Robert-Goldwater-Library

Eternal Ancestors: Alisa LaGamma on the Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC

[click above to listen]

via WNYC.org, The Leonard Lopate Show (October 15, 2007):

Reliquary Sculpture: Seated Male Figure (Muzidi) Kongo peoples, Bembe group; Democratic Republic of the Congo - 19th–first half of 20th century
Etnografiska Museet, Stockholm 1954.1.2332

Art from Africa's Equatorial Rainforests
Curator Alisa LaGamma joins Leonard to speak about "Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary," a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It features sculptures from Africa's equatorial rainforests and explores how they've influenced early 20th century artists.

Download MP3

David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings

via SMH:

On view: July 18-October 28, 2007

David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings

The Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to present David Adjaye: Making Public Buildings. One of Britain’s leading contemporary architects, Adjaye is known for his innovative buildings and their equal emphasis on the experience and function of architecture. Making Public Buildings focuses on his engagement with public space and the built environment, and follows the evolution of ten major buildings from design to production to completion. The exhibition includes architectural models, drawings and films of the buildings, which include the 2005 Venice Biennale pavilion and the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo; photographs of Adjaye’s travels around the world, and writings by artists and architects who have impacted his work. Focused on learning, community, contemporary art and housing, Making Public Buildings reveals Adjaye’s interest in rethinking social space and redefining the urban landscape.

Born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents, Adjaye has influences that range from West African art and architecture to the work of musicians such as George Lewis and Sun Ra and artists such as David Hammons and Chris Ofili. By applying conceptual frameworks to the fundamentals of architecture, he explores space, scale, measurement, light and materials to create daring and original buildings that transform the way we think about architecture and public space. Making Public Buildings is Adjaye’s first major exhibition.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Netherlands Architecture Institute, Maastricht; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; and Arario Gallery, Beijing.

Read a recent interview with Adjaye in New York Magazine.

more via Flavorpill:

Homes for creative A-listers Ewan McGregor, Juergen Teller, and Chris Ofili have made Tanzania-born David Adjaye one of Britain's leading starchitects. The Studio Museum in Harlem traces the evolution of ten projects — all of which address public space — from initial conceit to completion. Your Black Horizon, an Adjaye-designed windowless pavilion, housed Ólafur Elíasson's light installation at the 2005 Venice Biennale. In Whitechapel, London, Adjaye designed the Idea Store, a flashy cube of blue-and-green glass that houses the local library, dance studios, and community center. Not one for tradition, Adjaye retooled a former train station in Oslo as the Nobel Peace Center, adding a sculptural aluminum canopy to the building's courtyard. (HGM)

Note: This exhibition continues through Sun 10.28 (Wed-Fri: 12-6pm / Sat: 10am-6pm / Sun: 12-6pm).

Interview with Africa Comics curator Thelma Golden

via Artkrush:

Paul Laster talks to Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, about the museum's current Africa Comics show. [see our earlier post]

AK:  What is the premise of the Africa Comics exhibition, and how was the work selected?

TG:  The premise of Africa Comics is to provide a primer on contemporary artists working in comic and graphic form on the African continent. This exhibition came about for me, curatorially, in a somewhat funny, serendipitous way. In 2000, Africa e Mediterraneo, an organization dedicated to bettering European understanding of African culture, decided that comic art was a project that could reach out both to African communities in Europe and communities on the continent. They began to offer prizes for the best unpublished African comic art and have published, in the last six years, individual and anthology volumes. They never had the opportunity to show the work in America and came to me for advice; I immediately saw the opportunity for an exhibition. The challenge of bringing the works to an American audience was that while they were picked for both aesthetic and narrative content, many of them are not in English. Given the complex colonial histories of Africa, "native" languages may combine French, Portuguese, and Afrikaans with Wolof and Swahili.

