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10.15.2012

Marketing Mondays: Speak Up. It's Your Career

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 Image from Urban Cowboy


A couple of months ago I posted about The Difficult Artist. Today I’m posting about the other end of the scale: The artist who doesn’t take enough control. Whether out of fear of ruffling the feathers of colleagues or a gallery, or not being aware of their own power as artists, these are the folks who just don’t speak up.
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Item #1: A Midwest artist told me that his local dealer pressed him to enter a juried show because of the caliber of the juror—not an unreasonable request (though, frankly, the dealer should be cultivating those curator connections). Knowing things the dealer didn’t about the organization hosting the exhibition, the artist had reservations about entering. Against his better judgment he capitulated to the dealer’s request. The show was "a solid average," according to the artist, and the juror was not in attendance. Both artist and gallery gained nothing from the experience.
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“Why didn’t you tell your dealer you didn’t wish to participate in this show?” I asked.
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He replied, “I didn’t want to piss him off.”
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Item #2: A West Coast artist curated a show with a great concept and wonderful artists and secured a regionally prestigious not-for-profit venue. Sounds good, right? The problem is that the opening date conflicted with an established annual event in another city. This might sound like apples and oranges except that the curated show sprang directly from the original event in terms of mentorship and artists involved. Even the artist/curator was conflicted. Why didn’t she tell the gallery director that the date squared with the other event?
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“I suggested it, but the director wanted it on the date she wanted it,” replied the artist.
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“But it’s your show,” I countered. “ You have every right to say, ‘I cannot make the opening of this show. We need to reschedule,’”
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“I didn’t know I could do that.” This from a person whose chutzpah level is normally over the moon.
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Item #3: An artist organized a show with a prestigious curator as juror. Curiously, when the postcard was printed, the name of the juror—the most prestigious aspect of the event—was omitted, while the artist organizer, unknown to all but a small circle of friends, was prominently noted.
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When asked why the juror was omitted from a show she’d organized, this artist placed the responsibility in the lap of the hosting institution, demurring, "I didn’t necessarily agree with their decision.”
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Well for godsake, if you don’t agree with their decision, make an issue of it. Do something about it! It’s your show!
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The list goes on:
. An artist/curator ceded installation to the non-profit gallery staff. He was mortified to find that a painting was placed in a space with storage racks that doubles (badly) as an adjunct exhibition space. When he asked the director to move the painting, he was told, “We always place work there." Translation: "We're not moving it."  He was mortified but didn't press the issue because he didn't want to “rock the boat.” Dude, that ship has hit the rocks. 

. An artist arrived at the opening of a group show in a small-town commercial gallery only to find that her triptych had been separated and its panels placed around the gallery among the other artists’ works. “That way we can sell them separately,” she was told. The artist was aghast, crushed, furious . . . and silent. Because she didn't want to be "difficult,” she said nothing.
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But there are success stories in this mix, too.
. When I arrived to see the installation of my solo show at a gallery I work with, I found a large sculpture by another gallery artist in the same space. It is not unusual for that gallery to place an occasional sculpture by a gallery artist in a solo painting show, and in fact I like the way a dimensional work can charge the energy between and among the paintings. However, since my paintings in that room were small, I felt the particular sculpture overpowered them. There was some discomfort on both sides when I asked the dealer to move it, but mutual respect carried the situation. The dealer accommodated my request, relocating it to a second gallery where I had large horizontal painting. The vertical sculpture was an effective counterpoint. 

. When B, a savvy new York City artist, received no response from a consultant after almost six months of waiting for money from the sale of her work, she did some research and found out that the consultant had been paid almost immediately upon placement. She left this phone message with the errant consultant, “I know you have already been paid, even while you continue to stretch out the payment time to me. I am prepared to let the acquisitions committee [of the corporation that had purchased her work] know exactly how you have been treating the artists you work with.” A check was Fed Exed overnight. (I know this is an effective strategy because one of my dealers did pretty much the same thing with an errant consultant she'd been working with--and, it turns out, the consultant was one and the same.)
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. Jhina Alvarado, a San Francisco artist, talks in a blog post about When it’s Time to Jump Ship. Alvarado learned, rather quickly, that if it isn’t working for you—if the gallery requests are unreasonable, if their treatment is less than respectful, if they cancel the opening even after they know you’re planning to drive seven hours to attend it—it’s time to commandeer a lifeboat. She spoke up. And then she  found another gallery. That is how you rock the boat.
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Finding your voice
I know it's not easy for some artists to speak up. You think that by doing so, the opportunity you've worked so hard to attain will be taken away. But if it's not worth having, as Alvarado's story underscores, you have nothing nothing to lose.

