Michelle Obama’s “jazz studio” in the White House last Monday, June 15, got me thinking again
about her role in creating more interest in the arts, which I last wrote about here. 

Somebody’s got to help us do it: the need for constant support for and promotion of the arts was underscored a couple of hours after the jazz event, when the National Endowment for the Arts released its arts participation study. It showed arts participation dropping, almost across the board.

I figure that the more visibility Mrs. Obama’s efforts receive, the more effect they’ll have. So I called a few jazz buffs, including Arts Journal’s own Howard Mandel, who writes Jazz Beyond Jazz. And I managed to sell an article about Mrs. Obama and jazz to The Daily Beast. Here’s the link.

Howard loved the White House effort, and reacted emotionally, as you will see if you read the article.

I thank him for giving me a great anecdote and for recommending a few other sources, enriching the entire article.

Photo Credit: Geoff Coe 

Just catching up with the Americans for the Arts convention in Seattle this week, I discovered that it made a terrific award on Thursday, the “Public Art Network” award, to artist Buster Simpson.

Simpson, a Seattleite, has so many credits to his name — shows, projects, awards, panels, books, etc. — that it’s hard to pick one or two to talk about. Rather, I suggest looking for yourself at his website. But here’s Incidence, from the Museum of Glass in Tacoma.

 Giving the award, Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, said this:

Buster Simpson has helped define contemporary and environmental public art. He is an accomplished artist and an exemplary leader in community arts. His innovation and dedication has been recognized regionally and nationally in the public art field.

And Eloise Damrosch, executive director of Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council, wrote in his nomination:

He has never wavered from caring about and addressing critical environmental issues in all kinds of settings with a completely unique personal voice and style. Buster has been ‘green’ long before anyone really knew what that meant. He is a brilliant thinker, highly original artist, and treasured member of the country’s public art community

Americans for the Arts gave five other leadership awards, too. They went to Bruce W. Davis (support for the arts through a united fund), Randy Engstrom (emerging leader), Victoria Hamilton (building communities through the arts), Sheila Smith (state arts advocacy) and Big Thought (arts education). You can read more about all of them here.

And the group recognized forty of the “best public art projects” of 2008, culled from 300 entries. That list is not yet posted on its website, but the winners from previous years can be seen here.

[Read more…] about Seattle Artist Buster Simpson Wins Public Art Award

Back in early May, writing about the way humanities are viewed nowadays, here, I mentioned that the National Endowment for the Humanities had started a program called “Enduring
Questions,” offering grants of up to $25,000 (and said I’d return to the subject). Here’s what it aimed to do:

Enduring Questions [is] a new grant program that encourages faculty and undergraduate students to grapple with the most fundamental concerns of the humanities by reading influential thinkers past and present.

The winners — 20 colleges in 15 states for a total of $478,677 — are creating pilot courses and were announced this week.

So what are the “Enduring Questions”? No big surprises. They are indeed the eternal puzzlers. The wording may differ, but basically undergraduate students will have a chance to explore:

• What is happiness?
• What is justice?
• What is freedom?
• What is human dignity?
• What is evil?
• What is leadership?
• What is the meaning of life?

And:

• Do we need God for the good life?
• How should we view mortality (especially given biomedical advances)?
• What are the dangers of individualism?
• Should art be moral?

All food for thought for the weekend.

The NEH made many grants this week ($21.4 million worth all told) and they are posted here. 

It’s been a while, I think, since painting was declared dead yet again —
witness, for example, reports coming from Art Basel earlier this week, where recent paintings by the likes of Neo Rauch were selling well (if at prices below last year’s). Museums are loaded with great contemporary painting exhibitions this summer — not just the Bacon retrospective at the Met or Cy Twombly at the Art Institute of Chicago.  

This Saturday, June 20, the Phillips Collection in Washington opens one worth noting: Paint Made Flesh, curated by Mark Scala of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. It debuted there in January. The idea behind the show is this:

Paint Made Flesh presents paintings created in Europe and the United States since the 1950s in which a wide range of painterly effects suggest the carnal properties and cultural significance of human flesh and skin. As a revisionist study of post-World War II art, the exhibition offers a rejoinder to the modernist orthodoxies of the mid-to-late 20th century by contending that paint’s material properties make it well suited to convey metaphors of human vulnerability.

The show includes works by masters like Picasso, de Kooning, Bacon and Freud and work by contemporary artists like Jenny Saville (her Hyphen, 1999, is above), John Currin, Daniel Richter and Tony Bevan.

One reason I’m writing about this show (in fact, one reason I’m able to write about it, since I have not been to Nashville lately) is the material the Frist posted on its website about Paint Made Flesh, inviting people to learn about the exibition “before your visit.” 

[Read more…] about “Paint Made Flesh” Meets the Internet — And Makes A Good Match

Interesting, because the Guggenheim had signed up to be the third venue for Prendergast in Italy, a show organized by the Williams College Museum of Art (it begins there on July 18) that will then go to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In April, after many loan agreements were signed, news came that the third venue was, instead, to be the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I know this because I own a small, atypical Prendergast in the show, and I was asked to sign additional papers. I recently had an opportunity to ask why, and was told that the Guggenheim backed out for cost reasons.

The Prendergast exhibition was pulled because of costs but well in advance of these cuts and the current economic downturn. The show was never 100% confirmed.