Dinner Partners: Benefit 2013 Honors Leonard Lauder

May 13th, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

When I come downstairs mid-afternoon, the second floor hums with men and women dressed in black being briefed on how to serve the late harvest Indian panzanella salad. Also the braised short ribs with burgundy demi-glace, the apple confection, and the assorted truffles. The gallery has been carpeted and filled with long tables and a podium. At ICA we are accustomed to quick transformations: just last week this room was divided into five chambers hung with Brian Weil’s photographs; before that it was cut in two and sported pink shag rugs and long-haired male mannequins for the Jeremy Deller show. Still, the conversion from gallery to high-end feast hall takes my breath away. This morning we had our staff meeting in here among bare, stacked rental tables and shrouded chairs; now, with gold cloths discreetly glittering and orange roses blooming in long rows, it’s a stage set for a banquet from a dream.

photo: Sunny Miller

The banquet being prepared is for ICA’s major fundraiser, our annual benefit—but this year with a special twist. The museum turns fifty in 2013, and to mark the occasion we are honoring Leonard Lauder: emeritus chairman of the Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., emeritus chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, emeritus trustee of Penn, tenacious art collector, exuberant philanthropist. Just this morning (this morning!) Mr. Lauder was on the front page of The New York Times for donating his unparalleled collection of Cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum. In a few short hours the Met’s director, Thomas Campbell, will be sampling the short ribs in the company of the directors of the Whitney, MoMA, the Barnes Collection, the deputy director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and former ICA director Claudia Gould. Claudia, who now leads New York’s Jewish Museum, helped inaugurate the venture this evening celebrates, ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellows (WLCF) program, which brings fabulous young curators to us for a year or two, enriching our museum beyond measure.

Now ICA’s director, Amy Sadao, is welcoming the guests as the late harvest panzanella salad is expertly served. Now the short ribs, accompanied by a video: a lively, charming piece that chronicles the WLCF program and its ten fellows to date.

photo: Sunny Miller

This impressive array of curators has fanned out from Philadelphia over the past decade, bringing their talents and skills to museums, galleries, festivals, and universities all over the world. Back in January, I watched the videographers, Matt Suib and Aaron Igler of Greenhouse Media (good friends of ICA who also document our exhibitions), tape their interview with Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. First Aaron transformed Ingrid’s office into a stage set, plugging in lights, microphones, and a big contraption called a “soft box” for creating an even glow. It was crowded. “Can we get about ten more people in here?” Ingrid suggested. “How about some flying squirrels?”

Matt told jokes to put Ingrid at ease. “We’re interviewing fourteen people for a seven-minute video,” he reminded her. “Whatever you say will be boiled down to probably thirty seconds.”

Matt with his soft box.

And now, tonight, here’s the finished piece projected high up on the wall! Interviews with the fellows themselves interweave with gorgeous images of their ICA shows. Kathy Sachs, ICA’s former board chair and chair of tonight’s event, tells the camera, “I first met Leonard Lauder when the [Penn] Trustees came to ICA, and I was very lucky in that I ended up sitting right next to Leonard. He just turned to me and he said, ‘What’s happening at ICA?’ ”

A little later, when Mr. Lauder himself gets up to speak, he smiles at Kathy: “I pay attention to my dinner partners—especially if they’re young and gorgeous!” Then he says, “ICA is the crown jewel not just of Penn, but of the country.”

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Kathy Sachs gives print by Ellsworth Kelly, specially commissioned for ICA’s Benefit 2013, to Leonard Lauder. Photo: Sunny Miller

Seeing the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellows gathered in this room and hearing the program’s origin story is disorienting in the best possible way—like sitting in this room twice in one day and having it seem like two different rooms. So often in life we are presented with something—a successful program, an exhibition, a fancy dinner—and the mind takes it for granted, sliding over it as over glass, no friction. Learning how things are made, and what was there before, makes the experience richer.

Behind every successful curator lies the first chance to organize a show. Behind every successful program lies the first spark of an idea.

Everyone here tonight has this in common: behind whatever they are—curator, collector, museum director, artist, or museum intern—lies the first encounter with a work of art that lit their heart and mind on fire. We hope that, from time to time, that fire is ignited here at ICA.

 

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To stay up to date with all ICA’s sparks and anniversaries, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Posted in Art and Money, Events

3 Responses to “Dinner Partners: Benefit 2013 Honors Leonard Lauder”

  1. kathy sachs says:
    May 13 2013 at 6:24 pm

    Rachel,

    That was a beautiful story for a very special evening. Thank you for making it magical again.

  2. B A Churchville says:
    May 13 2013 at 10:49 pm

    Cheers to all who champion, support and love contemporary art,
    especially K+K Sachs.

  3. admin says:
    May 14 2013 at 11:42 am

    Thanks, Kathy! It’s not quite possible to imagine ICA without your support, enthusiasm, and ideas. It was your own magic, as much as anything, that made the evening as special as it was.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Curating: Judith Tannenbaum Revisits ICA

April 29th, 2013

post by Alina Grabowski

To have Judith Tannenbaum sitting across a table from me, eating a sandwich, is a bit surreal. I had imagined her taller. With curly hair. And perhaps a pair of cat eye glasses. Having spent many hours leafing through the former ICA interim director’s papers, I’d had plenty of time to construct her in my imagination. To see her in the flesh, petite and sporting a red-streaked bob, is jarring—like remembering that your favorite character in a memoir isn’t merely fiction.

Some clarification is necessary; I have not been snooping through Judith Tannenbaum’s files illicitly. I am part of the Spiegel Contemporary Art Freshman Seminar at Penn, where our first semester was dedicated to studying artist Glenn Ligon, with a particular focus on his 1998 exhibition at ICA, Glenn Ligon: Unbecoming.

