Monday, March 22, 2010

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RI Selects: In the Galleries & Museums

March 20 - April 25

Camilo Kerrigan: ”Nature mort”, 2009, Oil on panel,  6 x 5 inches
Lifelike, an exhibition of works by Ching Ho Cheng, Lynn Itzkowitz, Camilo Kerrigan, Joy Taylor, and Lucio Pozzi focuses on non-traditional approaches to the still life, including frottage, trompe l’oeil, and surrealism.
BCB Art
116 Warren Street, Hudson
Opening reception March 20 @ 6 - 8 p.m.
 
Now - March 21

Synethesia, a cross-sensory condition, is the of-the-moment neurological phenomenon, which brings us to The Amazing Acoustaphotophonogrammitron, a synesthetic exhibition featuring work by artists who find themselves somewhere between the visual and musical field, including Bird Names, Joshua Churchill, Paul de Jong, Lesley Flanigan, Ed Osborn, Tristan Perich, Nick Zammuto, and Christy Georg, above, in a still from Monitoring the Dunes. Curated by Ven Voisey, who also has work in the show.
MCLA Gallery 51
North Adams, MA
 
Now - March 26

An Exhibition in Black and White includes this photograph, Lunar Pond, by our own ad director Kate Frank Cohen.
CCCA Gallery
Hudson, NY
 
Now - March 28

The son of Abstract Expressionist Nicolas Carone, Claude Carone carries on his father’s nonfigurative bent. His paintings begin with a gesture and continue with another, and another until he sees and feels the beginning of a visual composition, guided by rhythm or a dialogue between the image and the space.
John Davis Gallery
Hudson, NY
 
April 1 - May 31

Altered States is a solo exhibition of mixed media constructions by John Sideli, an artist who lived in Malden Bridge, NY for over thirty years before moving to Wiscasset, Maine.  Sideli’s work is inspired by the cabinets of curiosity popular in the 16th - 18th centuries and by the box assemblages of Joseph Cornell.
Park Row Gallery
Chatham, NY
Artist’s reception, Saturday, April 10 @  4 - 6 p.m.
 
Now - May 8

Paul Bunyan Likes Pancakes
Paul Graubard’s work falls firmly within the realm of Folk and Outsider Art. The Lenox resident works with a bright palette, simple forms, tacit joy. and a whimsical sense of humor, all of which is evident in his solo, mixed-media exhibition, Stories from the Bible and Other Places.
Ferrin Gallery
Pittsfield, MA
Artist reception: Wednesday, April 7 @  5:30 - 6:30 p.m., followed by an interview and discussion with the artist @ 6:30-7:30 p.m.
 
Now - April 10

This year Pittsfield’s Big Read community book project is taking on Tim O’Brien’s collection of interconnected stories of the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried. As an unofficial kick-off to this program, photographer Bill Wright—himself a veteran of the Gulf War—has mounted a series of striking, straight-on portraits of local military veterans. Part of Wright’s Berkshire Veterans Photography Project, the show includes more than two dozen local residents, ranging from a 22-year-old who has already served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, to 99-year-old Margaret Haggerty, a World War II veteran. Wright continues to take photographs of Berkshire County veterans of all conflicts for an upcoming book project. To arrange for a free portrait sitting, please contact him at brkvets@gmail.com.
Lichtenstein Center for the Arts
Pittsfield, MA
 
Now - April 30

Admit it: You’ve always wanted to read your neighbor’s mail. If your neighbors happen to be artists Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzi Banks Baum, here’s your chance to do so without committing a federal offense. Berkshire Art Kitchen kicks off Women’s History Month with Fe-Mail: An Exhibition of Mail Art, featuring a three-year “Postal Discourse” between Baum and Arp-Sandel, consisting of over seventy-five mixed media postcards sent through the U.S. mail. The exhibition will be complimented with a series of events related to “The Daily-Ness of Art” mantra to which these two local artists subscribe.
Gallery talk: March 31 @ 7 - 9 p.m.
Berkshire Art Kitchen
Great Barrington, MA
 
Now - March 28

Edward Steichen Photograph by Sedat Pakay, 1967. All Rights Reserved.
Over the past 40 years, Sedat Pakay and Roman Iwasiwka photographed Cultural Icons of America and beyond. Together, these two photographers took portraits of many of the world’s most significant people in the realms of politics and the arts, including Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Edward Steichen, Ronald Reagan, Mark Rothko, Jeff Beck, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.
Brill Gallery
North Adams, MA
 
