Hillbilly Kama Sutra Is a Yawn!

This four-person exhibition is over, but you can check out the artists' work at their web sites. This review was in the Kansas City Star, June 13, 2012.

Chameleon, by Marcus Cain

Fiendishly disturbing, “The Hillbilly Kama Sutra” is also often predictable.

St. Louis printmaker Tom Huck’s inelegant suite of linoleum cut prints, “The Hillbilly Kama Sutra,” is a study in, among other things, disparities. The prints at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art are beautifully detailed, drawing influence from the historical thematic print series of William Hogarth and Honore Daumier.

Huck’s suite maps out in graphic detail humans, skeletons and other beings — costumed and otherwise — in multiple stages of violent sexual activity. Yawn.

If the results are wince-inducing and mostly grotesque, this printmaking process is strikingly intricate, which is, of course, part of the point. Huck has said he wants “to make bad things beautiful.” By setting up the age-old and stale don’t-want-to-look-but-can’t-help-but-look paradox, he creates a disquieting print suite with indeterminate and perhaps simply gratuitous purpose.

Anne Austin Pearce and Marcus Cain are 2012 Charlotte Street Foundation visual artist fellows. Pearce’s “Undertow” feels like a sea change. Having finally shed the fragmented body, these new paintings surpass her previous work. Painted on paper and framed, the giant 84-by-54-inch paintings “Inverted” and “Overlooking a Well” are staggeringly accomplished.

Using water as a metaphor for her thoughtful examination of “the unnamable corridors of emotion,” Pearce’s free-flowing works suggest sophisticated yet enchanted underwater fairylands. Now untethered from the human form, Pearce is free to utilize space with more authority and creative freedom. The movement in all of these works feels completely alive and complicated in ways that her previous work did not.

The five paintings of “Disruptive 1-5” enjoy a velvety surface. The flowing paint, partially absorbed into the wood panel surface, has a magnetic effect, pulling us along. “Undertow” is an apt title for Pearce’s metaphysical paintings inspired by water and its energy.

Marcus Cain continues his interest in stippling. Abstract paintings with little quirky eyes could feel banal, but Cain’s earnest soulfulness keeps cliché at bay. His carefully plotted paintings radiate dense precision and yet something unknowable and mysterious. Cain’s meticulousness embodies a sense of order out of disorder and control over chaos.

While Cain notes that he approaches the world with “wonder and dread,” we can’t help but find the wonder in each of his delicate, but definitive paintings. The dots radiate energy; the paintings pulsate and vibrate. Painted as sheer dynamism, shadowy faces and heads emerge from the space of these paintings as if in transformative states of being and becoming.

Kent Michael Smith also has the ability to stay true to a particular process or theme, yet continually advance it in engaging ways. In this latest group of paintings suspended in resin, Smith works in the round and has also begun to use larger geometric acrylic shapes within all the paintings. Where those geometric forms have been smallish in the past, they are now large and commanding, giving the works a new feeling of heft and difference.

While his backgrounds are typically gestural, as a counterpoint to the strict geometric forms that float suspended above, in two of the works he has scraped the paint off of his studio floor to create the background. These multihued scrapings add an alien depth to his already hypnotic works. The scrapings are dense, a little dirty, and he layers them so they become a contentious and unfamiliar surface upon which his sharp geometric forms smoothly ride. 

My advice? Hightail it to the gallery for a jam-packed free ride with four artists doing what they do best.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/13/3654942/bizarre-to-sublime-at-sherry-leedy.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Gallerist Bernice Steinbaum To Close Miami Gallery!

photo, Liam Crotty

Bernice Steinbaum, one of the most energetic and dedicated gallery owners I've ever worked with—in New York and then Miami—is closing her Miami gallery after 12 years.  I remember when she left her New York Soho gallery to open her Miami gallery, I was shocked then, and shocked now that she won't own her own gallery any longer.  At 70 (which surprises me, as she seems ageless), it's time for a change.  Bernice has always worked with extremely talented artists, with whom I've had the pleasure of working, including Ken Aptekar, Hung Liu, and MacArthur "Genius" Award winner Deborah Willis, to name a few.

Bernice, you are a force of nature! You shall be missed!

Read Lydia Martin's article in the Miami Herald here.

Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch's Fantastic Sculpture

A Busy Solitude, Jarrett Mellenbruch

Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch has a gorgeous sculpture in Bill Brady's gallery in the West Bottoms.  See my review here in the Kansas City Star, or read it below.  Mellenbruch is also participating in this year's Avenue of the Arts public art project.  His site specific installation FLOAT is a field of hammocks facing the iconic Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. 

Here's my review that includes Mellenbruch's A Busy Solitude sculpture.

Unique materials stand out in ‘East West Shift to the Middle, Part II’

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/06/3643610/art-review-unique-materials-stand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Garbage bags and gongshi have nothing in common. But as strange and alluring bedfellows, they inspire Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch and Brooklyn-based Andrew Sutherland, two of the 16 artists exhibiting at Bill Brady’s gallery.  These two artists are the highlights of “East West Shift to the Middle, Part II,” the second of Brady’s exhibitions aimed at establishing his presence in the Kansas City gallery arena.

