Tacoma Art Museum hosts controversial show that focuses on sexual identity
The ground-breaking show Hide/Seek, which examines 120 years of American portraiture through a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender lens, opened Saturday night at the Tacoma Art Museum, the shows only West Coast venue.
April 18, 2012
Bijan Chowdhury was born in Faridpur in 1931. And till his last breath he considered Bangladesh to be his own. Every major Indo-Bangla exhibition took him Back to the Roots. Every serious workshop would find him involved in a give-and-take of thoughts and idioms of visual and literary expressions. And yet, in his demise on Friday at Belle Vue Clinic, Bengal lost one of the early practitioners of its contemporary art. He is survived by two daughters and two sons.
Born to journalist Kunjabehari Chowdhury, Bijan Chowdhury was raised in an atmosphere steeped in music, painting and drama. Since his early days at Kolkatas Govt College of Art and Craft he was deeply involved in Marxist politics. This led to his being expelled before completing his diploma but strengthened his bond with Dhaka as it prompted him to graduate from their Govt Institute of Arts.
April 10, 2012
Video games like Space Invaders used to be confined to small screens at home and in video arcades. Not anymore, as of this past Friday. Rita Braver has the story:
They poured in the second the display opened – a celebration of video games through the years. And they definitely came to play.
But where theyre playing is whats unexpected: the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
You could say video games are a great grassroots expression of culture and in some cases art in our democracy, said museum director Betsy Broun. I guess what surprised me was just the sort of joyful excitement in the games.
Broun said the video game exhibit – the first ever at a major American museum – has caused so much excitement it will travel to 10 other cities, illustrating a growing understanding of the public fascination with games.
March 30, 2012
BIG DELTA, Alaska – Rose Albert is a survivor. Albert was the first Alaska Native woman to race in the Iditarod. It was just one of the many challenges she’s faced in her lifetime.
Albert was born to Phillip and Justine Albert on a houseboat on the Nowitna River in 1956. The Alberts raised eight children through trapping, fishing and hunting, all without government assistance. While trapping on the Nowitna, they based at Kokrines, 28 miles upriver from Ruby on the north bank of the Yukon River.
Kokrines, a former Army Signal Corps telegraph station, was established in 1909. During that era, her great-grandfather, Big Albert, was a band chief at Kokrines. When Albert was 3 years old, in 1959, Phillip Albert Sr. moved his family to Ruby so the children could attend school. When she was 14, her parents divorced, turning their subsistence life upside down. With her family split between Florida and Alaska, Albert began living with a foster family in Anchorage.
At 14, Albert became interested in art. After she saw an oil painting of her maternal great grandfather, Big William Demoski, Albert wanted to begin painting the elders. Her friend, the late Merreline Kangas, encouraged her to go to Santa Fe, NM, for art school.
The Bush, her lineage and the Iditarod have been a perfect marriage to shape Albert’s career as a painter and box carver.
Mushing dreams
During the second Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in 1974, Albert was skiing near Knik Lake when the mushers passed her. She watched as Carl Huntington mushed past her. Huntington went on to win the Iditarod that year, followed by his second win in the World Championship Sled Dog Race at the Fur Rondezvous.
In 1977, he also took the Open North American Championship title, making him the first “triple-crown” winner in dog mushing history.
It inspired the young Albert.
“The image of his perfect Yukon dogs quietly mushing past me stayed in my mind,” she said earlier this year. “I thought, ‘Someday I want to race in the Iditarod.’” A year later, Albert returned home in time to see Emmitt Peters win the 1975 Iditarod using the same lead dog, Nugget, with whom Carl Huntington had won the previous year.
Albert’s brother, Howard, decided he wanted to race as well. While Albert was attending art school in Santa Fe, her brother ran the Iditarod three times, placing seventh twice.
After Albert received her associate’s degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May 1981, she returned home to Ruby.
Remembering her dream, she asked her brother if she could use his dogs to run the Iditarod herself. After some pressure, he relented and pitched in with the rest of the family to help her prepare for the race.
Iditarod X
Albert, Susan Butcher and Sue Firmin (who later scratched) were the only women running in the otherwise all-male race in March 1982. As Albert and Howard flew out of the Iditarod start chute with 12 dogs, he jumped off, saying, “You’ll be OK.”
