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Posted by libby

The reason the McEneaney can't go next to the big dumb Peter Doig is it's bad policy to make your big dumb Peter Doig look even dumber (this is in answer to the end of Roberta's previous post).

permanent link   libby 9:58 AM
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Posted by roberta

I was at the PMA recently and noticed the absence of Philadelphia artist Tristin Lowe's "Untitled" (Dysfunctional Chair)" in the contemporary gallery where it had been lurking between a Jeff Wall photo light box and a Gerhard Richter painting. Here's my post from last November when I discovered Lowe's insertion into the collection -- a first local placement in the contemporary galleries in recent memory. And here's another post by Rob Matthews, who works at the PMA, describing more about the dysfunctional chair.

I guess there's only room for one local artist in the contemporary rooms because after I waltzed out of what I had considered Lowe's room, sad that his piece was gone, I checked the next gallery and there it was, the local token, Edna Andrade's op art piece "Color Motion 4-64" (1964). (in the image above, that's the Andrade on the wall, right, behind the Brillos. Image below is the piece, a true hurt the eye accomplishment.)

The Andrade looks great in the triangular arrangement with Warhol's three Brillo boxes (1964) and Richard Anuszkiewicz's op piece "Knowledge and Disappearance," 1961.
lowe, tristin
I'm happy to see the local toehold maintained at the museum, albeit in its minimal number. Would that there were room for more than one at a time. (I still think a Sarah McEneaney painting would be a great permanent addition to one of the rooms. Put in next to that big, dumb Peter Doig. Can anyone give me a good reason why not?)
andrade, edna

permanent link   roberta 9:28 AM
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Posted by libby

I'm off to Massachusetts including a day at MASS MoCA. Hooray. Looks like lots of good shows there. Meanwhile, I will leave the blog to Roberta who always has lots to say (image, my would-be wheels. The car covered in Bromo Seltzer bottles plus "Fifi" the poodle are from the Kinetic Sculpture Race, on display at the American Visionary Arts Museum).

permanent link   libby 9:11 AM
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Posted by libby

The ladies do not like to take meetings.
linc
But the LINC meeting at Fleisher yesterday (see Roberta's previous post) had a lot going on. Besides, we got to see and meet lots of people (there were more than 150 people attending!). Everyone who showed up is on our list of good citizens who want to make the art life better for all involved, all including dancers, actors, video artists--everyone in the arts (in the Fleisher chapel, early in the day).

LINC presenters told us about programs their own cities developed, and here are my brief-brief versions of the presenter highlights:

Los Angeles

Los Angeles' pool of art and art makers is huge (think about the movie industry, guys), but so many are not successful.

Judith Luther Wilder at the Center for Cultural Innovation, who has a business and entrepreneurial background, set up a program to give artists entrepreneurial training.

She said they made it clear to the artists that "Nothing we were doing was going to make them better artists."

Their core of counselors including attorneys, cpas, producers, museum directors, and for a small fee, artists can come to them for advice. "All these people had to be bilingual," she said, comfortable in the language of the arts and comfortable in the language of their own fields.

The students didn't think they needed entrepreneurial training, but the 30 years olds loved it.

Other parts of the program there included setting up a benefits program by forming an alliance with school alumni associations, including Cal Arts alumni to create a pool of 40,000 people.

They also set up a collateral pool for artists for when they need a mortgage or other loan.

Minneapolis

Artspace is a 25-year-old non-profit that aims to change the pattern in which artist move into an area, fix it up and then get priced out of their space. So Artspace creates spaces dedicated only to artists. One of their projects is now across from where the Minnesota Twins wanted to build their new ball park. The land is worth $24 million, but the artists are still there, still paying $664/month.

Chris Velasco, who made this presentation, is now working with the William Penn Foundation, exploring how to provide space for artists in Philadelphia. So if you get a survey from William Penn, now you know why.

Seattle

Sam Miller from LINC Boston explained how Seattle's artists community convinced state government to use artists as a demonstration group to work out a program that would insure the underinsured--all self-imployed, uninsured workers. Their baseline was it had to provide catastrophic care because 45 percent of bankruptcies of small businesses are due to catastrophic healthcare expenses.

