Ron English in Boston

Here are some more photos of New Jersey street art hero Ron English’s “Abraham Obama” mural and related posters on a construction fence across the street from Gallery XIV in Boston. They’re being presented in conjunction with the gallery’s “A politic” exhibit, which I reviewed here.

Check out English’s website. And here are photos of them installing the mural and a random video.

“A politic” at Gallery XIV

From my review of “A politic” at Gallery XIV in Boston:

There’s nothing like a brouhaha to make art feel relevant. And the Boston art scene has just been blessed by two. First, Gallery XIV caused a stir with its “a politic” show, the first thing it’s really done to turn heads since it opened last fall. Let’s hope that’s the beginning of something. …

The Gallery XIV show has 40 artists exploring political themes. That didn’t freak anyone out. What got people in a tizzy was an appearance at the July 2 opening by New Jersey’s Ron English, who’s (in)famous for (illegally) pasting over commercial billboards with his own slogans: “Jihad is Over! (If you want it)”; “Jesus drove an SUV/Mohammad pumped his gas/The new H2 Hummer”; “Support our CEOs.” (An outdoor video screening at the gallery on July 25 will include Pedro Caravajal’s documentary “POPaganda: The Art and Crimes of Ron English.”)

That evening, on a construction fence across the street from the gallery (with permission from the landlord), English pasted up 11 13-foot-tall reproductions of his painting “Abraham Obama,” [pictured at top] which merges the features of President Lincoln with Barack’s.

Read the rest here.

“A politic,” Gallery XIV, 450 Harrison Ave., Boston, July 4 to Oct. 4, 2008.

Pictured from top to bottom: Ron English, “Abraham Obama” mural; Joseph Woolfolk, “Basrah to Baghdad”; and Remedios Rapoport “Gentle Revolution Mobile.”

Urding Gallery seeks new space

Beth Urding Gallery is looking for a new home after its lease on space at 129 Newbury St. in Boston expired and Urding was unable to get a renewal. (The landlord had other plans for it.)

“I moved out on June 30 and my destination is unknown, though I am committed to Newbury Street and hope to announce the address soon,” she writes. “In the meantime, I exhibited at Art Santa Fe from July 10 to 13 and am working out of my home in Wellesley.”

Clark to focus on curating at Carle

Museum transitioning from start-up

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is seeking an executive director to free up founding director H. Nichols B. Clark to focus on organizing exhibitions and events, according to the museum. (See my initial report here.) The move represents the Amherst museum, which opened in 2002, moving out of start-up mode.

“As far as we’re concerned, Nick is a lifer with this organization. He’s not going anywhere at all,” Christopher Milne, chairman of the museum’s board, said this morning.

“We just feel at this point that we want to take this job that he had and separate the curatorial and programming functions, which are the heart and soul of the museum, from the executive administrative functions. No one person can effectively handle all those responsibilities in an organization of our size and with our scope of mission.”

“We’ve simply taken the position of founding director and split it in two. So we will now have a chief curator and executive director as the two most senior management positions. Nick is going to be the chief curator, because it’s important that he’ll be able to spend 100 percent of his attention in this area.”

Asked when the new executive director might come on board, Milne said, “Nick is still functioning as he’s always functioned. There is no vacancy. So we’re going to hire the new person as soon as we can find the perfect person for the job.”

“It’s a function of our growth and our success that, wherever possible, we need to move away from people having to do multiple functions – which is so common in a start-up operation – to allow people to focus on their strengths and areas of expertise.”

Ernest Morin and the future of Gloucester

One of the debates rumbling through Gloucester right now is what will be the future of a ramshackle neighborhood there of tenements, hard factories and crooked streets that they call the Fort. The mayor is leading a charge to rezone it and transform it, build condos and a Marriott hotel.

My pal Ernest Morin of Gloucester, who has been intensely photographing the city for seven years, is skeptical. He proposes shoring up the fishing businesses, and preserving the character of the neighborhood. “Businesses all have a niche,” he wrote in a letter to the Gloucester Daily Times. “Gloucester's niche is that it is a real place, that is what we have to offer and it is of real value.”


















Lately he’s stepped up his documentation of the neighborhood, roaming its streets and haunting the factories, fearing they’re now endangered, recording what he can before the mayor and the hoteliers get their way. But he’s not giving up yet. At Gloucester City Hall at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 24, he’ll present a slide show of 155 of his black and white shots of the Fort (some seen here). He’ll be joined by a couple painters and an anthropologist to talk about what the Fort means to the city and how that might be saved.

