Posts Tagged ‘Andy Warhol’

Not Just Papers: A Visit to the ICA Archive

July 9 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

High up in the Van Pelt library, a group of ICA curators sits expectantly around a table where several archive boxes are lined up. Pale and silent as ghosts, carefully labeled, reinforced with metal for durability, these boxes contain bits of ICA’s official records, but most of us have never seen them. They have existed at a distance, like uncles whom one is always intending to visit. Today, though, we are making good on our good intentions.

Next year ICA will turn fifty, a good moment for taking stock. We plan not only to revisit our history, but to make significant pieces of it available on our website. Today we have asked Penn Manuscripts Cataloger Donna Brandolisio and Curator of Manuscripts Nancy Shawcross to be our guides on an excursion into the past—a dry run for a more thorough exploration to take place this summer.

“I just happened to pull Machineworks first,” Donna says, pulling a box toward her.

Machineworks was an ICA exhibition from 1981 featuring mechanistic art by Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, and Dennis Oppenheim and curated by Janet Kardon. In each of the several Machineworks boxes, documents from the exhibition are neatly filed in pale buff folders with a title and a number penciled in tiny letters on the tab. Donna hands piles of folders down the table. We hold them warily, divers at the edge of the boat. Then, opening them, in we plunge.

Letters typed on onion skin paper flutter softly. Contracts and schematic drawings pull away from marketing ephemera, while photographs cling stubbornly to their plastic sleeves. For a while there is the collective, concentrated silence of a room full of people reading. Then:

“Here’s a handwritten dinner invitation,” Alex says. “It looks like a punk flier.”

“Here’s a postcard of a steam engine,” Ingrid says, holding it up.

Kate finds a checklist and a bill from the Holiday Inn. There are handwritten letters from artists to the curator, Oppenheim’s on stationary with his name in bold red curvy lettering. There are photographs of the show being installed, a missive in the form of a poem about pigeons, an advertising flier. There is a note apologizing for bad behavior at the opening.

Invitation to Opening

As a non-collecting museum, at ICA we often say that our archive is our collection. But the fact is that we are less conversant with our history than we might be. Certainly we know the highlights—Andy Warhol’s first museum show in 1965, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition that helped spark the culture wars, and so on—as well as most of the shows from the twentieth century. From the beginning, the mission of ICA has been about looking forward, but at some point it’s time to consider what all those forward glances add up to. Which were prescient, and which misguided? What did the future look like when envisioned in the past?

In the conference room, paging through the material, it becomes clear that the original idea for Machineworks was an exploration of artists and cars, but that at some point this idea was abandoned in favor of a show about machines.

Alice Aycock – From the series entitled “The Miraculating Machine: Mock Suns and Halos ‘Round the Moon” (1981) in process. “Machineworks” installation photo.

“But why?” Ingrid wonders. She turns pages, hoping in vain to find something that explains how the ground fell out from under one idea and came together under the new one.

This, of course, is the nature of an archive: interesting snippets, pages of dullness, provocative gaps. Given this, how do we proceed? Which papers should we refile, which set aside for digitizing? What will give a lively and useful picture of what the Machineworks show—or any show—was like? What might students want to look at? Or scholars? Or artists? What will represent us the way we see ourselves?

Coming into the library today, it was the exhibitions we were thinking about—how best to represent, or memorialize, them. But the archive itself is a living presence: being in this room makes that palpable. As Donna says of the painstakingly and thoughtfully organized files and boxes that make up the ICA records, “It’s a life. It’s an organism. It’s not just papers to me.”

There is something appealingly quixotic about this project: attempting to create a legible representation of an archive, that is itself a representation of an exhibition, that was an attempt to convey something essential about an artistic moment on which the light has dimmed.

Maybe the best way to think of it is as a distillation, as when a maple tree gives sap, boiled down with much labor, becoming at last a drop of perfect sweetness on the tongue.

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

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In Between Times (or, Not yet, not yet…)

August 12 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

The shows closed on Sunday, all three of them: Sheila Hicks, One is the loneliest number, and That’s How We Escaped. It was super busy at ICA the last few weeks as people flooded in to see them before they closed. We probably set a record for summer attendance. The current unofficial count is upward of 10,000 people, including 1,665 who came for programs and events.

