Breaking news, upcoming events, and periodic musings from the Weisman Art Museum.
November 2, 2009
They got WAMmered: ceremonial groundbreaking 10/26
"Get WAMmered" was the theme of the ceremonial groundbreaking celebration at the Weisman Monday, October 26. It marked the beginning of construction on the museum's 8,100 square foot expansion project, which will add five new galleries by fall 2011.
Watch a video:
Visitors lifted a hammer and tested their strength on the High Striker. (Those who hit the bell at the top won a limited-edition t-shirt.)
University president Robert Bruininks noted the importance of the occasion in his remarks to attendees. "This is an exciting moment for the Weisman," he said. "But it is exciting for the University of Minnesota as well, as we contemplate our enormous cultural and artistic resources, and as we work to integrate arts and culture more closely into the life and curriculum of the University."
Museum volunteers raised more than $10 million from private sources for the expansion project. Target Corporation committed an additional $2 million, and the University of Minnesota contributed $2.5 million.
Joan Dayton, who co-chaired the project's capital campaign, also spoke at the event. (Carol Bemis and Karen Bachman were the other campaign co-chairs.) University vice president Steven Rosenstone and Target Corporation vice president Minda Gralnek made additional remarks.
Officials marked the occasion by raising a silver sledgehammer and pounding a steel stake into the ground where the construction will take place.
New late-night series at WAM launches with Mates of State
Music is at the center of WAMplified!, a new late-night series at WAM. Offered three times a year, WAMplified! presents a live performance by a band or musician with a thematic connection to the major exhibition in the galleries.
In conjunction with the WAM exhibition To Have It About You: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Mates of State--featuring husband-and-wife team Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner--headline the inaugural installment on December 12, 2009 (doors at 9 p.m.). Anders Ponders opens. The event also includes food, drink, a video game lounge, and a midnight tour of the exhibition led by curator Diane Mullin and artist Lisa Bradley. Tickets ($22; $18 students and Weisman members) available here or by calling 612-624-2345.
You'd never suspect they are movers and shakers in New York's insider art world. She's a no-nonsense retired librarian, and he's an ex-postal worker who wears deliberately mismatched clothing. For decades, they've lived in a modest Manhattan apartment with their turtles, fish, cat--and more than 4,000 pieces of conceptual, minimalist, and other contemporary art. Meet Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, whose art collection has been called (by their friend, artist Sol Le Witt) "the most important in the U.S."
A portion of the Vogels' collection is now part of the Weisman Art Museum's permanent collection. Through a gift program designed by the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, works by 50 different artists from the Vogels' collection found a new home at the Weisman this fall. See a slideshow and hear more about the art that came to the Weisman here.
The national gift program has distributed the Vogels' collection of contemporary art throughout the nation, with a hand-picked assortment going to a selected art institution in each of the fifty states. The Weisman was chosen as the Minnesota institution. Artists whose work came to the Weisman include Lisa Bradley, Mark Kostabi, Lucio Pozzi, Alan Shields, Edda Renouf, Richard Tuttle, and many others.
2009-10 exhibition season focuses on art and the everyday
Home videos posted on YouTube. Personal photos shared with the world on Flickr. The widespread appeal of the Do-It-Yourself cable channel. America's fascination with "everyday" life is clear. Beginning this fall, the Weisman Art Museum (WAM) will launch a yearlong exploration of the idea of the everyday in art and culture.
This fascination with the everyday-and its relationship to art-isn't unique to contemporary times. American artists have explored themes of the everyday for decade. For example, in the early 20th century, American painters founded the Ashcan School and depicted the street life of New York City. Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Beuys questioned the distinctions between art objects and everyday objects.
Weisman Art Mob visits a shabby house turned modern home
Interior windows and translucent walls. Waterfall-tread steel stairs. Paired single-car garages. These are a few of the innovative elements that make architect Geoffrey Warner's Saint Paul bungalow an ideal family home.
For their July event, Weisman Art Mob members were invited inside the home and immediately began to comment on its thoughtfully planned living spaces, constructed with a blend of traditional and innovative building materials. Warner is principal architect at Alchemy Architects and his house, known as the Goodrich House, was one of many custom architecture projects for the firm. Alchemy is best known for its weeHouse, a modern manufactured home that arrives on lots in prefabricated portions and is assembled in hours.
