More than 400 turn out at Geffen Contemporary to support MOCA, LA Times
Eli Broad offers MOCA $30 million, LA Times
THE MOCA EXHIBITION ARCHIVE GOES LIVE
MOCA’s exhibition archive is now available online. Funded by the Getty, this new site features almost every MOCA exhibition from 1983 to 2004, complete with background information and installation shots.
Minneapolis Museum of American Art to close and reopen, ArtsJournal
LA MOCA faces serious financial problems, LA Times
The trouble at (not with) MOCA, Modern Art Notes
Below, an open letter from critic Christopher Knight on the MOCA situation as posted on weisslink:
AN OPEN LETTER TO MOCA’S BOARD OF TRUSTEES
By Christopher Knight, Art Critic
November 20, 2008
To: MOCA trustees
Re: Rescue plans for MOCA’s fiscal crisis
I read with interest in Wednesday’s paper about the fiscal calamity plaguing the Museum of Contemporary Art, which seems to suggest that the nation’s premier institution for art of the past 50 years is just about broke. I also read about the possible rescue plans you are prepared to pursue, in a desperate scramble to save your sinking ship. I’ve been hearing about others.
And if what I’ve been hearing is true, I have just one question: Are you freakin’ kidding me? What on Earth do you think you’re doing?
OK, that’s two questions. Forgive me, but I’m steamed.
We are talking here about an irreplaceable cultural asset, one that has been instrumental in establishing the primacy of Los Angeles on the world’s cultural stage. The proposals I’ve been told about are not solutions to MOCA’s real but avoidable crisis. No, they are weak-kneed examples of exactly the kind of thinking with which you got yourselves into this mess.
Yes, you.
Times are tough, and every indication is that they are going to get tougher. But don’t you dare blame MOCA’s plight on a recent economic downturn beyond your control. The meltdown in the markets is not the cause of the crisis, only of your panic.
Lots of art museums are tightening belts and getting by. The fact that you are not speaks volumes.
Ten years ago, in the spring of 1998, The Times reported that MOCA was operating on a $10-million annual budget with a nearly $50-million endowment. A ratio of 1 to 5 — or even 1 to 4, if you were exaggerating numbers then — for budget to endowment is pretty good for a nonprofit.
Last year, by grim contrast, MOCA was reportedly operating on close to a $20-million annual budget with a $20-million endowment. That’s a ratio of 1 to 1 — the technical term for which is “suicide.”
With ballooning expenses and a shrinking endowment rumored to be about $7 million — at most — you have gone from covering between 20% and 25% of your annual budget in 1998 to covering as little as 2%. You steadily pushed the museum further and further out onto a ledge, so that when the global economy finally tanked, MOCA went into free-fall.
Now that’s a scenario the California attorney general, whose office oversees nonprofits such as yours, could use as a cautionary case study. As trustees your first responsibility is fiduciary, and in that you have been a flop.
Spending down your endowment is the equivalent of a farmer eating the seed corn. The first time you dipped in, sirens should have sounded. The museum’s director and the board’s finance chairman should have put an immediate stop to it, but didn’t. That is dereliction.
This is trusteeship?
The rescue plans being talked about illustrate the problem. Two of them are frankly shameful.
One would rent your incomparable painting and sculpture collection to a local foundation — controlled by one of your own trustees! — in exchange for some sort of multimillion-dollar annuity. The other would be a flat-out sale of it to another museum, so that you might shift the fundraising burden elsewhere, take the revenue and continue as an exhibition-only venue.
Yes, we live in a market economy, where art is bought and sold; but one of the glories of an art museum is that it provides refuge from the crude commercial world. When art enters a museum’s permanent collection, it leaves the marketplace behind. That your first instinct is apparently scheming to monetize your extraordinary collection shows that you are not trustees, you are art dealers in disguise.
The third plan I’ve been told about is even worse — total Armageddon. A merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in which the collection and selected staff would move to the Mid-Wilshire campus and the downtown facilities would close, would mean MOCA would cease to exist. You seem to be willing to allow your own institution, one whose remarkable program and astounding collection are the envy of cities around the world, to simply disappear. Dumbfounding.
