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November 5, 2014 Table of Contents Fine Art Accented With Local Touch ........................................ 2 Art Studios by the Dozens Coming to Governors Island ........ 23 Sacramento Murals Come with Stories.................................... 3 Art Day Gives Expression to People of All Abilities ................ 25 Denver Paint Retailer Guiry's Launches E‐Commerce Site ...... 6 Glasgow School of Art Went Up in Smoke ............................. 26 3‐D Printing Taking Hold in Kingston ....................................... 6 Paintings in National Parks Spark Probe, Furor ..................... 29 For Hospice Patient, Art Offers Healing Near the End ............. 9 Dallas Parking Meters Into Works of Public Art ..................... 30 The 50 Greatest Paintings in New England ............................ 11 Is Vandalism of Art Excusable? .............................................. 32 Art Students: Your Degree Is Actually Paying Off .................. 12 Cezanne And The Modern Masters Together In One Place ... 34 Jersey City Art & Studio Tour ................................................. 14 Wearing Their Art on Their Cars in Houston .......................... 35 Grabner Named 100 Most Important Art‐World Women ..... 15 A Capital of the Arts Is Forced to Evolve ................................ 36 Bill Stockton Helped Bring Modern Art to Montana .............. 15 'Forbidden Art' Reminded Prisoners They Were Human ...... 39 Garden of Eden for Art Lovers ............................................... 17 Arts Education Transforms Societies ..................................... 40 Guidance Center Showcases the Value of Art As Therapy ..... 18 There Is An Accountant Art Expert ‐ Who Knew? .................. 42 Earn a Living From your Art, You’re Probably White ............. 19 High School Students Draw Portraits of Homeless ................ 44 Art for All Lets Kids in Hospital Create Art ............................. 20 A Master of Art Forgery Eludes Dogged Local Tracker .......... 22 November 5, 2014 2 ____________________________________________________________________________ Fine Art Accented With Local Touch SASKATOON, SK: Paul Trottier has combined his passions for education and art into a new business venture. Trottier has opened Hues Art Supply, located on Lorne Avenue. "We are a full line of art supplies," said Trottier. "Anything you are going to need." Hues specializes in visual arts supplies, carrying an extensive line of paints, drawing tools, artistic surfaces and some sculpture items. And if they don't have it in stock or it is a specialty item, Trottier said they will do their best to source and order items needed. Trottier has practised fine arts throughout his life. He spent 24 years at the University of Saskatchewan in a variety of positions, including as director of the Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus for eight years. Trottier grew up in the art world (his father is a painter) and he has been painting for many years. For the last eight years, Trottier has been showcasing his work as part of the Men Who Paint group, who are having a show and sale Oct. 24 and 25 at Federation des francophone (212‐308 Fourth Ave. North). They renovated the space on Lorne Avenue for four months, replacing the front of the building, redoing the inside and bringing everything up to code. Besides supplies, Hues also has art classes and a plein air group club that meets every other Saturday and goes somewhere to paint for the day. They even have special classes such as a recent one for medical students to help them see the human body in a different way. "And every month we highlight a local artist on the walls," he said. He said having knowledge of what he is selling helps his customers get exactly what they need. And being able to point out products and techniques on art that is on the wall is a great way to show off the product. "Sales are one thing, but learning is what it's all about," he said. The Star Phoenix: http://bit.ly/10myj8O November 5, 2014 3 ____________________________________________________________________________ More than Pretty Pictures: Sacramento Murals Come with Stories SACRAMENTO, CA: Generally, public art doesn't happen on a whim. There are detailed, deliberate stories behind the local murals featured in our photo gallery. Take, for example, the mural outside local nonprofit Valley Vision at 2320 Broadway, which was painted in 2010. The nonprofit held a contest that offered a $1,000 prize for the top mural idea consistent with its values, according to Valley Vision CEO Bill Mueller. The mural idea was also part of an effort "to create some interest and energy on Broadway," Mueller said. The winner: Alex "Cabron" Forster, a Vienna‐born artist who lives in the U.S. "Alex won with his painting of Ishi, the last California Indian. Alex said he considered Ishi to be a 'hinge figure' in history, representing both the old and new California," Mueller said. Valley Vision chronicled the mural's progress on Facebook. Just as the nonprofit's mural aimed to bring new energy to Broadway, a mural outside University Art at 2601 J St. began with a similar awareness of the power of public art. "I am very much in favor of public art, especially when collaborating with local artists in our area," said Dave Saalsaa, manager of University Art, which sells art supplies. Joshua Silveira, a University Art employee and freelance artist, finished the mural last September. The year‐long project depicts a series of faces. Saalsaa said he gave Silveira complete artistic freedom over the mural. "We also allowed him to take the time he needed," Saalsaa said. "It was his concept originally." Saalsaa always envisioned having a mural outside the store, and Silveira's vision came at the right time. "I believed in what he was doing and fortunately, the timing was perfect," Saalsaa said. Sacramento Business Journal: http://bit.ly/1rVrL7t Two Homeless Artists Find a Platform for Selling Their Work WASHINGTON, DC: Kimberly Williams says that art has already saved her life. She was an alcoholic, living on the streets and sometimes using other drugs. Seeking breakfast one morning, she came to Miriam’s Kitchen. And after the meal, the staff spread out the art supplies. Soon, Williams was a regular. Conversations about her artwork with a November 5, 2014 4 ____________________________________________________________________________ therapist on the staff led to conversations about other things she needed — an ID, clothing, a job. “The people here, they helped me to realize that my art, the things I do, were being hindered by being addicted and stuff like that, drinking and using drugs,” Williams said. “This place is a savior.” After 11 years of addiction, Williams, 41, said she has been clean for more than six months. She has moved in with her mother in Oxon Hill, Md., and reunited with her 3‐year‐old son. And she has a new platform for raising her art to a higher level — or letting art elevate her a little higher once again. It’s called ArtLifting, a Web site founded in Boston that sells high‐quality art by homeless and disabled people. Williams was selected as one of the first two artists to participate in Washington as the growing Web site expands its reach to the District. Her works on the Web site — abstract canvases full of swirls and slashes in radiant color — sell for $75 to $1,000 per print. For each piece that sells, she will receive 55 percent of the cost. The rest goes to ArtLifting, which has sold about 550 pieces since launching last September, according to Liz Powers, 26, who co‐founded the Web site with her brother Spencer, 29. Powers said that art therapy programs sometimes cannot sell participants’ work because therapists avoid blending a clinical role and a commercial one. Other programs that help homeless or disabled people create art just don’t have the time to help them sell it, too. That’s where the siblings’ Web site comes in. Powers said her goal, eventually, is to find corporate clients who will buy these homeless artists’ work in bulk — to decorate the rooms of a new hotel, say, or an office building. For now, the Web site is taking on artists in more and more cities. Divya Prabhakaran, the other D.C. artist picked by ArtLifting, has already sold a painting on the site. Many a morning, Prabhakaran and Williams can be found painting at Miriam’s Kitchen, located in the basement of Western Presbyterian Church in Foggy Bottom. Every morning and afternoon, 30 to 65 homeless people participate in the art sessions. But these two are standouts. When a new visitor introduced herself last week to Prabhakaran, 49, who goes by Joseph, a frequent guest watched them shake hands and called out: “You’ll never wash that hand again! This is Joseph Leonardo da Vinci.” ArtLifting’s curator, one of four employees at the site, has a trained eye — she is a Stanford art history alumna who used to work for Christie’s. She looked at the wide array of artwork created at Miriam’s Kitchen, and she selected Prabhakaran and Williams for ArtLifting. Both have modest commercial experience as artists already. Williams has sold her work in Dupont Circle and Chinatown. Prabhakaran said his pieces hang in a cafeteria at George Washington University and an office of a legal clinic — both institutions came to Miriam’s Kitchen looking for art, and he made about $75 each time. The two both have paintings in an exhibit called “Outsider Art” sponsored by Art Enables, an organization for artists with disabilities. The show, at 2204 Rhode Island Ave. NE, runs until Nov. 21. November 5, 2014 5 ____________________________________________________________________________ One morning last week, Prabhakaran was painting a richly layered image of fall foliage, his page laden with colors that might soon appear as autumn transforms the trees in the area. But many of his canvases show beach scenes, tropical paradises that look very far away. He paints from memory, he said. He held up a painting of a sun‐soaked inlet, a sailboat bobbing in the water with his middle name on it. The title was “Take Me Back.” That was a vacation to Aruba he took with a relative, he said. Before he moved from New York to Washington about 10 years ago, before his wife died at around the same time, before a decade of homelessness in the nation’s capital. He will say little more about his past, about just what memories the gorgeous landscapes hold or what path took him from those tranquil scenes to Adam’s Place Shelter, where he said he has lived for about a year. But he will quietly state his goal: to find a program with the money to put him in housing of his own, he said. Art therapist and case manager Lindsey Vance said that in the four years she has seen Prabhakaran nearly every weekday, she had never before heard him say he wanted to be housed. She credited his growing success as an artist with expanding his aspirations. “He is definitely a way different person than he was four years ago,” Vance said. “He didn’t even speak to anyone before.” Case managers found it challenging to work with him when he first arrived, she said. So Vance talked to him about art. When she saw that his normally serene landscapes sometimes took on a darker edge, she would ask him about it — and though he would be surprised that she could see his mood spilling out of his brush, he would acknowledge that he was having a bad day. Slowly, they built a rapport. Sitting next to Prabhakaran last week, Williams was the gregarious half of the pair. An unnoticed dab of yellow paint beneath her eyebrow, she narrated her search for a color that would “pop.” When she found it, she drawled in a singsong voice, “This painting is awe‐some.” Springing up to appraise her work from a distance, she nodded her approval. “I got to spend four or five more hours, and then I’ll really be cised.” Vance said that the bubbly, confident Williams she sees now has also changed dramatically. “Art was the one thing that kind of kept her, when everything else seemed to be going in the wrong direction for her. I’ve seen her make a whole 180 in terms of when I met her and how she is today,” Vance said. Williams agreed. “This might sound crazy. I needed the therapy,” she said. “For that single moment that I’m looking at something I created, it takes my mind off the pain.” The blend of art and counseling and case management was in full swing last week. While she painted, Williams asked Vance to print out a packet of West African symbols that she wanted to include in her upcoming paintings, as well as information on where she can get free clothes for job interviews. They talked about her search for a job with her newly restored nail technician’s license, her dream of opening her own salon someday and her hope that ArtLifting will be another gateway to stability and success. November 5, 2014 6 ____________________________________________________________________________ “If I asked Lindsey for something, if she didn’t have it, she’ll get it for me. The step‐by‐step, little, small steps that we took, they got me to bigger things,” Williams said. “Now, hopefully, I have very big goals. And I want to get there.” Her eyes filled with tears. She stopped talking and furiously picked up her paintbrush. Once more, she added vibrant color to the blank space on the canvas. The Washington Post: http://wapo.st/1xVfF2O Denver Paint Retailer Guiry's Launches E‐Commerce Site After More Than 100 Years in Business, Company Continues to Evolve DENVER, CO: Guiry's was founded more than 100 years ago as a paint and wallpaper shop dedicated to providing its customers with quality merchandise at a fair price with great service. Now it has launched a new e‐commerce site founded on the same values. Guiry's was founded in 1899 in Denver as a paint and wallpaper supply. Today, there are seven locations in the greater Denver area and, in addition to paint and wallpaper, they sell fine art supplies, faux painting supplies, window treatments, home décor, and furniture. Guiry's remains a family‐owned business, and is currently being run by the third and fourth generation of Guirys. The new website, which has a fully responsive design capable of display on laptops, tablets, and smartphones, allows customers to access their full selection, with more than 10,000 products. Neon Rain Interactive ‐‐ a leading Denver web development firm ‐‐ built the new website for Guiry's, including a customized Drupal Content Management System. "Expanding to e‐commerce is good for us and good for customers," said Richard Guiry, president of Guiry's. "We've always been a local business, and this new site will allow us to better serve our local customers. People like to shop online and like the convenience of either picking up what they need in the store or having it delivered. "We also think it's good for customers to have the option of dealing with a venerable business like ours online. Many online merchants are fly‐by‐night operations, and it's hard to trust the quality of either the merchandise or the service. At Guiry's, we're not interested in short‐term profit: we offer products that win over generations with their quality, and service that makes customers feel as at home in our store as in their own house. You can trust that we will stand by what we sell." Market Wired: http://mwne.ws/1x0YVZB 3‐D Printing Taking Hold in Kingston KINGSTON, NY: When Felix Olivieri needs name tags or something to hang art supplies, he doesn’t run out to an office supply store. Instead, Olivieri goes to his computer, not to order them online, but to print them out himself using a MakerBot Mini 3‐D printer. Olivieri, who co‐owns Olivieri’s Arts, Crafts and Coffee on Broadway with his wife Sarah Olivieri, said he’s had it for about three months and he was the first store in Kingston to have one. November 5, 2014 7 ____________________________________________________________________________ “When we were opening up the shop three months ago, one of the first decisions we made was I wanted to make sure the shop owned a 3‐D printer,” he said. Along with using it to make things like shelf brackets for the store or a salt shaker for the cafe, he said he makes things for customers ranging from rings and letters for kids to nametags. “Artists have been really interested,” he said. “When customers say can you scan things to print it out, I say yes,” Sarah Olivieri said they had a friend who was working with 3‐D printers at SUNY New Paltz and they inquired about the devices. “We wanted to make one that was available to people who weren’t students or faculty at the school,” she said. Felix Olivieri said choosing a MakerBot was a no brainer. “The first one that popped into my head was the MakerBot because they’re in Brooklyn and I’m originally from the city,” He said. “It just felt right.” On a rainy Wednesday afternoon he was making kid‐safe carving knives for a family friendly pumpkin carving event planned for Oct. 19 at the store. The red knives, which weigh next to nothing, derive their strength from a tiny honeycomb structure, he said. Sarah Olivieri said she’s seen companies working on 3‐D printing cells in a gel, chocolate, concrete that allows houses to be built very rapidly, and even organs, although not successfully yet, “Most of them work on the concept of building things up layer by layer,” she said. It has taken a mix of art and engineering for Felix Olivieri to make each object just right While he found his initial prototype knife capable of cutting a pumpkin, he said he wanted to make it stronger because he knew kids would be using it. “It’s trying to find a balance between being lightweight and strong,” he said. Sarah