pt at large

Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920 by Augustus Frederick Sherman

The first big wave of immigrants arrived in America between 1847 and 1860. A larger wave of immigrants from a larger range of countries sailed to America between the late 1800s and 1920. Most of them passed through Ellis Island, New York City. The exhibit of Augustus Frederick Sherman's "Ellis Island Portraits," reminds us that America is still a melting pot. Once again foreign languages and foreign looking clothing are heard and seen in our markets and shopping malls. Once again America is on the rocky road toward assimilation.

"Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920" by Augustus Frederick Sherman
October 11- April 26, 2009
National Heritage Museum
33 Marrett Road/Route 2A
Lexington, MA

If you live in an urban area of any size, you’ve certainly noticed the appearance of people who don’t look “American.” They don’t speak English with fluency and they certainly didn’t buy their wardrobe from Target or Sears. It’s still a bit of a shock to see a woman wearing a head scarf and a strange looking dress who is packing your groceries at the market or collecting your money when you drive past the toll booth at a parking garage. And what about the turbans and clothes worn by some of the men who drive the taxis?

By the middle of the twentieth century the people’s attire and language seemed as homogenized as the milk in the dairy case. In the past decade, though, we’re returning to the delicatessen style look and feel that exploded in the early 20th century. In the beginning, it can feel disorienting and bring on a touch of xenophobia, even in the most liberal-minded.

Just around the time I’m beginning to feel snippy about who these foreigners are, what their religious affiliations and cultural habits are, and who invited them here anyway, I drive to The National Heritage Museum in Lexington, MA. One New York minute after I’m walking through the “Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920 by Augustus Frederick Sherman” exhibit, I’m am jolted by the fact that if I’d been me at that time I would have been feeling a bit of condescension about my great-grandfathers Giovanni Sciutto of Genoa and Salvatore Tamburello of Palermo who entered through New York in the early 1900s.

Alfred Stieglitz's photo (not in exhibit): The Steerage, 1907, courtesy of Getty Museum

In Ellis Island’s peak year of 1907, more than 1,000,000 foreigners were processed for entry into America. An earlier wave in the 1800s was French and German. This second wave was mostly Catholics and Jews from Eastern Europe as well as Italians, Greeks, Dutch and Irish. They came for the usual reasons: poverty, persecution, and politics.

Travelers in First Class were processed aboard ship. Those in third class and in steerage passed through Ellis Island. In its heyday, the island could process 5000 people a day and send them off into America. Many headed west. To this day, their descendants populate Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and other areas of the heartland.

And boy oh boy their clothing advertised their heritage like a walking billboard. In Sweden, a maiden’s apron, and blouse could tell you her social status and hometown. The young girl wearing the white blouse and apron with horizontal stripes identifies her as an unmarried female from Ruttvik, a farming town on Lake Siljan in Sweden. Who needed Facebook to know that? You can still see apron patterns like this in Minnesota and South Dakota, but don’t make any assumptions about her marital status from them.

The photographer whose eye captured the immigrants in their raw “just off the boat” state was Augustus Frederick Sherman. An accomplished photographer, he was chief clerk with the Immigration Division at Ellis Island between 1906 and 1921. He had access to the 20% of immigrants who were temporarily detained for health, paperwork, or political background. Most made it through, 2% were deported.

Sherman clicked the shutter when he saw a tilt of the head, a hesitant or proud gaze, a certain bearing of the body, which revealed the person inside the elaborate national costume or unusual clothing.

Photo courtesy of National Heritage Museum web site

Women from the Netherlands wear headgear you might have seen in a Pieter Bruegel painting. Sherman’s photos bring us Romanian shepherds in tunics and boots, Bavarian men in lederhosen, a Syrian family in black embroidered shawls and coats. There is a young Albanian woman who would have been mistaken for a hippie if she wandered into Haight-Ashbury in 1968, and a regal Guadaloupe woman wearing a pillbox hat and flowing dress.

This was us at the dawn of the twentieth century, mostly folk and peasant stock. The pride in where they were coming from had not yet been eroded by taunts or prejudices that certainly would follow them until they had assimilated and become “us,” the citizens who built roads and populated factories and who fought for and died for the country that they now call home. Historians believe that more than 40% of us are descendants of these immigrants.

Look around. Some day these “foreigners” wearing funny clothes and speaking strange languages will be in the Chamber of Commerce and holding office in our city halls. They will don a military uniform with a red, white, and blue emblem on the sleeve. They will be proud of their roots but will be as much a part of our history as those whose portraits line the walls in the gallery at The National Heritage Museum.

They will be our fellow Americans.

Close Up: Big photos reveal little

"Close Up", images by Martin Schoeller
February 15 - April 15, 2007

The Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road
Winchester, MA 01890
781-729-1158
Tuesday - Thursday: 11AM - 5PM
Friday: 11AM - 4PM
Saturday and Sunday: Noon - 4PM
Admission $5 Adults, Seniors $2 Students and Members FREE
Thursday admission FREE

For celebrity junkies and even commoners like ptatlarge, gazing at the faces of the famous is endlessly fascinating. Martin Schoeller’s nineteen head shots of actors, athletes, rockers, and politicians is a visual feast. The exhibit fills walls of the modest gallery inside the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.