Original exhibition card for “Unbecoming,” January 16 – March 8, 1998

As part of my midterm paper first semester, I was assigned to research the Unbecoming archive housed in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I would ride the elevator to the fifth floor of Van Pelt Library, ring the bell to the sequestered room, and after stowing my belongings (save for a pencil), sit at a long wooden table and wait to be brought one of the four manila boxes in which the letters, faxes, press materials, images, and publications from that show are housed.

The most interesting file by far was the one dedicated to the ICA’s correspondence with Ligon. This thick folder consisted mainly of letters and faxes between Judith and the artist, detailing everything from potential installation configurations to party guest lists. Before taking this class, I had naively assumed curators conceived their exhibition concepts then organized the works and installed them—surely they didn’t have to worry about event invitations or hotel reservations. As I explored the archive, however, it became clear that a curator’s job was just as much about organizing people as it was the physical artwork, especially when working with a living artist. The archive served as an intimate guide to a curatorial process I hadn’t even known existed. The road map was a welcome one. This semester our class has been planning our own exhibition. Each One As She May, featuring works by Ligon, Steve Reich, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. The show, which references Unbecoming while exploring its own themes of language, movement, and understanding, opens in ICA’s Project Space on April 24.

The reason I’m sitting across from Judith on this Thursday afternoon is that she’s been generous enough to visit our class to speak about Unbecoming and to answer our questions about the exhibition and her experience with it. My four classmates, our two professors, Jennifer Burris and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Ingrid Schaffner, Senior Curator at ICA, and I have gathered in the ICA’s library, sitting around a table amidst trays of sandwiches and bowls of salad. Judith is warm and open about the process of organizing Unbecoming, often chuckling when we mention particular documents we’ve found in the archive. “Oh yes, I remember that!” she says, or, “I’m not quite sure I recall…”

Diagram of “Unbecoming” installation, 1997
Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library
University of Pennsylvania

First she tells us the basics: she was drawn to Ligon’s work after hearing him talk about it  and being struck by his eloquence and intellect. We discuss the Ligon coal dust drawings we will be showing in our exhibition, in which a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s story “Melanctha” is repeated. “He uses media to mediate personal experience,” Judith says, referring to the artist’s use of appropriated language.

She explains that when she approached Ligon about a possible show in 1997, it was a time of transition for him—very different from now, when he’s just had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. “The show was an autobiographical one, but also guarded,” she says of Unbecoming, noting that in Ligon’s Feast of Scraps (a series of photo albums featuring pornographic photographs of men alongside family photos), Ligon doesn’t specify which family photos are his own. It’s shocking to see a photo of a family gathered around dinner share a page with a naked, well-oiled man, but this juxtaposition is not merely for shock value: it questions our reaction. Why are some of these images considered vulgar, some wholesome?

Not only does Judith tell us about the process of organizing Unbecoming, she also shares her views on the curatorial process generally, advising us, for example, to keep our written materials in the gallery concise. When the issue of wall labels comes up, Ingrid shares a story about unwieldy labels she once encountered. Judith laughs. “I hate wall labels that ask questions,” she says, throwing up her hands.

After the laughter dies down, we receive perhaps the most valuable lesson of the afternoon. Judith opens her hands toward us. “If you’re going to say something,” she says,“ stand by what you say.”

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Installation view of “Unbecoming”

 

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Each One As She May is on view at ICA through July 28.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s curatorial lessons, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Posted in From the Archive, Guest Posts

One Response to “The Beginner’s Guide to Curating: Judith Tannenbaum Revisits ICA”

  1. Monice Morenz says:
    April 29 2013 at 7:38 pm

    Alina how exciting to be involved with these art professionals. Without curators art would not have an audience. Well done!

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A Painting with a Purpose: Sarah Crowner and Primary Information at ICA

April 15th, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“This might be easier than we thought,” Paul says, pulling the curtain onto the long dowel. Sarah, who made the curtain, carefully adjusts the folds.

Off-white and flame red, lipstick pink and lime green and black, the curtain is twenty-two feet long and made of irregular linen panels. Sarah, who is a painter—and who thinks of the curtain as a kind of portable painting—colored the bright sections with fabric paint, then ironed them, then stitched the whole thing together on an industrial machine. “I had to make a giant pattern for it,” she says, “like one would make for a giant jacket.”

Up on a ladder, David finishes installing brackets over the windows. He and Paul lift the curtain onto the brackets and let it unfurl. Suddenly ICA‘s mezzanine space seems more orderly, the chairs and tables and library carrel given context, orientation. Sarah frowns at the three-inch strip of glass showing above the curtain. “Is that distracting?” she asks.

David and Paul try raising it up a little. It doesn’t quite reach the ground, now, but it’s definitely better. Finally, it’s perfect. “It looks like it was made for the space.” Sarah seems pleased.

Actually, Sarah made the curtain as a backdrop for a Spanish-language staging of Robert Ashley’s opera, Perfect Lives. Partly because the opera, now called Vidas Perfectas, was set in the desert between Mexico and the U.S., she brought ideas from Mexican Modernism to the work. She also found inspiration in the early twentieth century Polish artist Maria Jarema, who designed costumes in theatrical collaboration with Tadeusz Kantor.

Then a few months ago, James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff asked Sarah if they could use the curtain as a backdrop for a very different kind of presentation: their spring Excursus project at ICA. James and Miriam are Primary Information—a non-profit that (re)prints new and out-of-print artist books and writings. Their Excursus IV is an archival exploration of ICA’s 1975 Video Art show, with lots of books and pamphlets and letters and diagrams; they liked that the curtain would introduce color into this largely black-and-white project.

Catalogue for the ICA exhibition “Video Art” (1975).

There was a practical consideration as well. Works from Video Art are being projected in one corner of the bright, open mezzanine, and the curtain helps dims the light. “It’s nice to think of a painting having a purpose,” Sarah says. Then she turns a critical eye to the creases in the fabric: “We’ll have to steam it.”

How does a painter of canvases come to curtains?

