Archives for September 2010

Last year the Brooklyn Museum* made good use of its collection of mummies, and now the Nelson-Atkins Museum is entering the mummy-discovery fray

Brooklyn, you’ll recall, subjected four specimens to CT scans at North Shore University Hospital — and got a lot of press for it. Three doctors at the hospital analyzed the mummies, which date to as long ago as 1064 B.C. and up to 395 A.D., give or take, and discovered that one, thought to be a female, was actually a male. Among other things.

When it was all over, the mummies went back to Eastern Parkway and are now part of the museum’s Mummy Chamber semi-permanent exhibition.

The Nelson-Atkins has taken a different route, forging an unusual partnership with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). ATF’s forensic scientists/special agents worked for more than three months on a mummy named Ka-i-nefer, who lived in Egypt 2,500 year ago but now resides in the museum’s new Egyptian galleries, which opened in May.

Sharon Whitaker and Robert “Randy” Strode used “a sophisticated computer program known as the Electronic Facial Identification Technique (EFIT) Program” to make a composite image of what the fellow looked like.

His composite image is above; the agents, with curators, also determined that “Ka-i-nefer was a man who lived to be about 45 to 55 years old, who stood about 5 feet 5 inches and wore size 7 shoes.” 

The Nelson-Atkins is holding a presentation of these results for the public this afternoon.

Now, I am aware of the opposition to such analyses, published in a recent New Scientist article: “research on mummies is invasive and reveals intimate information such as family history and medical conditions. And, of course, the subjects cannot provide consent.”

That does give me pause. But I am rather inclined, for the moment, to agree with N-A director Julián Zugazagoitia, who said in the press release: “This sort of marriage between science and art enhances our scholarship…”

Archaeology magazine has a complete assessment of the Brooklyn adventure here, and the Brooklyn Museum has an interactive about the exercise here.

UPDATE, 9/12/10: The Kansas City Star has a nice article on the subject (here), with more detail about the process and the involvement of a local cardiologist.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the respective museums

* I consult to a foundation that supports the Brooklyn Museum.

Here are two little causes for joy: a reattribution, in Dallas, and a reclamation-release, in New York.

Yesterday the Dallas Museum of Art announced that it owned a George Romney, not a painting by an unknown, probably American colonial artist, perhaps Ralph Earl. “Young Man With A Flute” entered the collection as part of a bequest in 1987.

Ten years ago, a British art dealer named Phillip Mould suggested that the painting might be by Romney, but had no evidence and the museum paid scant attention. This year, when Olivier Meslay, the senior curator of European and American Art, arrived from the Louvre, saw the painting and learned of Mould’s suspicion, he decided to investigate. Eventually, Romney expert Alex Kidson, the consultant curator with the National Museums Liverpool, saw and analyzed the painting, determining that it was indeed by Romney, a key figure in 18th-century British art and a contemporary of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.

The painting hangs next to a Reynolds at the DMA. Read more in the museum’s press release.

In New York, the story is curiouser. In 1971, Faith Ringgold was commissed to paint a mural at Riker’s Island, which then held women prisoners as well as men. “For the Women’s House,” her first public commission, depicted women in various forms of work and was hung in the cafeteria of the Women’s House of Detention. In the early ’90s, when RI became all-male, it was painted over, moved to the basement and slated for disposal. Luckily, a female guard contacted Ringgold, who appealed to the Corrections Commissioner, and the painting was restored — but rarely seen.

Until now: On Tuesday, the Rikers Island warden told the Neuberger Museum of Art that it would lend the mural to its coming People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s. It will be there when the exhibition opens on Saturday.

The things art works go through.

 

There’s unquestionably an art to farming, but how about farming as an museum exhibit?

If that sounds a little odd, you were not a judge in the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation’s biennial exhibition awards. Three 2010 winners were announced on Sept. 1, and $150,000 will go to an independent curator named Sue Spaid. Her exhibit, Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots will run at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, in September, 2012 — if all goes well. Here’s the description:

Green Acres aims to be the first museum exhibition solely devoted to the cultivation and distribution of edible foodstuffs. [It] will explore a global art movement that has been developing over the past 40 years wherein artists have developed and realized novel farming practices to inspire self-reliance, improve food quality, demonstrate sustainable farming techniques, engender community actions and foster local identities. These acts — whether of resistance, empowerment and/or genuine pleasure on the part of artists and participants alike — offer viable alternatives to the standard corporate farms upon which we depend. Green Acres combines an indoor exhibition of historically significant works, including the refabrication of Newton and Helen Harrison’s Survival Series (1970-1973), a completely functioning indoor farm, a photography installation and live video feeds to farm-as-art projects in New York, Thailand and Israel, as well as six on site outdoor sculptures.

Maybe you have to see it to decide if it’s museum-worthy. But Spaid has her work cut out to persuade me.

The Tremaine award “rewards innovation and experimentation at the curatorial level by supporting strong thematic exhibitions that challenge audiences and expand the boundaries of contemporary art.” Environment, along with art and learning disabilities, is one of the foundation’s program areas, so Green Acres provides a measure of synergy, I suppose. (See the award’s eligibility rules and goals here.)