Olivieri said the tubular plastic the printer used to make all kinds of objects is called PLA filament. “We have an option of colors in the store,” she said. “We have purple, we’re getting glow in the dark, a photo sensitive one turns blue when you put it in the sun.” “Other MakerBot printers use flexible material as well,” she said. The material passes through a component of the printer called the main extruder that features magnets on the back that allow it to automatically attach to the MakerBot, said Felix Olivieri. Once inside, it’s self‐guiding. And a plastic filament gear pulls the plastic through a metal part that heats up to 215 degrees Celsius, about 419 degrees Fahrenheit. “It comes out of a nozzle like a hot glue gun,” he said. “It just goes until the object is made.” November 5, 2014 8 ____________________________________________________________________________ As this is going on, the platform drops down laying layer after layer, he said. Depending on the thickness of the object, it can take anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour to make something. As the knife came off, he peeled off excess material, called raft, and unlike cookies fresh out of the oven, the knife was cool to the touch. “The material cools really fast,” he said. He said learning how to use a 3‐D printer involves a lot of trial and error, experimentation, and patience While a user can get it out of the box and set it up in under a half an hour, he said he doesn’t recommend doing that. Instead, he recommends users thoroughly read the instructions and watch instructional online videos. UPS In the town of Ulster, the UPS Store in Kings Mall is aiming their commercial‐grade 3‐D printing service primarily at the small business customers the store has served in its 12 years, said store manager Todd O’Brien. This store is one of less than 100 stores in the approximately 4,400 store chain that have a 3‐D printer and this location is one of just three in New York State, and the only one outside of the city that has one, he said. O’Brien said the UPS Store carefully studied the area’s demographics before deciding on the Ulster store. “3‐D printing is an avenue that the UPS Store was exploring, and they’ve found it’s something small businesses are really interested in the ability to do, especially entrepreneurs and inventors,” he said. “And we felt involving the Kingston community in the 3‐D printing revolution is something we ultimately wanted to do.” The store has an approximately micro fridge‐sized Stratasys 3‐D printer that prints on commercial grade ABS plastic, that he said is available in nine different colors with a maximum size of 8 by 8 by 6 inches. He said they’ve had it for about two weeks and there has been a lot of curiosity and interest among people in making prototypes. On a large dessert tray on the counter sat examples of various odds and ends, like a figurine of a gnome on top of a toad, named William by store staff. On a more practical side, there are backpack buckles that he said take approximately 1.5 hours to make. If a customer comes in with a backpack with a broken buckle a new one can be made on the 3‐D printer, he said. There was even a bearing and gear, a tiny model of a house, all made on the printer. Next to the tray was several inch‐tall blue robot figure named Fletcher that took several hours to make. He said many designs come from a website, thingiverse.com, that allows users to share open‐source designs. He said they are currently printing from computer‐aided design files that customers submit in store or through email. November 5, 2014 9 ____________________________________________________________________________ The store is in the process of adding a designer to the staff who could help people design what they need in store, he said. “Really, the limits are as far as your imagination, in terms of what you can do with it,” he said. KINGSTON HIGH SCHOOL Students are also getting a chance to experiment with 3‐D printing at Kingston High School, thanks to a grant from ALCOA that placed a slightly larger MakerBot in a classroom in the basement of the school last summer. Kingston City Schools Superintendent Paul Padalino said it represents a chance to prepare students for careers at high tech manufacturing in the Hudson Valley. “They’ve been hiring from outside the county,” he said. “I want to change that.” He said the 3‐D printer is the perfect tool for interdisciplinary use noting while it’s been used by students in an engineering, and problem solving, class, there has been discussions about using it for art classes or for models for biology classes. The class is taught by longtime teacher Jeff Karliner‐ “I’m the second oldest teacher in the building,” he said. He said the school is working to bring students from the SUNY New Paltz 3‐D printing initiative to work with high school students. Learning the ropes of using the printer and teaching students how to use it has included an extensive learning curve including multiple training sessions and an upcoming eight‐hour training course, he said. Daily Freeman: http://bit.ly/1uopmtl For Hospice Patient, a Life Lived With Art Offers Healing Powers Near the End MADISON, WI: Given two weeks to live last fall, Madison glass artist Diane Bresnan Fleming gave away all of her art materials, including her kiln. It gave her great joy, she said, to bestow on friends and family members items that had imbued her life with such meaning. Then one day in January, she awoke to a realization. The cancer in her body was not going to take her quite so swiftly. She decided to make art again. A lot of it. “I came back to the artwork at a place beyond where I left off,” said Fleming, 68, who retired in 2002 after 30 years as the art teacher at Madison’s Elvehjem Elementary School. “My friends say, ‘Your art is different since your illness,’ and I can see it, too. It’s better.” November 5, 2014 10 ____________________________________________________________________________ Fleming has been on a productive tear ever since, creating distinctive plates, bowls and jewelry with renewed passion. She recently was notified of another honor in her career. Her plates and bowls are now for sale in the museum store of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. The pieces, which went on display Sept. 22, are all newly created since January. She also is planning an art show at her home in December, where she intends to display at least 40 new bowls and plates, all made during her resurgence. “She’s had this explosion of ideas,” said a son, Conal Fleming, a mental health professional who recently moved to Madison from Waukesha to be closer to his mother. Diane Bresnan Fleming said her cancer is growing but manageable. She credits art with enriching her life, perhaps even prolonging it. “I just wake up each day wanting to do art, even if it’s just contributing something small to a project,” she said. “When you concentrate on that part of your life — the creative part, or what I also consider my spiritual part — it allows you to put away the physical part for a while.” On a recent afternoon, Fleming tapped a tiny sifter above a circle of glass, dispensing a coat of fine glass powder over a hand‐cut ginkgo leaf stencil. She was at The Vinery, a stained glass studio on Madison’s East Side owned by Denny Berkery, a fellow artist she has known since he visited her classroom nearly 30 years ago as a guest artist. Because Fleming gave away her kiln (and would never dream of asking for it back), The Vinery is where she now fires her glass and creates many of her pieces. Berkery fashioned a work station for her at a table just the right height for her wheelchair. Berkery said he has always believed in art as therapy, something Fleming’s life has only reinforced. “Last fall, she came by and said, ‘I’m really ill, I want to sell all my inventory and tie up all the loose ends,’” Berkery said. “Then all of a sudden in January, she calls me and says, ‘I really want to make this one particular plate.’ Her art really seems to have revived her.” Fleming works in a medium called fused glass. Instead of blowing her own glass, she composes art out of existing glass pieces and fuses them in a kiln, often creating multi‐colored images on them with glass powder. “Her work incorporates a lot of nature — flowers, birds, leaves,” said Leslie Genszler, director of retail operations for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. “They are just beautiful pieces, and it’s very approachable work. A lot of people identify with it.” While Fleming continues to live most of the time at her home, on this particular day at The Vinery she had come from the residential facility of Agrace HospiceCare in nearby Fitchburg. She had suffered a setback and was temporarily staying at Agrace to regain her strength. Conal had driven her to the glass studio. She has a second son, Sean Fleming, an attorney and graphic designer in Barrington, Illinois. The two collaborated in 2001 on “Simply Wright: A Journey into the Ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture,” a coffee table book for children that won an outstanding achievement award in children’s literature fro Lindy Anderson, a videographer at UW‐Madison, was among the children who passed through Fleming’s Elvehjem classroom in the 1970s. The two reconnected about 15 years ago when Anderson worked on a film project at the school. November 5, 2014 11 ____________________________________________________________________________ “I respect her as an artist, and I marvel at her ability to be resilient through all this,” said Anderson, who wears Fleming’s jewelry regularly. “She continues to inspire everyone around her and to demonstrate the value of approaching whatever you do with creativity.” Fleming said she hopes her personal tale imparts the same message she sought to instill in the hundreds of children she taught — that art can enrich and soothe and maybe even heal. Wisconsin State Journal: http://bit.ly/1tBDjSN The 50 Greatest Paintings in New England BOSTON, MA: It’s an ugly thought experiment, but let’s say a disaster scenario threatens, widespread destruction is likely, and you have the task of salvaging for posterity the 50 greatest paintings in New England. There’s no time for more. You must limit yourself to three works by any one artist (sorry Rembrandt, sorry Van Gogh). Murals are out (sorry Sargent). And relax: Other good folk have been put in charge of sculpture, furniture, drawings, and so on. Artificial and arbitrary as it sounds, the exercise is just an extreme version of the task curators at our art museums are routinely charged with. Only a fraction of their collections (at the Museum of Fine Arts it’s around 4 percent) are on display at any given time. Curators must discriminate between the worthiest and the merely very worthy. It ain’t easy. So which works really stand out from the crowd? Which are the paintings that really matter, the ones that have accumulated the most prestige and importance over time, the most singular, the most convincing, the most powerful and profound? It’s a quixotic enterprise. I concede. I am not usually one for “canons.” I defend fervently the solipsism of the fan (which I undoubtedly am) because in the end, art love is not a public utility; it’s at its best when privatized. I know for sure that if I were to choose my own favorite works in New England, this list would look very different. But here is my humble attempt to apply criteria that go beyond personal infatuation, historical curiosity, and a loosely applied ideal of variety (which is more or less how I choose the works I write about in my fortnightly column, “Frame by Frame”). It’s an attempt to set aside, too, market value and statistical popularity, by far the dominant criteria in discussions of art in our time. Why do it? Simply because I want to remind people how incredibly blessed we are in this part of the world when it comes to great painting. The list here is as good, I believe, as a comparable list would be almost anywhere else in the world. Only Paris, New York, and London might have an edge, and even that is by no means certain. I have tried to be ruthless about avoiding pandering to desirable outcomes, politically speaking. This has produced disappointing results. There are very few works by female artists, and not many modern works. The historical reasons for the exclusion of women from careers in painting are well‐known, and probably don’t need reheating here. (Times November 5, 2014 12 ____________________________________________________________________________ have changed, thankfully: A list of the most important 50 artists working today — certainly any list I drew up — would be at least half women, and would range from Cindy Sherman and Sheila Hicks to Shirin Neshat, Bridget Riley, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, and Marlene Dumas.) The paucity of works by modern artists can be explained two ways. Firstly, New England collectors never really got into the swing of acquiring vitally important works by modern artists. The Museum of Fine Arts passed up the chance to buy Jackson Pollock’s “Lavender Mist” in the early 1980s, which says it all. Secondly, and more simply, greatness and prestige take time to settle down. The very high number of works — more than half — from the MFA is also somewhat surprising. But then, if you tried a similar exercise in London or Madrid, I suspect you would have a similar proportion of works coming from, respectively, the National Gallery and the Prado, even though both cities have plenty of other great museums. In New England’s case, the MFA simply tends to have more of the singular, knock‐down masterpieces than even the great college collections like those at Harvard and Yale. That’s partly because collectors who own those truly special pieces have tended to prefer the idea of giving them to the MFA: Very simply, more eyes will be on works that end up there. Everyone will be able to think of great paintings that should be on this list. I have thought of plenty, too, I promise: I have a list of almost 100 works which were at one point in the top 50, and which I subsequently removed, including paintings that are listed as national treasures in Japan, as well as works by Botticelli, Raphael, Norman Rockwell, Rembrandt, Millet, Piero della Francesca, O’Keeffe, Pollock, and Matisse. The bar, in other words, is very high. So . . . let the disputation begin! But let’s remember, as we squabble, what extraordinary quality we have in our midst. Quarterbacks, pitchers, and great conductors come and go. These babies are here to stay. The Boston Globe: http://bit.ly/1GhYY7u Good News, Art Students: Your Degree Is Actually Paying Off The news: With many Americans still feeling the effects of the Great Recession, a frequent refrain about college education is that an arts degree simply isn't worth it. Studying the creative arts is economically risky: Sure, you'll spend four years poring over famous paintings and releasing your creative energies, but your post‐graduate life will be one of low income, low employment and misery as a "starving artist." But a massive new survey from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) suggests those recent arts alumni are actually doing more than OK. People who have earned degrees in the arts are actually thriving, despite the stereotype of the "starving artist" and economy‐wide setbacks from the 2008 recession. SNAAP argues that arts graduates have actually "found meaningful employment, are satisfied with their lives, and are pleased that they chose to go to an arts school." In fact, they're "among the happiest professionals in the US." The survey: In their 2014 survey of recent arts graduates, SNAAP analyzed responses from 17,000 alumni who completed an undergraduate or graduate degree in the arts up to five years before being surveyed, along with 88,000 who earned degrees before that time. The biggest group of recent graduates (27%) earned a degree in fine and studio arts, while another 15% earned a degree in design. November 5, 2014 13 ____________________________________________________________________________ The survey results show that finding a job wasn't actually as hard as analysts made it out to be. Some 65% of recent graduates report they were able to find work in arts‐related fields, and 52% of recent grads said they were satisfied with their income. "That figure is far below the 63% of their older counterparts," notes Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard, "but [it] surely reflects the fact they are younger and more likely to be in entry‐level jobs." Arts graduates aren't just holding their own in the workforce: They're happy doing it. Multiple surveys, SNAAP notes, have repeatedly shown that artists "are among the happiest professionals, according to several national and international surveys — reportedly happier than lawyers, financial managers, and high school teachers." And despite fluctuations in the economy, artists remain happy. Overall satisfaction with the job in which they were spending the majority of their time, among both recent and prior graduates, was very high, at 75% and 82%, respectively. In contrast to the traditional archetype of the "starving artist," the majority of currently employed SNAAP alumni also indicated they were satisfied with their income, and the majority of arts alumni reported being satisfied with the extent to which their work "reflected their personality, interests and values." Good news, with caveats: While artists may be doing far better than expected in terms of occupational success, the levels of satisfaction reported by recent arts alums were generally lower