatraz Island.

My visit to see @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz less than a week before its closing a couple of days ago got me wondering about the impact of the exhibition.

After all, the artist was “handed” one of the world’s most famous prisons as a canvas for activism through art in the wake of his own internationally-decried incarceration for speaking out against the Chinese government.

Alcatraz is one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions. And Alexandra Picavet, public relations specialist with Golden Gate National Recreation Area says @Large has brought even more people to Alcatraz.

“Ai Weiwei helped draw visitors for the local area who usually would not have gone, and it did help sell tickets quicker during the slower season in the winter,” Picavet says.  “There are only a handful of weeks that do not sellout each year. During those weeks we did see an uptick in ticket sales.”

What the show does very palpably, especially through its largest installations, such as “Trace,” pictured here, is draw in-your-face attention to the subject of incarceration — specifically the fate of the many people around the world who’ve been locked up for asking difficult questions of divisive governments. “Trace” unnervingly presents the portraits of around 175 prisoners of conscience on the floor of a giant prison work room through the playful and shiny medium of Legos.

The Legos make the images look like pixelated, old-fashioned newsprint when viewed from a distance, reminding us just how forgotten, obscure and otherwise removed from our everyday lives most of these people are to a great many of us: Beyond a few faces like Edward Snowden’s, I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with most of the portraits.

Visitors interact with the installations and then get the chance to write postcards to prisoners, which the exhibition staff then send off. The entrance ticket to the show pays, in part, for the mailing costs.

One of the docents told me that more than 70,000 such postcards have been sent off to date.

She also said 13 prisoners depicted in the show have been set free since September last year when it opened.

Here is a list, provided by Resnicow + Associates, the PR firm that’s been handling media inquiries on the Ai Weiwei exhibition. Their list has 10 names on it, not 13.

1.   Uzeyir Mammadli – Azerbaijan
Released Dec. 2014

2.  Bakhtiyar Guliyev – Azerbaijan
Released October 2014

3.  Dr. Tun Aung – Burma
Released January 2015

4.  Iván Fernández Depestre – Cuba
Released January 2015

5.  Bahman Ahmadi Amouee – Iran
Released October 2014

6.  Roza Tuletaeva – Kazakhstan
Released November 2014

7.  Artiom Saviolov – Russia
Released January 2015

8.  John Kiriakou – United States
Released February 2015*

*Released to house arrest for three months. Following completion of house arrest, he will remain under supervised release for three years.

9.  Shakir Hamoodi – United States
Released December 2014*
*Released to halfway house as transition to home detention until full release in April 2015.

10.  Nguyen Van Hai – Vietnam
Released October 2014

Of course, it would be wrong to assume that these people have gotten out from behind bars because of the barrage of postcards from well-wishers writing from a far-off art show. The releases could have happened for any number of reasons. But it’s thrilling to think that Ai Weiwei’s vivid depictions of these individuals in @Large might have helped to bring about this positive denouement.

But the postcard gambit hasn’t been unremittingly positive, apparently.

The same docent explained that one prisoner from Vietnam represented in Ai Weiwei’s work had to be removed from the show because the deluge of postcards was actually threatening her safety. Apparently the prison authorities in Vietnam did not take kindly to the onslaught of support from abroad and her life was in danger as a result.

I hope to add more information to this blog post, as well as double-check some of the facts, e.g about the number of POCs released, next week after the show closes. The PR firm that’s handling the show says that everyone at the For-Site Foundation, which organized the exhibition, is too busy to talk this week. After the closing day hooplah is over for the team, they will hopefully have time to chat with me in more depth about the outcomes.

UPDATE: Heard back on some details from Resnicow + Associates:

Ai Weiwei owns the works. Now that the show is done, the artist gas asked f0r the pieces to be shipped to Berlin. There’s currently no public information available regarding their fate from there. 

I hope to receive updated numbers on prisoner releases since the show opened in September 2014. Hanna Gisel, the spokesperson for the PR firm, said, “It is impossible to know what, if any, impact the exhibition had on the unique decisions to release individual prisoners.”

Gisel said the final postcard count is still being tallied. 