Mellenbruch and the self-taught Sutherland are acutely engaged with the material processes of their work, adding a layer of context beyond the conceptual impulses that inform them.

Mellenbruch’s satisfyingly chaotic “A Busy Solitude” initially may suggest Petah Coyne’s wax-covered objects. But Mellenbruch writes that his sculpture emerges from his interest in Chinese scholar rocks, or gongshi.

His cacophonous work has a counterintuitive empathy with the contemplative nature of the curious scholar rock. The beautiful and sculptural gongshi were removed from their natural locations to serve as focal points of personal reflection, as microcosms for the whole natural world.

The artist’s incorporation of absurdist objects such as tiny clown and kitten sculptures, branches and berries creates a visual Tower of Babel, perhaps also exciting in us deliberation of the weird world at large.

Sutherland’s three works reveal his material eccentricity. Both “Untitled (Red Tape)” and “Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting)” look exactly like red tape and black garbage bags mounted on canvas and covered with a glazy, shiny surface. However, the painstaking process involves applying about 40 coats of paint — pigmented and clear medium — onto garbage bags and a taped box, and then carefully peeling it off the objects to obtain the skin of a painting, which Sutherland mounts to canvas.

The pieces are uncanny, magical and obsessively detailed. While “Red Tape” is his best work in the exhibition, his sculpture “Geode” — plaster, chicken wire and tiny shards of car glass individually glued — is also an exciting triumph of material and process.

Robert Greene’s “Scott,” in his standard semi-monochromatic palette, is composed of his trademark vertical painted lines in horizontal rows. Greene’s rhythmic paintings pulsate. The lines optically undulate up, down and across the canvases.

Kate Shepherd and Gordon Terry explore the vast quietude of space in their dark panel paintings.

Terry’s trippy hallucinogenic blobs floating in space are a delicious counterpoint to Shepherd’s strict geometric forms that divide up her infinite space clustered with tiny white dots.

Other than Mellenbruch’s and Sutherland’s works, Brady’s exhibition is missing a major wow factor that might have felt inventive and unusual. While Brady writes in an email that his goal is “to inform and be a reference for local artists, collectors, and museums of what is current and trending on both coasts,” simply racking up 16 artists on white gallery walls fails, so far, to uncover innovation.

The exhibition is diluted, not strengthened, by the high number of artists. Fewer artists showing multiple works would resonate more deeply, because everybody knows that too many artists spoil the vichyssoise.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/06/06/3643610/art-review-unique-materials-stand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

You Going to Brazil Soon? See Marco Maggi.

Marci Maggi

If you are in the neighborhood of Saö Paulo anytime before May 13, then please, go see Marco Maggi's exhibition at Instituto Tomie Ohtake.  Maggi, who divides his time between New York State and Montevideo, Uruguay, has installed an exhibition titled Functional disinformation, drawings in Portuguese.  Maggi, truly one of the nicest people in the world, works with concepts of time and language in his exhibition.  The exhibition includes a large scale paper installation, in which he stacks sheets of paper and carves into some of the sheets.  Maggi is known for this type of installation; the Kemper Museum in Kansas City owns one, plus a couple of his other works.

Maggi notes, "All my work lies on the threshold between two and three dimensions: engraving and drawing, plan and installation, the line that cuts the paper and the micro sculpture."

Julie Chang at Hosfelt Gallery

Julie Chang, studio view

I've been following Julie Chang's work for a couple of years and I love it.  She stitches so many influences into her work—her Chinese heritage, social expectations, to name a couple—layering her art with meaning.  She's having her first solo exhibition in New York through June 16 at Hosfelt Gallery.  In Chinese. Japanese. Indian Chief—she takes the name from a game she played as a child—she exhibits beautiful panel paintings with multiple cultural influences.  If you're in NYC, stop by the gallery and see this gorgeous work.

Need A Grant Source? Try Fractured Atlas

I get posts from Fractured Atlas in NYC and have been interested in their granting opportunities for artists and arts organizations.  There is a fee to be a member, but it might be worth your time to check them out here.

Headed to London This Summer? NYC? Portland? Chattanooga? Get a Street Art App!

If you're headed to London for the Olympics in a few months, that's cool, but you don't want to miss some of the best art in the entire world in London's museums, galleries, and on the streets!  How do I find all that street art you ask?  Why, on your Street Art App for your iphone, that's how!  Cassandra Daily gives us this post about public art apps in London, NYC, and Portland, OR.  

Street Art London app for iPhone offers a comprehensive map of London's outdoor art.  The Arts for Transit app lets New York City's subway riders search the Art For Transit collection by artist or subway line.  The Public Art PDX app helps Portlanders find the city’s public art.

My friend Matthew Carroll is cofounder of SecondSite LLC, which provides a mobile app for the public art of Chattanooga.   Check it out!

New Gallery Space in Kansas City's West Bottoms Could Use Some Love

Three Kansas City artists are running a new gallery space, 1522 St. Louis, in Kansas City's West Bottoms.  In their first exhibition they are working a little haphazardly, suggesting that they need to put a little more love and attention into exhibition organization.  This is their first exhibition, so they have lots of time!  I reviewed it in the Kansas City Star here.  Or read it below!  