Africa e Mediterraneo and the museum worked together to curate a selection of work and then took on the task of translating them into a handout for visitors to take with them, so that they could not only appreciate the incredible graphic diversity, but also the content, which really gives a more personal window into the daily lives of contemporary Africans. [read the rest of the interview here]

Pictured: Mendozza y Caramba (Maxime Aka Gnoan Kacou) AAAAA!, 2002.  [source]

A Brooklyn Furrier and Artist Finds Soul Mates Among the Indians of the West

GREENPOINT JOURNAL
Reblogged from the NYTimes, 3 January 2007

By LILY KOPPEL

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Irving Feller in the back room of his fur shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with a painting of his wife, Selma.

EVEN IN A CITY full of talented people with eclectic interests, Irving Feller’s combination of work and obsession stands out. Mr. Feller is a furrier by trade and an abstract artist out of love.

He can make a sumptuous fur coat from scratch as easily as he can create jarring works of pattern and color. And both pursuits are informed by his passion for American Indian culture. All this has transformed his family’s fur business, started in 1916 by his father, into an unexpected preserve of one man’s vision.

Among the furs, paired with Mardi Gras beads draping the window’s mannequin to celebrate the new year, are a trove of artifacts: turquoise rings, a feathered headdress labeled “Child’s War Bonnet” and hand-sewn baby moccasins.

A la défense du Musée quai Branly

The latest number of Museum Anthropology (Fall 2006) includes an interview by Peter Naumann of Stéphane Martin, Président-Directeur général of the Musée du quai Branly. In spite of the brouhaha surrounding the new installation, Naumann keeps the interview focussed primarily on the architecture of the Musée, the position and future of contemporary 'aboriginal' art, and the museum's research and outreach program.

For those who can't get enough, you can find other online interviews here (the image source) and here.

• Our past posts on the museum are here and here and here.

Renaissance Society does YouTube

[reBlogged via NEWSgrist, 10/23/06; an interesting development in museum blogging and vlogging.]

via Artnet News Oct 19, 2006 :

RENAISSANCE SOCIETY ON YOUTUBE
In the 21st century, it’s all about YouTube! Chicago's Renaissance Society has posted a 10-minute documentary about its current show with Dutch sculptor Avery Preesman, Sept. 17-Oct. 29, 2006, on the web at YouTube. The low-key clip -- a collaboration with Chicago Access Network Television -- features the sculptor chatting with museum director Susanne Ghez, curator Hamza Walker and critic Lawrence Rinder, as a variety of assistants create his artworks in the background.

ROM architecture explained

Following up on our original post marking the opening of the remodeled Royal Ontario Museum, the summer/fall 2006 issue of Rotunda features excepts from the forthcoming book, Bold Visions: The Architecture of the ROM, by Kevin Browne, managing director of the Museum's Institute for Contemporary Culture. The excerpt (pp. 14-38) includes portions of a Q&A with architect Daniel Libeskind.

The book is scheduled to be published by ROM in the spring of 2007.

The perils of permissions

Following up on the recent post regarding the crisis in art book publishing, this 'just in':

Jennifer Howard writes an article in the August 4, 2006, issue of Chronicle of Higher Education profiling Susan M. Bielstein and her recently published book, Permissions, A Survival Guide.

Props to Joy of NEWSgrist, who blogged Bielstein and her book last June as part of the NYU Comedies of Fair U$e conference; read an excerpt of the book here.

Access to the online version of the Chronicle is by login and password. Museum staff can read it with the intercession of a reference librarian. Everyone else is up to their own devices.

Here's a teaser of the article:

If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.

"Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rush to extinction," writes Susan M. Bielstein in a recent call to arms, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.

This was no doubt the impetus for Christopher Lyon's musings in Art in America.

Interview with Okwui Enwezor

Michael Tsegaye, Untitled, from the series In and Out, 2005 © Michael Tsegaye, Courtesy the artist

via Time Out New York / Issue 546: March 16–22, 2006:

Continental lift
A photography show curated by Okwui Enwezor at ICP sheds new light on Africa
By Barbara Pollack

Best known as the artistic director of Documenta 11 in 2002, Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor first made his mark on the international art scene in 1996, when he organized "In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present" at the Guggenheim Museum. Now, the independent curator is updating that inquiry in "Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photo-graphy" at the International Center of Photography (ICP), a show featuring more than 200 images by 35 artists. TONY met with Enwezor at the ICP, where he was overseeing the installation of an exhibition that promises to challenge stereotypical portrayals of Africa as either an Edenic landscape or a perennially impoverished, war-ravaged zone.