And, in response to a question I asked Gisel about how, if at all, the activism surrounding this show will be continued after it closes, she said:

“Throughout the show, we hoped the artworks acted as a springboard for dialogue about critical issues of human rights and freedom of expression.  For all of us on staff at FOR-SITE and involved in the project, it was very rewarding to see so many visitors engage with these issues in a range of ways—from sending postcards through “Yours Truly” or sharing experiences and ideas on social media.  We hope that, although the works are no longer on view at Alcatraz, these important dialogues will continue, and as individuals we will continue to move forward in our own activism and engagement around these issues.”

 Also, check out this well-put-together roundup of the impact of the show in the Los Angeles Times. 

Brent Lindsay introduces Saturday night’s show at The Imaginarium, Santa Rosa (Photo: Chloe Veltman.)

My theater critic friend, R, took me on a road trip to Santa Rosa at the weekend. I had no idea what I was in for, beyond the fact that we’d be seeing a show that Rob was very excited about. So excited, in fact, that he’d spent much of every exchange we’d had in the preceding week telling me that if there was one thing I should see in Bay Area theater right now, it was this.

Now, to fully understand what R was saying, you have to know that these days he’s quite down on the Bay Area theater scene. Pretty much all straight drama being produced these days around here sends him into an angry diatribe about lazy companies and somnambulant audiences.

So to hear such a theater naysayer talk so passionately about The Imaginists, a scrappy, Santa Rosa-based company that produces experimental shows in a storefront theater an hour’s drive north of the city, piqued my curiosity. And by the time we emerged from that evening’s performance of “SitCalm!” I was raving as much as R was.

Although I’ve been away from the Bay Area for the past two years, I’m ashamed to say that I had never heard of The Imaginists before I left town, even though they’ve been around since 2007 at least, by the looks of the company’s website.

Judging by what I can find online and the one performance I’ve witnessed first hand, The Imaginists’ work is more akin to the sort of theater produced by experimental performance art ensembles in places like Berlin, London, France and Moscow than most American companies.

They seem to do mostly original pieces (such as “SitCalm!”, the one I saw last night, which was based on the American sitcom tradition) and adaptations, (e.g. “The Wizard of Oz). However, the ensemble has also made occasional forays into more traditional plays like “Waiting for Lefty.” Though I expect that there was little that could be deemed traditional about The Imaginists’ take on Clifford Odets famous agit prop drama.

“SitCalm!” is a totally warped take on sitcom tropes. The performance on Saturday was the culmination of a run that has so far featured four episodes of the series. The company calls this work “made for theatre TV” and the action — just like on many classic examples of the genre — revolves around a big, messy, American family. One ancestor, I guess, is The Bradys from the “Brady Bunch” sitcom series of yore.

The teenaged (or thereabouts) kids are all of varying ethnicities and personalities — one is sporty, another is nerdy, a third is so eccentric he wanders around in nothing but a diaper and talks mostly in barks and grunts. Their parents are mostly absent. They wander in and out like Deus ex Machina. They are sort of loving and sort of detached. A lot of scenes involve the brood sprawled out on the couch watching TV. And every time someone utters one of the many zingers smattered throughout the play, there’s momentary canned applause.

At one level, “SitCalm” critiques the vapidity of sitcom culture and its grand emptying of Americans’ brains.

At another, the piece provides an interesting metatheatrical window through which to understand the dynamics of this unusual company. The astoundingly committed young cast members all use some version of their own name for the character they play, e.g. Rachel Quintara’s character is called Rae; Hana Casita goes by Hana etc. And the mom and dad characters are played by the company’s directors and founders — Amy Pinto and Brent Lindsay.

Rob tells me that most of the young actors pretty much grew up with The Imaginists; Lindsay and Pinto are to a degree second parents to these kids. So in this way “SitCalm” plays out the fascinating dynamics of a theatrical family living in Santa Rosa.

I don’t know if The Imaginists will be doing more episodes of “SitCalm” any time soon. I certainly hope so. I’m hooked.

