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Friday, June 20, 2003

Bienvenidos a la casita

 

Pepon Osorio’s art has always told stories about people. For a man who came to art after a career as a social worker, it’s a natural coming together.

With his new public installation, “I have a story to tell you,” dedicated Wednesday, June 18 in North Philadelphia, the artist recounts 15 Philadelphia stories. The stories and the photographs that represent them are embedded in the glass walls of a “casita” (little house) in the courtyard of Congreso de Latinos Unidos. They're also in two windows in Congreso’s main building. (Congreso is the leading provider of services to Philadelphia’s Latino community.)

Osorio’s art (highlighted in Wendy Weinberg's 2001 documentary "The Art of Activism") reaches into the Latino community -- embracing the good as well as the bad. In this new piece, he’s gathered together archival snapshots portraying everything from a wedding...to a mother grieving over her dead son. “We raised a giant mirror to reflect back the community,” said Osorio at the dedication.

It’s a mirror all right, but it’s also a beacon -- lit from within at night, reminding people of safe harbor in family and community. (Watch for night pictures, coming soon).

This is Osorio’s first permanent installation, according to Penny Bach, executive director of Fairmount Park Art Association which sponsored the project as part of the New Landmarks Series.

Before the ribbon-cutting (crepe paper ribbon, that is), “Super Combo” a Latino band (see image of Papo, the percussionist) from Asociation de Musicos Latino Americano (AMLA) played and Osorio took people inside the casita. It looks like a little church and feels like an armored tank -- safe and indestructable.

Osorio explained the process of transferring the photographs into the glass walls of the house. The pictures were embedded in the glass in a process invented especially for this project, he said. (The glass fabricator was Derix Glassstudios in Taunesstein, Germany.) The glass is impermeable to grafitti and to breakage. It’s also bulletproof.


Osorio’s arrival in Philadelphia several years ago was a blessing from above -- so much energy, so much generosity and love, such intelligence.

Philadelphia now gets to repay his kindness. In addition to this great, public installation, ICA will host an exhibit of his indoor pieces in the fall of 2004, something ICA spokesperson John McInerney confirmed today in an email: "Pepon’s exhibition will open in the fall of 2004. There is not a signed contract but we have a verbal agreement so it looks very good."

Very, very good.

permanent link  roberta 9:38 AM
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Thursday, June 19, 2003

Lisa Yuskavage Re-redux

 

A post by Donna Sink

(For more on this topic, see posts of 6/3/03and 6/6/03) What upset me so much about her show at the ICA was that it was being fawned over by the press. In particular, Robin Rice felt that Yuskavage was using these pin-up girl paintings as a way to "work through" issues of commercial feminine beauty. Bullshit. There's no soul-searching going on in these images, they're only about "working
through" that common artist's problem of having a lean bank account - and worse, they're using common commercial sex-sells imagery under the guise of criticizing that imagery to do it. In other words, they're no different than Budweiser ads. There was one still life in the show, a vase of flowers, that was gorgeous and shows real technical skill and more. I just wish she wasn't falling back on the Playboy aesthetic to sell the work - I mean who can resist looking at these babes, after all? - when it seems she does have talent in there.

--Donna Sink, AIA, is an associate at the Philadelphia architecture firm, Atkin Olshin Lawson-Bell Architects.


permanent link  roberta 1:20 PM
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Lisa Yuskavage redux

 

A post by Astrid Bowlby

(For more on this topic, see posts of 6/3/03 and 6/6/03)
I saw Yuskavage's show at the ICA and was very disappointed. She is not a very good painter, but like John Currin, seems to get compared favorably to very good painters all of the time. (I think he is overrated as well). I don't know what her training was, but the paint handling, her understanding of the chemistry and the material quality of pigments and their suspensions, is sorely lacking. And she certainly is not a colorist. I was seeking sensitivity, love, if you will, expressed with material about her chosen subject matter. But what I felt was empty. Unfortunately, even if something is to be abhorred, it must be painted with love in order for anyone to be revulsed. Otherwise, there is no passion, no conviction, no essence, NO thing.

