Lawrence Argent’s "Red Rabbit", glass-covered aluminum sculpture

"Red Rabbit" from the escalator, mezzanine level

Joan Moment, "A Fragment of the Universe", mosaic

Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, well-known for glass sculptures, including one made of bottles that recently went up in Palo Alto, takes the substantially tarnished idea of home and gives it a mind-bending twist with a structure defiantly titled This House Will Not Pass for Any Color but its Own. Built of hand-blown slabs of purple glass held aloft by cylindrical red posts sunk into the terrazzo floor, the dwelling, sized and shaped like a bus stop shelter, stands just outside a security screening area. 

Mildred Howard, "This House Will Not Pass for Any Color but its Own", glass sculpture

Like the Red Rabbit, its appearance varies according to the time of day. It’s both transparent and reflective, and when it reflects light it sometimes does so with blinding intensity. Stand inside and you get a different experience. Metallic-hued strips embedded in the glass appear to be identical, but they are not. As with the exterior, some are transparent and others are reflective. What’s impossible to know unless someone tells you is that those pieces also spell out – in a highly abstract fashion – bits of text from Gold Rush-era letters that Howard sourced from the California Historical Society. It was a way, says the artist, of pulling the past into the future “using the physics of light “as a metaphor” to show us “what’s here and what’s gone. You see your reflection in these fragmented letters and you become part of that experience whether you know it or not.” 

Donald Lipski, "Acorn Steam", mixed media sculpture.  The wave form in the ceiling is real, no need to adjust your monitor.

Living Lenses, "Your Words are Music to My Ears", interactive sound installation

Camille Utterback and Michelle Higa, "Active Ecosystem", interactive video installation

Suzanne Adan, "Flying Colors, mosaic

Shelly Willis w/Lawrence Argent (in background) installing the Red Rabbit  Photo: Lawrence Campling

Christian Moeller, "The Baggage Handlers," low relief wood wall hanging

Lynn Criswell, "As the Crow Flies", terazzo and steel floor, suspended resin sculptures   Photo: courtesy of the artist

Marcia Stuermer "Migration", acrylic ceiling

Christian Boltanski, "Chance", French Pavilion

Every two years during the past decade, I have traveled to the Venice Biennial with the intent of writing something about it, but not right away. My strategy has always been to hang back for a bit and think about the exhibition, giving the bloggers and top-ten list chatterboxes the first words on the subject. Only then do I give my grave and deeply considered pronouncements, which in the case of the current iteration of the event, boil down to this: it is a respectable, predictable and boring affair. This might have to do with the national identity of its artistic director, Bice Curiger, the well-known founding editor of Zurich’s Parkett Magazine, an eminently respected publication that has done much to promote the fortunes of major American and European artists during the past three decades, as well as engender and reflect a significant shift in the priorities of contemporary art patronage. There is a saying that signifies trouble-free operation: “smooth as a Swiss watch,” and this Swiss watch of an art exhibition is as smooth as any cache of investment-grade artificial silk. A banker’s delight, this oddly placid iteration of the Biennial reeks of the turning of the recent respectability of contemporary art into an empty fetish, as befits our moment’s conflation of art fortunes and equity positions. The Biennial also contains a much larger percentage of dead artists than any of its recent predecessors.  

Boltanski: another view of "Chance"

Thomas Hirschhorn, "The Crystal of Resistance, Swiss Pavilion

Corinne Wasmuht, "ILLUMInations", The Arsenale

Maurizio Cattelan, "Touristi", 2011, taxidermied pigeons

Scenes from the Italian Pavilion

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, "Track and Field", U.S. Pavilion

Mike Nelson, "I, Impostor", British Pavilion

Jack Goldstein @ Central Pavilion

Latifa Echakhch: “Fantasia” , 2011, fiberglass flag poles, max. height 10 m

Gianni Colombo, "Spazia Elastico"

Michael Parekowhai, "Chapman’s Homer", 2011, bronze, stainless steel

Moving Parts Press, "Codex Espanglinesis from Columbus to the Border Patrol", 1998

If you’ve grown accustomed to designing books or brochures or even birthday cards on a PC, you may not fully appreciate the fact that typography and book design were once the province of skilled tradesmen (and women) who wielded industrial hand tools with a pride of purpose that today has practically vanished. For a reminder of what limited-edition fine press publishing looked like in the pre-digital age, The Art of the Book in California: Five Contemporary Presses offers a lively, literary display of book objects – one whose artistry, while not entirely grounded in the realm of fine art, is hardly extinguished or forgotten. Ranging from the downright funny to the poetic, the 50 books on view have a sensual appeal that comes primarily from the sculptural heft imparted by digital design’s progenitor: hand-composed metal type. In an era when the printed word faces extinction, this show feels like an appropriate bit of advocacy in favor of the “book beautiful” in which text comes first. The exhibition is drawn entirely from the extraordinary holdings on art of the book in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford Libraries. It is organized by Guest Curator Peter Rutledge Koch in collaboration with Special Collection’s Roberto Trujillo and the Cantor’s Alison Roth.   In addition, the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art offers a concurrent show of original book art, Rebound, about which I’ll say more later. 

Foolscap Press, "Herakles and Eurystheusian 12-Step Program", 2009

Moving Parts Press, "Documentado/Undocumentado (Relia Box)", work in progress. Courtesy of Felicia Rice

Turkey Press, "The Standard", 1977

Peter Koch Printers, "The Lost Journals of Sacajawea", 2010

Foolscap Press, "Other Worlds: Journey to the Moon, 2004

Ninja Press, "Burn Down the Zendo", 2004

Documentado/Undocumented, a related collaboration with writer and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, is an accordion-folded, codex book with a text accompanied by a performance DVD. It includes contributions by filmmaker Gustavo Vasquez and art critic Jennifer Gonzalez, with soundscapes by Zachary Watkins. All of these elements are contained an aluminum trunk, a cabinet of curiosities lined with bright green feathers that also houses ritual objects, an altar, and Mexican wrestling masks.

Ninja Press, XXIV, Short Love Poems, 2002

Peter Koch Printers, "Diogenese Defictions (Detail)", 1994

Koch uses the term “photo-interventions” for his digital adaptations of historic images seen in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, 2010. Sepia tinted, they suggest the ghostly distance of time and shadows of memory.  While Sacajewea’s name may be recognized due to the mythologizing lore of Western adventure, there is little known about this Native American woman, who traveled with the explorer team of Lewis and Clark in 1805.  Debra Magpie Earling, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, who teaches at the University of Montana, lends both poetic voice and prophetic vision to Sacajewea as a pregnant seventeen year old traveling up the Missouri River.  The type is a digital variation selected by Koch for its “retrogressive old-style irregularity.” The binding, designed by Koch, is covered in smoked buffalo rawhide paper by  Amanda Degener and its spine contains trade beads and a small caliber cartridge case—all tactile symbols of encroachment on and the destruction of Native American lands.

Ninja Press, The Real World of Manuel Córdova. Courtesy Carolee Campbell

All five presses in The Art of the Book had their genesis in the book-arts renaissance that was primarily situated in the Bay Area during the 1970s; its history, as the catalogue demonstrates, is broad-based, ranging from letterpress printing in the Gold Rush to the latest digital advances. In Robert Bringhurst’s catalog essay, “What the Ink Sings to the Paper,” he cites a “watershed distinction between these five presses and the many that preceded them. Every printer in this show is deeply familiar with the meditative pleasures of handsetting metal type, but each has lived some decades in the digital age and felt the changes it is bringing.” They may veer into the genre of artists’ books, use digital processes, or expand the very nature of the book into performance and installation. At the same time, these versatile designer/printer/ proprietors use fine press techniques that lend unparalleled sensual appeal and clarity of design to their exquisite books.  It is a steadfast tradition documented by Special Col.  The hybrid books in The Art of the Book are fresh inflections of the “book beautiful” tradition that William Morris launched in reaction to the revolution of his own day: the Industrial Revolution. 