Speaking up is an acquired skill. No one would call me reticent, but I've learned to articulate what I need. That story about the artist whose triptych was separated? I was that artist, a long time ago.

Over to you: Are there times you wish you'd spoken up? What was the situation? Have you spoken up? What did you say?

10.10.2012

Building Geometry: Steven Alexander,

Warren Isensee, Chris Johanson, Christian Maychack
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 Steven Alexander, Recent Paintings at David Findlay Gallery, September 5-29
 
 
These four artists (two painters, two painter/sculptors) are building geometry, whether layer by layer, line by line, or piece by piece. There's a strong sense of materiality that runs through much of the work. I'm going to keep my comments short so that I can show you a lot of installation shots.
 
The view coming out of the elevator, with Luna #2
 
We start with Steven Alexander, whose show at David Findlay Jr. Gallery on Fifth Avenue in Midtown was in an intimate, dark-walled room. I might have preferred to see these paintings in a more spacious white gallery so that their colors could expand beyond the parameters of the frame, but it turns out that the room, chapel-like in size and low light, created an opportunity to experience these paintings intimately. The way Alexander constructs his compositions, with layers of acrylic color and tinted medium, each painting emits a kind of  stained-glass luminosity. But make no mistake, these paintings are not transported on the wings of angels. They are built, block by block, color by color with chromatic logic and intuition.

Turning left into the gallery
 

On the foreground wall, Rosetta, 2011, acrylic on linen
 
Detail below
Alexander uses acrylic is a way that reads more like wax than plastic, with saturated richness and exquisite chromatic surprises
 
 

Moving into the gallery, with the appropriately titled yellow Interior, and a painting, shown  closer below, for which I don't have a title

You can see Alexander's own installation shots of the exhibition here.
 
 
Warren Isensee, New Work at Danese, September 7-October 8
 
 
Luminosity is the hallmark of Warren Isensee's work, too. Here the light is the result of hues vibrating against hues, as if tubes of neon have been bent into architectural compositions. It's paint, of course
--oil--which has been applied freehand to canvas with rigorous precision. By diminishing the thickness of the painted line as the concentric shapes become smaller, Isensee creates perspective in the work. Doorways, hallways and passageways are suggested to my eye, bathed in radiant mystery. 

Let me take you clockwise around the large main gallery, with Outer Limits, left, and Palomine
 

Continuing around the main gallery (the doorway leads to a small gallery with small works on paper) we come to Les Halles, which you see in larger view below
 

 
The main gallery, illuminated with a skylight, jogs into a  more conventionally illuminated section, where In Dreams, also shown below, hangs

 
Foreground, Sunshine Souvenier, 20 x 28 inches, with much of the power and electricity of the larger paintings
 
There's more behind the foreground wall, and you can see the gallery's installation shots here, which include views of the artist's small works on paper in a side gallery. There's also a beautiful e-catalog available for viewing on the website, here. (I also want to mention that having seen the gallery's physical catalogs printed by Blurb, I have revised my thinking about on-demand publishing. If Danese can do it, so can we.)
 
 
Chris Johanson, Windows at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, up through October 20
 
 
Continuing with the idea of portals, Chris Johanson's constructions, made from found wood and other materials, are windows into places where it seems that joy and poetry reside. Polor opposites to the precision of Isensee, these rather indelicately built works nonetheless offer a peek into another plane at the same time that the physical installation and a saturated palette have them radiating into the space of the gallery. The chairs have an anthropomorphic quality; perhaps there's a metaphor there, for they are reconstituted from myriad parts. I'm assuming they are not meant for functional use--no one was seated when I was there--but they are positioned in a way that invites sitting and viewing. In any case, through their material and process they dialogue actively with the work on the wall. 
 