Forgotten in this ridiculous saga are the Three Gs of trusteeship. Your job is to give art and money, get art and money, and guard the art and money you have gotten. So, here is what you need to do to actually rescue MOCA. It is not complicated, but it will require work.
You must call an urgent board meeting, gather round the table, pull out your checkbooks and calculators and stay in that room until you have cobbled together at least $25 million. That will buy you a little time — 18 to 24 months — during which you must do two things.
First, you cut MOCA’s unaffordable budget. Second, you craft a strategic plan.
Proper endowment
The centerpiece will be a capital campaign whose goal is between $80 million and $100 million — the size of endowment that an institution of MOCA’s international stature demands. With luck, President-elect Barack Obama will help you: By 2011, the country might be back on a coherent economic track, at which time you would be ready with your revenue enhancement plan.
Believe me, I know full well that among you there are men and women — mostly women, interestingly enough — whose past generosity ranks with the grandest anywhere, any time. My sense, however, is that the dereliction of the last decade and the wholly inadequate response to the very real possibility of collapse today might be a generational thing.
It seems a younger generation hasn’t followed the lead of an older one, which stepped forward but is now largely done. If so, the new kids on the trustee block might want to inquire of the older kids just what it was like in 1974, when the former Pasadena Art Museum went under.
PAM had a brief but storied life span, including the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective and the first museum show of Pop art — to its everlasting credit. But its growth as a national art leader outstripped local philanthropy. The “rescue” by Norton Simon left a great but very different museum behind, and L.A.’s contemporary art life suffered mightily.
In fact, central to the ethos of MOCA’s launch by artists and their supporters in 1979 was the powerful drive for artistic rebirth in the vacuum left behind. Great art will certainly continue to be made here. But if L.A.’s civic renaissance as an art center is now to be declared over, and MOCA is to go the way of PAM, I fear for the city’s future. And I would not relish the thought of being one of those to blame.
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
MOCA director Jeremy Strick comments on the crisis, LA Times
Here is how Art Forum reported on the MOCA story, Art Forum
So, let me get this straight, the board has mismanaged the museum and the endowment and now thinks the city should bail them out or they will fold and merge with LACMA or rent their collection to a foundation controlled by one of their trustees? Seriously?
It echoes the current banking and wall street crisis, in that it is driven by greed, excess, backroom deals and complicated structures that no seems to get and then when it all falls apart everyone is surprised?
The bubble has burst people. Greed
is no longer good. Excess is over. We can no longer be a society nor an art world focused on designer labels and outdoing our peers.
And in a somewhat related story, Eli Broad, the collector who donated his art collection to the new LACMA and then rescinded the deal is now going to build his own museum. Gee, just what LA needs, another museum. But I suppose if MOCA merges with LACMA, then LACMA will have a permanent collection when Broad decides to take his art and put it in his own museum.
Eli Broad to build his own museum, NY Times
Carson van Straaten Gallery showcasing the work of Julia Fernandez-Pol.
Carson van Straaten Gallery sent me two recent reviews by Kyle MacMillan and Michael Paglia of their current exhibit of work by Julia Fernandez-Pol.
I find it interesting that the van Straatens are using the Carson gallery as a retail outlet for artists discovered during residencies at Riverhouse Editions in Steamboat Springs. The holiday exhibit opening tonight at Carson van Straaten features master prints from the Van Straaten gallery in Chicago and new publications from Riverhouse Editions. The opening tonight features a talk by master printer Susan Hover Oehme. At least when we are talking prints with Riverhouse Editions they are done with the traditional printmaking methods–lithography, etchings, and monoprints–and not giclees.
Emerging artist’s solo exhibition a bold display of color and texture
By Kyle MacMillan
Denver Post
November 6, 2008
With concept often trumping craft and the entire medium regularly receiving death notices, revelry in the physical act of painting has hardly been a prized commodity in the contemporary art world for many years.
But if a striking exhibition on view through Nov. 14 at the Carson van Straaten Gallery is any indication, it just might be primed for a comeback.
Vibrant textures and energizing colors dance through this group of 21 paintings and original prints by Julia Fernandez-Pol, 24. The St. Louis native of Argentine descent earned her master of fine arts degree earlier this year from Boston University.