The portraits are huge, some as large as 3 feet by 4 feet (Angelina Jolie) and none smaller than 2 feet by 3 feet. They’re brilliantly printed studio "head shots", softly lit, but tightly focused in an extremely narrow focal plane. Schoeller zeroes in on the eyes and anything within that plane - cheeks, lips, mouth. All else - tip of the nose or ears are not in focus. With enlargement on this scale, you’d think we could see a hint of what makes the subject tick or wonder about the curl of a lip, an arch of the brow, a glint in the eye or a concerto involving all three.

Not so. The face of every subject is a deadpan, void of expression. Why? If he wants us to construct our own stories, as he professes, why not make us ask the reason for that smirk, or the furrowed brow, or the frown?

He presents us with masks.

Some with luminous skin, others with faint or deeply etched lines around mouths and eyes, like rings on a tree, suggesting the age of the subject. That’s as close a hint we have as to their humanity. Perhaps that’s what Schoeller wants, to strip them of their trappings of power or success and present only their naked faces, well known but with the same pores and lines as we have on our own.

Unfortunately, we want more. We’re probably more like the pilot fish that attach themselves to our most magnificent mammals, the whales, and let the whales take them places they could never reach by themselves.

Schoeller appears to be similar to his onetime boss Annie Leibovitz. He has strong opinions about his methods and how his photos are presented. “The number and identities of his photos were a mystery to us until the day before we got them,” the Griffin curator said. He insisted on arranging the sequence of the photos and even the height from which they’d be mounted from the floor, she said. An artist is entitled to that.

The scale of the photographs and their extraordinarily saturated color printing are truly impressive. But for all the technical virtuosity, they were all hauntingly similar. Schoeller’s aim is to have us create our own stories for his faces. Sadly, most of us prefer the stories we read in People Magazine.

Subjects:
Angelina  Jolie, Magic Johnson, Frankie Velella, Donald Rumsfeld, Marilyn Manson, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Jack Nicholson, Cindy Sherman, John McEnroe, Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro, André Aggaziz, Piwa Ndogo, Thomas, Jackson, Lance Armstrong, Joe Mosner, Tammy Faye Bakker

For more about Martin Schoeller, click
http://mediastorm.org/0002.htm

Griffin Museum of Photography
http://www.griffinmuseum.org

Copley Society "Shades of Frost", Cool for Collectors of All Stripes

The Copley Society of Art
158 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 / 617-536-5049
Tues - Sat 11 - 6, Sun - Mon 12 - 5
“Co/So Artists A to Z: Shades of Frost”
Lower Gallery, January 18 - March 10, 2007

The Copley Society of Art is a little oasis of accessible, affordable visual art in the midst of the priciest, toniest street in Boston. It’s the only gallery on Newbury Street where the collector has a chance to purchase artwork that won’t require taking out a second mortgage on the house.

The lower level of the two-tiered gallery is the place to start. Many of the approximately 500 artists who make up the society launch their careers down there. Of the 300 artists who apply for membership each year, only 30 are admitted. Consider the fact that their work passed through this firewall as a sort of provenance. The review committee here has high standards.

Each member may contribute three works to the society’s quarterly exhibitions, some of which are juried, some not. The current show, “Co/So Artists A to Z: Shades of Frost,” is not juried and is full of oils, pastels, watercolors, acrylics, photographs, monotypes, drypoints, gouache, and collages. This tapas approach is a great way for neophytes to develop their taste in art and veterans to capture the work of an artist they think might skyrocket into the firmament. Everybody wins.

Elisabeth Pearl's trio are 4 1/4 x 4 1/4, $165 each, oil on panel

Good things come in small packages - pieces are limited to 100 square inches. The walls are covered with lively contrasts in color, texture, theme, and imaginations. The relatively few pieces that are abstract are not so challenging that they defy comprehension.

Richard W. Field, 'Robbie’s Towing', $1200, acrylic, 9 x 12

Art lines the walls and is stacked in display boxes on the floor. As soon as a piece is sold, another takes its place. Once in a while, Assistant Gallery Manager Katherine Millet will move pieces around “If the space begins to look a little tired.”

Best of Show: Dianne Panarelli Miller, “Sidewalk Café”,  oil, 12x9, $650

The prices range from $200 to $1700. Don’t panic. Only a handful runs more than a grand. At least half are less than $500, with scores of pieces falling between $250 and $400. The price tag of “Best of Show” was $650 (see photo). And all the art is framed. Collectors know full well that it can easily cost $100 to frame an acquisition.

One of the most endearing features of the gallery is how comfortable a visitor feels asking questions about the art on the walls. They’ve developed the non-snooty knack for answering questions from curious visitors into an art form. 