Time Out New York: How would you define African photography?

Okwui Enwezor: I am not saying that there is an African photography, any more than I would say there's a European photography. But there is some commonality among the artists. When you photograph in Africa, you do get different kinds of images because of the environment, because of the unique spatial arrangements and simply because of the nature of life over there. These are compelling images in the show that tell a very different story than the one we're used to seeing.

TONY: So is one of the purposes of this show to give the public a different view of Africa?

OE: No. The idea of the exhibition is really to show the diversity of contemporary practices in photography currently being explored by African artists, both inside and outside the continent.

TONY: But taken as a whole, is the show intended to refute stereotypes about Africa, or at least photographic depictions of it?

OE: "Snap Judgments" is first and foremost a presentation of a framework through which artists are picturing Africa. But yes, you'll find many images that contest the familiar lens that has been trained on Africa over the years. I do think this represents a different kind of photography. It is both anti-photogenic and anti-touristic imagery. I believe these artists have evolved a way of looking at Africa that is completely contrary to Life magazine or National Geographic. The show is not about disaster—what I like to call Afro-pessimism, a perspective of hopelessness. So, in that sense, the photographers that I have selected are resisting the images which have been the stock-in-trade of so much of the media's coverage on Africa.

TONY: You traveled all over Africa to find artists for this show. What were some of the more surprising places that you found art production?

OE: I hadn’t done a show in Africa for a few years—not since "The Short Century," which was shown at P.S. 1 in 2002—so it was an opportunity to get reacquainted with themes on a continent that is constantly evolving and changing. In Senegal, which has a very strong tradition of cinema, it was compelling to find new approaches to photojournalistic work. Ethiopia surprised me because I had never been there before and there’s a very strong group of artists working there, although there's no real photographic tradition. Also, I found the very high number of women who are working and making images throughout Africa very exciting.

TONY: Are the photographers you selected trained or self-taught? Artists or photojournalists?

OE: I think of them simply as people who are working with images. Photography belongs to everyone. With the proliferation of cameras, there is also this incredible visual intelligence—a visual literacy—worldwide. People from all kinds of cultures can "read" images. They know which ones accurately represent them and which ones do not. This is a boon for areas of the world that have been pictured into a corner, like Africa, by a kind of photojournalism. So perhaps you can say that, while there is no African photography, there is beginning to be an African eye. As people will see, there is an aesthetic approach here that is entirely different from the way outsiders have photographed Africa.

"Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography" is on view at ICP through May 28. See Museums.

imagine art after Project

     

Images (l. to r.): still from The Cure: Complete Works (2003), Leo Asemota; Capecoast (2001), Senayt Samuel; Love (2003), Addisalem Bezuwork.

via the Guardian Unlimited:

Expanding on the notion that we are all works in progress, imagine art after is a project uniting artists who originate from the same country but who are now geographically and politically separated. [The artists come from Afghanistan, Albania, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Serbia Montenegro.]

The project brings together seven artists who left home and now live in London, and seven who remained in the country of their birth: the artist who left, and the artist who stayed. The aim of the project is to open lines of communication where they would otherwise not exist, enabling artists to exchange ideas and work, and also to discuss their experiences in an online forum ...

As well as their work being exhibited online, each artist will take part in a dialogue with their partner - hosted on the Guardian talkboards - in order to exchange text, images and ideas. The dialogues will begin on October 31, and continue for six weeks until December 11.

• Curated by Breda Beban; Produced by Index Arts
• The original launch
• See all the artists

Afterwords (Dec. 22, 2005)

Six weeks on, hundreds of thoughts and images have been exchanged as part of our imagine art after project. But now that the opening phase is over, what will the artists involved take away from the experience? A selection reveal what it was like to share everything with a stranger in another country.