Rhode Island

The lesson here, delivered by Ann Galligan of Northeastern University in Boston is that tax credits for artists work. duh. Are you listening, dear Mayor Street? Artists are workers, creative workers. So Providence created a no-tax zone for artists modeled on Ireland's Temple Bar tax incentives. No sales tax on art generated in the zone. No personal income tax for artists in the zone. And preservation credits for the buildings. Ironically, the artists still couldn't afford the downtown area in the zone, but the buzz attracted them to the area around it (right, at Fleisher at the end of a long day of meetings).

Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Got a problem with City Hall? Need to find a studio with a loading dock? In Pawtucket it's one-stop shopping. Herb Weiss, from the Office of Economic and Cultural Affairs in Pawtucket, is your go-to guy. He will help. He will print out a list of properties for sale that fit your needs. He will find the government agency who can help you.

The next step is to see what Philadelphia artists think are their biggest problems and to then work on solutions. Meanwhile, it was good to learn that a number of simultaneous efforts are going on, between Pew and the LINC project, and the William Penn Foundation effort.

I'm leaving the rest for Roberta.

permanent link   libby 8:10 AM
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Posted by roberta

Libby and I are off to an all-day seminar sponsored by LINC (Leveraging Investments in Creativity) a 10-year multi-city project. We're going to hear about making Philadelphia better for art and making Philadelphia art better. And we're hoping it's not just a lot of hot air. We'll let you know. More on LINC here. The local LINC honchos are Melissa Franklin of the Pew Fellowships and Beth Feldman Brandt of Stockton Rush Barton Foundation.
yamamoto, nami
Meanwhile here's a little color for you, a photo I took July 11 when I was at PHL International airport, Terminal E. It's a glass case full of Nami Yamamoto's bubbly art. Yamamoto is a Vox Populi member whose work we've written about. This piece, called "Primordial Soup," is in the public part of Terminal E. Here's the PHL page explaining more about Yamamoto's piece. Our pal, Ava Blitz, wrote to tell us that she's got art at the airport now, in the Terminal B-C area. However, you'll need a ticket to see Blitz's work since it's deep inside beyond the Homeland Security take your shoes off functionaries. Here's Blitz's page at the PHL website.

And for the complete list of who's exhibiting where and when see this PHL page.

I love the airport art program run by Leah Douglas who always seems to come up with a great mix of traditional Philadelphia art and new work of edgier more conceptual mein.

permanent link   roberta 7:41 AM
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Posted by libby

Edward M. Epstein's pen and wash "Delaware Vistas, Condensed" show at aSFe (art studio for experiments) have the look of the British tradition of travelog paintings mixed with politics, in this case the commentary being the loss of uninterrupted, unpolluted natural views. The work instantly brought to mind Steve Mumford's "Baghdad Journal," which ran in artnet.com.
epstein, edward m.

I get the sense that Epstein's vistas are composites of the Delaware Valley landscape, given the poses of the nudes appropriated from Renoir (see top image), the old-fashioned sailing ship behind the hamburger joint (image left), and the miles of what look like slag heaps.

But the paintings have the charm of a slice of modern life with young people chatting on a deck in a vast, mountainous landscape--very romantic until you note the towering oil tanks rising to the clouds atop the mountains like giant space ships grown to a size beyond all rational proportion.

I especially liked the drawings with the high contrast and the more improbable, shocking second colors--green, purple. They seemed like a new wrinkle on an old genre.
wander, david

Epstein directs the 40th Street Artist-in-Residence program, located in West Philadelphia, which grants free studio space to neighborhood artists on a six-month rotating basis.
tarver, ron

A few doors away from aSFe, Sande Webster Gallery has gone all out with mad plantings in the gallery itself for the show " The Garden is Art, Art of the Garden" (right, one of the indoor islands of live flowers and greenery, with David Wander's oil "Cherry White" in the background and to the right of the plantings, Andrew Turner's acrylic "Three Vases" above and James Atkins' oil "Warm Flowers" below.
baldeck, andrea

But the work I liked best in this show were the photographs from Ron Tarver and from Andrea Baldeck, both bodies of work luminous and magical, but not wholly unexpected. I thought it ironic that some of the best paintings and drawings in the show were in the hallway (left, Tarver's "Big Tree").
camp, gary

In typical Webster Gallery fashion, lots of other stuff was compressed into the back space--sculptures, benches, tables. Amongst it was this rather amazing face vase by Gary Camp (right), all hand built and so wild and intense and deliberately un-lovely and challenging that I couldn't take my eyes off of it. He also had a beautiful table nearby, the top-heavy hunk of wood resting on delicate, wavering, knock-kneed legs that capture at once Victorian delicacy and the modern attention to materials.

permanent link   libby 4:58 PM
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Posted by roberta

[Ed. note: Today's Weekly has my review of the PAFA exhibit "Light, Line and Color." Here's the link. And here's the story. For more, see Libby's post on the show.]
copley, john singleton

"Light, Line and Color," the vast exhibit of works on paper from the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is a delight. With 237 works chosen from more than 12,000 pieces-some of which have never been exhibited-the show is respectful of the Academy's tradition (there's a show within a show of figure studies), but playful too, demonstrating the collection's quirks as well as its depth.