Sign on door says ICA is closed

One of the main contributors to that solid program attendance number was last Wednesday’s Sister Ray Slam. Close to 400 people crowded into ICA to see Andy Warhol films (care of Jay Schwartz and Secret Cinema), eat Little Baby’s Ice Cream (Earl Grey Sriracha, Balsamic Banana, Birch Beer Vanilla Bean, and other flavors), and hear Dry Feet, Megajam Booze Band, and the Sweet Sister Ray band each offer up their own rendition of the Velvet Underground’s classic “Sister Ray.” Having planned to have the Slam outdoors on the terrace, we were upset when the forecast called for rain. But as it turned out, the energy inside that packed building was fabulous, a contemporary echo of a 60s Warhol Factory bash. The only downside was how utterly totally drenched people got taking the trash out to the dumpster at the one in the morning.

Even with the shows closed and the museum doors locked, there’s plenty to do. There are new shows to open, loose ends to tie up from old ones, and groundwork to lay for projects that won’t be in the galleries for years. I spent a lot of the day copy editing the proof of the catalogue for last winter’s Anne Tyng exhibition, which also documents the show’s run at the Graham Foundation in Chicago in the spring. ICA often publishes its catalogues after the shows open, because for us these books document the exhibitions as they are presented here in our space. Installation photography is crucial, so even if the photographers get in as soon as the show opens, there’s a delay. This catalogue is going to be gorgeous—well worth the wait—with vivid images of two very different installations of the same work in Philadelphia and Chicago. I love what the book designers, Project Projects, have done with Tyng’s life chronology, laying it out with photographs and relevant quotations from the architect like this aphoristic one: “It takes more than effort to make something simple.”

Also today, Becket was arranging travel for Ingrid to research a show scheduled for 2013, and Kate was ordering two versions of part of the wall vinyl because there might only be 19 artists in an upcoming show instead of 20, and Jacqueline was revising the bios of the 20 (or perhaps 19) artists in that show, and Alex was trying to nail down presenters for the fall programs, and Nikyia was adding installation crew members into the payroll system, and Annie was sealing stacks of invitations to the fall opening dinner into envelopes.

At noon, though, everyone took a break for the intern goodbye lunch.

Intern lunch

Photo: William Hidalgo

Luckily the weather was good, so this time we could be on the terrace. It’s impossible to overstate the amount of work the interns do for ICA, and it’s always sad to see them go, but they are en route to new adventures. One is going off to study in China, another to a programming job at an art center in her home town, and a third to finish her degree in painting. Pretty soon these people and others like them will be running museums all over the world.

It’s amazing how fast the shows come down. On Monday, the crew took all the crates out of storage and put them near the pieces that would be packed into them. On Tuesday, I finally got to see the inside of the crate from the Stedelijk Museum that Sheila Hicks compared to a boat during installation last March. Annie and I marveled over its J-shaped compartments, while Enrico Martignoni, here from Paris for the de-install, explained that the Stedelijk crates are always the same size—so that storing them doesn’t become a jigsaw puzzle—and therefore the inside parts must be custom designed for the art. By Wednesday, nearly everything had been packed up. The geometric green sculptural pieces by Lucas Ajemian and Julien Bismuth looked lonely in the upstairs gallery like the last autumn leaves still clinging to the tree.

Next week construction will begin for the new shows, which open September 7. ICA is presenting a major retrospective of the work of painter Charline von Heyl; a group show of mostly young, mostly Israeli artists, guest curated by Tel Aviv-based Doron Rabina; and a re-creation of the studio of the minimalist sculptor Bill Walton, who was important to so many artists in Philadelphia. I’m excited about all of these shows, but it’s difficult how quickly they surge toward us. Not yet, not yet, I want to say. Give us a little silence first—or perhaps a tolling of bells—to mark the passage.

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

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Posted in Installation, Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

Virginia Solomon: The Same Things with Different Pictures

July 15 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“It’s been a happy reason for my dissertation to gather dust and cobwebs,” Virginia says of her year at ICA. We’re sitting around the conference table at her final staff meeting. Virginia Solomon was the ICA’s 2010-11 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow (WLCF), which means that she spent a year here learning the museum trade. She organized a show, helped teach a class, and oversaw much of last year’s programming. The WLCF program, going into its 12th year, has brought many bright young curators to work at ICA who have then gone on to jobs at museums like MOCA and MCA Chicago, or running their own galleries, or working to promote and expand public art. Once Virginia finishes that dissertation at USC on the Canadian artist group General Idea, she’ll be on the job market, looking to become a professor of art history. As though that’s not ambitious enough, she hopes to be a professor who curates too, something she says is more possible now than it used to be: “Rare but doable!”