--Astrid Bowlby is a Philadelphia artist and writer. You can see her work locally at Gallery Joe.
permanent link  roberta 1:01 PM
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Showing in rough waters

 
Parallels gallery closed last week, not the first loss on the gallery scene this year. But it came and went pretty quickly--a not so unusual occurrence in the art world and the business world. And it has been a rough year (see May 24 post "Money makes the art world go round).

But then we heard a rumor that Charles More Gallery may be in deep water. The well-respected gallery has been a strong swimmer in the Philadelphia art world for more than 20 years, showing consistently high-quality shows with respected artists like Sidney Goodman (his "Angel" shown here) and James Havard.

“I don’t have any plan to close,” said More yesterday, although he did say he’d been hit hard by the economy, just like everyone else in the art business, and he added he’d had some personal upheavals.

But More, a businessman, is doing business--with Mitchell Zamarin, owner of Rittenhouse Fine Art. Zamarin is both renting More’s front room to show his own artists and renting 1,200 feet of More’s storage space.

That means More had to unload inventory (he had 3,000 pieces in storage) to make room for Zamarin’s. But More said that wasn’t he only motive. “I had 25 to 30 artists multiplied by 30 or 20 (pieces in inventory),” More said. “It became unmanageable for me.”

The only coherent show up at More, right now, is a Rittenhouse Fine Art show--hyper-realist, smooth-surface, slick still lifes from artists like Jeanette Pasin Sloan (her "Greek Key" shown left). Zamarin has shows lined up for that space into January, including a show of the Trompe l’Oeuil Society of Artists (golly, I didn’t know there was such a thing) starting Oct. 15.

The rest of More’s space will show pieces selected from inventory through the summer. More has also seen several of his artists move on to New York galleries recently, including Sara McEneany and Randall Exon (his "Kill Cummin" right). “I still have access to Randall Exon,” More said. “That relationship is still going on.”

He said it’s every artist’s dream to show in New York. “A lot of this is just natural growth. ...I’ve shown these guys, some of them for 20 years and they’ve been invited to show in New York. There’s a paradox. If they’re good enough to be here, they’re good enough to go on. ...I’m very proud of the people who go on.”

More now has 15 artists, including Goodman, Ben Kamihara and David Fertig (his "Three Officers" left), and a couple of new ones--Chuck Houng and David Campbell.

“We’re trying to think of a new way to make a living,” More said. While he’s thinking, hasn’t yet planned any shows for the fall, although he mentioned that he and Zamarin are talking about a show of the late Thomas Hart Benton’s work--a big change for a man who has always dealt with living artists and sold pieces hot from the studio (Benton's "Cradling Wheat" shown right).

He said he’s trying to reexamine who his clients are, what kind of art they would buy, and in what location they’d be most likely to buy it.

Gone are his traditional market--suburbanites from the Main Line who used to come into town for the orchestra, Nan Duskin and art, he said. (He thought the city had placed too many obstacles in their path to Center City over the years with the blocking off Chestnut Street, the construction zone when Liberty Place went up, the Schuylkill Expressway reduced to one lane for a while, the lack of parking. “We were slowly strangled here.”)

I hope he stays afloat.
permanent link  libby 10:38 AM
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Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Alice in Paintland

 


I went to Pearl Paint to buy a tube of Cadmium Yellow Medium acrylic and a helpful, young sales clerk asked me what kind I wanted. I said “not the student grade paint.” (I’m a rube in paintland, though not totally naive.) He said Golden was what a lot of people liked, steering me to the tube display.

I grabbed my tube then noticed a bunch of Golden color charts rubber-banded together on a shelf under the display. I happen to love color charts (not just the hit of color but color names, too). I have charts squirreled away from many trips to Duron and MAB. But I didn’t know that fine art paints had color charts so I was excited.

Then I noticed the best part. These Golden color charts -- with their grid of boxes, each one inhabited by a smear of color -- were individually painted and the brushstroke maker got to sign their name at the bottom, in pencil.

Did that make these charts paintings? (Did Gerhardt Richter pick up the idea for his color chart painting (see image below) from Golden?) Were the brushstroke makers, Stacey, D. Parker and G, artists?

And most importantly, how would these bright-colored grids look on my wall at home? It was easy to see that these were, in a way, paintings, albeit ones made in a routinized, stay-in-the-lines way. But there was plenty of individual expression.

