Posts Tagged ‘penn university’

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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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Posted in Curating and curators | 6 Comments »

Puppy Cerberus. Or, What Is Art?

July 7 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Jenna and I are in her car driving across town to pick up some printed folders from Jesse Olanday at Space 1026. All kinds of stuff goes on at Space 1026, which I will describe as a cooperative artists’ space on Arch Street in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, although, according to its website, that’s way too simple an explanation. “Space 1026 has been a 13 year experiment,” the site explains. “It has developed from a handful of founders to dozens of co-conspirators.” Also, “Space 1026 is not a collaboration! Yes it is! No its not! Yes it is! Exactly.”

Entry to Space 1026

Printmaking is definitely a big piece of what happens at Space 1026. Jesse, who has been part of the place for a decade, gives us a tour, showing us the exhibition space, the printing vacuum table, the exposure rack. “I went to school with the guys who started this. The were inspired by a Live/Work/Venue space of fellow RISD students called ‘Fort Thunder’ in Providence, Rhode Island,” he says. “This used to be a jewelers, so we have vaults.” One vault is for flammable stuff, and they do their coating in another. He takes us up to the third floor, which was condemned until 1999 but today holds artists’ studios, high shelves crammed with LPs (part of the building used to house a recording studio), and all kinds of miscellaneous mysterious equipment. Jesse knocks on a door and we go in to find Thom Lessner, an artist and member of ICA’s installation crew, drawing. He holds up what he’s working on to show us:

“A farting centaur!”

Photo: Jenna Weiss

Jenna, a painter and ICA’s Spiegel Fellow working with programs, asks, “Do you always draw sitting down?”

“Yeah,” Thom says. “That’s why I’m hunched over like this.”

On the way over in the car, I asked Jenna a lot of questions about her painting, her teachers at the Tyler School of Art where she got her MFA, and her excitement about making programs, which she sees as another mode of art-making. We talked about the Big Questions: How do you hold on to what’s essential to you as an artist? What is the relationship of an artist to her studio? Where do object-oriented artists fit into an increasingly conceptual contemporary aesthetic? As usual, these questions proved resistant to easy answers. Now, listening to her chat with Thom, I think maybe the Road to Truth lies through these little questions instead.

Jesse digs up some chairs, and we sit down to talk about his design of Cerberus, the three-headed puppy, which has become ICA’s most coveted T-shirt design.

“I got that image from a puppy calendar,” Jesse says. “You know you get these free calendars?” This was in 2006, when Jesse, as part of Space 1026, participated in ICA’s exhibition Locally Localized Gravity which invited artists and artists’ groups to create installations and host creative public programs. Jesse had been looking for an idea for a screen printing event. In the calendar photo, three puppies rushed pell-mell toward a bowl of food. “I thought it would be cool if four of the legs were gone, and it was a Cerberus.”

“Why do you think it’s so popular?”

“”I think it’s got the attitude you want in a shirt,” Jesse says. “Cute and tough.”

“Succinct without being logo-y,” Jenna says.

I ask Jesse to tell me about himself and his association with ICA. “I started as a gallery preparator in 2002,” he says. “When I got to Philadelphia I was renovating houses in Northern Liberties, and ICA was short-handed installing the Rudy Gernreich show. It was perfect for me at the time. Back then the installs were long and really intense.” He could do an install for ICA, save his money, and then do his own work for three months. Also, “it was a good way to learn the inner workings of a gallery to bring back here to 1026.” He gestures around the room. “I rebuilt this gallery more professionally with the techniques I learned at the ICA—everything was square and true and solid.”

Now Jesse does custom screen work and animation for various clients and runs his own art handling business. I realize I don’t quite understand to what extent Jesse is an artist and to what extent he is a designer, or custom printer, or whatever, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s okay to ask. Finally I put together some words basically inquiring whether he does much of his own art these days, and he indicates that he doesn’t: “It’s really tiring.” I guess that means that what he does now is less tiring—or maybe just less tiring to the soul, since he also describes doing print runs of a 1,000 pieces by hand.

And here I am again, stumbling into one of those Big Questions: What is the difference, really, between art and design? In other words: What Is Art?