Warner and his wife Dawn De Kayser--also an architect--purchased the home despite its sagging floors, impractical room divisions, dark spaces, and an unfinished upstairs. He and Dawn wanted to create a practical and functional space for their family of four to thrive for years to come. Their strategy was to remove unnecessary walls and create room divisions through building storage elements and custom furniture. They installed skylights, translucent walls, and interior windows to keep the house naturally and efficiently illuminated, even into the twilight hours.
Outside, the Warners have created an expansive-feeling space within their standard city lot. With landscaping help from Phillips Garden, the yard is colorfully cast using a variety of materials including Ipe decking, copper, siding, rocks, and grasses. Twin garages nestled neatly near a tidy vegetable garden and connected by a weathered steel alley wall add a historical feel and lots of charm.
Warner (pictured above right), De Kayser, and Alchemy Architects operations manager Betsy Gabler carried on individual conversations with Art Mobbers throughout the night. Members left for the evening having experienced a home that is balanced between ornate and functional, sensible and lush, and traditional and modern.
The next learning adventure for Art Mob members takes place in September; a walking tour of the U of M's public art collection. Learn more about Art Mob membership and view a full calendar of events.
From the collection: Lyonel Feininger's Drobsdorf I
This regular series offers a glimpse into the Weisman's permanent collection. Each post features an object currently on view in the galleries.
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) is known for paintings of landscape and architectural scenes that depict the environment through layered, structured planes of space. Feininger, an American expatriate who resided in Germany until World War II, originally trained as a musician, but developed into a cartoonist in the early 1900's. It was after his encounter with the French cubists in 1911 that he realized his unique painting style.
Feininger insisted that unlike cubism, a movement in which planes of space were also fractured to present the viewer with an alternate way of viewing the world, his technique created depth instead of drawing attention to the surface. The artist's fascination with landscape and architectural scenes allowed him to explore themes of light versus shadow, and material versus immaterial. In his paintings, each of these qualities embodies the same weight and presence as the other, effectively merging the tangible and intangible.
Drobsdorf I was painted along the shore of a coastal European town. It depicts a white church whose tall spire creates a sense of ascending motion. This is further augmented by the planes of atmosphere that press into and against the building. Color is the only factor that indicates different representational forms: the white of the church stands in stark contrast to the more muted colors of the sky and earth.
The Weisman purchased Drobsdorf I from the artist in 1939. Upon his return to the United States in 1936, Feininger faced criticism from American compatriots who thought of him solely as a German artist. It was only after his work began to be exhibited by major American galleries and museums in the late 1930's that it became recognized and appreciated as that of an American artist.
Working with visitors of all ages, and volunteer gallery guides we here in the Weisman education department (Judi and Jamee) wanted space to share some of the great questions, ideas and experiences that go down as people dig into our exhibitions. Kicking this off during the exhibition "Stories from the Somali Diaspora"--the powerful photographs by Abdi Roble seems like a perfect plan. So here are some thoughts from Judi.
Rooted in Abdi Roble's visual images that document this forced migration, I've heard some important, sincere and sometimes hard conversations take place in our galleries. Why did these families leave Somalia? Why Minnesota? What's with the Hijab? Where or what or when is "home"?
Abdi's photos are powerful and visitors have been moved by stories of violence, survival, strength and humanity. Being so close to a large portion of the Somali community in Minneapolis--our West Bank neighbors--I've been made more aware of my own cultural assumptions and unexamined fears as I met more Somalis, particularly young Somali women. It has offered a sort of education programming gut check--what is our relationship beyond campus to our diverse surrounding communities? We talk access and engagement, but do we really do it? Can we do better? We are so fortunate photographer Abdi Roble brought not only his artwork, but his enthusiasm and compassion to town, offering a foundation we have all built on.
One of the collaborative ideas that emerged was to create an ongoing, weekly art club with young kids from The Brian Coyle Community Center's summer program.
Working with Coyle Arts Coordinator Angel Peluso, each Tuesday this summer, a group of kids came over from the west bank to the museum to look into art ideas and create some work in response. We've had the help of teen artist Kendall Ray to get this rolling, and hope to grow with other neighboring community and arts organizations.
The Brian Coyle Center Art Club kids have been exploring identity, materials, architecture and visual storytelling.
