Archive for the ‘Staff’ Category

The Best Ambassadors: ICA Says Goodbye to Its Graduating Student Board

June 10 2013

Post by Grace Ambrose

On a sunny morning in early May, the ICA’s Student Advisory Board is munching on croissants and chocolate babka and sipping cups of La Colombe coffee. They need the coffee. It is finals season at Penn and they are swamped with papers and projects and exams. They’ve torn themselves away from the library so we can congregate around the conference room table one final time. Today we will say goodbye to our graduating seniors and welcome a new batch of freshmen to our ranks.

2012-13 Student Board with artist Trevor Paglen.
Photo courtesy of Patterson Beckwith.

We’re lucky at ICA to have a group of talented and curious Penn undergraduates who volunteer their time to help us figure out the best ways to engage with the student body. Once a month they file into our conference room-cum-library, where they tackle all sorts of issues from grant writing to program imagining. They attend Board of Trustees meetings, brainstorm marketing strategies, and help plan and execute public programs. They are our women (and men) on the street, the best ambassadors we have to the University that sprawls outside our front door. They are artists and art history majors, but also future real estate moguls and urban studies students and creative writers. They are indispensable.

Today the students are reflecting on their favorite moments of their board tenures. Justin and Isaac recall interviewing associate curator Anthony Elms about his exhibition White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart as the highlight of their first year on the board. The pair prepared questions and led a conversation at an event for some of our high-level donors. Anthony is always fun to talk to, and this time was no exception, but what they remember most is that all three wore gingham shirts that day. Matching bespectacled men sitting behind a table – pretty prescient for a discussion of a show about fashion.

Student Board member Ellie Levitt leads the Ribbon Bee at “Day With(out) Art,” 2011.

Ellie remembers watching ICA’s contribution to the worldwide Day With(out) Art movement grow exponentially. She brought the event to ICA’s Excursus space as a junior, playing host to an afternoon of fellowship, discussion, and button making over bagels and cream cheese. This year the event expanded tenfold and included a visit from the artist collective Fierce Pussy and a screening of the ACT UP documentary United in Anger at International House. Ellie is graduating, and she tells the freshman that they too can take an idea from imagination to reality. It’s one of the special things about ICA, a place where, when students want to meet with the director or bounce ideas off the Senior Curator, all they have to do is ask.

Student Board members Javi Battle and Kaegan Sparks
in conversation with artists Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch.

David remembers coming to see a program with Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch as a freshman. The artists, who were included in the exhibition Queer Voice, were in conversation with Student Board members and it was then that he decided he wanted to join the board, so he too could have access to artists he liked. He got a chance this year, when the board invited Trevor Paglen to our annual Free For All event in March.

At Free For All, Paglen discussed his project The Last Pictures, for which he chose 100 photographs—of the construction of the atomic bomb, smiling prisoners in an internment camp, the Hoover Dam, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, the surface of the moon—and had them etched them onto a silicon disk which was attached to a communications satellite and sent into space, where it will orbit Earth forever. Made up of mathematical tables and animations of spacecraft in orbit, Paglen’s presentation was equal parts Astronomy 101 lecture, artist talk, and philosophy seminar. In many ways, it was representative of where we sit at Penn. The ICA is a home for artists and art lovers, but we’re tucked into a larger community of knowledge seekers and question askers, all searching for different ways to look at and learn about the world around us. We’re a home for all of them too.

 

Laundry Boat, ICA’s contribution to the 2011 Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, organized by the Student Board.

The students seated around our table – the students responsible for bringing this and many other remarkable artists here to ICA – all have different degrees of interest in the art world. Some are throwing themselves in headfirst: one graduating senior will work at an auction house, two others will pursue graduate work, in art history and fine arts. Others will take different paths: interning with a District Attorney or spending the summer at an investment bank. They hail from London, Toronto, Kansas, New York, and Philadelphia, among other places. Many have cultivated a lifelong love of contemporary art, passed down from their parents and grandparents, while others discovered this world for themselves, when they arrived at Penn, through the ICA.

2009-2010 ICA Student Advisory Board. The author is second from the right.

I was one of those that fell in love with contemporary art at ICA. During my freshman year, I enrolled in a seminar taught by ICA Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. Six years later, I am still here, now as the Spiegel Fellow, following stints as intern and Student Board member and freelancer. I remember afternoons spent with artist Matthew Buckingham, who came to our Laundry Boat celebration, and nights on the ICA terrace, celebrating one opening or another with my cohorts. As an undergraduate, I sat around the conference table through countless meetings – discussions of which artist to invite or which tasty snack to have at an event. The latter was inevitably more heated.

