Tag Archives: brian ferriso

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

YU, new art and the transparency issue

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UPDATE: Jeff Jahn, who has followed the fortunes of YU from its beginnings, has kicked in with his own take at PORT. He argues that YU has “a general art world sophistication several tiers above” some earlier attempts at a nationally linked contemporary arts center, but also that it is severely harmed by its lack of a community board — its three-member board is also its three-member staff. Row made the same point in his Oregonian story, and it’s worth stressing: an independent, unpaid board is essential. ALSO: Some excellent points from Barry Johnson of Arts Dispatch in the comments below this post. Be sure to give ’em a look. Of note: Is YU hamstrung by its main donor’s restrictions?

By Bob Hicks

The Oregonian’s D.K. Row set off a micro-explosion with his front-page story in this morning’s paper about the cloudy picture at YU Contemporary Art Center, the fledgling nonprofit in the inner east side’s old Yale Union Laundry Building. Central to the issues that Row called into question: the center’s three principal figures (four if you count the building’s owner, who is divorced from one of the founders) have repeatedly sidestepped questions about the organization’s finances and structure.

D.K. is taking a bit of a beating in the online version’s comments thread, with people accusing him of making something out of nothing or, worse, engaging in some sort of hatchet job in an effort to kill off a good idea. Yet there’s very little in the story that I haven’t heard a lot of arts people saying privately for months. Few people think there’s anything nefarious going on. A lot of people wonder whether the founders aren’t in over their heads, and question both how much money this project is going to cost (the building will be very expensive to operate) and where the money’s coming from. I’ve also heard more than a few people ask the exact question that is central to Row’s story: Why won’t the people at YU just say what the financial situation is? D.K. didn’t invent these questions. He simply had the impertinence to ask them in public.

Continue reading YU, new art and the transparency issue →

General, Journalism, Visual Art

Portland collects: nailing down the story

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Pablo Picasso, "Blind Minotaur, Guided through a Starry Night by Marie-Therese with a Pigeon)," 1934-35 from the Suite Vollard, 1930-37. Aquatint, drypoint, and engraving with scraping, edition of 250, Anonymous loan.

By Bob Hicks

Riches of the City: Portland Collects, the 237-work exhibition of art loaned by 83 of the city’s collectors from their private collections, opens Saturday at the Portland Art Museum, and I reviewed it in this morning’s Oregonian. You can read the review online here, but if you pick up a copy of the morning paper, this is one instance where you’re better off seeing it in print. It’s the cover story of the A&E section, and it includes a lot more pictures than the online edition, including photographer Thomas Boyd’s fine portraits of collectors Jordan Schnitzer, Bonnie Serkin and Chris Rauschenberg with some of their art.

Roy DeForest, "Forest Hermit," 1990, Acrylic on canvas with artist-carved frame, Collection of Arlene and Harold Schnitzer.The review stands pretty much on its own, as an overview of what is an overview exhibition. Each of the exhibit’s six areas of concentration makes up its own statement, and each could have been reviewed rigorously on its own, but for most viewers — and for the museum itself — the larger picture is more important.

So instead of listening to me go into more detail about specific works, I thought you might be interested in reading about how the whole package (the newspaper package, not the museum’s, which took a whole lot longer to negotiate and assemble) came together. The process is both complex and routine, and is a good example of what an amazing structure the modern newspaper is, for all its historical failings and current flailings. Keep in mind, this is an ordinary story that could be planned, not the unexpected emergency that sends journalists into deep scramble mode. Someday someone will write the story of how news of today’s Egyptian crisis reached the world. It’ll read like an unusually fascinating operating manual to a great big complex machine that’s constantly being retooled and reinvented while it’s operating full steam ahead.

Continue reading Portland collects: nailing down the story →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Link: over the falls without a barrel

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Thomas Moran, "Shoshone Falls on the Snake River," 1900. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

By Bob Hicks

One of the things on our mind today is the great 19th century American painter Thomas Moran. Why? Because his iconic 1900 painting Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, all 12 feet wide of it, opens Saturday in a single-oil show at the Portland Art Museum. It’s on loan from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Mr. Scatter wrote about the show and the painting in this morning’s A&E section of The Oregonian. The main story, Window on the West, is about Moran and how he developed from a very good Hudson River School painter depicting scenes mainly in Pennsylvania into a grand-scale chronicler of vistas from the rugged West.

The second story, PAM chief sees multiple facets of one-piece show, is a lengthy interview with Brian Ferriso, the museum’s executive director, about Moran and the painting and the idea behind one-painting exhibits (which aren’t really solo shows: this one includes a half-dozen smaller Moran watercolors, plus a terrific, six-foot-wide photo of the falls taken in the 1880s). The online interview is a fair amount longer than the print version, and gets into some interesting areas you might like to see.