The Fort sits on a peninsula that shelters the fishing city’s inner harbor. The name comes from fortifications erected at the end during the Revolution then War of 1812 (Fort Defiance) then Civil War. It seems as if it has always been one of the centers of the city’s fishing industry – now wharves, fish processing plants, an ice factory. Here is where they invented frozen fish. Here is where the immigrants settled, the Irish and Portuguese and Sicilians. Here is where poet Charles Olson watched the harbor from his second-floor apartment and wrote.


















Morin is an excellent photographer, in the classic, gritty, crisp street shooter mode. (Check out his astonishing, eerie photo of a synagogue that burned in a fatal fire in Gloucester one icy night last December.) But what’s especially interesting is how he’s yoked his art to his activism.

When Morin presented the first big public slide show of his Gloucester photos at Gloucester City Hall in 2006, several hundred people attended for what turned out to be one of the best art events in the region that year. “Somehow Morin turned a PowerPoint slide show into a ravishing aria to the hardscrabble glory of the great seaport – followed by a sobering public discussion of what can be done to preserve it and how to adapt to remain vital,” I wrote that December. “Too often artists pay lip service to community engagement, but here an artist sparked a real community dialogue.”

Thursday he aims to do it again. Don’t miss it.


“Four Perspectives on the waterfront : an educational and art presentation.” Gloucester artists Ernest Morin, Jeff Weaver, and Matthew Rose present their work. And lawyer and anthropologist Sarah Robinson will give a brief talk on “A Short History of New England Groundfish Rebuilding, 1993-2008.” Gloucester City Hall, Kyrouz Auditorium, 9 Dale Ave., 7 p.m., July 24, 2008.



































Ernest Morin describes his project:

Sight Lines

Is a slide show of the Fort section of the Gloucester waterfront, an area that was predominately inhabited by Sicilian fisherman in the 1920s and retains its Mediterranean feel. It is a mixture of Fisheries related business and fishing boats and a real neighborhood with a beach front. It is also perhaps the most original and unique neighborhood in America.

Clarence Birdseye set up his frozen food factory there in 1916 and it is now slated to become a Marriott Hotel. The area is facing a major rezoning and inevitable changes. Changes that will forever alter the social fabric of this working-class neighborhood, as the Marriott stated to the Gloucester Times they want their "Sight lines cleared" because "when their guest arrive, they expect to arrive ‘somewhere’"... so why are they interested? Million dollar ocean views 45 minutes north of Boston.

I felt it was important to take the proverbial snapshot of the area before the Marriott moves in, their gentrification takes place. I thought the town should understand what is there right now has a real value and will be forever lost.

Change is not always progress, the world doesn't need another Newport, Rhode Island, or seasonal resort in the middle of a fishing port. The problem with such developments is they drive out the very character of a Place.

This work is about the nature and value of Place, something that has never been highly valued in America. We do not need to look like one huge shopping mall from sea to shinning sea... a veritable wasteland of dunkin donuts and Abercrombie and Fitch and Car dealerships as far as the eye can see.

I'm just trying to document what I see as a vanishing race, the American working class, or now, the working poor. The Fort is a microcosm of Gloucester and Gloucester is America.

Ernest Morin

Talk Tuesday on Vermeer forger who fooled Nazi

Edward Dolnick, a former Boston Globe science writer now living near Washington, D.C., reads from his new book “The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century” at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, July 22. The event is free.

The publisher describes the book thusly:

“The Forger's Spell" is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.

It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.

Dolnick told NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday:

Van Meegeren found that a forgery that was close was almost worse than if he hadn't tried at all, because as soon as it was close, the experts would focus on the difference between the forgery and the real thing. What turned out to be a much better strategy for van Meegeren was to make a painting that had a few hints of Vermeer but that wasn't like any of the known Vermeers, and then let the experts fill in the gaps themselves. Let them say, "Aha, didn't I always tell you that Vermeer had much more to him than you thought? It's not all ladies reading letters, it's sometimes completely different paintings like this new one we've just found."

Related:
Read an excerpt here.

Eric Carle Museum seeks director

Founding director Nick Clark leaving?

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst has begun a search for a new executive director. It seems to be seeking a replacement for H. Nichols B. Clark (at left), the founding director of the museum which opened in November 2002, but since it is after regular work hours I’m unable to confirm at this time that Clark is leaving. (Saturday update: I’m still looking into this, but an initial inquiry suggests Clark may not be leaving.)