Later on the trail, no one had warned Albert about the descent down the notorious Happy River Steps. “We slid down one cliff, down onto another, straight down, sliding until we reached the bottom. ‘Oh, crap!’ I said as we went airborne,” Albert said.
It wasn’t easy for Albert to get her overloaded sled uphill and through Rainy Pass. Flying down the Dalzell Gorge, she broke her brake and lost her snow hook.
At the bottom, she skidded sideways over slick river ice. The dogs could smell the Rohn Roadhouse and picked up speed. In the mad run, her second leader, Rae Rae, snapped her foot on the glare ice. Albert managed to stop the dogs, unhooked Rae Rae and put her in the sled. Because the dog was injured, Albert considered scratching. But it was Joe Redington, the father of the Iditarod, who told Albert “keep going, I’m proud of you.”
So she did. After she left Takotna, Albert remembered the magic of seeing a beacon far off in the dark. “The silence and the swooshing of the sled runners and dogs’ feet pattering along the trail,” she said. “I loved the Iditarod, being out there alone with the dogs.” After mushing around Norton Sound, she sprinted into Nome. The team seemed to know that their master, Howard, was waiting for them at the end of the race.
“When my leader, Pepper, saw Howard, he flew into his arms. Finishing 32, the last leg of the race was my best,” she said.
After the race
As Howard prepared for the Iditarod the following year, he became withdrawn and quiet. After a near-death experience, he had stopped drinking. But after the 1983 Iditarod, where he finished a disappointing 16th, he started drinking again. On Aug. 14, two weeks before his 26th birthday, Howard committed suicide. He was mourned across the state.
Alcohol was a battle for Rose Albert as well. When she moved to Anchorage, she planned to return to school, but between drinking and a job, it never happened.
“By 1991, alcohol was defeating me,” Albert said. “I asked Jesus into my heart, to be my personal savior.
After that, I never picked up another beer.”
In 1998, Albert started drawing, carving and painting Southeast designs on boxes that she found in thrift stores. They sold so well her new husband, Roy Westfall, ordered a jig and made her some boxes. After the marriage ended, Albert knew how to build the cedar boxes herself.
It changed her approach to art.
“My life as an artist began to take off,” she said.
Today, Albert works in her Anchorage studio painting wildlife, portraits and Iditarod scenes, as well as carving and painting cedar boxes for her annual shows at the Iditarod restart and at Alaska Federation of Natives bazaar.
To save time, she hired Carl Hartvigson and his father, Vern, to build boxes out of yellow cedar, the traditional Tlingit carving wood. In 2009, she began collecting rare beads for necklaces.
Her new line of boxes consists of famous Iditarod racers and their dogs. Both Two Spirits Gallery and the Alaska Native Arts Foundation in Anchorage carry her work.
Art and the future
Always at the restart of the Iditarod, this year Albert saw her old friend Joe Redington’s son, Raymie Redington. This year, Redington’s two sons, Ray Jr. and Ryan, took off in the first and last positions.
Raymie Redington, a 14-time Iditarod starter, said at this year’s restart, “Rose was good. She wanted to run again, but after what happened with her brother, she just didn’t.”
In November 2010, Albert was diagnosed with vitriol detachment in both eyes. Her vision has slowly declined; she continues to see streaks of light in the corner of each eye.
Her most recent art show, “An Artist’s Rendition of the Last Great Race,” was at the Alaska Native Arts Gallery in 2011.
Due to health constraints, Albert has cut back both on her painting and her shows. But she is satisfied with having lived her dream.
“Over the years, painting our centuries-old wilderness life and the Iditarod has brought me joy,” Albert said. “It is my record of my heritage, a history of life along the Yukon, and a testimony of overcoming addiction through Christ.”
Judy Ferguson of Big Delta is the author of six Alaska books. Look for her new book, “Windows to the Land, An Alaska Native Story” in 2013 on her website, http://alaska-highway.org/delta/outpost.
March 30, 2012
Often when art is created, it is a representation of the artist. But Hayley Kings latest exhibition is a bit different.
King, who creates under the name Flox, was tasked with creating the artwork and visual material for the most recent Fly My Pretties tour. The super group is well known for its aesthetic, so it was a challenge for King.