Rebound: A Survey of Contemporary California Artist’s Books @ Sonoma Valley Museum of  Art

Rebound is a potpourri of an exhibition with singular delights and unbound categories, ranging from fine press books with a hand-made appearance to one-of-a-kind book objects. In contrast to the Stanford exhibitions, most examples privilege the artist’s vision in their creation. The exhibition is a counterpoint to Sonoma’s concurrent traveling exhibition curated by Robert Flynn Johnson, Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, by Britain’s great art star David Hockney. It focuses on the 39 etchings that accompanied a deluxe, limited edition of the fine press book of the same name published by Petersburg Press in 1970. In Hockney’s reach to evoke the dark magic of his first readings, he instilled a mood to placate any contemporary Goth. And there’s a bit of wit, too, to match the artist’s view that narratives of scary fairy tales are really quite outlandish. There is the enchantress, who is bit of a thorny old crone, and there is the man who tore himself apart, an unusual feat without a tweet. 

Dominic Di Mare, "Rendezvous", 2006, watercolor, ink, cutouts

 

In Rebound, first-time curator Simon Blattner has done well to include Hockney’s 1963 livre d’artiste entitled Rake’s Progress. Based, in part, on William Hogarth’s prints of the same title, it narrates intensely autobiographical events through Hockney’s quasi-primitive pop pictures as a cautionary tale without text. Other highlights include Chris Burden’s diaristic Coyote Stories (2005); Bettina Pauley’s sculptural book objects; Kali-fornia Dreamin (2006), by William Wiley with its 40 buttons printed by Magnolia Editions; and four unique artist books in pristine watercolor by Dominic Di Mare.

Di Mare’s Paris (2003), whose vellum-like pages evoke intricate, vertical stained glass windows, is a serial meditation in black and white on linear and geometric form.  In contrast, Rendezvous is far more spare.  Here a metamorphosis occurs in abstract figurative elements, which are meticulously formed by tiny dots. Di Mare’s books have an almost musical progression and in Trip (2006) there is an initial sweetness to the tempo that builds up to a crescendo.  Curator Simon Blattner offers a suggestion for viewing Di Mare’s books: “Muse to yourself how long this work might have taken to complete and how rigorous is the process. This could only have been done by and through the total concentration of an artist who knows that he can make time stand still.” Part of the enchantment of Di Mare’s books comes from the tiny geometric, peep holes that reveal enticing clues to the configurations on the next page.  An associated, multi-layered book object, Rendezvous (2010), reveals a similar kind of exquisite surgery.  The museum has mounted some books with second pages in view through their Plexiglas supports, a good solution to the age-old dilemma in presenting book exhibitions in which only one page is visible, and in the case of Di Mare’s books, we may test how true our expectations have been.  That desire to discover what is concealed is, in fact, part of the great intrigue of book exhibitions.   

The Art of the Book in California: Five Contemporary Presses and Illustrated Title Pages: 1500-1900 @ Cantor Art Center through August 28, 2011

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Can San Francisco support three art fairs – all of them on the same four-day weekend, May 19-22?  Promoters are betting that it can. Rick Friedman, president of Hamptons Expo Group, which last year produced the San Francisco Fine Arts Fair (SFFAF) at Fort Mason, is back for a second turn with a group of local, out-of-state and international galleries. So, too, are his former top executives, Max Fishko and Jeffrey Wainhouse. With support from a group of dealers who were dissatisfied with SFFAF’s performance last year, the Brooklyn-based team created a competing fair, artMRKT, at the Concourse Exhibition Center, 7^th & Brannan.  If that weren’t enough, a third event, ArtPadSF, funded by Joie de Vivre hotel chain founder, Chip Conley, will set up at the rock ‘n roll-storied Phoenix Hotel, providing an ultra-hip venue for Bay Area dealers who represent emerging artists.  

Vik Muniz, “The Icebergs, after Frederick E. Church”, 2007, digital c-print 68 x 119” Photo: Rena Bransten Gallery. The gallery will feature a one-person show of the artist’s large-scale works @ artMRKT

Based on what happened last year we think there is a big enough base,” says Wainhouse on behalf of artMRKT. “We got a good response and we decided to do something else to continue and make it better.” His strategy: “create more collectors by bringing in more good galleries and by creating diversity.” “Our model,” adds his partner, Fishko, “is to go into the community and be an effective organizer.” Fishko, whose grandmother started Forum Gallery in New York in 1961, and whose connections to Bay Area dealers run deep, used his knowledge and experience to convince a number of former SFFAF exhibitors to switch sides. “He knows the business very, very well. He’s really the one who put his shoe leather into the last fair,” says Trish Bransten, president of the San Francisco Art Dealers Association (SFADA) and co-director of the Rena Bransten Gallery. 

Roy De Forest, “Painting the Big Painting”, 1993; acrylic and mixed media on canvas; 72 × 72 ¼ × 5¼” Photo: Brian Gross Fine Art. @ artMRKT

Frances McCormack, “Sprites at PLP”, 2008, oil on canvas on panel, 55 x 51” Photo: Elins-Eagles Smith Gallery @ artMRKT

Chris Eckert and Martin Fox, “Auto Ink”, 2010, polychromed metal and microelectronics, 54 x 22 x 20” Photo: Michael Rosenthal Gallery; Doug Thielscher, “Trudy”, 2010, marble, wood, aluminum, soil, leaves, 68 x 21” 26”. Photo: McLoughlin Gallery; Jeremiah Jenkins, “Blue Collar Bushido” Photo: Ever Gold Gallery. All @ ArtPadSF

Sohan Qadri, “Vedanta III”, 2007, Ink and dye on paper 55 x 39" Photo: Sundaram Tagore Gallery. @ SFFAF

Now that the all-new, tripled-in-size Crocker Art Museum has opened, it’s hard to decide which aspects of this achievement are the most remarkable: the building itself, the art inside or the fact that the project actually materialized. 

Over the past two decades nearly every urban renewal idea hatched in Sacramento has failed.  Yet by operating above the fray of local politics (and, apparently, outside the black hole of post-crash economics) the Crocker, led by Director Lial Jones, scored a succession of hits.  It raised $100 million from mostly private sources.  It hired Charles Gwathmey to build an architectural masterpiece, and over the project’s 10-year gestation period, it used its growing clout to convince artists and collectors to part with some 4,000 works of art valued at between $25 and $50 million, according to Chief Curator Scott Shields.

The results are something to behold.  The new structure seamlessly blends the Crocker family’s original Italianate Victorian buildings with a 21^st century design.  Its 19th-century pomp meets high-modernist slick, but without any of the ego-flexing we’re accustomed to seeing in “art chapels” designed by big-name architects.  To be sure, there are plenty of high-tech appurtenances.  Sleek, curving exterior lines, glassed-in cylindrical porticoes (echoing Victorian-era cupolas), an exterior sheathing of aluminum and zinc panels and a saw-tooth roof, whose clear panels let natural light stream into galleries – these are just a few of the expanded museum’s key features.  (Now, you can even buy a cup of coffee and a sandwich in the museum café or take in a film or a lecture in the 260-seat auditorium – two things that were never possible during the museum’s first 125 years.)  Yet from the exterior little of this is even hinted at; you could pass by on surface streets or on Interstate 5, which abuts the museum to the west, just a stone’s throw from the Sacramento River where prospectors once plucked nuggets, and never notice.  The real beauty of the all-new Crocker lies within.

 Michael Stevens, "Spike", 1988

The upstairs galleries of the expanded 125,000-square foot new wing are a labyrinthine maze of interconnected rooms: light-filled spaces that seem to flow one into the other, each revealing a different part of the Crocker collection.  It’s a bad-news/good-news proposition.  Much of what the museum inherited from its benefactor, Judge Edwin B. Crocker, just isn’t very good.  On various buying sprees, the judge and his wife, Margaret, loaded up on Central European paintings that hang on the walls of one very opulent, very beautiful room in the original gallery.  California Impressionists, a group that made negligible contributions, also occupy substantial space.  To their credit, the Crockers amassed one of the world’s largest collections of Old Master drawings.  Those, too, have a room of their own.  More recently, the museum, which was already a major player in ceramics, acquired Sidney Swidler’s encyclopedic collection of 800 pieces.  They roam from the merely functional to the utterly phantasmagorical and are documented in a 408-page catalog written by Associate Curator Diana Daniels.