The Copley Society’s web page features photos of some of the  “A -Z” artwork http://copleysociety.org/home.html
 

The Copley Society, A Co/So Treat on Newbury Street

Copley Society of Art
158 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116 / 617-536-5049
Tues - Sat 11 - 6, Sun - Mon 12 - 5
“Here and Abroad” October 19 - November 25
“Holiday Small Works 2006” November 9 - December 23

In this era of makeovers, we can excuse the Copley Society of Art for renaming itself the oh so au courante moniker of Co/So. Luckily for us, the society’s tastes are firmly anchored in the traditions of representational art that have been its general focus since its inception in 1877. ptatlarge says “luckily” not out of antipathy for non-representational forms of art but out of relief for not having to rent a headset to comprehend the artwork assembled on the walls of this intimate two level gallery on Newbury Street.

The upper gallery’s juried exhibition - “Here and Abroad”-  is easy on the eyes and the lower gallery’s  “Holiday Small Works 2006” is easy on the pocket book. Around 200 of the society’s 550 members submitted work for “Here and Abroad.” The jury chose 18 pieces representing 16 members whose work they believed best captured the theme: “Display a strong sense of place and, with their vividness, are able to transport the viewer to destinations far and wide.”

All the pieces succeed technically. The piece that earned the ptatlarge prize was Carol Monacelli’s Petit fer a Cheval, an oil painting, (40”h x 30”w). The slightly subdued palette, the postures of the two waiters in mid-conversation, the distinct European grounding of the tavern, are vivid. One can almost hear the clatter of plates, clinking of glasses, the shreds of conversation, and spot that one couple at the table in the corner who’ve provoked such pensive speculation from the two garcons. If the limit on your credit card is $10,000, exercise your plastic and take the painting home.

The annual “Holiday Small Works 2006”is a wild west of small pieces. Traditional, representational, whimsical, and abstract images in the usual mediums are mounted chock a block on the walls of the lower level. Every Co/So member could submit three pieces to this non-juried show and boy, did they ever. Scores of them are mounted on the walls and hundreds of them are piled in a small mountain in the gallery’s corner floor. The prices here aren’t scary and range from $100 to $600.

Most pieces are small enough to carry out the door under your arm. “This is a “cash and carry business” says the gallerista, as she wraps a piece for a customer.  It’s a unique opportunity to score a little gem for that wall in the hallway or space in the house you’ve been wanting to gussy up.

See the collection of all 18 oils, watercolors, pastels, and photos at http://www.copleysociety.org/Here_and_Abroad_06_online.htm

 

American Watercolors, Small wonders at the Fogg Museum

American Watercolors and Pastels 1875-1950
Fogg Museum, Harvard University
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA
Monday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Sunday 1:00 p.m. - 5 p.m.
April 8 - June 25, 2006
http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/fogg/americanwatercolors.html

There are several reasons to catch this show. First, the art is immensely accessible. Remember the term “representational art”?  You don’t need an audiotape to “get it”. Next, you can contemplate what you’ve seen while sitting at tables scattered under the Fogg’s three-story replica of an Italian Renaissance courtyard based on a 16th century façade from Montepulciano, Italy.

And, oh, it ends Sunday.

The fifty-two works were executed by some of the heavyweights of the past. You’ll nod your head as you recognize the work of John Singer Sargent (4), Winslow Homer (9), Edward Hopper (3), and James McNeil Whistler (8), And you might wonder why museums don’t show more of the work of John LaFarge and William Merritt Chase.   

This is a “Goldilocks” show, just right in size. The fifty-two works, spread in three small rooms in the street level Straus Gallery, include landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and even a few abstracts. The image sizes are roughly from letter size to 18 x 24 inches. Within half an hour, the ardent gallerista can wander through all three rooms a couple times then stand in front of favorites. There’s no conga line of visitors snaking through the gallery.

Taken as a whole, the exhibit is a tone poem to a bygone era. They were all painted between 1875 and 1950, considered the “Golden Age” of the medium. Yes there are many bright, frothy images that come to mind when one thinks “watercolor” but the show’s power stems from how the painters expanded the medium. Read the bite sized notes accompanying the artists’ work and you’ll see how their watercolors were often charged with gouache, tempera, and ink. These artists were pushing the envelope of their craft.

Walk into the room with the nine Homers and you’ll be drawn to several he painted with a rich blend of opacity and transparent wash. His robust watercolors capture the deep shade under forest canopies or at river’s edge and don’t rely exclusively on watercolor to achieve their punch.

See the exhibit this rainy weekend. That Italianate courtyard in the Fogg’s foyer has a roof over it.