Adam Magill as Con and Joseph Estlack as Dev in SF Playhouse’s production of “Stupid Fucking Bird,” an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” by Aaron Posner. (Photo: Jessica Palopoli)

Aaron Posner’s “Stupid Fucking Bird” transports Chekhov’s “The Seagull” into the 21st century with ukulele songs, expletives and plaid shirts.

The dramatist’s mostly cosmetic updates makes Chekhov’s angsty drama more approachable for modern audiences albeit in a thoroughly superficial way. There’s some good acting and a fluid mise en scene to SF Playhouse‘s current production directed by Susi Damilano. But I don’t think Posner’s version, which hews fairly closely to the original in terms of narrative — though bafflingly avoids the protagonist’s suicide —  improves in any way upon Chekhov’s drama.

Yet the play is undeniably entertaining (which cannot always be said of Chekhov productions, especially since so many of them suck the humor dry.) And in one way in particular – its volatile breaking of the fourth wall — I was sucked in by the show.

Chekhov’s earlier plays, such as “The Seagull,” include things like asides. “The Seagull” even has one moment where a character steps completely out of the scene to talk directly to the audience. The effect is quite startling in an otherwise realistic set-up where characters speak amongst themselves without consulting with the audience.

Lauren Spencer and Safiya Fredericks in Crowded Fire’s “Blackademics” by Idris Goodwin. (Photo: Cheshire Isaacs.)

In The Los Angeles Review of Books this week, academic and journalist Minda Honey writes about how Issa Rae is addressing the paucity of roles for black actresses on television and film with her hit web series and best-selling memoir “Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.”

Despite Rae’s considerable creds, it’s going to take more than one person to make powerful roles for women of color a normal occurrence in art and media though, as Idris Goodwin’s 2012 stage drama, “Blackademics,” so palpably suggests.

The surrealist chamber play explores the struggles of African-American female academics as they attempt to navigate a system that has largely been set up by and for white people. It’s a system that both excludes and fetishizes anyone outside the old boys’ club: As one of the characters in Goodwin’s drama puts it, while it’s OK for a member of the club to focus exclusively on a single, very narrow scholarly field e.g. the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson, a black female college professor is expected to know about every single idea ever written or thought by anyone who isn’t white. An already very broad field like African-American literature is apparently no longer valid in this competitive, academic world.

In Crowded Fire Theater‘s smart production, elastically-directed by Mina Morita (the company’s new artistic director), Ann, played with great poise by Safiya Fredericks, invites an old friend, Rachelle, embodied with soft toughness by Lauren Spencer, to lunch at a trendy cafe to celebrate getting tenure at a highly-esteemed liberal arts college. Even before Ann shares her good news, there’s rivalry between the two professors: Rachelle’s career at a state school, known more for its “great bleachers” than anything scholarly, is stalling. She doesn’t take Ann’s promotion well.

But the squabbling between the two characters is only part of Goodwin’s world view here: This kind of competition could just as easily be played out between white, male scholars. What’s particular to this scenario isn’t simply resentment that arises between two professionals on the make. It’s the fight against a system that almost completely excludes black women.

The system, in this case, takes the form of a matronly and mild-mannered white waitress, played with creepy authority by Michele Aprina Leavy. The waitress’ name is Georgia, a constant reminder of the South’s slave history and how little society has progressed since then, in some ways. From the moment she persuades her only two dinner guests to eat seeds from the palm of her hand near the start of the play, Georgia has the upper hand almost entirely.

The waitress listens in, off stage, to the diners, and brings them food and drink based on how well she thinks each one does in their game of self- and system-imposed one-upmanship. When Ann gets ahead of Rachelle, she scores a point from Georgia and wins a salad. But Georgia keeps her guests on a tight leash. They have to fight to earn a table. There’s only one chair, no cutlery or glasses and only one person gets to eat at any one time.

It’s an unsettling dictatorship, made all the more so by the cutting boards that adorn the otherwise modishly plain wooden cafe walls like so many unblinking eyes, and the smooth jazz that plays in the background when the atmosphere becomes unremittingly hostile.