Gordon Onslow Ford, "Voyagers in Space", 1971, acyrlic on canvas

Perhaps the most entertaining part of the museum, which I’ll call the “Early California Room”, is dominated on one wall by the high-kitsch dramas of Charles Christian Nahl (1818-1878), a failed prospector who earned his living painting commissions for San Francisco’s elite.  His rose-tinted, Arabian Nights meets Rape of the Sabine Women depictions of virgins being pursued by lusting horsemen look like something straight out Cecille B. DeMille.   

The really good news is that the Crocker, which bills itself as “the oldest museum in the West,” can now host traveling exhibitions and display about 20 percent of its permanent collection — up from about five percent before the expanded museum re-opened October 10 after a six-month hiatus.  This means – finally — that the Crocker can shed its reputation as a stodgy repository of inconsequential art.  It can now, for the first time ever, show its stuff.  And it has plenty to show.  Spread across two floors, and organized into various thematic categories (e.g. Pop, Latino, Funk, Bay Area Figuration, Abstract Expressionism), are works that represent a Who’s Who of Northern California art, much of it from the post-WWII period when the axis of cultural authority briefly tilted toward the West Coast.

Highlights include major works by Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Bruce Conner, David Park, Frank Lobdell, Christopher Brown, Paul Wonner, Michael Stevens, Suzanne Adan, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Viola Frey, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, Hung Liu, Marilyn Levine, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Brady, Mike Henderson, William Allan, Deborah Oropallo, Robert Colescott, Peter Vandenberge, Martin Ramirez, Stephen De Staebler, Raymond Saunders, Enrique Chagoya, Stephen Kaltenbach and Peter Voulkos.

Charles Simonds (detail): "Dwelling", 1982

Then, there are a slew of wonders that defy easy categorization.  Two that stand out are Charles Simons’ ceramic wall installation which mimics, at a vastly reduced scale, an Anasazi cliff dwelling.  The other is Richard Notkin’s earthenware tile “painting” of George W. Bush, All Nations Have Their Moments of Foolishness which photorealistically depicts the 43^rd U.S. president and his sins.  It’s been in the Crocker’s possession for some time now, but it still stuns.  So does Stephen Kaltenbach’s deathbed portrait of his father.

 I’ve heard complaints that the walls are overcrowded, and they are.  But they’re done smartly and tastefully and with full awareness of the unexpected conjunctions that can arise, like the one that occurs between Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford’s painting Voyagers in Space and the biomorphic totems seen in ceramic sculptor Toshiko Takaezu’s Devastation Trees.  You’ll find them on the third floor.

Will the museum always pack so many works into the building?  I doubt it.  My guess is that this is a one-time performance, designed to give the public a taste of what the museum has acquired but couldn’t show for lack of space.

Are there other nits to pick?  Yes, I’ve got a few.  The Crocker should really have at least a couple major works by William Wiley.  The single painting of his that it has on display is the same one it’s shown for years, Columbus Rerouted (1962). It’s a pale reflection of what Wiley accomplished later.  Photography is another gaping hole.  In the entire museum, I counted only four images.  Two is by Edward Burtynsky; one is by Robert Maplethorpe; the other is by George Platt Lyne.  None are notable.

While the Crocker is not the contemporary art museum that many hoped it might become in its new incarnation, it’s not your grandmother’s Crocker, either.  While the museum remains committed to mounting shows that reflect its current and historic strengths — drawings and prints; Flemish, Dutch, Central European and Italian art from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries; American Impressionism; early and contemporary California art; international ceramics; and art from Asia, Africa and Oceania – it also plans to keep at least a toehold in the present.

Hung Liu, "Shoemaker", 1999, oil on canvas

In January, for example, it will open Inferno of the Innocents, an exhibit by Vienna-born painter/photographer Gottfried Helnwein, whose depictions of inhumanity and violence are sure to ruffle feathers amongst the Crocker’s more conservative constituents.

The single best thing about the new Crocker is that it gives Sacramentans a way to view important art locally — without having to travel or imagine what it looks like from reproductions.  In revitalizing this historic institution, the Crocker demonstrated that at least one part of California’s capital city actually works.  Now it has a museum that everyone can be proud of.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Arshile Gorky, “Betrothal”, 1947, oil on paper, 51 x 40 inches

For nearly a week we roamed: from Santa Monica to Hollywood, from Beverley Hills to downtown, and from Claremont to Pasadena. We reveled in the wackiness and tackiness of it all — and yes, got stuck in some epic traffic snarls. Our reward: a handful of worthy shows, some of them life-changing.    

Arshile Gorky’s (1904-1948) retrospective at MOCA ranks high among the latter.  It’s difficult to imagine any artist today attaining Gorky’s level of prominence after operating for so many years in the shadow of others. He spent his most of his adult life working through Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Miro, de Chirico and other modernist masters.  Thus, in two thirds of this show, we see him wrestling with those influences without ever really coming into his own.  Then, somewhere around 1940, eight years before he committed suicide after a series of physical and emotional blows, he broke free, retaining a penchant for Surrealism, the impulse that ultimately defined him. We talk about artists walking a line between abstraction and representation, but Gorky really walked that walk.  His biomorphic shapes allude to things we know – like bodies and sex organs – but they never allow us to settle on any specific associations.  His bulges, blobs and orbs, connected by spidery lines, float in a netherworld, issuing sensations that never rise to the level of facts.  His colors are similarly ambiguous.  He often used bright hues, but the colors in his strongest works, particularly those from the Betrothal series that came toward the end, are so murky they’re difficult to name without a string of hyphens.  That they glowed in the museum’s dim light like mystical visions attest to his skills as a colorist. It is often said that Gorky presaged Abstract Expressionism, and indeed, you can see plenty of evidence; but whether he would have actually gone there given his allegiance to Surrealism remains open to debate.

Alberto Burri: “Bianco XV”, 1956, collae of canvas, burlap and oil on canvas, 23 ¾ x 19; ¾

Alberto Burri (1915-1995), the Italian Arte Povera hero, not only went there – he did so presciently, foretelling things to come.  Like Gorky, who experienced the Turkish genocide firsthand in Armenia, Burri was traumatized by war.  He served as a doctor in the Italian army until he was captured by the British in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Texas.  He spent three years there before being shipped back to Italy.  He settled in Rome. There, disillusioned by the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield, he renounced medicine and reinvented himself as an artist, scavenging whatever materials he could from a ruined city.  His early pieces consisted of burlap sacks that were crudely stitched together and splattered with scorched, gangrenous looking paint.  Widely hailed as raw analogues of his war experience, the saccos catapulted him to international fame, setting the tone for a career defined by remarkable inventions that would later become (at least in the popular imagination) more closely associated with others, particularly Robert Rauschenberg. 

Rauschenberg, as it happened, acquired the ideas for his combines from Burri whose studio he visited in 1953.  Thus, if we look at Burri’s saccos and see echoes of Rauschenberg, it’s only because the emerging New York art establishment, from 1960 until quite recently, discounted everything not stamped “Made in U.S.A.”  Combustione: Alberto Burri and America at the Santa Monica Museum of Art sets the record straight.  It showcases not only Burri’s earliest work, but also what came after, when he began dividing his time between Europe and LA.

