Archive for the ‘Art and Money’ Category

Dinner Partners: Benefit 2013 Honors Leonard Lauder

May 13 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.”

(primary)

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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The Voting

May 11 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Before the voting, there is the tour. Last April this group threw its support to Stefan Sagmeister The Happy Show, so tonight, in preparation for this year’s ballot, they walk through the galleries to see how the show looks.

Videos show truisms spelled out in moving Jello. There is a bike that lights up a big neon sign when you ride it. The group approaches the sugar sculpture, complete with lights and face recognition software. “If you look through the Plexiglas,” says Anthony, who is leading the tour, “the lights change color depending on how much you smile.”

John puts his face in the frame and tries it out, grinning. The sugar cubes light up brightly, green and blue. It’s as though the show itself is saying he made a good choice last year.

Every spring, members of ICA’s Leadership Circle listen to pitches by three curators about three upcoming ICA exhibitions, then vote on which show to support. “It’s like the battle of the Titans,” Ingrid says, revving up the crowd. “I feel very powerful,” one voter confides as the group settles in with sandwiches and wine. Outside, the giant inflatable Happy Show monkeys peer in as though they want to know what’s going on.

Stamatina goes first. She is organizing an exhibition of photographer Brian Weil who died in 1996. “Weil is a very under-recognized artist right now,” she says, “but a generation ago he was very well known.” She talks about Weil’s life and work, showing images of his photographs of people with AIDS and their families, of Hasidic Jews in New York, of murder victims in Miami. Weil was known for immersing himself in the communities of people he wanted to photograph, living with them for months sometimes before taking out his camera. Later, after the pictures were taken, he made visible his role as intermediary, scratching, blurring, or overexposing the negatives.

Untitled self-portrait (from Hasidim), n.d., gelatin silver print

Stamatina shows us the only known Weil self-portrait, a contact sheet of many images of the photographer in the guise of a Hasid. In these pictures, in hat and full beard, Weil gazes into the camera wearing a multitude of expressions as though trying to find one that fits.

Kate is up next. “Karla Black makes site-specific sculptures,” she says, clicking through her slides. Pink and white and baby blue, fabulously gauzy and powdery, these big constructions burgeon forth, dangling from ceilings or piling precariously up toward them.

Karla Black, “Nature Does The Easiest Thing,” 2011 (Detail). Installation view, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photo: © Lothar Schnepf, Cologne. Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Often made from chalk, paper, body creams, toothpaste, and make up, they have what Kate describes as “a pastry or confectionary quality,” like macaroons at a giant’s tea party. This exhibition will be Black’s first solo show in an American museum.

Going last, Anthony explains the title of his group show, White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart. It’s what the gods said to Narcissus when—fed up with him gazing at his reflection in the pool—they decided to turn him into flower. Anthony’s show is about pose, clothing, and self-presentation—how we “multiply our personalities” by what we put on our bodies. He tells us that it takes inspiration from a JG Ballard quote—“Fashion: A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.” Anthony has a long list of artists he hopes to include. Wardell Milan makes drawings and collages of people—part outer skin, part skeleton—overlayed with paint, paper, or swatches of fabric.

Wardell Milan, “Naomi and Landscape #1” 2009, c-print

Zoe Leonard’s photographs of runway shows catch the models looking at each other as though in lesbian flirtation. Frances Stark has a sculptural dress in the form of an old-fashioned dial telephone that she wears for performances that touch on sex-phone-chatting.

When the three curators sit back down, the serious ruminating begins. “Can we rate them 1-2-3?” someone asks. “Are any of the shows going to travel?” someone else wants to know. “Raise your hand when you’re done,” Sam calls, “and we’ll come around and collect your ballot.” Pencils scribble, hands go up. Sam and Christy disappear into the kitchen to count the ballots.

A moment later, they’re back. “And the winner,” Sam declares, “is Brian Weil!”

Stamatina looks happy.

Actually, everybody looks happy! People voting to spend money for art is not something you see every day.

Only the monkeys, out on the terrace, glower. They are like children whose mother is pregnant again, angry at the prospect of being displaced.

Photo: Pam Yau

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Learn more about Leadership Circle here.