I think about Jenna talking about programs as art, and how making programs was part of the artistic project of Locally Localized Gravity too. Is art anything an artist says it is? Is it the job of curators and museums to decide? ICA has a history of presenting exhibitions of design, so we have likely done our part to blur the boundaries. Or maybe the point is to ask the questions and not worry too much about the answers? These mysteries and confusions spiral through my head like the summer heat, and when they clear this is what I’m left with:

An image of Jesse standing in the organized anarchy of 1026, looking at the puppy calendar and seeing something else beyond it, something he might shape with his own particular vision. Intuiting possibilities invisible to everyone else.

* * *

Note: When I showed a draft of this post to Jesse, he sent me the following response:

When I joined 1026, I aimed towards a fine arts / gallery career. For me, it was exciting, uncharted territory. There was a freedom to make and create. I made (or made attempts at) anything that came to mind. After about the sixth year of pursuing that path, my priorities slowly shifted though. I felt accomplished and the drive to make “fine-art” relaxed. Not that I was out of ideas but rather I felt satiated in that respect. I felt that the challenges had been met, and the fulfillment of the pursuit dwindled. That was roughly around the time of the ‘Locally Localized’ exhibit. I managed the 1026 team and worked on most of the exhibit design and construction. It was a huge undertaking and felt like a great send off to that aspect of my life.

Also around then my standard of living became more of a priority, and grown-up responsibilities (like handling bills) became more vital. I began concentrating efforts on business, production and more on technical craft. There was a new challenge. I pumped the brakes on gallery shows and personal work. I worked at being more professional in production and in business relations. Working in various disciplines gave a wider perspective and relevance to the aspect of making art.

Full circle a few years after that, I became proficient in the administrative side of art-business and eventually bored of that as well. The thought of making art for art’s sake became appealing again. The creative side and logistical side are now second nature, and in that, I feel a second wind. I am starting to get back into creating more personal work. Learning better time management and when to step back/away is crucial this time around to avoid the burn out.

Creative work takes a long time to internally process and continually question. That could lead to never finishing a project and in turn losing momentum. Plus finding the funds to back outlandish endeavors can gnaw on the conscience too.

So how would i define myself? Now when people ask, i reply Artist & Craftsman. Still ambiguous, I know, but I am able to give a solid answer while leaving it open to delve deeper and deeper if the person is still curious. Some mornings I don’t even know which hat I’ll be wearing for the day; I could be fabricating light fixtures or art directing a company’s re-branding. But it will always require creative problem solving and presentation.

“Is it art or is it design?” It’s similar to asking, “Is that a painting, drawing or illustration?” If you look at an illustrator’s portfolio site, they will categorize their work into these categories. What an artist would label as a painting, the visitor may consider an illustration. But it’s the artist’s site, so that is how it is categorized. In a store Campbell’s soup is package design; in a museum it’s art. I’ve heard that art leans heavy on concept and theory, while design lives on the functional side.

I think whichever the label is dictated by the means it is presented to the viewer.

J.O.

* * *

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Posted in Art and Design, Artists | 2 Comments »

The Happiest Moment

July 1 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

“People who make things with wood are the happiest people,” Stefan Sagmeister says. “You see what you’ve accomplished every evening. And the wood smells good.”

Paul, an artist who is also a professional art crate builder and ICA’s head preparator, affirms that he is happy; he does a lot of wood working. I say I have heard that orchestra musicians, when surveyed, turn out to be quite unhappy, and we speculate as to why this might be. Happiness is a slippery creature, which may be partly why Stefan is so interested in it. A well-known and influential graphic designer (you might know his album covers for the Talking Heads, Lou Reed, and the Rolling Stones even if you don’t recognize his name), Stefan has been making a personal and professional study of happiness for the last decade. You can see him talk about it in some great TED videos, and he is currently at work on a documentary called The Happy Film. The reason he’s here at ICA on this sunny June Monday, along with two designers, Jessica and Michael, who work for him, is that he’s making a show at ICA next spring: The Happy Show.

Peeking into ICA's wood shop

It’s not exactly clear yet what will be in The Happy Show. Organized by ICA Director Claudia Gould, it will partly showcase Stefan’s work and partly be a new installation he’s dreaming up. So far, Stefan is conceiving a series of encounters, experiences, experiments, and sets of instructions that not only explore and embody happiness, but are intended to make visitors happier as they move through the space. There may be therapy sessions, meditation classes, music. There may be chocolate, ladders, windows with views, tickling machines, instructions for taking cell phone pictures with a stranger with your eyelids touching. There will undoubtedly be good design.