Steve Roden: “One Mountain of Found Breath”, 2005-06, oil and acrylic on linen, 46 x 38”

From LA, Burri made frequent trips to Death Valley, and he translated those experiences into memetic “equivalents”: displays of cracked paint on fiberboard that look like they were lifted whole from the valley floor.  (These predate Andy Goldsworthy’s clay wall works by decades.)  For me, Burri’s most electrifying works are his combustiones, accretions of plastic singed with a blowtorch.  The signature piece from this period, Nero Plastica L.A., looks like a chunk of molten obsidian that accrued and cooled inside a wooden frame.  I stared at it for a long, long time, wondering what led him to create such a thing.  Then I read a quote from the Italian critic, Giulio Carlo.  Writing in 1960, he called Burri’s practice “a sort of trompe l’oeil in reverse, in which it is not painting which simulates reality, but reality that simulates painting.”

I’d also place into the life-altering column Steve Roden’s retrospective In Between at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.  If you knew nothing of Roden, you’d probably peg him as a stoned-out hippie working in a remote cabin.  His combination of quavering lines, symbolist iconography, obscure smatterings of text, small expressionistic gestures, radical mash-ups of crazy perspective and alien topographies can only be categorized one way: visionary.

In point of fact, Roden is a highly educated, scientifically minded artist who lives in a neat, well-ordered designer house in Pasadena. Nevertheless it’s difficult not to think of him as something of a savant.  Howard N. Fox, the show’s curator, points to one organizing principle: the artist’s translation of musical scores and non-musical sounds into mathematical formulas that help generate the bare bones of each picture.  Out of that you might expect something neat, linear or symmetrical – or at the very least, something comprehensible.  What we get are free-form improvisations built layer-upon-layer that seem to be guided by an unfailing compositional instinct.  Problem is, when you view these iterative paintings close-up, they reveal some rather ham-fisted paint handling.  Oddly, this doesn’t seem to detract from the experience.  Instead, I found myself marveling at how Roden apportions the opposing impulses of logic and reason, intuition and happenstance – fashioning his synthesis into works that dangle the prospect of great meaning but yield none.

John Millei: “Maritime # 6” and “Maritime #4 (Ship’s Deck)”, both 2004; Installation view of “Maritime” series

By contrast, you’d be hard-pressed to find a painter of greater virtuosity and vision than John Millei.  He has two shows at Ace Gallery: one of his multi-part Maritime series in Los Angeles and another of pictures based on Picasso’s Portrait de femme (Dora Maar) at the gallery’s Beverly Hills branch.  The Maritime, White Squall and For Surfing paintings – 62 canvases in all – represent an astonishing reassertion of the vitality of the Abstract Expressionist impulse.  They include a monumentally scaled, realistically painted image of an 18^th century sailing vessel; highly abstract pictures of masts and rigging; and dark seascapes composed of electrically bright serpentine wave forms, painted in both color and black-and-white.  Millei uses still photographs and films as references, and the scale and impact of his works reflect both an art-historical and cinematic orientation.  While each series aspires to heroic status, his White Squall paintings most fully achieve it by capturing the blinding disorientation of a ship engulfed in a storm.

Ewerdt Hilgemann, “Imploded Cube”, 2009, Stainless Steel, 39” x 39” x 39′

Swatches of ropes, rigging, netting and cables are clearly visible, but the overall effect is of a complete white-out in which gravity and spatial relationships are suspended.  Viewing them makes feels like walking up to the edge of an abyss.  Less apocalyptic, but no less awe-inspiring, are the Maritime paintings that place us on deck and inside the hulls of these same vessels.  The views are of jagged lines and blindingly bright spaces and yawning expanses of darkness.  Millei paints them in swift, fluid strokes, some thin, some thick, alternating between glossy, dark, metallic sheens and matte-white and silvery finishes that roam from heavy impasto to nearly translucent .  The raw, unfinished quality of these lines and their visual complexity do more than just demonstrate Millei’s painterly skill.

As Donald Kuspit wrote in a recent 18,000-word essay on Artnet, Millei builds a new chapel in the religion of art from fragments of past art the way medieval cathedrals were built from the ruins of pagan temples…Turning known artistic territory into a terra incognita of abstraction, he restores art’s existential mystery.”

German sculptor Ewerdt Hilgemann’s solo U.S. debut, Panta Rhei, at Samuel Freeman creates frisson through an altogether different means: he converts the raw, inert mass of stainless steel forms into an experience of specular light by literally imploding them.  To demonstrate, Freeman shows me a video of the artist working in his studio.  With an impish twinkle in his eye, Hilgemann explains how he begins with basic forms: triangles, squares and oblong rectangles that he builds from sheet metal and buffs to a seamless, high gloss.  Some are small enough to fit on a pedestal; others approximate the size of human figures.  To these he welds a pneumatic valve which, when hooked to a generator, sucks the air out of each object with a loud boom.

Heather Gwen Martin, "Blind Spots," 2009, oil on linen, 48 x 67"; "Trigonometric Functions," 2009, oil on linen, 48 x 67"

Their kicked-in, hollowed-out look feels like a perceptual trick whose impact is compounded by the way they simultaneously reflect and refract light.  No, they don’t produce the giddy, hall-of-mirrors effect of say, Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, but on a vastly smaller scale, they come proportionally close.  They evoke the glossy sheen of minimalism while simultaneously issuing a poke in the eye to its purist orthodoxies.  Donald Judd’s gleaming boxes: deflated!

Heather Gwen Martin’s super-saturated paintings at Luis De Jesus feel, at first, like an attack on the senses, but their ultimate destination is the psyche where surrealist-inspired images behave like visions in a fever dream.  Part biomorphic, part animated cartoon, Martin’s pictures recall Gorky’s in the way her forms play at being representational, but allude to nothing specific.  In his catalog essay for the show, painter Kim MacConnell cites many precedents for Martin’s work.  They include, in addition to Gorky, a host of other surrealists and abstractionists, including the late, great John Altoon, who, like Martin, threw cartooning into his mix.

Llyn Foulkes, “Lucky Adam”, 1985, mixed media, 50 x 35”

But there’s another aspect to this work that’s equally important: color.  Sometimes color is content, and in the case of Martin, whose day job involves coloring cartoons with computers, the use of preternaturally bright hues to background animated forms – or to simply define geometric volumes — dovetails with surrealist notions of how reality can be bent.  That, as MacConnell notes, may not be fashionable, but with deep roots in art history, both local and global, Martin’s work has enough weight and whimsy to open a line of inquiry that has been closed for too long.

I concluded my LA tour at the Hammer with a view of contemporary selections that included a lot of well-known suspects, the most memorable being Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, Llyn Foulkes and Nayland Blake.  Bradford, for me, was the main draw, but it was Walker who tore my head off.  The bait-switch text of her multi-panel installation, Every Painting Is a Dead Nigger Waiting to Be Born, shows how belief systems can be peeled back to reveal racism in disguise.  Ditto for Nayland Blake’s epic rant, Scum.  It does to the male gender what Walker does to race, piling up clichés with enough force to reveal the source of their power.  Llyn Foulkes’ painting, Lucky Adam, from 1985, drains the glory from war by drenching the subject’s head in a bloody red comb-over that is positively gruesome.  It’s not an atypical painting for Foulkes; but to categorize him would be a disservice.  To wit: If you haven’t seen “The Machine”, a collection of instruments that Foulkes operates as a one-man band, you haven’t lived.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Cover detail: John Millei, "For Surfing # 3", 2001-02, oil and gesso on canvas,138 x 80" 

Alberto Burri: Combustione: @ Santa Monica Museum of Art through December 18, 2010

 Ewerdt Hilgemann: Panta Rhei @ Samuel Freeman through October 16, 2010

John Millei: Maritime @ Ace Gallery Los Angeles through November 15, 2010

Steve Roden: In between, a 20-Year Survey, Armory Center for the Arts, through Jan. 9; 2011

Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, The Hammer Museum, through January 30, 2010.

Heather Gwen Martin, Recreational Systems @ Luis De Jesus Gallery through October 16, 2010

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective closed @ MOCA Grand Ave. September 20, 2010.