In fact, it's the quirks unearthed by PAFA assistant curator Robert Cozzolino that make the show both entertaining and enlightening.

The show is divided into five themes: portraits and self-portraits, rural vistas and urban spaces, the language of abstraction, the academic tradition, and contemporary strategies. There's something for just about all tastes.

I can't say PAFA's Fisher Brooks gallery space-windowless, high-ceilinged and impersonal-does anything special for the show. I'm guessing the 7,000-square-foot gallery was created to accommodate large contemporary sculpture and installations requiring airplane-hangar-like digs.

On the other hand, this show, with its mostly small works requiring close examination, is intimate. But the art is so strong and the curatorial flow is so well-focused that the space ultimately doesn't interfere.

The last major exhibit of works on paper at PAFA was in 1986, and since then PAFA has acquired major works on paper that haven't ever been exhibited, Cozzolino said at the press opening.
walker, kara
There's a wonderful John Singelton Copley chalk drawing from 1764 (Portrait of John Scollay, pictured at top, sorry about those reflections) that was acquired in '87. This is its PAFA debut. The Colonial-era portrait, a flawless rendering of a man who must have been a strong character, would stand out anywhere for its skill and nuance. Like many delicate and light-sensitive drawings, Copley's work will go back in storage after this exhibit and may not come out again for some time, so don't miss it.

In an exhibit with international and historical superstars, there are also moments of local pride. Prints from the 2004 Philadelphia Print Collaborative Portfolio-including works by Kate Abercrombie, Ben Woodward and Charles Burwell-are included in the contemporary section.


rothko, mark

There's also a fantasy figure drawing in pencil by Randall Sellers, and an ink drawing by Charles Burns that was used for the front cover of issue No. 7 of Black Hole. Both Sellers' and Burns' drawings are included in the academic strategies section, showing just how far figures have come since Thomas Eakins.

Kara Walker's linocut African/American, a new acquisition, is one of the few confrontational pieces in the show. Walker's black silhouette of a nude female, who's upside down and whose parted legs reveal a jungle of pubic hair, is an image that shows the Academy's ability to accept potentially controversial subject matter in its tradition without flinching-a nice surprise.

(image above is Walker's print next to a Barbara Kruger print)


Other surprises: John James Audubon's 1820 graphite portraits Mr. and Mrs. McClung, sensitive depictions of people-not birds; Reginald Marsh's watercolor and graphite Junkyard Scene, which shows a hulking heap in an urban junkyard instead of the artist's usual fashionable urbanites; Stuart Davis' surreal gouache Dalìnian beach scene Sand Cove; and a diminutive Mark Rothko acrylic on paper, '68's Untitled (Maroon Over Red)-which, at a mere 39 inches by 26 inches, seems like a tryout for the artist's later, more robust works.

(image is installation shot of the Rothko, which had the feel of a screen door on a small house.)

The smart exhibit underscores the importance of works on paper to the Academy's tradition and to the history of art. It's also a pleasure to view.

"Light, Line and Color: American Works on Paper (1765-2005)"
Through Sept. 4. Fisher Brooks Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118 N. Broad St. 215.972.7600.

sketches

More from PAFA: Curator Robert Cozzolino emailed to say he has another exhibit on display. This one's at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin (my alma mater and Cozzolino's too). The curator, whose Ph.D. thesis is on American fantasy painter Ivan Albright, organized another big group show for Chazen (104 works). "With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965" includes work by John Wilde, whose two drawings in PAFA's "Light, Line and Color" exhibit are outstanding.