View into the gallery with long view of the wheel-like sculpture--or is it a flattened cube?--on the back wall, shown in closer view below
 
 
  
This work, Window Painting #1, is visible at an extreme angle in the opening images
 
Detail below

 
Moving clockwise around the gallery we come to Window Painting #2, acrylic and latex paint on found wood
 
Closer view below

  
 
 Christian Maychack, Flats at Jeff Bailey, September 7-October 6
 
I'm not sure how Christian Maychack would identify himself, painter or sculptor, but like Johanson, he's doing double duty in an interesting way. Maychack's work reads as abstract painting with dimension, so the title of the show, Flats, tantalizes with ambiguity. I like how the artist takes charge of the picture plane, punching into a third dimension or creating holes so that the viewer can perforate it visually. I also like the way he fractures the grid. He's doing this with epoxy clay pressed and manipulated in a way that gives the surface a wildly energetic quality. Epoxy clay is a crafty medium if ever there was one, but he transcends it handily. (Yes, pun intended.)
 
 
Detail of Blue Through (CF 23),  epoxy clay, pigment and wood
Full view top
 
Panoramic view of the gallery with Floater, left; Blue Through (CF23) in back wall; and Double Flat #1, the tall sculpture at the center
 

Additional views of Floater, Blue Through and Double Flat #1
 
Detail below of Double Flat #1, with the finger impressions in the surface of the clay




Pair Apart (CF 20), 19 x 26.5 inches
 
The gallery's website offers good images of both the installation and individual works here. There's a lot I didn't show you. If you're intrigued by this work, click on over to the gallery's website to see more.
 
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10.08.2012

Marketing Mondays: Exhibition Options. A Recap

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Here’s a question asked by several

artists recentlyHow, exactly, does one

curate a show in which the work .

has been juried by someone else?
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Just when I think I'm running out of topics for Marketing Mondays, along comes another one. One could certainly organize a show that has been juried by another—there’s a ton of work before and after the juror steps in to make selections—but curating implies that someone had a concept, researched artists and their work, made studio visits, and then selected particular works to offer a visual narrative or considered view of a particular theme. 
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I’ve written before about the various types of exhibitions (juried here and here, invitational, curated) but let me offer a recap.
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Curated
We start with a quick definition from Wikipedia: In contemporary art, the title curator is given to a person who selects and often interprets works of art. In addition to selecting works, the curator often is responsible for writing labels, catalog essays, and other supporting content for the exhibition. Such curators may be permanent staff members, be "guest curators" from an affiliated organization or university, or be "freelance curators" working on a consultant basis.
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At a museum you expect a curated show—that’s what the exhibition curators do. (Other curators manage and care for the permanent collection; some do both.) In a small museum with one curator, the credit may be understood, but in a larger venue, where there are many curators, the particular exhibition curator is acknowledged.
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Art dealers curate all the time: gallery exhibitions, their booths at art fairs, perhaps even a collection for a particular client. It’s unusual for an art dealer to claim the title of curator, but in a venue with many employees, credit for curating a particular show may be given when a person curates who does not usually do that job.
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Typically there is no entry fee for a curated show because there is no submission. Artists are selected via curatorial research. Museums and large commercial and academic galleries typically arrange for pick up and return of work, the costs of which they cover. Galleries should at least split the cost (you pay to ship, they pay to return) but that's not always the case, as many small galleries continue to struggle. With a pop-up or DIY exhibition, artists may be expected to share the costs. Though results are not guaranteed, an ambitious curator might seek grant funding to cover all or part of the costs of a DIY show, or an individual artist could look for professional advancement grants to help defray her/his share of the expenses.
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Invitational
An invitational is an interesting way to spin what a dealer does when she’s curating or organizing a group show that includes artists in addition to the ones she represents. In a small museum or academic gallery, an invitational may be an essential aspect of community outreach, acknowledging local or regional artists.
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Invitationals are not typically juried, the idea being that the artist is asked to participate, not required to submit work. So again, there's not usually an entry fee. Shipping terms vary from venue to venue.
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Organized
This term suggests several possibilities: the effort of a person who has the concept and does the work but leaves the selection up to another—a juror, for instance; or who invites the artists but leaves the selection up to them. It might also suggest a group effort in which no one person makes all the curatorial decisions but everyone works hard to create a successful exhibition. There’s a lot of work involved in putting on an exhibition, and organized by is a good term to acknowledge it.

