"Over the last 10 years, China jumped from ninth place to first place in 2010, becoming the world's largest auction marketplace for Fine Art and overtaking the United States and the UK, the grand masters of the market since the 1950s. ..." [Read Full Article]
Published By: PR Newswire
On: 04/05/11
Website: http://www.prnewswire.com/
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Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
"Through the Garden Gate" Art show opening this week at Museo Gallery in Langley
"Museo Gallery on First Street in Langley this Saturday night, April 2nd, from 5-7 pm for the opening party of this spring's not-to-be-missed art show for gardeners. Owner Sandra Jarvis has assembled a collection of art pieces both practical and ..." [Read Full Article]
Published By: Valerie Easton, Plant Talk
On: 03/30/11
Website: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Looking for original art? Visit Artistically Connected today!
Published By: Valerie Easton, Plant Talk
On: 03/30/11
Website: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Looking for original art? Visit Artistically Connected today!
WikiLeaks and Culture, Part 2: US-Spain Quid Pro Quo - Undersea Treasure for Art Looted by Nazis
WikiLeaks cables: Art looted by Nazis, Spanish gold and an embassy offer
Spain rejected attempt to tie together claim on coins found by US firm and row over painting in Madrid museum, cables show
US officials offered to help Spain claim an undersea treasure haul of gold and silver coins discovered by a controversial American exploration company in return for Spanish assistance in the recovery of valuable art looted by Nazi Germany, according to embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.
In a conversation with the Spanish culture minister, César Antonio Molina, the US ambassador in Madrid, Eduardo Aguirre, sought to tie the treasure found off the Iberian peninsula by Odyssey together with attempts by an American citizen, Claude Cassirer, to recover a painting by Camille Pisarro that hangs in a Madrid museum.
"The ambassador noted also that while the Odyssey and Cassirer claim were on separate legal tracks, it was in both governments' interest to avail themselves of whatever margin for manouevre they had, consistent with their legal obligations, to resolve both matters in a way that favoured the bilateral relationship," the embassy reported in a cable on 2 July 2008.
The offer was made after the Spanish government claimed ownership of half a million gold and silver coins found on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean by Odyssey's underwater robots. The company had provoked Spanish fury by landing the treasure at Gibraltar and flying it straight to the US.
The so-called Black Swan treasure, which Odyssey said came from an unidentified shipwreck, had been valued at about $500m.
Molina refused to tie the Odyssey case to the Pisarro painting, according to the embassy. "The minister listened carefully to the ambassador's message, but he put the accent on the separateness of the issues," the cable reported.
He promised, nevertheless, to meet Cassirer to discuss what could be done about the painting, Pisarro's Rue St Honoré. Après-midi. Effet de Pluie, which currently hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid.
In another cable the embassy explained the background to Cassirer's claim. "The Nazis forced Mr Cassirer's grandmother to sell the painting in 1939. Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza acquired it in 1976. In the early 1990s, the Spanish government purchased the collection and built the current museum. In 1958, Mrs Cassirer received a DM120,000 restitution payment for the disappearance and provisional dispossession of the painting, but retained full right to the painting."
The museum has refused to hand over the artwork, claiming that it was bought in good faith. Baron Thyssen had not known the story of Lilly Cassirer, a wealthy German Jew who said she was forced to sell the picture for 900 marks (about $360). She said it was the only way she could obtain an exit visa from Germany as Nazi oppression of the Jews escalated. The painting of a rain-soaked Paris boulevard had hung on the walls of the family's Berlin and Munich homes since the impressionist painted it in 1897.
Molina pointed out that as the collection technically belonged to a foundation, there was little the Spanish government could do about it.
"The painting was acquired legitimately by the foundation in 1993, along with the rest of the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection," the museum said in a recent statement. "The foundation has been the peaceful owner of the picture ever since its purchase and has exhibited it permanently, so there can be no question of its ownership."
With Spanish courts unlikely to force the museum to give up the painting, embassy officials at one stage asked Spain's cultural policies director, Guillermo Corral, whether there might be some "creative solution".
"Spain is sensitive to the family's claim, Corral said, but does not believe it can legally negotiate compensation," the embassy reported. "It might, however, be able to make gestures to the family and to the Los Angeles Jewish community. The government could, for example, organise and fund travel to Spain and cultural exchanges to promote mutual understanding and appreciation while giving due recognition to the Cassirer family."
The family continues to pursue its claim, although Claude Cassirer died in September. Earlier this year a court in Los Angeles allowed the family to bring a case against Spain demanding that the picture be given back to them.