Virginia, on right, with artists at her opening. Photo: J. Katz

For Virginia, the teaching and the curating seem very much intertwined. “Contemporary art history is in flux,” she says, “and the teaching of it is in flux too.” Working at ICA has influenced the whole package, helping her hone the practice “of putting the object first and the idea coming from the object…Objects don’t always come first in the study of art history.” Being here offered her the opportunity to get her hands into every aspect of curating, not just working with artists but negotiating loan forms, publications, shipping, budgets, transportation.

Virginia’s ICA show, Shary Boyle & Emily Duke: The Illuminations Project, showcased two artists, one of whom works primarily with images and the other primarily with text, working together in a new kind of collaboration, responding to one another’s work but resisting straightforward ideas of illustration or narrative explication. The bright, often violent work that resulted was both political and visceral in its effect. About how making the show affected her, Virginia says, “It made me realize that I’m always talking about the same things, but with different pictures.”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Working with the class “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” Virginia helped the students—Penn freshmen—curate their own show, which was an exploration of ICA’s iconic 1965 Andy Warhol exhibition. She lectured the students on contemporary art, put issues of queer identity and politics on the table, helped them learn to do archival research, and shepherded them through the gazillion details that go into presenting an exhibition.

It was Virginia who asked last winter if ICA should respond to the removal, after protests from the Catholic League and some members of Congress, of the controversial David Wojnarowicz video “A Fire in My Belly” from an exhibition of gay portraiture at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. A week later, the video was on view in the ICA lobby.

What else did Virginia do during her sojourn in Philly?

Drank coffee. Went on studio visits. Rode her bike. “I love the Wissahickon. I went mountain biking there as much as I could with my dog, Georgia,” a large and lovely mixed breed who will miss the friends she made in Clark Park.

What will people at ICA remember about Virginia?

“That I walked around the office in Spandex all the time,” she speculates, smiling.

Photo: Jenna Weiss

That’s true, of course. And who could forget the boxes of fresh vegetables delivered to the museum offices? We will also remember her good humor and positive attitude, her gregarious laughter and her awesome mix tapes. Jenna Weiss, who shared an office with her, said the best thing: “She made you aware of small things like recycling, and big things like being aware of being attentive and sensitive to difference, if you sometimes got lazy.”

Virginia, good luck out there in the world of freeways and movie stars! We’ll think of you when we think about art and politics, and when we drink coffee, and when we laugh.

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

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Posted in Curating and curators | 6 Comments »

Warhol Blouse

May 5 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

We’re in my station wagon driving up Lancaster Avenue past the trolley tracks and the boarded up houses, but when we cross the city line into Montgomery County the streets are suddenly lined with blooming cherry trees. Virginia, ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, points out a sign that looks like it spells “SIN,” though really it’s just pointing out South and North on Route 1. Robert, ICA’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, asks Hillary, a Penn freshman, how she traced the Andy Warhol blouse, the piece of clothing patterned with Warhol’s Green Stamps print which we are on a mission to fetch. She says she used the White Pages.

Robert and Hillary looking at The Blouse

The blouse was worn by ICA Board Chair Eleanor Biddle “Lally” Lloyd to Warhol’s first solo museum show, which was held at ICA in October 1965. ICA is displaying it as part of “That’s How We Escaped”: Reflections on Warhol, an exhibition in ICA’s Project Space on view this spring and summer. Hillary is part of the freshman seminar “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating”—the original undergraduate course in curating in the country—which is organizing the exhibition. She tells us how she called various relatives of Lally Lloyd’s; how Lally’s son led her to his two sisters, the one who had photos of the ’65 Warhol show, and this one, who has the blouse. Hillary is an impressive young woman: I can’t imagine making calls like that at eighteen.