To sign up for Miranda‘s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Alpine Sheep in the ICA Meadow: Honoring Karen Kilimnik

April 13 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’m not sure what table size you need,” Eric says. “I did the ultimate. If you get 250 people at this party, you can fit them in.”

We all look down at the sketch of possible table arrangements while Eric, who runs the interior design firm Fury Design with his partner Jim, talks about birch trees and the mise-en-scene he envisions for the center of the space. “My idea is that they’re going to hover. I’ll have nine-foot saplings that they’ll cut early.” He has plans for real sod growing with rye grass, for glitter sprayed lightly through the branches as though the wind has blown it there, and for seventy yards of white scrim fabric to be drawn dramatically back when it’s time for the dinner to begin. A glittering ball will hang above the birches: an indoor moon.

“You don’t see any live flowers?” Sam asks.

“Not enough impact. But if we knew anyone who had ten little French chairs! Or those gold ballroom chairs people rent.”

“I have a lot of those,” Hilarie says. “Like a hundred.”

This is a meeting of the décor committee for ICA’s 2012 spring benefit, our big annual fundraiser at which we honor a significant member of the museum community. This year the honoree is Karen Kilimnik, whose mid-career retrospective—curated at ICA by Ingrid Schaffner—traveled the country in 2007, exposing thousands of new admirers to the artist’s work in photography, installation, drawing, and painting. A native Philadelphian, Karen Kilimnik explores perceptions of glamor and fantasy from Kate Moss to ballerinas, from Madonna to Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

From the moment she agreed to be honored at this event, we have been imagining how to shape the Benefit around Karen’s distinctive sensibility, which draws on the romantic tradition and pop culture, on nature and history. I’ve heard the look we’re going for described variously as “whimsical and glittery” and as “decrepit elegance.” The pale pink invitations, designed by Ominvore, boast two gold Ks intertwined to form an elegant chandelier. How to translate this into tablecloths and centerpieces is, however, still an open question.

Karen herself, when asked about the evening’s look, suggested an alpine, winter, farm animal motif. She even made a new artwork—a small pastel of two alert, pinkish sheep in a greenish meadow—for the invitation. The original pastel will be raffled off to a donor at our Golden Muse donor level. (A Charline von Heyl print will be given to donors at both the Golden Muse and the lower-tiered Muse level, permitting many guests to go home with more art than they had when they arrived.)

At the décor meeting, the talk turns to candles: simple glass votives lining the tables, enhanced here and there, perhaps, by a leaning chandelier.

“I’m happy to have a big chandelier leaning against the dessert table as though it fell out of the ceiling,” Eric says.

“That’s very Karen,” Babs says. “People are going to feel they’re walking into a different space than they’ve ever walked into before.”

The committee discusses about the dessert table. Cupcakes are suggested, decorated with sheep reproduced in icing from Karen’s pastel. (“Half the people don’t eat dessert,” one committee member warns, but another says, “They’ll eat cupcakes.) From cupcakes, the conversation turns (naturally) to chocolate farm animals and marshmallow Peeps.

“Peeps are made locally,” Eric observes, gathering up color samples as the meeting winds down.

“Yes,” Babs agrees. “They’re made in Philadelphia.”

Just like Karen Kilimnik.

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Sheep image above: Karen Kilimnik, Sheep in England, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery. photo: Simon Greenberg

For more information about Benefit 2012, click here.

To sign up for Miranda‘s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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People’s Conference, Part II: Art in Your Own Back Yard

March 9 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’ve taken art to non-art spaces,” Astria Suparak says, “and non-art to art spaces. Before YouTube, when people had much less access to alternative, unconventional, experimental work, I did a lot of shows in places like bars, skating rinks, and living rooms…Some people have called this the rock band model: taking the work to the people, rather than waiting for the people to find to the work.”

Left to right: Andrew Suggs, Nato Thompson, Astria Suparak, and Jens Hoffmann. Photo: William Hidalgo

Astria, curator of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, is the first of the flock of creative, forward-thinking curators to speak at People’s Conference at ICA. They’re here to discuss the variety of relationships art institutions can have with their local neighborhoods, what’s alternative about alternative art spaces, and other issues arising from People’s Biennial, an exhibition organized by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), which looked for art in unconventional places. One of the artists in that show, Warren Hatch, makes nature films of microscopic life he finds in his Portland, Oregon neighborhood. This is a good metaphor for most of the curators here today, whose missions are bound up with the art and artists in their own backyards.