G, whose strokes were short and fat, produced a chart with a Zen-like calmness to it. At the end of the stroke there was a nice pool of color that occasionally broke quietly out of the box. Very satisfyling. You could see G’s affinity for the hot colors. Yellows and reds got longer, more juicy strokes.

D. Parker’s strokes had an aggressive diagonal push downward which gave them more zip. However, the paint application was thin.

Stacey, who painted the “Heavy Body Acrylics” charts, was the find. An abstract expressionist within her circumscribed boundaries, Stacey’s strokes, which were uniform in their left-right trajectory, distinguished themselves with drips (!) and ear- or tail-like protrusions that gave the whole chart an animal quality -- a little stampede of strokes moving left to right. Very sexy.

I checked Golden’s website to see if I could find Stacey, D. Parker or G listed anywhere. While the site is remarkable for its user friendliness and homey touches (story of the company's founding in 1980 by 67-year old Sam Golden and his wife Adele is especially great--click the site map link, then the history link), there was no mention of the color chart painters.

Maybe it’s just as well. I have the charts on my wall and they seem like great, outsider art, made for reasons that go beyond art-making by artists who might just as well be called anonymous. They’re probably all women.
permanent link  roberta 9:36 AM
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Sunday, June 15, 2003

Road Trip!!

 

photos by Cate Fallon and Roberta Fallon

I haven’t made it to Bilbao to see the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim, but last week I was in Milwaukee. My home town, known more for beer and bratwurst than for cutting edge architecture, now has a $122-million piece of trophy architecture designed by Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, and it’s ready to go mano-a-mano with the Gehry or any other contemporary boutique building you can name.

Calatrava's building, called the Quadracci Pavilion, is an add-on to the Milwaukee Art Museum (see more images, including night-time shots, at their site). It seems more like a piece of functional sculpture than a building -- beautiful, exotic and mysterious. It's a great civic icon for the blue collar city on Lake Michigan. Without pandering or reaching too high, this building, which looks like a yacht or a bird or fish, refers to the city’s roots in the harbor and to its citizens’ aspirations for the future.

It’s a cunning building that's spiritually uplifting -- and weird, in a good way. The building has “wings” which open and shut several times a day (called a Burke Brise Soleil, the wings are a sunscreen of sorts and a moving sculpture). It's also full of motifs that conjure up Neptune's kingdom, like the windows that evoke the open maw of a shark.

Inside the building’s a dreamy mix of cathedral, Star Trek Voyager and belly of the whale. A big, open lobby area is where the space lifts off to another level, light spilling in, reflected in shimmery waves on the glossy floor.



There’s a gift shop in the addition, a restaurant, an auditorium and one interior gallery (with dark, glass doors to keep out the overwhelming natural light). Two walkways take you to the MAM’s collection (which includes a respectable number of contemporary work by Robert Gober, Willie Cole, Gregory Crewdson, Cornelia Parker and others.

Sitting in one of the walkways, Andrea Zittel’s "Wagon Stations," 12 mod-pods for sleeping lined up in a row like a wagon train (image is detail of an open pod). They fit right in. Isolation chambers for sleepy voyagers (sleepy staff?), the only thing “off” was the build-up of dust on their brushed aluminum exterior -- get a donor to Pledge quick.

The gallery has a design exhibit devoted to the works of Milwaukee industrial designer, Brooks Stevens (1911-1995), an innovator who, among other things, proposed turning the military jeep into a mass-market, family vehicle which he dubbed the “victory car.” (Jeep snapped up that idea fast.) Stevens also coined the phrase “planned obsolescence” though he never intended it to mean cheap, shoddy construction.

Is it worth the money?
There is that problem of the museum’s $25 million deficit (down from the scary $122 million it was before $98 was raised through corporate, foundation and private donations.) New MAM director David Gordon, a British import who knows his numbers, is working to turn that deficit around. (For more about Gordon and his mission, see June 10, 2003 Financial Times article by Caroline Daniel.)

I hereby recommend a trip to the midwest. Of course a city is bigger than a building but if you're looking for a reason to go, it's a good one.
permanent link  roberta 10:39 PM
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