A nice bonus is this 14-photo gallery by Amiran White of the painting’s installation at PAM. It tells its own intriguing story.

A teaser from the Ferriso interview, this one about Moran’s fellow painter of the West Albert Bierstadt, whose 1869 painting of Mt. Hood is a treasured piece in the Portland museum’s American collection:

… Bierstadt in particular understood the marketplace. He would very much create idyllic scenes, sort of these manufactured landscapes that were compositionally well-shaped. The Mount Hood that we have that Bierstadt did, there is no such place. You can’t go to that place, because the lake that he depicted doesn’t exist. He’s added it.

I once gave a tour to some visitors when I was overseeing a Hudson River School show, and one of them said, “Now this is the kind of art I like. It’s real. It’s a real place.” And I said, “Well, don’t be too sure, because it’s not real. It’s a fabricated view. Don’t be fooled by what you see.”

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

It’s mourning. Do you know where your weeping medieval alabasters are?

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By Bob Hicks

Like “a troop of fairy-tale dwarfs turned to stone by an evil sorcerer” — or so Ken Johnson describes them in his review this morning in the New York Times — they march, mourning the death of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy (1371-1419). These 16-inch-tall alabaster carvings, which these days do most of their weeping at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon in France, have traversed time and the Atlantic for a tour of seven American museums. Their first stop is Medieval Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they’ve been since March and will stay through May 23.

mourner_75Johnson’s report caught my eye first for the gorgeous photo that the Times ran and then for the story’s mention that the tour was organized under the wing of FRAME (the French Regional and American Museum Exchange), the innovative organization of which the Portland Art Museum has been a leading and vigorous member. The almost forty alabaster carvings in The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculptures From the Court of Burgundy will move on to FRAME member museums in St. Louis, Dallas, Minneapolis, Los Angeles (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), San Francisco and Richmond — but not to Portland.

Why not?

Continue reading It’s mourning. Do you know where your weeping medieval alabasters are? →

Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Journalism, Theater, Visual Art

Sunday links: Art garden and a wild and crazy quote

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A quick Sunday scatter of good stuff in other places:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer," 1573, Louvre/Paris. Wikimedia Commons*************************

FEED THE BODY, FEED THE MIND: Under the headline Philbrook Museum of Art Trades Tulips for Tomatoes, artdaily.org reports that Tulsa’s Philbrook — the museum that Brian Ferriso left to become executive director of the Portland Art Museum — is replacing its 3,600-square-foot south formal garden with a vegetable garden and will give the veggies to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma to help Oklahomans get through the economic crisis. Now, there’s a conceptual art project we can get behind. Bravo. Too often when times get tough, culture and shelter (and schools, for that matter) get tossed into an either/or funding game, turning natural allies into competing animals at a shrinking watering hole. As this project reveals, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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STEVE MARTIN UNLEASHED: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has a good report in Sunday’s O! section on how things turned out when students from the local high school finally got to put on their production of Steve Martin‘s stage comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. They performed it at Eastern Oregon University instead of at the high school because the school board, after receiving parental complaints about the play’s purported immorality, called the thing off.

Martin then stepped in and paid for the production himself, and in a letter to the local paper he came up with this gem, which Hughley quotes:

“I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as ‘people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.’ With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle.”

Yes, Xenophobia, there is an Oregon. But the good news to take from Marty’s story is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

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IN SWITZERLAND, A SWING TO THE RIGHT: A few art insiders complained when Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ chief art critic, decamped to Europe for a year instead of paying attention to what was happening on the art scene stateside. Not me. I’ve enjoyed his Abroad reports. They’ve helped an already top-notch critic broaden his knowledge even further, and they’ve given readers a lot of good stories they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

One of the best is last week’s report from Zurich, In Quiet Switzerland, Outspoken Rapper Takes on the Far Right, about an Estonian-born Swiss rapper stage-named Stress who’s stirred up some welcome controversy by tackling directly in his lyrics chemicals tycoon Christoph Blocher, powerful head of the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party, who is one scary dude. Like Hitler and Stalin before him, Blocher uses his own sanitized vision of cultural purity in the arts to push his ideal of the perfect, and perfectly xenophobic, homeland. Kimmelman writes:

Mr. Blocher used his own collection of works by 19th-century painters like Albert Anker and Ferdinand Hodler in shows he organized to illustrate what he has said represent wholesome Swiss ideals: women in the home, farmers milking cows, a nation historically separated from outsiders by more than just mountains.

Steve Martin, the good people of Switzerland need you. Now.

