Posts Tagged ‘Summer Studio’

ICA Mosaic

August 6 2010

ICA intern Charlotte Ickes with some of the many boxes she readied for the archives this summer. Photo: Carina Romano

post by Rachel Pastan

On days the museum is closed but the offices are open, you have to ring the doorbell if you want to get in. Some days it rings all day long, that bell: the mailman, the UPS guy, the FedEx guy, and the many interns who do so much of the heavy lifting here at ICA. Mostly they’re Penn grad students and undergrads, and they do everything from research to filing to helping plan and run events. They work in every department. Some of them have been here for years and know everything! If they all decided not to show up for work tomorrow, I suppose we wouldn’t actually close, but it would be a slow, dull, unproductive day.

Last week we had a lunch to thank them (that probably sounds fancier than it was—Mexican food around the conference room table), and I asked them to tell me something interesting they had done or learned about ICA this summer. Taken together, their answers make a nice snapshot of what goes on here—a kind of mosaic. Here are a few.

Sam (spent the summer resizing, organizing, and in many cases digitizing ICA’s old exhibition images for easy access): It’s interesting to see how many people you have to contact for a single show—artists, lenders, scholars, conservators. One exhibition will generate letters to maybe a hundred people! Also, I can now name every ICA show for the last ten years.

(***Actually, I didn’t write down what these people said word for word. Any errors, confusions, inelegant phrasings, embarrassing exclamation points, or slanderous remarks are entirely my own.)

Sara (going into her senior year at Penn; just elected head of her campus sketch comedy group): I’ve been sorting through the education files to get them ready for the archives, and I found a bunch of material on the controversy about ICA’s Robert Mapplethorpe show back in the eighties. I had no idea ICA was so involved in that! There were all kinds of petitions and statements from Penn in defense of the First Amendment.

Rachel (a graduate student at Penn’s School of Design and a competitive fencer): I’ve been going through the prints ICA offers for sale on the website, doing research about the artists and finding out how much their comparable work sells for. So far I’m at letter G.

Grace (writing her thesis at Penn on the representation of performance art in museums; has been reorganizing the ICA library): Sometimes great old letters fall out of books. And I got to pick the band for the ICA Free For All on September 29!

Lily (a rising senior at Moore College of Art majoring in curatorial studies and getting ready to start a zine): I learned how to make labels for the printer.

(I know Lily did lots of other stuff, too. But actually, if you can master labels on our printer, you can master the universe.)

Charlotte (a grad student at Penn writing her Masters thesis on two portraits of Pocahantas): For Summer Studio with Anthony Campuzano, I helped run the artists’ statement workshop, but it rained and hardly anyone showed up. I spent two hours working with this one guy! But I think we made his statement a little better. Also I spent a week with Anne Tyng [architect and subject of an upcoming ICA exhibition].

One of the interns who wasn’t at lunch was Carina Romano, a young professional photographer who spent the summer working in ICA’s marketing department, and who helped me out a lot with this blog. I don’t know what she’d say she did or learned this summer, but she certainly spruced up the look of Miranda. Thanks, Carina! Thank you Sara, Annika, Lily, Rashana, Sam! Thanks Grace, Rachel, Charlotte, Pericles, Seghen, Kristen! I hope you had fun, made an enduring connection to ICA, and got some good stories to entertain your friends.

Maybe consider sharing a story in the comments field below? Just between us?

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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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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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