It strikes when your often afraid on AdobeAistream

Follow this link to a recent post about the CELL (Center for Empowered Living and Learning) in Denver and their exhibition on terrorism.

Rauschenberg, Robischon and Chinese Contemporary Art on Adobe Airstream

This article appears at Adobe Airstream. It's one of the most viewed articles on the hard hat blog site. Read it by clicking here.

David Adjaye, Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco to create quintessential video biennial at SITE Santa Fe?

Another post at Adobe Airstream on the 2010 SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Read it by clicking on this link.

What can we learn from Denver's Blue Mustang on Adobe Airstream

Read about the controversy surrounding Luis Jimenez' seminal work at DIA here.

Recent articles you might have seen on Adobe Airstream

Just in case you think I haven't been busy writing, the following are a few links to posts made last month on Adobe Airstream

The Met's Museum Store Compresses

$25 million for Jeff Koons' train about as ridiculous as a fur-lined trash can

Durango Film Festival Screens 80 Films

Transgressing Culture at Culture Unplugged

Read my latest work Transgressing Culture at Culture Unplugged an international website of film and culture.

Edward S. Curtis: Artist or historian?

In 1895, Edward S. Curtis met and photographed Princess Angeline (1800-1896) aka Kickisomlo, the daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle. Hers would be the first of 40,000 photographs Curtis took of Native Americans from 80 different tribes during his life.

A selection of his work is now on display at The Open Shutter Gallery, and art historian Marilee Jantzer-White will lead visitors on a tour of the images Monday evening, exploring the ethnographic, historic and artistic viewpoints Curtis held.

It wasn't the image of the aged princess that launched Curtis to create his seminal work, The North American Indian Projec, Jantzer-White said this week.

Instead, it was an expedition in 1900 with George Bird Grinnell during which he saw the Sun Dance at an encampment of Blood, Blackfeet and Algonquin people in Montana. That was followed by a visit to the Hopi reservation in Arizona a few months later that fueled his desire to document the tribes west of the Mississippi that still maintained their native ways and customs.

Curtis was supported in his project by the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, President Theodore Roosevelt and his financial patron J. P. Morgan who agreed in 1906 to pay him $15,000 for five years to create his 20-volume work.

By 1922, Curtis had only published 12 volumes. Volumes 19 and 20 finally were published in 1930, but five years later the North American Indian Corporation liquidated its assets and sold the materials from the project to the Charles Lauriat Co., a rare book dealer in Boston.

Lauriat acquired 19 sets of The North American Indian along with thousands of individual prints and the handmade copper photogravure plates. Curtis' original glass plate negatives were left in the Morgan Library basement and eventually were destroyed or sold for next to nothing.

Several of these original prints and reproductions from Curtis' handmade photogravure plates are on exhibit at Open Shutter. Because copyright law does not protect Curtis' work, cheaper reproductions are often available, but they are not what you will find in this showAround 1970, Karl Kernberger of Santa Fe found almost 285,000 original photogravures and copper plates at the Charles E. Lauriat bookstore and rediscovered the work of Curtis. He bought all of the surviving Curtis material with Jack Loeffler and David Padwa. They launched exhibits at the Pierpoint Morgan Library and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The controversies surrounding Curtis' work remain. His obituary in 1952 listed him as first and foremost as an "internationally known authority on the history of the North American Indian." It concluded with, "he was also widely known as a photographer."

Today, he is known as an artist. His ethnographic work has been called into question because most of his photos were posed or staged and he intentionally removed all hints at Western society such as clocks, umbrellas and clothing. Curtis believed, as many scholars of the time did, that all Native American cultures would be absorbed into white society and entirely disappear. He wanted to catalog what he considered to be a "vanishing race."

Instead, Curtis turns the lens back on Euro American society and by romanticizing the cultural beliefs of Native Americans manages to make the viewer question society's obsession with capturing history.

If you go

Marilee Jantzer-White will give a free guided tour and lecture on Edward S. Cutis and his photographs of American Indians at 6 p.m. Monday, The Open Shutter Gallery, 735 Main Ave.

The Art of Numbers opens this week in Milford, PA

UPDATE: Good Question Gallery is now online. Check out the link.


“The Art of Numbers” at Good Question Gallery
Works By: Lisa Zukowski, Kate Okeson, and Monica Goldsmith
Opening: Saturday, March 7th, 7pm to 9pm
Exhibit Runs: March 6th to March 29th, 2009


Good Question Gallery is pleased to present the “The Art of Numbers,” a show of recent works by Lisa Zukowski, Kate Okeson, and Monica Goldsmith. This exhibition, the gallery’s first, explores the artist’s common interest in the role numbers can play in the realm of visual expression and what they can say about us as human beings.