than pre‐recession graduates, probably due to the changing expectations and requirement for employment and wages in the post‐recession economy. Part of this responsibility rests with schools themselves. While the study suggests universities and other institutes of higher learning are getting better at training arts graduates in the more practical aspects of pursuing their craft, university arts projects have more work to do to better prepare arts graduates for the modern workforce. "Only 25% of recent graduates and 21% of non‐recent graduates indicated that their institutions helped them 'some' or 'very much' to acquire or develop financial and business management skills," the report notes. "Only 30% of recent alumni and 24% of non‐recent alumni said the same about entrepreneurial skills." And while arts graduates may be happier and better prepared for the workforce than previously thought, they're still facing the same issue virtually every college graduate has to deal with: a higher debt load than previous generations. Some 14% of recent graduates say they left college with more than $16,000 in debt, up from 4% who graduated prior to when the recession struck. Only 31% of recent graduates reported they graduated with no November 5, 2014 14 ____________________________________________________________________________ student‐loan debt, compared to 46% of those who graduated before the recession. "Fifty‐eight percent of recent graduates report that the amount of debt they incurred has had at least some impact on their career or educational decisions, compared to less than a third of non‐recent graduates," states the report. The takeaway: If the goal of going to college is to earn a high starting salary, you may want to consider leaving the paintbrushes at home to study engineering instead. But for aspiring artists who pass over arts school in favor of something "more practical," rest assured for that arts degree actually pays off. Mic: http://bit.ly/1ySGyoZ During Jersey City Art & Studio Tour, Artists Praise City's Art Scene JERSEY CITY, NJ: The Jersey City Art & Studio Tour took the city by storm over the weekend, with artist studios and other venues opening their doors to hundreds of eager art lovers. The annual affair, formerly called the Jersey City Artist Studio Tour, is one of the most anticipated art events in the city. Over the weekend, art tourists canvassed diverse neighborhoods to visit over 100 venues with group art shows, solo shows, artist studios and live performances. Highlights included Dylan Egon's "22" retrospective at Marco & Pepe, "Lucid Visions" at Panepinto Galleries in the Powerhouse Arts District, and Jersey City Art School founder Thomas John Carlson's new show "Atlas Chatter" at 313 Gallery Downtown, which were all were big hits. Carlos Castillo, who works at Hudson County Art Supply, where local legend Peter Bill has works on display, said he's made good friends through some JCAST shows. "You stand, you look at the art, someone stands next to you and there's that little conversation that sparks from the piece, from what mediums they used, what I think of the piece, and so on," said Castillo. "It's not easy for me to talk to people, but I run across a lot of people who make it easy for me to talk to them." Many from outside of Jersey City were impressed with the art scene. "I heard a lot about Jersey City and I think there's a good rapport and good things and it's building," said Anthony Heinz May, a Brooklyn artist featured in "Obsolescence" at Curious Matter. Abby Levine, a Union City artist who also exhibits in Jersey City and was part of "Interconnections" at CityLife, said that while she worries that artists could get priced out of Jersey City, there is hope. "We're someplace really cool and I think by word of mouth and being open about what's going on here, developing an art market in Jersey City will happen naturally," said Levine. Virginia Kamenitzer, best known locally for her work with Paul Vincent Studios in Hoboken, said Jersey City's art scene is special. "It's a thriving scene," said Kamenitzer. "This whole town is centered around the fact that art is pumping through its veins." NJ.com: http://bit.ly/1wYTlbG November 5, 2014 15 ____________________________________________________________________________ Michelle Grabner Named One of 100 Most Important Art‐World Women MILWAUKEE, WI: When The Atlantic ran an essay a few years ago posing the old question anew — Can women really have it all? —
many in Milwaukee's art community thought immediately of Wisconsin native Michelle Grabner. That instinct has just been confirmed in a fairly official way. Grabner was just named by ARTnews to be one of the 100 most important women in the art world, along with performance art superstar Marina Abramovic and power house art dealer Barbara Gladstone. Grabner, a Wisconsin native, is the ultimate art‐world insider and outsider, too. She runs an internationally respected gallery the size of a one‐car garage next to her home in Oak Park, Ill. called The Suburban, and an avant‐garde art space in rural Waupaca County called The Great Poor Farm Experiment near her vacation home. She writes beautiful criticsm, has been the chair of the painting and drawing department at one of the nation's more important art schools, the Art Institute of Chicago, and this year she was one of three curators for the most important survey of contemporary art in the U.S., the Whitney Biennial. As an artist, which Grabner considers her core professional activity, she enjoyed a major career survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland last year and currently has an important show of new work up at the James Cohan Gallery in New York. One of the defining characteristics of Grabner's practice is that she has created her work around the things that matter most to her — motherhood, family, friendships and time to think and read. I asked her recently how she seemed to have it all. One of her secrets, she said: Waking early. The last time I talked to Grabner, she was shopping for a home in Milwaukee, a place she considers an artistic home base. It is where she finds her tribe, people such as Nicholas Frank, David Robbins and Paul Druecke, among others. The ARTnews rundown includes many women of color and women from across the age spectrum. One telling bit: There aren't as many artists as one might hope on the list (something to parse and consider another day). Journal Sentinel: http://bit.ly/1tBEOQO Lone Wolf Artist, Bill Stockton Helped Bring Modern Art to Montana The late Grass Range artist Bill Stockton called himself a lone wolf in a 1970s interview because he hadn’t read an art magazine in 15 years and “had nothing to do with the art world.” Stockton was an opinionated man who some colleagues described as a curmudgeon. Although he studied art in Paris and Minneapolis, Stockton spent most of his life on his sheep ranch studying the “harsh, abstract, semi‐wilderness qualities of central Montana,” he told former Yellowstone Art Museum director Donna Forbes in 1993. Stockton’s influence is felt throughout the Northwest and beyond November 5, 2014 16 ____________________________________________________________________________ because he brought abstract painting techniques to landscapes, exploring patterns in nature. He often mixed turpentine with cattle markers to make a heavy oil paint. Cattle markers are oil‐based grease markers used to mark cattle at auctions. Neil Jussila, longtime professor of art at Montana State University Billings, gave the eulogy at Stockton’s memorial service in 2002. Jussila said Stockton was an admirer of C.M. Russell, but Stockton chose to respond to a feeling of place instead of presenting a “staged interpretation of the landscape” like Russell often did. “The gift of his expression, which comes from the earth, is a reminder of how precious life is — weeds and all,” Jussila said. “And we, who love art, remain blessed in his passionate quest.” The Yellowstone Art Museum has 90 works by Stockton in its permanent collection. His 23‐by‐29‐inch livestock marker and pencil work on paper, “Lone Pine,” is on display in the Boundless Visions Gallery through the end of the year. Some pieces were donated to the YAM by Stockton, but most of the works were donated to the YAM by the late Stockton admirer Miriam Sample. One painting done with cattle marker and pencil was donated by a one‐time fishing guide and psychologist who met the artist during Stockton’s final year of life. Mike Lawler met Stockton in 2001 when he visited Stockton’s sheep ranch. Lawler was introduced to Stockton by former YAM executive director Robert Knight who took Lawyer to see the artist because Lawler kept returning to the museum to sit and stare at Stockton’s works. “I visited with Bill out on his ranch and sat by his bedside to talk. It was a great privilege,” Lawler said. Lawler purchased two large works depicting an apple tree with a lone apple left on it that was growing in Stockton’s yard. The sunnier, more cheerful piece Lawyer kept for himself and the darker, moodier painting Lawler donated to the YAM. “A lot of his subject matter was right outside his window,” Lawler said. “He painted the everyday, mundane things that he saw and he painted them in an incredibly emotional and personal way that somehow reaches out to us.” Stockton attended Rocky Mountain College for a year, working in the dairy barn and studying agriculture. It was during that time when he met Isabelle Johnson, who taught painting at Eastern Montana College. The two remained friends throughout their lives. Stockton served in France during World War II, which is where he met his wife, Elvia. After the war, he returned to Paris to study art at Ecole de la Grande Chaumiere. He also studied at Minneapolis School of Art and exhibited his work in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mark Browning, longtime director and curator at the Miles City Art Center, which is now Waterworks, helped get Stockton’s book, “Today I Bailed the Hay to Feed the Sheep that the Coyotes Eat,” published through the Montana Institute of the Arts. “He was a grizzly, old curmudgeon of a guy,” Browning said. “The first time I came across his work it was the early 1970s, and he broke all of the rules.” Some writers thought Stockton’s book needed some prettying up, but Browning argued that the stories, paired with loose gesture drawings, were gritty but true to Stockton’s character. November 5, 2014 17 ____________________________________________________________________________ “He was such a coarse character, yet his paintings had such a sensitivity to them,” Browning said. Stockton’s son, Gilles, who lives on the family ranch with his elderly mother, Elvia, said his father found beauty in common scenes in Eastern Montana, inspiring a generation of younger artists to explore the landscape in their own styles. Gillis remembers sitting around the kitchen table with his dad’s artist friends, Isabelle Johnson, Genie DeWeese, Frances Senska and Jessie Wilbur. “I knew it was different from when the neighbors came over. It was like having a foot in two different worlds. This was the group that brought modern art to Montana,” Gilles said. There is a wild story about arts supporter Miriam Sample visiting Stockton one day when he was so discouraged he started to bury his paintings in the yard and she rescued them. Gilles said the story is only half true. A chimney fire had frightened his dad into building a steel vault for his paintings, which he thought he would bury in the yard to protect from a potential house fire. Sample discouraged him from burying them because humidity would damage them. Sample arranged for the purchase of the works and donated them to the YAM. “Unlike some of his contemporaries, who sometimes never sold a painting, my father was always selling, but not always for a lot of money,” Gilles said. “But there was enough encouragement there to keep him going.” Lone wolf artist, hard‐working rancher, lover of the plains, curmudgeon — Stockton was all those things. Missoulian: http://bit.ly/1odgG6t Garden of Eden for Art Lovers KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA: ART lovers, head over to Wei‐Ling Contemporary to view the solo exhibition by artist Hamidi Hadi titled “Balam — The Journey to Garden of Eden” which will be held till Thursday. Hamidi, who is also a lecturer at Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), said this was his fifth solo exhibition since 2005. “I am grateful that art lovers continue to appreciate my collections till today,” said the 43‐year‐old. Hamidi will be showcasing 16 of his artworks at the exhibition. “Balam refers to the act of seeing or looking at something from a distance, where things look obscure, hazy and indistinguishable. It is a distinct characteristic of the artist’s work, furnishing paintings with the elements of mystery and drama,” he said. Hamidi said he used to do a lot of figurative art in his early years before venturing into experimental art. “I started to get involved in experimental art in 2001. My work revolves around exploration of materials and art medium,” he said. Hamidi added that among the materials used in his pieces are industrial paints such as polyurethane, enamel paint and resin. November 5, 2014 18 ____________________________________________________________________________ “My choice of materials can be considered as unusual among major oil painters. “I have more faith in using industrial materials for my work,” he said. For this exhibition, Hamidi said his favourite piece was the artwork titled Antara Dua Musim (Between Two Seasons). “The painting has the element of contrast and harmony in it,” he said. On how he gets his ideas, Hamidi said: “The idea usually comes to me in flashes of colours. As for my preference, I like to use nature and the environment as inspiration.” Hamidi had the opportunity to display his artworks in the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and China in the past. Wei‐Ling Contemporary is located at the ground floor of The Gardens Mall and is open daily from 10am to 9pm. New Straits Times: http://bit.ly/1A87Tbi Long Beach's Guidance Center Showcases the Value of Art As Therapy LONG BEACH, CA: The American Art Therapy Association defines art therapy as a mental health profession in which clients, facilitated by art therapists, use art media, the creative process, and the resulting artwork to explore their feelings, reconcile emotional conflicts, foster self‐awareness, manage behavior and addictions, develop social skills, improve reality orientation, reduce anxiety, and increase self‐esteem. A goal in art therapy is to improve or restore a client’s functioning and his or her sense of personal well‐being. Here at The Guidance Center, we understand these values and benefits of art therapy as they aid in the healing process for many of our own clients and their families. Both drawn to art, Emily Brozyna and Madoka Urhausen, two art therapists from our Long Beach Clinic, have shed some light on this important form of therapy and how they are able to combine two passions of theirs—art and therapy. Emily Brozyna, Marriage and Family Therapist Registered Intern Emily has been creating art her whole life. She began creating art at a young age and soon began to realize this was her own form of therapy which played an important role in her personal healing process. From this, Emily knew she wanted to pursue a career as an artist. She attended Massachusetts College of Art & Design and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Emily then accepted an internship in the psychiatric unit at Boston Children’s Hospital and upon completion moved to Los Angeles. She worked as a counselor in Dual Diagnosis Inpatient for teenagers until she began graduate school at Loyola Marymount University. During her time at LMU, her personal art began to shift from familial‐based concepts to issues pertaining to the field of psychology. Eager to pursue a career as an art therapist, she accepted a position with The Guidance Center in August 2013, after completing her practicum with the Center in May 2013. Her passion to help children continues to fuel her creativity personally and as that of an art therapist. Emily encourages her clients to think outside of the box by using diverse art materials such as charcoal and palm tree fronds and to really November 5, 2014 19 ____________________________________________________________________________ become engaged in the art making process. Her take on being an art therapist is dynamic in that it serves as a personal healing tool in the visual work while also healing the family during a session. Emily participates in themed art shows outside of The Guidance Center and focuses on feministic work pertaining to the field of psychology, specifically the history of women’s struggles, and shows the change in the field from the past until now. Madoka Urhausen, LMFT, ATR‐BC, Clinical Supervisor/School Based Coordinator Madoka’s passion for art began at an early age where she used art as a means to express her own feelings, even keeping a personal art journal. She went on to attend California State University, Long Beach where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and has been part of the art world ever since. During this time, she was also interested in therapy and the social aspect that came along with it. Through this, Madoka decided to combine the healing properties of art with her passion for therapy and attended Loyola Marymount University to obtain her masters in art therapy. She chose to combine these passions because it was such a rewarding experience for both her and her clients, specifically