But to me, this is a stretch, part of the museum as town-hall/art-isn’t-necessarily-central trend. And it’s sad.

Tremaine gave two other exhibition awards: Steven Matijcio, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, was awarded $85,000 for Paperless, which will showcase artists “wrestling with the implication of paper as artifact.”  

And João Ribas, Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, was awarded $150,000 for Man in the Holocene, which “will explore how contemporary art acts as a speculative science of objects and phenomena… as a form of inquiry into how we perceive and configure our physical world.”

Over at Brainstorm, Laurie Fendrich has been writing about art in America, so to speak — beginning with the line: “I’ve noticed, during the nearly three years I’ve been blogging for Brainstorm that whenever I blog on art, the reaction is deafening silence. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, people are at the ready with their opinions.”

That caught my attention because, on the surface at least, it basically says that people don’t care enough about art to argue about it.

Fendrich argues the case somewhat differently: she believes that people react to a work of art in one of three ways — they like it, they don’t like it, or they’re indifferent to it — and also that, the heck with specialists like art historians and curators, “people firmly believe that art is a subjective matter, and that all opinions about it are therefore equally valid.”

At the same time, she continues, a lot of people — even sophisticated people — think modern art is a joke, but the sophisticated ones don’t want to admit to that. So people don’t talk because they feel they don’t know enough. Getting aesthetic taste to “broaden,” she writes, would require a lot of direct experience with art, like hanging around museums. 

That was her Part One. I agree with it, mostly — except I think the bigger problem is that people don’t care enough to know enough. They’re not interested in spending more time looking at art, and they think it’s a closed circle.

In Part Two, Fendrich almost makes that reticence a virtue as she dissects why everyone feels so free and almost obligated to talk about politics: “For most of us, talking about politics has become merely another means of self-expression — another way to yell (if we’re bullies), rant (if we’re full of tension), sound reasonable (if we’re nice people).”

But that has consequences: “People eagerly opine about politics because talking about politics today has deteriorated into nothing but a game of chatter–a way of responding to the unsettling modern world that seems so devoid of much that’s beautiful or good.”

So cheer up, art-lovers. Would you rather have a lot of people blather on and on about something, even when they don’t know much, or remain quiet because they don’t know much?

We’re in the second universe today, and I think I prefer it.  

We’d all love it if more people cared about art (and visited museums and galleries), but can you imagine the heated rantings (and more) that contemporary art could cause if people felt uninhibited?    

Another history lesson (these coincidences happen).

Now the year is 1885: the first successful appendectomy is performed, the Madhi Muhammad Ahmad’s troops defeat Gordon and conquer Khartoum, the Washington Monument is dedicated, The Mikado opens at the Savoy Theatre, Good Housekeeping makes its debut, the Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor.

And Kraushaar Galleries is founded by Charles Kraushaar. Kraushaar, now located on East 79th Street and open “by appointment or by chance,” specializes in American art of the first half of the 20th century, and shares this longevity (to the 19th Century) with only three other New York galleries. They are Knoedler (dating to 1846), Babcock Galleries (1852) and James Graham & Sons (1857). Like Kraushaar, the later two specialize in American paintings.

Kraushaar started out as a supply store, then handled many European artists. Under Charles’s brother, John, it became known for handling painters like Guy Pene du Bois, Charles Demuth, and several members of the group of American realists known as “the Eight,” most notably George Luks, William Glackens, Maurice Prendergast and John Sloan.

Kraushaar is marking the occasion with a book, Kraushaar Galleries: Celebrating 125 Years, by Betsy Fahlman, and an exhibition with the same title at the New York Research Center of the Archives of American Art curated by Fahlman. The Archives, happily, owns the galleries’ records from 1885 through 1968 (the findings aids are here).

Other galleries, please note: the galleries’ records were donated.

The book is out tomorrow, and the exhibition begins on Wednesday. It will consist of 48 photographs and documents drawn from that trove. That’s presumably an image of the gallery above (it’s copied from the exhibition announcement). 

I remember first visiting Kraushaar when Charles’s niece/John’s daughter Antoinette Kraushaar was in charge, and the location was 724 Fifth Avenue. She had started working at the gallery in 1917, at age 15, took it over in 1946 upon her father’s deaths, and remained at the helm until 1988. She died in 1992. Carole Pesner and Katherine Degn now run the gallery.

A formidable dealer who helped found the Art Dealers Association of America, Antoinette was an oral history subject of the Archives (a transcript is here), interviewed four times by Avis Berman in 1982. In 1917, Luks painted a lovely portrait of her, in her grammar school graduation dress, that’s now owned by the Brooklyn Museum. Have a look.

She later recalled:

It was very interesting because you could see how he would put a strong stroke in the painting–I couldn’t see the painting, but I could see him as he worked on it. At one point he said there was an awful lot of white, so he went around the studio and came up with a dusty piece of blue linen that he draped over my shoulder.

There’s a lot of history here, worth plumbing — because learning about galleries inevitably means learning about artists. More information here. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Archives of American Art