Spain claims that the Black Swan treasure find comes from a Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which sank off Portugal's Algarve coast in 1804. The vessel had just returned from Montevideo when it was attacked by four Royal Navy ships, and was carrying half a million coins that had been minted in Peru.
Descendants of the 249 Spanish sailors who went down with the ship joined the Spanish government's case against Odyssey in a court in Altanta, Georgia. The court ruled that the cargo belonged to Spain; Odyssey has appealed.
The company claims that up to 70% of the treasure the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes was carrying did not belong to the Spanish state at the time, and so the vessel was effectively on a commercial mission. That means the cargo cannot belong to the Spanish government today, it argues.
The leaked cables reveal that the US embassy had the previous year handed over to Spanish authorities the customs documents filed by Odyssey when it flew its hoard of coins into the US in mid-2007.
This article is from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-us-spain-treasure-art
Film house, center receive $35,000 for their programs
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]
[/caption]Belcourt Theatre, Frist get art grants
By Stephanie Toone
The National Endowment for the Arts recently approved $35,000 in grants for a Hillsboro Village film house and downtown's renowned visual arts center.
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The NEA awarded a $20,000 grant to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts for its upcoming Vishnu: Hinduism's Blue-Skinned Savior exhibit, which will open on Feb. 20, said Susan Edwards, executive director for the center.
The agency also presented a $15,000 grant to Belcourt Theatre for its Repertory Film and Visiting Artists program.
"I think it says we're one of the most creative communities in the United States," Edwards said. "This is so exciting for us. This will help us show the culture and complexities of Hinduism."
The two Nashville arts organizations were among 1,057 nonprofits to receive the first round of 2011 grants from NEA, said Liz Stark, NEA spokeswoman. The first round of grants will distribute more than $26 million to arts agencies. The second round of recipients will be announced in spring 2011. Since Congress established the agency in 1965, it's awarded more than $4 billion in grants to agencies for innovation, artistic excellence and creativity that benefit the community.
Stephanie Silverman, managing director at Belcourt, said receiving the $15,000 NEA grant will ensure that cinematographers, producers and filmmakers will continue to lecture at Belcourt as a part of its visiting artists program. The funds will supplement the expense of shipping film roles from places such as France, Tokyo and Argentina, she said.
"We had about 20 visiting artists come in and speak this year, and we show hundreds of films each year. Half of those are our repertory films," Silverman said. "It can be unbelievably expensive to ship these prints, so this funding will allow us not to rule that out."
The Frist Center will utilize its artistic excellence grant to support its upcoming exhibition focusing on one of Hinduism's deities, Vishnu. The works will give insight to he meanings and culture of Hinduism's Vaishnava tradition. At the end of the Nashville run, the artwork will be placed at Brooklyn Museum of Art.
"There are three major deities, and there have been major exhibitions on the others, but this is the first to deal with this God and his many incarnations," she said. "We've been working with the Hindu community in Middle Tennessee because we want to present all cultures and help people see the world in a new way."
The installation of the exhibition will begin next month after the Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from Musee d'Orsay ends its run at the Frist.
The Frist Center and Belcourt Theatre offer the local community different forms of visual arts, but both organizations serve the same purpose, Silverman said.
"We're venues that contribute to Nashville's deep and rich artistic community," she said. "The NEA is a national nod to what we're doing locally. That's a real compliment."
The Art Center's Executive Director's Books Don't Add Up
Woman Accused of Stealing From Carnegie Visual Arts Ctr.
Decatur, AL - A two month long investigation has led to the arrest of the former Executive Director of the Carnegie Visual Arts Center.
According to Decatur Police, the Center reported several discrepancies in their financial records on October 13th. Police found that the money was being moved into other accounts not associated with the Center. The accounts allegedly belonged to Laura Harris Phillips, the former Executive Director. She had resigned from the post after the money was moved, but before police got involved in the investigation.
Further investigation showed that items has been purchased with the missing funds that were not authorized by the Center. In all, police say the funds transferred to Phillips' prsonal accounts and the unauthorized transactions totaled more than $50,000.
Phillips was arrested at her home and charged with theft on Tuesday.
She's being held in the Morgan County Jail.
This article is from: http://www.waaytv.com/news/local/story/Woman-Accused-of-Stealing-From-Carnegie-Visual/akM14VRpP0OwB8GGKUVsBA.cspx
An All-Too-Predictable Culture War
Critic's Notebook: Smithsonian Institution fails to stand up to anti-gay bullies
Pressure groups succeed in getting a piece removed from a show about gay identity in art at the National Portrait Gallery.
By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic
Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian.
