Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

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About The Future…

It’s going to be hard for me to push the “Publish” button on this post. Blogging is a bit of an obsession for me–or, rather, became one after I started RCA in March. 2009, at the invitation of Doug McLennan. Since then, I’ve posted virtually once every weekday, and sometimes more often. Sometime, even when I was on vacation.

I went away, on vacation to India,  on Jan. 18 and since I returned late on Feb. 4, I’ve tried to plow through all the relevant art-world things that happened in those 18 days. I still haven’t finished reading emails, mail, newspapers and other publications to catch up.

I have also started a new project to which I intend to devote a lot of time.

Therefore, and you see where this is going, I have decided to cut back on my blogging. I won’t be posting something every day. I’ll weigh in on some things that really matter to me, but I can’t say how often that will be. It may be every other day; it may be less. It will probably be irregularly.

Many of my readers check in everyday, and if you are one of them, I suggest that you sign up for an email subscription to RCA to be sure to catch my posts. That option is in the right-hand column on RCA’s home page and in the same place on every post.

Thanks for reading RCA over the years, and I hope you will stay tuned in.

I’m Away…

I’m taking a winter vacation, and am unlikely to have the opportunity to post new items here until my return. If I do have access to a computer, and see something amidst the art and culture I’ll be seeing, I may add something from time to time. If not, I’ll be back on Real Clear Arts around Feb. 6.

Monumental Art Undertaking in Saudi Arabia: Needs Partners

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia, which just partnered with LACMA. The Center, pictured below, hasn’t received much national press in the U.S. (though apparently it held a meeting with the press at Art Dubai). It’s a venture of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned global petroleum and chemicals giant of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. At its founding, it had American oil companies as partners, but no more (they’re not listed in “History” on the website, either).

SaudiCenterThe Center for World Culture (located “near the famed Prosperity Well, a national landmark that commemorates where oil was first discovered in Saudi Arabia in commercial quantities”) apparently is intended as an investment in “Citizenship,” per Aramco’s website, which says:

…the multi-faceted Center will use knowledge, creativity and cross-cultural engagement to both shape the next generation of Saudi talent and support economic and social development.

Snøhetta was selected to design this cultural facility (see the description here), which when opened in 2016, will include (and I quote):

  • a 21st century social library with general public, youth- and child-oriented and academic materials, including more than 200,000 print and 20,000 media titles
  • a four-gallery museum where visitors can explore the rich Arabian heritage, culture, natural history, and contemporary art
  • theaters equipped with the latest technologies to showcase the world of performance, audiovisual and cinematographic arts
  • the Kingdom’s first ever children’s museum, a vibrant place where children and their families can explore, learn and create through discovery labs and interactive displays
  • Keystone, an entrepreneurial creativity and innovation center where young Saudi professionals can bring their ideas to fruition by creating market-ready products and services
  • a lifelong learning center
  • an exceptional interactive learning environment for visitors of all ages

Construction began in 2008, and it was originally intended to open around 2012–but construction being construction, there have been delays. I am not sure what the current oil price bust will mean for it, if anything.

LACMA is not the only partner institution, but I believe it’s the first American partner: The British Museum is organizing exhibitions with and for the Center, and London’s Natural History Museum is working on an archaeological section. The Pompidou Center is also involved.

Saudi Arabia seems to be opening up a tad of late: the Roads of Arabia exhibit, which displays fabulous artifacts found along the Kingdom’s trade routes, has been traveling since 2011, including a stop at the Freer-Sackler, and there’ve been stories about the country being more open to archaeological digs.

This can only be good.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Aramco

The Story Behind LACMA’s Saudi Partnership

Press releases often provoke more questions than they answer. That was certainly the case when one from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art issued one on Jan. 6 about its new collaboration with Saudi Aramco’s King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. It said that LACMA and the Center:

damascusroom3are pleased to announce that the Center will exhibit more than 130 highlights of Islamic art from LACMA’s renowned collection on the occasion of the Center’s opening. The installation will include works of art from an area extending from southern Spain to northern India along with a never-before shown 18th-century period room from Damascus, recently acquired by LACMA.

“This is a landmark project for the museum,” said LACMA CEO…Michael Govan.

While the release mentioned “a significant partnership” with the Center “to restore and conserve the room,” details were scarce. What was the Center, which has no permanent collection at the moment–it won’t open until next year–giving in return?