Today we’re touring the space, giving Stefan a sense of the container he has to work with. We take a peek inside ICA’s wood shop, behind a locked door in one of the galleries, filled with saws and ladders, sheet goods and lumber, screws and nails, and a hammer drill.

“It looks like it’s fun to work in here, no?” Stefan says. He is a tall man in a light blue shirt, his Austrian accent lilting through the air.

“It’s great,” Paul says.

“Maybe we keep the door open and put some Plexi here,” Stefan says. “If we do this woodworking thing.”

“I thought Stefan would like it,” Claudia says.

Up on the roof. Photo: Robert Chaney

We wander out into the main upstairs gallery where One is the loneliest number, a show exploring artistic collaborations, is on view. Michael and Jessica take pictures of all the angles with their phones. Claudia talks about other exhibitions that have been presented in this space in the past: Trisha Donnelly’s paintings lined up tightly along one wall, the work of Dutch designers Hella Jongerius and Jurgen Bey, Damián Ortega’s disassembled VW bug. “He paid someone in Mexico City to take it apart,” Claudia says. “We hung it here, and then MOCA bought it. There’s a big history in this space.”

We look at the Ramp, a long V-shaped corridor with windows on 36th Street, discussing the challenges of lighting and what to do about a tree that has filled out, partly blocking the view. We talk about which entrance people will use to get into the show, which museum walls are permanent and which can be removed. Stefan says something about building super complicated things, and Paul smiles. “We love a challenge,” he says.

We look at the mezzanine, the lobby, the staff kitchen. “What parts of the museum are up for grabs?” Stefan asks.

“Everything is possible,” Claudia says.

The June sun shines through the glass onto the mezzanine, and traces of exhibitions past seem to hang in the air. You can almost see the ideas beginning to spin in Stefan’s head. Good weather, inspirational history, no immediate pressure, and an expansive vision as yet uncompromised by logisitics or budgets: this may be the happiest moment in the creation of any work of art.

* * *

The Happy Show will open at ICA in April 2012.

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Marilyn

June 23 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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Posted in Art and Money, Miscellaneous | 11 Comments »

New Blood, or, What’s the name of that copier?

June 17 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Kate says, “Robert Mapplethorpe did a show here in the eighties that was really important and raised a lot of censorship issues.” She’s talking to this year’s crop of ICA summer interns and work study students, who of course mostly don’t know about the 1988 Mapplethorpe show, or any of our other historic shows: Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Glenn Ligon, Richard Artschwager, etc. This is the official orientation session, but a history lesson isn’t part of the program. It’s just that someone asked why our big printer/copier/scanner is named Mapplethorpe. Now they know.

Darcey, ICA’s Associate Registrar, has put together a manual called A-Z of ICA (really it’s A-T, “answering the door” to “timesheets”) which is full of information like: “When we are not open, it is your job to answer the door intercom when it rings. It is usually a fellow intern/work-study/volunteer/key-forgetting employee who needs to be let in. Other times, it is a VIP who has an appointment.” And, “Copying is a useful life-long skill. If you are not already proficient in copying, approach this internship as a chance to be!” The manual is a model of clarity and comprehensiveness, and as Kate takes us through it, I learn a thing or two I didn’t know.

The new interns are an appealing bunch, and they all seem ready to jump in. Anna-Lara is a history major at Penn who has previously worked at the Penn Museum. Julia took one of the courses ICA co-presents every other year, “Writing Through Literature and Art,” and she has studied Chinese for seven years. Pam knows everything about social media. Elizabeth has set fabric sculptures afloat on the pond at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s Art Camp for children. Annie studies painting at Washington University and plays the oboe. (Sometimes we have men, too, just not right now.)