Katie Ford, "The Science of Idealism + Social Graces," detail

Viewers struggle to decipher meaning of gallery’s exhibit based on random words

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Should you be leery of an exhibition whose theme “was generated randomly”?

The answer may depend on your patience.

A project space is a different animal from a commercial gallery or an institutional space. It can be freer and looser, which can be good or not. It can work if managed properly, but if the goal is to broaden a conversation with an audience, then a more specific vision may be the first order for the folks running the 1522 St. Louis space.

Kansas City artists Erika Lynne Hanson, Justin Gainan and Mike Erickson are operating 1522 St. Louis, a small space in the West Bottoms. Their inaugural exhibition, “Naamah, Uliginous, Laborer,” features an installation by Kansas City artist Katie Ford.

Hanson said the gallery exists as an experimental, organic space in which invited artists respond to ideas or arbitrary words presented by the three artists running the space.

The gallery’s stated model “is that of the studio practice where one action, be it a random or well-researched decision, informs the next.”

Isn’t that simply everyday life, one action informing the next? Wake, get out of bed; stay in bed, skip work; action, consequence; and so on until your days are filled.

For this inaugural installation, Ford was asked to respond to the three words of the title, which Hanson said were randomly chosen — “a dictionary was thrown into the air” — with no thought to content or meaning.

Isn’t this idea straight out of reality TV, with little regard for expertise?

Despite the admittedly careless challenge imposed by the artists in charge, Ford produces an earnest, if somewhat impenetrable, artistic response.

In an installation composed of bundled sticks, plastic-wrapped cardboard and other detritus, Ford’s materials seem to denote place, with common debris defining the space — Thomas Hirschhorn in miniature.

She said by email that her interest in the failed social/scientific experiment Biosphere 2 informed her work.“In looking for a way to interpret these words in a way that rang true with the concepts in which I’m already interested, using these experiments in isolated living and re-created biospheres seemed to make a lot of sense.”

There’s a platform covered with cardboard mimicking hardwood flooring, bundles of sticks and a flag that seems to suggest a landing or colonialist land claim. 

“I enjoy playing with the interactions between the materials themselves and also let the materials remain fairly obvious or bare because I like the human implication, the levels of manipulation,” she said. “Also because of this, I mostly like to start with fairly raw materials.”

Although she is trained as a printmaker, Ford’s interest in different materials is wide-ranging and generous.

The installation, which Ford titled “The Science of Idealism + Social Graces,” is raw but not overwhelming like some accumulation-based installations can be. Although the tiny gallery space allotted might have curtailed her work.

However, audiences need conceptual and visual access; we can’t all have long email exchanges with artists about their art. The meaningless title should have been dropped because it provides no reference or access point for viewers, and, in the end, the artist produced a respectable installation based on her own interests in spite of, not because of, the title she was given.

It’s a good thing to have another exhibition space in town, but “studio practice” may be an insular academic conceit that is difficult to translate to the actual world of casual visitors.

Isn’t the goal for a larger conversation than the one you can have with your friends? In the future, the goal to expand artistic and conceptual ideas to include an ever-wider ring of participants might be more winningly achieved with a more thoughtful approach.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/04/11/3546881/muddled-dialogue.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Mother-Daughter Duo at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art

Judy Onofrio, Flux

Judy Onofrio and her daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes  have an exhibition whose spooky undertones are sometimes successful, and sometimes not.  Here's my review in The Kansas City Star.

If you think “Danse Macabre” is just a delightfully overplayed Camille Saint-Saens tone poem, you should hasten to see this odd mother-daughter exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Haunting bone sculptures and ghostly photographs create a new dance macabre.

Artists who use bones in their work surely realize the slender edge of disturbing upon which they dance.

Wisconsin self-taught artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein suggested visionary worlds with his delicate chicken and turkey bone thrones and towers.

Bones eerily suggest death since they are only available once a being is finished with them, or more precisely, dead. 

And yet, Judy Onofrio turned to them after confronting a serious illness, as if to deny bones their death relation and confirm them as life affirming and spiritual, even.

Perhaps more interestingly, Onofrio untethers herself from the female figure, visual cacophony, and the carnival colors that dominated her work for so long.

In the “Earth Bound” sculptures, Onofrio gathers bones in decorative clusters, which she paints in delicate pale greens and creams.

Most of the sculptures deploy cattle and other large mammal bones. These bones feel uncomfortably human in scale, and generally fall into two categories, freeform and attached to wall-mounted bases. The freeform works feel active, engaging, as if they might jettison from the wall, and Onofrio presents them in surprisingly varied ways.

“Twist” is one of the largest free-form sculptures into which Onofrio incorporates curvaceous horns with the bones. Smooth and ribbed, the horns weave through the bones, gracefully tying the work together.

There are a few sculptures with tiny bones. In “Dig 1,” “2,” and “3,” Onofrio crams diminutive mouse bones into a decorative trough-like mount. These fragments, all jumbled together and painted a creamy hue, feel old, as if they have been unearthed from an antique cabinet of curiosities.