A few ptatlarge  faves:

John LaFarge, “Chinese Pi Thong”, 1870, described at the time as “a rich square of eye delighting color”… still is. (photo below)
Winslow Homer, “Pike, Lake St. John", 1897
James McNeil Whistler, “Sailboat and Fourth of July Fireworks”, 1880
William Merritt Chase, “Self Portrait”, 1884 (photo below)

David Hockney Portraits:MFA Boston

“david hockney portraits”
February 26 - May 14, 2006
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Gund Gallery
Tickets complimentary for MFA members; non members $22.00

Yes, I was late to the party. Not what one would expect of a culture junkie, possibly one of your beacons of whatshappeningnow. But cheer up. What with a mid-spring monsoon forecast to blanket Massachusetts for the next five days, visiting the David Hockney Portraits exhibit (closes May 14) at the MFA Boston is an ideal Plan B.

This exhibit is a ray of sunshine. The guy is into people. His inherent instinct for design and structure give the viewer a comfortable platform to see into his work and his subjects.

Hockney has painted friends, colleagues, lovers, business associates, and, over about a thirty year period, his mother. His subjects advance in age, and the artist’s style subtlety evolves as he migrates between acrylics, oils, watercolor, collage, etching, and photography. His style is recognizable, iconic and versatile.

The show is a visual diary of Hockney’s life. His portraits of couples seem straightforward but, linger in front of them and questions surface. Why are they standing apart? What is that look on their faces? Posture? Is this a couple or two strangers?

The highlights of any exhibit have less to do with the work than the viewer (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”) A memorable part of the exhibit for ptatlarge was the “headshots” he’s painted throughout his career. One series done in 1997 contains a dozen 11 x 14 inch brilliantly colored collection of friends, mounted in a stunning array of 6 over 6. The brushstrokes, treatment of facial contours, and saturated edge-to-edge color are pure Hockney.

A riveting series of four paintings, about 11 x 14 inches, portrays his mother in final years of her life. He uses the same colors in each but tones the values down successively and synchronously as his mother comes closer and closer to passing away. The combination of his painting her face less distinctly and the descending color values is gripping….and far more loving than morbid. You can feel him saying, “Farewell, Mother,” as the color and vitality fade from her life.

Speaking of color, the aquamarines and azures that became embedded in the portraiture in his California period (60s, 70s) will stop you in your tracks. Short of a walk on a beach in the Virgin Islands, they’re the most arresting renditions of those colors you’re likely to see. Stand in the middle of the Gund Gallery and you’ll be surrounded by art that is totally informed by vibrant color of Hockney’s oil paintings, some of which are wall sized, and the restless curiousity that's led him to create in so many mediums.

Hockney, born in Yorkshire, England, in 1937, has been painting since he was a teenager in the 1950s. The MFA exhibit consolidates Hockney’s portraiture. Google around and you will discover Hockney’s astonishing range.

After leaving this exhibit, I guarantee that the next time you look in a mirror, you’ll wonder what David would have seen in your face and how he would have painted it.

Hockney frequently quoted a Chinese master: “Painting draws on three things - the hand, the eye, and the heart.” This exhibit draws on a fourth: an audience to appreciate them.

Tip: spend the five bucks to listen to the Audio Guide.

http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=638
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hockney/hockney.clark-percy.jpg

Drama of Scale

Drama of Scale
Art exhibit organized by Mixit Print Studio
Regis College, Carney Gallery 781-768-7070
235 Wellesley Street, Weston, MA
Monday - Friday 10 a.m - 4 p.m. through April 20, 2006

Just the drive from an urban environment onto a soon-to-be-leafy campus of a small New England college campus is a spring tonic. The “Drama of Scale” exhibit at Regis College’s Carney Gallery might be upstaged by the annual drama Mother Nature is staging outside but it certainly puts you in the mood to shove the winter boots to the back recesses of your closet.

The Mixit Print Studio in Somerville organized this exhibit and nineteen of the artists who rent space there are represented. Artists went about evoking the theme of the show, Drama of Scale, with a variety of media and a wide range of formats. What is big and what is small becomes relative.

Occasionally a print would strike your fancy the same way the first glimpse of a crocus pushing its head up through a still monochromatic garden delights us after months of being starved for color in the landscape. That’s the way Ilana Manolson’s monotypes “Macro Moment I” and “Macro Moment II” struck me.

If none of the artwork appeals to you, just walk out the door. Mother Nature’s got her own show going and she really knows a thing or two about scale. The whitish pink buds on the Magnolia tree just outside the gallery are a good start.

Photo: Pansies waiting to be transplanted onto a campus garden

Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light

“Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light”
A traveling exhibition featuring the large-format, richly detailed images of distinguished landscape photographer Robert Turner.
Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (617) 495-3045
Through March 26, 2006.

Going to a photography exhibit like “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” makes me feel like I spend days with my eyes wide open but see nothing. I don’t have to drive 40,000 miles a year in a pickup truck like Turner does to find places to photograph. I don’t have to surf weather service web sites like he does to find storms that I think will produce ideal light conditions in which to take pictures. But I do have to pay more attention to the quality of light around me. A walk through 43 of Turner's images on display at the venerable Harvard Museum of Natural History is a good reason to see why.