Today, welcoming the new members, I am glad to be on the other side of the table. I look forward to helping them harness their ideas and make them reality. We can’t wait to see what they will do.

 

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Grace Ambrose organizes people. In addition to supporting programming at the ICA as Spiegel Fellow, she was a co-coordinator of Ladyfest Philadelphia and the Junior Fellow at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently editing the project In Open Letters A Secret Appears: A People’s Guide to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

 

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

March 18 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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It’s Really Great to Have You Here: Lunch with Amy Sadao

December 3 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

Susan, an intern in the curatorial department, tells us how she ordered the books for The Uses of Literacy, one of the installations in ICA’s current exhibition, Jeremy Deller: Joy in People. She says she was surprised to learn “how much work goes into the tiniest details…the different arrangement of the books on the shelf. The colors and how they looked against the wall—whether the orange should be in the middle and the green should be on the side.”

It’s a sunny lunchtime on the mezzanine, and Amy Sadao, ICA’s new director as of September, is having lunch with ICA’s other newcomers: this fall’s crop of interns and work study students. Some are Penn students, others have graduated recently from other universities, and a few have even curated their own shows. Over turkey or avocado-and-cheese sandwiches, Amy asks them to go around the table and share what they found most surprising when they started working here.

Ian, a Penn senior, says, “I think it’s really interesting that not everyone at ICA has a PhD in art history.”

Joanna, who wants to go into conservation, says she’s amazed by how much the museum changes from show to show: “It’s not just a passive space for art,” she says.

Lindsay, who works in the development department, says, “How much work goes into making it free for everyone!”

“I’ve been an intern,” Amy says. “That’s how I learned a lot about art institutions.” She sketches her background, how she went to Cooper Union for her BFA—“but I knew halfway through that I wasn’t going to be an artist.” Later she attended a PhD program at Berkeley in Ethnic Studies. For ten years, before beginning this job, Amy was Executive Director of Visual AIDS in New York City, an ambitious institution with a small staff that relies on interns and volunteers perhaps even more than ICA does.

Photo: David Kelley

When it’s her turn to say what surprised her most about being here, Amy tells the interns, “I thought ICA’s staff of eighteen would be a lot! But now I see that eighteen: it’s really not that many people for the great ambitions and scale of what ICA does. So it’s really great to have you here!”

Eva, who is getting her masters at Tyler, says she’s surprised by how much research goes into marketing strategies for each individual show.

Egina, who has already done some independent curating, says, “What really surprises me is how democratic the space is upstairs [in the offices]. That wouldn’t necessarily happen at another museum.”

Tammy says, “How much paperwork there is.”

After the circle is completed, the conversation turns to other things. Amy talks about her own various internships, offers advice, and muses about art: “I like the idea that, if you are going to work with contemporary art, you might be interested in the unknown. Because that’s what artists are interested in.”

Getting a new director is itself an exercise in the unknown. It’s like moving into a house in early spring before anything has come up in the garden: every day reveals something new. So far the garden that is Amy Sadao is fast-growing, full of bright vines and flourishing berry bushes, bees buzzing everywhere. There has been lots of activity here this fall: new ideas and people, an energetic openness to connections in all corners of the art world, the University, the city, the region. Amy spent her first week at ICA meeting with every staff member, and her interest in all aspects of museum functioning is unmistakable. It was her idea to have this lunch, to make sure the interns knew that she appreciated their work, and to hear what they might have to tell her. “Your perceptions are valuable to the institution, and to me,” she says.

As lunch comes to an end, Anthony, ICA’s Associate Curator, comes up the steps, laden with grocery bags. He’s getting ready to make dinner for participants in tomorrow’s ICA Salon.

“Anthony!” Amy says. “What surprised you most when you first came to ICA?”

“That everybody cooks,” Anthony says.

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To stay abreast of what surprises Miranda, email miranda@icaphila.org.

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Objects and Ambiguities: A Studio Visit with Becket Flannery

June 19 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

A large green eye in a plastic face looks up at us from the floor as we go by. The door to the studio is shaped like a wave.

eye on the floor

Photo: Becket Flannery

Becket's door

Photo: Becket Flannery

We are here for an informal studio visit, to see the art Becket has been making on the days he is not arranging travel and organizing correspondence for ICA’s curatorial department, where he works part-time as an administrative assistant. In the office, he wears three-piece suits and ties, often with pocket square, so it’s strange at first to see him here in jeans and flannel shirt. Still, it’s clear that his gracious good humor, his excavating intelligence, and his self-possessed calm serve him in the studio as they do in the office. Becket will be leaving Philadelphia at the end of the summer to attend an MFA program in painting at the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC. His sturdy, polished shoes will be difficult to fill.