Astria, for example, told us about a show she organized in Syracuse, Embracing Winter, “repositioning winter as an opportunity to view your surroundings in new ways.” Video, installation, and photography were all on view, along with an enormous knitted sculpture of a mitten. A chart on the wall showed area snow fall levels over fifty years. Big piles of sparkling, environmentally sensitive ice melt were arrayed on the floor for people to take, decreasing in proportion to the increase in the snow outside. Perhaps most delightfully, in what Astria called “a reversal of Duchamp’s readymades,” an array of snow shovels was hung on the wall for visitors to borrow as needed—the object returned to its usefulness.

Embracing Winter, curated by Astria Suparak, at Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University, 2007.

Andrew Suggs, director of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi, recounted how this alternative artist collective was launched (legend has it) at a bar called Dirty Frank’s one night in the late 80s “by a group of art students who were drunk and decided they wanted a place to show their work.” Andrew raised useful questions about the world alternative, for instance: An alternative to what? He quoted curator Lia Gangitano who wrote, “While some of us continue (perhaps out of respect) to use terms such as ‘alternative space’…it’s not clear anymore what, exactly, we mean.”

The biggest institution heard from was the Queens Museum of Art whose director, Tom Finkelpearl, gave an eloquent overview of how his museum—located in a borough where 47.6% of the residents are foreign born—serves, woos, and otherwise engages with its community. Art exhibitions, usually with some tie to the area, are an important part of the program, but so are local community festivals that offer cultural celebration along with access to social services. The museum staff speaks eight languages. “Our goal is to be the most community-engaged museum in America, without giving up on the complex contemporary art practices,” Tom declares. “We may be outside of the mainstream of the art world, but we’re not outsider artists.”

Photo: William Hidalgo

A third model for combining art and community was presented by Ruthie Stringer and Dana Bishop-Root of Transformazium, a small artists collective working in Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. The young members of Transformazium originally moved to Braddock from New York City on a wave of optimism, largely because a lovely old building was available for sale very cheap. Part of the building, however, turned out to be uninhabitable and had to be deconstructed, a huge undertaking that Transformazium approached in the spirit of an art project. Once settled in the community, the artists worked hard to develop good relationships with their neighbors, seeking creative ways to kindle meaningful conversations. One program they dreamed up paired artists with Braddock youth to create site specific installations in the kids’ neighborhoods. A screen printing shop was opened, and an artist-in-residency program begun—all on the proverbial shoestring.

Jim Kidd, Resident Artist in Residence, and Leslie Stem, Transformazium at the Neighborhood Print Shop

Which brings us to the crucial, interesting, and often uncomfortable question of money. At about this point in the conversation, an audience member called out, “Who gets paid? Where does the money come from?” I was relieved, having been wondering about this myself.

In this realm, too, many models were represented. Transformazium members, for example, have day jobs, get small grants, collaborate with established non-profits like the local library, and sell art when they can, plowing the proceeds back into their project. The Queens Museum, by contrast, is largely foundation funded. Tom Finkelpearl went right to the heart of the issue when he said, “Can you remain idealistic and true to your goals if you take money from foundations and corporations? That’s the challenge. But it’s important to have health insurance for your employees.”

So many important, awkward, interesting questions raised over the course of one day! Not just Where does the money come from? and An alternative to what? but also, What if you’re somewhere there’s nothing you’re an alternative to? What happens when social practices are framed in terms of artistic production? Could it be an advantage to a curator to be untrained? Have we moved beyond the provocation of Duchamp’s urinal?

Coincidentally, I was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art last weekend and happened upon Duchamp’s “Fountain” sitting placidly in a bright room at the end of a hallway. A man was showing friends the gallery. One of the women, after looking around, turned to the man. “But is it art?” she said.

I confess I felt a little thrill. My guess is that object is not quite ready to be returned to the restroom yet.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

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A Space to Inspire Them: Art at Work

November 11 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I want to make sure they’re in a space that inspires,” Laura Alber says, gesturing around the new Williams-Sonoma, Inc. IT building in San Francisco. She’s talking about her colleagues who work in the building, the walls of which have recently been hung with works of art by contemporary artists: Walead Beshty, Shannon Ebner, Tamar Halpern, and others. Laura, who graduated from Penn in 1990, is President and CEO of Williams-Sonoma, Inc., and she is hosting a tour of the new collection for local alumni, ICA staff, and friends.