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There is not typically an entry fee associated with an organized show because, again, the artists are invited as a result of the organizer's research—however if it's a DIY project, artists may be expected to share the expenses of mounting the show.
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Juried
The juried show is typically the domain of a non-profit institution or
co-op gallery, where community is fostered by bringing artists together. A juror, usually invited and modestly paid, selects from a pool of submissions. She creates a show from the best of what comes in. Of course there’s curation involved in the process, but even with a thematic show, a juror is assembling a show from work she might not have selected on her own and, this is important, selecting work that she has likely seen only in digital reproduction. The venue personnel, whether gallery director or assistants, are the likely installers, unless the venue is large enough to be abe to hire someone specifically for the job. A juror might have ideas for placement but is not typically involved in the installation. 
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For artists the juried show is a crapshoot—you might find yourself surrounded by fabulous work, or be so embarrassed that you don't even list in on your resume—but early in a career it can be a lifeline out of the studio and into a broader discourse. And in special situations it can be a great way to show with professional peers.
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Juried shows often require entry fees for the artists. If you're going to plunk down $30 to even $50, make sure the project is worthwhile. Who's the organizer? Who's the juror? Where's the venue? What's the history of the show or organization? Is there a sophisticated audience for the show? Will there be a catalog or essay? Has it been advertised? Are there prizes or perks?
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Crediting the effort
Credit the curator. Credit the organizer. Forget what grad school professors tell you about not acknowledging the curator. It's professional and respectful to credit those who select your work for a show. Identify them on your resume and in all promotional material.
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Do you credit the jurors? On a resume, not necessarily—especially if your exhibition history is already full of juried shows. But who wouldn't want to acknowledge the museum curator or gallery directory who chose your work?  Certainly note their involvement on your promotional materials. You should expect the exhibition organizers to note them prominently on the postcard and all promotional materials as well.
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Comments?
As always, there are plenty of blurry lines and gray areas. Your comments are welcome.
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10.06.2012

Waxing Philosophic


I probably write less about encaustic on this blog than I do about any other medium—and if I do, I integrate in into a broader discoursebut today I have something to say.

An exhibition in book form

A Book and Exhibition
If you are in the Hudson Valley this weekend, please join me at the opening of Encaustic Works 2012 at the R&F Gallery in Kingston, New York. Encaustic Works is the name of a biennial exhibition sponsored by R&F Handmade Paints, one of the few manufacturers anywhere of encaustic paint. This year, for the first time, the exhibition is taking place not in a museum or gallery, venues where it has been held in the past, but in a book. I have a special affection for this exhibition in a book, because I was the juror, invited by the folks at R&F to select an exhibition from some 450 artist submissions. I selected 50 artists.

While the book is the exhibition, Laura Moriarty, director of the Gallery at R&F, has selected 14 artists from the book for an exhibition-within-an-exhibition, so to speak. If you are curious about what contemporary encaustic painting, sculpture and printmaking look like, come on over. You’ll get to talk with many of the artists, too.  By design, most of the artists are within driving distance, so the opening should be packed. The opening is on Saturday, October 6, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. 


Two views of Encaustic Works 2012

Above: Lisa Pressman and Renee Magnanti on back wall, Kevin Frank, foreground
Below: Lorrie Fredette on far wall;  Gregory Wright, Hilda Shen and Toby Sisson; these photos, Laura Moriarty



A Fork in the Road
But things are not all luminosity and waxy goodness. Encaustic painting has reached a fork in the road. Those of you who first learned about it through the flags and targets of Jasper Johns know it to be a substantial medium for abstraction, a medium which holds the track of a brushstroke or the path of a drip, a medium which functions like glue for collage (it’s what holds the newsprint to Johns’s canvas), so that paintings have muscle and heft.


Installation from Focus: Jasper Johns, Museum of Modern Art, December 2008-February 2009; left: Target with Four Faces; right: Flag, both encaustic and mixed media


If you are familiar with the work of Tony Scherman, you know encaustic to be expressively and romantically figurative, with great swipes of translucent paint applied alla prima to large canvases. If you are familiar with the sculpture of Petah Coyne, you know encaustic to have a baroque richness rife with metaphor and uncommon beauty. 

And if you saw the Lynda Benglis retrospective at the New Museum last year, you saw the work of an artist fluent in plastic mediums—latex, expanded foam, fabric, wax and metal—whose ideas about organic and sensuous accretion have remained more or less consistent among her various modes of expression.