children with trauma and those facing substance abuse. Madoka began working at The Guidance Center in 2011. Her work as an artist inspires her work as a therapist in that she is able to reflect on client sessions which give her more insight into fulfilling her own work, and she continues to be inspired by her clients and their resiliency. Madoka describes art therapy best as a means for clients and families to express their message, while validating their expressions. Madoka has been traveling to Fukushima since 2011 for disaster‐support related assignments for a personal mission. This year she will lecture Japanese counseling students at Mejiro University about the applications of art therapy. Just how Emily and Madoka are inspired by their clients, The Guidance Center continues to be inspired by both of these art therapists’ creativity and dedication to helping the many children and families at the Center heal with this unique form of therapy. Long Beach Post: http://bit.ly/1rVwNRh If You’re Lucky Enough to Earn a Living From your Art, You’re Probably White The thing about racial diversity among working artists in America is that it pretty much doesn't exist. Nearly four out of every five people who make a living in the arts in this country are white, according to an analysis of 2012 Census Bureau data by BFAMFAPhD, a collective of artists dedicated to understanding the rising cost of artistry. The study, which surveyed more than 1.4 million people whose primary earnings come from working as an artist, represents a broad population of creative types in the country, and reveals a number of troubling truths. The lack of diversity is, for instance, even more pronounced for those with art school degrees — more than 80 percent of people with undergraduate art school degrees are white, according to the analysis. And it's most severe among art school graduates who go on to make it (or, at the very least, a living) in the art world — more than 83 percent of working artists with an art school degree are white. November 5, 2014 20 ____________________________________________________________________________ The racial gap among artists in America isn't, of course, a question of desire, talent, or ability. Despite growing minority populations, the United States is still predominantly white — about 60 percent. Naturally then most artists are likely to be, too. But there's something else at play here that explains the jump from just over half (the percentage of the population that is white) to almost four fifths (the percentage of artists who are white). And that's money. Racial inequality is both very real and very severe in the United States. It's also, as my colleague Emily Badger noted earlier this year, growing. In 2000, white households had a net worth 10.6 times greater than black households; by 2011 it had grown to 17.5. The gap is similarly large between whites and Hispanics. Art schools, meanwhile, are really expensive institutions — 11 out of the 15 most expensive universities in the country are art schools, according to The Wall Street Journal. Art schools, as it happens, are also anything but a bridge to gainful employment in the art world: only one out of every 10 art school graduates goes on to earn his or her living as an artist. So spending, say, $120,000 on an art education is often more of an extended luxury than an investment in an adolescent's future. It's of little coincidence that most other top liberal arts institutions have much larger minority presences (at Ivy League schools, for instance, the percentage of the study body that is white ranges from about 41 to 58 percent). "The fantasy of arts graduates’ future earnings in the arts should be discredited," the study says. That isn't merely true because art school graduates rarely go on to become full‐time artists. It's also likely the case because artists rarely make a decent wage, even when they manage to practice art and have it be their main source of income. An analysis of nearly 1.5 million working artists, which included writers, visual artists, actors, photographers, musicians, singers, producers, directors, performers, and dancers, among others, by BFAMFAPhD found that those with an art school degree earned a median salary of just over $36,100 a year, while those without one earned just over $30,600. A separate survey in 2011, which, unlike BFAMFAPhD's, included architects and designers, for whom salaries tend to be more lucrative, put the median salary at just over $43,200. Neither ranks all that highly in the spectrum of salaried jobs in the country. And both are top heavy — meaning that, like with the general populace, the biggest earners earn a disproportionately large chunk of the dough being paid to artists (take the music industry, where the top 1 percent earns almost 80 percent of the money, according to Digital Music News). The Washington Post: http://wapo.st/1DWPRW4 Art for All Lets Kids in Hospital Create Art UTMB pediatric patients and siblings can use self‐expression to allow them to fight stress and cope more easily with stay GALVESTON, TX: When Reyna Collura left her position with a hospital arts‐
in‐medicine program in Florida last year to move to Galveston, she struggled a bit to find her way as an artist. "It felt a little hollow making art for myself," Collura said. "I kept thinking, 'Who is this benefiting?' " So, it has been especially meaningful to Collura to return to the work she loves through a partnership with Child Life Services at the University of November 5, 2014 21 ____________________________________________________________________________ Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Since July, Collura has been visiting UTMB's John Sealy Hospital building weekly to guide pediatric patients and their siblings through art projects in her new position as director of education for the Galveston Arts Center. "It reminds me of why I'm here at the art center and directing my career in this direction," Collura said. "I'm really proud the art center got behind this and we got funding." The funding came in the form of a $5,00 grant from The Dr. Leon Bromberg Charitable Trust Fund. The art center will use the money to buy art materials for the hospital program, Art for All at UTMB, and a cart to push supplies from room to room. Art for All at UTMB is an expansion of the center's Art for All educational outreach, which sends local artists to teach weekly classes at Ronald McDonald House, Libbie's Place Senior Center, The Sunshine Center for Adults with Disabilities, The Alcohol/Drug Abuse Women's Center, and The Resource and Crisis Center of Galveston County. Collura, who has a bachelor's degree in illustration from University of Wisconsin‐Eau Claire and a master's in illustration from Savannah College of Art and Design, began her career as an artist‐in‐residence with University of Florida Healthcare. There, she created the Fantasy Portraits program for pediatric patients. "I thought I could make their wildest fantasies come true," she said. During her five years there, her responsibilities expanded, and she begin to work with oncology, critical/intensive care, outpatient clinics, waiting areas and other departments before her husband's work moved them to Texas. In Galveston, she contacted the art center and asked its leadership how it would feel about her starting a program at UTMB. The executive director at the time was enthusiastic, but swamped with other projects. Collura moved on to other artistic pursuits and helped the art center with an unrelated project. When the center decided to create the director of education position, its board approached Collura. For her, it was an opportunity to share her ideas, not only for a hospital outreach, but also for programming throughout Galveston. As for Art for All at UTMB, Collura plans to seek additional funding and hopes to expand the program beyond the pediatric department. She's confident patients of all ages can benefit from creating art. "It's a form of self‐expression, which becomes more pertinent in a hospital, where there aren't a lot of opportunities for control," Collura said. The process of creating art also can help patients better cope with their situations, relieve stress, and in some situations, manage pain, she added. November 5, 2014 22 ____________________________________________________________________________ Collura said she has been enjoying seeing children at UTMB experience some of these benefits as she works one‐on‐one with them. "I've noticed in certain situations kids calming down; they get very focused. That's magical to see." Lizette Perez is the pediatrics child life coordinator at UTMB. "Our goal with the Art for All program, in collaboration with Ms. Reyna Collura, is to foster an environment that incorporates emotional support by engaging and energizing children through special events involving various art media," Perez explained in an email. "Through the Art for All art program, another main objective is to support families confronting grief and bereavement issues," Perez wrote. "Research has shown that artistic interventions open the lines of communication between pediatric patients, parents and members of the interdisciplinary team, which facilitates a greater collaboration to meet their medical needs and fosters positive coping skills." Houston Chronicle: http://bit.ly/1Gi1AT9 A Master of Art Forgery Eludes Dogged Local Tracker CINCINNATI, OH: The dynamic between art forger Mark Landis and former museum registrar/Cincinnati resident Matthew Leininger is the mythic and existential stuff of legends. This is the ultimate game of cat and mouse played out in an all‐too‐real world stage that shrinks to human scale thanks to the immediate proximity of its recent act taking place in our own backyard — Leininger was the one who uncovered Landis as a fraud. Landis will likely go down in history as one of the most prolific art forgers in our nation’s history. For 30 years he has produced recreations spanning styles and periods with what can only be described as the greatest of ease. It is a high‐
wire act, to be sure, a daring mix of immense talent and an even more shocking degree of chutzpah, as he displays an imperviousness in movement when he donates his works as originals to museums around the country — in many instances, the same piece to multiple galleries. Watching the documentary Art and Craft from directors Sam Cullman (co‐director of the Oscar‐nominated If a Tree Falls), Jennifer Grausman (Emmy‐nominated Pressure Cooker) and Mark Becker (Independent Spirit‐nominated Romantico), the astute viewer will recognize Landis, a character we have seen before, albeit in fictional feature presentations, with assurance that stems from classic handsomeness and/or a dark passion to outwit those he believes have taken something from him or his family. Imagine, for a moment, Clive Owen in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, the delirious post‐9/11 caper, a work of art in its precision and captivating style, with Denzel Washington as the officer in charge of the situation, attempting to gain the upper hand against a brilliant mastermind working at the top of his game. The two men trade sharply scripted repartee as motivations are sussed out and the cataclysmic endgame draws near. Landis stymies such a comparison though because he is not that kind of charming rogue. November 5, 2014 23 ____________________________________________________________________________ There is a bumbling, comic aura around the man; as he shuffles along from place to place you get the sense that he is moving about his own head in much the same way. Thus, you underestimate Landis’ potential as a brilliant criminal mastermind. At best, he seeks dominion over his cluttered yet obviously beautiful talent. It should be noted that Leininger is no Washington for that matter. He is a determined Everyman who happened upon a piece of a puzzle that no one else even realized was a puzzle in the first place and wouldn’t let go. It wouldn’t be hard to envision Art and Craft catching David Fincher’s attention, allowing him to cast Mark Ruffalo as Leininger, sending him on a Zodiac‐style quest down a never‐ending rabbit hole of forgeries. The pursuit would be the point in Fincher’s take, much as it is in real life because what becomes clear in this documentary is that Leininger has nothing to gain from exposing Landis. In fact, that is the paradox inherent in each man, one that will confound audiences expecting the type of narrative closure most contemporary thrillers grant us. (Zodiac stands as an exception to the rule, which is why Fincher would be the perfect candidate to adapt this story into a feature film.) Neither man, Landis nor Leininger, gets anything out of their efforts. What type of art forger is Landis? Why would a man of his singular talents produce these elaborate fakes, which could be worth thousands if not millions of dollars, and not seek to extract something for himself? He comes off as a piece of work, a curious fiction, an emotionally stunted genius with an unhealthy fixation on his mother (a nod to all the amateur psychologists who will watch the movie). His stunning ability, therefore, gets reduced in scale as we watch him, early on, pushing a cart down the aisles of the Hobby Lobby in search of art supplies. He has no small tight‐knit crew of cohorts (think Michael Mann’s Heat, Ben Affleck’s The Town or even Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me) or the desire to amass a fortune that will never be enough. There will not be the dream of one last scam. The game of forgery at its simple core is all that matters to Landis. For a man who could produce significant works under his own name, there is no stopping him — not even a 2012 gallery show at the University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning dedicated to his exquisite fakes and the documentation that allowed them to make their way into the art world. In that, we discover a trace of the familiar. City Beat: http://bit.ly/1x12w9V Art Studios by the Dozens Coming to Governors Island NEW YORK, NY: Spaceworks, a non‐profit that offers affordable studio space for artists, is renovating an over 20,000‐square‐foot building on Governors Island. The renovation will cost around $4.5 million, and the capital funds are coming through the city’s Dept. of Cultural Affairs. Once completed, it will house 43 visual art studios, a performance/rehearsal space and a possible community space/gallery. The studios will range in size, from about 180 to 200 square foot and two studios will be around 596 sq. ft. “We started talking to the Trust for Governors Island sometime ago about doing Building 301,” said Paul Parkhill, executive director of Spaceworks, in a phone interview. “Governors Island was one of the initial public projects that was identified kind of early on in our evolution as a potential space.” November 5, 2014 24 ____________________________________________________________________________ Building 301 is a one‐story red‐bricked structure with a modified L‐shaped plan and was formerly P.S. 26 and a child development center, which served children of Coast Guard personnel. Spaceworks will sign a 20‐year license agreement with the Trust. Construction is slated to begin next spring. Turner Construction will manage the bidding process that will start later this year and Douglas Hassebroek of BRB Architects is the architect. “Because it’s a public building and we’re using public capital funds the process takes some time,” said Parkhill, who presented the plans before Community Board 1 last month. Parkhill said the project should be complete by the end of 2015 and that he hopes to be filling up the studios in the spring of 2016. Once the site is up and running, there will be some challenges to bringing the artists’ materials to the island because ferry service ends at 6 p.m. Overlooking Buttermilk Channel, Building 301 is near Yankee Pier and the Brooklyn ferry stop. Spaceworks plans on working with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, who runs the Arts Center at Governors Island. “L.M.C.C. has come up with a variety of strategies for how they work with their artists who do residencies there so we’re going work closely with them to try to coordinate efforts,” he said. The idea for affordable artist studios in all five boroughs began in the Dept. of Cultural Affairs during the Bloomberg administration. Worries that high rents were driving artists away prompted the agency to hire a consulting firm to create a business model. Then Parkhill, who has worked for non‐profits for 20 years, was hired in the spring of 2012. For Governors Island, Spaceworks hopes to partner with small arts organization from each of the five boroughs. “Since Governors Island is technically in Manhattan but really a five‐borough resource and not exactly of any of the boroughs, we thought it made sense to try to bring organizations from around the city to participate in the program there,” he said. There are different applications for performing and visual artists, who get a studio space for a year. Visual artists must submit a resume, artist statement and portfolio online. Then a panel reviews the artist’s application and ensures that the artist is currently working, showing and committed to using the space on a regular basis. “The thing we’re most concerned about is people getting the spaces and then not using them,” said Parkhill. After the vetting process, a lottery is then used to determine who gets the space. Currently, Spaceworks has two projects in Long Island City and Gowanus, and is working with the Brooklyn Public Library to offer space at certain branch locations. To