Passing through the wave-shaped doorway, Jennifer crosses the room to a table where Becket has laid out some of his artwork for us to see.

One piece began life as a VHS tape case. One is a big book of empty pages with drops of faux-marbled paint on the cover. A third is made of pieces of sky blue foam about the shape and size of sticks of butter, nestled in a white cardboard shell on top of a slab made from more blue foam.

blue piece

Photo: Becket Flannery

“You desperately want to touch it,” Jennifer says, leaning close.

“They’re carved,” Becket says. “They have this geometry, but they’re very, very handmade. I use this blue color a lot, but I try not to use it as a color. I use it as a substance.”

There are a lot of things to see in this small studio space—un-air conditioned in the summer, unheated in the winter—in a big, ramshackle building full of artist studios. On our way in, we passed rows of doors all shut with padlocks, the corridor walls flaking and strangely marked, and a derelict brush factory in a big open space. It’s a Monday afternoon, quiet. Becket asked the band upstairs if they could please not rehearse today.

In addition to the pieces on the table, there are works hung on the wall, still others standing or lying on the floor. “This is the brightest spot,” he says, pointing, “so whatever I’m working on at the moment is here.” He shows us the shadowy place further along where easy access is blocked by the end of the large table. That’s where he hangs his finished pieces when he wants them around for reference. Jennifer admires a shiny, deep red object, shaped not unlike a lightning bolt, on the floor.

red piece

Photo: Becket Flannery

“I feel like I could dive into it,” she says.

“I chose this color because the surface was hard to find,” Becket explains. “The great thing about some of those enamel surfaces is that they’re hard to see.” The talk turns to materials: enamel, foam, paper, found objects. “Material is incredibly seductive,” Becket says. “I don’t want to be an artist who’s naively interested in materials.”

“Why not?” I ask. I’m wondering whether the seductiveness of materials for an artist is like that of words for a writer. Ideas and stories tend to slip away when we swoon over language instead of organizing it in the service of something larger. Becket tells me that materials come with cultural meanings—symbologies—that it’s important to get away from those. “A lot of making things,” he says, “is the ambiguity between the material of an object and its appearance.”

Becket and Jennifer in the studio.

Ambiguity is a good word for Becket’s work, which resists easy categorization. Sometimes, looking around the room, I’m not sure what’s a painting and what’s a sculpture. I have to ask. If Becket minds answering, he gives no sign of it. He is a forthcoming, articulate, warm host, calmly introducing his guests around the room, helping us get to know the family of objects inhabiting the space. He says, “I think what’s great is that objects stick around. They resist being digested.” He explains that there is a point, when you are working on an object, when the piece seems to recognize its own existence: “You feel as though you’re being looked at when you’re looking at it. That’s how I answer the question about how I know when a piece is done.”

We go back for more time with the sky blue foam object. Jennifer is interested in the white cardboard bit. “It’s like a little shell or a little clam,” she says. Becket explains that the thing began life as a shoe insert, the kind you take out at the store before you put your foot in.

“It’s a stand-in for the organic,” Jennifer says.

“It puts it in an ambiguous place—not really technological, not really nature,” Becket says. Then he adds, “If you’re not paying attention to what’s interesting in the object, it doesn’t succeed.” A little later he says, “Things are not beautiful because there are rules about beauty; they’re beautiful because they’re attractive of desire.”

tape case

'vi deo t ape.' Photo: Becket Flannery

I think that’s exactly what these objects do: draw the eye to them, call to the hand. As Jennifer said earlier, you want to touch them—test their weight, feel their sheen, run your skin along their curves and angles.

When it’s time for us to go, Becket picks up the deep red floor sculpture and leans it prosaically against the wall, tidying up, making room for the other artists who share the space. “It kind of ruins the magic,” he says.

But it doesn’t, not really. The magic just takes a step back, moving into the shadows where it flickers patiently, preparing for the mythic journey west.

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Claudia

October 14 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“I should make it clear that Claudia did not want this reception,” the Provost says. “But once she understood we were determined, she immediately started suggesting color palettes.”