Roland Reiss: “Paradisium”, 2009, acrylic on canvas; “Anthurium in Space, 2010, acrylic on canvas, both 68” x 52”

LA in the fall is a joy.  The air is clear.  Days are comfortably warm, nights are T-shirt cool, and the galleries and museums, however battered by economic stress, seem determined to put their best foot forward.  I’ve spent most of my life disparaging LA.  But now, at a riper age than when I first visited, I love LA for all the reasons I once hated it.  Its relentless car culture, its celebrity-youth obsession, its obscene displays of wealth and pervasive kitsch now seem like comforting reminders of better times. Looking at the sprawl of it all against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, it’s easy to see the appeal.  LA, despite its flaws, is a great and wondrous city.

Roland Reiss

What drew me south were three exhibits honoring Roland Reiss. As an instructor at the University of Colorado and as a hands-on chair at Claremont Graduate University (1971 to 2001), Reiss shaped two generations of artists.  At 81 he continues to work innovatively and prolifically.  He recently unveiled ten new paintings from his Flora series at CGU, along with fiberglass-and-resin works from the ‘60s at Andi Campognone Projects in Pomona.  A third show, also organized by Campognone, features Reiss alongside former University of Colorado students and colleagues at OBJCT Gallery (located in the space previously occupied by the Claremont Art Museum).  The latter, Navigating Boulder: Connecting with Roland Reiss, includes Joe Clower, Jack Edwards, Merion Estes, Judith Hudson, Connie Jenkins, Tom Jenkins, Joan Moment, Jim Richard, Clark Richert and then-visiting professor William T. Wiley.  I took the opportunity to bask in the glow of these events and survey as much of the LA scene as I could over a long weekend.   Another show, For Roland, at Bunny Gunner in Pomona, featured more than 300 works from CGU grads. 

This I did from a base near the intersection of S. Robertson and W. Pico, a neighborhood dominated by orthodox Jews and populated with tacky (and sometimes wacky) storefront shops, most of which seem to always be closed, Sabbath or not.  For me, the scene brought to mind the Tom Waits song Eggs and Sausage. At a nearby Starbucks, actors, homeless men, students, soccer moms, business types and wi-fi moochers of all stripes could be seen ordering coffee and conversing with each other in Hebrew, Spanish, English and Farsi. 

“Slipstic”, “Cosmologic”, “Twister”, “Mirage”, 1968-1969, fiberglass and resin gel coat, sizes range from 45" x 45" x 6" to 66" x 68"

Befitting the onset of Sukkot, my own harvest was just as diverse.  In addition to the Reiss events, I took in retrospectives from Arshille Gorky (MOCA @ Grand Ave.), Arte Povera pioneer Alberto Burri (Santa Monica Art Museum), Steve Roden (Pasadena Armory) and a huge show of John Millei’s paintings (Ace Gallery).  At Bergamot, we happened upon the first U.S. show of German sculptor Ewerdt Hilgemann (Samuel Freeman) and a retina-scorching exhibit of paintings from Heather Gwen Martin (Luis de Jesus), neither of whom I’d heard of previously.  At the Hammer, I checked out selections from the museum’s contemporary collection, which included head-spinning work from Mark Bradford, Llyn Foulkes, Nayland Blake and Kara Walker among others.  (I’ve have more on all the above in a separate posting.)

Reiss: "A Garden for Sally, 2010, 375 fabricated flowers, 192" x 144"

As for Reiss, his place in the firmament of LA art isn’t always easy to locate.  His most distinctive trait is mutability.  It’s kept him vital as an artist and a pedagogue of legendary status for nearly 50 years.  In 1991, when the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park mounted a 17-year retrospective of the autobiographical dioramas he calls “miniatures”, Reiss had already quit sculpture for painting.  In the years since, he’s reinvented himself continuously in that medium, with paintings that modulate between pure abstraction and glancing representation, and between his competing desires to make paintings that “don’t allude to anything outside themselves” and an equally strong urge “to engage viewers directly” by purposefully allowing “the presence of landscape” and other recognizable elements to enter into the work. 

In the Flora series, realistically painted flowers float over twisted grids that vaguely allude to an urban archeological map.  They sit directly on the picture plane atop intertwined ziggurats that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.  Some of the works contain buildings; others have backgrounds that appear to be littered with grit and dirt.  Overall, the feeling runs from elegiac (Fleur Du Mall II, 2008) to heraldic (Anthurium in Space, 2010).

Joe Clower: “Untitled (City)”, 1976-97, wood, glass, tin, 3′ x 4′ x 6′

Apart from light, which has been a central concern, Reiss has never, to my knowledge, explored nature in much depth.  He favors either pure abstraction or allusions to the “built environment” rendered in pigments laced with industrial ingredients to maximize transparency and reflectivity.  Thus, Flora is markedly different.  Yet in another respect – the use of artificial flowers as models – demonstrates a longstanding interest in the artifice of his immediate environment.  In a floor installation called A Garden for Sally he displays 375 of those flowers, stationed upright on circular wire stands. 

It’s tempting to read Flora as an ode to mortality – and, quite possibly, a bid for immortality (since flowers do resurrect each spring).  Short-term, I’m betting that the 15 fiberglass-and-resin works Reiss has on view at Andi Campogne Projects will do the job sooner.  In the Light-Space and Finish Fetish movements Reiss was a pioneer.  He began working with plastics and shaped fiberglass while he was in Colorado in the late ‘50s – well before hot rod-influenced aesthetics took hold in Southern California.  (De Waine Valentine, for example, was a former student of Reiss’ in Colorado.  But by the time Reiss relocated from Boulder to Claremont to run CGU’s graduate program, he’d moved on to the miniatures, and so this work remained unseen in California until now.)  Made between 1962 and 1969, it reflects the wide range of his experiments with convex and sometimes ragged-edged shapes that he coated with outlandish finishes: luminescent oranges, candy-apple reds, and metal-flake textures and glazes inscribed with Asian-inspired and camouflage-like forms.  Newport collector Gerald Buck snapped up two of the pieces, opening the possibility that the work will turn up next fall in the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, a traveling exhibition that will draw heavily from Buck’s collection and place Reiss’ work from this period alongside that of Valentine, Craig Kaufman, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and others.

Jim Richard: "Big Red", 2009, oil on linen, 25" x 35"

At OBJCT’s Navigating Boulder show, Reiss’ former students and colleagues display a diverse selection of current and past works.  Wiley submits a tapestry based on his epic painting, Alchemical Lion Tortured with Abstraction, which recently toured the U.S. as part of his Smithsonian retrospective; Reiss features one of his miniatures, Castle of Perseverance from 1978, a send-up of minimalist interior design; Merion Estes offers a fiery, quasi-surrealist landscape built from collaged swatches of combed paint; sci-fi inspired painter/sculptor Joe Clower serves up a tin city set inside a hand-made vitrine whose supports look sturdy enough to withstand an earthquake; and Joan Moment submits two paintings that overlay op-ish circular forms against super-saturated topographical grounds. The biggest surprise was the Southern California debut of New Orleans artist Jim Richard whose work skewers homes of the rich and the tasteless. He gathers pictures from magazines and books to create electronic mash-ups.  These he commits to canvas using multiple perspectives which make the scenes freakier and more claustrophobic than they probably are in real life, proving that it pays to bite the hand that feeds, provided you do it skillfully.

If there’s a message embedded in all this, it’s that fierce individuality begets the same when proffered by an enlightened pedagogue who practices what he preaches.  From Boulder to LA, Reiss cuts a wide swath, and so do his progeny. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

Roland Reiss: Selections from the 1960s @ Andi Campognone Projects through October 30, 2010

Navigating Boulder: Connecting with Roland Reiss @ OBJCT Gallery through October 31, 2010

Roland Reiss: Flora: Recent Paintings & A Garden for Sally @ East & Peggy Phelps Gallery, CGU closed Sept. 17, 2010

For Roland @ Bunny Gunner Gallery through October 5, 2010.