The 2009 works, which are displayed on oval wall-mounted bases, are more closely related to her former works — they incorporate mirrors, pearls, fruit, teeth, branches, glass orbs and other non-bone detritus. And yet by painting them with monochromatic pale colors, Onofrio encourages serenity rather than chaos. 

Onofrio’s daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes cuts close to the spooky bone with her ghostly photographs. While she uses her own body in the images, they are not self-portraits; in fact the body is scarcely discernible. Instead, the grainy, velvety, wispy images suggest otherworldly beings.

Borrowing from 19th century spiritualism and ghost photography, Fornes capitalizes on the romantic notion of communicating with beings from the spirit world. Her large silver gelatin prints are beautiful, lush, full of dramatic movement and have evocative titles such as “Deep Sleep,” “The Space Between,” and “Falling Away,” which emphasize her narrative.

Fornes uses her body, ethereal textiles, and the studio to create images that suggest an absence and a presence. As she moves through the studio, her camera captures ghostlike movement, suggesting something or someone.

The small, white-framed oval images of her “Trace” series are even more ephemeral. Blown out to almost indiscernible imagery, the photographs have only the slightest grey-to-white contrast. An image is just barely apparent. 

Fornes’ work suggests the disembodied spirit of things or beings that are present, but not quite there, while her mother’s work unearths the presence of beings that have been, and what remains behind.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/03/21/3503289/sherry-leedy-displays-a-mother.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

New York's Exit Art Has Its Final Exhibitions

Exit Art

I'm sorry to say that after 30 years, Exit Art is closing doors.  On March 24, Exit Art's final exhibitions open.  Every Exit is an Entrance:  30 Years of Exit Art, runs through the space's closing, May 19, 2012.  The exhibition documents Exit Art's history from its founding in a loft apartment on Canal Street to its current location in Hell’s Kitchen.  A second exhibition, Collective/Performative is an exhibition and event series focusing on performance practices that require the participation of an audience. The exhibition will include new works by eight commissioned artists and organizations that will utilize Exit Art's space during gallery hours for a public project, as well as an "artist's history" of performance art told by seminal performance artists who have exhibited at Exit Art.

It seems sad, but things end.

Los Angeles's True Rock Star!

The boulder in its quarry (from LACMA's blog).

Oh how I wish I were in LA to see Michael Heizer's gargantuan boulder finally appear at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  LACMA has always been one of my favorite museums.  I love its vibe and I've seen some really outstanding exhibitions there.

And I love the idea of this fantastically ambitious work titled Levitated Mass.

Here's some press on the boulder's journey, and LACMA's blog about the work.  While the cost is staggering ($10 million!), I love this devotion to an artist that enables him to carry out this monumental Earthwork.

Lawrence Artists Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin at Rockhurst University

Here is my latest review in the Kansas City Star of Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin's exhibition at Rockhurst University's Greenlease Gallery.  The artists' work made a dynamic combination.

Lawrence artists offer a naturally unnatural exhibit

Michael Krueger

The unpredictable combination of Lawrence artists Mark Cowardin and Michael Krueger unearths smart yet idiosyncratic gestures.

While their work is visually dissimilar, both artists articulate reverence for nature and as often, a lament for its diminution.

Cowardin’s smoothly graceful sculptures juxtapose materials and conflicting ideas. In “The Great Escape,” a taxidermied pheasant attempts to break from a sculptural, ebonized walnut branch with roots clawing at absent earth. Like all of Cowardin’s sculptures here, the wood is deliberately too beautiful and highly crafted, perhaps a suggestion of our dissociation from the natural world.

As a native Midwesterner, Cowardin questions and accepts his Midwesternness and the complexities that it embodies.

In “Get a Grip,” a circular sculptured branch morphs into a hand, grasping its own roots. A single green leaf juts out of the top. Cowardin explains that it is “a piece that illustrates contrasting desires to hang on to and let go of one’s roots with a dash of optimism. This piece works as both a personal narrative and an illustration of the dangers of interrupting the natural cycle.”

Other sculptures are ambiguous. In “Milk & Honey,” a blindfolded pink flamingo hovers over a trinity of three-rooted branches.

Michael Krueger’s pencil-on-paper drawings are studies in hot neon hues and paradoxical relationships. The drawings are unpeopled, except for “Night Falls,” a riff on the romanticism of Hudson River School paintings. 

Here, groovy hippies are at home with the land, yet the scene is odd and slightly disturbing, despite the idealized overtones. A blood-red, pink, yellow and brown sky compresses the composition, suggesting discord.

Curiously, two of Krueger’s drawings combine furniture and pottery with the land. For Krueger, the exquisite craftsmanship of highboys and Arts and Crafts pottery emphasizes a particular utopian quest for perfection. In “Highboy,” Krueger faces two dressers on a cliff’s edge, as if they are chatting about the precarious place in which they, oddly, find themselves.

“Arts & Crafts Stack” is a totemic mystery. A stack of pottery vessels balances on another cryptic rock edge, juxtaposed against an egg yolk-yellow background.

