a MARN workshop held at Hotcakes

I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but every curator has different expectations and criteria. Think of it like dating. Some people are always attracted to the smart, nerdy type, some fall for a pretty face or a smooth talker, some just want to hang with the cool kids, some pursue who they THINK is good for them, some chase the popular girl just so they can tell their friends, and some seem to end up in the same relationship over and over. In the four and a half years I owned Hotcakes, I fell into most of those categories at one point or another. Like I said, every curator is different, but every professional curator wants to work with artists that act like professionals.

I mentioned in my first post that I also co-founded a nonprofit art service organization, the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN). MARN has an ongoing series of workshops that bring in industry experts to lecture and answer questions based on a number of topics relating to professional practice in the arts. Each year for our most popular workshop, “How to Approach Galleries,” I would bring in a couple different gallery owners and museum curators to share their very personalized techniques for choosing artists to show.

One museum curator said that for one full day every couple months, he would sit down and go through all the proposals that had accumulated on his desk. His technique was to first read an artist’s statement. He felt that if the statement wasn’t well written — if the artist couldn’t communicate about her art or her process — then she certainly couldn’t make work developed enough to merit a show in a museum. Spelling mistakes also got proposals immediately rejected.

Continue reading »

Trenton Doyle Hancock, "Smoked," 2010. Photo courtesy of Dunn and Brown Contemporary.

In this week’s roundup, Cai Guo-Qiang at MFA Houston, Julie Mehretu at the Metropolitan Opera, Oliver Herring at Meulensteen, Trenton Doyle Hancock at Dunn and Brown Contemporary, and much more!

• Cai Guo-Qiang is creating Odyssey, one of his largest gunpowder drawings to date for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston October 4-6, with the public observing.  The work will be installed in the new Arts of China Gallery, opening October 17.

• Julie Mehretu has a solo exhibition, Notations after the Ring, which is on view at the Metropolitan Opera’s Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met now through January 2011.  Mehretu created a 12-part etching that’s 15 feet long, called Auguries, as well as a new painting and a suite of recent drawings.

• Oliver Herring: Areas for Action at Meulensteen  is devoted entirely to the performative aspects of the work of Oliver Herring.  Each day from October 7 – November 6 will feature a different performance to be documented and purposed in to new artworks installed for the following day. The show is open to the public and audience interaction is encouraged.

• John Baldessari: Pure Beauty will soon be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 20 -  January 9, 2011. This retrospective will feature approximately 120 works by John Baldessari.  The exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Tate Modern, London.

Continue reading »

René Daniëls, "De Slag om de Twintigste Eeuw (Battle for the Twentieth Century)," 1984. Courtesy ABN AMRO Collection.

René Daniëls is a really, really good painter, maybe even a great painter, who stopped painting twenty-three years ago and has only resumed in the last two years. In 1987, he suffered a brain aneurysm from which he still hasn’t fully recovered, and some of his recent work, shown alongside his ’80s painting in the current show at the Camden Arts Centre, has a tentativeness you might expect from someone gradually returning to a loved activity. What must it be like for Daniëls, seeing his earlier paintings – richly colored, exuberant, mischievous oils – laid out here, with his more recent pieces – small-scale, scrawly felt-tip revivals of earlier motifs – dotted among them? It’s a reminder, at least, that for an artist, the past is always present, like a rebuke.

What makes Daniëls’s sudden halt so moving – and his current return so heartening, and quietly triumphant – is the sheer blazing visual excitement his paintings release. Daniëls is, first and foremost, a whipper-upper of retinal delight. His 1987 painting, The Return of the Performance, is a case in point. A zoomingly recessive perspectival space (a sort of three-walled room, like a stage set, that sometimes detaches itself from illustration and becomes, in other works, a kind of levitating bow-tie) creates a setting for the display of primary colored boxes and planes, like a painting of a Donald Judd installation made in enthusiastic recall. Paint slips and slides across the surfaces of things, just describing enough, never telling everything. In the center, a microphone stand with seven protruberances stands in a pool of milky light, and a figure peers in shadow from behind a wall, as if preparing to make a speech. The theme of performance recurs in Daniëls’s work (when human presences appear, they’re theatrical, dandyish flaneurs, as in his Cocoanuts of 1982), and the paintings themselves feel psyched-up-for, generated by nervy energy and stage fright.

Continue reading »

Still from Peter van Bagh's documentary, "Helsinki Forever," 2008. Courtesy the Finnish Film Foundation.

I didn’t sleep much in Helsinki. Though it was my second trip there and my umpteenth time in the Nordic countries, I somehow booked my travel to coincide with Juhannus, Finland’s midsummer. Simply put, midsummer is the annual summer solstice, falling in or around June 21 each year. We Americans give this seasonal astronomical event an acknowledging nod or, if we’re feeling festive, a bbq. But for Finns, Juhannus involves a mass exodus from civic and economic duties, as droves of city mice evacuate the capital for their country homes and a pre-lapsarian return to the simple life. In Finland, at least, this consists of gigantic, competitive bonfires, endless sauna-ing and dips in the frigid North Sea, lots of drinking and weird Estonian liquor, and grilled things.