Laura Alber, in black, chatting with guests

Before we look at the art, though, she tells a story. Having purchased a building known as the Ice House for the company’s new headquarters—a very pricey piece of real estate—Howard Lester, Laura’s predecessor at Williams-Sonoma, Inc., proceeded to fill the place with mid-century art. Appalled at the expense, Laura questioned his decision. Wouldn’t the money spent on art be better used in other ways?

In response, Mr. Lester had his own question: “How would you like to work in a building in a basement with no windows?”

And so Laura’s mind began to change.

I like this story for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it’s rare for someone to pinpoint an a-ha moment in their lives—a specific occurrence that opened their mind to something new. For another, the story relates to a longstanding conversation I’ve had with myself about where art belongs.

For the most part, art is either in the home, where it is a rich part of the daily life for a very few people, or it’s in a museum in the good company of others of its kind (and available for visits by many strangers) but without any daily domestic intimacy to animate it. Then there are in-between spaces like public buildings and parks: in a City Hall, for example, or on a University Green.

None of these places, however, is where most of us spend most of our waking hours. Rather, we spend them at work: in offices, factories, stores, classrooms, and cubicles—many, many cubicles—with safety notices or family snapshots the only things hanging. One of the things I love about working at ICA is that there is art on the walls even upstairs in the offices. Behind me, in my own cubicle, hangs a poster from a 1968 Christo exhibition, and in front of me over the partition I can see a beautiful print, Sarah McEneaney’s self-portrait of the artist (and ICA board member) in her bathtub. I have never worked anywhere else where this was true, and chances are you don’t work someplace like this either.

But why not? Isn’t the office arguably the place that needs art the most? Isn’t art good for morale, productivity, imagination? Shouldn’t hanging it be a good investment for a business—an investment in the mental well-being of its employees, a kind of health plan for the soul?

At our tour Jimmy Castelucci, a Williams-Sonoma, Inc. associate, tours us through the collection. “The art in this building was inspired by innovation and technology,” he says. He points out the Roland Flexners in the lobby, explaining how they were made by the artist putting India ink and soap in a straw and blowing bubbles that burst against the paper. He shows us the Walead Beshty photographic print made in a process precipitated by what happened to a roll of film going through an x-ray machine shortly after 9/11. He takes us upstairs, past the cubicles and the white boards, past Huddle Room 2A and Conference Room 2B.

What do the people who sit in these cubicles and scribble on these white boards think of this art? Does it grow more meaningful to them over time? More invisible? Might the guy at this desk here look right past all of it for months, and then one day—a difficult afternoon, perhaps, tangled in intractable computer code—look up and really see the Cornelia Parker piece of wires spun from bullets? Might it make some difference?

Some of the Penn alumns at the Williams-Sonoma tour

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Field Trip: Alternative Spaces

October 7 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s a bright, cool Saturday afternoon when I park on Callowhill Street beside a row of warehouses. I walk around the corner to 319 N. 11th Street, home to Vox Populi, Philadelphia’s longest running artist collective, and a bunch of newer collectives, studios, and artist spaces: Grizzly Grizzly, Marginal Utility, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Napoleon, and others. Oddly memorable names: they seem like they should belong to bright and strange new worlds—and they do.

Vox's green door

Guided by big arrows painted on the walls, we climb the battered wooden steps, duck through a red metal door, and find ourselves in a vestibule with bright green walls. We are on an ICA field trip, a special program for members of the museum’s donor clubs, Leadership Circle and Art Council, people whose financial and personal support of ICA underpins our ability to do our work.

Grizzly Grizzly door

The first stop is Grizzly Grizzly, founded in 2009, making it one of the older gallery spaces here. A cooperative, its seven members pay about $25 a month to rent the narrow room on the second floor where Skye Gilkerson and Sarah Steinwachs are sharing wall space this month. Perhaps because I’m a writer, I’m particularly taken by Gilkerson’s work in which printed texts are excised of all letters, leaving only a tracery of punctuation.