rent a space for an hour can cost from $12 to $16 and monthly rent is around $350. Parkhill said there will probably be price restructuring for the Governors Island space, but that the rates will be reasonable. “The mission of the organization is to create affordable space. Regardless of where it ends up, we will strive to keep it quite affordable,” he said. Downtown Express: http://bit.ly/1oistQR November 5, 2014 25 ____________________________________________________________________________ Art Day Gives Expression to People of All Abilities NEWPORT, DE: For people with disabilities who lack fine motor skills, the simple act of drawing or painting can be challenging. But on Saturday, a group of University of Delaware students were there to help them bridge the gap. Haley Shiber, 17, of Smyrna, was at Artfest with her father, Howard, and a UD student assigned as her “buddy” for the day, Natalie Pesetsky. Pesetsky helped steady a smiley‐face stamp in Haley’s hand and press down into a piece of soft brown clay. Haley, who uses a wheelchair, has a rare genetic disease and needs assistance to communicate, Howard Shiber said. “She’s very engaged in what she’s doing; she’s very interested in what’s going on,” he said. About 130 people – those with disabilities and their loved ones and University of Delaware students – attended in the morning and early afternoon at Absalom Jones Community Center in Newport. Some participants used adaptive equipment, such as a paint roller attached to their wheelchair, which they rolled forward to paint a mural. Haley had a soft cast placed on her hand, upon which a paintbrush could be attached. The event was sponsored by the UD Center for Disabilities Studies and Art Therapy Express of Wilmington. The latter is an organization that puts on a weekly event in the county‐owned community center. “Here’s a Saturday where we get to wear our comfy clothes, get a little messy and create. It’s good for the soul,” said Beth Mineo, director of the Center for Disabilities Studies. The artworks are featured in the center’s calendar and annual report. The UD students who take part in the annual event tend to get inspired, and some have made career‐changing decisions as a result, Mineo said. There are roughly 50 UD undergrads who take part in the event, she said. Paige Thomas, a junior at UD in exercise science, was helping Geoffrey Steggell, 25, of Newark. Steggell was designing a bag with a pressed image of a lion on it. “Press down,” Thomas said, as he stamped down, and wiped the paint off his fingers on a copy of USA Today covering the table. Steggel is limited in what he can do on an everyday basis, but art is a good way for him to express himself, Thomas said. Linny Marvel, 33, of Bear, who uses a wheelchair, said the day helps brighten her mood. “It gives me a way to get out of my feelings, to get out of my frustration,” she said. Art Kay of Newark said his wife, Barbara, 82, had long created art, but she has been living for years with the after‐effects of the polio she contracted as a young woman. She has been “pretty much homebound” in recent years in her wheelchair. When he saw the event listed in The News Journal, he decided it would be good to get out and try it. November 5, 2014 26 ____________________________________________________________________________ She made a colorful image with the outline of leaves and pressed paint into a canvas bag, as she struck up a nice rapport with her buddy for the day, Camryn Jung, a freshman at UD. “It encourages me,” Barbara Kay said. Lisa Bartoli, executive director and founder of Art Therapy Express, called it a special event, that encourages bonding between the artists and their buddies, she said. Of the students, she said, “I believe they get as much as the participants do.” Delaware Online: http://delonline.us/1wt0oYw What Happened When Glasgow School of Art Went Up in Smoke? GLASGOW, SCOTLAND: The call wasn't met with much concern. Over the years, at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service's Johnstone command centre, there had been many call‐outs to the famous Glasgow School of Art (GSA), always to a drill or false alarm. Nevertheless, dispatchers immediately radioed through to the three closest fire engines. Arriving at the building – which sits proudly on Renfrew Street – four minutes later, the fire crews were struck by the speed of the evacuation as students streamed through the double doors and down the cascading front staircase. That morning, the building had hummed as 102 final‐year fine art students and their undergraduate helpers put the finishing touches to their pieces for the degree show. The product of four years of work, the alarm sounded four hours before the final deadline. It was to be the only time in that all the work was together in one place. "That whole week was hectic," says painting and printmaking student Adam Quinn. "I was coming in at 8am and leaving at 11 at night. Sanding the walls down, painting them, cleaning everything up and installing my work. It was just the last wee bits when the alarm rang, I just needed to finish setting up." It was not long before the firefighters shifted their approach. "We saw a wisp of smoke. It was of a not‐nice colour; almost brownish," says David Goodhew, the officer in charge on the day. "That told us not just that something was on fire, but that it was a serious fire." While black smoke points to a fire fuelled by plastic, brown indicates "a deep‐seated working fire". It is the colour of smoke you get from a fire that is burning building materials – that has got into the structure of a building. As more crews arrived, events quickly took another twist, when someone pointed to smoke coming from the roof of the building. "And that didn't make sense," says Goodhew. "We'd been called to a fire in the basement." "It's hard to overstate the importance of the building for Glasgow," says Pamela Robertson, professor of Mackintosh Studies at the Hunterian University . "In many ways, it is Glasgow's Acropolis: our building on the hill that adds lustre to the city." November 5, 2014 27 ____________________________________________________________________________ Charles Rennie Mackintosh had been a 28‐year‐old junior draughtsman at the Glasgow architectural firm of Honeyman and Keppie when he submitted plans to a competition committee for a new building for the city's expanding art school. To be built to a budget of £14,000, the brief was made tricky by the unforgiving site: a tight plot on a steep slope, constrained by the requirement to have large, north‐facing studios. Out on its west wing, but conceptually at the building's heart, was the library. Shadowy and cloistered with dark pine and oak panelling and jutting verticals, it was breathtaking; the jewel in the crown. "One has to see the library as an integral part of the building," says Robertson. "There is the journey from the street, up the stairs, through the foyer, up into the museum space and along the corridors. There is this grand approach through the building before you arrive at the library itself. It sensitises you." The fire that engulfed the building over the course of the day was contained within the west wing and – despite the dramatic images seen from the streets below and on television sets far and wide – only 10 per cent of the structure was lost. But the library was gone. Thanks to the quick actions of the firefighters, who effectively formed a human chain to remove the building's contents from harm's way, a number of students' work survived. But for many who had been assigned studio space in the west wing, all or part of their portfolios were lost. The stress of a deadline is a universal experience – and it is hard to imagine a more unnerving hand‐in day than the one had by the Glasgow School of Art's class of 2014. How the fire started is unclear. Just before 1.30pm, third‐year sculpture student Felix Welch was hurrying along one of the four main corridors in the basement with two tutors and a fellow student. Ahead of him, he heard a pop. "It sounded like someone slamming a door," he says. Welch took a couple more steps and saw that in one of the temporary studio spaces,a large panel of expanding foam had caught alight. One of the tutors grabbed a fire extinguisher from a bracket on the wall and tried to tackle it. But within a matter of seconds, the flames had leapt to a wooden partition wall and were spreading quickly. One of the tutors hit the alarm and they headed for the stairs. In the days that followed different accounts of how the fire started circulated –including the suggestion that it may have begun with a rushed attempt to dry expanding foam with a hairdryer. But the prevailing version of events is that the fire was sparked by a faulty projector. Coming out of the Bourdon Building on the other side of Scott Street, Quinn's mind was on whether he would now be able to get everything > ready in time. "My initial reaction was 'the deadline might not be five o'clock now: it'll be eight, nine, or maybe even Monday'," he says. "It didn't really seem that serious." Milling outside, people soon began to spot the smoke coming from the roof. At first a barely‐visible curl, then a streak and soon a thick yellow‐charcoal plume smeared across the bright spring sky. At around 1pm, the intensity of the heat inside the building shattered one of the large north‐facing windows and shards of glass fell on to the street below. The police acted quickly to seal off Renfrew Street, forcing back the last few remaining people. The building had quickly become a victim of both its form and function; built, in large part, in timber which had spent a century soaking up turpentine. The library, of course, was packed with hundreds of thousands of pages of books. To make matters worse, the ventilation system was constructed from wood. While modern building regulations require at least an hour burning‐time between floors, this system of flammable chimneys saw the fire rip through six storeys – from the basement to the roof – in just four minutes. November 5, 2014 28 ____________________________________________________________________________ The students gathered at the muster point at nearby Garnethill Park. Over them, the plume grew thicker, drifting south and west across the city. Residents on the other side of the River Clyde, three‐quarters of a mile to the south, smelt burning wood, while traffic slowed on the city‐centre stretch of the M8 as the smoke column drifted over. In the park, rumours began to spread. A combination of titbits from people joining the throng and updates from BBC and Twitter, some said the roof was on fire, others that the blaze had spread to studio 40, to 44, 45. Melissa Maloco's studio was directly below the Mackintosh library, while Freya Stockford's was directly above. "I knew that the damage to my work would be very severe because of where the smoke was coming from," says Maloco. "Then the BBC put up a picture they had been sent on their website. It was of firefighters pouring water in from their cranes and you could see flames coming out of one of the windows. It was on the first floor. I began to count how many along. I realised it was studio 43, my studio, and I knew I'd lost everything." For Stockford, it was a different story. "I was totally unaware that any of my work had gone. It wasn't until the next day when I received an email sent out to staff and students which included a press release. It outlined the extent of the damage and said the area above the library had been destroyed. I'd been moved away before the fire spread and the last I'd seen was smoke coming from the roof, but not from the west end of the building." After the initial shock, she says her emotional state "went from bad to worse": "It felt like losing an old friend". At around 5.30pm, firefighters coming out of the building told Goodhew that the west‐facing gable wall looked as if it might collapse. On the advice of a council structural engineer who had rushed to the site, Goodhew called his crews back from their position on Scott Street, from where they had been hosing water directly into the Mackintosh library. As the evening drew in, students began to head to The State Bar off nearby Sauchiehall Street. Five hours after the fire had started, ash still rained down through dusk air thick with the smell of a pyre. The mood was sombre. "I've never been in one place with so many people crying that hasn't been a funeral," says Rob Hodge. "It was quite grim, standing there with a pint, watching our degree show go up in flames," says Quinn. "It should have been the pint that said 'Right, that's us. We just enjoy it from here'. But instead, everyone was in tears." The sense of grief transcended the loss of the students' personal portfolios, yet that feeling has continued to permeate within their approach to their work. "It was like mourning a death, which I know might sound over‐exaggerated," says Maloco. "But I think everyone felt like that. For a period afterwards, the thought of making new work seemed very alien and I just couldn't really fathom recreating things and getting back into that process." It was apparent on the day that much of the work in the west wing had been destroyed, while the east wing remained largely undamaged. But, says Ella Porter, "no matter which side of the building you were on, everybody felt more or less the same devastation. Everyone saw it as their building". Up on the hill, as darkness fell, the firefighters judged the fire to be under control. Floodlights were brought in so that teams could work through the night on an "inspect and extinguish" mission to ensure that no smouldering debris remained. But, long before the lights were switched on, it was clear that nothing of the library had survived. "I keep using the present tense," says Pamela Robertson, speaking four and a half months after the fire. "And I'm going to carry on doing that." On the day, she says she felt compelled to leave her desk and head to the GSA "to say goodbye". But now, she is optimistic. November 5, 2014 29 ____________________________________________________________________________ A campaign set up in the wake of the disaster has raised between £6m and £7m to restore the building. The majority of this, £5m, has come from the UK Government while the Scottish Government has pledged to fund‐match any other donations (up to £5m), accounting for the rest of the total. Despite the iconic status of the library in the city, a debate is now under way as to whether the library should be reinstated to Mackintosh's original plans, or replaced with a new design. Local fashion entrepreneur David Mullane, chair of the Friends of the GSA organisation, came out last month declaring it would be an "embarrassment" to rebuild to Mackintosh's original plans and would amount to a flagrant display of "Mockintosh". In the library's place, he has called for a "high functioning space, somewhat like a common room". However, the restorationists argue that the necessary materials and crafts are readily available for a faithful rebuild of the original. All of the year's students graduated in June, assessed using extenuating circumstances protocols. Other than two who chose to return home to China, they will receive a bursary, totalling £750,000, funded by the Scottish Government. Named the Phoenix Bursary, it will allow them to study at one of several institutions around the world. The destinations are set to be announced this week, with all students planning to create original work, rather than revisiting their degree show. Melissa Maloco has already created a handful of new pieces. A month after the fire, she returned to "The Mack". Taking ashes from the fire, she daubed them across a series of canvasses. "Carbon is the source of all new life," she explains. "Which, to me, seemed quite fitting." The Independent: http://ind.pn/1tBGMRs Paintings in National Parks Spark Probe, Furor A series of colorful, eerie faces painted on rocks in some of the West's most famously picturesque landscapes has sparked an investigation by the National Park Service and a furor online. Agents so far have confirmed the images in Yosemite and four other national parks in California, Utah and Oregon. Park Service spokesman Jeffrey Olson said the vandalism could lead to felony charges for the person responsible. The images appear to come from a New York state woman traveling across the West this summer and documenting her work on Instagram and Tumblr, said Casey Schreiner of modernhiker.com, whose blog post tipped off authorities. The investigation is the subject of well‐trafficked threads on the website Reddit, where people railed against the drawings as the defacing of irreplaceable natural landscapes. "You're seeing this emotional response of people who feel like they've been kicked in the gut," Schreiner said. It's not the first time vandalism in parks has been documented on social media. Last year in Utah, two Boy Scout leaders caused an online uproar when they recorded themselves toppling an ancient rock formation at Goblin Valley State Park and posted it on YouTube. But in this case, the woman appears to consider the work an artistic expression, Schreiner said. November 5, 2014 30 ____________________________________________________________________________ One photograph online showed a painting of a woman's face on a rock outcropping against the panoramic sweep of Oregon's Crater Lake National Park. In another, a backpack‐size line drawing of a woman smoking a cigarette appears on red rock in Utah's Zion. The images appear to have been painted with acrylic paint or drawn with marker, Schreiner said. He took screen shots Tuesday of seven images