Last week, Smithsonian Institution officials in Washington removed an artwork from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The critically acclaimed show's subject is a century of gay identity in art. The decision to remove the work caused an uproar.
Coming after months of news reports of bullying and shocking teenage suicides, and in the week of a fresh Pentagon study supportive of gays and lesbians serving openly in the armed services, the context of the action speaks volumes
Seven short years ago, the United States Supreme Court, ruling 6 to 3 in Lawrence vs. Texas, decided that consensual intimate conduct between same-sex adults is protected under the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, in a widely noted dissent, "If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is 'no legitimate state interest' for purposes of proscribing that conduct ... what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising 'the liberty protected by the Constitution'?"
Indeed, gay and lesbian couples can now enter into legal marriage contracts in five states — and more are on the way, California perhaps next in line. When gays and lesbians are also allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, then the social assimilation of homosexuals into previously restricted neighborhoods of heterosexual privilege will be, if not complete, then irreversible.
Against this remarkable backdrop of landmark civil rights advances, long thought impossible, came last week's Smithsonian dust-up. The public had registered no complaints about the show, but a small, familiar cast of voluble anti-gay pressure groups, politicians and media did. They have read the civil rights handwriting on the wall, and they threw a tantrum. The Smithsonian acquiesced.
Among 150 artworks in the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," attention focused on 11 seconds of a 13-minute video made 23 years ago by the late artist David Wojnarowicz. Images of a decaying crucifix lament the failure of many Christians to act with compassion in the AIDS pandemic's early years.
Opponents turned those 11 seconds into what Alfred Hitchcock famously called a MacGuffin — the ultimately irrelevant plot element everyone on screen is after. A MacGuffin is used to mislead the audience, diverting attention from the real caper that's underway.
The real story here is an exhibition at the nation's officially sanctioned Portrait Gallery that treats gay and lesbian identity as a respectable subject for serious artistic study and, by implication, social acceptance. Privately funded, as most such Smithsonian exhibitions are, "Hide/Seek" is not the first museum show to examine homosexual identity in art. But it is the first to do so in the nation's capital with the establishment blessing of the popular Smithsonian Institution.
And so, to some, it needed to be stopped.
Who objected? Not the public. Museum publicist Bethany Bentley told the media that no complaints — none — were received from the day the show opened, on Oct. 30, until Nov. 29, when an online article appeared on the right-wing Cyber News Service.
CNS was founded by L. Brent Bozell III, who once complained in the Hollywood Reporter, "Why can't a single prime time [television] show say — with no strings attached — that homosexuality is morally wrong?" Last summer Bozell expressed outrage that, on the hit TV show "Glee," the only characters "disapproving of homosexuality are vicious school bullies."
The CNS story was written by Penny Starr. An article of hers immediately before this one wondered whether elected Republicans backed by the "tea party" movement would take on social issues "such as same-sex marriage." Last March, she also went after the Smithsonian — this time with an article about the National Museum of Natural History, which did not include the conservative religious doctrine of creationism in a science display.
The video MacGuffin was propelled by the anti-gay Catholic League. Spokesman William Donohue — who last spring received widespread criticism for declaring that the Catholic Church "doesn't have a pedophile problem, it has a gay problem" — claimed the 11 seconds are "hate speech." Within hours, conservative Republican politicians piled on.
House Speaker-designate John A. Boehner, majority leader-designate Eric Cantor and Jack Kingston, who hopes to chair the House Appropriations Subcommittee, called for the show to be closed. All three congressmen rate a zero on the Human Rights Campaign's scorecard on gay equality issues.
Immediately, the Family Research Council praised the politicians. The FRC is designated an anti-gay hate group by the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center for continuing to "pump out demonizing propaganda" against homosexuals.
Finally, Fox News Channel climbed onboard. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mercedes Viana Schlapp and others took to the airwaves to falsely suggest, as Donohue did during an online Washington Post Q&A, that the exhibition was paid for by taxpayer dollars.
Apparently none, Starr excepted, had seen the National Portrait Gallery show, MacGuffin and all. They didn't need to. The anti-gay agenda is to pick bogus fights about art, free expression and federal funding, since those tactics were effective in the bruising culture war of the Reagan era. And it's being led by partisans who owe significant portions of their livelihoods to the money-raising power of homophobia.
It's easier to see the scam now than it was 20 years ago, when similarly manufactured outrage over homoerotic art was likewise the MacGuffin. Back then, in the exhausting wake of the AIDS crisis, the attack meant to divert attention from the sex and money scandals roiling the lucrative, politically influential televangelist empires of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Peter Popoff, Marvin Gorman and Jimmy Swaggart.