We're having a blast getting to know these young artists and to share ideas with their dedicated teachers and organizers. For our last summer session we went over to Brian Coyle and helped kids make shaped hats to wear in a final celebration parade planned with Bedlam Theater. The hats...well...they got a bit tall.
Thanks to Angel for her enthusiasm and here's to our continued neighborhood collaborations!
Crews from the Weisman and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) installed Robert Rauschenberg's Currents at the Weisman. Currents, a 54-foot screenprint that is part of the MIA collection, is featured in the Weisman's exhibition Au Courant, which opens June 20.
Thirteen crew members from both museums collaborated on the installation, conditioning the print, installing plexiglass sheets and hoisting the print on four lifts to hang it on the wall.
A genetically-modified petunia is the centerpiece of Eduardo Kac: Natural History of the Enigma, a new exhibition opening April 17 at the Weisman Art Museum. The exhibition runs through June 21, 2009. The public is invited to meet the artist at an opening reception from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 17 at the Weisman.
The exhibition is the result of a three-year collaboration between artist Eduardo Kac and University of Minnesota scientist Neil Olszewski. Kac and Olszewski have created and propagated a new life form—a transgenic petunia—by fusing proteins from both a plant and from Kac himself. Kac’s DNA is expressed only in the flower’s red veins. The Weisman exhibition features the transgenic plant and prints based on the seeds produced for the project.
"The result of this molecular manipulation is a bloom that creates the living image of human blood rushing through the veins of a flower," Kac said. "This piece is a reflection on the contiguity of life between different species. It uses the redness of blood and the redness of the plant's veins as a marker of our shared heritage in the wider spectrum of life."
This regular series offers a glimpse into the Weisman's permanent collection. Each post will feature an object currently on view in the galleries.
Milton Avery’s Still Life is not a window through which we look to find a perfectly realistic scene, and if it were—oh, what a Technicolor world we’d live in! Instead, Avery (1885–1965) composed Still Life with bold blocks of deeply saturated colors that flatten the picture plane, simplify forms, and ultimately create a harmonious, dynamic composition.
A contemporary of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and mentor to Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, Avery worked tirelessly to instill an appreciation of color and form in American art. As art historian Alfred Jensen noted, “Milton Avery brought color to America.” Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Avery developed a style that used broad washes of bright color. He treated each shape as a single color area, flattening and abstracting his images.
Weisman Art Museum:
Phuong, your self-portraits from Vietnam featured in Changing Identity represent complicated relationships: between you and your family, Americans and Vietnamese, and between viewers and subjects. We look forward to hearing you talk more about this series and about projects you have developed since. Could you give us a preview?
Phuong M. Do:
The self portrait work was a seven year process. While a sense of disconnect from my relatives doesn’t really go away, I have come to accept it for what it is...and that I will probably not ever feel familiar with them or they with me. Having known something about my family history—though fragmented—provides me context so that I can form own sense of self.
The "abandoned photographs" project [involving secondhand shop image collections] is an extension of the self portrait work in that the personal family photographs are lost and disconnected from their “family.�? They also provide visual snippets of narratives about peoples’ lives in a time and place that are part of the larger historical and cultural puzzle for not only Vietnamese in diasporas but for those living in Vietnam. They are also displaced by war. I haven’t had much time to work on the images but I have been thinking about ways to make the images accessible to people and perhaps become identified. I think the webspace is a great place for that but I need to conceptualize how they will be presented and if they are identified by their owners, how to integrate that into the narrative.
I brought some of my new, lacquered photographs to show at Sunday’s talk because the projected image does not really show the physical sensibility of the work. The lacquer work is more conceptual in terms of my feelings about a sense of place and space. It also integrates a process that is specific to Vietnam. Lacquer’s preservation qualities...can be likened to the photographic medium and process.
Weisman Art Museum:
Thank you, Phuong, we look forward to seeing and hearing more this Sunday at 2pm in your dialogue with Changing Identity curator Nora Taylor!