The cafe, from which Rachelle and Ann cannot escape, and the creepy waitress, reminds us of “No Exit” by Jean Paul Sartre, not to mention countless other existential plays of the 20th century by bastions of academic study like Samuel Beckett. The fact that Goodwin’s play smacks so strongly of mainstream, white literary history adds a layer of caustic metatheatrical humor to the dramatist’s effort to grant visibility to African-American culture.

In Sartre there is no way out of hell. That’s what makes the surreal play seem very real. But Goodwin’s denouement is more optimistic, and, I think, overly simplistic. Rachelle and Ann can continue to bicker — and lose. Or they can team up against Georgia — and possibly win.

Yet the message is a powerful one when it comes to thinking about real-life examples like Issa Rae. Rae is scoring wins for the visibility of black actresses in the real world. But the establishment she’s up against is daunting.

Geoff Hoyle in “Lear’s Shadow” at The Marsh, San Francisco. (Photo: David Ford.)

This morning, my first in San Francisco since moving back here after a two year hiatus in Denver, I ran to the top of Mount Davidson.

I had never been to Mount Davidson before, much less run up it. In fact, the tree-covered Mount had barely registered with me during my first 13-year tour of duty in this city, I’m ashamed to say, because the views from the top are spectacular.  The climb up there is intense. But I guess the time I spent in and around the Mile High City has increased my lung capacity and I more or less sprang up that vertiginous hill.

It would have been so easy to run all my favorite old San Francisco runs this morning: to Ocean Beach through Golden Gate Park, for example, or along the Marina to Chrissy Fields and back. But the desire to find something new in a city that’s very familiar to me sent me up Mount Davidson this morning. And at the top, I saw San Francisco in a fresh way.

I bring up my morning run not to brag about my physical prowess, but rather to stress the importance of doing something new with the old.

Geoff Hoyle, a longtime actor and clown who’s been making work in the Bay Area for decades, faces a similar situation with his new take on Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”

In “Lear’s Shadow,” which runs at The Marsh in San Francisco through Mary 30, Hoyle explores Shakespeare’s tragedy from the perspective of The Fool.

“Lear” is obviously well, well, well-worn turf. And Fool-centric adaptations of the play are also not uncommon; the Phoenix Theatre in New York, for instance, created a show called “The Fool’s Lear” last year.

So the question is: In the face of such familiarity, what fresh perspective does Hoyle’s Fool bring to the party?

Clearly, Hoyle was made to embody The Fool, with his long background of playing clowns. He trained with the great mime artist Etienne Decroux in Paris and originally made his name in the Bay Area  as the clown Mr. Sniff in The Pickle Family Circus. It could also be said that at this point, the veteran actor has reached a stage in his career where visiting “King Lear,” a drama of aging, makes sense.

Plus, Hoyle has always been something of an actor-philosopher, a thinking man’s comic. So his decision to take on one of Shakespeare’s wisest clowns, Lear’s Fool, and include occasional quotes from other Shakespeare plays that involve similarly dark funny men (the roles originally played by Shakespeare’s colleague Robert Armin — “As You Like It”‘s Touchstone” and Feste in “Twelfth Night”) adds to the particularity of the performer’s vision.

Over the course of 90 minutes, the performer retells the story of Shakespeare’s drama by taking on not just the role of The Fool, but also that character’s mimicry of Goneril, Regan, Cordelia and the King. The characterizations are clearly-drawn, if a bit forced.

What’s interesting about Hoyle’s particular take, though, is his view of The Fool as a working man — and, even more piquantly, a working man who has suffered at the hands of commerce.

Hoyle is an actor who has explored and criticized the forces of capitalism in his art in the past. And in “Lear’s Shadow,” The Fool is portrayed as an exploited worker. The show is fraught with jokes and commentary about being laid-off and about being subject to the forces of an inhospitable workplace. At one point, Hoyle even takes a swing, for the sake of contemporary resonance I guess, at the Google buses that have come to symbolize all that is evil about the Bay Area’s current economic landscape.

In this way, Hoyle version of “Lear” feels like my run up Mount Davidson: We’ve been here many times before, but this is quite different.

Inside The Alabama Theatre in Birmingham, AL. (Photo: Chloe Veltman)

Just like many urban centers in the U.S., the city of Birmingham in Alabama has seen its fair share of close shaves when it comes to the destruction of gorgeous old buildings.

