Posts Tagged ‘opening’

Ornery

April 1 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Photo: J. Katz

Everyone else on the steps is in black, but Sheila Hicks is wearing burgundy and purple. It’s only fitting. She is the royalty here tonight, the honored maker of the hundred plus pieces in the exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years. Organized by Joan Simon and Susan Faxon for the Addison Gallery of American Art, and reconfigured with some new work here at ICA by Jenelle Porter, this brilliant and colorful career survey is opening tonight. ICA’s lobby is full, the bar is open, and the chatter drifts and floats forty feet up to the ceiling, where the hanging sculpture, Baby Time Again, made of dozens of hospital infant shirts, flutters and ripples in the late afternoon light.

(Muñeca, Zapallar, Blue Letter, Dimanche, Tenancingo.)

Joan Simon takes the microphone. “The important part of the show for me,” she says, “is that we haven’t made a distinction between art, design, textiles, weavings, commissions. The question is: Why hasn’t there been a major show of Sheila in the U.S.? The reason is that the work doesn’t fit into a category.”

When I first started writing about Sheila Hicks I made the mistake of calling her a fabric artist, but I was quickly corrected. She’s an artist, period. Or sometimes: an artist of international stature who works with color and line. A born Nebraskan who has lived in Paris for 45 years, an independent, spirited artist who has worked with and for international corporations, Sheila Hicks is a woman of contradictions. Tonight one of the many curators in attendance says of her, “Sheila is original, innovative, international,” but the artist slyly interrupts:

“I’m most often accused of being ornery.”

(Willow, Squiggle, Vanishing Yellow, Serpent à Sonnette, Grand Prayer Rug, Linen Lean-to, Cicatrices.)

Photo: J. Katz

We make our way into the galleries for the members-only walk through. Standing between a woman with raised gold dots all over her shirt and another with daisies braided through her hair, I listen to the curators describe the work and to Sheila resist their analyses. Jenelle points out a hanging piece “that begins to punch out from the surface of the wall.” Sheila counters, “The show speaks for itself.” Susan says, “For the first time a body of work has been collected so the conversation can begin.” Sheila pipes up, “If I have made anything in this show that requires an explanation, I apologize.” But she herself can’t quite resist the temptation. “There are two words that I think of in this room,” she says, looking around. “Precariousness and permanence…those two qualities I play with throughout the show.”

(The Principal Wife, Banisteriopsis—Dark Ink, The Principal Wife Goes On, Self-Portrait on a Blue Day.)

A little later, standing in front of Trapeze de Cristobal, which once hung in the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam, she reaches her hand through the thickly twined thread and asks the Stedelijk curator, who is in attendance, to reach in too and take her hand. “I like that you can enter the work,” Sheila says. “It’s an inextricable involvement of the eye, the mind, and the hand.” (Visitors to the show, however, should keep their hands to themselves.)

(Footprints, Raining Baby Bands, Olympic Bravery, The Silk Invitation.)

In the next room, gazing up at the cascading enormity of May I Have This Dance?, Sheila calls over Enrico Martignoni who installed it. “Enrico, tell us how you installed this piece forty feet high!”

Sheila Hicks, Jenelle Porter, and others. Photo: J. Katz

Enrico beams. “It’s all about belief,” he says.

(Loosely Speaking, Kneeling Stones, Battle of Lexington, Battle of Lincoln, Battle of Omaha.)

As the walk through reaches the final room, Jenelle tells us how she tried to cull the show when she thought there wasn’t enough space to hang it all: “So I thought—because this is what curators do—does anything repeat?” Nothing did. As Jenelle told us, Joan Simon and Susan Faxon had made a perfect selection from Sheila’s hundreds of works. Luckily, there was enough room after all.

The tour is almost over. “Be sure to grab the gallery notes with the checklist,” Jenelle says, “because the titles take you places.” Titles like Les Escargots, La Lettre du Rupture, Déménageur, Embedded Voyage.

Jenelle and Sheila again. Photo: J. Katz

Sheila looks around. “Any pressing questions?”

Jenelle looks at her watch. “And I mean, really pressing,” she says.

Someone calls out, “What are you doing next?”

(A Certain Distance, Prophecy from Constantinople, Triumph.)

Sheila smiles. “Monday night, I’ll take a flight to Paris,” she says. “Tuesday at nine AM, I’ll be in my studio.”

* * *
Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is on view at ICA through August 7, but don’t wait till summer.

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Summer Studio Opening Party on the Terrace

July 2 2010

post by Rachel Pastan

For a couple of days earlier in the week, the artist Anthony Campuzano trekked in and out ICA carrying stuff: chairs, computers, art supplies, drawings, photographs, tacks, snacks. Campuzano—TC to friends—is known for using found language in his drawings, taking text from newspaper headlines, Wikipedia entries, the covers of paperback novels, song lyrics, etc. And as of yesterday, July 1, he has moved into ICA’s second-floor gallery for a month. He’s not exactly an exhibition, but any day the museum is open you can stop by and say hello and watch him making art.

There’s lots of other stuff going on too. TC asked friends and mentors (Anissa Mack, Kate Abercrombie, and others) to lend artwork to pin up on the walls. In the evenings and on weekends he’s offering free classes based on lessons that were important to him as he emerged as an artist. These lessons have great names like “Kite Technique Drawing Class” and “Sculpture Scavenger Hunt.” One, I’m told, involves cooking eggs. There are also video screenings, Friday night reading and discussion groups, workshops for artists on useful topics like writing artist statements, a day geared toward families and children, and probably lots of unscheduled activity and delight.