At Fort Mason in SF: $300M worth of art from more 500 artists represented by 80 galleries.  Photo: DeWitt Cheng

In the fall of 1947 a New York art instructor teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), wrote to an artist friend: “The city is unspeakably beautiful & the weather is perfect …There is no doubt that by its visual attributes alone this city has earned the right to be the art center of the world, and that we must do something to bring this about.”

LA Gallerist Louis Stern with Karl Benjamin’s "#7" from 1966.  (DC)

Professor Mark Rothko certainly understood San Francisco’s appeal; but his love of our landscape didn’t stop him from returning to New York after his stint at SFIA.  Fact is, San Francisco, for all its great vistas and year-around mild climate, has never been a great art market and probably never will be due to its small population.

Nevertheless, the pool of Bay Area art talent has always been deep.  One longstanding explanation for the discrepancy between art and commerce in this region is that we are too nature-obsessed; or perhaps the views from our couches (or beaches) are too good to need accessorizing with art.

Last week, however, locals got a jolt of art-world adrenaline when the SF Fine Art Fair (May 20-23) came to town, filling up the 50,000 square feet of the Festival Pavilion on the bay at Fort Mason. It’s the same venue that housed the San Francisco International Art Expo from 1998 through 2006 before running into financial problems; so attendees were both thrilled by the new fair (a production of Hamptons Expo Group which runs fairs in Bridgehampton, NY, in July, and in Aspen, CO, in August), and cautiously optimistic, seeking good omens in bad times.

Chatting up a prospective buyer.  Photo: David M. Roth

Good omens came in the form of $300 million worth of works by more than 500 artists from some 80 galleries, hailing from New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Santa Fe, Denver, Chicago, Sacramento, Charlotte, Seoul, London, Berlin and Venice.  Big-name artists included: Diane Arbus, Charles Arnoldi, Romare Bearden, Ross Bleckner, Charles Burchfield, Roger Brown, Jess Collins, Bruce Conner, Robert Cottingham, Richard Diebenkorn, Eric Fischl, Janet Fish, Sam Francis, Robert Frank, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Levine, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mapplethorpe, Shirin Neshat, David Park, Martin Puryear, Ed Ruscha, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smiith, Masami Teraoka, Wayne Thiebaud and Peter Voulkos.  Their works, along with pieces from 475 other artists were spaciously arranged and well-lighted under the Pavilion’s lofty roof in near-perfect art-viewing conditions.

Opening VIP gala drew more than 3,000 people. (DR)

Even the best flaneurs, or art strollers, need a break, however, and the fair offered a variety of programs and events to those in need of a chair.  Pioneer gallerist Ruth Braunstein, whose Braunstein/Quay Gallery celebrates 50 years representing such artists as Peter Voulkos, John Altoon, Robert Brady, Richard Shaw, Ursula Schneider, Mary Snowden and Michael Stevens, was honored at a special ceremony with a Lifetime Achievement Award; her charity project ArtCare, a collaboration between the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San Francisco Art Dealers Association, will fund the badly needed maintenance of the city’s public sculpture.

Gallerist from Sundaram Tagore (NYC/LA) speaking about artist Kim Joon. (DR)

Braunstein, when handed the microphone at the event, didn’t cast a reflective look on her half century in the art business; instead, she appealed for donations to ArtCare and received, on the spot, a $10,000 check from art patron and philanthropist Roselyne “Cissy” Swig.

The West Coast Art Collector’s Conference, consisting of 14 panel discussions emceed by Squarecylinder’s David M. Roth, offered tips on collecting sculpture, prints and photographs; framing; appraisals; how to buy art as an investment; the modernist art of India; how galleries pick their artists; the media’s impact on the marketplace and other topics.

Attendance, which was plagued by a malfunctioning sound system, ranged from full-house (media and the marketplace; how galleries pick artists) to moderate (Indian Modernism ) to practically nil (framing) — a shame since Paul Porambo of SF-based Fine Art Services, brought more imagination to the subject than one would have thought possible.  

Special exhibits included a huge digital, interactive robotic sculpture, “Inflatable Architectural Growth,” by Chico MacMurtrie, in conjunction with San Jose’s Zero1 Biennial in September, and solo exhibition booths for five artists: John Altoon (Braunstein Quay Gallery, SF), Joachim Hiller (Walter Bischoff Galerie, Berlin), Klari Reis (Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London), Jenn Shifflet (Chandra Cerrito Contemporary, Oakland), and Jeff Wallin (Patrajdas Contemporary, Chicago).

Ruth Braunstein and Cissy Swig.  (DR)

The Bay Area art audience responded affirmatively, with 15,000 visitors participating in the four-day event. The Thursday night kickoff, a benefit for the San Francisco Art Institute (Rothko’s old employer, which was exhibiting work by its new MFA grads next door) turned out to be a tribal gathering of Bay Area art-worlders—with five times as many celebrants as the fair producers had expected.

The following morning, Hamptons Expo Group CEO and Founder Rick Friedman (himself a major collector of Abstract Expressionist art) enthused: “There’s a tremendous amount of interest in the show; a turnout of 3,000 VIPs that came in for the opening night—that’s extraordinary, in any fair in America…there are a lot of red dots, a lot of sales, some in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  This will blossom; it will be even better next year.” He praised the high quality of the work: “There really aren’t any weak spots on the floor. This is the only show I’ve seen in a long time that’s strong, front, middle and back.”

Director of Sales Max Fishko was similarly optimistic on Sunday afternoon as closing time approached: “We’re very interested in seeing the Bay Area become not only a national destination, but an international destination for the kind of art tourism you see centered around really successful art fairs — Art Chicago, Art Basel Miami Beach, the Armory Fair in New York.”

Just as important as the fairs’ “multiplying effect” in galvanizing new collectors and stimulating the market, however, are its psychological benefits to local artists, galleries, and museums: “The energy that an event like this can bring to an art market— it’s kind of a demonstration or show of force: ‘This is alive and well and you need to come here and pay attention to it.’  We all know how the wheels [of commerce] turn, but this is really a socially benevolent kind of activity.”

Whether the fair grows and thrives will depend on sales and whatever ancillary benefits accrue between now and next year.  So far, the views from most of the participating galleries have been favorable, notwithstanding various glitches including a malfunction sound system, limited food options and catalogue errors.

Here, below, is a sampling of reactions from gallerists:

Ruth Braunstein (Braunstein/Quay Gallery, San Francisco):“I felt the fair had a lot of energy, whether you like the work or not. The work was not that adventurous—not anything you can’t see somewhere else. I don’t think that dealers made a lot of money, but there were huge crowds. A lot of the local people that you never see came, and attendance stayed pretty constant for the whole three and a half days. Fairs are very expensive, and people are tired of fairs. I don’t think it should be done every year—maybe every other year [alternating with Los Angeles].”

Katrina Traywick (Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley): “Art fairs are now an established way of doing business, especially for dealers that are not in larger art markets like New York or Los Angeles… I am very pleased with the energy, the crowds and the sales from SFFAF 2010.  It will take some time to establish it as a solid, regional fair but this can be done. And it is a terrific antidote to the overcrowded and sometimes overblown mega-fairs in Miami and New York. It will take additional advertising and outreach both in the Bay Area as well as in other major West Coast cities:  Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle etc.”

Peter Fetterman (Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica): “San Francisco is one of the great cities in the world, so in terms of an art fair destination it has so much going for it.  Fort Mason, with its views, natural light and proximity to Greens Take Out makes it very user-friendly for us art fair warriors.  There was good, positive energy all round and a genuine will to see it succeed.  However, it’s really imperative that the opening night have a real sense of occasion. Here the organizers perhaps have to do some real subtle social networking and align themselves with a group that can deliver a well-heeled, sophisticated and seriously interested audience. This is hard to do from the East Coast, but it is the key to the show’s survival and growth. We look forward to hearing about new, positive developments so we can clear our schedule and continue to believe, like Annie, that "the sun will come up tomorrow."