It is unusual for a gallery of this caliber to devote a solo exhibition to such a young and unproven artist, but this ambitious, fully formed body of work more than justifies such a leap of faith.
While most of the paintings — all abstract to varying degrees — suggest aquatic scenes, the real subject matter of these works is painting itself, as it was with abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s and ’50s.
One of the show’s standouts, “Green Chaos” (2007), a 96-by-80-inch oil on canvas, takes up where famed second-generation abstractionist Joan Mitchell left off. Like the variegated topography of her works, multiple methods of paint application abound in this spirited composition.
Subtle washes and graceful drips commingle with thicker, more assertive sections, including an unruly heap of paint that juts as much as an inch from the canvas. It is chaotic, as the title suggests, but it is controlled, pleasing chaos.
The largest portion of paintings consist of more manicured, evenly textured canvases, whose lush, creamy surfaces look like frosting on a cake. Indeed, Fernandez-Pol’s use of a large syringe to apply thick, squiggly lines of paint is similar to techniques used by cake decorators.
A stunning example is “Lily” (2008), a 60-by-78-inch oil on canvas that loosely depicts a water lily. The central flower, rendered in an explosion of intermingled, non-objective colors, rests on a background of hundreds of petal-shaped ovals of paint in pastel green, blue and lavender, all meticulously applied using a palette knife.
A similar but slightly more complex companion piece is “Cerebro (Brain)” (2008), a 72-by-64-inch oil on canvas with a more involved composition and an even richer mix of textures. In several sections of the canvas, Fernandez-Pol has swished a palette knife through previously applied swaths of paint — a frequent De Kooning technique — flattening and melding the colors in its path.
While watery-colored greens and blues predominate in this show, they do not hold a monopoly. “Mariposa (Butterfly)” (2008), 24 by 18 inches, looks like it was caught in a flash of light. Hues of yellow dominate, with a rainbow of other colors making appearances as well.
If the exhibition has any weaknesses, it would be two decidedly darker, more somber works, including “Introvert” (2007). A desire to offer an emotional counterbalance to the prevailing brightness is understandable, but the less textured style of these pieces proves underwhelming.
Also on view are eight examples from Fernandez-Pol’s “Reef” series of bas relief, hand-painted monotypes. These similarly aquatic-tinged abstractions were printed through Riverhouse Editions, a Steamboat Springs-based fine art publisher whose owners also run the Carson van Straaten Gallery.
She shows herself to be as adept at printmaking as she is at painting, creating colorful, dynamic images that extend many of the techniques she employs in her canvases.
Bursting with talent and potential, this young artist is a find. Fernandez-Pol’s ebullient celebrations of painting make viewers want to celebrate right along with her.
Julia Fernandez-Pol at Carson van Straaten Gallery
By Michael Paglia
Westword
November 6, 2008
When Sandy Carson, a fixture in Denver’s contemporary art world, announced earlier this year that she had sold her namesake gallery, even insiders were shocked. Carson has been on the scene since the beginning of time, which in Denver means the 1970s.
The buyers were Bill and Jan van Straaten, who changed the name to the Carson van Straaten Gallery, and many have wondered about the future direction of the gallery. Julia Fernandez-Pol, which highlights recent paintings by this emerging Boston artist, is our first indication, as it’s the initial effort of the new era. It turns out that Fernandez-Pol’s compelling abstract paintings are very compatible with the established aesthetic program that’s been the gallery’s signature for decades; her work looks like a cross between that of Homare Ikeda and Lorey Hobbs, both of whom are part of the gallery’s roster.
Fernandez-Pol first came to the attention of the van Straatens when she earned a residency at Riverhouse Editions, their fine-print outfit in Steamboat Springs, and this show includes a series of embossed monotypes she did at Riverhouse a few months ago, among them “Reef Series, 26″ (pictured), which is gorgeous.
Just as spectacular — or maybe even more so, owing to their remarkable tactile qualities — are her incredible oil-on-canvas paintings, many of which are large. The artist’s compositions are crowded with formal elements based on vaguely organic shapes that are held together in the pictures by an awkward sense of balance. She works the paint in a number of ways, most notably by making gigantic brush marks that look like cake decorations, both because they resemble the familiar candy flowers made of frosting and because of the colors, which also suggest the shades that cake frosting comes in.