We are at a goodbye reception in honor of ICA director Claudia Gould, who is stepping down after twelve years to become the director of The Jewish Museum in New York City. The Provost (ICA is part of the University of Pennsylvania) presents Claudia with a commemorative statuette of Ben Franklin—painted pink—and describes her many accomplishments. Then Anne Papageorge, who worked with Claudia on a committee to oversee public art on campus, says, “Claudia was good at cutting through the issues and saying what needed to be said.”

None of us who have worked for her would have doubted it for a second.

Claudia on the mezzanine

Photo: Tommy Leonardi

There have been a lot of lasts around ICA since Claudia (and The New York Times) announced her departure: last opening, last public program, last board meeting, last staff meeting. I think it was at the staff meeting that Claudia said something I have been turning over in my mind ever since. It was about the first opening she attended at ICA, just after she took the job, for a show of the artist Sol LeWitt. There were only ten or fifteen people there. “This is your opening?” Claudia asked a board member, who explained that only museum members were invited to the openings. Immediately Claudia started plotting change.

There has been a lot of change over these twelve years—so much, in fact, that for people like me who have only worked at ICA for a fraction of that time, it’s hard to imagine what things used to be like. Claudia not only invited the public in for openings, she tripled the exhibition schedule, tripled the staff, tripled the budget. She divided the upstairs gallery, creating a Project Space for smaller and more experimental exhibitions. She invited students to serve on a new student board, initiated an architecture and design series, helped launch two classes for undergraduates—one in collaboration with Art History, the other with English—and made museum admission free to the public. Just this summer, she forged a connection with the iconic Philadelphia coffee company La Colombe, which plans to open a café in ICA’s building later this year. She is also responsible for the Rudy Gernreich wallpaper in the bathrooms, a souvenir of the exhibition of the radical Austrian fashion designer which she brought to ICA in 2001.

I sat down with Claudia the other day in her sunny office with its green velvet divan and shelves full of books not just about art (I always notice Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking when I come in). Claudia had just gotten back from a visit with Stefan Sagmeister (she’s organizing a show of Sagmeister’s work at ICA in April, coming back to Philadelphia to do it), and she told me that the visit reminded her “how great it is to work with artists. I got to know so many artists at ICA. Their expansive minds! It’s amazing that these things come out of people.” She mentioned artist Lisa Yuskavage, whose 2000 show was one of the first Claudia organized here. “Where does she get it?” Claudia marveled. “How deep does she have to go?”

For me—for many of us at ICA—this is Claudia’s greatest quality: her genuine and passionate valuing of artists. ICA is a place where art and artists come first, where giving an exhibiting artist a fabulous experience is as important as (and inseparable from) organizing a fabulous show. I have never worked anywhere else where art genuinely came first.

Photo: Shira Yudkoff

Claudia talked about how important it was for staff—not just curators—to be out seeing art: “going to museums and galleries, and not just with vacation days.” She told me how happy she always is to write letters and make phone calls for interns and members of the student board to help them get jobs in the art world. I have often seen students in her office on the green divan. It’s obvious her conversations with them give her pleasure—no less than (though perhaps different in kind from) introducing a terrific new show, drinking tequila to celebrate an honoree at an ICA benefit, or exulting over a good review.

I asked Claudia what she would miss about Philadelphia. Before answering, she told me what she wouldn’t miss: “I want to say that I don’t like the taxi service in Philadelphia. I want that on the record.”

Luckily, the other list was longer: the Ritz movie theaters, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all the wacky, off-beat museums. The staff and the board here at ICA. The Rodney Graham wallpaper in the hallway and the Rudy Gernreich wallpaper in the bathrooms. Modern Eye, John at Avril, La Colombe coffee, Class 165 (“the most visionary class”). The Philomatheon Society. Virgil Marti’s pink chandelier in the lobby.

It won’t be the same at ICA without Claudia, in yet another gorgeous black dress, sailing out of the elevator, gold rings sparkling, black hair clipped back from her face. ICA and Claudia Gould have bled into each other so long and so deeply, it’s hard to say where one stops and the other begins. When I ask her what her hopes for ICA’s future are, she says, “I hope somebody comes on and takes everything further. More money, more staff, more press. More, more, more!”

Then she tells me what she said to someone who asked how she felt about leaving behind the world of contemporary art.

“I’m not leaving contemporary art,” she’d answered. “I’m adding to it. Leaving contemporary art would be like leaving my life.”

Photo: J. Katz

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

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