In fact, the whole freshman seminar is impressive! Guided by their instructors, these kids have researched Warhol and his ICA exhibition; tracked down soup cans, articles, programs, and photographs; obtained permissions; written press releases and wall text; and done everything else that goes into curating a show. It’s fitting: Sam Green, ICA’s one-time director, who organized that original Warhol exhibition, was only in his twenties at the time. (Warhol himself, on the other hand, had already had a career as a commercial artist and was pushing forty.)

Hillary and Minney

The gray stucco house sits behind rhododendron bushes. It looks modest from the outside, but there’s a lot of space when you go in. Minney Robb, Lally Lloyd’s daughter, introduces us to her husband Ted. If they didn’t expect a whole troop of us, they’re too polite to let on. In her purple sneakers, Minney show us into the dining room, where a large white box lies on the table. Robert pulls on his art handling gloves before he lifts the lid and unwraps the blouse, which, like the house, is bigger than I expected.

“This was made by my mother’s dress maker,” Minney says, showing us where Warhol signed his name.

“Is there a name for that style of blouse?” Virginia asks.

“Sixties,” Minney says, and she laughs, pointing out the bowl neck, the three quarter sleeves.

We ooh and ahh. “Where do you keep something like that?”

“Under the bed,” Ted says. “In the guest room.” He smiles, and the talk turns to insurance.

The Blouse, with photos of an earlier installation it was in

Hillary asks about a painting on the wall. “Is that one of your children?”

“No, it was me as a child,” Minney says. The painting, by Franklin Watkins, shows a young girl with red ribbons in her hair, scissoring a piece of cloth. I imagine it must have been painted around the same time Lally was donning her Green Stamps blouse and waiting for the babysitter who would watch Minney and her siblings while Lally attended the Warhol opening, a crazy manic celebrity event with crowds on the silver-painted floor chanting for Andy, who sought refuge with Edie Sedgwick on a metal staircase and ultimately escaped through a hole cut in the roof.

Think of all the bits of history packed in boxes, waiting in attics and closets and under guest beds for someone like Hillary to come calling. I’m glad we’re able to offer this blouse a little air and the company of other Warhol mementos for a while. Think of the conversations that go on in stagey whispers under the vitrine: soup can and blouse comparing signatures; invitation and newsletter swapping memories; photographs and articles arguing over the details. Climb the steps to the Project Space, put your ear to the Plexiglas, and listen.

Warhol show opening! Photo: J. Katz

“That’s How We Escaped”: Reflections on Warhol is on view at ICA through August 7.

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Posted in Andy Warhol, Installation | 3 Comments »

Checklist for the Prince of Pop

March 3 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Here is a list of some of the items likely be on view in ICA’s upcoming show, That’s How We Escaped: Reflections on Warhol:

* An invitation to the preview party for Andy Warhol’s 1965 exhibition at ICA—his first solo museum show—printed on the back of a genuine Campbell’s soup label.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

* Photographs of the crazy, legendary opening night of that exhibition, which was attended by up to 4,000 people, and during which Andy, along with 60s It Girl Edie Sedgwick, took refuge from the shouting crowd by climbing a metal staircase that went nowhere, and on which they were stuck for four hours, waving and signing autographs, until curator Sam Green finally convinced University of Pennsylvania officials to cut a hole in the ceiling, through which the artist and his consort escaped into the rare books room of the art history library.

* A three-dimensional model of the exhibition design, painstakingly recreated from installation photographs by Penn undergrad Shaye Roseman and Architectural Archivist Bill Whitaker, and constructed by architecture student Ben Loughin, showing where Andy’s art hung—or at least where it hung until it was taken down from the walls after the preview so it wouldn’t get hurt in the crush of opening night fans, meaning that there was no art on the walls during the opening, and also no room to dance on the glittering silver-painted floor despite the fabulous pop music playing in the gallery.

* Empty walls lit here and there by track lights to represent the blank places where the art wasn’t back in 1965 (though that exhibition was held in temporary ICA quarters in Penn’s Furness Building, not in our current permanent home at 36th and Sansom).