that appeared on Instagram and Tumblr accounts under the handle "creepytings." The accounts later were made private or taken down. The Associated Press is not naming the woman associated with the accounts because she hasn't been charged with a crime. Efforts to reach her Thursday were not successful. Artists who work in natural environments typically consider who owns the land and get permission to work there, said Monty Paret, an associate professor of art history at the University of Utah. The earthwork "Spiral Jetty" sculpture on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, for example, is on land leased from the state. The images that surfaced this week look more like graffiti, Paret said. "As opposed to tagging in a back alley, it's like tagging an iconic building," he said. "It's going to get a lot more attention." National parks agents have confirmed the vandalism in Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks in California, Canyonlands and Zion in Utah, and Crater Lake in Oregon. Investigators also are looking for vandalism in other places the woman's social media trail indicates she visited: Joshua Tree, Sequoia and Kings Canyon in California; Rocky Mountain in Colorado; Bryce Canyon in Utah; and Grand Canyon in Arizona. Crater Lake superintendent Craig Ackerman said bad weather has kept staff from going to the painting there, which is at an elevation of about 9,000 feet. Though rangers typically remove graffiti to discourage others, sometimes cleaning it causes even more damage, he said. Vandalism is a small but persistent problem for the Park Service, which welcomes about 280 million visitors a year, Olson said. It typically is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $5,000 fine and a year in prison. But vandalism in national parks can be a felony if the damage is extensive or in specially protected places, he said. ABC News: http://abcn.ws/1x42mNh Program Turns Dallas Parking Meters Into Works of Public Art DALLAS, TX: Strange things are happening to Dallas parking meters. Tiny red people scale those in front of the Majestic Theatre, dropping bags of money on each other. Farther down Elm Street, rainbow textiles bedeck the parking meters’ poles. Intricate graffiti‐style monsters cover those in Deep Ellum. Meters in Oak Cliff November 5, 2014 31 ____________________________________________________________________________ have been transformed with acrylic paint into rose bouquets, gumball machines and goldfish. “Are they doing something different with the parking meters?” a woman walking down the street asked artist Sara Lovas, as another passerby took a cellphone photo of a decorated meter. “The ones down there had sweaters on them.” It’s the kind of reaction the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs had been hoping for. As a result, a pilot program to transform 60 parking meters into works of public art has led to a larger effort. The initial project began last month, after the office selected seven artists to design and decorate functioning meters in three Dallas neighborhoods. Last week, the Cultural Affairs Commission approved a $25,300 expansion of that endeavor to turn 100 more meters into art pieces. Lovas, a Dallas sculpture artist, chose to decorate her 10 meters with the tiny red people interacting with coins. It was, the artist said, a playful way of exploring the themes of money, commerce and sharing. One meter has a figurine dropping a coin that says “Parks” into the slot. Another has a “Take One, Leave One” dish, where motorists can drop a quarter for the next meter user. “I like that Dallas is starting to do things like that, where you just see art in a normal setting,” Lovas said. “You don’t have to go to a museum, you just come upon it.” She added that she appreciated that artists like her — a graphic designer by day — could participate in small‐scale works of public art. Most of the people selected to decorate the first round of meters have full‐time day jobs and do artwork on nights and weekends. Kay Kallos, the city’s public art program manager, said her office is making a conscious effort to include artists who haven’t had the chance — or who don’t have the reputations — to take on major public projects. Artists can be put on a “pre‐qualified” list for projects worth less than $50,000. The Office of Cultural Affairs hosted a “Public Art 101” workshop in August and plans another one in April. “This is bigger than the parking meters,” Kallos said. No timetable has been established for the second parking meter project. Artists will apply via the office’s usual selection process, which involves being added to the pre‐qualified list, then selection by a public art committee. Selected artists will submit proposals specific to the sites where their meters are. The project so far has not been without its challenges. The meters Sally Ackerman and Ronda Van Dyk transformed into giant crocheted flowers on Elm Street have been repeatedly vandalized, leading the city to cover those and Lovas’ nearby meters. The crocheted flowers will be moved to meters near the Dallas Farmers Market, where there is more consistent traffic, Ackerman said. They, and Lovas’ works, will be unveiled during a ceremony and meter‐art kickoff party next month. Katherine Rodriguez, a Fort Worth artist, used oil paints to enliven meters along Jefferson Boulevard, near the Texas Theatre. An apartment complex manager, Rodriguez started painting only two years ago. She’s had works displayed by the Puerto Rican Association of Dallas‐Fort Worth, she said, but never in a gallery. The meters could be great exposure. November 5, 2014 32 ____________________________________________________________________________ “It’s an open door — a little crack,” she said. “I would be thrilled if I got an offer from someone saying, ‘Hey, I’d love to have a couple of your paintings on the wall.’” Dallas Mornings News: http://bit.ly/1odjjFh Is Vandalism of Art Excusable? Recent examples are fueled not by artistic critique but by an urge to destroy “Much of the story of 20th century art can be told as a series of acts of vandalism,” novelist and poet Ben Lerner wrote in a recent essay in Harper’s Magazine. The work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, who broke the picture plane into pieces with cubism, and Marcel Duchamp, who bestowed on everyday objects the elite status of art, constituted acts of deconstruction. Those modernist artists attacked traditional aesthetic and cultural ideas by creating art that put forth an alternative philosophy. Their work amounts to conceptual vandalism. Artists in the 21st century, however, are taking this commandment of vandalism quite literally. In August an anarchist artist using the open‐source nom de guerre Monty Cantsin — who is thought to be Hungarian‐
born Canadian performance artist Istvan Kantor — splashed red paint in a giant X on a gallery wall of the Whitney Museum to protest the high prices commanded by the slick works of the featured artist, Jeff Koons. The same month, a graffiti artist who goes by the name Sintex defaced a Detroit mural painted in remembrance of Vincent Chin, a local Chinese‐American murdered in 1982, because he felt he had a territorial claim to the wall it was painted on, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood. On Oct. 19, the Koons show was attacked again — by a graffiti artist again calling attention to the high prices of the work on display. Other acts of artistic vandalism are more costly. This February, artist Maximo Caminero picked up a painted vase installed in the Perez Art Museum Miami and smashed it on the floor. The vase, part of an installation by the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, was estimated to be 7,000 years old and worth about $1 million. Caminero claimed his act was a spontaneous protest that underlined how the museum ignored local artists. It was also a referential one: One of Ai’s important early works consists of photographs of himself smashing similarly ancient Han dynasty urns as acts of iconoclasm against what Ai sees as China’s obsession with its dynastic history and its inability to move forward. These acts against art may take the shape of aesthetic or ideological rebellion, but they are far from effective. At its best, artistic rebellion happens either in the form of works that collaborate with the institutions even as they critique them (such as those of Hans Haacke, which have long pointed out unsavory truths about the hallowed art world) or works that operate outside the institutions altogether (such as the Guerrilla Girls’ feminist billboards that overturned how the public viewed museum collections). But the recent examples of iconoclasm are motivated less by true artistic critique and more by a simple urge toward destruction. The rising pedestal Visual art today struggles to resolve a schizophrenic conflict between its status as a commodity and its need to be revolutionary. We live in an era of record‐breaking monetary valuations of art in the private market. The art market keeps beating itself, anointing new works each year as the most expensive ever sold at auction. Koons’ “Balloon Dog (Orange)” took home that distinction just last year for a work by a living artist; it went for $58.4 million to an unnamed November 5, 2014 33 ____________________________________________________________________________ buyer. The extreme prices promote the public perception of visual art as the world’s costliest luxury objects, with single pieces worth more than what the vast majority of humans will earn in a lifetime. Thus the objects are precious and must be protected, surrounded by guards and buffered by white gallery walls. Yet art is far more outwardly ideological and affective than a Louis Vuitton bag. It still inspires anger, joy, nostalgia and fear, intense emotions that sometimes get cheekily classified as the Stendhal syndrome, the perhaps psychosomatic disorder of becoming overwhelmed by an experience of art. In an essay for The Atlantic, Lerner calls this discrepancy between static commodity value and spiritual impact “museum guard syndrome,” after a moment in “A Heart So White,” by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, in which a guard moves to burn a painting that angers him. “On the one hand the painting is an object of immense financial value that has to be protected,” Lerner writes. “On the other hand it is a masterpiece capable of evoking emotions that overwhelm any economy.” Given the current myopic focus on price and an increasingly internationalized art ecosystem, we are all subject to a form of museum guard syndrome, in which economic value and elitist cultural attitudes prevent us from interacting with visual art in a productive, personal way. The impulse to bring such venerated objects to our level is what seems to motivate artistic vandals such as Kantor and Caminero: They give in to museum guard syndrome and attack the object in order to stop its influence over them. Even Banksy, whose work is supposed to exist outside the art world but has been integrated nonetheless, is the target of such aggression. A recent piece the artist installed in public was vandalized almost immediately. To vandalize art is not to deny that the objects in question have value. After all, most of the recent cases involved works by the kings of the inflated art market. Rather, such acts only reaffirm that value and uphold the art as a symbol of the dominant ideology. This can explain the tagging of a Mark Rothko mural at the Tate Modern in 2012 by Wlodzimierz Umaniec, a founder of a crackpot movement called yellowism, which means about as much as its name indicates. “It’s not art, it’s not reality, it's just yellowism,” he told The Telegraph. “In yellowism, all the possible interpretations are reduced to one — are equalized, flattened to yellow.” The tagging was Umaniec’s attempt to integrate a culturally acknowledged masterpiece into his nihilistic ideology by appropriating it — or perhaps denigrating it — through his signature. When he told reporters, “I am not a vandal,” he was incorrect. He is no artist, just a vandal. Unlike Picasso or Duchamp, whose works moved artistic discourse forward, Umaniec presented no valid alternative to the work he defaced. He apparently felt bereft of speech and thought and instead accepted violent action as the only way forward. That path leads nowhere: Umaniec was jailed for two years. Art, the provocateur In many cases, the ability of art to shock and surprise is enhanced by its existence in the museum and gallery ecosystem. When I was a teenager, I attended an after‐school program once a week at a local contemporary art museum. One weekend, a curator at the museum led our group on a tour of Chelsea, the locus of New York City’s art galleries. We stopped in dozens of galleries that day, but I remember only one piece. In a white‐walled space an artist had installed a group of delicate sculptures made from pulped paper. One sculpture was a tall gray rectangle, like a model of a skyscraper. Walking around the piece, I noticed a tiny airplane made of the same color material attached to the side, its nose just meeting the edge of the building. It was, of course, a representation of a plane hitting the twin towers on 9/11. But the artist had turned it into a gentle meeting, a delicate union instead of an earth‐shattering explosion. November 5, 2014 34 ____________________________________________________________________________ The sculpture unexpectedly enraged me. My fists balled up. I had the urge to knock the soft sculpture over, to crush it, to stop its mockery of an event that had changed my world indelibly. I grew up in Connecticut, and that gallery tour day wasn’t so far removed from 9/11, the anxiety of which still pervaded the city and the tri‐state area. In that moment, I suffered from museum guard syndrome. Why was the work so personally offensive? The curator later asked what I thought of the work. I said I couldn’t believe it was portraying 9/11 in — as I had interpreted the piece — such a cynical, sarcastic way. She responded that art existed to be provocative, that artists have license in their work to depict their perspective as they see fit. I’ve spent the past decade coming to terms with that statement in a way I suspect Umaniec, Kantor and Sintex have not. Years later, I don’t remember the name of the exhibition’s artist, nor do I consider the 9/11 sculpture a particularly good work of art. It’s too simple, a one‐line joke that exhausts itself quickly and goes no further than a superficial critique. But I still defend without question the piece’s right to exist unharmed. Aljazeera America: http://alj.am/10mG9PR New Exhibition In Atlanta Brings Cezanne And The Modern Masters Together In One Place ATLANTA, GA: An exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum of Art showcases a group of impressionist and post‐impressionist works amassed by a private collector who described the pursuit and acquisition of the pieces as an adventure. The exhibition, "Cezanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection," includes 50 pieces, including works by Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Amedeo Modigliani, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin and Henri De Toulouse‐Lautrec. It opens Saturday at the High. The centerpiece of the exhibition is 24 works by Cezanne, including 16 rarely exhibited watercolors. One of the first paintings visitors see in the exhibition, Chaim Soutine's "View of Ceret," in which a cityscape is hardly recognizable, was Henry Pearlman's first major acquisition made in 1945. In Pearlman's "Reminiscences of a Collector," which is printed in the exhibition's catalog, Pearlman writes that he would get a "lift" when he saw that painting whenever he arrived home. "This first pleasant experience with a modern painting started me on a road of adventure that has been both exhilarating and satisfying. I haven't spent a boring evening since that first purchase," he wrote. Pearlman, whose Eastern Cold Storage Company made significant contributions to marine shipbuilding during World War II, and his wife Rose went on to build an impressive collection that has been housed at the Princeton University Art Museum since 1976. The collection includes works that are considered among the best by the respective artists, including van Gogh's "Tarascon Stagecoach," Modigliani's portrait of Jean Cocteau and Cezanne's "Mont Sainte‐Victoire." But it also lacks anything by Pablo Picasso and others that would seem natural inclusions for a collection of works from that era. "There are relationships between things, but it's not a textbook collection," said High director of collections and exhibitions David Brenneman. "It's really Pearlman looking at things and drawing relationships." November 5, 2014 35 ____________________________________________________________________________ Pearlman greatly admired Cezanne, and his collection includes works featuring familiar subjects for the artist — landscapes set in the countryside of Provence in southern France and still lifes of objects from his studio. Some of the oil paintings seem incomplete with patches of canvas showing through, and it's not clear whether Cezanne had reached a point at which he was satisfied or whether he meant to come back to the paintings later, Brenneman said. Graphite drawings provide the framework for the watercolors, with colors added in varying intensity and the bright white of the paper shining through in places. Soutine, the second most represented artist in the exhibition, is perhaps less familiar to the casual art consumer. But Brenneman said he hopes the exhibition will help