You can practically hear Pete Seeger singing “This land is your land, this land is my land…” as you gape at Turner’s large format photographs taken in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, the canyons of the Colorado Plateau, and the forests of Maine.

Turner is a poet with a camera. His credo is simple. “I want to create individual pieces of art that will endure well and create uplift for people. I want to show the value of wild places, and the feeling of awe, peace, drama, that an interaction with the environment can stimulate.”

Like the 19th century world-class English landscape painter JMW Turner (no relation), he’s fascinated with the quality of light. Unlike his predecessor, who treated light romantically, Robert Turner faithfully reproduces the light he captures on his 4x5 inch transparencies, then meticulously prints them.

The results are jaw-dropping operas on the chromatic scale of light. Storms produce the intense color and soft light that are Turner’s Holy Grail. For the series in Utah, Turner zeroed in on the weather service web site and watched the progression of storms across the country. When he found one that he liked and could get to in a day and a half, he jumped in his truck and drove there. And waited for moments “at the edge of a storm, after a rain, in the afterglow of sunset - when light upon the land intensifies color to almost magical proportions. The effect is other-worldly and profoundly evocative.”

“Storm Over The Green River”, Canyonlands National Park (attached), Utah, is a stunning example of one of those moments. Turner found a spot he liked and waited. He was hunkered down with a garbage bag over him and his camera when a shaft of light moved over the park’s terrain and spilled onto a spot that portrayed a nearly surreal moment of peace in that wild place. The colors in his images are so rich that you can practically feel the early morning mist evaporating from your skin or smell the musk of decaying ferns underfoot in a mountain pass.

Photo courtesy of Robert Turner's web site

Turner’s art is his pulpit. He’s preaching especially to city dwellers, those of us whose idea of wilderness is a walk on the nearest Audubon Trail. He intends that his permanent images of “rare places in a rare light” awaken an appreciation of nature’s grandeur and the need for us to conserve it. If the Wilderness Society had membership forms outside the exhibit, their membership would soar as people filed out of Turner’s exhibit.

Is there something in the American culture that values communing with nature as a solitary experience? If Henry Thoreau had a camera, he’d probably take photos like this. There are no people in Turner’s photographs. In his mind, we viewers provide the human presence and peering into Turner’s images, the viewer can easily feel not only solitary but also diminutive in scale. Think about the everyday beauty around us the next time you see a magic moment in a shaft of morning light. And think about ways to keep images like Turner’s a part of our wilderness environment for a long time to come.

IN the meantime, “Robert Turner: Rare Places in a Rare Light” is an opportunity to commune with nature without having to drive a day and a half in a truck to see the action.

http://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/exhibitions/index.html
http://www.robertturnerphoto.com/default.htm

Herb Greene: Brief encounters with the Dead

Herb Greene: Brief encounters with the Dead
Gallery Kayafas
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02118
Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 am - 5:30 pm
www.galleryKayafas.com

No, this isn’t a midnight cinema tribute to Lon Chaney or other masters of the macabre. It’s a black and white photographic love fest at the Gallery Kayafas featuring formal and candids of Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, and a few other luminaries who shot across the musical and cultural firmament in the revolutionary meteor shower known as the sixties.

Herb Greene, whose career began as a staff photographer for a San Francisco department store, had a passion for folk music. Giving in to the heady mixture of sounds akin to those of Pan, the archetypal piper, Greene followed his ears to the streets, eventually ending up at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco photographing the boys who would become “The Grateful Dead”. He gained their trust and snapped photos of them for thirty years. Many of these photos are on display at the Gallery Kayafas in the “SoWa” arcade at 450 Harrison Avenue.

One of Greene’s earliest photos of Garcia reveal him as a pimply faced teenager with doe-like eyes and no hint of the bearded icon he’d soon become. Looking now at the photos of musicians whose music is embedded in the DNA that was our youth, did any of us know where we were headed? And could any of us guess how surprised, perhaps alarmed, we’d feel that age has overtaken us? In the reflection of the glass covering those prints, we can see the faces of the adults we’ve become.

Documented in beautifully developed black and white platinum prints, Greene presents us with flower children dressed in pegged pants, flowing cotton skirts, or nothing at all. Gallery owner Kayafas says, “Kids too young to drive and people using walkers have come to see this show.”

Greene’s other photos show Carlos Santana, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Led Zeppelin. Somehow, sex, drugs, and rock and roll seemed so innocent in the sixties, a decade in which we believed ourselves immortal. I wonder if young music enthusiasts will feel the same way about the music of today when their AARP cards arrive.
And the beat goes on…

Harvard Square Art: Three for free, Part 3

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

THREE
• “Red”, a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org

PART THREE

A few steps into the lobby of University Place and you get the idea that Santa made a low level pass over the place, shook out a huge mixed bag of art - oils, watercolor, collage, etchings, sculpture, painted furniture - and ordered his elfsquad to assemble it all in the central lobby and main corridor.

