Posts Tagged ‘Dance with Camera’

Ambassador of Art

January 21 2011

Javi & other members of ICA's Student Board. Photo: J. Katz


post by Rachel Pastan

Last Wednesday afternoon, as on many afternoons over the last two years, Penn student Javi Battle was in ICA’s conference room for a meeting of the Student Advisory Board. It would be his last. Javi is graduating this winter and moving to New York to start an executive training program at Lord and Taylor. He’s crossing that potent, invisible threshold from school into the world.

ICA has a complex relationship with Penn. We are part of it, we sit in the midst of it, its students work in our offices and tour our galleries and surge past us down the sidewalk on their way to Urban Outfitters across the street. Each year we collaborate with the School of Arts and Sciences to co-teach a class for undergraduates, and some of our programs, like last fall’s Free For All, are specifically geared toward Penn students. At the same time, the museum raises most of its own money and has independent relationships with the art world. Still, education is at the heart of much of what we do, and having students advise us, offering us their perspective and their energy, helps. In return we trust that being part of ICA will be a memorable and influential part of our student board members’ education. Listening to Javi’s enthusiasm makes me optimistic that it is.

Javi is passionate about art and about ICA. Growing up in Arizona, he played a lot of soccer, but his mother took him to art museums too. Coming to Penn to study at The Wharton School of Business, he quickly found his way to the museum, coming to shows and attending programs. One day ICA Director Claudia Gould came up to him after he’d asked an interesting question at a lecture. She’d seen him around the museum a lot and wondered if he wanted to join the student board. He did.

One important role the board plays is liaison to fellow students, letting them know what’s going on at the museum and motivating them to come by. Last year, at their request, student board members were trained as docents and gave tours. “The first one was tough,” Javi says. “But after two or three I got the hang of it.”

I asked him what he likes about ICA. There were a lot of things on the list:

“I love that I can go there and be by myself and look at art. I love seeing things I’ve never seen before. ICA has really opened my eyes to video art, especially with the Dance with Camera show. I also had the honor of co-hosting along with Kaegan Sparks (Penn ’10/ICA Student Advisory Board) a screening and discussion with the video artist Ryan Trecartin that was truly amazing. I love to see artists sticking to their guns, doing what they want to do.”

What Javi himself wants to do is and isn’t clear. He’s excited about his upcoming work at Lord and Taylor, where he interned in the buying department last summer, but he has ambitions beyond retail management. We talked about ICA’s 2009 Tim Rollins and K.O.S. exhibition—“so poignant, so introspective,” Javi said, adding that he liked it partly for the way it brought together art, education, and activism. Javi, who volunteers teaching saxophone at the Penn Alexander School feels that art and social engagement are as much in his future as business is. “I think there’s a way to bring them together,” he said.

I love the art students involved at ICA, and I love the art history majors. But engaging students in other fields—medicine, engineering, business—has a particular delectation. They are true ambassadors, sailing away on ships to other places, bringing the good news of art.

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Her Air

December 13 2010

Photo: Aaron Igler


post by Rachel Pastan

HER AIR

Today is the first day at ICA without Jenelle. After six years as a curator here, Jenelle Porter has moved on to a senior curator position at another ICA—ICA Boston. It’s funny, because we made T-shirts just last October saying: “My ICA Is Better Than Your ICA!” But along with the jokey competition there’s a wonderful sense that the whole world is made up of ICAs, like islands in a contemporary art archipelago, and that a person could step from one of them to another for a whole long, various career.