As a painter, Lisa Zukowski has been highly influenced by Italian architecture. Her thoughtful use of surface texture serves as a touchstone for illustrating the tension between modernity and decay. Zukowski’s nuanced understanding of the exterior wall as a forum for written communication has brought her to use numeric figures in a way that references both the graffiti artists of 1980s New York, and the “note pad” style wall writing of present day Venice.

Kate Okeson uses the artists’ book to dissect the ways in which pagination effects our consumption of knowledge. By embracing the abacus as a structural and functional motif, she creates books where page numbers completely occupy both the physical and metaphorical sphere of content. Okeson’s work opposes conventions of order and sequence while asking us to rethink the way we function as both readers and viewers.

In her “Subdivisions” series, Monica Goldsmith creates topographically inspired compositions that blur the line between public and private space. Also making use of the iconic form of the abacus, she asks questions that are as much existential as they are environmental. Goldsmith’s geometric abstractions prompt us to consider the unknown quantities of ecological impact and acknowledge the ever-present possibility of a “point of no return.” Monica Goldsmith’s work can be seen in the fall 2008 issue of New American Paintings, No.78.

Good Question Gallery is located at 210 East Harford Street, Milford, PA 18337.
Beginning March 6th 2009, the gallery will be open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 12pm to 7pm, or by appointment. For more information, please contact Richard Cutrona
at (570) 296-5066.

Beyond Beauty, Durango Herald, March 17, 2009

SITE Santa Fe exhibit pushes boundaries of aesthetics

Much contemporary art is highly intellectualized, sprouting from institutes of higher learning, embedded in a system that eschews beauty and prefers provocation. Art today is in-your-face, shocking, gigantic, but rarely is it pretty. At SITE Santa Fe, Laura Heon has curated an exhibition intuitively, "using her gut," as she said to The Albuquerque Journal. Her gut exploration is about the tension between the beautiful, the finely crafted and the grotesque.

"Pretty Is as Pretty Does," features 50 works by nine artists who push the boundaries of aesthetics. Look beyond the highly detailed and finely crafted porcelain sculptures of Kathy Butterly and there is something creepy and uncomfortable. The yin and yang of an effervescent prettiness and sneering nastiness create a tension that permeates.

Seeing ceramic work in a contemporary art museum is unusual, and Butterly seems to breathe new aesthetic life into an undervalued medium. Her intensely hued, teapot-sized sculptures are abstract in form. Their shapes at once bizarre and familiar.

"Above Normal, 2008" Kathy Butterly, glaze, clay 4 3/4 x 12 1/2 x5 1/4 inches
Courtesy Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica Photo: Alan Weiner

According to the gallery guide, Butterly fires her sculptures as many as 30 times to achieve the desired effects. She describes her work as psychological self-portraits.

Her work on display in "Pretty" is an entirely new body of sculptures made in response to the theme of the exhibition. Normally, this does not work because what the artist creates is too self-conscious, too wrapped up in theme.

But Butterly maintained a preoccupation with the political, environmental and economic crisis throughout the world. "Above Normal" is a title taken from a phrase repeated in reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Big Gulp" reflects on our super-sized culture.

"Golden, 2008" Kathy Butterly, glaze, clay 6 3/4 x 6 7/8 x 6 3/4 inches
Courtesy Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica Photo: Alan Weiner

Butterly's sculptures are surrounded by the photographs of Tanyth Berkeley, whose portraits are of people our society deems to look unusual. Through her work, Berkeley suggests that perhaps it is not the albino model Grace or the angular woman Linda who are out of the ordinary, but our conventions that need examination.

"Grace on her Couch, Yellow Shirt, 2008" Tanyth Berkeley
C-print 40 x 30 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Bellwether, New York

Another artist who explores the conventions of beauty and glamour perpetuated by fashion magazines is Marilyn Minter. Minter uses painting and photography to explore the overlapping spaces of beauty, sexuality and artifice. A glamorous high-heeled shoe worn by a woman with dirt caked on her foot juxtaposes the beautiful and the base. In her photo realistic paintings, Minter bares evidence of the artist's hands. Perfection is impossible to achieve.

"Spiked, 2008" Marilyn Minter
Enamel on Metal, 96 x 60 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

Whether it is the anime-inspired video projection of Chiho Aoshima, the complex installation by Rina Banerjee, the pealing plaster, fur and teeth that seem to come from within the building by Ligia Bouton, the intricate embroidery of Angelo Filomeno, the wall drawings of David Leigh, or the stained-glass paintings of Judith Schaechter, "Pretty" challenges our ideas of beauty.

Prettiness may only be skin deep; beneath the surface at SITE are unsettling subjects like violence, sexuality and death.

If you go

“Pretty Is as Pretty Does,” 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Fridays, and 12-5 p.m. Sundays at SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. Admission is $10/$5 and Fridays are free. Call (505)989-1199 or visit sitesantafe.org for more information. Through May 10