“We all contribute, we all look at the work, and we all curate,” says Mike Ellyson, one of the founding members of the cooperative. “It’s not about making money. I just want people to have the chance to show their work.”

Variations of this avowal—I almost want to call it a manifesto—ring out repeatedly over the course of the afternoon. David Dempewolf and Yuka Yokoyama, co-founders of Marginal Utility, talk to us about conversations they had with the artist they are showing now, Hadassa Goldvicht. When they told her the opening would be on a Friday (openings are always on Fridays), she said she wouldn’t be able to come because it was the Sabbath. After insisting there was no choice—the opening had to be on a Friday—they suddenly realized there was a choice after all. They opened the show on a Thursday, and on Friday, when the building was full of people attending other openings, a grate made it possible to see in: “Instead of changing the artist, we would change the gallery. We try to fulfill the artists’ needs rather than producing something for us.”

Show closed for Sabbath

Napoleon (the name is a joke based on the tiny size of the space) is the newest gallery in the building. “When we were putting this event together,” ICA Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon tells us, “Napoleon didn’t even exist yet.” For Commonplacing, Napoleon’s first group show, each member of the group chose work by an artist not associated with the space, “sharing a little of who we are through the things that inspire us,” according to Jordan Rockford’s curatorial statement.

In the Napoleon gallery space

Except for Vox, which is comparatively expansive, it’s difficult for all of us to squeeze into any of these spaces, which makes the experience of looking at this art feel intimate, slightly strenuous, and correspondingly valuable. Not many people have seen this work: we’re pioneers. When we like something, our response is peculiarly pure, a form of discovery. I love this, but at the same time, something else is happening to me: I can’t stop thinking about money. It’s like what happens when someone says, “Don’t be aware of your tongue.”

Let me back up. The people on this alternative spaces field trip are here because a.) they care about art, and b.) they have given a certain amount of money to ICA. Without this money, we could not do our work: could not present exhibitions, could not organize programs, could not publish catalogues—could not connect exciting and important new art to the world.

Artists need money too, of course, both in order to eat (and for all the other things in the category of supporting life) and to buy supplies (and for all the other things in the category of supporting art). The galleries we’re seeing today may operate on a shoestring, but even a shoestring costs something. I keep following the links of this chain around and around: these small galleries are giving value to our donor clubs, which supports us, which helps us support artists—maybe even some of the artists whose work we’ve seen today. The exposure to a broader audience is good for these spaces; the exposure to these spaces is good for this audience; connecting the two together is good for us. It’s like a water cycle, filling pools and making rain, or maybe it’s more like a Möbius strip, with no inside and no outside.

As I wrestle with metaphors, trying to find the right one, I think back to something Grizzly Grizzly’s Mike Ellyson said, trying to describe the trajectory of his gallery:

“It’s turning into…I don’t know what it’s turning into. But it’s turning into something wonderful.”

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To find out more about ICA’s Leadership Circle and Art Council, email Christianna Miller at chmille@ica.upenn.edu

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@ica.upenn.edu.

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Marilyn

June 23 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“Look at those buttons!” Marilyn says, reaching for my sweater. Or, “Look at the way that seam is stitched.” She likes fabric, my boss. She talks about sample sales, quilts in progress, color and texture and sheen. She won’t be my boss much longer, though. After over eleven years as ICA’s Director of Development and Alumni Relations, Marilyn is leaving in a few days.

Marilyn Pollick grew up in Philadelphia in a neighborhood of German and Jewish immigrants who shared one another’s holidays. She put herself through Wharton, worked for the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Franklin Institute, and served on the boards of many Philadelphia institutions. For a while she lived in Alaska, where if you’re not careful, she says, the ice fog can cut your throat. As a consultant, she has traveled the country. At ICA, where she has worked since 2000, she has been an enthusiastic and tireless advocate for the museum, for the arts, and for Penn. Also, she’s a skillful fisherman.

At ICA, Marilyn has overseen a fundraising campaign that has nearly reached its $17 million goal. The museum now has endowments to support our director’s position, exhibition publications, and the guest curator program that gave us, most recently, the wonderful exhibition Set Pieces, curated by artist Virgil Marti from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition to the big things, she is always quick to attend to the little things: writing name tags, considering menus, arranging flowers. In a crowded car stuck in traffic on the way home from an event, she will be the one making jokes to keep spirits up. She always finds the time to talk to an alumni stopping by the museum, or a young person considering applying to Penn. She listens to their stories. As my colleague Christy says, “That is the true gift of a development officer.”