When I got to ICA in fall 2009, Jenelle’s Dance with Camera show was just going up. The first thing you saw as you entered the semi-dark space was a series of large Kelly Nipper photographs of a dancer with her arms curved above her head. Half concealed behind a latticed screen, the dancer’s form is broken into pixel-like bits, seeming to invite the viewer to see how the dancer and the dance are changed—hidden and revealed—by the processes of setting up and taking the photograph. Step further into the darkness: the hallways and open spaces and enclosed rooms filled with light and shadows. Enormous images loom, flickering on the walls, while intimate ones unspool just for you on monitors, some serious and intense, others funny, some enacted by professional dancers and others by playful amateurs. The hand of the curator, as always, is both invisible and everywhere. Most people seeing the show don’t think about her, don’t know her name, but the experience they have and the ideas that spring into their heads as they walk through the rooms are shaped by her vision, her excitement, her education, and her hard work. The air in the room is her air.

Jenelle installing. Photo: Conny Purtill

Though visitors down in the galleries might not be quite aware of Jenelle’s presence, upstairs in the offices you always knew when she was around. Opinionated and outspoken, with a confident speaking voice and a loud, frequent laugh, it was no secret when Jenelle liked something, when she didn’t like something, and when she thought it was time for a meeting to be over. At Jenelle’s last staff meeting, ICA director Claudia Gould reviewed her career at ICA, asking about the show she was most proud of (Dance with Camera); the hardest show (Trisha Donnelly—“It was as great to do as it was challenging, we installed one wall of work for two weeks!”); the most surprisingly successful show (Locally Localized Gravity). In addition, Jenelle coordinated ICA publications, worked with her husband Conny Purtill to redesign ICA’s lobby and signage, served on the museum’s strategic planning committee, and on the search committee for the Department of the History of Art’s new contemporary art professor, Kaja Silverman. Claudia said, “You contributed exactly what I hoped. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

What I’ll remember most about Jenelle is her attitude that things are doable, that the fact that something is hard is no reason not to go ahead: ambitious exhibitions, long curatorial essays, and smaller things too. That first fall I told her I wanted to go to some of the evening screenings that were part of Dance with Camera, but that I couldn’t because I had to get home to my kids. “Just bring them!” she said. I didn’t, which I still regret. The next spring, after lending me Anne Truitt’s fabulous memoir of an artist’s life, Daybook, she told me Truitt was having a (posthumous) show in New York and that I should go see it. Again I said I couldn’t: New York was too far, I had family responsibilities. “It’s not that far!” she said. “Just go!” So I went. I’ll never forget that exhibition, the vibrant stillness of those tall simple sculptures, the feeling of them so unlike what I had guessed from the photographs. Thanks, Jenelle, for that.

One day last year, Jenelle mentioned to me that she’d been to a presentation of curators reading their manifestos. She didn’t have a manifesto, but she was going home to write one. Last week I asked her if she would share it with me, and with her permission I’m passing on a few highlights here:

• Encourage false constructs and arranged marriages
• Prod artists to get outside their own head/aesthetic/mannerisms
• Say yes until you absolutely have to say no
• Mentor your audience
• Make good design
• Be timely, but lead with your gut
• Fail better
• Don’t take art too seriously, but believe that art can change the world

Good luck on your new island, Jenelle! We’ll think of you on your new part of the archipelago, encouraging, prodding, mentoring, laughing, leading with your gut, and helping art change the world.

* * *

Just because Jenelle Porter is moving to Boston doesn’t mean you’ve lost your chance to see her exhibitions in Philadelphia. She will be back in March to install Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, an extraordinary exhibition of one of the world’s foremost fiber artists (organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art), and she is continuing to work on her Charline Von Heyl exhibition, which will open at ICA next fall.

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So Many Amazing Ideas!

September 1 2010

Photo: Greenhouse Media

post by Rachel Pastan

What if you gave everyone who came into a museum a bell, and they wore it, and it rang as they wandered through the galleries?

What if you offered short, private concerts in the museum’s coat closet, for just two people at a time?

What if a museum offered plant vacations, where you could send your philodendron for a week of pampering: special water, poetry read aloud, intimate videos of pollination screened at midnight?

What if a museum hosted a lecture series, and each month you could get in free if you met a different random criterion: if you were a Virgo, or won a thumb wrestling match with a body builder, or could guess what a teenager had in her pocket?