“I was thinking about duration in art,” Sarah explains. “In sitting in front of a painting for forty-five minutes instead of going into a gallery where you might look at something for maybe three.”

And then, she wondered, what happens when you put a painting behind a stage on which things are constantly happening? Does the painting still the action? Or, conversely, does the action make the painting move?

In Vidas Perfectas, the curtain’s white panels became screens onto which the text of the opera was projected. Here on ICA’s mezzanine, it will frame public programs and stand sentry to private chats and reading experiences, to casual browsing. I find myself wondering which of the scheduled programs it might particularly enjoy: the conversation about camouflage and mimicry perhaps? Or maybe it’s interested, as I am, in chapbooks .

Coffee and Conversation program in front of the curtain. Photo: Emily Wu

In past presentations, the curtain has been backlit or illuminated with stage gels. “Here,” Sarah tells me, “it’s beautiful, because it’s all natural light.” Almost as she speaks, the sun comes out from behind a cloudbank, casting pale streaks across the linen. The fabric brightens irregularly, the pinks glowing, the greens becoming as translucent as beach glass.

Primary Information will be ICA’s final Excursus project. Excursus, which invites artists, designers, publishers, and others to delve into ICA’s archive and use what they find as a starting point for an installation (and also an online residency) was started by Alex Klein when she came to ICA as Program Curator in 2011. The four Excursus projects she has organized—Reference Library, East of Borneo, Ooga Booga, and now Primary Information—have enlivened ICA’s physical space and enriched its intellectual compass. I urge you to experience it this spring while you have the chance. After that, the curtain is coming down.

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Excursus IV: Primary Information is on view at ICA through June 16. Follow the project and learned about upcoming programs at the Excursus website.

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Posted in Artists, Excursus

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with tomorrow’s sun: public program as glittering vortex at ICA

April 1st, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

The clear afternoon has darkened, and from ICA’s high glass lobby we watch the rain fall sideways across the sky. Wind sends garbage spinning down 36th Street and pulls umbrellas inside out. Jennifer, who has been working on her presentation for tonight, seems delighted. “I’m talking about the twister in the Wizard of the Oz!” she says, then hurries back upstairs.

Jennifer’s lecture is not the only feature of tonight’s program, which ICA Spiegel Fellow Grace Ambrose, who organized it, has named “with tomorrow’s sun.”

Grace was a student intern at ICA when I started working here in 2009, then got a Masters in curating at the Cortauld in London, and now she’s back. She has been assisting with all aspects of ICA programs since September, but with tomorrow’s sun is the first one that’s hers entirely.

At 6:00, artist Field Kallop starts her ten pendulums swinging in the Project Space.

Diamond dust pours through their tips, tracing elliptical patterns on the floor. The room is crowded, quiet, dim. Field moves from pendulum to pendulum, filling each one, testing it, setting it going like the master clockmaker starting the planets in their motions. The ropes swing fast, then they slow as others start to move, until the whole room sways with hypnotic motion. One man sits on the floor with his two small boys in his lap: images of wonder.

Out on the mezzanine, the programming team uncorks prosecco, its golden effervescence in keeping with the night. They arrange cookies, brew coffee, and admire the newly installed lights with their green and red gels. “I brought them for My Barbarian,” Alex recalls. “And we also used them for Open Video Call on Halloween.” The gaudy lights infuse the space with a moody glow.

Slowly the mezzanine fills up, grows noisy. Behind me, two men discuss physics and Field’s work—the relationship between how she pushes the pendulums and the patterns the diamond dust makes. One of them says that, after earthquakes disalign moving pendulums, those pendulums gradually and inevitably begin to trace figures eights. Before I can ask if this is true, the subject changes to randomness, then random number generators. Figure eights turned on their sides are infinity signs. The evening spirals on.

Jennifer’s talk starts with a film clip.

photo: Pamela Yau

In shimmering black and white, a blond woman sits on a piano, smoking. Then, putting the burning cigarette down to smolder on the piano, she begins to sing. “You’re the cream in my coffee,” she warbles, then breaks off to yell—in a language that might be German—at the piano player, off-camera. After a while she smiles and sings again—in English—only to break off and yell some more. At the end of the clip, Jennifer explains that we have been watching Marlene Dietrich’s screen test for The Blue Angel. “Let me tell you why I’m starting with the Weimer Republic in a talk about contemporary art,” she says.

photo: Pamela Yau

It would be foolish to attempt to summarize the subtle clockwork of Jennifer’s thinking, but I can tell you that her talk organized various familiar (and unfamiliar) stars into a new constellation: Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty; Liam Gillick washing gallery floors with vodka and glitter; Jack Smith and Flaming Creatures; Plato; Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes; Dorothy’s ruby slippers; Gilles Deleuze; Weimar-era children playing with stacks of near-worthless banknotes (hyperinflation) ; Max Beckmann and Otto Dix; the first credit card; and the New York City blackout, which happened the same year—1977—that the World Trade Center towers were completed. Within this constellation she situated the artists in her show, Glitter and Folds—Crystal Z. Campbell, Field Kallop, Jayson Keeling, and Carter Mull—explaining how she came to their work through her interest in a historical unfolding of the cultural capital of glitter, what she calls “a surfacing of shimmering abandon at times of political and economic precariousness.”

photo: Pamela Yau

From here, it seems an easy leap to poetry. David Bowie’s Major Tom serves as segue, and now here we are, listening to a reading by poet Frank Sherlock, who writes what Grace calls “utopian verse.”

“When I think of the mixture of glitter and alcohol in this city,” Sherlock says, “I think of New Year’s Day.” He means, of course, Philadelphia’s annual spectacle, the Mummer’s Parade. He reads a poem, “The Ballad of Bill McIntyre,” a tribute to the man he calls “the glitteriest of all the mummers,” who founded the first fancy brigade, the Shooting Stars, in 1947:

                                                       Toast the founder
                                     Auld Lang Syne again
                           Plumbers Carpenters Face-painted stars
They take him with them once again                            onto that Golden Street

Tonight, ICA seems to spangle on that golden street as though painted with stars.