It was really nerve-wracking – I had all these boxes to tick. The illustration had to represent the song itself, it had to, in a sense, represent that musician, the artist who actually wrote the track, their personality and then it had to work with the treatment for that track – how we were going to bring it to life.
King created 16 illustrations for each track performed by Fly My Pretties that were then brought to life during each performance through projection, animation and visual trickery.
This exhibition continues the process further, with more original large-scale pieces carrying on the narrative that she explored with the tour works.
On show will be framed one-off stencil works on paper, multimedia, large hand cut virgin stencils, light-boxes and mixed media. There will also be large-scale visual mixes taken from the Fly My Pretties IV DVD, and a soundtrack of mastered mixes of the album.
Its going to be a fantastic opportunity for the Fly My Pretties fans to come face to face with my artistic processes in large format, and like on tour, witness the artworks being brought to life in yet another dimension.
King says while she has worked with other artists before, teaming up with musicians added another layer to her work.
I have collaborated before with other artists, but to collaborate with musicians and to create something purely aesthetic from a sound is the point of difference here – its where art meets music.
There were so many things to think about. From an artists point of view it was very challenging and it has help push me along to atheistic in my own practice that I otherwise probably wouldnt have gone.
But after six weeks of work since the tour finished, King is looking forward to taking a step back from the works and enjoying what she has created.
Opening nights are about taking a breath and enjoying all that hard work that youve put in over the last few months.
Fly My Pretties IV – Flox Exhibition
Auckland Venue: 155 KRd
Public viewing hours: 20 – 24 March, 10am to 6:30pm
Wellington Venue: Bats Theatre (1 Kent Tce)
Public viewing times: 27 March – 1 April, 10am to 6:30pm
March 29, 2012
Mar 16, 2012
BERLIN (AP) — A Berlin museum must return thousands of rare posters to an American man, part of his Jewish father’s unique collection that had been seized by the Nazis, Germany’s top federal appeals court ruled Friday.
The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe confirmed Peter Sachs, 74, was the rightful owner of the posters collected by his father Hans and ruled he is entitled to receive them back from the German Historical Museum.
The ruling ended seven years of legal battles over a vast collection dating back to the late 19th century that is now believed to be worth between EUR4.5 million and EUR16 million ($6 million and $21 million).
The court said if the museum kept the posters it would be akin to perpetuating the crimes of the Nazis.
“I can’t describe what this means to me on a personal level,” Peter Sachs, who recently moved to Nevada from Sarasota, Florida, told The Associated Press in an email. “It feels like vindication for my father, a final recognition of the life he lost and never got back.”
The case ended up with the Karlsruhe court because of the posters’ unique and tumultuous journey through more than 70 years of German history. The posters were collected by Sachs, stolen from him by the Nazis’ Gestapo, became the possession of communist East Germany for decades, and then moved to the Berlin museum after Germany’s reunification in 1990.
The court acknowledged that Peter Sachs did not file for restitution of the posters by the official deadline for such claims, and that the postwar restitution regulations instituted by the Western Allies could not be specifically applied in his case. But the judges ruled that the spirit of the laws was clearly on Sachs’ side.
Not to return the posters “would perpetuate Nazi injustice,” the judges wrote. “This cannot be reconciled with the purpose of the Allied restitution provisions, which were to protect the rights of the victims.”
Hagen Philipp Wolf, a spokesman for Germany’s cultural affairs office which oversees the public German Historical Museum, said the decision would be respected.
“The Federal Court of Justice has decided, we have a clear ruling, the German Historical Museum must return the Sachs posters,” he said.
A total of 4,259 posters have been identified so far as having belonged to Sachs’ father. They were among a collection of 12,500 that his father owned, which include advertisements for exhibitions, cabarets, movies and consumer products, as well as political propaganda — all rare, with only small original print runs. It is not clear what happened to the remainder.
The German Historical Museum rarely had more than a handful of the posters on display at any given time, though it had said the collection was an invaluable resource for researchers.
Sachs’ attorney in Germany, Matthias Druba, said his client now hopes that he can find a new home for the collection where they can be displayed to a wider public.
“Hans Sachs wanted to show the poster art to the public, so the objective now is to find a depository for the posters in museums where they can really be seen and not hidden away,” Druba told the AP.
