Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

“Artist to Artist” – New Short Film Series

Sikander_PhotoI’ve mentioned Art21 here before; it’s the nonprofit that makes videos about artists. Its television series, “Art in the Twenty-First Century” won a Peabody Award, and it has other offerings, too.

This week Art21 introduces something new:

A series of short-format documentaries highlights leading contemporary visual artists in conversation with their peers, discussing the inspirations and ideas that drive their processes. The films have a distinctive format: each film follows a single artist/host as she engages with other artists in a shared art exhibition setting, exploring cultural events from the artists’ perspectives, a rare viewpoint.

diana_headshot_0It’s called Artist to Artist, and the first films feature artist Shahzia Sikander (top) at last spring’s Sharjah biennial, where she talks with artists David Claerbout, Thilo Frank, Lucia Koch, Ahmed Mater, Ernesto Neto, and Wael Shawky, and at the Instanbul biennial last month. There, she talks with Karamustafa, Diego Bianchi, Basim Magdy, Rietveld Landscape, and Hito Steyerl.

In what’s billed as the second film, Diana Al-Hadid (bottom) goes to the Venice Biennale, which began last June and is still on, conversing with artists ranging from Kimsooja (Korean Pavilion) to Jesper Just (Denmark Pavilion) to Ai Weiwei (Sant’Antonin Church).

Both narrators say they enjoyed hearing how other artists worked out problems.

When it debuts on Thursday, you can watch Artist to Artist online at art21.org/ArtistToArtist, as well as on YouTube and Vimeo. If you click on that link now, you’ll get a preview. .

 

What Conclusions Can We Draw From ArtPrize?

This weekend, ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Mich., awarded $560,000 in cash to the artists of 16 installations — the end of a 19-day competitive event in which the public visited artworks spread around the city, and voted on those they liked best. 49,078 people voted, casting  446,850 votes — they chose the 10 public awards, 10 artists who together won $360,000. An eight-person panel of art professionals decided six juried award winners totaling $200,000.

Here are the two winners, tops in each contest:

Sleeping Bear Dune Lakeshore

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bunga-Ecosystem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s pretty easy to tell which won the public award and which the professionals’ award, isn’t it? The top, a landscape art quilt called Sleeping Bear Dune Lakeshore by Ann Loveless won the first, and the bottom — one scene from Ecosystem, a site-specific, architectural intervention by Carlos Bunga, pleased the pros.

It happens every year, and ArtPrize has been going since 2009. It’s great, in a way, but it also throws the chasm between the public and the pros into high relief. I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment on these pieces in particular, but it seems to me that there’s work to do on visual literacy — or else the professionals are going to be proven wrong by history.

The public awarded nine other awards — Anni Crouter of Flint, Mich. for Polar Expressed, three separate 48” by 72” polar bear paintings, got $75,000 and Andy Sacksteder, who made  UPLifitng, a bronze sculpture depicting two dancers, will receive $50,000,

And $10,000 each, to:

  • Paul Baliker, Palm Coast, Fl., Dancing with Mother Nature
  • Jason Gamrath, Seattle, Wa., Botanica Exotica a Monumental Collection of the Rare beautiful
  • Benjamin Gazsi, Morgantown, West Va., Earth Giant
  • Robin Protz, New Hartford, Conn., Myth-or-Logic
  • Fraser Smith, St. Pete Beach, Fl., Finding Beauty in Bad Things: Porcelain Vine
  • Michael Gard, SanFrancisco, Ca.,Taking Flight
  • Nick Jakubiak, Battle Creek, Mich., Tired Pandas

Pictures of those entries are here.

The other juried award winners, who each received $20,000, are

  • Kyle Staver, New York, N.Y., Europa and the Flying Fish
  • Cooley / Lewis, Chattanooga, Tenn., Through the Skies for You
  • Shahzia Sikander, New York, N.Y. The Last Post
  • Urban Space J.D. Urban, Brooklyn, N.Y., united.states : an everydaypeople project
  • Greg Bokor, Beverly, Mass., Erase 

Congrats to all.

Photo Credits: Courtesty of ArtPrize

 

 

 

The Pinta Fair’s Great Idea

PINTA NY — the six-year-old Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art Fair — is more than a month away, but I’m writing about it now because it has what I think is a unique part called the Museum Acquisitions Program. Through it, a group of museums chosen each year work with PINTA NY and exhibiting galleries to select and acquire artworks by artists represented at the fair, and — the good part — PINTA NY provides matching funds to the museums to make the deal.

errazurizAccording to PINTA, participating museums so far have included:

  • The Museum of Modern Art
  • The Bronx Museum of the Arts
  • El Museo del Barrio
  • Museum of Fine Arts Boston
  • Harvard Art Museum
  • Museum of Fine Arts Houston
  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art
  • Centre Pompidou
  • Tate Modern
  • Museo Tamayo
  • Pinacoteca of the State of Sao Paulo

All told, they’ve received more than $1 million in matching funds from PINTA. This is worthy of imitation, I say to other fair organizers. PINTA itself, along with corporate sponsors, foundations, and individuals, provide the matches.