Will it work this time? The onslaught might damage art museums, which would be lamentable. And Smithsonian acquiescence is a self-inflicted wound.
But it won't turn back the tide of civil rights history. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is "no legitimate state interest," as Justice Scalia wrote, it's too late for equality to be denied. Irrational animus is a good working definition of bigotry, and that's all Smithsonian opponents have been putting on display.
This article is from: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-new-smithsonian-20101206,0,6416921.story
Under Pressure, National Portrait Gallery Removes Video
Museums shouldn't bow to censorship of any kind
By Blake Gopnik
Against all odds, the stodgy old National Portrait Gallery has recently become one of the most interesting, daring institutions in Washington. Its 2009 show on Marcel Duchamp's self-portrayal was important, strange and brave. "Hide/Seek," the show about gay love that it opened in October, was crucial - a first of its kind - and courageous, as well as being full of wonderful art. My review of it was a rave.
Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards. Today, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, it decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.
But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.
Until Tuesday afternoon, museum staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan, believed that "Fire" was interesting art that made important points. And now it looks as though they're somehow saying that they were wrong about that, and that it really was unfit to be seen or shown, after all.
If every piece of art that offended some person or some group was removed from a museum, our museums might start looking empty - or would contain nothing more than pabulum. Goya's great nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called them porn.
Norman Rockwell would get the boot, too, if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents, which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from "Hide/Seek." Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it.
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has said that taxpayer-funded museums should uphold "common standards of decency." But such "standards" don't exist, and shouldn't, in a pluralist society. My decency is your disgust, and one point of museums, and of contemporary art in general, is to test where lines get drawn and how we might want to rethink them. A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.
In America no one group - and certainly no single religion - gets to declare what the rest of us should see and hear and think about. Aren't those kinds of declarations just what extremist imams get up to, in countries with less freedom?
Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.
This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "
The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.
And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack.
Twenty-one years ago in Washington, the Corcoran Gallery of Art took a huge hit to its prestige and credibility - a hit it has yet to fully recover from - when it canceled a show of images by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, under similar puritanical pressures. The Washington Project for the Arts, which this year celebrates its 35th anniversary, had its finest moment when it embraced the show instead.
So here's a gauntlet thrown down to test the courage of Washington's art institutions: Will the Hirshhorn Museum, the Katzen Arts Center, tiny Transformer, Flashpoint, or even the Phillips or National Gallery - or maybe the Corcoran, in a rare redemptive moment - have the guts to mount the video the Portrait Gallery has taken down?
Artists have the right to express themselves. Curators have the right to choose the expression they think matters most. And the rest of us have the right to see that expression, and judge those choices for ourselves.
If anyone's offended by any work in any museum, they have the easiest redress: They can vote with their feet, and avoid the art they don't like.
This article is from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/30/AR2010113007227.html?wprss=rss_print/style
Another Collapse Of Ruins In Pompeii
Another Collapse at Pompeii Renews Calls for Better Care
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
ROME — Less than a month after Pompeii’s so-called House of Gladiators collapsed into rubble, portions of a garden wall at the nearby House of the Moralist fell down on Tuesday, prompting new calls to better safeguard the city buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Antonio Varone, Pompeii’s director of excavations, said the house – which actually consists of two adjacent abodes that belonged to two families – was in no danger.
The wall, which bordered an unexcavated area and was shored up earlier this year, had been completely rebuilt after the United States bombing of the Naples area in World War II, according to the culture ministry. Mr. Varone told the news agency ANSA that the wall had most likely succumbed to the “incredible, incessant torrential rains” that have washed over central Italy in recent days.
“These atmospheric phenomena are so unusual that they’ve even surpassed the protection that we have set into place,” he said. Pompeii officials were monitoring the areas most at risk, he said.
Demands that the Italian government take better care of its fragile archaeological sites grew after the collapse in early November of the Schola Armaturarum, whose walls were decorated with frescoes of military themes. Political opponents of the government have called for the resignation of the culture minister, Sandro Bondi, and a confidence vote is expected in December.
On Tuesday, Tsao Cevoli, president of Italy’s National Association of Archaeologists, said that the collapse of the wall was further “proof of the incompetence with which Minister Bondi and this government has handled the situation at Pompeii,” ANSA reported.
This article is from: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/another-collapse-at-pompeii-renews-calls-for-better-care/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Art is in the third eye of visual artist
NEW YORK (AP) — A New York University arts professor might not have eyes on the back of his head, but he’s coming pretty close.