Now - March 31

An exhibition of fanciful videos by Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner includes an enactment of Moby Dick (above) and another starring MASS MoCA director Joe Thompson with an ersatz plane crash.
MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
 
Now - August 8

One can’t help but wonder what Herman Melville would have thought of Tristin Lowe’s Mocha Dick, a life-size (52 feet long, ten feet high) white sperm whale made of industrial wool felt, complete with lifelike gashes, scars, and barnacles, beached on the floor of the museum’s largest gallery. This landlocked leviathan is modeled after a whale that terrorized ships near Mocha Island in the South Pacific Ocean, whose flesh was described as being “white as wool,” and who was the inspiration for Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick.
Williams College Museum of Art
Williamstown, MA
The Whiteness of the Whale: A Multidisciplinary Discussion of Moby Dick, Thursday, April 8 @ 4:30 pm
 
Now - April 8

Immersion is an exhibit of paintings by Hudson Valley Artist Dean Nicyper at this recently redesigned gallery in the Moviehouse theater. Nicyper’s works range from plein air landscapes (both near and far) to equally atmospheric depictions of the jazz world (earlier in life, he played saxophone professionally). 
The Moviehouse Gallery Cafe
Millerton, NY
 
Now - April 10

A group show of Hudson Valley artists encourages you to Express Your Love in celebration of Valentine’s Day.
Gazen Gallery
Rhinebeck, NY
 
Now - April 11

Triple Whammy, three solo shows: Franc Palaia’s Sojourns 100 + Color Photographs: Two Continents, Joanne Klein’s installation, Saturation (above), and Bill Rybak’s digitally generated sculptures and prints.   
G.A.S. Visual Art & Performance Space
Poughkeepsie, NY
 
Now - April 25

The Singer (La Cantante mondana), c. 1884, by Giovanni Boldini
Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 1/8 in. (61 x 46 cm)
Collezione Fondazione Carife, on deposit at the Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Ferrara
Is it any wonder The Clark chose Valentine’s Day to open its winter exhibition, Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris? The Italian artist best known for his vibrant brushwork and society portraits first gained his chops in the romantic City of Lights, where he painted bustling streets, cafes, and concert halls as well as sunny suburban landscapes. The show includes work by Boldini’s Parisian peers—including Meissionier, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Manet—which illuminate the influence of the Impressionists on their early work.
The Clark
Williamstown, MA
 
Now - May 2

Jessica Rankin (Australian, b. 1971), Flat Land, 2008. Courtesy of the artist, White Cube, London and Carlier/Gebrauer, Berlin
The work of four contemporary artists who blend the worlds of art and science comprises Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain. Susan Aldworth, Andrew Carnie, Jessica Rankin, and Katy Schimert share a fascination with various aspects of the brain—be it cell biology, neurology, memory, or structure—but diverge in their approaches and preferred media to create a fascinating, mixed-media show.
Williams College Museum of Art
Williamstown, MA
 
Now - May 15
The poet Marianne Moore in a photograph by Esther Bubley
Photojournalist Esther Bubley rose to the top of the highly competitive and overwhelmingly male field of photojournalism during its “golden age,” from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, when American illustrated magazines thrived. An exhibition of her work is on display at this gallery/bookstore within a wine shop.
Joie de Livres @ Salisbury Wines
Salisbury, CT
 
Now - May 16

Norman Rockwell Answering Fan Correspondence in Norman Rockwell’s Studio; Stockbridge, Massachusetts,  c.1971. Photograph attributed to Louie Lamone. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing; Niles, Illinois. From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum
ProjectNORMAN, which entails the digitization of art and artifacts related to Norman Rockwell, has been a wellspring for the Norman Rockwell Museum, facilitating first the headline-garnering Behind the Camera exhibition and now To Rockwell, with Love: Fan Mail and the Saturday Evening Post, which chronicles readers’ reactions during the artist’s forty-seven year tenure as illustrator for the magazine, from the New Deal through the Baby Boom.
Norman Rockwell Museum
Stockbridge, MA
 
Now - May 31

Before he was known around the world as the archetypical American illustrator, Norman Rockwell was called “the kid with the camera eye,” due to the realism of his work. In the mid-30s, Rockwell moved away from using professional models and embraced photography to capture the poses and expressions of everyday people, many of whom were his Stockbridge neighbors, and many of whom are still around to tell the tale. Like a film director working with a cinematographer, Rockwell drew performances from his subjects on intricate sets of his own design, though he never personally fired the shutter. The groundbreaking exhibition Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera brings together approximately 120 prints of Rockwell’s study photographs and 25 original paintings and drawings that emerged from the photos on display.
Norman Rockwell Museum
Stockbridge, MA
 