2008 Year in Review: The Big Picture for Minnesota Arts
Weisman curator Diane Mullin contributed the following to the 2008 Year in Review feature for <a href="www.mnartists.org> target="_blank">mnartists.org:
TRENDSPOTTING: PROLETARIAN ART, BLOGGING ARTISTS, SPOKEN WORD & DIY CRAFT
Northern Lights: This “roving, collaborative, interactive media-oriented, arts agency from the Twin Cities for the world” was founded by our own media arts impresario, Steve Dietz. This new style arts enterprise has already given us the city-wide “Unconvention�?—a collaborative effort to produce and support art in response to the RNC in St. Paul and by extension the state of our nation’s political theater/reality; Artists on the Verge—a new fellowship and mentoring program that supports Minnesota artists working experimentally at the intersection of art and technology, with a focus on practices that are social, collaborative and/or participatory; and what may be the most interesting blog on art and the public sphere out there. As Dietz noted about the Artist on the Verge program in the Daily Planet profile: “There are some exceptional artists here and there are some strong programs at MCAD and the U.; but there isn’t the strong environment of support you get in San Fran and New York.�? Bravo to Dietz and to Jerome, AOV partner and funder for helping our city to catch up with its artists.
West Bank Shop: Taking its name from an already existing sign in a storefront window on Cedar Avenue, West Bank Shop is a collective of 13 artists (Beth Jeffries Barnes, T.J. Barnes, Rebekah Champ, Adrian Freeman, Travis Freeman, Katinka Galanos, Jason Gaspar, Lauren Herzak-Bauman, Sam Hoolihan, Lisa McGrath, Peter McLarnan, Peter Haakon Thompson, and Brennan Vance)—many students or alums of the University of Minnesota—who temporarily took over a former tobacco shop on the West Bank to present art work and events that pushed the boundaries of what art is and how it can be presented and interpreted. The plan was to utilize the shop space as a place for art to happen. In a statement—a manifesto of sorts—the group declared; “We conceive our project as an engaged, fluid, critical and playful endeavor. A project that is open and experimental, collaborative and process-based, conceptual, and social.�? The project existed as scheduled for 50 days and included events such as an artists hair styling, an open record spin so that people who no longer have turn tables but can’t trash their vinyl could sonically revisit their albums, and my favorites—the baking and sharing of bread with artist Travis Freeman and Peter Haakon Thompson’s “Teach me Your Language,�? where the artist opened the door to the linguistically diverse community of the West Bank asking to be taught its many tongues—a brilliant reversal of the traditional museum conceit that it educates. Though the original space is now more permanently occupied by another entity, the collective is seeking new digs. Let’s hope they find some and give us another bright spot in 2009.
All in all, these beacons of experimental social and public practice seem like a good turn for the Twin Cities. A welcome respite from the building campaigns of the last decade, it is hopeful that such entities can—even must—exist here.
—Diane Mullin, Associate Curator, Weisman Art Museum
Well, this is it, my final post. I’d like to thank the staff at the Weisman Art Museum for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with the net-surfing public.
As the only artist on the museum’s inaugural blog team, I’m sure the folks at the Weisman were hoping I’d write a bit more about art. However, my allotted blog-time encompassed the ground-breaking 2008 election, the national economic melt-down, the Franken-Coleman senate recount, and the annual bitter-sweetness of the holiday season. My heart was in the street, not the studio.
What’s happening now in our country and communities is a paradigm shift of monumental proportions. This shift will bring changes and challenges that require our care and attention. No armchair quarterbacking. We’ve got to get in the game. Which underscores the premise I’d planned to make when I accepted this blogging gig last summer: that the personal is political, and that life – the personal – can be a work of art when approached with intention and creativity.
Though I am primarily an interdisciplinary and public artist, I also paint. Painting in the studio is, for me, a form of visual journaling and highly meditative. For ten years I have worked on various bodies of work but most of my paintings share one thing in common: the ongoing study of the horizon line as visual metaphor.
Night Seeds, Camille J. Gage, 2003
Readers of my earlier posts know that I lost my mother unexpectedly 27 years ago. This early loss inspired an ongoing interest in the dualities that form the core of our existence: life and death, day and night, good and evil, darkness and light. It is the tension, the shimmering place where these realities intersect, that compels me. Such sweet mystery!
The Uruguayan writer and social philosopher, Eduardo Galeano, once commented that art-making is our attempt to make sense of the inevitability of death and that its pursuit must never be reduced to a specialized practice exercised only by a handful of ‘experts.’ Like Thoreau, Galeano believed that we all have the ability – and perhaps even the responsibility – to make art of our very lives. It’s a utopian vision, but then what IS so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?
“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.?
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