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For information about future ICA programs—including a rare performance by Leif Elggren on April 17—visit the events page of our website.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s glitter, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Posted in Public Programs

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A Fixture in the Gallery: Linda Harris Celebrates a Decade at ICA

March 18th, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

This morning we are celebrating Linda Harris, who has been a security guard at ICA for a decade. “How many people have been here ten years?” Robert, ICA’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, asks. He raises his hand, and Linda raises hers. The rest of us, comparative newbies, keep our hands at our sides.

Robert says, “At least twice a month someone says to me we have this awesome security guard in the galleries. And I say, ‘Yes we do!’”

I’ve heard that too, from many people—all of us at ICA have. Attentive, caring, quick to smile and to offer advice, Linda is a warm and a lively presence in the galleries. “I always say hello,” she tells me. “And we’ll start a conversation. Someone might ask me, ‘What do you recommend that’s good?’” She makes sure you know which wall labels go with which artworks, and if she thinks you’re missing something, she’s likely to tell you. “Sometimes people don’t have the patience to watch [a video], and I tell them, ‘This is good, you should watch it,’” she says.

Video art is her favorite kind of art. She watches the videos here so much and so carefully that she usually memorizes them. Jeffrey, ICA’s Assistant Director of Development, remembers watching Kalup Linzy’s video with her during 2010’s Queer Voice exhibition: “She recited it word for word.”

This sunny morning there are pastries, orange juice, gifts, speeches. Once Linda dries her eyes, someone asks her what the first ICA show she remembers is.

“The one with the sock monkeys,” she says, referring to 2002’s Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More…On Collecting.

“And what was your favorite show?”

There are a lot of favorites. Anyone who watched her talking to visitors in last year’s The Happy Show knows that exhibition was one of them, but also The Puppet Show, Rodney Graham: A Little Thought (the artist gave her a CD), and Ensemble, a group exhibition of works that make sound, guest-curated by Christian Marclay. This exhibition famously contained “Telephone Piece” by Yoko Ono: a telephone in the gallery that the artist would occasionally call. “I spoke to Yoko Ono!” Linda remembers. “I couldn’t believe it was her for real!”

I had heard how noisy Ensemble was, with gongs and chimes and intermittent screeches. “Didn’t that show drive you crazy?” I asked.

“Did it,” Linda agrees. “This one going off, that one going off—the talking trash. The trash would be saying boom boom boom! It was so interactive.”

She also remembers Pepón Osorio’s Trials and Turbulence, a show that dealt with the Department of Human Services. It related to her childhood, she says.

Pepon Osorio, “Trials and Turbulence,” 2004. Mixed media including: 5 computer monitors with video, 2 large projected DVDs, TV with home video.
Photo: Aaron Igler

Having grown up in North Philadelphia, Linda, who has three children and three grandchildren she often cares for, came to security work after an accident cut short her nursing career. It’s easy to imagine how seeing her bustle into a room would cheer a patient. I watched her recently when a group of retired teachers—some with canes and walkers—toured the galleries. Concerned that one woman was losing her balance, Linda went to check if she was okay, then stopped to laugh with another who joked that the spiky hair of a subject in a photograph looked like her own hair when she got up in the morning. No wonder that one family, frequent ICA visitors, sends her a yearly Christmas card, or that former Penn students frequently come back to visit. At our morning reception, ICA’s director Amy Sadao tells Linda, “I’m new here, but you welcomed me the way you welcome everyone.” I felt that way too, my first months at ICA—always happy to see Linda because she always seemed happy to see me.

Later that day, I was in the lobby when a man came in and walked right past the front desk, heading toward the gallery. Larry, who was working the desk, called out to him: “You going in?”

“Nah,” the man said. “I’m just saying hi to Linda.”

Photo by Libby Rosof. Courtesy of theartblog.org.

 

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To stay up to date with all ICA’s anniversaries, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Posted in Staff

12 Responses to “A Fixture in the Gallery: Linda Harris Celebrates a Decade at ICA”

  1. Marilyn says:
    March 18 2013 at 10:42 am

    Congratulations Linda! You’ve been a constant friendly smile at the ICA. Hope you will be guarding the galleries for many more years. Best, Marilyn

  2. kathy sachs says:
    March 18 2013 at 10:49 am

    Thank you all for recognizing how wonderful Linda is and how she has become a part of the ICA experience.

    Congratulations Linda on your 10th anniversary.

    Keep your smile – we all cherish it.

    Warmest wishes,
    Kathy

  3. Olivia says:
    March 18 2013 at 11:32 am

    Congratulations Linda!

    You greeted my high school art class each month when we visited the ramp show and made sure we weren’t wreaking havoc. When I visited each month on my own as a student at Penn, I loved hearing your take on the work, letting me know what other people thought and how they interacted with the installations, which pieces were your favorite and which I shouldn’t miss.

    Making art accessible is one of the missions of the ICA. Linda, your presence is so integral in that! Never stop!

  4. Jenna says:
    March 18 2013 at 4:28 pm

    Congrats Linda! and hats off to you Rachel for making her a part of the Miranda archive -

    ICA is truly a family and Linda is a family member I look forward to seeing every time I come back!

  5. Amanda says:
    March 18 2013 at 4:35 pm

    Linda!

    You are a marvel and have added so much to my visits to ICA. You are the most powerful force against cynicism (towards art, towards life) I might have ever encountered.

    Congrats!

  6. chris says:
    March 18 2013 at 5:06 pm

    Bravo on the outstanding post. Made my heart jump from all the way on the Llano Estacado. Great to see Linda’s dedication and energy celebrated so wonderfully. Keep that fabulous ICA mojo happening.