Now - June 6

Trace the history of civilization through weapons and armor in Armed & Dangerous: The Art of the Arsenal. This landmark exhibition not only explores the craft, and craftiness, of armament; it examines the natural weaponry and defensive mechanisms of animals, and illuminates the influence of the natural world on the man-made instruments of war. With plenty of swords and scimitars, helmets and headdresses, machetes and muskets, Armed & Dangerous is drawn primarily from Berkshire Museum’s permanent collection as well as objects on loan from the Higgins Armory in Worcester, Massachusetts; the show also includes stunning examples of war poster propaganda as well as work from an international array of groundbreaking contemporary artists.
Berkshire Museum
Pittsfield, MA
 
Now - June 6

Living Under the Same Roof is an exhibition in which the public helps choose which pieces from the Hessel Museum of Art will be on view. Mounted in conjunction with Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, the exhibit focuses on the Hessel’s extensive artists’ books and film/video collection.
Hessel Museum of Art
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
 
Now - October 31

Spanish-born Chicagoan Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s inverted, half-scale model of Mies van der Rohe’s uncompleted project, 50x50 House (1951) a spare, square glass-walled structure complete with upside-down furniture and a cup and saucer dashed on the ceiling-cum-floor— weaves together modernist architecture, early sci-fi literature, and the auteur Sergei Eisenstein in a mysterious narrative installed in the immense gallery known as Building 5. Also on view: the artist’s2006 film Always After (The Glass House), a sort-of prelude to Gravity… about the end of utopian transparency, created at Crown Hall, van der Rohe’s 1950 School of Architecture building on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago.
MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
 
Ongoing

Orly Genger, Boys Cry Too, 2009
New work has arrived at The Fields, where visitors can walk or bike through 400 acres of rolling farmland, with 80 pieces of contemporary sculpture scattered over 100 acres.
The Fields Sculpture Park at Omi International Arts Center
Ghent, NY

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 03/10/10 at 06:55 AM • Permalink

Norman Rockwell’s American Dream: The Auteur Theory

After surveying more than 18,000 black-and-white photographs that Norman Rockwell staged as studies for his iconic paintings, author Ron Schick has developed a belief that Rockwell was the illustrator as auteur. “He worked with models the way a film director works with his actors,” says Schick, curator of the new exhibit Norman Rockwell: Behind The Camera (opening on November 7 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge) and the book of the same name. “You have to think of him in the cultural context. The parallel artist is Frank Capra,” says Schick, referring to the director of all-American classics such as You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. (Not so coincidentally, two of the titans of modern moviemaking—Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—are major collectors of Norman Rockwell paintings and are loaning work for an exhibit called Telling Stories that will open in 2010 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.)

In Schick’s view, Rockwell’s paintings can be seen as movie stills that capture a split-second of a complex narrative. “Rockwell was a storyteller and his paintings are very cinematic—you can imagine what happened in the moments before and after the paintings,” he says. “People say that Norman Rockwell paintings leave nothing to the imagination, and I completely disagree. I think there is a lot left for us to wonder about.”
Now, thanks to Schick, we don’t have to wonder about how Rockwell dreamed up with all those raised eyebrows, cockeyed glances and sideways grins.  As Schick explained to Rural Intelligence, Rockwell stopped painting live, professional models in 1930, and he started photographing friends and neighbors instead.  He had to coax the often stoic New Englanders in Arlington, VT (where he lived from 1939 - 1953) and Stockbridge, MA (where he lived from 1953 until his death in 1978) to uninhibitedly express all sorts of emotions—surprise,  confusion, fear, delight, frustration, suspicion, faith.  Though he always had a clear idea of the story he wanted to tell, the models would invariably provide spontaneous reactions that he would use. “You could never get a model to hold a spontaneous expression on his face for three days in a studio!” says Schick, whose expertise is archival photography and who wrote The View from Space: American Astronaut Photography 1962-1972, with his wife, Julia Van Haaften.  As David Kamp wrote in the November Vanity Fair, “The complexity of Rockwell’s process belies the ‘simplicity’ often ascribed to his finished products.”