The crowning example is The Alabama Theatre, a magnificent moving picture palace in downtown Birmingham. It dates back to 1927 and — unbelievably for a well-used public building that’s getting on for 90 years old — it still contains many of the original details in their original locations.

Also, scarily but much more believably, the place was nearly knocked down in the 1970s to make way for a parking lot.

When I visited The Alabama a couple of days ago, Brant Beene, the executive director of the theatre, showed off alcoves where 1920s banquettes still fit snugly, apparently never having budged since they were first installed. The same can be said of a massive blue ceramic vase depicting Prometheus. According to Beene, the piece has stood in the same corner, halfway up the grand staircase, since the venue’s earliest days.

Like any nonagenarian, The Alabama is in need of constant care. One of the things that impressed me the most is the corps of Birmingham volunteers who devote their free time to lovingly keeping artifacts like the lovely old Wurlitzer organ working correctly and looking spick and span.

Another thing that impressed me is the venue’s business model. The Alabama is non-profit. But Beene says 90% of its coffers come through earned revenue from tickets sales and rentals. Only 10% comes from grants and donations.

Now the Alabama is re-opening another restored downtown theatre — The Lyric — across the street. It will have around 600 seats and be a more ideal place for groups like the local symphony to perform. Filling 2000+ seats at the Alabama is easy for acts like Dave Chappelle, who’ll be there on April 20. But that’s not so much the case for an orchestra these days. The Lyric is currently in renovation mode and will open its doors before the end of the year.

http://blip.tv/infocustv/in-focus-with-eden-lane-show-733-cpr-arts-bureau-chloe-veltman-7176038

It was a bittersweet thing for me to sit down last Friday to watch the public television interview I did with “In Focus” host Eden Lane via webstream. The 30-minute-long segment originally aired the previous Friday, the day I officially announced my resignation as arts editor at Colorado Public Radio.

My body language is mighty awkward as I try to answer Lane’s questions as honestly and politically correctly as I can. We recorded the segment a couple of weeks before I left CPR and at that stage I didn’t know whether I’d be moving on or not, so I had to behave as if it were “business as usual.”

But there’s undeniably a wistful quality to my smile and a slight strain in my voice as I tell Lane, as unemotionally and impartially as I can, about CPR’s singular “news focus” when it comes to covering the arts.

It’s been an interesting and at times exhilarating journey. I don’t regret coming here to launch and lead CPR’s new arts bureau for a second. I learned a great deal about Colorado’s bubbling arts scene, further developed my skills as a manager and journalist and made many friends.

But as we got into the collaboration, my vision for arts coverage turned out not to be the same as CPR’s.

The main point of divergence: I adamantly do not believe a groundbreaking media organization of the 21st century can cover the arts in a meaningful way if it insists that the job can be done by covering the arts in the same way that it covers the legislature. Or the environment. Or education, for that matter.

News is a piece of the pie. But it’s not the whole. There has to be room for opinion. There has to be room for experimentation. There has to be room for play.

So I’m moving on.

I’m thrilled to announce that KQED in San Francisco has hired me to serve as its senior arts editor. The organization’s vision seems to be more closely aligned with my own. So I’m looking forward to getting stuck in to the cultural scene of one my favorite parts of the world — a region which was my home for 13 years prior to my move to Colorado.

There is much I will miss about my life here, from 19th century opera houses tucked away in tiny mountain towns at 11,000 feet, to exhibitions that feel more like parties at the Denver MCA.

However, after nearly two years of not being able to blog — at CPR, the arts editor is forbidden from expressing her opinion about the art she covers explicitly; she may only report on it and in so doing reveal her biases implicitly — I am thrilled to begin again.

So watch this space!

Henri Matisse (Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Wikimedia Commons)

Denver art lovers will get the opportunity on Jan. 13 to experience the movie version of a blockbuster exhibition currently at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

The U.S. premiere of “Matisse from MoMA and Tate Modern,” is based on these museums’ joint, “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” show which runs through Feb. 10 in New York. The film is screening in several metro area theaters including Pavilions in downtown Denver, Lakewood’s Bel Mar cinema and the Regal River Point in Englewood.