Last night there was music. Megajam Booze Band played on ICA’s terrace as we celebrated the opening of the Summer Studio project with cooler blues, beer, popcorn, and watermelon. There must have been close to two hundred people there: a woman in a short yellow silk beaded dress, a man in a Jerry Garcia T-shirt and a red ponytail, a woman with a kite tattoo on her arm (will she be at the Kite Technique Drawing Class, I wonder, or maybe she’s already taken it?). There was a man with a jaunty devil tattoo on his leg, a little girl in a pink sweater, a tall woman wearing purple sparkly shoes, and a taller woman in an Edwardian wedding dress and tall black boots: that was Kate Kraczon, the ICA curator who made this project happen.

photos: Carina Romano

One guy sported a “Campuzano Construction” T-shirt. He turned out to be TC’s dad, Anthony Campuzano, Sr.

I talked with TC in his new summer digs while the band set up. I asked him if he liked the size of room and he said yes, but that the best thing was—in contrast to his tiny Kensington studio—the absence of mice. Also, the air conditioning.

Campuzano had an exhibition at his gallery, Fleisher Ollman, just last month, and usually in the wake of a show he might let himself relax, but he said he was excited to be getting right back to work. He seemed excited. He told me about the art he’d borrowed to hang for the month, and the reproduction Rachel Harrison piece pinned up in the corner near his kindergarten diploma from St. Philomena’s in Landsdowne. He showed me the drawings he does to relax his hand, blue pencil copies of a postcard of Juan Gris’s “Portrait of Max Jacob” that one of his teachers, Elena Sistos, gave him. (Another version of these drawings by Campuzano was recently acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) “I like copying things,” he said. “Well, not copying—riffing off them.”

There was a lot of energy and excitement at ICA last night. When I left, the band was still playing and the beer was flowing and people were talking about which classes they wanted to sign up for. To see the whole calendar of events click here. They’re all free and open to the public, artists and non-artists alike. Or just stop by and chat with TC and watch him work. When will you have another opportunity to see what an artist actually does all day?

I’ll be there. I can’t wait to find out.

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Opening

May 7 2010

Ingrid Schaffner talking about Queer Voice

post by Rachel Pastan

I’ve never used a counter before, and I’m actually kind of excited about it. My job for the next hour is standing by the front doors and counting everyone who comes in, while my colleague Christy, who is much better dressed than I am—not to mention taller—politely makes sure no one gets in who’s not on the list.

1, 2, 3, 4. A woman comes in wearing a bright orange jacket and glasses with bright green frames. 29, 30, 31. An ICA board member comes in wearing an expensive suit with a silver lizard on his lapel. An artist in the video show comes in wearing a lavender dress. A woman comes in carrying a bag I’m afraid to handle—it looks so expensive—but I stash it for her with William behind the desk. 83, 84. A man comes in wearing a button that says “Post Queer.” I think I know what that means, but then I think again and realize I have no idea.

This is the opening of two ICA shows, Queer Voice and Video Art: Replay, Part 3: Ludicrous! It’s rather amazing, counting all these people streaming in to our usually quiet museum. In the lobby they gather around Ingrid, who curated Queer Voice, and she gives them some things to think about before leading them through the doorway into the dark space echoing with exclamations, utterances, songs and murmurs—nine artists speaking at once, though the show is designed so you can listen to them one at a time. Some of them, like Jack Smith and Andy Warhol, speak from beyond the grave, Andy into a silver painted cube—a sort of miniaturized Silver Factory—and Smith down from a height onto a lovely fainting couch on which the listener (I almost wrote viewer) is invited to lie.

On one wall, Laurie Anderson’s androgynous form sings “O Superman.” On another, John Kelly’s passionate diva sings in a glorious counter tenor. In the next room, you can rest on metal-framed beds and follow Ryan Trecartin’s voice up and down a hysterical register under a musical haze.

Queer Voice, which is not exactly a typical art exhibition (there’s almost nothing on the walls, the idea is to listen) is typical in this way: there are a lot of things in a room and you can decide which one to pay attention to. Upstairs in Ludicrous! however, there’s just one video playing at a time. Today it’s Mary Reid Kelley, painted white with black outlines like a two-dimensional drawing, situated in a white room at a white table with a white tea cup, reciting a long rhyming story hypnotically. What’s fun about this show is that the video changes every week, so that it unfolds over time. You need to come back again and again to really understand the curator’s vision, how the whole thing fits together. Which is how life is, too.

Back at my post, I realize I’ve seen this tall man in the blue shirt before. He must have gone out for a cigarette and come back in, so I don’t count him. Someone has a baby in a carrier. Someone else (William shows me) is wearing a wig. Maybe lots of people are wearing wigs—I like that idea!—but I can’t tell. A man comes in and says he just saw two rainbows. That has to be a sign of something.

People drink wine, exchange kisses, gossip and preen and chat. Their voices spiral up toward the second floor, swirling and echoing. 206, 207. Since I’m thinking about queer voices, I can’t help starting to think that all the voices sound queer—certainly the crazy cacophony of them at this opening! At the dinner afterward, ICA’s director, Claudia Gould, will say how the queerest voice is maybe one’s own.

In her gallery notes for Ludicrous! Jenelle wrote: “Many of the videos immerse audiences in magnificently bizarre worlds.” I look around the lobby at the happy crowd in their hats and high heels and bright scarves and golden purses drinking sangria, and I think that seems just about right.

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