Also at this orientation is Alex Klein, ICA’s new program curator, who started work this week too. Alex is an artist, writer, and co-founder of the independent publishing imprint Oslo Editions. While working at LACMA in 2007, she made amazing conversations about photography happen in all kinds of places and over all sorts of channels: essays, discussion forums, debates, questionnaires. Eventually the project turned into a website and then a book. Alex is also a dog owner, a Philadelphia native, a vegetarian, a recent lecturer at the Roski School of Fine Arts at USC, and already a calm, informed, discerning presence around the office. She has wonderful ideas for expanding the range of programs we do here, and for activating new parts of the museum as well as the traditional programming spaces.

Kate shows us the library-cum-conference-room with its shelves of catalogues (browsing encouraged during slow times), the new mirror on the back of the director’s office door (“Before events there’s kind of a mad scramble to get mirror time”), and the supply closet. She talks about catalogues, label printing, computer passwords, the mini-kitchen.

ICA has a terrific public face, whether we’re talking about exhibitions like Kate’s current show, One is the loneliest number, or programs like the Ayurveda Workshop that the collaborative Megawords is presenting here next Wednesday. However, it is the efforts of bright, energetic, ambitious student workers—the prompt and polite answering of the door buzzer and the mastery of the powerful Mapplethorpe copier—that makes it all possible.

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THE TEXTILE MIRROR: A Visit to the Penn Museum

June 10 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Sheila and Ingrid walking toward the Penn Museum.

“Lucy,” Ingrid says, “you’re living my Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler fantasy!”

We are in the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Keeper Lucy Fowler Williams, who specializes in American textiles, keeps bringing out the most extraordinary things from behind the poker-faced doors of numbered cabinets: fragments of thousand-year-old tunics, cactus spine needles, a tie-dyed Anasazi blanket. The comment might seem strange coming from a curator like Ingrid, who seems to practically live in ICA, our own museum; but the Penn Museum is a different animal: vast and historical rather than bright and emphatically new. ICA doesn’t have a permanent collection, but the Penn Museum’s collection, like a great tree, grows larger every year. There are 300,000 objects in the American collection alone!

This special tour is occasioned by the presence of artist Sheila Hicks, whose fabulous survey exhibition, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, is on view at ICA through August 7. Sheila knows everything about textiles, and so does Lucy, though their two everythings don’t always exactly overlap. On the way in they talk about the magic Sheila performed at ICA’s benefit a few nights earlier. Subscribers brought her items of clothing—ties and shirts and underwear-and she wrapped them in layers of thread, transforming them into containers for memory. Sheila says the podium from which she worked was like a confessional: people brought their stories—both of their objects and of themselves—hoping for the absolution of art. We walk past an ancient bull with lapis horn tips and a headdress of gold. Sheila stops to admire a figure from Guanyin, China (900 – 1279 A.D.)—how the folds of the drapery are rendered in wood and stone.

We pass through a private hall where people are setting up for a dinner, clothed tables overlooked by stone sphinxes. Sheila and Lucy reminisce about potlatches.

It’s chilly in the white collections room. Lucy has pulled out some boxes for us, each one divided into smaller compartments, each compartment holding some small but extraordinary fragment: a 15th-century loop of a thread, or a bit of cloth, or a spiny needle, all from Pachacamac, Peru.

Photo: Pam Kosty

“The soil is very oily there,” Sheila says in her Nebraska-bred, Paris-refined voice. She’s been there.

“These were buried with women,” Lucy says. “Textiles or cloth for these cultures were the most important thing—like gold might be somewhere else.”

“Because it’s the most difficult thing to do,” Sheila says. “These are the superheroes!”

Lucy shows us a stretch of vicuna wool cloth, dark red with green, brown, and mustard woven in. “A lot of recent scholarship relates these to the sky, possibly to time,” she says, explaining where the colors come from: the red from cochineal—tropical insects—the bluish green at least partly indigo.

“I’m very fond of these positive/negative shapes,” Sheila says, pointing.

Photo: Pam Kosty

Lucy takes the lid off a box holding a khipu—threads of knotted cords used as a recording device. Different styles of knots—different colors, different turnings—mark different characteristics of whatever is being recorded. Sheila bends over to see. She makes khipus, too.

“The word khipu is very fun to say,” Ingrid says.

“You can imagine putting it on your belt and walking with it,” Sheila says.

“Recording how many llamas were born last year.”

“That’s why we do shows, to have an excuse to get out some of this material.”