According to Schick, there is probably only one Norman Rockwell photograph that was taken without the artist’s intention of every turning it into a painting.  It was Closing A Summer Cottage, Quogue, New York (above), a 1957 Kodak Colorama that hung in New York’s Grand Central Terminal; it featured a paneled station wagon (that seems to reference his famous 1947 diptych Coming and Going) outside the type of simple, shingled beach cottage that is no longer built in the Hamptons and that middle class families can no longer afford.  A six-foot long version of that photograph will be hanging at the entrance to the exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum (which will move to the Brooklyn Museum in February 2011). “I love that photograph,” says Schick. “It looks like the characters stepped out of one of his paintings.”

Norman Rockwell: Behind The Camera
Norman Rockwell Museum
Stockbridge, MA
November 7 - May 31, 2010

Opening: November 7, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Commentary by Ron Schick at 5:45 p.m., followed by a reception with cash bar and book-signing of Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera (Little, Brown and Company, 2009). Free for Museum members; $15 non-members

Photo credits from top to bottom:  Reference photos for Norman Rockwell’s Soda Jerk, 1953. Photos by Gene Pelham. Photo montage created by Ron Schick. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL. From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum.

Soda Jerk, Norman Rockwell, 1953. Oil on canvas, 36” x 34”. Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953. ©1953 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN. Collection of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. Bequest of J. Willard Loos.

Reference photo for Norman Rockwell’s Marriage Counselor, 1963. Photo by Bill Scovill. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL. From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum.

Marriage Counselor, Norman Rockwell, 1963. Oil on canvas, 31 1/4” x 38 1/4” Intended for The Saturday Evening Post, unpublished. Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL. From the permanent collection of Norman Rockwell Museum.

Closing a Summer Cottage, Quogue, New York, a 1957 Norman Rockwell art-directed Colorama by Ralph Amdursky and Charles Baker. © 2009 Kodak, courtesy of George Eastman House.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 11/03/09 at 07:04 AM • Permalink

Landscape Painting Class at Olana

Our breathtaking Hudson River Valley has been inspiring artists for centuries; now, would-be artists, it’s your turn to be inspired by the landscape surrounding Olana, the historic home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Church.  The class, conducted by the eminent landscape painter Tony Thompson, will be held at Olana’s new Education Center on Friday, October 9.  Thompson will guide beginning-to-experienced artists in their exploration of basic composition and in techniques for capturing space, light and color in their medium of choice.  He will also lead a discussion on the Hudson River School’s style of landscape painting versus more contemporary approaches.  Students are welcome to bring any materials they are interested in experimenting with; acrylics, canvas, paper, easels and brushes will be provided.

Olana State Historic Site Wagon House Education Center
5720 Route 9G, Hudson
1 mile south of Rip Van Winkle Bridge
GPS coordinates: Latitude: 42-12’58’’ N; Longitude: 073-49’35’’ S
Friday, October 9, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.; please call if weather is questionable, 518-828-1872 x 110
Rain date October 16
Class is at the farm complex; first right after the lake.
Please bring a picnic lunch. 
Pre-registration essential; .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Workshop: $20/adult; $10/members

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 09/24/09 at 10:52 AM • Permalink

Norman Rockwell Museum Turns Back Time

 
The Norman Rockwell Museum has turned the clock back to 1960. “It was a very significant moment in Norman Rockwell’s life,” says Corry Kanzenberg, the musuem’s curator/archival collections, who has overseen the reinstallation of Rockwell’s studio on the museum’s lush park-like 36-acre campus in Stockbridge, MA. “His second wife, Mary, had just died and he was increasingly interested in social change.” Called A Day in the Life: Norman Rockwell’s Stockbridge Studio, the new exhibit opens May 2. For the past two decades, visitors have seen Rockwell’s studio (which was moved from its nearby South Street location on two flatbed trucks) exactly as it was when he died in 1978. To celebrate the museum’s 40th anniversary, it was decided to reinvigorate the studio tour by capturing a specific moment in time when Rockwell was in the midst of working on Golden Rule, a pivotal work that ushered in the era when his paintings were increasingly about civil rights and social justice. This season in his life was chosen because there was extensive documentation that made the recreation possible. “We have photographs taken in October 1960 by a local photographer named Bill Scovill, which gave us a 360-degree view of the studio,” explains Kanzenberg, who notes that some 40,000 Rockwell photographs have been digitalized over the past few years.