* A photo of Sam Green and exhibition fairy godmother Eleanor Biddle “Lallie” Lloyd, chair of ICA’s board at the time and the woman for whom one of ICA’s galleries is named—not to mention wife of CIA deputy director H. Gates Lloyd—in which she is wearing a blouse made of fabric patterned with Andy’s Green Stamps print, and he, Sam, is wearing a matching Green Stamps tie, and they are standing in front of wall papered entirely in Green Stamps.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

This 1965 exhibition is part of ICA’s origin story. The museum was founded in 1963 by the dean of Penn’s architecture school, Holmes Perkins (who you can see chatting up Edie Sedgwick in another of the photos likely to be in the exhibition), but the Warhol show was what put ICA on the map. What happened on that wild, transformative night is the original example of what we pride ourselves on doing: giving significant exposure to emerging artists and thereby helping launch their careers. The fabulous media event that was Warhol’s ICA show helped catapult him to superstardom, and it helped define ICA’s role in the world of contemporary art.

But despite its iconic status, many of the details of the show slipped quickly into the fog of history. The records disappeared long ago, and in recent years no one seemed to know what works were on view, or where the hole was cut in the roof, or who was there, or what exactly the public response was.

Then last year, Kenny Goldsmith—conceptual poet, Warhol fan, writing teacher, provocateur-at-large—was asked to teach “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating,” a year-long course co-offered by ICA and Penn’s Department of the History of Art, along with ICA’s Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow, Virginia Solomon. This class always curates a show in ICA’s Project Space at the end of the year, and Kenny thought it would be fun to revisit that original Warhol exhibition, to put the students to work and see what they could dig up.

Dig they did. They spent time in the library, learned to use the archives, located and interviewed people who had been at the opening, talked to former reporters for the DP (Daily Pennsylvanian) who covered the show and the protests it spawned. Amazingly, they tracked down the missing archival materials from the Warhol show after nearly half a century’s absence. The documents were apparently resting after all that hoopla in Penn’s Architectural Archives—which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense until you remember that Holmes Perkins, ICA’s founder, was the architecture dean. The kids had hit pay dirt.

Courtesy of Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

Last week the class invited some guests to a presentation of their ideas for the show. Donna Brandolisio of Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library was there, and Architectural Archivist Bill Whitaker, and ICA Marketing and Communications Director Jill Katz, and Ben Laughin the model builder, and artist Alex De Corte who has been engaged to do a special commission for the show representing the iconic staircase, and me. The students’ presentations were not only clear, they were exhilarating, and the images they showed were fantastic. Kenny kept bouncing out of his chair and enthusing, “Isn’t this cool?!”

It was cool.

I can’t promise that the opening of Reflections on Warhol on April 21 will still be talked about 46 years later—that crowds will chant and protesters wave signs and helicopters rescue stranded celebrities—but it might happen. So tell your friends, don your hippest duds, wear a wig, bring your own can of soup, and also a tape recorder, and while you’re at it a hacksaw. This is ICA, after all. You never know when you might need one.

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Posted in Andy Warhol | 3 Comments »

Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week’s ICA lecture, “The Artist as Curator,” was introduced by ICA director Claudia Gould standing behind an unfamiliar podium. “For those of you who are regulars here,” she said, “this is a very new podium, made by Paul Swenbeck [ICA’s head preparator] and his team. It smells of paint.” The new podium is indeed very nice: sleek and white, with a convenient shelf for presenters’ laptops. As someone who cannot make anything, I love working at a place where no one would think of going online and ordering a podium. Obviously someone who works here would just make one.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a series of essays for this blog about Virgil Marti’s show Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), for which Virgil explored the depths of PMA storage and arranged an assortment of the pieces he found there in intriguing mash-ups and suggestive vignettes. In these posts I’ve been poking away at the question of how Virgil approached that task, and, more generally, what it means to curate an exhibition. How do curators organize the art they present? Is it their job to make a story out of it? An argument? To show the art off to its best advantage? To make you see it in a new way?

Virgil and Ingrid squaring off in Virgil's show, Set Pieces. Photo: J. Katz

How serendipitous that all the time I was writing those little pieces, ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner—a thoughtful and insightful person and an actual curator—was getting ready to address herself to this very topic! It was, in fact, the underlying subject of tonight’s lecture.

Standing at the new podium, Ingrid told an audience of about 100 that the idea of an artist making an exhibition out of a museum’s collection goes back to 1969, when Andy Warhol lifted all kinds of things from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art’s storage and arranged them—or sometimes declined to arrange them—in the galleries. The resulting show, Raid the Icebox, featured rows and ranks of Windsor chairs, racks of shoes, clusters of hanging umbrellas, and lots of baskets, blankets, paintings, ceramics.