Petah Coyne, Untitled # 1243 (The Secret Life of Words),  2007, cable, chicken wire, bolts, wax, silk flowers and other materials, at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2008 with Galerie Lelong
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Detail below


Lynda Benglis installation view at the New Museum, February-June 2011, with  work in poured latex (foreground), and cloth, wax, urethane foam, wax, and cast bronze respectively

Lynda Benglis, Karen, 1972, wax on wood, 36 x 5 x 3 inches

Detail below


Those of you who are familiar with my work (see sidebar or click Exhibitions, a tab under the header) know encaustic to be a refulgent material that allows me to create a painting with light-infused layers—color fields and reductive geometric compositions—in which image and object are one.

There are many excellent painters and sculptors—well known and not so well known—who employ this contemporary medium, a medium with roots that extend to the Fayum portraits of Greco Roman Egypt. (If you saw Ancient Faces at the Met in 2000, you saw the first and only time a large collection of these mummy portraits, the earliest surviving paintings on a substrate other than cave walls, has been shown together.) I’ve shown and written about work in encaustic here, herehere and here. But there’s a problem: Wax is such a seductive material that it’s drawing hobbyists like bees to the hive. These are folks who describe their efforts as “waxing” instead of “painting,” as if Pledge rather than paint were the stuff at the end of a brush.  So when melty melts and drippy drips flood the art centers and juried shows, and retired engineers start calling themselves artists—actually “encaustic artists”—after a weekend workshop, the serious painters, myself included, start getting twitchy.

Of course hobbyists are active in every medium—think paint by number or Elvis on velvet—but oil has Rembrandt and Goya, Mitchell and Snyder; and acrylic, a long line of masters from Helen Frankenthaler to Agnes Martin to a host of contemporary practitioners. Unless you are familiar with the Fayums, however, you may think that encaustic begins and ends with a few well-known artists and everything else is kitsch. Indeed, I’m sparing in how much I write about encaustic on this blog because I don’t want to be associated with the craft and hobby component out there. (At the same time, I am active in the encaustic community to encourage professionalism among its practitioners and I work to raise the bar via the annual conference I run.)

Art, No Adjective
My rule of thumb is simple: Whether made with sheetrock or sequins, wood or wax, it’s the vision and voice of the artist that gives form to the medium, not the other way around. “Encaustic art,” on the other hand, is a hobby conceit, organized by those eager for visibility without the chops to get shown outside of a small circle of friends. “Encaustic art” as a term was used differently a couple of decades ago, but now if it’s adjectival, with very few exceptions it’s a subgenre. 

I’ve said enough. A few "encaustic artists" are already taking aim with tomatoes. But I’m doing my part to identify and acknowledge the contributions serious encaustic, and those who use it, offer to the discourse of contemporary art. As viewers and artists, as dealers, curators and critics, please don’t settle for less.

OK, I’ve got an opening to attend. See you there?

10.04.2012

Structure and Space

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 Entering Mark Dagley's Structural Solutions at Minus Space


Two current shows are interesting to me for the way their geometry occupies the space they’re in: Mark Dagley’s Structural Solutions at Minus Space in DUMBO, and Sarah Oppenheimer’s D-33 at P.P.O.W. in Chelsea.
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Dagley has placed three large geometric paintings in a relatively small space—one painting per wall. Because of the gallery setup—the viewer enters via the fourth wall—there’s a strong sense of drama with the three leads emoting all at once. The installation shouldn’t work but it does. I wonder if it's the seemingly provisional installation, which allows the viewer to stand toe to toe with the paintings (which are nonetheless larger than life)? 
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Each painting is set on flat aluminum blocks on the floor and leaned at a slight angle against the wall, a "casual" but clearly well-thought-out strategy. Each painting embodies some aspect of geometry, both in structure and composition: a bicolor right-angle triangle, a prismatic grid, and a long rectangular painting whose diagonal stripes and keyhole cutouts suggest something out of a construction site. I don’t think the latter analogy is out of line, since Dagley’s work is all about how his paintings are put together. Here’s how he has described it: “The opticality is just the sexy part, the byproduct of the real issue at hand, which is structure.”
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Structural Solutions is up at Minus Space through October 27, with a concurrent retrospective at Kent Place Gallery in  Summit, New Jersey.