I loved Fernandez-Pol’s pieces at Carson van Straaten and highly recommend that you check out this show before it closes on November 14.
Here is a link to a feature article I wrote for Trend magazine. It was published exclusively online. Trend is a beautiful magazine. I hope the publisher is able to resume print publication in the Spring.
Freshman actors fare well despite mature themes Special to the Herald
Asked if she could sum up “Raised in Captivity,” a play by Nicky Silver, in one sentence, the play’s guest director, Lisa Kramer, hesitated. Instead, she came up with three words: Dark, honest and hilarious.
They are good words to describe a play that is complex and multilayered. It’s a play that ends the first act with two men describing death – one the death of his lover from AIDS, and the other a convict describing the murder he has committed. In a point-counterpoint strongly delivered by actors from Fort Lewis College on Friday, Silver brings a play about emotional stagnation to bear on the audience. Both men are cut off from their feelings.
This may not sound like a comedy, but that’s exactly what this quirky play is. It’s a funny exploration of serious issues: guilt, reparation and release. It opens with the death of Sebastian and Bernadette’s mother, Miranda, in a freak accident caused by a showerhead. The estranged twins, played by Eli Halterman and Mary Quinn, are brought together after a dozen years. Sebastian is emotionally bankrupt; Bernadette bubbles over and cries at everything. She is passive-aggressive. Sebastian is just passive.
Bernadette is married to Kip, a dentist who hates teeth and gives up his practice to paint. Matthew Mount plays Kip, the idealist, always looking for the new adventure.
Sebastian is pen pal to the convicted murderer Dylan. Sebastian’s therapist, Hillary, comes undone, and we learn that she herself has more problems than her patients. Miranda, the mother, returns as a ghost providing a bombshell of information about Bernadette and Sebastian.
Kramer has staged the play not on the main stage, but in the outer wings of the stage and pushed the players into the audience, building an extended stage over the first couple rows of seats. The action takes place in small “cages.” It works because these characters are on the fringe, and it puts the already uncomfortable audience even more on edge. The players are almost on top of the viewers in a play during which the audience doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or cringe.
Act Two seems like a completely different play, set on the stage in the living room of Kip and Bernadette’s home. The characters combust together in this place and each finds a form of deliverance, of rescue or of escape from his or her lives.
For director Kramer, the play represents characters trapped by the way others perceive them, but really, the characters are trapped in their self-created identities. The freedom they seek often leads them to become more confined in the cages to which they limit themselves. In the end, some of the characters escape, others continue on an endless quest, never stopping to realize the redemption they seek is within.
The actors manage to find a balance between absurdity and hysterics. It’s a fine line. Sometimes they cross it. Sometimes they overact, but for the most part, the work is nuanced and the characters are portrayed with a consistency that is impressive, considering most of the players are freshmen, including Lauren Brown who plays Hillary, Halterman, Quinn and Vidak.
These young players handle a very adult play and its dark themes, intense ideas and colorful language with maturity beyond their years. None steals the show because they are all capable and confident on stage. However, Patrick Wiabel is powerfully angry as Dylan, the convicted murderer, and as Roger, a drug-addicted prostitute who appears in one scene.
Nathan Lee’s sets run a wide range from the opening graveyard – dark, gray and ghoulish – to Kip and Bernadette’s living room with its average sofa and dull wallpaper. Ginny Davis’ costumes place the characters somewhere between preppy and middle class.
The selection committee’s decision to choose a play like “Raised in Captivity” for young actors to perform is testament to the Fort Lewis College theater department. This lushly written play, with its elegant sentences and witty one-liners, requires impeccable timing. Not once does the play collapse in the hands of these students and their guest director.
artsjournalist@mac.com
Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the arts.
Carol Vogel reports on the results of the Christie’s auction on Nov. 12 in the NYTimes. This includes the sale of works on paper by former Lehman Brother’s CEO Richard Fuld and his wife Kathy.
At Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art on Nov. 11, only 43 of the 63 lots sold for a total of $125 million. Presale forecasts predicted a minimum of $202 million in sales.