The show is titled “Red: It's more than just a color: a metaphor, feeling, idea, or hue” And, glory be, the content is a healthy counterpoint to the four far-out pieces inside the Carpenter Center. Here is a show that the amateur art lover can comprehend without the aid of drugs or alcohol.

As promised, each piece has a component that suggests or contains red. pt @ large did a quicktime march through the nearly 100 artists represented then retraced his steps to linger with favorites. With this much variety, there’s something everyone might want to find under his or her Christmas tree or Chanukah bush this holiday season. Remember, artist’s need to shop, too. The pieces are all for sale.

Some items that buzzed my credit card included:
• Fiedlerworks, an oil painting by Patrick Anderson
• Pekin Opera, a solar etching by Christiane Corcelle-Lippeveld
• Junction, an oil painting by Greg Thielker
• Bo and Mischia, a Fuji print by Paul Weiner
• Grief and Emma, an oil by Donna Pomponeo

If you insist, there are dozens of stores that will gladly take your money as you forage through and make your holiday purchases. But these “Three for Free” exhibits are free to visit and either challenging or comforting on the eyes. Merry Whatever!

Harvard Square Art: Three for free, Part 2

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com

PART TWO
Videos are becoming the oxygen that feeds our mass culture. Video screens have popped up on iPods, at the checkout counter at the supermarkets, at your health club, and on cell phones. So why not erect a couple of monitors atop the Information kiosk a few yards from the Out of Town News stand? And load them with a confection of three short videos you can watch while you finish your latte and drink in the original people watching carnival that plays live every hour of the day in the pit leading to the stairs of the Harvard Square T.

pt @ large assumes you’re hip enough not to be thinking how civic minded of Cambridge to present entertainment to the 53,000 people who walk by the booth every day. We’re talking commerce here. The videos are sandwiched between advertisements for a slew of businesses with a short sashay from the two monitors. If pt @ large were paranoid, he’d wonder if said establishments had a surveillance camera trained on the kiosk that tracked viewers right into their doors after being sucked in by the advertising.

The three videos are pleasant little potpourri of animation and reality: one allegory, one paean to sisters everywhere, and one riff on a modern day Alice in Wonderland tale. On the outside chance you’d prefer to see these videos without having panhandlers asking you to contribute to their housing or sustenance needs, you can view them (the videos, I mean) at www.lumeneclipse.com

OK, now that you’ve taken a breather, it’s on to the third stop of the “Three for Free” tour.

Harvard Square Art: Three for free. Part 1

Harvard Square Art: Three for free

ONE
• Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
October 15, 2005 - April 16, 2006
http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu

TWO
• Lumen Eclipse, an outdoor video installation set over the Information Booth next to entrance to the T in the epicenter of Harvard Square
Daily 5 A.M. - 1 A.M.
www.lumeneclipse.com

THREE
. "Red", a juried show sponsored by the Cambridge Art Association,
University Place, 124 Mt Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA
Monday - Friday 9 A.M. - 6 P.M., Saturday 9 A.M. - 1 P.M.
November 18, 2005 - January 19, 2006
www.cambridgeart.org

The retail stores in Harvard Square may have become a look-alike patchwork of national franchises but the artwork in the neighborhood is just as eclectic, unique, or opaquely incomprehensible as ever.

pt @ large recently spent a couple of hours sampling three exhibits within a bit more than a three minute walk from the Out of Town News kiosk, the square’s epicenter. The free exhibits ranged from the abstract to the whimsical to what most mortal galleristas would quantify as something they’d recognize as ‘art’. By sheer dumb luck, the order in which I visited them proved restorative to my sense of aesthetics and faith in the world of art.

PART ONE
Quantum Grids, Carpenter Center for the Arts

The leading edge of art revolves around a different sun than most of what you’d find in the halls of the MFA. Like life, art is always in a state of flux, change is a necessary ingredient for growth, and the results are not always comforting. Ergo, we can employ viewing modern art as practice for dealing with life’s complexities and curves. Hey, it’s cheaper than a fifty-minute visit with your favorite therapist.

Most mortals enter exhibits of modern abstract art at their peril. We’re confronted with representational art with grotesque subject matter; or paintings with no discernable subject matter; or use of experimental or “found” materials; clusters of wires, metals, stones, or paper maché that resemble, well, piles of wires, metals, stones or paper maché.

The muse that fired the artist’s imagination is often mute when it comes to whispering meaning and intent into our ears as we gape and wonder, “what is this and why is it here?” Turning to the gallery’s guide for elucidation is a descent into a cave with a cerebral echo chamber in which curators speak in tongues as they labor to explain the voice of the muse to bewildered visitors (more on this below).

pt @ large, always game for a view of art at the edges, visited the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center. The four artists represented are Cai Guo-Qiang (Chinese, b. 1957); Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, b. 1929); Sol Lewitt (American, b. 1928); Fred Tomaselli (American, b. 1956).