>> Rob Matthews and Sharon Horvath, both local artists represented by Gallery Joe, are in a fabulous group show in New York at Adam Baumgold Gallery. "In a Series" explores work made in a series (of course). Matthews emailed to say his work was "mere inches away" from a piece by Ed Ruscha, this year's American representative at the Venice Biennale. The show's up through Aug. 12. (R.F.)

permanent link   roberta 10:37 AM
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Posted by roberta

[Ed. note: This post comments on "The Lost Meeting" at Abington Art Center. See my post for more about getting lost, and see our "Lost Meeting" thread at the left for more comments on the project. If you're going out there be advised that the Art Center's building is on summer hours, although that's not reflected on the website. What that means is no Saturday hours for the gallery. While you can see the outdoor exhibits (as many as you can find) the indoor component is not available on Saturday.]

Post by Abigail Doan

I visited the Abington Art Center this past weekend to tour the woods and view "The Lost Meeting". I agree that more signs are needed as I wandered a bit too far and was reprimanded by a groundskeeper on an adjacent property. The woods are indeed very magical and one wants to chance upon the installations rather than follow a bread crumb trail. I have to confess, though, that a less perceptive visitor might have a difficult time finding some of the pieces, particularly "The Lost Meeting" and Roy Staab's piece.

(top image is the Quaker meetinghouse in which "The Lost Meeting" resides. Left is one of Joan Bankemper's ceramic pieces on the grounds in the exhibit "Passages" up now to Nov. 23.)

-- Abigail Doan is a New York artist who calls herself an environmental tinkerer. Her work involves, among other strategies, interventions in the environment made with degradable materials. Doan, who knows Abington Curator Amy Lipton through Nurture New York's Nature visits Philadelphia often for shows. Check out her website.
bankemper, joan
doan, abigail

permanent link   roberta 8:35 AM
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Posted by libby

I'm happy to report once again that art in places like restaurants and cafes can be good, even excellent. The only problem for a regular art lover is the screening process is dicier.
marchetta, theresa
I biked over to Cafe Loftus, which is also called Christopher Loftus Project Art Gallery, at 3649 Lancaster Ave. to look at work by Theresa Marchetta.

Marchetta had shown flowers made from peeled paint in a group show at the Optimistic in November. The flowers looked like fake flowers, but the material was inventive (right top, "Laura 1", with two intense light reflections that are not part of the painting. sorry).

The paintings are also an inventive use of materials. But they are also beautiful and surprising. They are like giant cloisonne enamel work, with pools of intense, shiny color separated by squiggly raised lines of material. Some of the pools allow the wooden backing, stained or not, to show through. The paintings also reminded me of stained glass.


The same squiggles that contain the pools also serve as black drawing lines, which give the paintings a cartoony feel (left, detail of "Gorb").

Each painting seems to be named after a person--"Laura 1," "Gorb," "Chandelier Gordon."

"Carl" looks like camouflage accented with peach. It also is like a forested scene with flickering light penetrating between the leaves. I don't know who "Chandelier Gordon" is, but the image reflects the name (right, "Chadelier Gordon").

These paintings are worth a trip to Powelton Village, which now has four galleries on Lancaster Ave. There's Photo West at 3625 Lancaster, the Community Education Center (CEC) at 3500 Lancaster, and Art on 38th Gallery at 3808 Lancaster (I haven't been there yet but my intentions are good) as well as Loftus. Once the summer's over, I have high hopes that enough good stuff will be going on there to keep me coming back.

Also showing at Loftus are photographs by James Jackson.

permanent link   libby 9:31 PM
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Posted by roberta

While organizing some photo files I ran across two images from Paris-based American artist Matthew Rose that I should have shared long ago but will do so today in the spirit of this is great and you should see it.

Rose is one of the stamp artists featured in the "Axis of Evil" exhibit that we saw and loved last year at Nexus Gallery. The show travelled on to Chicago and to controversy. (See Axis of Evil thread in our Old Hot Topics at the left, and see Rose's website for more of his art).

I had an email back and forth with the artist about mail art and stamp art and he actually sent me some of his stamp art -- and then, a miracle, a piece of mail art. I'm fascinated with the whole genre of mail and stamp art. Somehow in the world we live in where everybody does email and fewer and fewer people write and use the postal services the whole enterprise seems quaint. And yet it's timeless too, arising from an impulse to communicate across geographical space with other people of like minds and create a kind of community. Almost like a blog in a way but in the real, slow, wrinkled and weight-concerned world where it costs $0.37 to move an ounce of paper. Speaking of moving things I guess that's one of the nifty things about mail art--the circuitous route of travel the art takes to get to your door. It's like a performance piece by the Post Office only they don't know they're doing it. Kind of fun to think about.
rose, matthew
Rose's piece of art arrived in my mailbox naked, not wrapped in an envelope or secured in a box. I think it was rubber banded together with some magazines and junk mail flyers. It's like an overgrown postcard with an image on one side and a message, address and stamps on the other. I'll call it "Mercury," because I don't know if it has a title but I like it. Isn't Mercury the messenger? And isn't there..or wasn't there a car that was a Mercury?) The piece measures 11 3/4" x 9 1/4." (that's the piece up top, standing on my stoop leaning against the front door.)
loi, valentina