Kanzenberg is fairly certain that the archival photographs were somewhat staged; after all, Rockwell made a career of art-directing his own paintings (as well as photographs for others such as Closing a Summer Cottage, Quogue, New York, a Kodak Colorama image that appears in the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair to illustrate an essay on the American Dream by, coincidentally, Lakeville weekender David Kamp).  But Kanzenberg says that the studio’s Shaker-like fastidiousness is not contrived. “He was notoriously neat,” she says. “He swept out his studio three times a day. He would clean his palette and put away his brushes every night.” She is training the guides who are stationed in the studio to tell the story of Rockwell’s life at the dawns of the 1960s. They will point out to visitors that the phone numbers scribbled on the wall (photo below) include those for the Red Lion and the famed pyschologist Erik Erikson, a friend of Rockwell’s who was then at Austen Riggs and whom he’d seek out for counseling.  They will point out the reproduction of a pastel done by Rockwell’s wife that she made as part of her art therapy at Riggs.

The bookshelves are painstakingly arranged exactly as they were 48 years ago. But some objects from 1960 have been lost to time or were not installed because they would be damaged by too much exposure to sunlight. Kanzenberg readily points out things that are not original: the vintage blue tin can of Edgeworth Tobacco in the old photos but she had to buy on eBay. “It was $15,” she says. They could not find his pipe either, and when she found one on eBay the seller agreed to donate it to the museum. The radio is not the same one Rockwell had in his studio, but the opera that is being played is the music that Rockwell listened to while he worked. “He worked as a supernumerary at the Metropolitan Opera when he was young,” she notes. “He knew Emmy Destinn and Enrico Caruso.”

And, of course, the canvas in progress on his easel is a facsimile, though Kanzenberg notes that the fact that it is framed is historically correct. “He always painted on a framed canvas,” she says. Finally, the guides will point out that the final version of Golden Rule (which Rockwell began painting on August 19, 1960, completed in January 1961, and published on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on April 1, 1961) can be seen in the main museum across the lawn.

Norman Rockwell Museum
Stockbridge, MA
Free Community Day: Sunday, May 3, 12 - 4 PM

Golden Rule provides the inspiration for a family-friendly afternoon with an international flavor, featuring a performance of Brazilian music by the Berkshire Bateria, world folktales by award-winning storyteller Eshu Bumpus, dance performances by BRIDGE of Great Barrington, an original play by Julianne Hiam inspired by Rockwell’s paintings and performed by Berkshire County Day students, and a display of classic 1960s cars by the Piston Poppers.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/29/09 at 08:47 AM • Permalink

“These Days: Elegies for Modern Times” Opening at MASS MoCA

These days I seem to think about
How all the changes came about my way
And I wonder if I’ll see another highway
      —Jackson Browne

These Days: Elegies for Modern Times, the new exhibit opening on April 4 at MASS MoCA, gets its name from a Jackson Browne song that was originally recorded by Nico and the Velvet Underground in 1967.  But the show’s curator, Denise Markonish, only chose the title after she started commissioning new work from four artists—George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver and Pawel Wojtasik—and selecting practically brand new works by Robert Taplin and Sam Taylor-Wood.

“I had been working on the show a while before I landed on the final title,” says Markonish. “I always knew the show was about the elegy and had been reading a lot and considering some more poetry driven titles—a key quote relating to the show comes from a Rainer Maria Rilke sonnet ‘And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.’ I wanted something to balance that idea in Rilke that calls out for change in the midst of darkness.”

Markonish says the nod to Browne, the Velvet Underground and Nico adds a pop culture dimension to the exhiibit. “I just thought the sentiments of the lyrics fit the show perfectly, the way it is really about taking stock and seeing how one can move beyond to the next moment. Also just the phrase ‘These Days’ itself seemed so open yet specific to the moment we find ourselves in globally and much of the work deals with that moment.”

These Days: Elegies for Modern Times at MASS MoCA
Public Exhibition Opening: Saturday, April 4, 2009,  5:30 - 7:30 PM.
Most of the artists in the exhibition will attend the reception. MASS MoCA members are admitted free. Not-yet members may attend for $6 per person.  All should RSVP to Rebecca Rice at rrice@massmoca.org. or 413 664 4481 x 8112 .
The exhibition runs through September 2010.

At 8 PM, attendees are invited to a performance of Sea of Birds, Sebastienne Mundheim’s dreamlike theatrical work which uses large kinetic sculptures, dancers, live musicians, and video projection to explore memory and history.  Tickets for Sea of Birds are $13 / $10 for students.