For Krueger both drawings suggest a specific American arts and crafts idealism. He notes, “the movement was all about creating a utopian balance in life through art and design and living with these objects that resonated with hope and optimism. I have (the highboys and pottery) in the landscape in tenuous situations but they still (in my mind) ring of hopefulness and optimism. It’s about finding a way that the images can be both hopeful and doomed at the same time … tragic and glorious.”

Only Krueger, Mel Ziegler and the late Kate Ericson could suggest that furniture is tragic and glorious and make me believe it.

Other drawings depict dying trees and landscapes with colors that are beautiful, perhaps toxically so. Bitter yellows, greens and pinks envelope branches scattered about on a parched ground. Jagged lines and great slashes of unnatural color bubble to the surface of Krueger’s drawings where the landscape has become unknowable and even alien.

The land is both precious and yet not quite right. Something is amiss where perfection and imperfection coexist. 

Cowardin and Krueger lay claim to and reject our typical relationship to the natural world. While beautifully articulated — the wood is perfect, the colors are crystalline — the work also suggests we are often unrooted, and those colors may be toxic. The world is familiar, yet not utopian, and still cruelly at odds with itself.

Sharon Louden Reviewed in Art In America

Merge, Weisman Art Museum

My dear friend, artist Sharon Louden, created a fantastical, enormous site-specific installation to celebrate the reopening of the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.  Responding to Frank Gehry's iconic architecture, Louden's installation, Merge, is a dazzling tour de force, made of 250,000 aluminum strips.  The work is at the Weisman until May 20, 2012.  Janet Koplos has reviewed the work in Art in America.  Read her review here.

I worked with Sharon on The Attenders, her 2003 solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, when I was curator there.  That was also a beautiful exhibition.  Congratulations, Sharon!

Vizcaya's Contemporary Arts Project

I love historic houses, the quirkier, the better.  One of my favorites is Miami's Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.  I once had a very strange experience there since I was the only visitor, wandering around the property all alone.  Built in the 1910s as a winter home for agricultural industrialist James Deering (who was an International Harvesters executive) the house is an interesting Italianate structure with a mélange of styles in its interior.  When I was there more than 10 years ago, the house felt a little run down and in need of some love.  What excites me now is the Contemporary Arts Program Vizcaya is curating.  The juxtaposition of contemporary artists working within a historical setting is so exhilarating!

To invigorate the museum Vizcaya has initiated a Contemporary Arts Project in which artists create art and installations that emerge from, capitalize on, and/or expand upon Vizcaya and its history.  Here's some information about the most recent exhibition with New York Artist Francesco Simeti.

From Vizcaya's site:  "Francesco Simeti's A seahorse, a caravel and large quantities of concrete, stone, fill, topsoil, tiles, piping, trees, and other plants is the winter/spring exhibition of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens' Contemporary Arts Project (CAP), a commission program that invites artists to develop site-specific projects inspired by Miami's most popular National Historic Landmark. The exhibition will be on view February 24–May 21, 2012.

New York-based artist Francesco Simeti transforms one of Vizcaya's outdoor fountains into a surreal theatrical set, providing a playful and melancholic commentary on the fragility of human endeavors. Inspired by the mechanical apparatuses that simulated natural phenomena in Baroque gardens, Simeti's animated assemblage is composed of floating sculptures representing elements of the estate. The project continues in the Main House exhibition room with an installation of historic artifacts pulled from storage and on display for the first time ever."

I would LOVE to see this exhibition at Vizcaya, so if you're in Miami, please go check it out and report back!  

World's Fair Comes to Kansas City

Keller Frères, France (1881–1922). Pitcher, 1900. 

The history of world's fairs staggers across the country in architectural fragments.  Queens, NY's Flushing Meadows, the Seattle space needle, and the Sunsphere in World's Fair Park in Knoxville, Tennessee, (where I used to live and gazed upon the sphere every day), are a few remnants of this wide-ranging, romantic, imperialist, exciting 19th century idea.  One of my favorite historical novels is Erik Larson's brilliant Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which depicts fictionalized events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.  If you haven't read it, I do recommend it!  I am anxious to read his latest book as well.
Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opens the exhibition Inventing the Modern World:  Decorative Arts at the World's Fairs, 1851–1939, April 14.  The exhibition will feature 200 objects from multple world's fairs.  Those objects will be the cutting edge designs of their times.  The exhibition is co-curated by the Nelson-Atkins and the Carnegie Museum of Art.  

I can't wait!

Sarah Hobbs, Fantastic Georgia-based Photographer

Sarah Hobbs, a Georgia-based photographer, has a gorgeous new book of her photographs hot off the press.  Hobbs' work in this new book published by Charta is reproduced in beautiful imagery with two essays.

I first met Sarah in 2004 when I curated a solo exhibition of her photography at the Knoxville Museum of Art.  She creates large-scale images of installations that she makes that mine the fields of obsessions, anxieties, and the humor and absurdity of daily living.  The cover image Untitled (insomnia) with its omnipresent post-it notes suggests the insomniac's tortuous attempt at sleep while reminders of worries and to-do lists dangle above the bed, rupturing any idea of peace.  Here, the homey bed offers neither safe refuge, nor comfort.