Wafaa Bilal, a visual artist widely recognized for his interactive and performance pieces, had a small digital camera implanted in the back of his head — all in the name of art.
Bilal said last week that he underwent the procedure for an art project that was commissioned by a new museum in Doha, Qatar, in the Persian Gulf.
Titled “The 3rd I,” it is one of 23 contemporary works commissioned for the opening of the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art on Dec. 30.
The exhibition is titled “Told/Untold/Retold.”
“I am going about my daily life as I did before the procedure,” the Iraqi-born artist said in a statement.
Bilal, who is teaching three courses this semester at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, will wear the camera for one year. It is 2 inches in diameter and less than an inch thick.
The project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions,” he said.
He declined to say when the camera was implanted or other details of the art installation, saying it “will be revealed to the public as part of the museum preview on Dec. 15” and on a website to be launched on the same day, http://www.3rdi.me.
He said he chose to have it put in the back of the head as an allegorical statement about the things we don’t see and leave behind.
How it all fits together is still a bit of a mystery.
The camera will capture his everyday activities at one-minute intervals 24 hours a day and then be transmitted to monitors at the museum, said curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of Art Reoriented, who commissioned Bilal on behalf of the museum.
“He doesn’t have to alter his lifestyle or what he does. In principle, he’s moving on with his life,” Bardaouil told the Associated Press from Doha. “It will be a three-dimensional, real space-and-time experience. Once the piece is revealed, you’ll realize that the camera is only one aspect of the work and there are aspects as important that will be experienced.”
The project has raised challenging questions for NYU, the nation’s largest private school with about 44,000 students.
“As a school of the arts, a school whose mission is to educate artists, we place a high value on his right to free expression in his creative work as an artist,” NYU said in a statement.
“We also take seriously the privacy issues his project raises, its impact on our students, and the importance of preserving trust in the pedagogical relationship between a faculty member and students.”
NYU said it has had numerous “constructive and productive” conversations with the artist and was continuing “to discuss with him the right mechanism to ensure that his camera will not take pictures in NYU buildings.”
But a number of students said they were not overly concerned about their privacy being violated.
“I don’t really know what you would be protecting them (students) from, what would be happening in the classroom that couldn’t be shared,” said Erin Wahed, 22, who graduated in May with a degree in photography but did not take any of Bilal’s classes.
Seth Mrocska, who was friends with some of Bilal’s students but did not have him as a professor before graduating in May, agreed, saying, “It’s not that there’s much to hide in the classroom.”
However, he said he wasn’t OK with the images being transmitted to another country and “shared across a media platform to be stored for all to view.”
Bilal said “The 3rd I” builds on his other body of work that combines performance art, digital and body art and photography “into a unique conceptual piece.”
Many of his previous works have invited debate and controversy.
In a 2007 online installation, “Domestic Tension” in 2007, virtual users could shoot a paintball gun at Bilal 24 hours a day. The Chicago Tribune deemed it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him Artist of the Year that year.
A 2008 video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored by the city of Troy, N.Y., where it was shown. In it, Bilal inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-President George W. Bush. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a claim against the City of Troy for closing the arts center showing the work.
The artist has said the work was meant to shed light on groups that traffic in hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with video games like Quest for Saddam.
In a recent live performance piece titled “... and Counting,” Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink visible only under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink.
This article is from: http://inspiredhomeomaha.com/article/20101128/ENTERTAINMENT05/711289969
Nigerian art market suffocates artistic creativity says Nnenna Okore
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"]
[/caption]By McPhilips Nwachukwu
Educated at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria, Nnenna Okore, an Assistant Art Professor presently the Chair of Art at North Park University, Chicago has emerged as one of the most significant visual art voices of her generation.
Sourcing her compositional materials from clay, recycled paper and other discarded materials, Okore has imbued in her art a new energy that bristles with the aesthetics of fashion, climatic upheavals among other socio-cultural issues.
According to an internet source profile, “Okore enriches her work with layers of meaning through familiar processes. Both in her home country Nigeria and United States, she relies on the use of flotsam or discarded objects, which are transformed into intricate sculpture and installations through repetitive and labor-intensive techniques.”
A widely exhibited artists both in Nigeria and oversears, the United States based artist also happens to be among the privileged artists, whose works met the ArtHouse Contemporary auction currently going on Lagos.
In this e- interview, Okore, who has participated in all the three editions of the auction shares her experience about the auctions and as well, talked about the emerging African art market. Excerpt.
Nnenna can you tell us about yourself?
I am an artist and an art professor. I chair the Art Department at North Park University, Chicago and have been widely exhibited in numerous international art galleries and museums. My most recent outings this year were at the Blachere Foundation Art Center, France and the 29th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brasil.