The posters were seized from Hans Sachs’ home in 1938 on the orders of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who wanted them for a museum of his own.
Born in 1881, Hans Sachs was a dentist who began collecting posters while in high school. By 1905, he was Germany’s leading private poster collector and later launched the art publication “Das Plakat (The Poster).”
After the seizure of the posters in the summer, Hans Sachs was arrested during the Nov. 9, 1938, pogrom against the Jews known as Kristallnacht and thrown in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin.
When he was released about two weeks later, the family fled to the United States.
After the war, Hans Sachs assumed the collection had been destroyed and accepted compensation of about 225,000 German marks (then worth about $50,000) from West Germany in 1961.
He learned five years later, however, that part of the collection had survived the war and been turned over to an East Berlin museum. He wrote the communist authorities about seeing the posters or even bringing an exhibit to the West to no avail. He died in 1974 without ever seeing them again.
The posters became part of the German Historical Museum’s collection in 1990 after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
Peter Sachs has said he only learned of the existence of the collection in 2005, and began fighting then for their return.
When he receives the posters back Sachs will repay the compensation that his father received, Druba said. He said it was not yet clear what the amount would be in current terms.
Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
March 29, 2012
Philanthropist Neil Balnaves has criticised the provision of funding to make the Adelaide Festival an annual event.
He claims the $8 million could be better spent to boost the budget of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
The former South Australian, now living in Sydney, provided more than $100,000 to back the Festivals Biennial of Australian Art.
While he did not attend this years Adelaide Festival, he said the event had become elitist.
He said it was run in a city that resembled a funeral parlour.
Thats a provocative statement really driven by the fact that you drive round the city and you dont even get the sense theres a festival on, he said.
The city is not decorated … [if] you go back 30 or 40 years ago, the city was really decorated, there was a real buzz on the streets, there was a sense the Festival was being held.
SA Arts Minister John Hill has rejected the criticism and says the funeral parlour barb is stupid.
People are welcome to stay in other states, its just these cheap shots that just really I just think reflect more on the person than they do on Adelaide, he said.
Were used to these type of comments from people from the eastern states. I dont know why they bother doing it.
March 26, 2012
Art review
At Frye Art Museum: Li Chen and the beauty of imperfection
Seattles Frye Art Museum hosts Li Chens meditation on the beauty of imperfection in Eternity and Commoner. This is the first US museum exhibition by the Taiwanese artist.
By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times arts writer
March 24, 2012
Portly brass figures clutch oversized coins on the subway platform at 14th St. and Eighth Ave.
The Coney Island-Stillwell Ave. station boasts a silk-screened glass wall that’s as breathtaking as the ocean views outside.
And straphangers crossing the 1-2-3 train mezzanine at Times Square travel beneath a vibrant porcelain mural of a bullet train rushing through the Crossroads of the World.
For anyone who has ever wondered about a sculpture or portrait they passed during their commute, the MTA has a new app that identifies the 236 public artworks installed throughout subway, Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North stations.
The free Meridian App for Apple and Android showcases the hundreds of art installations that commuters often take for granted.
“We believe that, geographically, New York’s mass transit system is the largest museum in the world,” says Sandra Bloodworth, director of the MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design.
“The public owns this collection, and now they have the guide.”
The app lets users search for art pieces by name or by subway line to pull up a detailed description of the work and its influence.
Some stations also include audio files and videos where MTA Arts for Transit employees or the artists themselves discuss the works in more detail.
Additionally, hubs like Times Square, Yankee Stadium, Court Square in Queens and Atlantic Ave. in Brooklyn include tours that are programmed with turn-by-turn directions to the precise location of each mass transit masterpiece at the station.
The service only stalls at stops without an Internet connection, which is required to run the app.
“There are many stations that are aboveground,” says Jeff Hardison, the vice president of Meridian, which designed the app.
Currently, six subterranean subway stations have WiFi service, including the 14th St. stations at Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Aves., and the Eighth Ave.-W. 23rd St. station.
The MTA plans to connect the remaining 271 underground stations by 2016.
For now, the Meridian app works around service blackouts with a “sync” feature that lets users download a tour onto their phone while they are connected aboveground.
They can then access the tour whenever they want, whether they are in a WiFi hot spot or not.
March 21, 2012
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