  7. karen says:
    March 18 2013 at 5:35 pm

    linda you make every visit to the ica special!

  8. libby rosof says:
    March 18 2013 at 10:19 pm

    Curators and directors aside, the ICA is really Linda’s space. I had the impression for a brief period that someone asked her to tone it down, but fortunately, she just kept being herself until the limits eventually vanished and Linda reasserted her rights to the space she takes care of. She has always made me feel like she’s really happy to see me, and when I haven’t been around, she lets me know that I’ve been missed. Then she gives me the low-down on what she thinks is good. She’s never steered me wrong.
    The ICA is lucky to have such a warm presence and such a special person in the galleries.
    One of the funny things you need to know about Linda is that everyone who notices her thinks she is their personal discovery–like a celebrity, with fans and admirers each claiming her for their own. What a star!!!!

  9. Sharon says:
    March 18 2013 at 10:44 pm

    I am a Colorado artist who used to exhibit at the Rittenhouse Square festival and I always tried to see the latest show at ICA and I remember having great conversations with Linda! She treated me so warmly and I appreciated that so much because I was on the road alone and loved the human connection with such a lovely person. Congratulations on your 10 years and I hope to see you there next time I’m in Philadelphia!

  10. TELEPHONE MEMORIES @ica « onovox says:
    March 18 2013 at 11:02 pm

    [...] http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/staff/a-fixture-in-the-gallery/ “And what was your favorite show?” [...]

  11. Sonia says:
    March 19 2013 at 11:10 am

    Linda is the best! <3 Seeing her always cheers me up. Can't wait to give her a big congratulatory hug when I see her next.

  12. Anissa says:
    March 24 2013 at 3:24 pm

    Linda is always a joy to talk to whenever I come to the gallery. Today she told me, “Oh, girl, I haven’t seen you in forever! You missed some great shows!” She was right. And, little did she know, as I was coming here today, she was one of the fixtures in the gallery I was hoping to see!

Meaning Something: A Conversation About Brian Weil at ICA

March 4th, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“I worked with Brian for a year before I knew he was an artist,” Ric says. “We were more focused on building the movement.”

“ACT UP was awash with artists in the eighties,” Patrick adds. “Because everyone was an artist, no one talked about it…There was a feeling that art was not a responsible response to the crisis.”

Patrick, Ric, and Stamatina, with a rare image of Brian on the screen.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and we’re in ICA’s auditorium for a conversation about photographer and activist Brian Weil—about how his art and his AIDS activism intersected. How to think about the grainy, scratched, sometimes blown out, often riveting black-and-white images he made before dying in 1996 at 42? The Brian Weil retrospective currently on view at ICA presents several bodies of work, each exploring one of several insular, marginal communities in which Weil immersed himself and which he then photographed. The Sex pictures show images of S&M and bestiality, the Miami Crime series shows the bodies of the dead Weil encountered while riding sixteen-hour shifts with the police. There are pictures of boxers and bodybuilders, photographs of Hasidic Jews, and video for a final project, never completed, about the transgendered community. But it’s the AIDS photos Weil is best known for, and he himself believed his AIDS work was the most important he would ever do.

In a talk preceding this afternoon’s conversation, curator Stamatina Gregory, who organized the show at ICA, tells us that at the start of his involvement with groups like ACT UP, Weil had no intention of photographing AIDS subjects. It wasn’t until an HIV-positive graduate student he knew asked him to photograph her baby daughter, Flavia, who was dying of AIDS, that Brian brought his camera to the cause.

Brian Weil
Maria eight months pregnant with Adriana, Brooklyn, NY, 1985
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Brian Weil Archive

“Photography for Brian became a way of making sense of the crisis,” Stamatina says. Eventually he would travel all over the world, imaging the crisis in Haiti, in South Africa, in the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. But over the course of this more than ten-year undertaking, a number of intriguing, difficult tensions emerged. For example:

* That Weil characterized this work as alternatively an activist project and as an artistic one, depending on who was asking.

* That Weil welcomed the use of his images to educate the public, but remained ambivalent about his own artistic endeavor.

* That he believed “artistic skill can engage the viewer without them turning away,” but at the same time he had concerns about presenting the work as art.

Ric Curtis, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, worked with Weil on New York City’s first needle exchange program, which Weil founded. Of Weil’s AIDS photography, he says, “I think Brian felt it [taking photographs] might cheapen the process.”

Patrick Moore, Deputy Director of the Andy Warhol Museum, who worked with the photographer in ACT UP, says, “I think it’s really hard to take a picture of someone who’s dying.” He describes an exhibition of AIDS photographs at MoMA in the eighties by a different artist—how the activist community protested that show, feeling it objectified its subject. “How do you have it mean something?” he asks. “Not just shock.”

What makes a given body of work art or exploitation? Art or education? Good art or bad art? Does the intention behind the work matter, or only the result? There are, of course, no easy answers to these questions, but viewing Weil’s work makes them palpable, urgent. The answers seem to shimmer in the stark, hugely mediated images, then recede before one can grasp them.

Patrick speaks admiringly about the intimacy of Weil’s photographs. He talks about the supersaturated blacks and the blown-out whites—how they make you feel about the photograph’s subject that “this person is almost somewhere else.” There is a way in which the essential humanity of the subject is captured even as the details of the physical body blur and fade. One image of a woman in bed catches my eye every time it cycles by on the projection screen. Because of the overexposure, all we see of her is hair, hands, eyes, lips. The rest of her’s bleached out as though she’s already bone, or ghost. Pure light.

Brian Weil
Woman with AIDS at Baragwana Hospital, Soweto, South Africa, 1990
Gelatin silver print
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Brian Weil Archive

When he died, not of AIDS as many assume, but of a heroin overdose, Weil was right in the middle of his work. He was still using all the tools at his disposal—time, an extraordinary ability to connect with people, and of course a camera—to capture experience as most people never see it. To open our eyes to the brilliant lights and the terrible darks, to the grainy indeterminacy, of life.