I agree with LACMA’s goal to have its collection seen more broadly around the world–as long as the works of art are safe (see some listed in the press release). But was LACMA emptying its galleries of “masterpieces” and for what? Was this a “rental” deal?

A conversation with Islamic Art curator Linda Komaroff on Friday, just a day before she was head to Saudi Arabia, cleared up many questions. The answer, I think, is no.

The partnership arose after LACMA hosted a visiting curator from the Center in 2013, just when it was assessing whether to  buy a large, largely complete, lavishly decorated reception room that had been rescued from demolition (for highway construction) by Lebanese dealers in 1978. They held onto it for decades, moving it to London, and it was offered to LACMA by dealer Robert Haber.

Dated 1766–67, the room measures 15 x 20 feet (“comparable in size to the one at the Met”) and was where the head of the family would have entertained honored guests. “She fell in love with the room,” Komaroff said, referring to the Saudi visitor–and the idea of a two-pronged partnership arose. The room (detail at right) was expensive and needed extensive restoration, plus the armature to hold the many pieces in place. The Center would pay for a large part of that in return for having the chance to show it and those 130 other objects from LACMA’s 1,700-item Islamic collection.

Komaroff says the room’s bright colors (the room was unvarnished) are mostly still there, though covered with dust. Here’s her description from a 2012 blog post:

As is typical, the room has colorful inlaid marble floors; painted and carved wood walls, doors and storage niches; a spectacular stone arch that serves to divide the upper and lower sections of the room, which are separated by a single high step; and an intricately inlaid stone wall fountain with a carved and painted limestone hood…

Komaroff won’t say how much it all costs, but she did say that the conservation costs were about equivalent to the purchase price, and that the whole effort was “a multi-million-dollar project.” LACMA has no acquistions fund, so she had to raise a lot of money for it, beyond what the Saudi oil company contributed.

She describes the current conservation efforts in another post, here.

The Saudis are also paying normal exhibition/loan fees for the 130-object exhibit; after the staff work, including research, required for sending the show, Komaroff says, “it’s a wash”–LACMA doesn’t make a profit on this deal. “That’s not why we’re doing it,” she added.

Lending the room next year “is okay because we don’t have a place to show it yet,” Komaroff said–it requires high ceilings; even LACMA’s Resnick pavilion, which has the highest ceiling of all its buildings, stretched only to 20 feet high.  But the expansion Govan is contemplating should have room for it.

Komaroff compare the loan to “sending the art of the Roman empire to Rome”–a coup of sorts and something of a compliment to the collection. Saudis, she added, don’t learn visual art that goes with their history. They’ve not been exposed to much visual art.

The Center (more about which tomorrow) is also partnering with a couple of European museums.

Clearly, given the recent destruction of cultural heritage in Syria, this is a worthy effort.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of LACMA

The Heard Museum Loses Its Director To…

More musical chairs. The other day the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa announced that it had hired James Pepper Henry as its new executive director; he starts Mar. 30.

JPepperHenryPepper Henry (at right) has a lot of experience with Native American art. Before the Heard, he had been director of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, associate director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, founding director of the Kanza Museum in Kaw City, Okla.; interim curator of American Indian Art at the Portland Art Museum; gallery director at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland, Ore.; and gallery director for the Institute of Alaska Native Arts in Fairbanks, Alaska.

He is a member of the Kaw Nation and affiliated with the Muscogee Creek nation, which–he pointed out in the press release–is a heritage he shared with Thomas Gilcrease, the museum’s founder.

The Gilcrease collection has a wider span, though–there’s a lot of American art and history, particularly Western art, that is not Native American. His claim to fame at the Heard was BUILD! Toy Brick Art at the Heard. a show last summer that showed how “American Indian and non-American Indian LEGO brick artists” made many “creative and surprising forms” from the toy. That’s a tad too commercial for my taste—families were invited to join in–but it was “the most successful summer exhibit in the [Heard] museum’s history, increasing museum attendance by 58 percent  and memberships by 150 percent.”

BuildBrickArtAtTheHeard-760x300We all like measurements of success, but… sometimes the numbers complicate rather than clarify the story. Attendance, just strictly attendance, is not the best measure of success for a director.

That’s not a comment on Pepper Henry–I don’t know what else he did at the Heard–it’s a comment on art museums in general nowadays.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Gilcrease (top) and the Heard (bottom)