To get the matching money, museums have to be selected and it’s unclear to me how they are chosen.  You might try Natasha Bunten, PINTA’s Museum Program Manager.

This year, PINTA is moving to 82MERCER, a Soho loft building, for the Nov. 14-17 event. The fair is also changing its format, moving to a curatorial model.

In this program, though, its own model is worth emulating.

Photo Credit: Sebastian Errazuri ‘s Untitled (Bird Chandelier), Courtesy of PINTA-NY

 

 

Another Curator Leaves Indianapolis; It’s Worrisome

When I last wrote here about the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it was looking quite troubled. That was March. Now it’s worse; IMA seems to be hemorrhaging people.

Hyperallergic, reporting more departures in the contemporary art department, got this quote from Sarah Green, the Curator of Contemporary Art, who just quit: “I don’t believe in [Director Charles] Venable’s mission for the IMA, and our visions don’t align.”

IMAIt would be one thing if Green were the only one departing for that reason, but Hyperallergic reports, the reason for most if not all of the departures appears to be the same as Green’s:

Richard McCoy, a former Conservator of Objects & Variable Art laid off this summer, told me over the phone, “Of the people I know that have left since the cuts, they left because they disagreed with the direction Venable is taking the museum.” This sentiment was echoed on condition of anonymity by several current and prior employees; the staff is voting on Venable with their feet.

Granted, at least one person left for a better job — Lisa Freiman, who was senior curator and chair of the Department of Contemporary Art at Indy, recently took the post of inaugural director of the VCU Institute for Contemporary Art, for example. I suspect she would have taken that job no matter who was IMA’s director.

But without her and Green, Hyperallergic said, “As of next week the only person left in the contemporary department will be Gabriele HaBarad, the Senior Administrative Coordinator.” And it noted that:

Sarah Green brought in her own top-notch exhibitions from the likes of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Green also helped curate the Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion, where she exhibited large-scale installations by artists like Spencer Finch and William Lamson.

Green, too, is leaving for a good venture, if not as planned. She will be “curator and host of a new video series [in PBS] called The Art Assignment, which will premiere in 2014. Each episode will focus on an emerging to established contemporary artist from the US working through a single assignment, from start to finish.” She’ll be working with her husband, John Green. That a look at that link, on the title, to see what she’s doing, really. To me, it’s less interesting than I had hoped — but we’ll see. It depends on the execution.

In fairness, Venable has been hiring staff too, and they may be more than up to the job; they may even be better than those leaving. There’s a new European paintings curator and a new CFO, for a start. Other news — all good, of course — is posted on the press release page of IMA’s website.

Probably what Indy needs right now is some stability. Although I admired some things Venable did in his previous job, I have to withhold judgment now, for the time being.

 

 

 

Another Season of Deaccessioning?

Has it begun? Last fall was full of deaccessions by museums, and today an email from Christie’s arrived with three from the Metropolitan Museum* to be sold in the 19th Century European Art sale on Oct. 28. The highlight, as Christie’s put it, is “James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s Victorian masterwork, In the Conservatory (Rivals).” Estimated at $2.5 million to $3.5 million, it is “a tour-de-force of the artist’s skill,” and I would agree. It continues:

In-the-Conservatory-(Rivals)-(2)--1875-78Gifted to the Museum by the esteemed collector Mrs. Jayne Wrightsman, this painting showcases, through an impeccably detailed execution, the splendors of wealth that were available in the 1870s this comedy of manners is set against the backdrop of afternoon tea in a lush conservatory. Tissot, a French-born Anglophile, settled in England in 1871 and Rivals was likely aimed toward appealing to the new generation of collectors. A classic example of Tissot’s “storytelling,” the Victorian work incorporates a plethora of gestures, expressions, and interactions between the subjects, but the plot is kept vague. This deliberate ambiguity keeps viewers imagining what has just happened.

Using the Met’s website, I could not find an image, let alone an exhibition history there. But the Christie’s catalogue says the gift came in 2009, and the last exhibition it cites was in 1955. Still, I am a bit surprised at this sale. Tissot is no genius, but what he did, he usually did well — and this painting, in the slide, looks worth exhibiting to me. Christie’s clearly thinks it will sell — it get six pages in the catalogue.

The other Met offerings are more modest: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Deux bateliers en rivière, estimated at $120,000 – 180,000, and François Vernay’s Still-Life with Fruit, estimated at $8,000-10,000.

The Toledo Museum of Art is shedding 12 paintings, including Félix Ziem’s Embarquement devant la bibliothèque Marciana, a lovely Venetian cityscape, which has been in the museum’s collection for 91 years, estimated at $60,000-80,000, and works by such artists as Henri-Joseph Harpignies, Jozef Israëls, and Joseph Bail, among others.

As RCA readers know, I am not against all deaccessioning. But with the Detroit situation, people are watching museums these days. All things can’t stop because of Detroit, but I would hope that museums are particularly sensitive to the face they are presenting to the public right now.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of JamesTissot.org

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met