This past year, I curated a touring film program called “Package Deals: Finland” and this summer, I returned to Helsinki to get a deeper, closer look at what contemporary Finnish art and cultural policy look like. I will go into more detail about the artists I met, spaces I visited, and artwork I experienced in future posts but since I’m setting the scene here, I’ll start with my home during my two-week stay: Suomenlinna and its tenants, the Helsinki Artist-in-Residence-Programme, or HIAP.

Continue reading »

Ellen Gallagher, "Wiglette" (detail) from "DeLuxe," 2004/2005. Photogravure and plasticine sheet: 13 x 10 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Two Palms Press.

Printmaking is a vital and significant aspect of contemporary art, yet there is currently very little discussion or media coverage of this medium in the press. When Art on Paper announced that it would cease publication earlier this year, a world of artists, professionals, aficionados, occasional perusers and curious newcomers were left with no dedicated source for information on contemporary prints. While this column cannot begin to fill such a void, I hope it will provide a starting point for discussion and exploration.

My love of prints began over 15 years ago, when I was an undergraduate studio major at the University of Iowa. Since then, I’ve changed focus a few times from being an artist to a museum curator, auction-house specialist, independent curator, and appraiser, but prints have always remained central to my professional work.  (For a thorough and enjoyable nuts-and-bolts tour of various printmaking methods, visit MoMA’s interactive flash feature, “What Is a Print?“)

Championing printmaking can sometimes feel like being a Red Sox fan, pre-2004 World Series title, but like that team, I think it’s due for a big comeback.  A European tradition that flourished in postwar America due to a handful of groundbreaking workshops, printmaking seems to have lost some of the momentum it once enjoyed. Aside from the occasional super-edition, such as Ellen Gallagher’s DeLuxe, few prints were able to attract serious interest in the over-hyped art world of the past decade.

Personal bias aside, this is a great time to spotlight prints for a number of reasons.  Many artists are creating them because they enjoy the process and are under less pressure to focus their energy on big-ticket works.  Likewise, collectors are more open to prints in the current economy because they are a more affordable art form.  Finally, we have entered a period in which many of the aforementioned printmaking workshops that revolutionized fine printing in the United States in the ‘60s and ‘70s have been or will be celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries [first among these, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) celebrated its fiftieth three years ago and will be featured in a future post].

This year is Tamarind Institute’s birthday. As with all birthdays, this passage of time is something of a shock but the milestone affords an opportunity to look back at what was originally accomplished, review the productive decades in between, and explore new directions in printmaking.  Founded in 1960 in Los Angeles by June Wayne, the institute relocated to Albuquerque in 1970 to become part of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Tamarind’s mission is to promote and maintain a high level of fine art lithography through training new master printers, collaborating with contemporary artists to print and publish new editions, and disseminating information and research on the medium.

Continue reading »

Ellen Gallagher, "Wiglette" (detail) from "DeLuxe," 2004/2005. Photogravure and plasticine sheet: 13 x 10 inches. Image courtesy the artist and Two Palms Press.

With the advent of October, we are pleased to announce the latest column on the blog. Ink is a specialized medium-based column that will complement this site’s current content by providing a forum to discuss contemporary prints, printmaking, and book arts.  Posts vary in content, from in-depth interviews with master printers, artists, and curators to general discussion of the state of printmaking in contemporary art practice.  The column also includes reviews of selected new editions, exhibitions, and scholarly publications.  Though there is a special focus on New York, posts also highlight other centers for printmaking activity throughout the US, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, Wisconsin, and New Mexico.

Ink is written by Sarah Kirk Hanley, an independent print curator and specialist appraiser. With over ten years of experience in the field, her knowledge of Western prints spans the Northern European Renaissance to the present.  As a specialist in Christie’s New York Print Department from 2006-09, Ms. Hanley was involved in business development, catalogue preparation and research, as well as insurance, gift tax and estate appraisals.  Prior to her auction experience, she was Associate Curator and head of the Prints, Drawings, and Photographs department at the Milwaukee Art Museum.  She has also held positions at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. Ms. Hanley holds an M.A. in Museum Education from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a B.F.A. in Printmaking and Art History from the University of Iowa with Distinction/Special Honors.  She completed her graduate internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, ArtTable, and the Appraiser’s Association of America.

SUBSCRIBE TO EXCLUSIVE: RSS | ITUNES | YOUTUBE | ARTBABBLE

In celebration of Art21′s forthcoming feature film William Kentridge: Anything is Possible — premiering October 21, 2010 at 10:00 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings) — the Exclusive series is devoting the month of October to telling stories about Kentridge’s numerous artistic collaborators whom we’ve had the distinct privilege of meeting these past few years. This is the first of six episodes.

Episode #122: Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, discusses the historical context and artistic sensibility of William Kentridge’s 2010 production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose (1928), based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol (1836). Featuring behind-the-scenes technical and dress rehearsals, as well as performances from the production’s opening night.

Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—William Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects most often framed in narrowly defined terms. Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge often uses optical illusions to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.

William Kentridge is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch full episodes online via PBS Video, Hulu, or iTunes (link opens application).

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Tom Bergin. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: William Kentridge. Special Thanks: Peter Gelb & The Metropolitan Opera, New York. © 2010 Art21, Inc.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.