Marilyn isn’t one for talking about her past, but if you listen to the hints and allusions, the occasional bright detail (the grandmother’s cameo, the stapler thrown through the air, the warrior yoga), you start to understand how many lives she has lived, and how deeply Philadelphia—and Penn—are part of her.

There is something birdlike about Marilyn’s features, her fine feathery hair, and the way she tilts her head. When I heard she was leaving ICA, it seemed to make sense: it was time for her to shake out those folded wings.

On one of the most beautiful days of June, the ICA staff had a picnic on the Terrace to say goodbye. We ate fried chicken and potato salad, and Marilyn cut large slices of cake. Some reminiscing was done: What was your favorite Benefit? What was your least favorite Benefit? Do you remember when the tent broke and we were standing in three inches of water?

Most of what happened over the past decade I know only through stories and guesses. Most of Marilyn’s career at ICA took place before my time there. The working folders of Staff Writers past are nested inside each other like Russian dolls on ICA’s shared computer drive: Susan inside Joseph inside Brett inside Elysa inside me. All of us have benefited from Marilyn’s warmth, her kindness, her acute editing pen, her extraordinary knowledge of the Philadelphia community, and her passion for the arts and philanthropy.

Marilyn, the offices of ICA will be duller without your bright plumage.

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Benefit 2011: Sumo Balls

May 20 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s early evening, and the servers are holding trays of champagne glasses—not flutes, but the saucer-shaped kind said to have originally been molded from the breast of Helen of Troy. The guests filter through the glass doors in their finery: a blonde in a shimmering green dress, a smiling man in bow tie, a young woman in a gown printed with foxes. The ICA staff has spent the day arranging the dark purple calla lilies in their vases, dealing with a shortage of electricity, buying extra tequila, and laying Mylar—sent all the way from France—across the tables. I myself have spent an extraordinary amount of time proofreading names on place cards; you wouldn’t want to get that wrong. It’s nice to have all that behind us now, and to see the guests enjoying themselves.

Photo: Shira Yudkoff

The large ravioli filled with cheese and quail egg seem to be a success. In the gallery (champagne and ravioli left outside), a woman points to large hanging Sheila Hicks sculpture and says to her companion, “We need one of those!” I presume she can afford it. This is ICA’s Benefit, the night our most generous donors pay a tidy sum to honor a special figure in the art world in support of the museum’s programs. This year’s honoree is Sheila Hicks, whose current ICA exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is the first major retrospective of this extraordinary artist who works largely in fiber: cotton, wool, linen, silk, bamboo fiber, synthetics, rubber bands. Sheila, who lives in Paris, was around through a chilly March week for installation, and it’s nice to have her back in this celebratory mode.

Sheila in the gallery. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

After cocktails, everyone moves out onto the Terrace for dinner, where luckily the heavy rain had held off. The Mylar tablecloths look lovely with the dark flowers on them. They reflect the deep purple of the programs and the bright yellow of the wine. After the caponata and the beef cheeks (SD26 Restaurant and Wine Bar prepared the dinner), there is a pause. ICA Board Chair Andie Laporte welcomes the guests. ICA’s director, Claudia Gould, tells a story about a man who picked Sheila up hitchhiking in Mexico in 1950, where she was studying indigenous textiles, and got taken back to her house for a good meal. Poet Bill Berkson, an old friend, takes us on a leisurely journey through the Paris streets to Sheila’s studio: “If you are in Paris, and you’re coming from the Marais, you take the 96 bus,” he says. Then Sheila herself floats up to the podium:

“I was thinking we could take off our clothes and I would wrap them for you, and then we could decide who was worthy of taking them home. Who will give me something that I can wrap?”

Murmurs and laughter rise through the night. People start passing bits of clothing up the tables: socks and stockings, a hair ribbon, a glove. A man stands up and takes off his tie.