In regard to his AIDS project, Brian Weil was clear-eyed about the way a difficult photograph should operate: “You need to seduce them, you need to amuse them, and then you need to show them the truth.”

* * *
Brian Weil is on view at ICA through March 31.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s complications, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Posted in Art and Politics, Brian Weil, Public Programs

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Something Has Zombiefied: Irena Knezevic in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart

February 18th, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“That looks like it fits,” Ika says, as the shoe model tightens her laces.

“They look cool.” The model admires her new footwear, which looks something like a woman’s figure skate with the toe and heel cut out. “I would actually wear these.”

Photo: Constance Mensh

A few volunteer models have come into ICA tonight to rehearse Nine Hour Delay, a fashion show/performance that is part of a new project by artist Irena Knezevic, who invites me to call her Ika. The project centers around a type of shoe—the model is called Borosan—that was commonly worn by women in the former Yugoslavia. They’re not made any more, and Ika spent all summer collecting them—a complete set, every size, in both white and navy. White was for office workers, doctors, and other professional women. Navy was for factory workers and women who cleaned for a living. “No one wanted to have a mother wearing the navy ones,” Ika says.

The models practice drawing the tall pink curtain that will hide them from the ankle up during the fashion show. They practice displaying their shod feet first here, then there.

“It’s not going to be a very fast walk,” Ika tells them. “Just relax.”

Ika loves these shoes. Constructed from rubber, cotton, and canvas, with metal eyelets, they are entirely recyclable. The ergonomic ball in the sole makes them easy on the wearer’s back. In Yugoslavia in the seventies and eighties, when you wore yours out you could exchange them for a new pair at a negligible price. The shoe was designed for nine hours of standing—eight hours of working, plus an hour for lunch.

This project is just one pleasure among many in White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart, ICA’s major new exhibition of art engaged with clothing, fashion, self-presentation, pose—with how what we wear expresses our relationship to the social sphere. The show’s title refers to Narcissus, the beautiful youth of Greek mythology who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and eventually wasted away and died—or fell in and drowned, according to some versions. Either way, the yellow-hearted flower sprouting from the spot where he gazed upon the unattainable was named for him. Narcissism lurks at the core of this show—though, as its curator, Anthony Elms, consoles in his gallery notes: “Don’t fret, per American writer Wayne Koestenbaum’s pithy reminder: ‘Narcissism isn’t evil: it’s ordinary.’ It is self-evaluations at the work place, profile pictures for your social media, and looking at yourself in the mirror leaving the house.” Donning the courage of his convictions, Anthony has offered his own body as part of the gallery space. He’s wearing one of the works on his wrist for the run of the show: a digital watch by Dexter Sinister engineered so that the time runs—fleetly, fleetingly—across its face.

Ika in the gallery, working.

For Ika, the Borosan shoe is a lovely example of Eastern bloc Constructivism—art and design used for a social purpose. “It took nine years to actually engineer them,” she says. “There were lots of experiments and refinements.” At the same time, however, the shoes clearly denoted the wearer’s place in Yugoslav society—and they were generally despised for that reason, as well as for being required wearing in the public sector for decades. Tonight’s models, though, declare they would pay good money for a pair, underscoring the point that what we wear doesn’t have a fixed valence, an objective value, any more than a reflection in a mirror does.

Nine Hour Delay is an ambitious, long-term project, just starting out on what promises to be an exciting journey. For future iterations, Ika will invite presenting art institutions to pick a color, then place an order with the Boreli factory to manufacture 2,000 pairs of Borosan shoes in that color. The women of the museum will be asked to wear the shoes during their work day—to make them, in fact, the institution’s official footwear. Thus, in Ika’s words, “the art institution is actively excavating and propagating art histories.” Also, the support will help keep Boreli alive. “What’s so incredible about this company,” Ika says, “is that its charter from the 1940s prevents it from splitting up—in perpetuity.” And so it perambulates on, subsidized by the new countries of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia—a last remnant of a dead regime.

Well, or nearly dead. As Ika says, “Something has zombiefied.” As long as Boreli exists, there is a way in which Yugoslavia does too—gossamer threads, frayed but tough, holding it together. If I close my eyes, I can almost see the spidery garment they weave: a social cloak, woven of our needs, choices, desires, and delights. The fabric of society.

* * *

White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart is on view at ICA through July 28.

To stay up to date with all ICA’s zombie and shoe-related activities, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Diamond Dust Ellipses: Field Kallop Installing

February 4th, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“This is my homemade pendulum,” Field Kallop says. “Two bottles pieced together with some epoxy and duct tape.” She measures out lengths, snips, then wraps tape around the middle of the plastic bottles like wide black belts. With a funnel she fills one with finely crushed glass—diamond dust—then attaches it to one of ten long strings dangling from the ceiling. She pulls her pendulum back and lets go. The hard glitter runs from the tip, tracing a sparkling line on the floor. Field catches the bottle, then releases it again, this time with a curved motion instead of straight. The glass inscribes patterns, overlapping ellipses, like the paths of planets moving through the sky. The curves shift slowly, accruing into kite shapes, distended trapezoids. Repeating sweeps of dazzle.

Field stops the pendulum again, detaches it.

She’s using lead fishing weights for heft, taping them to the bottles’ sides. They’re a good shape for her purposes, echoing the length of the bottles, but she’s not sure how many she’ll need. That’s part of why she’s at ICA today, a few weeks before the show her work is in, Glitter and Folds, opens. A heavier pendulum will travel faster and make bigger forms than a lighter one. “I’ve done two iterations of similar projects,” she says, “but they’ve never been this big, and never with a ceiling this high.” She has to experiment with each variable until she gets it right.