“Get Back” is part of Robert Taplin’s “Everything Real Is Imagined (After Dante)”

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 03/31/09 at 01:18 PM • Permalink

Presenting The First Annual Berkshire Festival of Women in the Arts

For the past eight years, Bard College at Simon’s Rock has quietly hosted an Annual International Women’s Day conference.  This year, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, the director, believed the theme, The Power of Women in the Arts, had sufficient strength to exceed the bounds of the Great Barrington campus, so she tentatively spread the word to other cultural institutions in Berkshire County.  Their response was literally overwhelming; nearly everyone came up with a way to participate.  So Browdy de Hernandez did the sensible thing: she lobbed her hot potato to Eugenie Sills, founder and publisher of The Women’s Times.  In a blink, the hodgepodge of vague ideas had been coordinated into a schedule (with all of those previously MIA present and accounted for), and the event had a name, a snappy logo, a website, a glossy brochure, and an awards component (what’s a festival without awards? meet The Moxies).

The First Annual Festival of Women in the Arts promises to dominate the cultural life of the county for the entire month of March and well beyond.  Moreoever, its organizers hope that it will become an annual event.  Rural Intelligence talked to Eugenie Sills about the festival’s goals.

Rural Intelligence: Why women in the arts now?  Haven’t we pretty thoroughly hashed that one out without coming to any clear conclusions?

Eugenie Sills:  For some who attend, gender may not be the relevant issue; it’s just an arts festival, an opportunity to hear a fabulous musician or a storyteller or an author or to see a dancer or some great artwork.  Our goal is to shine a spotlight on accomplished women in the arts.

Rural Intelligence:  So this isn’t about sexism in the arts and the art world? 

Sills:  As publisher of The Women’s Times, naturally I’m aware that for every Tina Packer [artistic director of Shakespeare & Company], there are a half dozen companies whose entire season is directed exclusively by men.  When was the last time you saw a woman conducting at Tanglewood?  But that’s just my take.

Rural Intelligence:  The schedule is exhaustive.  I counted 67 events throughout March and beyond, well into May. Can you share a few highlights?

Sills:  Each venue brings its own approach to the festival.  The Clark chose to do Women’s Work, a show of prints, drawings, and photographs by such artists as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Berenice Abbott.  Leslie Ferrin [owner of the eponymous gallery in Pittsfield] has done a group show that includes works by both male and female artists, all of whom have chosen women as their subject.  The show is hung without labels.  Leslie will be doing a couple of salons to encourage discussion: “Does gender matter?”  And, of course, this all began with “The Power of Women in the Arts,” at Simon’s Rock, which is this weekend and includes a staged reading of a dramatization of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by Carol Gilligan, the eminent feminist psychologist and author of In a Different Voice (Harvard University Press, 1982), which has been called “the little book that started a revolution.” 

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/05/09 at 03:48 PM • Permalink

What’s Cooking at the Berkshire Art Kitchen?

Art dealers often say they want their galleries to be places where their friends and clients will feel at home and want to hang out, but Gabrielle Senza really means it. She has moved into an old colonial with a deep front porch on Main Street in Great Barrington (across from Searles Castle) and she has dubbed it the Berkshire Art Kitchen (BAK). “It’s a different sort of live/work space,” she says.

Senza, an accomplished painter who has shown at the OK Harris Gallery in Manhattan, ran the pioneering Spazi Gallery in the village of Housatonic for most of the 1990s. She moved to Rome for a time but returned after she got pregnant. “Have you ever been in an Italian hospital?” she says. “I did not want to have my child in one.”  She and her son, Matteo, 10, moved into the Main Street house in December.  After having all the old wallpaper removed and repainting the walls in warm, soothing colors, she has transfomed the house into a tranquil and welcoming backdrop for exhibiting art and gathering creative people together.

Her inaugural exhibit, “The Promise of Light,” features her own ethereal landscape paintings (you may recognize her work which hangs at the restaurant Local 111 in Philmont) as well as sculptures by Joe Wheaton, a wall piece made of Mardi Gras beads by John Lawson, abstract monoprints by Karen Skelton, and works on paper by John Clarke. She’s also curating a show called “Radical Detour” at the Storefront Artist Project in Pittsfield, where she’s on the board. “Radical Detour,” which is being held in honor of the Berkshire Festival of Women in the Arts, will feature work by women artist/activists who address topics such as gender issues, global warming, racism and human rights. As if that were not enough to keep her busy, Senza is hosting a soul-food potluck and house concert benefit at BAK on March 5 for Red Collaborative, a group she started in 2003 that engages survivors of abuse and trauma in public art projects as part of their healing process.