I spent over twenty years living and schooling in Southeastern Nigeria prior to relocating to the United States, which explains why most of my works are deeply rooted in my Nigerian sensibilities and experiences. Generally speaking, my works are inspired by stunning cultural, natural and architectural forms. I employ a wide range of mediums, including but not limited to clay, recycled paper, rope and wax.
You have featured in the three editions of Arthouse Contemporary organised auctions. How would you score the performance?
Arthouse has done well in promoting and marketing works selected for their auctions. What sets them apart from others, I believe, is their ability to create and set high standards, which are reflected in the organization, venue, catalogue, etc. They’ve undoubtedly increased visibility for many artists and more importantly, brought greater value to works by Nigerian artists.
What would you say are the high points of the exercise?
One of the high points of the auctions has been the exposure of Nigerian artists to an international audience, which I think will force the existing commercial art centers to treat their artists better and reckon with the professional standards set by Arthouse.
Do you think that auctions meet the conditions required of the practice in the global art market?
I can’t speak much to the practice, having not had much direct experience with auctions myself. But from the much I know, the Arthouse auctions are generating wider national and international interests, which can be viewed as a positive step towards positioning African artists on the global scene.
What is your candid opinion about the second and third tier visual art markets in Nigeria?
Do you mean the smaller galleries and craft stores?
Well,if you put it that way ?
I think the Nigerian art market, perhaps not intentionally, has generally controlled and suffocated artistic creativity for too long; largely because they have had to sustain and market whatever art styles or mediums that sell well.
As a result, artistic and conceptual originality is almost nonexistent in the Nigerian art culture. Struggling artists are forced to create and sell what these commercial galleries dictate. There’s no question that these dead-end practices have suppressed the progressive art growth in Nigeria, but I am optimistic that the new trends of interests and international visibility enabled by art centers like, CAA and Arthouse will provide artists with a better platform to compete on a global scale.
Do you think that the present economic climate supports this emerging market?
Who is to say, especially when art sales in the global market have continued to surge. I don’t know how the Nigerian economy will affect this season’s auction, but judging from the outcome of the last Arthouse auction and their ever increasing reputation, I believe they will fare well.
Recently, the national gallery of art in Ngeria proposed a bill to the National Assembly requesting that certain royalties be paid to artists over the acquisition of their works by buyers. What is your take on this move?
I have not followed this too closely, but I can say this: It seems like a good idea, especially in the light of increasing value for art and incuring a better future for the Nigerian artist. However, it’s unclear to me how the royalty will be applied and sustained. With the exception of ‘resale or reprint royalties’, I am not aware that creative artists are entitled to lifelong royalty right like musicians. I think it will be challenging to implement or monitor it since we don’t have an institutionalized art industry and my assumption is that there aren’t high occurrences of resale.
Is this request the global practice?
As far as I know, many European countries as well as Australia have legislated the resale royalty rights; but it’s not as popular a practice as one might imagine. The United States, (with the exception of the state of Califonia), Canada, and New Zealand have yet to adopt any binding act. I think the pros and cons have to be considered carefully to ensure that artists will benefit from it.
If a buyer of work at an auction for instance, is expected to pay royalties on such works. Don’t you think such a measure will frustrate the growth of the emerging art market?
It could, again depending on the terms of the royalty.
Finally, how do you see the future of African arts in the global arts market?
In all fairness, I don’t think African artists in general have done too badly in the global market. Africans, particularly from North, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa had enjoyed visibility and global attention for many decades and for good reasons: government support and international exposure. I believe Nigerian and West African artists, on the other hand, are beginning to make remarkable advancements on the international stage, and will become a competing force in the near future.
This article is from: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2010/11/nigerian-art-market-suffocates-artistic-creativity-says-nnenna-okore/
Making College Art Programs Safe For Students
Art Programs Stress Studio Safety
By Daniel Grant
How does one judge a collegiate art program? It might be on the basis of average class size, or if students get their own studios, or whether the equipment is state of the art, or the prestige of the faculty, or how successful the alumni are. All quite valid. But what about whether it will threaten your life?
A growing number of art programs are making studio safety an integral part of both the curriculum and facilities. They are improving the air quality, reducing exposure to potentially hazardous materials, and increasing the safety training that students and faculty receive.
“We’ve increased the number of technicians to help in safety training,” said Carl Powell, director of environmental health and safety at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fla. These technicians monitor how students use art supplies and equipment. Additionally, “at the beginning of the school year, I give students a safety orientation that covers proper ventilation, safe use, storage and disposal of chemicals, and the kinds of safety equipment students need for their own personal protection, such as goggles, dust masks, and gloves.” Students are required to sign an agreement stating that they will abide by safety guidelines.