After the khipus, Lucy shows us two mummy bundles: ancient bodies wrapped in cloth. One is an infant, another an adult with a mask where the face would be. She asks us not to take photographs. The discussion returns to the wrapping Sheila did at the benefit, to how wrapping something is an ancient, natural way to make it sacred. “In the relation of the human and the spiritual,” Sheila says, “cloth plays such an important role.”

Why cloth? I ask.

“It’s worn on the body,” Lucy says. “It holds the memory of you.”

“The fluids of the body are in it,” Sheila adds.

“But we wrap our dead in wood,” I say skeptically.

“But cloth first,” Lucy says. “First we dress them appropriately.”

Sheila nods. She bends her head over the bundle, and so does Lucy. The maker of cloth and the keeper of cloth meet over this sacred object. For both of them, textiles are mirrors in which you can see—if you know how to look—a human face.

* * *

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

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Travelogue Beirut: Art as a space for politics

June 3 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

At the beginning of her talk about the Beirut art scene, artist Lamia Joreige said, “In the mid-nineties, Beirut was just coming out of what is commonly called a civil war, and a new generation of artists was coming of age.” Lamia’s presentation was the last in the Travelogue series ICA has been presenting all year, in which curators, writers, and artists from across the globe come to ICA to talk about the art world where they live. Sitting in ICA’s auditorium, we have traveled to Vilnius, Singapore, Paris, and Santiago. But Beirut was different. In Vilnius, we heard how artists responded to the end of Soviet rule, a complex historical situation; but only Beirut was dealing with the immediate aftermath of war.

Photo: J. Katz

While Lamia didn’t talk at length about particular artworks, she did relate how the artistic vocabulary of the city seemed to change after the Lebanese war, moving away from traditional painting and sculpture to installation, video, and hybrid experimental forms. The lack of infrastructure, too, led to the crossing of boundaries between genres, so that video, visual art installation, fiction film, and documentary often blended together. The lack of funding brought about a freedom of experimentation. It’s as though a people picking itself up, rediscovering itself, needed new frames to hold and explore its new world. “Nothing is easy in Beirut,” she said, recalling the assassination of the Prime Minister, the Israeli bombings, and other horrors. “We have no funding from the government. Actually, we don’t have a government.”

Lamia described the creation of the Beirut Art Center (BAC), which she started with Sandra Dagher in 2009—not only to curate shows, but to create a platform for discussion in the city. “For me, BAC was a political gesture,” she said. “I’m a big believer that art is a space for politics.” BAC made art accessible to everyone. It was also a place where art could be a springboard for conversation.

Beirut Art Center

Lamia’s Travelogue raised many urgent and unanswerable questions. Is lack of official support good for art? If art is a space for politics, is there such a thing as non-political art? Is what is sometimes called domestic art political when looked at from the right angle? Mull this as you walk through ICA’s lush, tactile exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, where you can see, I think, political passion in the warp and woof of every textile minime.

Sheila Hicks, Fenêtre II, Photo: Bastiaan van den Berg

Certainly patronage by elites, notably the Catholic Church, has made possible some of the greatest art of all time; and yet it also true that uncertainty and chaos often kindle experimentation and edgy creativity. I’m not suggesting we abolish the NEA, let alone the government. And I worry that political art, as that term is conventionally understood, privileges ideas over formal qualities—though in Lamia’s discussion, such art seems like an outpouring of feeling and thought into the necessary form.

These are important ideas to wrestle with. At ICA, we’d love to know what you think. Please use the comments field below to respond to these questions, and help us begin a conversation in our own (virtual) art space right here in Philadelphia—or wherever in the world you are.

* * *
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Posted in Art and Politics, Travelogue | 5 Comments »

Spring at the ICA: A haiku and cake celebration

May 27 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Cake by Anna Cohen. Photo: J. Katz

The Tree of Knowledge
has many flowering branches.
Thank Eve. Thank the snake.

-L.S.

This lovely haiku was posted as a comment to the recent Miranda that celebrated ICA’s blog’s first birthday. Thanks to everyone who sent their birthday wishes in the various forms of poems, pastries, and pictures!

Please enjoy them, and add more in the comments section if you’re so inspired.

Nerd's Rope from Kate Kraczon. Photo: J. Katz

Mira Miranda!
She sneaks up on little tweets,
and swallows them whole.