"Mercury" is a photo collage with a nice real world element -- a piece of wood glued on at the top right. The only other glued on element is the blue letter "C." All the rest is Photoshopped or somehow photo-collaged and printed on paper, including the six USA 1-cent stamps which I -- and the Paris Post Office -- mistook for the real thing. (Notice the Paris-Daguerre Post Office cancellation mark on the little bird stamps. See the image big here.)

The image shows a detail of what looks to be a photo-interpretation of the famous surrealist painting "The Lovers" (1928) by Rene Magritte. I did a little Googling around and found this page on Art the Magazine with an article written by Rose himself (he's also a writer and editor) about the Italian artist Valentina Loi who happens to have made a film called "Les Amants (Homage a Magritte)" (2003). Voila! That's got to be the source for my mail art image, n'est-ce pas? (image above is the Magritte painting and below is a film still from Loi's film).



It's somehow fitting that a mail art piece mailed from Paris, the City of Love, reference a Surreal image having to do with love. Also, it was mailed to the City of Brotherly Love at a time when the Surreal master Salvador Dali was having his blockbuster exhibit at the PMA and some of the real world stamps that moved the work from point a to point b are three Dali centennial commemorative stamps, each costing 1,11 Euros.

On the message or reverse side, the hand-written note from the artist says: "Dear Roberta, Please enjoy this exciting collage by Matthew Rose in your home or office."

It's embellished with a drawing of an airplane pulling a banner that says "The Paris Correspondence School." There's a parachuting stick figure who says "Holy Merde!" because he's going to land on a prickly pear cactus drawn to look bigger than the airplane. There's also a boat out of water at the bottom.

That's Rose's faux art stamp "RIEN" in the right corner along with three standard-issue postage stamps. The Paris Post Office has dutifully hand cancelled "RIEN" along with the rest. (image. see it big here.

Somehow I would love to have been a tiny camera riding along on this art for its journey through Paris and over here to Philadelphia and to my front door. I guess that's part of the thrill of mail art -- imagining the journey and all the hands the thing passes through before getting to its destination. The signs of handling, which for any other piece of art would be considered flaws and damage, here tell stories about passing through machines and into and out of hands. The tears, wrinkles, and knicks are like marks of character. This piece was made. And it made it here.
magritte, rene

permanent link   roberta 1:50 PM
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Posted by libby and roberta

Martin Bromirski mentioned on his blog anaba that he was in a show, radius250, in Richmond, VA. The show's conceit is art produced within a 250-mile radius of Richmond. Who knew that Richmond is the hub of an art world radiating in all directions? It's a great idea for organizing a show and we'd like to see radiating art exhibits elsewhere. When we looked at the website -- which is very good and has a nice color image for each artist represented -- we saw that Philadelphia art is big in the show. And in fact, we found lots of Philadelphia or Pennsylvania artists who are who are also in artblog's radiant orbit. We've written about many of them. The show's juried by John Ravenal, former curator of contemporary art at the PMA, now Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
ullrich, kirsten
Here's the list of Philadelphia or PA or artblog aura artists in the show:

Warren Craghead, Mike Geno, Nadia Hironaka, Patricia Ingersoll, Amy Lincoln, Nelson Marlowe, Althea Murphy-Price, Todd Scalise (Pittsburgh), Keith Sharp, Matthew Suib, Kirsten Ullrich. Many of the names are in our artist's list at the left.

radius250 runs July 22 to Sept. 18 at artspace gallery in the Plant Zero art center in Richmond. (image is a painting of a tomato, we think, by Ullrich, a recent Tyler MFA grad.)

permanent link   libby and roberta 6:56 AM
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Posted by libby

Before this show blows right out of town, I wanted to get something up about the Print Center's "79th Annual International Competition: Printmaking." It's one of those shows that challenges any assumptions about prints as a weak medium, often falling prey to deadly process and control and old hat imagery. Well, at least I confess I sometimes feel this way about printmaking--but not after seeing this exhibit (right, Briana Clark's screenprint "Little Red Ridinghood," 10 1/2 x 11 inches).
clark, brianna