Faculty members are also required to complete a safety-training seminar. “If they don’t complete the training, they don’t get a contract,” Powell said. “I got administration support on that.”
Since the fall of 2008, art students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have signed a safety contract after attending a one-hour training session from the Department of Environmental Health and Safety at the beginning of each semester. That was instituted when a new $28-million studio-art building was opened, bringing together disciplines that had been scattered around the campus. The former sculpture facility had been a wood-frame building that burned to the ground after an accident with the forge furnace, while the ceramics program had been housed in a 19th-century structure whose only source of ventilation was open windows and doors (weather permitting).
In contrast, the new facility has a separate spray room for spray paints and fixatives, portable sinks in which wastewater is collected and disposed of rather than emptied into the water supply, numerous showers and eye-wash areas for students in contact with dust, and locked storage cabinets for flammable materials in each undergraduate and graduate studio. There are various ventilation systems: dust collection in the wood shop, vapor extraction in the print-making and photography studios, and fume extraction in rooms where kilns and welding are found.
William Oedel, an art historian and chairman of the art department, noted that environmental health and safety staff make weekly inspections of the studio-art building and dispose of all wastes according to state environmental guidelines. “They’re pretty strict about that,” he said.
Other programs have become stricter, too, sometimes prodded by government. In 2001, Boston University was fined $253,000 by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and required to spend $518,000 in cleanup and other environmental projects after the EPA discovered a slow, chronic leak into the Charles River of various oils from an underground storage tank. At about the same time, the University of Rhode Island was forced to spend approximately $800,000 in fines and cleanup for environmental contamination caused by the art and other departments.
Learning from this, art programs have become vigilant about waste disposal. “We’re always telling students, ‘Don’t wash your brushes in the sink, only in the brush-washing area,’” Oedel said. They require close monitoring in that, he said, because they “always want to get done quickly.” At the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, students are required to label everything in their studios—even their mineral spirits or bottled water—“for their own safety and so that the wrong things don’t get poured down the sink,” said Pat Wasserboehr, an associate professor in the art department.
Programs are also substituting less-toxic supplies for those that are more expensive to store, ventilate, and dispose of. “We’ve banned turpentine here,” said Mark Knierim, facilities and technical coordinator in the art department of the University of Minnesota, because the concentration of harmful vapors in the air is three times higher than for mineral spirits, requiring more expensive ventilation.
Similarly, the Rhode Island School of Design works with the two on-campus stores and academic departments to encourage the use of less-toxic materials, such as “replacing acetic acid with citrus acid, turpentine with Gamsol”—odorless mineral spirits—“and resins with mercury with resins that don’t contain mercury,” said Alan Cantara, RISD’s environmental health and safety manager. He noted that the department of environmental health and safety, which was formed in 2000, assumed responsibilities that had been handled by three different campus offices (fire safety, public safety, and physical plant). His department takes on the responsibility of reviewing new products and equipment before they are introduced into studio classes.
RISD still permits potentially harmful materials in studio classrooms, such as cadmium and cobalt paints, which are associated with certain cancers, but their use is restricted, in large measure because of the cost of disposal and the worry that some may find their way into the Narragansett Bay. More and more, programs are switching from nitric acid to ferric chloride for etching, cleaning printmaking presses with vegetable oils rather than with solvents, replacing lead solders with lead-free solders in sculpture, and solvent-based marking pens with water-based ones in drawing classes.
“There are a lot of new products coming out that don’t require solvents in cleanup,” said Monona Rossol, an industrial hygienist who was a consultant in the design of the studio-art building at the University of Massachusetts. “Like water-washable oil paints, in which the ventilation rate is practically nothing. Pregnant women can take the course.”
Even with the new, less-toxic materials, creating art is by no means a risk-free endeavor, and many programs tack up copies of Material Safety Data Sheets. Some programs also require students and faculty to undergo training in the steps that should be taken in the event of an emergency. At Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, casting and welding classes are kept relatively small—10 students, compared with the more customary 16 to 20—to limit the number of people who might be hurt in an accident or even back into something because the room is crowded.
The visual-arts department at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., does not allow the use of certain metal- and woodworking equipment unless a supervisor is present. Chemicals and acids are stored in locked rooms, only available to students when an instructor (with a key) is available and can control what is used and how.