Taking off the tie. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

At the podium, Sheila asks for scissors. She lifts spools of thread from a bag: silk and cotton, synthetic and linen, green and gold and blue. She begins to wrap the flotsam clothing the tide washes up, making sumo balls—commemorative pieces that cocoon significant objects in thread. She wraps a man’s shirt. She wraps a pair of pink and white lace panties. Claudia takes the microphone: “I want everyone to know that one of our Board members just gave up her bra!” she reports jubilantly.

A man approaches solemnly with his hand in his hand; he has a prosthetic hand, which he has removed, and he passes it silently over to Sheila who takes it quizzically, tenderly, wraps a ribbon around it, and passes it silently back. Two men, a couple, offer up their ties, and she unspools purple silk, then blue linen, binding them together into one bright sphere, enfolding intimate objects in the blessing of thread.

Sheila wrapping. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

Sheila wraps and wraps, beaming as she works. She likes working. As the night wears on, it seems to me that she looks younger, as though she is unspooling not just thread but also time; as though she is moving back toward that young woman she used to be, hitchhiking through Mexico. The woman who loved textiles, color, pattern, texture, but couldn’t yet guess what she would make of them.

* * *

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years will be on view at ICA through August 7.

To sign up for Miranda’s mailing list, email rpastan@upenn.edu.

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Mission

October 21 2010

Photo: J. Katz


post by Rachel Pastan

ICA has a new mission statement. I admit that doesn’t sound amazingly exciting, but give me a minute, because it is. Our old mission statement was about what we did in a literal kind of way: make exhibitions, organize programs, document what we do in publications. This new one is more exhilarating:

The Institute of Contemporary Art believes in the power of art and artists to inform and inspire. The ICA is free for all to engage and connect with the art of our time.

Before I started working at ICA, it hadn’t occurred to me that a museum needed a mission statement. Our new one is part of ICA’s new strategic plan. It hadn’t occurred to me that a museum needed a strategic plan either.

But of course, a museum is a business. We have a bottom line and salaries to pay and decisions to make about what kind of art to exhibit and how to publicize our program. We’re not quite the same kind of business as, say, a gallery—we’re a non-profit, and we’re part of a university, so we’re not about making money—but obviously we need to transport art and insure it and display it and get our beautiful catalogues designed and buy tamales to feed you when you come to our Free For All. ICA is free for all—we don’t charge admission. What we care about is that you come to see the art we’re excited about, and that you get excited about it too. Also, we want the artists we work with to have a good experience here: to feel their work is valued, and if possible to give a boost to their careers.

But it’s hard to do those things if everybody’s operating on their own. It’s useful to have a guiding vision that helps you remember what’s important, and to agree upon a set of priorities and specific activities to help you achieve what you want to achieve. ICA spent two years developing its new strategic plan, a process that involved staff, board members, other museums, members of the public, as well as an arts consulting firm, LaPlaca Cohen, which at first I thought was a woman with an exotic first name.

One of the themes I find myself coming back to again and again in this blog is the intersection between art and money, or art and business. With some notable exceptions (Warhol with his Factory, Murakami with his in-gallery boutiques), artists don’t usually approach their work with anything resembling a businesslike mindset. That, in fact, is partly why they have galleries, so someone else can take care of that money stuff for them.

That’s why it’s so important for museums to remember that we are businesses. We owe it to the artists we present to be responsible and strategic, to meet deadlines, to behave professionally, to interrogate our methods and evaluate our progress. Some of the specifics in our strategic plan don’t make for exciting reading: “Tactic 1.1.2.2: Gauge and operate at different speeds with time for long-term projects to develop, while accommodating short-range opportunities when they arise.” I do like this one, though: “Integrate new media channels, such as blogs, into the media pitch mix”!

Sometimes working at an art museum is really fun, but other times it’s more or less like working anywhere else. On those days—long, paperwork-heavy afternoons studded with meetings and deadlines—it’s good to remember what the point of it all is:

The Institute of Contemporary Art believes in the power of art and artists to inform and inspire. The ICA is free for all to engage and connect with the art of our time.

Come by and visit and see if you get inspired. If you do, tell us about it in the comments. It’s always great when someone tells you you’re accomplishing your mission.

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Benefit

May 13 2010

Photo: Ryan Lavine

post by Rachel Pastan

Lisa Yuskavage’s photograph has been in the rotation on the video screen in ICA’s lobby for the past few months, so I recognize her right away when she comes in. Her parents are here too, back from their retirement in Florida to see their daughter honored at ICA’s annual benefit. Their daughter, the famous painter! How many parents think the day will come when they might say that?