Even before artists were raiding museums’ iceboxes, of course, they were curating. In 1938 Andre Breton invited Marcel Duchamp to organize a surrealism show in Paris, which Duchamp did. There were no lights in this exhibition; visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the paintings as they made their way through piles of leaves and under the 1,200 empty coal sacks dangling from the ceiling.

I’d love to just list all the intriguing shows Ingrid mentioned. A 1989 Brancusi exhibition at MoMA organized by Scott Burton helped viewers see that Brancusi’s pedestals should themselves be seen as sculpture. Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society displayed artifacts from that state’s history—like iron shackles and silver spoons—side by side. John Waters Curates Andy’s “Porn”, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2005, was viewable in a wooden cubicle complete with glory holes. Of this last, Ingrid quoted then-Warhol museum curator John Smith who said, perhaps a little wistfully, “I don’t think I could have gotten away with that.”

Which brings us to the crux of her lecture: what is the difference between the way an artist curates and the way a curator curates?

“It’s my job as a curator to minimize the distance between the viewer and the object,” Ingrid opined, whereas, as an artist, “Virgil inserts himself.” He paints the wall purple; he builds white fluffy poufs to display stuff on; he offers us a marble bust resting on its side. The professional curator is not supposed to indulge in such high jinx.

But doesn’t the professional curator have a point of view, too? Doesn’t she have style? Of course she does. But she’s supposed to be less flamboyant in the way she conveys it to us, adhering to a kind of institutionalized modesty. If you stop to think about it, though, what’s the least bit modest about choosing art, spending a decent amount of money to organize it in a room, inviting the public, and saying: Look! This is worth looking at!

At the end of her talk, Ingrid related that thinking about how Virgil inserted himself into the making of Set Pieces threw into relief for her how made all exhibitions are, implying that the exhibition-maker—the curator—is really a species of artisan. I liked that: the exhibition-making artisan (Ingrid) talking about an exhibition made by an artist (Virgil) known for his décor-as-fine-art (chandeliers, wallpaper, poufs), while standing at the podium made by an artisan (Paul) who is, in fact, also an artist.

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

I’m starting to think of the curator as a kind of marionettist, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Just because we don’t see her hand doesn’t mean her hand isn’t there: assured, controlling, and potent.

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Posted in Curating and curators, Public Programs, Set Pieces | 2 Comments »

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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Weird but Useful Stuff

July 29 2010

Photo: Darcey Sawicz

post by Rachel Pastan

It’s the change of the seasons here at ICA. Just as you can feel the approach of autumn out on the street in September, here in the museum I feel the end of Queer Voice approaching and the murmurs of the new exhibition season getting ready to blow in. This Sunday evening the projectors and audio loops will be turned off for the last time. The guards will go home until the new shows open in mid-September, the tour guides will have a few weeks to bone up on some new artists, and the crew will show up to disassemble the silver Andy Warhol listening cube and the Jack Smith chaise longue and roll up the carpeting.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the preparations for Set Pieces (click here to read that piece), guest-curated for ICA by artist Virgil Marti from works from the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). Since then, Virgil and Robert and Darcey have gone over to the PMA to measure some of the objects Virgil is using, especially some marble busts he’s going to put on a pouf. Actually he’s going to make poufs especially for the marbles, which include a bust of Napoleon and another big bust of a woman lying on her back. There are some concerns about the stability of the marble woman, who is actually designed to be displayed upright, but Virgil is confident that any mounts they need to use to secure her in place can be hidden in the fluff of the pouf. He can fluff up the fluff, he says.

Down at the PMA, he asks one of the art handlers to put the woman on a big piece of craft paper so he can trace her for reference when he builds the pouf. She’s so heavy, it takes two people in purple Nitrile gloves to lift her.

Not everything Virgil needs to see is down in storage. Some of it is up in photography already, waiting its turn to have its picture taken—along with a fabulous life-sized silver gander that I can’t wait to see in the show. Other stuff is up in conservation, including two ivory candlesticks that are being cleaned.