Senza plans to show films and host discussion groups and even offer an alternative environment where creative folks who work home alone (and too often procrastinate) can spend a few hours during the day working quietly surrounded by like-minded people for a small fee. “In the spring, I am going to put cafe tables on the porch,” she said. “I will have WiFi, so come back when it gets warmer and bring your laptop.”

The Berkshire Art Kitchen
400 Main Street, Great Barrington; 413.717.0031
“The Promise of Light”
Opening Reception with Champagne, Chocolate and Live acoustic music by John Clarke
Saturday, February 28; 4 -6 PM; RSVP required.

Soul-Stirring Women in Music
Pot-luck supper with performances by Vikki True, JoAnne Spies, Carol Stevens, Carol Emanuel, Maia Conty, Trice Atchison, Mary Campbell Case, Eve Schatz, and Stephanie Campbell
Thursday, March 5; Dinner at 6; music at 7:30
Tickets: $25

Storefront Artist Project
124 Fenn Street, Pittsfield; 413.442.7201
“Radical Detour”
Opening Reception Friday, March 6; 6 - 8 PM

 

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 02/25/09 at 06:16 PM • Permalink

An Insider’s Look at Vassar’s Outsider Art

Vassar College has been collecting art since its founding in 1864, and the school’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center now has nearly 18,000 works, including the Warburg Collection of Old Master Prints and Matthew Vassar’s collection of Hudson River School paintings. The holdings also include an extensive array of work by outsider or “self-taught” artists, which was bolstered by a recent gift of 110 pieces by alumna Pat O’Brien Parsons (class of 1951), who ran a well-known gallery in Bedford, NY, in the 1970s. Now, curator Mary-Kay Lombino has selected more than 50 pieces by 39 different artists for Faith and Fantasy in Outsider Art from the Permanent Collection, which explores the spiritual dimensions of these artworks (such as Mose Tolliver’s Self Portrait in house paint on board, below) that were not made with a museum show in mind.

“Several of the artists in Faith and Fantasy use imagery that reflects their own intensely personal religious beliefs,” says Lombino. “They sometimes refer to spiritual visions they have experienced, while at other times creating their own interpretations of familiar themes such as Adam and Eve. The common focus on legend, myth, dreams, and fantasies can be seen as evidence of the artists’ alienation from family and community, thus further defining them as outsiders.

“As with many self-taught artists, they began their art practice outside of the mainstream venues of contemporary art, and several of them have moved steadily into a broader spectrum of acceptance and appreciation,” says Lombino. “They often demonstrate an all-consuming devotion to art-making and a tendency to create extremely personal and imaginative narratives, resulting in artwork that is highly individualized and idiosyncratic.”

Faith and Fantasy in Outsider Art from the Permanent Collection
Opening Reception and Lecture (free and open to the public)
Friday, February 13

5:30 pm
Lecture: “Through the Lens of Language: Self Taught Artists from Dubuffet to Today,” by Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of the Contemporary Center and director of the Henry Study Center at the American Folk Art Museum
Taylor Hall, Room 203

6:30 pm
Opening reception
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center
124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie; 845.437.5632

William Tyler’s “Swimming Pool,” colored pencil and black ink on paper

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 02/11/09 at 08:00 AM • Permalink

Toulouse-Lautrec and His Paris at the Clark

Robert Sterling Clark, who always went by his middle name, was the grandson of Edward Clark, business partner of I.M. Singer, the inventor of the lockstitch sewing machine.  The elder Clark, a lawyer, handled the business side of the Singer Manufacturing Company, but he was inventive too—after settling myriad patent disputes in the company’s favor, he came up with such fiendishly clever schemes as revolving credit and trade-ins (all of which were destroyed to prevent the formation of a second-hand sewing machines market). 
 
Edward’s grandson Sterling was clever as well, but he had no head for business.  Even after college and a long stint in the army, he did not seem inclined to settle into a profession.  He tried his hand at science, which he’d studied at Yale, heading an expedition to a remote region of northern China.  Though the mission was a success, his interest in the field did not stick. Then in 1909, at 32, he inherited part of his parents art collection and found his true north.  A year later, he moved to Paris, then the capital of that world, to pursue art collecting.  A decade and scores of acquisitions later, he married Francine Clary, a beautiful former actress with la Comédie-Française.  Both were in their 40s.  It was too late for them to build a family; so instead, they built a brilliant art collection and eventually the museum that would bear their names. 
 