expose more people to the works of the French expressionist who painted with thick strokes that leave markedly raised ridges of paint on the canvas. To that end, the High borrowed five Soutine portraits from a private collection to supplement the seven other Soutine works included in the exhibition. Just as Soutine's landscapes verge on abstraction, his portraits nearly cross the line into caricature, Brenneman said. Other highlights of the exhibition include "The Sacred Grove" by Toulouse‐Lautrec, a parody of a classical scene by academic painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes that includes objects and people from Toulouse‐Lautrec's time, and carvings by Gauguin and Modigliani. The exhibition runs through Jan. 11 at the High. Then it will be at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, Canada, (Feb. 7‐May 18) and will finish its tour at the Princeton University Art Museum (Sept. 12‐Jan. 3, 2016). It previously was shown at museums in England and France. Huffington Post: http://huff.to/1xVlTzw Wearing Their Art on Their Cars in Houston What started with a couple of thousand spectators watching 40 cars drive by in 1988 in Houston, Texas, has grown to 315,000 spectators watching 250 entries from all over North America, Mexico and the U.K. “Of course you decorate your car, otherwise you look like everyone else.” HOUSTON, TX: As you drive into Houston, passing under elaborate, almost beautiful concrete trails that whisk traffic off to some of the nearly 1,000 kilometres of freeways in the area, it is abundantly clear this is a city that loves its cars. But Houston has perfected more than the art of the overpass. As the highway widens and the traffic thickens, if you pay close attention, you may spot the Map of Space and Time scoot by. Rebecca Lowe’s 2009 FX Honda is one of the beloved art cars driving among the millions of vehicles on the road in Houston. “Of course you decorate your car, otherwise you look like everyone else,” Lowe explains as she points out the word “faster,” a tiny tank, a Houston ring road and other treasures in among the swirls of colour on her car. It took her four years to paint the Map, her third art car in 17 years, and says she’s finished painting her baby “for now.” November 5, 2014 36 ____________________________________________________________________________ Most recently, Lowe painted the dashboard so she could “see stuff on the inside” and keep herself amused as she amuses other folks who wave and shout “Art car!” when she drives past. Lowe is one of the about 30 “daily drivers” who use their art car to get around and for one weekend every May, she feels like a rock star driving in Houston’s annual Art Car Parade, the oldest, largest and most organized art car parade in U.S. and “the most fun in the whole world, ever.” What started with a couple of thousand spectators watching 40 cars drive by in 1988 has grown to 315,000 spectators watching 250 entries from all over North America, Mexico and the U.K., where Andy Hazell lives. When the British artist heard about the parade a couple of years ago, he had to be a part of it. “Instead of going on a Caribbean cruise I come here and work in the art‐car‐cave,” he says as he creates a giant spider atop an old Lincoln Continental, a design he sketched on the plane on the way over and that won first prize in the 2014 Art Car Parade. He won first prize in 2013, too, with the Heroicar, a superhero riding on top of a car and thousands of LED lights along the side. When Hazell is safely back in the U.K. making public art and “putting blobs in front of buildings,” his winning art cars make appearances at events around Houston all year long. “There is no stopping me, I really like doing it,” he says. “It’s like a game show challenge, you get two weeks and a bunch of stuff and off you go.” Instead of winning a car, you get to drive one in the parade. If you miss the parade, you can also check out a few art cars at the Art Car Museum (or Garage Mahal, as the locals call it), a not‐for‐profit that has bought and displayed a few of the winning entries over the years — a giant cockroach, a bigger bunny and even a red stiletto on wheels. It’s all part of the city’s tight‐knit art‐car community. “It becomes contagious, you have to be careful who your friends are or you’ll make an art car,” says Nicole Strine, president of the Houston Art Car Klub and creator of Shattered Vanity, a 1997 Honda Accord adorned with thousands of cut mirrors she assembled during five months of evenings and weekends “without sleeping or eating.” She admits — somewhat sheepishly — that these days, she parks her art car during the week and takes a different one on her long commute so as not to risk crashing her work of art. While Strine misses the attention she used to get on her way to work, she jokes that there are advantages to looking like everyone else on Houston’s roads: “Now I can pick my nose.” Toronto Star: http://on.thestar.com/1wt0Ztw A Capital of the Arts Is Forced to Evolve PARIS, FRANCE: Even as the economy and his own fortunes sputter, President François Hollande has whirled through a flurry of recent museum openings and art events in Paris with the zeal of someone in the middle of a political campaign, reveling in the nation’s place as a capital of culture. November 5, 2014 37 ____________________________________________________________________________ On Saturday, the state‐run Picasso museum swung open the grand doors to its remodeled 17th‐century Baroque mansion, overhauled at a cost of 50 million euros (about $63 million). On Monday, the Louis Vuitton Foundation formally opened to the public a $135 million museum of billowing glass sails and misted ponds to show off the private collection of the billionaire Bernard Arnault. Paris also hosted a sprawling contemporary art fair that drew galleries from around the world. “We cannot build anything based on nostalgia,” but instead “on emotion, hope and conquest,” Mr. Hollande said at the inauguration of the Musée Picasso, boasting that France was “culturally shining.” The opening of two major museums within days underscored the place that France, and Paris in particular, holds as a beacon of art and culture. But even at Paris’s moment of celebration, France’s underlying political and economic troubles were a tear in an otherwise lovely canvas that was impossible to ignore. France’s leadership is struggling to pay for the government it provides. While the capital remains a global magnet of culture, it increasingly risks becoming a playground for the world’s elite, detached from its midsize cities, villages and countryside, where rising hardships stoke resentments and widen the opening for far‐right parties. The tough economic climate is forcing France to revisit its vaunted model by which the state funds and manages the arts, and the juxtaposition of the two museums made clear the lurking shift being forced on France’s values, with all the attendant controversies. The Louis Vuitton Foundation is just the latest example of how French cultural glory is being privatized. And the epic troubles of the Musée Picasso — closed five years amid cost overruns and a staff revolt — illustrate how even a state with a proud history of arts patronage retooled its approach in the face of an erosion of resources. “All the shine and gloss of this cultural moment hides the misery befalling our culture budgets, our decline in the global art market, our creaking state institutions, our falling behind the Chinese, the declining appetite of the French public for museums,” said Isabel Pasquier, a cultural journalist for France Inter radio. “Paris still has all of the glamour, but not the financial strength.” Some view the shifting winds as a healthy sign. Frédéric Martel, a writer who hosts a radio show on the arts and wrote a book on the funding of culture in the United States, noted that the conventional view in some quarters used to be that culture financed and organized by the state was good and culture shaped by market forces, whether Hollywood or Disneyland, was bad. This prejudice is slowly dissipating, he said. Increasingly, France is importing the model of the nonprofit foundation bankrolled by a wealthy benefactor. Such patrons can also afford risk‐taking star architects like Frank Gehry, who designed the Louis Vuitton Foundation, or Renzo Piano, who did the new quarters of the Jérôme Seydoux‐Pathé Foundation, devoted to the history of cinema, which looks like a giant armadillo. “There is a new way of thinking that having a billionaire create a nonprofit foundation for the arts is a very good thing and a public good,” Mr. Martel said. The notion that business can pollute the arts is changing, he added. November 5, 2014 38 ____________________________________________________________________________ Reduced national spending over the past two years has forced major landmarks like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay to turn to the public in search of crowdfunding to restore a precious Gustave Courbet painting or to acquire a historic jeweled table. The Musée Picasso itself financed much of its remodeling costs by renting precious works to foreign museums. Because of necessity and budget cuts, institutions like the Palais de Tokyo are experimenting with renting out some of their space to luxury goods companies like Chanel, which created an exhibition about its classic perfume, Chanel No. 5, last year. “The nation’s budget helps a lot of the arts, but the situation is very difficult,” said Jean de Loisy, president of the Palais de Tokyo, whose museum has been responsible for raising 50 percent of its budget in the past two years. “We are like museums in all the world everywhere, and we have to ask people and brands to participate and I think that’s very good.” While the French capital’s museums are a huge international draw — more than 70 percent of the Louvre’s nine million visitors last year were foreign — the city’s place in the global art market is less secure. France once dominated the art market, but it is now ranked fourth in the contemporary art market with €26 million in sales last year, or around $35 million, well behind China at the top, with around $800 million in sales, followed by the United States and Britain, according to Thierry Ehrmann, president of Artprice, a French database for art auctions and art prices. Against that backdrop, the rise of audacious buildings funded by big business is becoming more attractive. Fleur Pellerin, the culture minister, said in an interview that France had a long tradition of private sector funding of the arts, and she stressed that state funding and private funding of culture were “complementary.” In the case of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the new building is funded by subsidiaries around the world of LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate, according to Jean‐Paul Claverie, an adviser on the project to Mr. Arnault, who said the foundation preferred not to discuss its financing. “In philanthropy, we never express figures because we want to let the dream and the emotion speak for itself,” Mr. Claverie said while sitting near the reflective pools of the new museum. “Bernard Arnault had in mind that the group has to contribute to the arts because the success of the group is based on its relationship with the artistic image of France.” But critics are already wary of the impact of a private museum with huge resources. At Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC, the contemporary arts fair in Paris that ended Sunday, the debate centered on issues such as whether a private museum was really more concerned with brand marketing. “The capital of culture is only marketing for Louis Vuitton, and that’s where they are going,” said Fernando Morales‐de la Cruz, creator of the Itinerant Museum of Art, who was roaming FIAC in search of funders for his decidedly different approach: painting the artworks of legendary artists on nude adults walking in public spaces. “Why do you have to make these museums so amazing outside?” he added. “Because this is a marketing tool.” In a sign of the tensions over the increasing privatization of the arts, the creation of the new Louis Vuitton building was pilloried by some critics as the glorified vanity project of a billionaire who had used his power and influence to build a pyramid and to silence dissent. November 5, 2014 39 ____________________________________________________________________________ The widespread publicity about the building “is emblematic of the corrupt relations between the media and LVMH,” fumed Mediapart, an influential online news website, under the headline, “The Courtesan’s Ball.” Nevertheless, others say hard economic times may have the paradoxical virtue of helping to spur creativity and to magnify the importance of culture. Ms. Pasquier, the France Inter journalist, noted that the greatest artists throughout the centuries produced many of their masterpieces when, like France, they were living through difficult periods. “An artist with no worries becomes spoiled and complacent,” she said, “and the same applies to a country.” The New York Times: http://nyti.ms/1x2OiEH 'Forbidden Art' Reminded Concentration Camp Prisoners They Were Human A new exhibit at the Polish Museum of America features work created in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück. CHICAGO, IL: You've probably never heard of any of the artists whose work appears in "Forbidden Art," a traveling exhibit that just arrived at the Polish Museum of America, but given the circumstances under which their work was created, it's close to miraculous that anyone knows their names at all. The 20 paintings, drawings, and sculptures were created by prisoners—both Jewish and Christian—in Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald concentration camps during World War II. The exhibit was conceived by Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz‐
Birkenau State Museum, and Marcin Chumiecki, director of the Polish Mission of the Orchard Lake Schools in Michigan, and executed by Elżbieta Cajzer, head of the Auschwitz‐Birkenau collections department. For the past three years, it's been touring the U.S.—it came to Northeastern Illinois University in 2012—and will most likely move on to the United Nations in New York after it leaves the PMA in January. (The drawings and paintings on tour are reproductions; the three‐dimensional works are original.) "We wanted to bring it to light so people won't forget," says Joe Drobot, chair of the PMA's executive board. "These people were condemned to death. They were in unimaginable pain and difficulty. But they had a will to live." Art, the exhibit suggests, was a way for the prisoners to hold on to their humanity. Several pieces were intended as gifts for other inmates, like the album a group of men at Auschwitz created for the women at the Budy subcamp. It contained drawings of their hometowns and mentions of their husbands or sweethearts. Another prisoner made a miniature sarcophagus as a memorial for a dead friend. It's large enough only to hold a piece of bone and for the artist to have engraved his friend's name and dates on the exterior. Others used art as a way to transcend the horrors of their daily lives. One group wrote and illustrated a booklet of fairy tales for the children they'd left behind when they were arrested. Stanisław Trałka transformed the kommandants into caricatures. Zofia Stepień drew idealized portraits of her friends so that they didn't look like prisoners. "Almost all the women had ulcerations, furuncles, suppurating wounds," she explained later. "I just tried to embellish them all." Sometimes art was a means of communicating, literally, with the outside world. Josef Sapcaru made a painting as a gift for a woman who brought him food from outside the camp. A few artists in Auschwitz made a figure of the devil out of November 5, 2014 40 ____________________________________________________________________________ wire and ribbon, with a tail of fur. The kommandos used it in Christmas performances; the prisoners used it to smuggle messages to one another. Some inmate artists wanted to document life as they saw it in the camps. Mieczysław Kościelniak was lucky enough to be able to draw the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviets as it happened. Kazimierz Tymiński and Józef Pribula created an album of their drawings called A Diary of a Prisoner, which Tymiński bound in human skin, an echo of Nazi brutality. An artist known only as MM made one of the few drawings that actually shows prisoners being directed to the gas chamber. It was found in 1947, hidden in a bottle, buried in the foundations of a barracks. Whoever MM was, he or she knew that penalties for making art were harsh. Franciszek Jaźwiecki, for instance, was punished with three months in the camp's penal company, a hard‐labor detail in a separate barracks, and all his work was destroyed. More than 500 of Maria Hispańka's pictures were destroyed too; only one survived, discovered after the war hidden in a jar along with accounts of the medical "experiments" that went on at Ravensbrück. "It was incredible they still had the will to create," says Drobot. Art supplies were virtually nonexistent, though some artists worked for so‐called "good kommandos" who gave them extra paper. Others improvised with whatever material they could find. One unknown artist used a sharpened nail to carve a table leg into a small statue of a man. Józef Szajna made pictures out of fingerprints. Włodzimierz Siwierski drew on cigarette papers and smuggled his work out of the camp under a bandage on his arm. Most of the work is rough and