A job listing on the museum’s website, which was also posed to the New England Museum Association site on July 3, begins:

“The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is seeking an Executive Director with strategic vision ready to lead it through its next phase of growth as it becomes a highly recognized international art museum. This is an exciting opportunity for an articulate and energetic manager with bold vision who can develop funding sources and oversee operations of a start up organization.”

More to come.

Related:

• A 2006 interview (pdf) with Nick Clark.
• Clark is scheduled to give the opening talk at the Rabbit Hill Festival of Literature at the Westport Public Library in October.

“Meat After Meat Joy” at Pierre Menard

From my review of “Meat After Meat Joy” at Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge through Sunday:

Last Wednesday an e-mail arrived from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demanding that Pierre Menard Gallery take down “Meat After Meat Joy.” My first thought: “What took you so long?” The show, guest-curated by Heide Hatry of New York, has 10 artists who make sculptures of meat or art depicting meat to investigate “the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body.”

“Unless you’re Hannibal Lecter, there’s nothing ‘artistic’ or ‘joyful’ about meat,” PETA senior vice-president Tracy Reiman said in the press release. “If it’s unacceptable to kill humans for an art exhibit, then it should be unacceptable to kill animals, too.”

“They’re only looking at the show from one angle,” gallery director Nathan Censullo said of PETA, “and not trying to consider it from another one that might be respectful and reflect their views.”

Read the rest here.

Related:
More on PETA’s complaint here.

“Meat After Meat Joy,” Pierre Menard Gallery, 10 Arrow St., Cambridge, June 21 to July 20.

Pictured from top to bottom: Tamara Kostianovsky’s "Abacus,” 2008, articles of clothing belonging to the artist, ink, shellac, wire, meat hooks; and Betty Hirst’s “Baby” and “Bust,” both 2008, raw meat sculptures.

MA House approves 1st in nation Creative Economy Council

Wednesday the Massachusetts House of Representatives approved a bill that would create a “first in the nation” statewide Creative Economy Council. The proposal now moves to the state Senate.

This follows Governor Deval Patrick’s appointment in June of Jason Schupbach as the state’s first "creative economy industry director," which was also billed as a “first in the nation.”

Dan Hunter, executive director of Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, & Humanities, reports:

"The council will work with the Office of Economic Development to ‘develop a statewide strategy for the enhancement, encouragement, and growth of the creative economy in the commonwealth, and to promote through public and private means responsive public policies and innovative private sector practices.’ … The council will consist of 23 members including legislators, the director of MAASH, the director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and other leaders in the creative economy movement.”

The bill was proposed by Rep. Dan Bosley (D-North Adams), House chairman of the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies.

Saul Leiter in Gloucester

Plus Ab-Ex and Photography






















Above is a shot New York photographer Saul Leiter took when he spent a week visiting Gloucester’s Lanesville neighborhood with, uh, friends as a 35-year-old in 1958. It was featured last month in his exhibition at New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Gloucester was a summer destination for major American artists from Winslow Homer until the Abstract Expressionists. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb all summered there.

I don’t know who Leiter’s Gloucester friends were that summer, but he began his artistic career as a painter and took up photography in the 1940s at the encouragement of Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was then experimenting with photography and gave Leiter a camera. Leiter’s photos often have broken-up, abstracted compositions that echo New York abstract painting of the time.

It’s another example of the exchange of ideas and inspiration between the Abstract Expressionists and photographers – a subject touched on by Boston College’s “Pollock Matters” exhibit last fall. That show made a convincing case that Jackson Pollock drew inspiration for his signature drips and compositions from his pal Herbert Matter’s experimental abstract photos. But the subject got buried by the curators’ focus on whether the recently-found, alleged Pollock paintings there were authentic. (The curators leaned to yes; the scientists leaned to no.)

A couple other photographers to consider in the relationship between Ab-Ex painting and photography are Aaron Siskind (who also summered in Gloucester) and Rudy Burckhardt. With Burckhardt, I’m thinking in particular of the abstracty shots of grass and things that he made for ARTnews to publish with his portraits of Ab-Ex artists, if I’m remembering correctly.

Ab-Ex and photography is an exhibition waiting to happen.

As for Leiter, there’s been something of a resurgence of interest in his work since the mid 1990s, when he began printing his color slides from the late 1940s to ‘60s. He had printed few of his lush color photos back when he shot them because of the expense of color printing; instead he presented them as slide shows. The result of the new prints was his first museum solo show at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2006 (some of this work appeared at Boston’s Gallery Kayafas in January 2007).

Pictured: Saul Leiter, “Lanesville,” 1958, chromogenic print, printed later, (c) Saul Leiter/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.