Represented by Nancy Solomon of Atlanta's Solomon Projects, Hobbs continues to create complex and thoroughly engaging images.  And, she is one of the nicest people with whom I've ever worked.  Congrats, Sarah!

Marilyn Mahoney's Cinematic Drawings

First of all, I said that I'd follow up with my review of Ari Fish's installation at La Esquina.  Well, I tried to see it last Sunday, (suffering with a  monstrous cold), and it was closed, despite the fact that it was supposed to be open!  Grr.  There's too much to see and do in the world, so we're moving on.  

Here's my review, in the Kansas City Star, of Kansas City artist Marilyn Mahoney's work at Avila University's petite and nicely appointed Thornhill Gallery.  It's a really nice space; great for intimate works.

Arthur's Turn

Artist Marilyn Mahoney’s ‘Cinematic’ has tiny details, grand scope 

Drawings shine in a midcareer exhibit of her work at the Thornhill Gallery.

By DANA SELF, Special to the Star

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

If a body in motion tends to stay in motion, then Marilyn Mahoney’s drawings are images of perpetual kinesis.

Trusses, bridges, and other architectural fragments are the vehicles by which the midcareer Kansas City artist examines perspective, spatial relationships, abstraction, and underlying themes of dance, cinema, and memory.

The show in the Thornhill Gallery at Avila University has an enigmatic title, “Cinematic.” In its broadest definition, the name aptly conveys the essence of the work. Its scope is grand, yet Mahoney manipulates the most minute details with precision and dramatic flair.

By drawing, painting, and cutting on Mylar and paper in shades of gray, cream, black and rust, Mahoney designs and manipulates elements that dissolve from one thing to the next, suggesting contradictory notions of movement and immobility.

Everything can be seen in flux.

Out of the 14 works, two are traditional paintings on canvas while the rest are layered drawings on Mylar and paper. While the paintings are accomplished, it’s in the drawings that Mahoney really shines.

Interestingly, Mahoney cajoles more movement from her acutely precise, hand-cut shapes layered upon one another and manipulated with paint and graphite than she does from the relative freedom of acrylic paint. As illogical as it sounds, the paintings seem a bit staid by comparison. In “Scrimshaw — Truss,” those trusses feel stubbornly anchored to the striped background.

The paintings lack the drawings’ freedom.

“Licorice Twist,” the largest work on paper is, among all the works, the most bewitching. It is precise, lyrical, and shot through with dazzling choreography.

The drawing is a cross between an abstracted, elegant pavilion and a whirling dervish. Mahoney said it was influenced by her mother’s dancing pirouettes. Because the forms float unencumbered on the paper, the entire composition, with its sinuous curves and arching protrusions, feels changeable, unpredictable and cinematic.

In “South Pacific-Horizon,” Mahoney strips down to the basic elements that she embraces in all of her drawings. Here two nestling, recumbent trusses cut a sharp line through the ether.

Mahoney’s individual drawing components exist in a geometry of spatial relationships to one another and to the picture plane. At times the trusses and images coalesce into an abstracted object; they suggest a building or an architectural fragment, and at other times, the drawings exist in almost pure abstraction.

Mahoney meticulously investigates the push and pull of perspective in all of the work. She delves only into surface appearances in some drawings and in others she digs through layers and unearths spatial ambiguities. Even her earthy color choices imply the archeology of accretions.

In “Arthur’s Turn,” thick layers of trusses and sharp angles create a chaotic field that seems impenetrable.

In Mahoney’s abstracted choreography there is no movement without quiet and no quiet without some movement. Something is always stirring, or about to become.

The exhibition’s title, “Cinematic,” launches and summarizes this body of work. Mahoney leads us through stages of stability and instability, close-ups and long shots, as she pans across sections of changeable architectural fragments.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/08/3415080/cinematic-has-tiny-details-grand.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

February First Friday in Kansas City!

February brings us crazy warm weather (it has been in the 60s for the past week) and another First Friday.  I'm really interested to see Ari Fish's installation at La Esquina, 1000 West 25th St. Kansas City, MO, which opens tonight.  She has created a "temporary temple" mixed media installation called High Seas, Low Planes.  I'll be reviewing it, so, stay tuned.  I love a good installation, so, we'll see how she does.  

On Tuesday, February 21, my friend, composer Paul Rudy performs there with Heidi Svoboda, 6 p.m.

Kansas City Artists Are Feeling the LOVE

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

We've known it for a long time.  Kansas City artists are ambitious, rigorous, and without a doubt, worthy of any personal or institutional collection.  Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art director Bruce Hartman has curated an exhibition that's a love letter to Kansas City artists, artists who are associated with Kansas City, and to the Johnson County Community College, where the Nerman Museum lives.

Here is my review in the Kansas City Star, Jan. 29, 2012.

Nerman Museum exhibit ‘Abstract Kansas City’ showcases local artists

By DANA SELF

Special to The Star

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Nerman Museum exhibit ‘Abstract Kansas City’ showcases local artists

By DANA SELF, Special to The Star

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Nobody believes in you like your mama. And sometimes success comes with talent and a little nudge from someone who loves you.