This show's a gem, with lots of provocative work from lots of artists I never heard of as well as some artists I have. Forty pieces by 35 different artists are included in the show, which was curated by Judith B. Hecker, the assistant curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA. Only one print in the show was entirely digital. The others relied mostly on traditional means of production (left, Jacques Moiroud's etching "Sweet & Sour," 24 x 18 inches, New York, which won an award).
moiroud, jacques

Familiar names in the show include three local artists--Kip Deeds and artblog favorite Jeanne Jaffe, both of whom won awards, as well as Althea Murphy-Price, who recently had a terrific piece in the Voxennial (see post here). Deeds' piece was purchased for the Print Center Permanent Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, selected by John Ittmann, curator of prints there. The name of the award was the Anne Kane Museum Purchase Award for his screen print, "By Gone Attachements" (screenprint, 11 x 15 inches; Deeds is from Newtown, PA, and Roberta has written about him here).
deeds, kip


Although the means were traditional, the subject matter was right up to date, the imagery and styles chosen by artists with eyes wide open. There are wacky angles suggested by camera imagery and the movies; there's cartooning; there are metaphorical narrations and metaphorical abstractions and metaphorical portraits; there's a lot about how people relate to one another and about where people fit in the world at large. There are references to art history and the imagery of advertising that surrounds us daily (left, Murphy-Price's "Up Do Series No. 1" is a similar idea to her dramatic "Sunday Crown" sculpture, but the print's curly hair lines are delicate and gestural. Murphy-Price is an artist to watch).
murphy-price, althea

While some images seem to hark back to the 1940s, even those retain postmodern touches that make them look fresh (right, Daniel Brewer's woodcut "Empty Shirt," which captures a person cramped by the corporate life in the cartoony lines of the cramped clothing).
brewer, daniel
I cannot possibly begin to name each artist whose work I admired, because I liked nearly every one of the images. So I've put up a few images and just want to urge you to go to this show.
jaffe, jeanne

Also at the Print Center is a show of prints by Elizabeth Osborne. While I found this work less surprising, it has some fine moments, such as the view of a lake taken under different conditions. The contrast between the two is a reminder of what Osborne's work is about (top image, "Lake," and bottom, "Calm Water").

osborne, elizabeth


The other great moment, for me, was a view of Osborne's studio with a river beyond, the river becoming a metaphor for life passing by as the artist works, and also a metaphor for how art gives only a slice of what's out there (right, "River Studio").

permanent link   libby 11:00 PM
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Posted by libby

cardiff, janet and george bures-miller
If you've never experienced a Janet Cardiff/George Bures-Miller walk with Cardiff whispering conspiratorial instructions in your ear, you might want to check out a CD presentation of their work at UArts Wednesday night, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the CBS Auditorium. (left, "Her Long Black Hair).

See our posts on their piece "Her Long Black Hair" here and here. bures-miller, goerge and janet cardiff

permanent link   libby 6:28 PM
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Posted by libby

Conceptual artist Elaine Reichek and recent winner of a Guggenheim fellowship talked Wednesday at the UArt Summer MFA "Food for Thought" series, and, Sonny, she gave the guys hell, using a gentle sense of humor.
(The "Food for Thought" schedule can be found here.)
reichek, elaine


Before the talk began, however, she proved how game she was by donning a tee shirt designed by Gerard Brown who is in town for the summer as UArts Summer MFA faculty member.

How Reichek found her subject matter may have been her experience as an art student at Yale, a male enclave where she felt like the odd woman out. Some time during her Yale experience, she observed to herself, "These chairs were not designed with your behind in mind." That was back around 1970.

The experience eventually transformed her thinking and her material. She switched from Minimalism to Conceptualism. And she changed from painting as her main material to embroidery, which, she said, had its own art history. It was a feminist act and it was subversive. The change was gradual, but ultimately dramatic, given that at Yale Ad Reinhart was her mentor.

madamimadam


A recent project of hers, "madamimadam," at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, involved placing her series of samplers all related to the Adam and Eve story in the museum on closed days, taking pictures, and then creating an interactive CD-ROM (right, "Adam and Eve," images based on a number of early-American samplers, from "madamimadam").
newman, barnett
This was the only way to get her work in the Gardner, which has a rule against changing the exhibit.