But large institutions are able to afford vent hoods and dust collectors, while artists elsewhere may only be able to crack open a window in the part of the house or apartment that has been designated as a studio. Properly disposing of wastewater, solvents, dusts, clays, and even the scrapings off a painter’s palette is time consuming and expensive. So the question remains whether artists will carry crucial lessons on safety and the environment with them after graduation and into their professional practice.
This article is from: http://chronicle.com/blogs/arts/arts-programs-stress-studio-safety/28017
Phila. Museum Acquires Major Paul Strand
Art Museum acquires trove of photographs by Paul Strand
By Stephan Salisbury
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired more than 3,000 photographic images by the pioneering modernist Paul Strand, catapulting the museum into the front ranks of worldwide photography meccas, and creating the greatest single repository of Strand's work anywhere.
The acquisition, made through gifts and a purchase agreement with the New York-based Aperture Foundation, is expected to be announced Thursday.
"It's a landmark in terms of our holdings of photography," said Timothy Rub, museum director. "It makes the Philadelphia Museum of Art the go-to place for the study of Strand."
The Strand works will add "richness, depth, and texture to our collection of modern photography to an extent that no other acquisition has," Rub said. "That has to do with Strand's greatness."
Strand was born in 1890 in New York, studied with Lewis Hine, worked with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Charles Sheeler, and other giants of early modernist photography, and died in France in 1976. He was a committed socialist, which for a time was reflected in his work, and led him to leave the United States for Europe in 1951 in disgust with what he viewed as growing American anticommunist hysteria.
There are three parts to the acquisition. First, the museum has received 1,422 images from the Paul Strand Archive at Aperture, thanks to funding from philanthropists Lynne and Harold Honickman, Marjorie and Jeffrey Honickman, and H.F. "Gerry" and Marguerite Lenfest; an additional 566 master prints made from Strand's negatives by the artist Richard Benson came by the same route.
Simultaneously, the museum has entered into an agreement with Aperture to purchase an additional 1,276 photographs.
Museum officials declined to disclose the cost of the acquisition, citing museum policy, but it is believed that the price extended well into seven figures, if not higher.
An excited Lynne Honickman said she and her husband, both deeply interested in photography, believed the Strand body of work should be held together.
"We both feel it needs to be in a place where it is well cared for and studied," she said. The possibility that Strand's work might ultimately wind up in different institutions was "bloodcurdling," she added.
"Paul Strand was one of the first great modernists," she said. "The body of his work is not only together, but it has been maintained fastidiously. It's in exquisite condition."
Juan Garcia de Oteyza, Aperture's former executive director who shepherded the Strand images through the latter stages of the six or seven years of negotiations with the museum, noted that Aperture was "not really a collecting institution" and lacked exhibition space to display the images.
"It really doesn't make sense for Aperture to hold on to the work," he said. "We're really very, very pleased. This is much better than if we placed works in many museums."
The Art Museum has had a long association with Aperture, as well as with Strand's creative work, thanks to the efforts of Michael Hoffman, the museum's longtime adjunct curator of photography and Aperture director.
Hoffman, who died in 2001, knew Strand well, formed the photographer's archive, and organized the museum's landmark 1971 Strand retrospective, the first anywhere since 1945. In 1972, the artist gave the museum one of his most important early platinum prints, City Hall Park, New York (1915), along with six other works, and the museum purchased 10 other prints. These acquisitions were followed by purchases in 1974 and by gifts from Strand's widow, Hazel, in 1977 and 1978.
In 1980, the artist's estate gave the museum the entire contents of his retrospective exhibition - 497 prints, including a group of seven of his early exhibition platinum prints, among them the iconic images Wall Street (1915), Man in a Derby (1916), and Telegraph Poles, Texas (1915).
With the new acquisition, the museum is now custodian of about 4,000 Strand images. All of the newly acquired images are at the museum and are being studied in preparation for a major Strand exhibition scheduled for 2014, museum officials said.
Peter Barberie, museum curator of photography, described the acquisition as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. Strand, he said, "helped define the vocabulary of 20th-century photography and what it would be about."
Within the museum's holdings, Barberie said, were works covering every aspect of Strand's career across seven decades - from his early soft-focus images, through harder, socially significant street portraits, and on into abstraction and studies of landscape and place.
The sweep of the Strand holdings, he said, includes prints from the majority of his negatives, including most known variants and croppings of individual images. The museum is now also able to keep together prints made from a single negative using different processes, at different times, and with different papers.
"Between our publishing [program], our study room, and our exhibitions, I think they're going to have a great life here," Barberie said.
Article from: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20101117_Art_Museum_acquires_trove_of_photographs_by_Paul_Strand.html#ixzz161S8vt1t
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