At least that’s what Jered Sprecher, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee and former Overland Park resident, might say. He is one of the 32 artists in the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Abstract Kansas City” exhibition.

Sprecher’s mother suggested to museum director Bruce Hartman that the work was worth a peek, and Hartman took notice.

Turns out Sprecher’s mother was right.

And while this isn’t a story about a mother’s pride, it is a story about love — for art, for students and for establishing a cultural legacy.

“Abstract Kansas City” is a love letter in the form of a museum exhibition honoring an unlikely contemporary art collection in an unlikely place: the middle of a former farm in Kansas.

It all started in 1981. What is now the dazzling collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College was at one time the dream of a collection for a small community college made up of a few buildings in a field.

Landon Kirchner, who was the assistant dean of humanities and social sciences at the college, decided his students needed and deserved exposure to actual works of art. He established an art acquisition committee, and the members wisely resolved that the collection focus on contemporary art.

One of the visionary and guiding principals of the collection was that it be accessibly installed throughout the campus so that students could have a daily encounter with vital and authentic works of art.

The committee consulted, commissioned and purchased, looking to the artists in the community and beyond.

Fast forward to 1990, when Hartman became the director of the JCCC Gallery of Art, where he found a collection of 100 very strong works.

“I inherited a good collection and came into a situation where the school was looking at art with a critical eye and a seriousness of intent, which set the tone for future collecting. With the mandate that the collection be visible to students and visitors, the museum was a natural progression,” Hartman says.

All along, the acquisition committee realized the importance of collecting the work of Kansas City artists and artists associated with Kansas City. One of the first works was “Galileo’s Garden,” a commission from Dale Eldred.

Through the years, Hartman has remained devoted to the art of his hometown. He adds, “With a sense of continuity, the members of that committee collected art that reflected the strength of the college’s studio practice: ceramics, sculpture, photography and painting.”

In 2011, when the collection exceeded 1,000 works of art, Hartman concluded it was the right time to further recognize the collecting efforts of the institution, and “Abstract Kansas City” was conceived.

It’s fair to say that no other local collecting institution has devoted the same energy and attention to Kansas City artists. The exhibition — and the collection itself, of which a full 30 percent is devoted to Kansas City artists and/or artists with a Kansas City connection — is a phenomenon.

And as at any collecting institution, the exhibition also reflects the passion and interests of Hartman and patrons Marti and Tony Oppenheimer, who have been essential in the collecting process and who always recognized the importance of including Kansas City artists.

Some of the most commanding works in the exhibition suggest that the acquisition committee and these artists love color. James Brinsfield, Eric Sall, Lester Goldman, Nate Fors, Andrzej Zielinski, Kent Michael Smith, Larry Thomas, Stanley Whitney and Mary Wessel all rely on vivid, saturated color.

It’s a heady visual experience, and Hartman’s sensitive installation nurtures relationships between these artists who embrace abstraction as a vehicle with which to process the multiple ideas of modernity.

Many of the paintings are often wildly gestural, and yet there are delicate, ephemeral works here, some of which are narrative. Corrie Baldauf, Ke-Sook Lee and Anne Lindberg trend toward the intimate.

Baldauf’s refined drawings are the most plainly autobiographical. Narrating personal anecdotes from her life, she pencils in diminutive stories along the sides of a large image of concentric circles. Vanishing into her short stories — “Mom called” — is the central experience of the work, validating the minutiae of our daily living.

Lindberg’s work is as intimate as Baldauf’s, yet through a wordless graphite language.

Lee’s delicate needlework emerges from the history of women’s work, domesticity and childhood memories of her grandmothers sewing. Rachel Hayes’ “Return to the Easy System” trades on fiber and stitching, but she manipulates copper wire and acetate rather than thread and fabric.

Artists committed to drawing include the irrepressible Amy Myers, whose monumental and psychedelic abstract bubble drawings draw us in as much as they send us out to some unknowable place.

Garry Noland’s tape panels, “Cripples,” comprising 88 units, feel almost as linear and hand-drawn as Lindberg’s graphite work. The staccato effect that emerges from his repeated yet slightly different panels suggests a hieroglyphic, indiscernible language.

Drawing with light in her “Worldscape” series, Mary Wessel works on light-sensitive photographic paper. A liquidy pink shape snakes across the work’s surface radiating an energy field that seems confusing and disordered, yet soothing.

The exhibition’s works span 50 years, starting in 1961 with an abstract Wilbur Niewald watercolor.

At 87, Niewald is the elder and elegant statesman of this wide-ranging exhibition. “Mountains II” is a field of crystalline blue paint strokes that still shimmer with clarity. This abstract landscape is a surprising precursor to the steady, realistic paintings that distinguish Niewald’s oeuvre.

Hartman’s thoughtful installation capitalizes on relationships between artists and styles. The triumvirate of Dan Christensen, Warren Rosser and Ron Slowinski vibrates with a subtle dynamism that characterizes their three paintings.

Christensen’s painting, “Cape Crozier,” is one of his finest and most haunting. A ghostlike white form hovers in a calm peach-colored background. This delicate apparition pulsates with movement, revealing the artist’s tender yet graceful hand.