The CD-ROM, however, has her interventions in place, hanging among the old (boy) masters. The interactive CD is online here. Fiddle around with it for a minute or two and you'll get the idea. It's got sound and details. You can listen to a quote from Barnett Newman in which he uses the Adam and Eve story to prove that a man was the first artist, and you can see an image of Reichek's embroidered version of a Newman (left, "Original Man," Reichek's Newman appropriation with quotes from Newman and Genesis). You can hear a quote about a sci-fi Creation from Stanislas Lem.

The mighty computer
bruegel
With needle and thread, Reichek has been stitching her way through history and art history. The computer she credits with helping her find quotations--about communication, translation, men and women, etc.--that she then pairs with imagery.

She loves the way the Internet and the computer can come up with connections and samples that more conventional searches would not find. It's the new thinking, as far as Reichek is concerned. (And we who are of a certain age are certainly grateful for how it has expanded our memories.)

Words and images

It's the juxtapositions of the imagery with the words and the material that point up the questionable underlying assumptions in the imagery and in the words. "It's in the interstices between the appropriation of an image and an appropriation of a text that the meaning is. They come from different times and different media. Web knowledge and the way knowledge comes up these days is a whole new way of thinking. Every medium carries its own meaning."

Her love of the computer and what it can do has now brought her to another tool. She mentioned she just bought a digitized home sewing machine and is struggling up a mountainous learning curve. "My studio looks like a sweatshop," she said. "I have so many machines, I've started giving them names."

Language and translation
morse, samuel

She has stitched her way through macho-centric quotes from Samuel Morse (who painted as well as invented) to the Bible to filmmaker David Cronenberg. She has also stitched her way through symbols of language and communication, which is the underlying theme in all of her work (right, Reichek's sheer curtain with Morse's first telegraphed message in both the original Morse Code and our alphabet).


She has paired Bruegel's "Tower of Babel" translated into stitchery with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges. Babel is a favorite choice for her because the story is about language and the ability to communicate, she said. She thinks of her embroidered borrowed images as translations. And speaking of translations, she has found, when paying careful attention to the words males use, that men are Neanderthals from Mars, and therein lies the gender gap (left, Bruegel's "Tower of Babel" as stitched by Reichek).



She has translated Macintosh screen savers into embroidery as well as the message that the world's largest radio telescope transmitted into space just in case there's life out there. She takes note of the woman's stereotyped, sexy pose, the pairing of the man and woman like Adam and Eve, the numerous codes the scientists hoped aliens could decipher, and she especially loves the part of the messages that states, "No message could ever be free of ambiguity." Then she notes, "These folks are funded by the government, incidentally" (right, detail of embroidered version of message sent to space by the world's largest radio telescope).


She worries that the Library of Congress has been digitizing its contents, but that by time they are done recording it all, the technology will have moved on. "It will be passe and unreadable," she said. Some of it already is, she said (left, "White Magic," an alphabet used the practice of white magic).

Often, when appropriating a painting or other imagery, she uses a computer to break the image down into pixels, each pixel a stitch, a single color. Sometimes she does the translation by hand.
reinhart, ad
Appropriation of a different kind
pettibone, richard

Reichek explained in response to a question from Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery Director Sid Sachs that her own work is different from that of other appropriation artists like Richard Pettibone, Elaine Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine. Reichek said the others were about ownership, capitalism and duplication, and not about feminism or history. "My work has to do with philosophy." And Reichek's sources are more wide-ranging than just art--they are cinematic and post-modern, she said (right, Pettibone's "Andy Warhol, 'Campbell's Soup Can [Pepper Pot]" oil on three attached canvases, 10 3/8 x 6 3/8 inches).

Which brought Reichek back to her choice of embroidery. She said she admired it for its conflation of high and low culture.

"Who writes the history gets the memory," she observed. And by putting historic memory into a computer, that history gets rewritten. And she thinks the computer searches, with their algorithms and surprising finds, are doing the rewriting. And then she's translating it into embroidery to write her found version into art history.

About teaching

Of her teacher Reinhart at Yale, Reichek said she learned "scrupulosity" from him--that every thing you put on the canvas matters. "If a teacher teaches you anything, it's about how to think," she said. But she also observed that his practice of picking favorite students was not good teaching. "If you were struggling with something he wasn't interested in, he didn't have time for you."

permanent link   libby 8:27 AM
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