Works by Abby Goodman.

“I feel this desire for the association with natural imagery reflects concerns towards the current global environmental situation. This imagery acts as a harbinger, yet functions as a symbol of hope. My work is a visual metaphor for this longing for an ideal balance between man and nature.”

Abby Goodman’s website or on ArtSlant

Who are we? Lets examine the place from which we came.

Howard Singerman argues in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999), art education no longer demands the acquisition of specific skills, but instead becomes simply a shortcut to an artistic identity.

Laurie Feindrich, a professor of art at Hofstra University explained it best by attacking the artists’ romanticism. She posits that art education “has become a hodgepodge of attitudes, self-expression, news bulletins from hot galleries, and an almost random selection of technical skills that cannot help but leave most art students confused about their ultimate purpose as artists.”

“…The first-year curriculum seems to promote a Web-oriented workplace full of computers, where students work antiseptically and collaboratively with others, behave like wannabe public intellectuals, and develop “concepts” that borrow heavily from the vocabularies of sociology, computer science, and government bureaucracy.”

She marches on to suggest a different approach - worth revisiting by every artist at any stage - or even a solution for emergence.

Read:  ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mess’ short essay (or download the PDF version).
(essay first published in The Chronicle Review, Volume 51, Issue 39, Page B6)

Antony Gormley, the mayor, Sky TV, and we at The Art Klatch want to know.  OneAndAnother.co.uk

The Center for the Future of Museums has brought in Dr. Jane McGonigal to attract future museum goers. Together they seek to quantify and qualify their decision to advise traditional museums in this direction. They address the need for increasing the attraction of museums to newcomers by looking at positive human psychology. Enter the Science of Happiness (Video on TED). It states that there are…

4 things human beings need to be ‘happy’:

1. 1. have work to do (a concrete task),
2. 2. be good at something (an applicable strength),
3. 3. spend time with people we like (social interaction), and
4. 4. have the chance to be a part of something bigger (meaning beyond life).

Museums are great at facilitating #’s 3 and 4, but what about 1 and 2?

“Most gamers have never known a time without games, and see them as a perfectly valid tool for solving problems, relating to other human beings, and discovering one’s identity.”
- John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, authors of “Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever” (quote from Interview with Harvard Business School)

Museums should be in the business of making people happy instead of leaving them feeling overwhelmed, out of place, or even dumb. Today’s visitor also needs clear goals, feedback, a successful outcome and social interaction for a complete fulfilling experience. McGonigal suggests that adding elements of ‘gaming’ to a museum’s program could help to increase attendance. She states:

Museums can learn and benefit from studying popular games because:

• - Games are museums’ competitors—vying for people’s increasingly scarce leisure time.
• - Games present an opportunity for museums to engage new audiences and interact in new ways with existing audiences.
• - Successful games can teach museums how to create experiences that are deeply satisfying.
• - Games may provide new ways for museums to have a profound impact on society if they are designed, as alternate reality games are, to change people’s real world behavior.

A great example of new interaction is now happening at the Milwaukie Art Museum, and here’s a wonderful review.

It is getting easier to find a museum that has opened itself up to civic activities such as concerts, dance parties, and even yoga. This year the Oakland Museum of California will host exhibitions based on the “wiki model,” with curators holding open office hours at desks in the galleries…

Is this a lot to ask of our institutions?
Could this be pandering to the under-educated, or disinterested, or perhaps a solution to a serious problem?

Related Links: 
Wired Magazine - “Dream Machines”
Xbox Natal Project - requires no controller.
Reshaping the Art Museum - ARTnews

* sol⋅ip⋅sism  [sol-ip-siz-uhm]
–noun
1.     Philosophy. the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.
2.     extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.

Pae White: Lisa, Bright and Dark, is showing at the Taubman 9/4 - 11/7/2009.

I’m particularly inspired by Pae White’s work not just for the luscious visual attacks of light and space, but also for her dance between the handmade everyday and foreign fantastic.

The Taubman Museum of Art will showcase “White’s pivotal themes: the rhetoric of style, the aesthetics of domesticity and leisure; the potential of abstraction and color; and the pleasure of experimentation with materials.”

Read more about Pae White:  a recent exhibit, a city public space, and at the Hammer Museum.
See more about Pae White at the Sue Crokford Gallery

(please report your experience with this exhibit!)

Works by Kathryn Pannepacker, also a mentor of mine currently showing at SMILE gallery (105 S 22nd St. Philadelphia PA). Learn the story behind these works and how they address an artist’s expectations of and in the community — and more about this show including artist Dave Foss in an article by Marie Elcin one of our upcoming guest authors this fall on her blog site Colored-Thread.blogspot.com.