Left: Lucifer, 2012, acrylic on triangular canvas, 134 x 115 inches; right: The Mackintosh Variations, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 104 x 120 inches 

Continuing around the gallery, Janet's Dilemma, 2012, acrylic on canvas with notched holes, 78 x 156 inches  
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 Entering Sarah Oppenheimer's D-33 at P.P.O.W


While the viewing experience at Minus Space is chromatically blazing and almost physically encroaching,  at P.P.O.W. it's quite the opposite. The gallery door opens into what appears initially to be an empty room. But there's geometric activity at the sides of each wall in front of you, and an off-kilter doorway beckons you to enter to find out what it is. The experience is serene yet surprising, with the elegance of the geometry revealing itself only if you navigate the space.

D-33 is up at P.P.O.W. through October 13.


Entering the doorway at right brings you into an empty space which leads you into . . .

. . . a small room that offers unexpected views of and through the structure. What you're seeing above is not a painting but a look through a glass window to the geometry of the doorframe we just entered

Below: We shift our gaze from left to right to see this construction



We're going to conintue walking through the structure, but just to orient you let's take a moment to peer through the window you saw in the photo just above this one. That's the door through which we entered the gallery


We continue our tour of the structure . . .

. . .and end in a south-facing room in which the sunlight through the windows becomes part of the geometry of the installation. (A mirror in the doorway skews and enhances the disorientation.)





10.01.2012

Marketing Mondays: The "Octogenarians"


Let me start by saying that I am not in my eighties—and I won’t be for some time—but when I do get to be that age, if I am referred to as an anonymous “octogenarian” or “elderly lady” or “old woman,” or “elderly grandmother” (which would be quite the trick, since I have no children that I know of)  instead of by my own name and occupation, I will haul off with the punch and foul mouth of a juvenile delinquent. Identifying someone because they're old rather than by who they are and what they do—especially women (surprise)—is ageist and sexist. I’d rather you just call me one pissed-off bitch. (Though if I do smack someone upside the head, I know what the headline would be: "Rogue octogenarian.")
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First there was the Beast Jesus flap. Amateur restorer Cecilia Jimenez put her paintbrush to a flaking fresco of Jesus in a Spanish church and created what is now the most publicized “restoration” outside of the Sistine Ceiling--not as good, but now just as well known. Here’s the Huffington Post’s headline from August 22:

“Elderly Woman's Hilarious Failed Attempt At Restoring A 19th Century Fresco In Borja, Spain.”
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Yes, it was a hilarious attempt, one that I skewered here, but it would have been just as hilarious if she’d been 21 rather than 81. Chutzpah comes in all ages and all languages. Arianna Huffington, and pretty much everyone else, should have done better with the headline. and story.
 
Just out of curiosity, I Googled "spanish fresco destroyed by amateur," leaving out any mention of age. Below is a screengrab of what came up. Kudos to USA Today, headline at the very bottom of the image, which identified her as an amateur, the only real issue with regard to the restoration. Age can appear in the text of the piece as it does in any other story.
 
 
Then there was the infinitely sadder recent story, which this headline notes: “Johnny Lewis dead at 28: 'Sons of Anarchy' actor killed elderly landlady”
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Turns out the “elderly landlady” was also 81, having lived a life almost three times as long as the Hollywood meth-head who killed her, but most headlines treated her just as expendably as her killer did.
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There was a lovely exception to the ageist anonymization of this woman, whose name is Catherine Davis. The actor Taylor Negron wrote a tribute to his friend, whom he describes as “a writer, artist and entrepreneur. . . .a woman of astounding energy and clear-minded self creation.” She supported herself— and her community— by renting rooms in her villa to struggling actors. She the difference? 

Davis is shown here in the doorway of her Spanish-style style villa, which many struggling actors called home. Hardly the person "elderly landlady" calls to mind. I might not have taken the time to write this little editorial had both of these women not been artists, albeit amateur and/or unsung. (Davis, according to Negron, "was working on a biography of Phoebe Apperson Hearst," mother of William Randolph, at the time of her murder.)
Catherine Davis in the doorway of her home, photo from the Internet; photographer is uncredited
 
Given that most of us will not achieve New York Times above-the-fold status, or the cover of Art in America, the “elderly woman” (or “elderly man,” for that matter) may one day be how we are identified, even if—let’s hope—it’s not under either circumstance.
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We can all do better when we write about artists, when we write about one another. If we are lucky that respect will be accorded to us one day. 

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