This, it turns out, is how you clean ivory candlesticks: with saliva. They have little pots of sterilized saliva up there in conservation, and they dip Q-tips into it and slowly clear away the dirt. Saliva! I go home and tell my husband, and he smiles and says, “Is it elephant saliva?”

Then he tells me about this nuclear fusion experiment he was once involved in where they suspended a tiny, frozen-hydrogen sphere inside a very small gold cylinder, then sent powerful laser beams in. (Doesn’t that sound like it could be a contemporary art installation??) The trick is, how do you suspend such a miniscule sphere inside such a puny gold cylinder without using metal bars that would mess up the experiment?

The answer: spiderwebs. Spider silk (as anyone who’s read Charlotte’s Web knows) is thin and strong and abundant. When my husband asked the guys at the lab if they used any special kind of spider, they told him, “We use whatever kind of spider we find around the lab. When they die, we send out an email asking people to bring in spiders from their offices, or from home or wherever.”

There’s something glorious in this—the way there are still problems nature can solve for us; the way the needs of both art and science can sometimes be answered by common stuff we usually think of as disgusting.

Also, the way people you never see—people behind the scenes—are resourcefully solving problems you never thought of in ways you never would have dreamed.

Do you have a story about people using weird stuff to solve unusual problems? If so, please describe it in the comments section below. I’ll try to drum up some weird ICA prizes for the best weird solutions. Deadline: August 15.

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Summer Studio, Week Two: The Laboratory

July 8 2010

Kite Technique Drawing Class. Photo: Julia Blaukopf


post by Rachel Pastan

This week when I wandered into the cool, second-floor gallery where Anthony Campuzano is conducting Summer Studio—a free-form art school and working artist’s studio, both free and open to the public here at ICA throughout July—I found Campuzano (T.C. to his friends) chatting with a family from Connecticut. The man was a big guy in a Saab baseball cap who turned out to be an architect and photographer. The woman wore jeans and nice glasses (I didn’t find out what she did), and their girls, busy coloring on poster board at a table, were 6 and 3. It was hot outside—101 degrees—and an air conditioned art museum was a good place to be.

T.C. was talking: “We had a great class here Saturday,” he said enthusiastically, referring to the Sculpture Scavenger Hunt. “Everything here is like an experiment.”

Exactly.

Sometimes I think of ICA as a big laboratory where the questions pursued are not (as across so much of Penn’s campus) about the physical and physiological life of the body and the natural world, but rather about the nature of contemporary life, the boundaries of art, the intersections of the two, and—in this case—what one youngish, ambitious, talented artist might do given a big room and a bunch of materials and some willing friends and thirty days.

The people from Connecticut seemed happy. They’d spent the day before at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the kids kept asking when they could do some drawing. The six year old, wearing a green dress, struggled with a pencil sharpener and an orange colored pencil. She was working on a drawing of a dinosaur and a flower. Her plastic triceratops (which I mistakenly called a stegosaurus) sat nearby, partially engulfed in a woolen hat. The younger girl had made some very nice red scribbles on her poster board.

T.C. told them about that night’s Kite Technique drawing class (offered Wednesdays from six to eight PM all month). The class is based on a lesson Campuzano learned from his teacher Elena Sisto, which she learned from the late Philip Guston. “It’s a modernist technique where first you plot the edges of the figure,” he said. “I still use it, even though I don’t draw the figure anymore.” He told them about the model he had lined up for the class, a guy named Ezra who’s doing an internship at the Fabric Workshop. Then he started rummaging around in a corner. “I got this cool thing from my parents’ house for the class,” he said, pulling out an old-fashioned bird cage strung through with ivy. The woman asked him how he was getting any work done with all the classes and field trips and film screenings.

“I haven’t actually gotten much done yet,” he admitted. But T.C. strikes me as someone—energetic, resourceful, overflowing with ideas—who will always find a way to get work done.

When I left, the girl in green was cutting off a sliver of poster board with big scissors, and T.C. was telling the family from Connecticut about Andy Warhol, how he had his first solo museum show here at ICA. “It’s a thrill for me,” he said, “because I had my first museum show here, too.”

ICA has been instrumental in the making of many careers. Could Campuzano’s be the next?

That’s exactly the kind of question that gets answered here in the ICA laboratory.

* * *

To see the whole Summer Studio calendar, click here.

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