These were some of the ideas tossed out by Mark Allen (an artist, educator, and founder of Machine Project in L.A.) and Adam Lerner (Director and Chief Animator of the Department of Structures and Fictions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver) at a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative roundtable for the curatorial community last month—a truly fabulous presentation by two people who seem to breathe out good ideas as though they were air. Anyone who is reading this blog probably knows that this is a difficult time for museums, as it is for book publishers, orchestras, theaters, dance companies. Attendance is largely down, as is funding from both government and private sources. People’s leisure time is increasingly spent online, whether on Facebook or playing videogames or watching their favorite YouTube channel. Blah blah blah—that old story.

Yet, in direct opposition to these trends, real live people all over Los Angeles and Denver are getting themselves into cars and onto buses and using their feet to travel to the museums and galleries where Mark and Adam are, and once they get there they pay money to see—and participate in—art, art-making, and all kinds of fabulously wacky art programming. Adam’s tag-team lecture series Mixed Taste (two half-hour lectures on unrelated subjects, such as earth art and goat cheese, or Gertrude Stein and prairie dogs, with a combined Q&A at the end in which connections beautifully and serendipitously emerge) draw over 300 people each and sell out a month in advance. And while Mark claims that he would rather make something five people look at for a thousand minutes rather than something a thousand people look at for five minutes, he too is attracting a serious following for his programming.

Just sit in a room with these guys and you partly get it—the intensely creative, imaginative, topsy-turvy energy they send out is addictive. But this is not just a charisma thing. There are lessons here that can be learned by any institution interested in learning them.

For example: People are increasingly interested in experience-based programs rather than object-based programs.

Also: The way you frame what you’re doing matters. What you call things matters. Using humor draws people in. Being a little zany can help. As Adam says, “We create excitement through the trappings, but the trappings are not just trappings—they are part of the content.”

I know some of you are thinking this is just gimmicky, or that it detracts from the powerful experience art can offer, or that these jokers are merely pandering to the lowest common denominator. It seems to me, however, that what they are doing is exactly the opposite of that—that they are in fact trying to engage people who care more about substance and creativity than about the traditional formal accoutrements of the old-fashioned museum experience. That they are in fact trying to bring what you might call art to the entire experience of visiting a museum, not just to the authorized works that hang on the walls or stand on pedestals. That they are reaching for new forms of collaboration in which, in Mark’s words, “the voice of the institution and the voice of the artist blur together.”

Video excerpts from their talk can be viewed here.

Here at ICA we pride ourselves not only on our terrific exhibitions, but on inventive and thoughtful programming that helps connect the visitor to the art by way of experiences that are fun, memorable, enlightening, communal. I’ll never forget last year’s ecumenical celebration of spring with dogs in hats and deviled eggs and poetry, organized by artist Sarah McEneaney in the spirit of Maira Kalman; or Curator Jenelle Porter’s spectacular lecture on her show, Dance with Camera (complete with tons of video clips); or Tim Rollins joking with members of K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) in a way that enhanced rather than detracted from the life-and-death seriousness of their artistic and educational project.

This fall I’m looking forward to Art School Double Feature with curator Kate Kraczon and artist Matthew Ritchie (Wednesday, September 22); ICA’s first-ever Free For All, featuring the 2010 version of Ingrid Schaffner’s annual inquiry “What Is Contemporary?”, screen-printing by Print Liberation, and music by Reading Rainbow (Wednesday, September 29); and Jenelle Porter’s Travelogue series that will bring curators from all over the globe to talk about what’s going on in their backyards (the first lecture, on Wednesday, October 20, takes us to Vilnius, Lithuania—or rather, brings Vilnius to us).

In the meantime, a request. Please use the comment field below to tell us which ICA programs you’ve liked (or haven’t liked) in the past and why, and/or what kinds of programs you’d like to see us offer in the future. We’d be very grateful for your opinion.

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Posted in Miscellaneous, Public Programs | 1 Comment »