Throughout their collecting careers, the Clarks turned a deaf ear to professional advice and to the entreaties of museum directors, whether for temporary loans or bequests. Sterling often credited Francine with having the superior eye, as long as she did not succumb to sentimental subject matter, an occasional failing. When they returned to the United States and settled in Williamstown (the founder of the family’s fortune was a Williams man), they continued collecting even as they laid the groundwork for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, beneath the front steps of which they are buried (Sterling died in 1956; Francine in 1960).  To the end, they took no interest in twentieth-century art.  Yet, in addition to the Old Masters, some of the artists credited with leading the way to modernism were among their favorites—Degas, Sargent, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
 
In the United States, Francine Clary Clark was considered “a lady,” a dignified member of the highest reaches of the establishment.  But though in 19th-century France an actress with la Comédie-Française might have been an intellectual, she would not have been thought of as anything so hidebound (or insipid) as “a lady.”  She surely would have been familiar with the vibrant and racy Parisian nightlife,  some of whose participants were referred to as demimondaines.  Think: Collette.  Think: the sort of beautiful women who do not marry, at least, as Gigi’s Aunt Alicia tactfully points out, “not at first.”  Think: the thrilling mix of gaiety, chic, and wealth at nightclubs such as Maxim’s and the even more louche Moulin Rouge.  Think, in short: the world of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. 
 
From now until Spring, it is this lively world that the Clark will devote itself to exploring.  In addition to an exhibition of the museum’s extensive holding of works by Toulouse-Lautrec (of the 80 works in the exhibition, 54 are oil paintings, posters, drawings, and lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec), there will be much ancillary gaiety, starting with a “Pleasures of Paris Winter Gala” this Saturday night, January 31st, followed by a lecture, the alluringly titled, “Wicked Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec invents the Fin de Siècle”  on Sunday, February 1.  Another lecture on February 22, will focus on Toulouse-Lautrec’s lifelong engagement with the nightlife of Paris.  If the talks are like the life, they promise to be anything but dry.
 
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
225 South Street; Williamstown; 413.458.2303
Toulouse-Lautrec and Paris
February 1 - April 26
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 10 - 5
Admission: Free until June 1
Lectures: February 1 & 22; 3 p.m.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 01/26/09 at 05:14 PM • Permalink

Carrie Haddad Opens a Brave New Photography Gallery

Since she opened her first gallery in Hudson in 1991, Carrie Haddad has been exhibiting photography as well as paintings, most recently in her eponymous gallery at 622 Warren Street.  “I have a history of showing photography and an audience for it,” she says. “But it’s hard to mix photography with paintings.  The photographs are fantastic, but when they are next to a rich oil painting—it’s hard to compete with all that glistening and texture.”

So to give it its due, photography needed a gallery of its own.  Now.  Just when everyone else is swearing off risk.  A giant leap of faith?  “Maybe it’s just smart,” says Haddad.  “With the digital age, photography is so popular—it has such a broad audience.  The 300 block of Warren is where I started with my first gallery.  It’s good to be on the same block as Nicole Fiacco Gallery and with the John Davis Gallery just up the street.  There are three or four restaurants.  We’re going to be open late, until 9, on weekends.  In summer it might be more nights.” 

Appropriately, the inaugural exhibition, which opens this Saturday evening and runs through January 11, is a study in expansiveness.  Curated by Haddad’s colleague Melissa Stafford, the show borrows its title from a 2003 song by the band The Postal Service that later was on the soundtrack of the film Garden State.  Such Great Heights contains a line that says, “everything looks perfect from far away.”  Says Stafford, “I wanted to do something really positive.” 

Five photographers work will be featured, including John Griebsch’s aerial landscapes (“Wheatfield and Tractor”, above), Jefferson Hayman’s nostaligia-inducing photographs of airships floating in the New York City sky (right), and works by photographers Vincent Laforet and Keith Loutit, both of whom use tilt-shift lenses to distort their images’ depth of field.  Loutit pushes the envelope by using time-lapse photography to make thousands of stills, which he then turns into videos.  The team Kahn & Selesnick, who photograph their own elaborably staged semi-fictional historical narratives, will also be in the show.
   
Carrie Haddad Photographs
318 Warren Street; 518 828 7655
Opening reception Saturday, November 29, 6 - 8 p.m.
Gallery hours: Thursday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 9 p.m.
Sunday & Monday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 11/24/08 at 01:12 PM • Permalink

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