It’s part of an emerging trend. Arts lovers have become used to seeing stage plays, concert or opera at a movie theater over the past five years or so. 2.7 million people have watched one of UK’s National Theatre productions on the “National Theatre Live” program since its inception in 2009, according to its website.

Now, museums are stepping into the celluloid arena in the hopes of capturing a virtual audience for their largely site-specific work.

But following a camera around a gallery isn’t as compelling as watching a performance on screen. For one thing, you can only linger on a painting or sculpture for as long as the film’s editor allows you to.

A virtual tour with behind-the-scenes information

“Ninety-five percent of the audience can’t get to London or New York,” explained Phil Grabsky, the UK-based documentary filmmaker behind the Matisse film and other blockbuster exhibition-oriented movies such as “Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy.”

Grabsky has been making art exhibition films since 2011. Movies like the one he made about Manet have been seen in 35 countries so far. Other exhibitions he’s brought to the screen have revolved around such artists as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Van Gogh.

“The film provides an opportunity for them to share in these art works,” he said.

The “virtual tour” of the exhibit is then interwoven with behind-the-scenes information from curators and other experts as well as biographical and historical insights into the artist’s life and career.

Denver Art Museum not planning to make its own films

“Feature filmmaking, production and distribution is not a focus for the Denver Art Museum,” said Kristy Bassuener, the museum’s associate director of communications and public affairs .

In recent years, the museum has been an originator of — and a key touring stop for — several blockbuster art shows.

The ongoing “Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century” is the most comprehensive exhibition ever produced by a museum centering on the famous jewelry house. And Denver was the only U.S. location to view 2012’s “Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective,” the high-profile survey of the revered fashion designer.

The glitzy Cartier and Yves Saint Laurent shows are ripe for movie treatment inasmuch as they present big brand populist fare intended to appeal to audiences who wouldn’t normally consider attending museum exhibitions.

According to data provided by the Denver Art Museum’s marketing department, 20 percent of the people who attended the Yves Saint Laurent show were first-time visitors to the museum.

Yet Bassuener says the museum has no plans to collaborate with film production companies on the making and mainstream distribution of films about its exhibitions.

A more modest approach

Although the museum will not be bringing its Cartier bling to multiplexes across the world anytime soon, it is exploring the medium of film as a means to complement its on-site programming in a more modest way.

“Our team has plans to highlight the local screenings in social media related to our own Matisse exhibition,” Bassuener said.  The museum’s “Matisse and Friends: Selected Masterworks from the National Gallery of Art” show runs through Feb. 8.

And on Jan. 23, DAM will show “William Matthews: Drawn to Paint,” a documentary by filmmaker Amie Knox to coincide with the institution’s exhibition of Matthews’ work which runs through May 17.

The screening will take place on the museum’s premises, and excerpts from the film are already on view in the gallery. It also received an airing at the most recent Starz Film Festival late last year.

For now, the museum attempts to give the public a look inside its inner workings through its Behind the Scenes blog, which features visuals and staff commenting on exhibitions, conservation, collections and other process-oriented topics.

Elsewhere, museum films continue to grow

But this online offering is a small effort compared to the massive undertaking of producing feature-length fine art documentaries and distributing them around the globe.

Through his production company Seventh Art Productions, Grabsky finances his projects like the Matisse film independently with loans and private investors. The budgets range from $300,000 to $400,000.

The museums give his team access to their galleries, processes and staff, Grabsy says, but they do not have any editorial or creative control over the finished product. He does collaborate closely with art institutions when making his movies, and says he isn’t opposed to the idea of collaborating with DAM on a film down the line.

“Increasingly, galleries are coming to us about filming their big exhibitions,” Grabsky said.

“Cinemas were initially resistant; why would someone come to a cinema to see an art exhibition?” Grabsky said. “But now they understand the value for thousands of people who can’t get to the exhibitions.”

Over the past few weeks, CPR’s Arts Bureau has been collecting 30-60 second dance pieces created specially for the radio.