unpolished because of the circumstances under which it was created, but there is one highly crafted piece, an intricate silver bracelet that shows scenes from the Łódź ghetto. It was likely made before its owner was transferred to Auschwitz; after the war, it was discovered buried beside a crematorium, along with a series of notes describing ghetto life in more detail. Why did the artists take such risks and go to such lengths in order to create? The exhibit doesn't attempt to answer this question directly. But an answer may come from Leon Turalski, an Auschwitz survivor, quoted in the text beneath a portrait by Marian Ruzamski, who, until he died of hunger in 1945, made drawings of his friends and hid them in his clothes: "They were pleased they were alive," Turalski wrote, "that it is him in the drawing, that maybe somebody would manage to smuggle that tiny portrait, his image, outside the camp and in that way they would inform his immediate family that he still looked like a human being, that he had survived." Chicago Reader: http://bit.ly/1umxxWy Arts Education Transforms Societies Do you enjoy the sleek look of your new iPhone? You can thank Steve Jobs for taking a calligraphy class at Reed College. Have you or your kids scribbled on a pair of Vans sneakers? Vans' President Kevin Bailey credits the brand's creativity with the arts education many of his employees have taken. At her promotion and swearing‐in ceremony a few weeks ago, Capt. Moira McGuire, assistant chief of Integrated Health and Wellness at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, credited the arts as central to her practice as a caregiver for our wounded, returning military veterans. These are just a few of today's leaders crediting their success to arts education. November 5, 2014 41 ____________________________________________________________________________ Although many people may agree that arts (music, theatre, dance, visual, media, literary and more) are an important part of education, they may not realize the powerful trickle‐up effect of arts education on a modern, innovative workforce. Indeed, arts education has the power to transform societies for the better. Arts education increases employment rates by raising high‐school graduation rates. Last year, high school graduates had a 3.5 percent lower unemployment rate than those without diplomas. And when exposed to arts education, students of all backgrounds are more likely to graduate. Americans for the Arts' research shows that low‐income students who are highly engaged in the arts are more than twice as likely to graduate from college as their peers with no arts education. Additionally, low‐income students with a high participation in the arts have a dropout rate of 4 percent, in contrast to their peers with a low participation in the arts who have a dropout rate of 22 percent. Once they graduate, students who have had arts education are more likely to hold onto jobs and thus positively contribute to the economy. According to a 2012 study in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, jobs in the creative areas‐‐such as engineers, artists, scientists and educators‐‐experienced lower rates of unemployment during the 2008‐2010 recession than those in service or production jobs, even when employees had the same level of education. Furthermore, the researchers note that those in creative jobs are more resilient to technology advancements and outsourcing than other careers. Students with exposure to arts education are also more prepared for the jobs of today and those of the future. Americans for the Arts and the Conference Board's joint "Ready to Innovate" report shows that 72 percent of business leaders say that creativity is the number one skill they look for when hiring, and a subsequent report credits arts education as key to a student gaining that creativity. Additionally, in IBM's 2010 Global CEO Study, 1,500 CEOs from around the world named creativity as the leading skill needed for business success. The executives from 60 countries and 33 industries believe that instilling creativity in their organizations is the key factor for successfully handling the challenges facing businesses today: changing regulations, evolving industries, incredible data accumulation and quickly changing customer preferences. The value of arts education extends even beyond primary school. According to Adobe, while 78 percent of college‐
educated Americans believe that creativity is important to their current careers, most found that they value creativity more as professionals than they expected to while in college. So arts education for adults‐‐like taking a ceramics course, playing in a band, or even just attending performances‐‐can positively affect job performance. And artistic hobbies matter too: Robert Root‐Bernstein, a creativity researcher, consultant, and professor at Michigan State University, published research showing that having one persistent and intellectually stimulating hobby (like painting or playing an instrument) is a better predictor for career success in any discipline than IQ, standardized test scores, or grades. Franklin Roosevelt said it well: "We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future." So to prepare, protect and equip today's workforce and that of the future, we must ensure that arts education remains a priority in our schools and in our lives. Do you know whether your local school provides quality arts education? Americans for the Arts offers a toolbox‐‐including research, questions to ask, and ways to involve the community‐‐to equip parents, citizens and teachers to advocate for arts education in schools. It's an issue not just for parents, but for all of us: to ensure a flexible, innovative and employable workforce, we need creative, curious citizens who have been educated in the arts. Huffington Post: http://huff.to/1tBIqCu November 5, 2014 42 ____________________________________________________________________________ There Is An Accountant Art Expert ‐ Who Knew? Art has been in the tax news of late and I was bemoaning the fact that accountants generally don’t know that much about art. Of course there are exceptions and among them, perhaps foremost among them, is Gary Castle, a principal with Anchin, Block & Anchin. Gary is a member of Anchin’s Art Specialty Group. Among the clients he serves are high net worth individuals, private foundations, artist‐funded foundations and family offices. He is a Chartered Accountant and has the corresponding British accent, which probably gives him an edge in the art world. Depending on your point of view being a Chartered Accountant is equivalent to, slightly better than or almost as good as being a CPA. A little known bit of CPA trivia is that when New York became the first state to license CPAs in 1896 it only issued licenses to American citizens. Cynics thought that was to prevent chartered accountants from the UK, where the profession first took root, from stealing our lunch. I’m certain it was patriotism, but we’ve gotten over those things – mostly. Recent Decisions The tax decision that caused the biggest stir in the art world in recent memory was that of Susan Crile. Ms. Crile is a professor at Hunter College and a renowned artist – world class really – with works hanging in the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and even the Worcester Art Museum. Beautiful as her artwork was, her tax return was kind of ugly with consistent Schedule C losses offsetting about half her salary year in and year out. The IRS attacked her with Section 183, commonly called the “hobby loss rule”. The IRS lost badly in Tax Court on that issue. Ms. Crile is not out of the woods yet, since there will be another decision on whether some of her expenses like tipping her doorman were really “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. Gary Castle agreed with my perspective that exciting as this case might be, it is really of limited applicability. The money shot tax decision for the art world this year was the Fifth Circuit decision in the case of the Estate of James Elkins . You might say that the Fifth Circuit spanked the Tax Court in Elkins as the Tax Court had spanked the IRS in Crile. Only the stakes were a lot higher – over $14 million in estate tax. The issue was the valuation of fractional interests in artwork. The estate had claimed a 44.75% discount for lack of marketability and control. The IRS went for a zero discount. The Tax Court allowed a 10% discount. I covered the Tax Court decision. I passed on the Fifth Circuit decision because Ashlea Ebeling beat me to it and I didn’t have anything to add. I asked Gary what his thoughts on Elkins were. He defended the concept of minority discounts for fractional art interests indicating that it is no different than a minority interest in a closely held business. My concern is questioning why somebody who owns 100% of something would divide it into pieces that sum up to less than the value of the whole. Of course, the obvious answer is that if a family wants to hold onto art that has been collected, perhaps over a lifetime, the death of the collector presents them with a severe liquidity problem. Regardless Gary does not think the success of the Elkins Estate should embolden planners to assume they will be able to sustain discounts approaching 50%. Neither the IRS nor the Tax Court did a very good job analytically in Elkins. If they had, somewhere between 10% and 45% might have been the answer. November 5, 2014 43 ____________________________________________________________________________ Other Tax Issues Although estate taxes play a major role in art planning, there are numerous other tax issues. If you want to diversify your collection or get the yen to move from say Impressionism to Abstract, you might have significant taxable gains. Although I’ve always believed that 1031 might have application in the art world, Gary confirmed that it is a viable technique. He recommends that you involve an institutional exchange facilitator which might also be doing real estate and equipment, since they will have the facility with the proper tax execution. I couldn’t pry a name out of him. Then there are state tax issues. The New York Times recently ran an article about a sales and use tax dodge that some collectors were using. Works that they bought were shipped on loan to a museum in a state that would not charge sales or use tax. After a few months the work could be moved to the collectors home and he beats the use tax because the original use was the museum loan. Gary’s firm put out an alert, that nifty as this idea might be it does not work if your bring the artwork into New York, New Jersey or Connecticut. Art As An Investment I asked Gary if he thought art makes sense as an investment, independent of what pleasure owning say a Picasso might yield. He indicated that for someone with a net worth north of five or maybe ten million, it might make sense to have as much as 5% to 15% in collectibles including art, but also possibly collectible wines, automobiles or historical documents. He believes that such investments can be counter‐cyclical. He noted some of the major problems with this category of investment such as lack of liquidity, a totally unregulated marketplace and costs of ownership. An important element to the investment is maintaining its condition. And if you want to move it, you can’t just hire the local moving man or as I once did a couple of college kids and a U‐Haul. There needs to be a condition report each time the work is packed and unpacked. For whatever it is worth, he told me that oil on canvas is much more resilient than watercolors on paper. Then there is knowing when to sell. If you have focused your collection on a particular artist, your decision to sell several works could conceivably move the market adversely. How Do You End Up With A CPA Art Expert? Anchin, Block & Anchin with 350 people claims to be the largest single office accounting and advisory firm in the country. They take up seven floors at 1375 Broadway in Manhattan putting them almost dead center between 42nd Street and Herald Square if you want to give them regards. Gary says that concentrating all the firm’s intellectual capital in one place allows practitioners to effectively support one another. Anchin was founded in 1923 and Gary has been there over 30 years, which reminded me just a bit of my own experience at Joseph B Cohan and Associates which was founded in 1917. Herb Cohan took advantage of his intellectual capital concentrated in what was then the Peoples Savings Bank Building on the Worcester Common by roaming up and down the hall asking everybody the same question till he got an answer he liked. I told Gary that I was surprised that I hadn’t heard of his firm. He attributed that to my spending a career in the wilds of Central Massachusetts. I tested that theory by asking Bob Charron, the last managing partner of JBC and now Tax Operations partner at Friedman LLP. He confirmed that Anchin is well known and well regarded. November 5, 2014 44 ____________________________________________________________________________ A tax adviser ends up learning about the intricacies of his client’s concerns, because you cannot do tax planning in a vacuum. The Anchin client base provides enough art collectors and people in ancillary businesses to make the effort worthwhile. Ultra high net worth clients tend to value privacy, so I don’t know who Gary might be consulting for, but I was able to find a “for instance” which was pretty impressive. Robert Wilson was a hedge fund founder and philanthropist who gave away most of his fortune which peaked at $800 million. His most peculiar donation was $30 million to the Archdiocese of New York for its Catholic schools. What made the donation peculiar was that he was an openly gay atheist, who thought the Catholic schools were good at educating kids. More to the point of this piece is this quote from Wilson’s obituary: Gary S. Castle, a philanthropic‐giving specialist at the accounting firm Anchin Block & Anchin who worked with Mr. Wilson for many years, said Mr. Wilson had suffered a stroke in June. I just checked the retail value of my limited edition print collection which includes a print of a B‐25 taking off from a carrier that has signatures of veterans of the Doolittle raid. Even with that, I barely break a thousand, so I won’t be needing Gary anytime soon. Forbes: http://onforb.es/13BFOKT Golden High School Students Draw Portraits of Denver's Homeless GOLDEN, CO: When Golden High School art teacher Tim Miller wants to get his advanced 2‐D art students out of their element, he doesn't assign them a new medium or bring in a complex object or model. He gets in the driver's seat of the bus and takes them there. "It's more important to get them out of their environment, out of their comfort zone," he said. "I want their artwork to be affected by them being down there and talking one‐on‐one with their subjects." Miller has taken students to an assisted‐living home, Children's Hospital's dialysis unit and to meet elders at the Denver Indian Center. This year, he took them to the area of the Denver Rescue Mission to talk to members of the city's homeless population. The field trip is part of Miller's effort to integrate life experiences into his curriculum, and Gwen Ahlers, who teaches drawing and painting at Lakewood High School and works with Miller and other Jeffco art teachers for professional development, said he goes above and beyond. "Tim is unique. I really think he has a heart for reaching out to other communities and getting his students out from a smaller community into a bigger community," she said. She pointed to the fact that Miller got a bus driver's license to cut cost and scheduling hurdles associated with organizing his trips. His commitment to the project is part of why he won Colorado Art Education Association's high school art educator of the year award in 2013. November 5, 2014 45 ____________________________________________________________________________ Golden High School senior Amanda Berry said the project did not necessarily change her perspective on the homeless population — she went into it with sympathy. However, it did change her perspective on her art, and how such an experience can have an effect on it. "As an artist, it's important to draw something that inspires you. I think the reason a lot of us went was that it was something that caught our attention, something that we were interested in," she said. Many of the students found it difficult to ask strangers about themselves and their situation and said most of their subjects were not very talkative. They simply accepted the "goodie bag" containing a homemade cookie, bottle of water and a dollar bill in exchange for having their photo taken. Miller said he told the students before the trip to pay attention to the body language of the people they met and what their eyes said. The project made students like senior Bailey O'Hara more curious. "I definitely learned to be genuinely sympathetic," she said. "I mean, I always have been, but to go up and meet one of them it was pretty interesting. It honestly just makes me wonder what their background is." And that curiosity caused them to ponder, to remember the short moments of their meeting and make an investment in their portraits. The students' drawings, along with written reflections of the experience, will be displayed at Jeffco Public Schools Education Center in Golden at the end of the semester. Miller said he will know if the students got a life experience out of the project. "I see it," he said. "I see it in their artwork." The Denver Post: http://dpo.st/1x2OhR1 November 5, 2014