Contemporary art stars plunge to earth, AFP
Contemporary art sale at Sotheby’s nets $125 million, International Herald Tribune
Sotheby’s contemporary art sale defies worst fears, Reuters
Here’s a link to a great image of a Roy Lichtenstein that sold that night from Artdaily.org
If you prefer to listen, click on this link to hear the story on NPR
Songwriter joins Leo Kottke in concert
Special to the Herald 
Folk singer and songwriter Loudon Wainwright III will play Saturday at the Community Concert Hall along with guitarist Leo Kottke.
Writing songs “is just something I’ve been doing for 40 years,” the self-effacing folk singer Louden Wainwright III said by telephone from his California home this week. Wainwright will perform at the Community Concert Hall with Leo Kottke at 7 p.m. Saturday.
Songwriting, Wainwright added, is something he stumbled upon. He wrote his first song in 1968.
“People reacted to it, responded to it and paid me for it,” he said.
The son of a journalist, Wainwright didn’t want to be a writer. He thought he was going to be an actor. That is, until he became slightly better known for his songwriting and folk singing than his acting.
Although he still gets the occasional acting gig – many know him best as the singing surgeon from the long running television series “M*A*S*H” or more recently as Dr. Howard from the film “Knocked Up” – singing and songwriting have earned him comparisons to Bob Dylan.
“(But) I’m not cryptic or mysterious or complicated at all,” Wainwright is quoted as saying on his MySpace page.
Wainwright’s new album, “Recovery,” is an archeological dig through old material that was originally recorded as just a voice and a guitar. He went back as far as 1970 to the first track on his debut “School Days,” a slice of collegiate bravado written when he was 23.
At 25, he wrote “Motel Blues,” a song about a young singer inviting a girl up to his motel room. Today, Wainwright says he’s only interested in how the windows open in a motel room and how to get the Wi-Fi working.
Wainwright took the old songs and reconceived them, then re-corded them with his favorite band in Los Angeles, a group of fellows with whom he said he loves working.
“It’s sort of like we put meat on those old bones,” Wainwright said.
He didn’t update or alter the songs; he said he didn’t have to because, physically and vocally, Wainwright is a different singer than he was in his 20s.
“My voice has technically dropped, and it sounds like I’m a different person,” Wainwright said. “Perhaps it is wishful thinking that I am a better and more expressive singer now, but it’s my opinion, even if it doesn’t count.”
Titling his new album “Recovery” is somewhat of a play on words. Wainwright is recovering his own music, reclaiming his own songs.
“But more importantly, it also carries the connotation of getting better, which is something we’d all like to think we’re doing,” he said.
Wainwright plays Saturday with innovative guitar virtuoso Leo Kottke, who no longer grants interviews.
Kottke has recorded more than 30 albums and collaborated with many musicians throughout his career. Entertainment Weekly has called him a national treasure.
artsjournalist@mac.com
Leanne Goebel is a freelance writer specializing in the arts.
Two artist’s I’ve written about previously are featured in issue #78 of New American Paintings. Monica Goldsmith paints hard-edged, geometric abstractions dealing with the environment and land use. Goldsmith is an MFA candidate at the Art Institute of Boston. She is represented by Gallerie Urbane in Marfa, TX. Kevin Bell explores nature and human intervention in fragmented realism. Bell used to teach at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. Now he is teaching at the University of Montana in Missoula.
A conversation with an artist whose work I enjoy. Hadi Tabatabai.
An ice sculpture entitled “Main Street Meltdown,” the work of artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese, made it’s debut on the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that caused the Great Depression.
As the day wore on, the sculpture melted. Watch a time-lapsed video here.
The monument measures 15 feet long, 5 feet tall, and weighs almost 1,500 pounds. It is the fourth in a series of ice sculptures by the artists that deal with important political issues. Earlier this year, Ligorano/Reese staged ice sculptures of the word “Democracy” during the Democratic and Republican Conventions in Denver and St. Paul.
This one is in Denver outside the Museum of Contemporary Art during the Democratic National Convention.
1,000 artworks to see before you die. The Guardian writers pick the essential art of the world.
Hint: O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, the nearest location to find one of these works.