Catharine Clark (Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco): “There were 15,000 people in attendance and that in and of itself was impressive and helped to keep energy and spirits high (for gallerists, collectors and patrons). The gallery sold work and met some people that we did not know going into the fair—the main reason to participate in any fair. The layout of the fair was clean and contemporary looking (no carpets—yes!); the collaboration with ZER01 was innovative and impressive. The outreach to the public was beyond expectation. The sound [and signage need to] … be improved upon next year…. I’d like to see more contemporary galleries participating from the far reaches of the globe.” CCG will attend next year and recommends that others do so, too. On the poor media coverage: “I find it scandalous that the Chronicle did not feel obligated to cover an event that 15,000 San Franciscans thought was important enough to show up to.”

George Krevsky (George Krevsky Gallery, San Francisco) concurs on the media being missing in action: “There was absolutely NO coverage in the SF Chronicle or West Coast NY Times, or TV coverage. Press in general was terrible.” He points out the absence of many blue-chip galleries: “This [fair] has some promise but I was disappointed with the number of qualified collectors who attended.” 

Kimberly Johansson (Johansson Projects, Oakland): “My experience at the fair was unexpectedly good. Most of the folks I placed work with were new. They had heard of the gallery but had never made the trip over the bridge to see it in person. I think it could be even better next year if we could attract some strong galleries from afar and market to collectors out of the region and perhaps also plan more events for travelers.”

Beth Jones (JAYJAY, Sacramento): “It was thrilling to be part of the revival of the art fair in San Francisco.  The venue couldn’t be better and the turnout could not have been stronger.  Sales did not meet our expectations. But on the plus side, the relationships we built with new collectors – those I believe will ultimately bear fruit. Is there room for improvement?  Yes, there is.  The panel discussions need to be focused on contemporary issues, not generic topics, and the food and concessions need to be more upscale; collectors need to be pampered and rewarded for showing up.  Small glitches aside, this was a high-caliber event.

Louis Stern (Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood) “Sales and contacts are our major register of how well any art fair has functioned, and with regard to sales we were pleased, or at least cautiously optimistic, with the results.  In terms of contacts and conversations, I was consistently impressed with the level of interest and knowledge demonstrated by the attendees.  It has been my experience that the real test of the viability of the contacts made during any fair is determined in the following six months.  How many of these folks will actually visit our website to check out our inventory or swing by the gallery when they journey to LA?  How many of these folks will actually contact the gallery and become our clients in the months to come?  That’s the real question.”

Michael Rosenthal (Michael Rosenthal Gallery, San Francisco): “The San Francisco Fine Art Fair was a welcome jolt to the San Francisco art world in scope, ambition and the range of things it gives you to think about.  However, it is disappointing that out of 48 San Francisco art galleries, only 18 actually participated.”

William Havu (William Havu Gallery, Denver) “I was delighted with the venue at Fort Mason.  What a view!  I was also delighted with the overall quality of the exhibitors and what they brought.The fair organizers, Hamptons Expo Group did a great job in turning out the audience and promoting the event and, though I did not get an opportunity to attend any of the discussions, thought that having them added an extra dimension. We did manage to sell seven pieces, all paintings and all relatively small which didn’t pay the overhead, but it was better than we had done two years ago at RedDot during Art Basel/Miami. That fair was held at an unfortunate time economically and even though I don’t think things are a great deal better, there has been improvement.  I would certainly do this fair again next year.  Everyone was having fun looking and appreciating the art if not actually buying.  It gave me hope and made me smile.”

Susan O’Malley (Curator and Print Center Director Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose) “As a non-profit art space we were satisfied with the exposure and level of awareness we raised at the Fair. Ultimately, we are happy and encouraged that San Francisco hosted a modern/contemporary fair which we hope will become a catalyst for generating an important discussion about the Bay Area art ecosystem going forward. We’re excited about the possibilities and understand that it takes a village.”

Whether gallerists did good business or missed their goals, one thing appears clear: If the results of our informal and (and admittedly nonscientific) opinion poll continue to hold, many dealers will be back next year, expecting a more polished second year and better times as the recession (hopefully) fades.  They will be evaluating the role of art fairs and the role of San Francisco in the international market, holding in the balance Rothko’s dream of a Bay Area art utopia.  

Hamptons’ Max Fishko: “It’s a tough economy. It’s a rough moment to be taking risks. “We took a risk to come out here to do it and we were lucky enough to find people willing to take the risks with us.”

–DEWITT CHENG

The San Francisco Fine Art Fair ran May 20-23, 2010 at Fort Mason.

Lawrence Argent’s Red Rabbit: a virtual view of the construction site

When Sacramento’s new International Airport terminal opens in late 2011, visitors will be greeted by a new urban mascot: a 56-foot red rabbit that appears to be diving from the ceiling into a suitcase. It’s the creation of sculptor Lawrence Argent, best known most recently for a giant blue bear that, on hind legs, peers into the windows of the Denver Convention Center. Argent’s is one of 13 new pieces of public art that will soon grace an expanded Sacramento International airport and transform how many visitors see the city for the first time. 

Sacramento International Airport Terminal B exterior view.  Architect:Corgan Assoc., Dallas

Donald Lipski, virtual installation view of “Acorn Steam”

Sacramento already has a museum-quality collection of public art scattered within a stone’s throw of the State Capitol. It includes pieces by Alice Aycock, Stephen Kaltenbach, Jennifer Bartlett, William Wiley, Jenny Holzer, Deborah Oropallo, Deborah Butterfield, William Allan, Robert Brady, Nathan Oliveira, Lita Albuquerque and Mark di Suvero to name but a few. In all, there are more than 650 pieces of public art in its domain. Problem is, unless you work for the state or have reason to do business with the government in-person, it’s unlikely that you will ever see many of these works – although you could have seen quite a few of them had you taken one of the tours offered last year by SMAC.

Joan Moment, “A Fragment of the Universe", 2009, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic on paper; virtual view of the piece as a 12 x 18-foot glass teserae floor

 

The remake of Terminal B addresses the visibility issue by masterfully integrating art and architecture. It was not an easy feat. With its curved roof, floor-to-ceiling windows and sweeping, light-suffused vistas, the building doesn’t exactly offer a surfeit of hospitable places for displaying painting, sculpture, installation or video. Nevertheless, by working creatively with SMAC and with the architect, the artists, at least on paper, figured out how to install engaging works that complement the airport’s essential functions: parking, transportation, security, ticketing, baggage handling. 

 

A preview of what it will all look like is on view at the Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento through May 16.  The show (In Public: Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport) consists of architectural drawings, models, video presentations and original paintings. The paintings, by Suzanne Adan and Joan Moment, will be translated to glass teserae mosaics by Franz Mayer of Munich, widely regarded as the world’s leading fabricator of glass for contemporary art installations.  Overall, the exhibition achieves its goal of demonstrating the process by which works of public art come into being; that is, the revisions that an artist must make to satisfy structural, safety, security, aesthetic and budgetary requirements. 

 

What a show like this can’t possibly communicate is the complexity of the overall process.  To get an idea of what’s involved, I spoke to Shelly Willis, program manager of SMAC’s Art in Public Places Program. What follows is a condensed version of our conversation.

 

Sculptor Lawrence Argent and Shelly Willis, program director, Sacramento’s Art in Public Places program  Photo: Lawrence Campling

David M. Roth: Bringing the outside world into the interior of the airport seems to be the connecting thread for most of the pieces in this project. Why was that important?

 

Shelly Willis: "Bringing the outside in" is one of the underlying building design concepts. As the artists began developing their designs, I suggested they consider this as a foundation for their work. Thus far, all but one of the artists uses this idea in their work.  

 

Sacramento actually has quite a bit of great public art, a lot of it by well-known artists, both local and national. What does the art in this project bring to Sacramento that’s new and exciting?