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A CREATIVE WAKE-UP CALL IN PORTLAND?: Also in Sunday’s O! section of The Oregonian, visual arts critic D.K. Row files this intriguing report on how the flap over City Hall’s recent push to bulldoze Portland’s Memorial Coliseum has lit an activist fire under at least a slice of the city’s creative class. D.K. quotes architect/activist Stuart Emmons:

“We’ve just said, ‘Enough.’ We need to speak out for what we believe in and quit allowing politics to keep us from what’s right. This goes way beyond Memorial Coliseum.”

This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the art of politics.” Stay tuned. Let’s see where this thing heads.

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ON ART AND THE CRITICS: A recent Art Scatter post about Rocco Landesman’s appointment to run the National Endowment for the Arts sparked a heady and rambunctious round of comments that went off in all sorts of directions. I hope to get back to some of those issues, notably the meaning of “local” in the arts and the role of failure in creativity: Is it a necessary element of discovery, or a cult of self-absorption that ignore the needs and rights of the audience? Then there was this note from playwright, filmmaker, novelist and teacher Charles Deemer:

“At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.”

Can’t argue with that. But if you’d like to, hit that comment button.

Bob Hicks, Environment, Film, General, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: of foxes and hen houses, etc.

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An egg crisis is ravaging the hen house.

They’re disappearing.

And the foxes are shocked, shocked.

While the hens bemoan the loss of their little ones — several survivors have been running around crying that the sky is falling — the foxes have gathered the whole barnyard to declare that Something Must Be Done. Trust them: We Must Act Now.

The head fox has declared that the true victims are the foxes themselves, who have been cruelly deprived of their stockpile of eggs. To avert catastrophe, the foxes’ hoards must be replenished: The hens must lay 700 billion new eggs, right now. The farmer, blinking owlishly, agrees. One wise old fox, who yearns to live in the farm house, has declared that he will Suspend All Other Activities while he Helps Find a Solution. That solution will be found by foxes, and foxes alone. And the solution is that the Hens Will Provide.

Meanwhile, no omelettes this morning. And for music lovers, the rooster doesn’t much feel like crowing, either. Where’s Aesop when we need him? Where’s George Orwell?

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NEW GUY AT THE GUGGENHEIM: Those who can curate, curate. Those who can curate well, lead museums. At least, that’s the mini-trend among major museums in New York.

Following the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s appointment earlier this month of European tapestry curator Thomas P. Campbell to replace the venerated Philippe de Montebello as director, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as the Guggenheim‘s next director.

Like Campbell, Armstrong rose in the ranks on the strength of his curatorial qualities, not his showmanship: His specialty is contemporary art, a good fit for the Goog. And the ever-busy Carol Vogel, in her report for the New York Times, suggests that after years of expansion in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and (coming in 2013) Abu Dhabi, Armstrong and the Guggenheim are ready to shift their focus back to New York. Another good report comes from The Art Newspaper.

Is it possible that sober financial times are bringing more prudential museum leaders? De Montebello, of course, has combined prudence, measured daring and a brilliant commitment to the art for more than 30 years at the Met, following the mercurial reign of supershowman Thomas Hoving. At the Guggenheim, Armstrong will follow high-rolling Thomas Krens. And when the Portland Art Museum‘s Hoving-like director John Buchanan headed south to take over the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the museum board replaced him with Brian Ferriso and charged Ferriso to quiet the waters and keep things on an even keel.

The question is, will an even keel fill the cruise ship with customers? Is generating excitement gauche, or is it part of what a museum is about? To what extent does a museum exist for insiders, and to what extent does it have a duty to appeal to the general public?

These are uneasy times, and leading a major — or modest — museum is no easy task. To Armstrong, Campbell, Ferriso and their compatriots, then: Good luck, be wise, balance well, take risks, and don’t forget the public.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SOMEDAY: Someday Lounge, that is. The Old Town Portland night spot and hub for interesting alternative arts has turned two and is celebrating with a bunch of events this weekend. The one that catches our eye is the premiere of Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, a documentary about Portland’s Chinatown (which is more or less where the Someday coexists) to be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28. Here’s what the Lounge has to say:

Portlander Ivy Lin directed and produced Pig Roast & Tank of Fish. “I’ve always wondered why our Chinatown went from being the second largest in the U.S. to almost like a ghost town. It’s in the heart of downtown, with that beautiful gate and garden and nothing much else,” says Lin. “Earlier this year, 70 Asians showed up at a city council meeting to testify against the the siting of another homeless shelter on Block 25 in Chinatown. I was not even involved with the Chinese community then, but I was very moved and this event became the inspiration for this project.”

This documentary is the first-ever motion picture to acknowledge the history/legacy of Chinatown, Portland’s oldest neighborhood where the pioneers of many ethnic communities once called “home.” It includes some rarely seen footage of ongoing cultural/social activities behind closed doors…Chinatown is not dead!

See you there, Friends of Art Scatter.