-I.S.

Marie Antoinette
She said let them eat snake cake
And off went her head

-J.W.

In the effort to
connect with our audience
in just a year’s time.

-W.H.

A new skin, but still.
Black and white, red all over
Miranda the snake.

-R.C.

And this from our wonderful designer, Thom Anthony, after I’d asked him for the tenth change in one morning for the new Miranda design:

let’s all endlessly
revise minutae until
my fingers fall off

That man needs a slice of virtual snake cake!

As do we all. Snake cake for everyone!

Cake by Jenna Weiss. Photo: J. Katz

* * *
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Benefit 2011: Sumo Balls

May 20 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

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

Photo: Shira Yudkoff

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

Sheila in the gallery. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

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

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

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

Taking off the tie. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

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

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

Sheila wrapping. Photo: Shira Yudkoff

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

* * *

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

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

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Miranda’s Birthday

May 12 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

When I started working at ICA in 2009, everyone agreed the museum needed a blog but no one wanted to write it. Poke around the web and you’ll find that almost every museum, large or small, has a blog these days, but for the most part reading them makes you think that the people who write them aren’t having much fun. You can find information in those pixels, but not a lot of inspiration or delight. As a former columnist, and also a novelist, I thought it would be nice to write a kind of online ICA column, made up of little essays and stories that not only described the cool stuff going on at ICA but also seriously explored the work of museums: what curators do, how art is moved around, even how money is raised. I also wanted it to be fun to read.

Luckily for me, ICA liked the idea. In a fit of inspiration, our director Claudia Gould named the blog after my recently deceased corn snake, Miranda. It seemed like a fine choice. The name is derived from the Latin word “mirare”—to admire—and can mean something worth looking at or deserving of admiration. It’s also a nice way to remember my snake.

The real Miranda, in a friend's pocket.

This month, we are celebrating Miranda’s first birthday!

Please send her your birthday wishes. You can use the comments field below for congratulations, compliments, and also suggestions for the coming year. You can post haiku, prose poems, anagrams, koans. Even better, send birthday flowers—or birthday mice!—by attaching images to an email care of me. If we get enough, we’ll post these in a special Miranda at the end of the month, with a free ICA catalog for the sender of the most inventive gift.

As an even better birthday tribute, email me to sign up for our Miranda mailing list, so we can let you know when there’s a new post.

Foil snake by Adam Blumberg. Photo: Robert Chaney

A year ago we published the first blog posts, about me trying to count the people coming in the door for the Queer Voice opening, why public programs are important, and what Chuck Close said in his roast of Lisa Yuskavage at our annual benefit. May is also the month of my own birth. There has been some confusion between me and Miranda, and for the most part that’s okay, as we do largely share one another’s opinions. Miranda is perhaps a little jauntier than I am, and occasionally more sentimental. Looking back over the year’s work, I see that I no longer manage to post twice a week (though only twice have I ever missed a week’s posting). On the other hand, my use of photographs is much improved. These days I try to make them part of the narrative, not just incidental decoration.

Cobra on Wood, by Nick Payne

I’ve been looking back over some of my favorite posts. I still really like the first one, which talks about my aspirations and gives a sense of daily ICA life:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/video-art-replay/miranda-opening-3/

I’m fond of this one, that connects architect Anne Tyng to Odysseus’s Penelope:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/anne-tyng/anne-tyng-platonic-solids-and-penelopes-bed/

and this one about the mystery of art crates:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/mineral-spirits-anne-chu-and-matthew-monahan/big-truck-unloading/.

People really enjoyed these two, about departing staff members, Head Preparator Shannon Bowser and Curator Jenelle Porter:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/miscellaneous/talk-to-the-boss/

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/curating-and-curators/778/

This one, about the de-installation of Virgil Marti’s exhibition, Set Pieces, is the silliest and most poetic:

http://www.icaphila.org/miranda/set-pieces/elegy-for-an-exhibition/.

I hope you have enjoyed Miranda so far, and that you’ll continue to follow her.

Virtual coils
slithering through the white cube:
throw the doors open!

by Casey Watson

* * *

Snake images above (except the real Miranda) by members of ICA’s fabulous installation crew.

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