 

All of the work in the project looks like art. I know this may sound strange, but sometimes when artists are required to create functional works of art (benches, tree grates, fences), it can disappear into the building. This work will not. The "outside-in" idea prevents that from happening. It serves as a theme that holds the work together as if it was curated by one person.

 

Most people have no idea how complicated it is to integrate art into a construction project this size.  Give us a brief idea of what it takes to bring a project like this from conception to completion. 

 

The process began two years ago with a plan that had three phases.  The first was a limited competition for works that are part of the building’s structure. These have to be planned early on because the art is literally part of the structure. The artist and the architect have to work cooperatively.

 

 Terminal B, Interior View. Architect: Corgan Assoc., Dallas

The remaining 10 artworks were selected in a second phase that began with a nationwide call for qualified artists. 503 artists responded.   I convened seven panels of community members. Depending on the project, the panels met three to six times to select the artists and to approve designs. Each panel, after reviewing the nominees, narrows its selection down to a group of finalists. From there, a winner is selected who then submits a proposal. The proposal is generally revised quite a few times before it is accepted by the panel. After that, it must be approved by the Arts Commission and by the Board of Supervisors. There’s a third phase that will involve three additional artworks, two in the international terminal and one on the South Lawn. The artists have yet to be selected.

 

How much of what you described is your direct responsibility?

 

I direct the program which means I manage the process from start to finish.

 

What distinct challenges did this project present for artists?

 

Overall, I think time is the biggest issue. Meaning, I wish we had more of it! However, each project has its own set of challenges.

Christian Moeller: long view of untitled baggage claim worker portrait, “bit-map” images in wood

 

Public art commissions are seen as big paydays for the artists, and because of that the competition is always intense, and the results are often hotly debated both by artists and the public. What steps did you take to ensure a fair and transparent process?

 

Christian Moeller: (detail) of untitled portrait of baggage claim workers using wood shelving to create wall-sized “bit-map” images

I don’t know about "big paydays". In this project artists are restricted to receiving a maximum of 15% of the budget for design and project management.   The remaining 85% of the budget is used for fabrication and installation. But, yes the competition is fierce – and that is as it should be.   There is a lot of pressure on everyone involved. The artist wants to make a great work of art without compromise. Staff wants to run a flawless process. The panel wants to jury the work at the highest level possible, and of course the Commission and Board want to provide the highest level of project oversight. Nobody wants to make a mistake and everyone wants success. From the very start, every part of the process is held in open public meetings.

 

Was the composition of each selection panel the same, i.e. equally divided between county officials and art professionals? 

 

It was about 50/50. Every panel included the architect, three County officials, a commissioner, and at least 3 arts professionals. 

 

How were the nominees for each of the projects selected?

 

The majority of these artists were selected in an open competition. Seven of the ten opportunities seen in this exhibition were restricted to artists residing in Northern California. Limited or direct selection processes are not the rule. However in addition to trying to reach as many artists as possible through an RFQ (request for

qualifications), I always do research and invite artists to apply to particular projects based on the purpose of the art at the site or what the public wants the artists to "do". This is an important distinction. My research is rarely, if ever, based on what the public wants the artwork to "be". Artists, especially those who have not made public art before, may not be plugged into the public art network; so like any contemporary art curator or historian, I am always researching, reading, looking at art and encouraging artists to apply to particular projects.

 

Mildred Howard, untitled glass house

How many artists were presented to panelists during the first round of the selection process?

 

It was different for each panel. It varied from about 30 to 250 artists.

 

In public art projects there is always a battle over what portion of the total project cost will be used to calculate the art budget. How did this all play out with the Terminal B project?

 

The Sacramento County code applies to all public projects, not just the Sacramento County Airport System. Unless a different amount is directed by the Board of Supervisors, two percent of the total construction costs of the eligible projects is allocated to art. For this project the Board of Supervisors approved an amount less than the normal 2% called for by the County’s Ordinance for the airport art budget. 

 

What, then, is the total budget for art in this project?

 

$8 million dollars was allocated to the art program. $5 million dollars for art. $1 million for administration of the program (any amount not used for administration will be used for art), and $2 million dollars to be set aside for an endowment. 

 

There was quite a flap last year about that, about money that was allocated to maintenance rather than to funding new works of art in the airport. What are your feelings about that?  

 

Establishing an endowment was a brilliant and visionary decision by the Board. The interest from the endowment will be used to maintain the artwork and to fund temporary public artworks at the airport.  

 

Suzanne Adan, “Flying Colors”, 2009, 16 x 22 inches, oil on paper; virtual view of the piece as a 12 x 18-foot glass teserae floor

Tell us about your background in public art.

 

My love of public art began in 1986 when I read a description of the public art program at the California Arts Council. It was fate, I guess. Although I’ve curated a number of exhibitions in traditional exhibition spaces over the past 20 plus years, my work inevitably moves out of traditional exhibition spaces and into the community.   I came to Sacramento after six years of managing the University of Minnesota public art program where I directed the development and installation of temporary and permanent public artworks on campus throughout the University of Minnesota system. I developed a public art minor program at the University, the first program of its kind in the United States, which has yet to be launched, and taught courses in public art in the Department of Urban Studies and the Department of Landscape Architecture. Among other writings, my essay on the state of public art education in the United States was published by Americans for the Arts in the book titled Public Art by the Book, edited by Barbara Goldstein.  I am also co-editor of the book, Public Art Practice, published by Routledge New York in the spring of 2008. I think I am proudest though, of some of the work I did while working for the City of Fairfield and in Sonoma where I produced works of temporary public art. 

 

Besides the airport project, what other public art projects are you currently managing?

 

Lynn Criswell, model for one segment of a 18 x 30-foot terrazzo floor mosaic, “As the Crow Flies”

The Art in Public Places Program has a small staff that includes myself, a project manager, and program assistant, a part time education coordinator, and a person who works with us part time on maintenance issues. Together we maintain a collection of more than 650 works of art. We produce 12 exhibitions annually in public spaces. We’ve got seven new public art projects in the pipeline and approximately another 15 in the works — not including the airport. 

 

Among local art professionals, it’s a fairly well-known fact that you work a crazy-busy schedule. Give us a glimpse if you will.

 

My average work week is 60 hours. In any given day I can be figuring out how to deal with the tile that is falling off a major work of art, talking to an artist about how to best present their ideas in a public process, developing the budget for a new project, giving a talk about the history of public art to a panel, writing a press release, and researching the artists for a new project.   It’s impossible to be bored and not feel vital in this job. 

 

What other things would you like people to know about this project that I haven’t asked you?

 

I care deeply about this work because I’ve seen it create real and substantial change in communities across the country. 

 – DAVID M. ROTH

 

In Public: Designing Art for the Sacramento International Airport @ Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento through May 16, 2010.  

 

I rarely drive east on Hwy. 80, but every so often I get the urge to see mountains and snow. This time, however, it wasn’t scenery that lured me out of my hive; it was art. 

 Art in Fallon? Yes, Fallon. Fallon (pop: 7,536) sits in the high desert 40 minutes east of Reno, surrounded by sagebrush, distant peaks, alfalfa fields, a U.S. Naval air station and little else, save cumulous clouds that enclose the Lahontan Valley in a billowy cocoon this time year. On the ground, Fallon looks like a lot of towns in Nevada. On the way in you pass small manufacturing operations and trailer parks before you reach the main drag: a neon-lit strip of chain stores, pawn shops, motels and casinos and a few picture-worthy roadside attractions. Highway 50 runs straight up the middle en route to Austin, the next closest outpost 110 miles east.

L to R: Hwy 50 bet Reno and Fallon; fighter jet; Hwy 50 near Fallon; Top Gun Car Wash sign; Oaks Park Art Center

"Natomas 1, 2, 3", mixed media, 75 x 17 x 13 inches, 2009

"Untitled", mixed media on paper, 14 x 14 inches, 2009

"Confirmation" (detail), mixed media, 87 x 10 x 11 inches, 1998