Organized by ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Jennifer Burris, Glitter and Folds isn’t the easiest show to describe. The text on the exhibition card begins: “What do we know to be true? That the earth rotates, time moves forward, gravity pulls, and mirrors reflect light.” This is a poetic statement rather than an analytical or descriptive one one, fitting for a show like Glitter and Folds which will present work by four artists, each of whom—like Field—strives to make visible some potent but ghostly force. Subterranean social currents. Gravity. The drift of time.

Field has always been drawn to science, particularly chemistry, physics, and astronomy with their immutable laws. Her installation is titled and upon each stood a siren, borne around in its revolution, which is how Plato described the musicality of the orbiting planets in The Republic. Part of the work’s appeal is in the tension between the immutability of the force it makes visible—gravity—and the ephemeral nature of the forms it creates: patterns of glitter on the floor which entropy (and visitors’ shoes) will quickly wear away.

Many traditions make art of ephemeral dust: sand or pollen or powered bark. Field tells me about the mandala painting of Tibetan Buddhists (whose whole theology is based on the impermanence of the world), the healing sandpainting of the Navajo, and the British tradition of “table decking”—decorating the dining tables of the rich for feasts. She is especially drawn to the bonseki craft of Japan—another Buddhist tradition—in which landscapes are created on black lacquered trays with bird feather brushes.

Field’s own early work was in paint, but one day she bought a toy pendulum for her desk. Its movement appealed to her so much that she attached a pendulum to her studio ceiling and began making drawings with it. “The elliptical forms were so perfect and so simple,” she says. At first she used bleach, running it through the pendulum onto cloth: “Each kind of bleach would reveal a different color in the fabric. I love working with the bleach, but it was really wearing on the system.” Jennifer remembers visiting Field in her studio and finding her basically wearing a hazmat suit. Diamond dust, for all its sharp glitter, is safer.

In the gallery, the strings dangling down through the space are not attached directly to the ceiling. Rather, they are suspended from other strings that run horizontally, thus introducing another force into the system, making what physicists call complex harmonic motion. The horizontal string moves back and forth, and the dangling one moves in a circle, and so the forms sketched on the floor are more elaborate, squarer, and more complexly textured than if only one kind of motion were in play.

(primary)

At the opening of the show at ICA on February 6, Field will set her pendulums in motion in an hour-long performance. She will start from the back wall and work forward, the bottles in the rear slowing as the ones at the front still swing fast. The performance will be repeated on February 27, and for a final time on March 13. Thus a work of art about cycles will exist in three cycles of its own. It’s as though a diligent deity were making the universe over thrice, inscribing the clockwork of its mind on the void in bright dust.

* * *

Glitter and Folds opens at ICA on February 6 and will be on view through March 31.

with tomorrow’s sun, A Night of Poetry & Performance, will be held in conjunction with Glitter and Folds on Wednesday, March 13, at 6:30pm

To stay up to date with all ICA’s sweeps of dazzle, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Posted in Artists, Installation

One Response to “Diamond Dust Ellipses: Field Kallop Installing”

  1. Wednesday links | Tyler Green: Modern Art Notes | ARTINFO.com says:
    February 13 2013 at 9:07 am

    [...] Behind the scenes of the ICA Philadelphia’s “Glitter and Folds” with artist Field Kallop and her diamond dust. [...]

One New Idea: A Visitor Survey

January 21st, 2013

post by Rachel Pastan

“Words can be visual art.”

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

“The bike-powered art piece prompted me to consider that art can be participatory.”

Photo: Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media

“I’m inspired to paint my stairs!”

I could fill this whole post with comments like these in response to the question, “What is one new idea you are taking away with you?” from a visitor survey ICA commissioned recently. Here are a few more:

“How can I apply the language of design?”

“Be more open minded.”

“Seek discomfort!”

“Museums = awesome.”

Of course, many of the questions in the survey were more straightforward: What did you come to see today? What is your age? Before today, were you aware that ICA is free?

Useful though responses to those questions are, we also wanted to understand what happens to people when they come to ICA. Maybe one day tiny functional MRI machines can be attached to visitors as they tour the museum to answer this question, but until then, asking about new ideas sparked by time in the galleries seemed like a place to start.

On a warm, cloudy Saturday last fall, I sat on a bench in ICA’s lobby and watched Claire Cossaboon, a masters student in museum communication at University of the Arts, administer the survey she developed for us. “So many people are excited about sharing their opinions,” she told me, which—somewhat to my surprise—turned out to be true. Maybe this is partly because of Claire herself. She’s enthusiastic without being chirpy, warm and attentive and good at listening. “So much of this is engaging in the conversation,” she explained, “so people don’t feel they’re taking a test.”

(primary)

I watch her chat with a couple in their fifties. “This show has been a flashback to my life,” the woman says. (She’s referring to Jeremy Deller: Joy in People, which reflects the artist’s interests in popular music and acts of rebellion among other things, and which includes a life-sized reproduction of a Manchester, England tea room, where you can get an actual cup of tea.) These people came in today because they just happened to be walking by. That’s their answer to question #3, “What prompted your visit?” Their suggestion of one thing they might change? “There should be free tea all the time!”

It’s gratifying to see how few changes our visitors request. Aside from some complaints about signage (“Have more panels with explanations about the meaning of the work”; “The way-finding was a bit confusing”; “I wasn’t sure if I could use the back ramp”) many of the suggestions are of the “It would be nice to incorporate music more into a future exhibition” variety. Or, “Bigger, I want more!”

I was surprised to learn how young our audience is—65% between the ages of 18 and 32—and thrilled to see how many say they would return again (98%) or recommend ICA to a friend (the same 98%).

Of course, the whole issue of surveying one’s audience raises questions. While it’s vital to know who our visitors are, how they learn about our shows, and if they’re confused about whether they’re allowed in the Ramp (they are), the bigger question of the relationship between audience and museum is complicated. What is our responsibility to please audiences? If we present a show that crowds the galleries, is that by definition more of a success than an exhibition that speaks deeply to just a few people and confounds or even annoys others? Is our first responsibility to the audience or to the art?