Guo-Qiang considers the Atomic bomb to be the iconic image of the 20th century. His “The Century with Mushroom Clouds” gets him in touch with his inner Feng Shui and his Chinese hometown’s reputation as the gunpowder capital of the world. His concept is to balance Feng Shui, the optimal flow of energy to a structure, with the deadly flow of energy produced by the A bomb. Guo-Qiang covers an 18’ by 10’ parchment paper with scores of mushroom cloud images he’s made by burning the surface of the parchment paper with gunpowder. The clouds he burned have a similar mushroom shape but differing sizes and gradations of blacks and grays. Whether an optimal flow of energy was achieved is unanswerable by this writer although I do think it was mounted auspiciously on the west wall.

What makes the piece resonate beyond one dimension is Guo-Qiang’s black and white video installation of 1940’s A bomb tests in Nevada. Even sixty years later, watching the bomb’s thunderous impact, the gargantuan upheaval of a piece of the planet into the stem of that mushroom cloud inspires awe, fear, and despair over the deadly force we introduced that day. Part of the clip shows a regiment of army grunts kneeling miles away from the original ground zero. The rush of wind and dust that, like a wave whooshes past them and then rushes back toward the blast, actually rocks them back and forth. The scene of the soldiers in the foreground dwarfed by the mushroom cloud darkening the sky in the distance stirs a gut feeling of how we’ve become the servant of what we created. The unsettling question Guo-Qiang’s work inspires is, “Can we protect ourselves against ourselves?”

“Accretions II, 1967”, by Yayoi Kusama, is a 3’ by 6’ oil on canvas. What has been accreted are hundreds of tiny white dollops of white over a deep rose base. If you let yourself gaze at it with your third eye, it takes you far into the cosmos as you imagine speeding past stars and into space at hyperspeed.

Sol Lewitt’s “Four-Part Geometric Structure” is a set of twenty individual white painted structures placed on five gray painted wood panels. pt @ large imagines the geometric shapes might be the focus for a field trip for a high school geometry class.

Fred Tomaselli’s “Guilty, 2005”, an inkjet digital print that superimposes a color design over a New York Times page one headline, is an artistic jab at the greed that brought down Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski.

The Carpenter Center is at the ivied edge of Harvard Yard, right next door to the Fogg Museum, Harvard's oldest art museum, that covers the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. The Carpenter Center’s sunlit lobby with several small tables lined in front of a huge plate glass window, offers a great view of ivy league pageantry - professors, students, tourists, and UPS trucks as they make their daily rounds. And a good place to relax before heading to the middle of Harvard Square, the second destination for the day's artistic trifecta.

But wait. The lobby is also the place to contemplate one of the most prodigiously rarified versions of “art speak” that pt @ large has encountered: the small brochure that accompanies the exhibit.

Describing the exhibit, associate curator Linda Norden writes, “The title ‘Quantum Grids’ with an emphasis on the quantum, refers to just one of the ideas the juxtaposition of these four works proposes formally and conceptually: if the word “grid” usually conjures an image and implies a desire to contain and order, “quantum” is often inseparable from “leap” and the ungraspable range that “leap” would describe.”

Oh, I see.

The centuries old proverb “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is nowhere as valuable as in an exhibit like this. You just have to lighten up, not try too hard, and let your random access memory take charge. Surprisingly, Norden seems to echo that when she concludes her explanation of the exhibit by saying, “Each of the artworks here invokes the grid less as container than as counterpoint, as a mechanism through which to imagine the irrepressible, irrational, and incomprehensible human behaviors that define our moment.”

I pondered that all the way to Harvard Square.

DreamingNow: eight mixed media installations

DreamingNow: an exhibition of eight mixed media installations
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
January 27 – April 24, 2005
February 16, 2005

Installation artists have a knack for stretching the borders of what one might consider ‘art’. In other words, it’s quite possible to feel like a damned fool while taking an excursion through their creations.

The main conceit at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum’s current exhibition seems accessible enough: use dreams, usually considered quite private, to make comments about the political, cultural, and social world surrounding us. The artists’ intent has been to stimulate us to see that our dreams have as much to do with the world around us as within us. So far, so good.

When I read the show’s introduction, however, I began to think about Alice’s slippery ride down the rabbit hole. “Withdrawn from an entirely privatized arena and made public, the diverse dream metaphors in DreamingNow shed light on contemporary issues of transnationality, globalization, the distribution of political power, consumer and popular culture, the media, hierarchies of social structures, and gender politics. They also explore the capacity of art as a rich terrain where new links and imaginative thoughts can be mediated, discussed, and tested.” Raise your hand if you followed that.

Without reading the artist’s explanations accompanying the installations, I would have needed mind-altering drugs to guess the metaphorical intent to convey a social or political message. “History of the Main Complaint”, William Kentridge’s five minute animated film on post Apartheid South Africa is an example. There was something violent and troubling going on in the corporate white male’s dream life, symbolic images floated about. Was he passively acceptant, emotionally paralyzed, or part of the problem. Short of ESP, there was no way I could have interpreted the artist’s explanation of his piece.