Hartman juxtaposes Christensen with one of the most quiet and least colorful of Rosser’s paintings, “Play Continued.” Articulated in shades of gray, the graceful ovals that are typical of his work include a white one that seems to be exiting the dreary painting to join the more sparkling Christensen.

Slowinski’s equally restrained and ambiguously metaphysical “Untitled (Pollen Painting)” completes the triangle.

The giant abstractionists with sweeping gestures dominate the first gallery. Eric Sall, Andrzej Zielinski, James Brinsfield, Sharon Patten and Lester Goldman telegraph their passion for painting’s formal processes, the act of putting paint to canvas to study spatial relationships, and they excavate the modern world’s vast choices and ultimate ambiguities.

Amy Myers’ and Sandy Winters’ work straddles the visual distance between these artists and the more delicate and restrained work of Baldauf, Lee and Niewald, all of whom share that first gallery.

JCCC professor Larry Thomas’ mixed media on canvas work, “The Problem With Curiosity,” is one of the few recognizable images. A swirling vortex containing snakes, feathers and other things destabilizes the painting’s elements, suggesting chaos.

Side by side with Lauren Mabry’s earthenware cylinder, whose surface is beautifully articulated with glazes, and Nate Fors’ carnivalesque and vividly green sculptural painting, Thomas’ work seems to tether the three together.

Hartman’s juxtaposition of Kansas City Art Institute alumni Stanley Whitney with younger artists Sprecher, Grant Miller, Kent Michael Smith and Matt Wycoff resonates with stylistic linkages that collapse time and distance.

Despite their varied media, generational differences and range of material application, the exhibition artists are linked through their devotion to systems of discovery and, of course, their Kansas City connections. Personal narrative, chaos, metaphysical ideas of the sublime and pure formal processes are the schema through which each artist deploys his or her own sense of self and place.

The exhibition is a vital tribute to 30 years of collecting and identifies the museum as Kansas City’s most essential institution devoted to Kansas City artists’ significant accomplishments.

Hartman concludes, “I walk through the galleries, look at the individual works of art, can see how each work fits into each artist’s body of work, and think, this is what it’s all about.”

As love letters go, it’s one of the best.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/27/3395212/nerman-museum-exhibit-showcases.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

Loving Maya Lin

I have always loved Maya Lin, ever since she wowed the world (and bravely faced incredible turmoil and ugly backlash) when she was awarded the commission for her powerful and game-changing Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.  If you have never watched the Oscar-winning documentary Maya Lin:  A Strong, Clear Vision, you need to do that, stat!  It is truly inspirational.

Maybe we have Maya Lin on the brain (and in our hearts) since my daughter just finished her "Hero" report on Lin for her class.  Daughter was thrilled to relate to Maya Lin as a Chinese person and for her love of math and art!  Learning she could combine those two loves was a thrill for her!

If you happen to be anywhere near Pittsburgh, PA, there's a Maya Lin exhibition opening February 11 the Carnegie Museum.  She's scheduled to give a talk on Feb. 10 at 6 p.m.

In this opening of the year of the dragon, we are loving Maya Lin.

Happy New Year! Wishing You Peace and Prosperity in the Year of The Dragon!

We've cleaned house and swept out the old year and we welcome in the year of the dragon.  Since we have a dragon living in our house, we are doubly excited for the Chinese New Year!  (I, myself, am a pig, which my daughter thinks is hilarious.  Or, more elegantly put, a boar...)

We will be celebrating our new year at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art's giant celebration this Friday.  We're thrilled because on Friday the museum also opens four renovated galleries devoted to its famed Chinese art collection.  The collection is one of the finest in this country.

Alice Thorson, the Kansas City Star's art critic told me that it is fantastic!  Here's her early preview in the Star.

We can't wait, so, Gung Hay Fat Choy—have a prosperous new year!

Todd Hido at Stephen Wirtz Gallery

Bay area artist Todd Hido, whom I've had the pleasure of working with in the past, has a new exhibition at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco.

Hido is known for his eerie photographs of houses and suburban streets of Ohio, his home state, and other places.  

Todd Hido
Untitled #10106
2011
chromogenic print
20 x 24 inches, ed. 10
30 x 38 inches, ed. 5
38 x 48 inches, ed 3

In Excerpts from Silver Meadows, his new series, Hido examines the lonely streets and landscapes of Silver Meadows, a housing development outside of Kent, OH.

The press release notes, "Sequenced to form an almost cinematic narrative, atmospheric landscapes of in-between, and isolated places in America provide the setting, and portraits of female subjects, broken starlets in suburban dress, stand in as the main characters. While the subject matter is mined from Hido’s own experience growing up in Kent, Ohio, what results is a collectively familiar, yet entirely imaginary and dreamlike melodrama untethered from a specific time and place, a visual pulp novel of Midwest mythology."

I find the unpeopled images of the streets and the lonely houses more compelling than the images of the women.  The suburban-scapes and landscapes provide a richer, more provocative and haunting narrative for me, maybe because, as a Midwesterner, I recognize these places.  But I love his work.  If you're in the Bay area, the exhibition is at the gallery through February 25.