So how’s little Lisa?

Lisa? Oh—she’s a famous painter in New York.

The benefit dinner is held on ICA’s terrace, green tablecloths under a white tent. Over the gazpacho there are remarks. “It all started one day in 1995 in the East Village,” says Yvonne Force, president and co-founder of Art Production Fund and self-proclaimed president of the Lisa Yuskavage fan club. She lists the terrific titles of some of Yuskavage’s works: “Socialclimber,” “Asspicker,” “Headshrinker,” and “Transference Portrait of My Shrink in Her Starched Nightgown with My Face and her Hair.” She recounts her pleasure at being asked to model for Yuskavage, and the wonderful strangeness of hefting her nine-and-a-half-month pregnant belly onto a table to become part of a still life with flowers and fruit, herself the most overripe of all.

Yuskavage, who had her first museum show in 2000 here at ICA, is known for her luscious, voluptuous paintings of women with their breasts dangling, their legs spread. Chuck Close, who speaks after Force, jokes that the church Yuskavage grew up attending in Philadelphia should have been called, not The Church of the Holy Innocents but rather Our Lady of Perpetual Perversion.

Close is bigger than I expected, dominating the terrace even in his wheelchair. He kneads the microphone in his big hands, drops it, picks it up, and says: “Is it just me, or does this thing look like a vibrator?” He recounts how Yuskavage famously said that she didn’t understand the difference between nudes in Penthouse (her father’s collection warped her for life, Close quips) and the ones in museums. “She’s spent her whole career trying to level that playing field,” he says.

Then he tells how, when he was on a jury considering the then-unknown young artist for a grant, he and his fellow judge couldn’t tell from the slides whether she was a hack or a great painter. Not wanting to take the risk, they didn’t give her the grant. A few weeks later Close saw one of her canvases in person and called her to apologize and make amends.

There’s a lot to learn about the art world from this story: about how thin the thread is separating those who make it from those who don’t. About riskiness and contingency, and the role of chance, human error, and fear. Part of what makes Yuskavage a great painter is clearly her fearlessness and her determination that “the repulsive and the beautiful are both worthy of being seen.” (And by the way, who knows better than Close himself about chance, about determination?) Her ambition for her work drives her hard, has made her seize her opportunities, prise open whatever cracks in the slippery surface of the art world she could find. Still, one can see how things might have played out differently.

In her speech, Yvonne Force said that when she first walked into Yuskavage’s studio, it was a like a movie—one great canvas stacked against another along the wall! Maybe it’s true that Force knew right away that she had discovered a great painter; but even so, what if she hadn’t gone to the studio that day? What if Close hadn’t happened to see that canvas on the wall? How many artists with equally great canvases are still waiting in their East Village tenements for someone to walk in who sees what they’re doing and understands what they are capable of?

After dinner, Lisa herself takes the microphone. She talks about growing up five miles from ICA in Juniata Park, about how she’d always wanted to have her first show in this museum. She says her parents used to give her a blank check to take to the art supply store to buy paints. She thanks them for trusting her—thanks ICA for showing her. Then she turns to Close and says, “Chuck, the porn magazines were my mother’s.” Everyone laughs.

Lisa Yuskavage’s story is a story with a happy ending. Talent, drive, and luck have come together for her. Tonight she has helped raise almost $300,000 for ICA. The night is clear and not too cool, and Lisa’s mother has baked two hundred cookies to go with the after-dinner tequila. The money raised tonight will go toward mounting shows of other artists who have not yet received the recognition they deserve—if “deserve” is even a word you can use in this context. It’s a feel-good night, and the clothes are beautiful, and the guests will walk home with orchids from the tables, and gorgeous monotypes by Ann Chu, and Karen Kilimnik towels made by the Art Production Fund (Chu and Kilimnik, both here tonight, have both shown at ICA, and Chu will have another show here in the fall).

But I’m looking at the table of young artists near the planters, lingering for a few more shots of tequila. For all their laughter and high spirits, they must all be wondering how to do it: how to traverse the vast territory that separates them from that podium, ten feet away.

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