The Dream Bed installation is the sleeper of the show. The artist Marina Abramovic created a bed in which participants can sign up to sleep in for an hour and consent to record their dream experiences in a log which becomes part of the exhibit. Sure enough, when I entered the softly blue-lit room, there was a man lying in the special zip up “dream suit” for his one hour Big Sleep. I felt like a voyeur as I tiptoed around the room looking at the Dream Bed and the guest dreamer and became part of the installation in spite of myself, wondering what he was dreaming and what I might have dreamt if I’d been in his suit. And did I mention the magnets embedded in the ‘dream suit’, the crystal pillow, and that the wooden sided "bed" looks alarmingly like a coffin? Her statement offers an imaginative explanation.

After the exhibit travels the world for ten years, Abramovic will collect the dream records into a ‘dream library’ that will become “ a barometer of the political and social issues of our time.” I don’t trust the accuracy of self-selecting socio-political barometers but am impressed by Abramovic’s artistic hubris and her sense of scale. I just might return for an hour and to sacrifice myself and my dream world to art.

Ever play cat’s cradle? The entire second level of the Rose Museum and the stairway leading down to it is one massive, spider webby, black yarn cat’s cradle-like installation engulfing fourteen beds. Being the performance artist she is, Chiharu Shiota may occasionally be found sleeping in one of the beds. Depending on your point of view, the encapsulated beds and the dreams we have on them can be cocoon like structures protected from the outer world or prey captured by one tyrannical man eating spider (I cribbed some of this from the artist's statement, part of which actually made sense to me). For the life of me I can’t fathom her notion of how “dreams challenge the western concept of identity” but could, without the pretension I often need to practice in museums, actually grasp her idea of a collective unconscious swirling around the universe. Who knows, maybe there’s a master weaver at work up there somewhere. He’s a bit spastic but that’s the subject for another day.

I could make some guesses about two of the other installations, “falling bodies blanket me” and “Dream” that seemed plausible until I read the artist’s explanatory text. How do they dream this stuff up?

This exhibit is a great opportunity to experience one of art’s classic conundrums: the viewer’s reactive interpretation versus the artist’s intent. How much of the personal can be conveyed as universal?

I don’t know about the “art-speak” notions of “transnationality, globalization, or the distribution of political power”, but The Adventurer will admit that the visit offered him alternate constructs for thinking about his dreams. As with most exhibits featuring installations, this one has its hits and misses and seemed both accessible and dense. But then again, so is our own dream life.

The Art of Japanese Calligraphy

pt at large
The Art of Japanese Calligraphy: 6 PM lecture at Harvard University’s Sackler Museum
February 11, 2005
The lecture coincided with an exhibit entitled “Marks of Enlightenment, Traces of Devotion: Japanese Calligraphy and Painting from the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection” on display until April, 2005.

I know next to nothing about Japanese calligraphy other than the fact that reminds me of abstract impressionism and is often associated with Zen Buddhism. Based on this lecture and the accompanying exhibition at the Sackler, I would say that by following the development of Japanese calligraphy, one could trace the development of religion, history, and culture in Japan.

The exhibit is from the collection of a remarkable pair of Harvard professors, Sylvan Barnet and William Burto, who began acquiring art in the 1960s, and spans the 8th through the 20th centuries. The show aims to offer “an introduction to the religious, literary, and calligraphic traditions of Japan” with “special emphasis on sumptuous, painstakingly rendered Buddhist scriptures and powerful examples of monochrome Zen calligraphy that dazzle viewers with their elegance, simplicity, and expressive force.” It works.

The key to making this exhibit understandable for neophytes like me is the series of informative panel texts (see addendum below) that lead the viewer through the development of calligraphy as a communication and art form in Japan. Without those panels, The Adventurer would have been lost soul as he tried to make sense of early Buddhist scriptures from the 7th to 13th centuries, Japanese poetry which includes text and images, casual writings in the form of diaries and letters writings, portraits called “ink traces” by noted Zen priests, and modern works including a four panel folding screen titled ‘Dragon Knows Dragon’. And who knew that Japanese calligraphy descended from Chinese pictograms and characters of the 6th century?

That boldly brushed, saffron and black colored screen in the last room of the chronologically ordered exhibit stopped me in my tracks. It would be right at home with the abstract impressionist paintings in Harvard’s Fogg Museum right across the street or the Museum of Modern Art.

In a moment of enlightenment that might have pleased Buddha, I sensed the evolution of Japan’s calligraphic styles when I remembered trying to read the original handwriting on the Declaration of Independence, thinking how old fashioned it seemed. The styles of Japanese calligraphy, English and American handwriting, even my own penmanship have continually evolved over time. A perfect lesson for this grasshopper: accept impermanence, embrace change, grow.

Link: http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/sackler/marks_of_enlightenment.html