It’s easy to say (and I do say it) that there has to be a balance. We have more than one gallery after all, and more than one slot per exhibition season. In any given year we offer variety: the monographic and the thematic, the established and the emerging, works in different media by a diverse range of artists, work that’s more accessible and work that’s harder.

Still, there’s a part of me that wants to read the results of all these surveys, think about them, get better signage about the Ramp, and then forget the whole thing—sort of like a tennis player forgets the individual element of her stroke when she’s in the zone.

We believe—we believe passionately—in connecting the best new art to audiences. But the art itself is where we begin.

* * *

To stay up to date with all of ICA’s percentages, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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The Programs That Were: Grace Ambrose Reflects on Programming at ICA

January 7th, 2013

Post by Grace Ambrose

Here at ICA we’ve just said goodbye to Jeremy Deller’s Joy in People. When I walked through the doors on January 2nd, there were already boxes being packed. A few weeks before, we gave the blue hammock that sat on the mezzanine to Paul, our chief preparator. This morning I sent the last box of books from Excursus III: Ooga Booga back to Wendy Yao. My first season of exhibitions as Spiegel Fellow is over.

In the programming department, we’ve been looking toward the next round of shows for a while. And soon after they open, on February 6, we will look ahead further still. Recently, we started thinking about what we might try to do in conjunction with Jason Rhoades, Four Roads, which opens next September.

Program Curator Alex Klein and Spiegel Fellow Grace Ambrose. Photo: Patterson Beckwith

Robert, Dana, and Paul ably coordinate the objects you see in the galleries, which fly all over the country and the world and whose loans are carefully negotiated. I work with Program Curator Alex Klein to produce programs and exhibitions, including the Excursus series. We coordinate bodies, filling spaces with conversations and screenings and performances and readings and anything else that you can think of, getting interesting and interested people in a room together and seeing what happens. Though Jeremy Deller’s Valerie’s Snack Bar and I Heart Melancholy installations are gone, we programmers celebrate the Joy in People all year round. We depend on it. And people are difficult to pin down.

For one thing, schedules are complicated. We contend with the institution’s schedule, with the university’s, and with every individual’s own life. Though we’ve worked on them for months, next season’s programs are still coming together. It’s the nature of this kind of work. Fitting everything onto the calendar is like a series of turning cogs. When all is said and done, they’ll neatly lock together. It always works out, but waiting for the machinery to get up and running can be nerve wracking.

Behind every one of these public conversations is a series of many smaller, private ones. Unlike objects, people can talk back. As Spiegel Fellow I’m responsible for coordinating the logistics that go along with every program: making sure we have enough work studies and interns, booking airplanes and hotels, and processing C-Forms and W-9s. While we’re looking forward to the next season (we are always looking forward to the next season), we have to make sure of the current one first.

I help make the posters on our Risograph and set up the chairs in the auditorium. I drive around the city buying snacks from Trader Joe’s and special spices from the Pakistani market. I scour thrift stores for the perfect glass vessel for an artist’s performance and knickknacks to be transformed into coveted prizes. I pop popcorn. I brainstorm tweets. I order books and hammocks and lights and signs and flags and tarts and vegan, gluten-free, nut-free cookies. I help Alex stay on top of her correspondence with our guests and together we brainstorm each season of exhibitions with other curators, artists and grant writers. One weekend, I donned silk pants and a cape and joined in with performance collective My Barbarian.

Plants from Excursus III: Ooga Booga in the programming office, along with the sculpture produced by Dean Allen Spunt’s November 7th performance on the mezzanine.

Every program has its own needs, its own set of spinning cogs, and that means this job is different every day. While I support Alex on all that she does, I’m responsible for organizing some programs on my own. All fall I have worked on March 12th’s multi-part presentation “With Tomorrow’s Sun.” There will be a talk by the curator of Glitter and Folds, our Jennifer Burris; a reading by Philadelphia’s famed and fabulous CAConrad; and a performance by Field Kallop, whose pendulum will swing diamond dust across the floor of the Project Space. For that evening, the pieces fell neatly into place – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to be done. There will be thank you notes to write and photos to color correct and honoraria to be paid. The life of a program is long, much longer than the ninety minutes or so that it lives in our building.

By the time you read this, the art in the galleries will be gone, making its way in its special boxes toward St. Louis. The walls will be coming down and new ones rising in their places. The programs, of course, disappeared weeks ago, into the chilly nights and crisp afternoons when they occurred. I look around my office though, and find objects have replaced them. The plants that populated the Ooga Booga installation on our mezzanine line the windowsill. Jeremy’s I Heart Melancholy print from Free For All hangs above my desk. A Polaroid of me from Patterson Beckwith’s Portable Portrait Studio is tacked to the bulletin board. A slip of paper, one of Wendy’s cats from the flat file drawers, is pinned above it. A prize I received from Club Nutz, a bobblehead of Phil & Phillis, precursors to the Phanatic, sits next to the computer monitor.

From left: to-do lists, ICA’s Happy New Year card, a cat that lived in a flat file drawer, Polaroid portrait of the author by Patterson Beckwith

I’m excited for the coming season. I look forward to seeing the things that will arrive in our galleries over the next four weeks: the photographs and videos and sculptures and installations. I cannot wait to hang one of Sarah Crowner’s curtains across the mezzanine, as it is transformed by Primary Information for our final Excursus. But more even than that, I am looking forward to the objects that will end up on my desk once all those have disappeared: totems of the programs that were.

*****
Grace Ambrose organizes people. In addition to supporting programming at the ICA as Spiegel Fellow, she is a co-coordinator of Ladyfest Philadelphia and the current Junior Fellow at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. On February 5th, join her at the Writers House for the launch of her project In Open Letters A Secret Appears: A People’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

To stay up to date with what Grace and the rest of the ICA are staff are up to via the machinery of Miranda, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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