The first thing to know about the Museum is that it is located in Forest Park, the second largest city park in the nation – second only to Central Park in New York.  This immediately impressed me, as I find there to be something rather lovely about the pairing of natural aesthetics with human aesthetics (the Met in Central Park, the Royal Academy by Hyde Park, the Tate Britain and Tate Modern on the Thames, the Musee D’Orsay on the Seine… it’s obviously a theme).  Perhaps we feel that our creations should be married with a creation larger than ourselves, or maybe we feel that our beauties would be most beautiful next to larger beauties.  Whatever it is, the St. Louis Art Museum achieved it marvelously.  And surprisingly, unlike the museums listed above that are sided with some grand city street, the museum stands alone in the park, has no city element at all near it, and looks fondly down upon a grand fountain.

I walked in, and again, I was impressed because the Museum is a member of the American Association of Museums, and because I am, I didn’t have to pay an entry fee to the special exhibition.  As an almost-graduate student, this was very good news.  The rest of the Museum is free to the public, which is also something I admire.  (Museums like the Guggenheim in New York that charge $18 entry fees to the public upset me greatly).

And now for the good part – the work itself.  I first meandered into one of the side rooms, which incidentally held 18th and 19th century art.  I must say that even amidst my initial positive impressions, I was not expecting much.  But lo and behold – Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, a Courbet – all sorts of lovely 18th century British work.  The Impressionist room next door was equally impressive – one of the prettiest Monet water lilly paintings I’ve seen (most of the time I fail to be too captivated), Derain, Matisse, Gauguin.  The thing about all the works is that it didn’t seem that the curators were collecting or exhibiting them just because they had big names – the pieces themselves, though not major works, were particularly lovely minor works.

I traveled downstairs to encounter a very well-curated exhibition of Native American Art, which is rare to see in any museum, and also encountered an exhibition of South American Andean art, which I believe is the only exhibition on the subject I’ve ever seen.  Because I’m about to spend a year studying the politics of “western” and “non-western” art, the presence of these exhibitions was particularly noteworthy.

I then proceeded upstairs to the floor of Modern art, and while I was rushed because it was Sunday and the Museum was closing early, there was an interesting Dan Flavin, some Picasso, Miro, and Anselm Kiefer.

But the real pinnacle was the special exhibition itself, a visual look into the treasures of the Ming Dynasty in China.  Not only was the exhibition clear and well-curated, but the design of it encouraged milling around the objects, and looking at all sides of them.  It also included decorative arts and even exceptional kimono tailoring and design.  What was most impressive, however, was the condition of the objects themselves.  It was obvious that the intent of the curators was to find the most well-kept objects that reflected the premise of the exhibition.  Some of them were in such good condition, for example the fabric of the kimonos, that they looked better than clothing one might find at thrift shop, which is saying a lot considering its five-hundred years old and instead of ten years old.  Also, again, the fact that their premiere exhibition was of nonwestern content suited my sentiments perfectly.

My raving proves that I was impressed.  The Saint Louis (pronounced fancily this time, like Saan Louey) Art Museum has much to offer, and is well worth making time for, even if you’re only going to be in town for a day.  It almost matched 34 Club, a dive bar with a fab bartender that matched our money on the internet jukebox.  All kidding aside, the Museum is very much a highlight of the city, and I highly recommend it to the art connoisseur or the lay art peruser.  There’s also something to be said here for a commitment to seeing art wherever one goes, even if it doesn’t seem like a place that would have a decent museum or decent galleries.  You never know when you’ll be surprised, and even if you aren’t, you’ll know the city is not worth going back to for art alone.

” I am fascinated by the way we interact with each other and our environments.  I capture images to feed my obsession with the intricacies of human behavior and communication in the modern world. Through both still and moving images, I examine encounters, moments, and arrangements of objects that reveal patterns in our collective actions, and insight into our collective psychology. ” Kelly Shimoda

©2008 Erica Allen

“Untitled Gentleman is a series of fictional portraits created using anonymous faces from contemporary barbershop hairstyle posters combined with figures from discarded studio photographs. Through interventions in these found photographs, this work explores representations and constructions of identity in portraiture and appropriates value to images and individuals who are otherwise overlooked.

Existing between the real and artificial, these images are made effective by creating an expressive ambiguity in an unexpected context. In subverting the meaning and expectations of the traditional studio portrait, the images create an unknown narrative and visual tension that play with the viewer’s perception of the work.

The ambiguous expressions captured in these barbershop portraits inherit a vulnerable quality when placed inside the familiar frame of the studio portrait. In this new context, these once primarily functional photographs become unusually candid and passive representations of masculinity. Paired with figures from historical and contemporary found photographs, these men adopt new identities and are recognized as individuals, while remaining anonymous; identified by the hairstyle number originally found on the barbershop posters.”