Monthly Archives: February 2012

I Want to Be a Modern Day Gertrude Stein for Jacksonville

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art is proud to present “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde”, on view from February 28th through June 3rd in the Tisch Galleries. The Stein siblings—Gertrude, Leo, Michael, and his wife Sarah—were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the 20th century. The Steins’ Saturday-evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums. The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde—at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 28 through June 3, 2012—will unite some 200 works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins’ patronage had on the artists of their day and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art.

Beginning with the art that Leo Stein collected when he moved to Paris in early 1903—including paintings and prints by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir—the exhibition will trace the evolution of the Steins’ taste and examine the close relationships that formed between individual members of the family and their artist friends. While focusing on works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, the exhibition will also include paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Manguin, André Masson, Elie Nadelman, Francis Picabia, and others. Highlights from the exhibition include Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), purchased by Leo Stein from the famous “fauve” Salon d’Automne of 1905, and Picasso’s painting of Gertrude Stein (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which will be presented alongside additional portraits of the Stein family by Matisse, Picasso, and Vallotton.

Life-size photographic enlargements of the Steins’ Parisian apartments will be displayed throughout the exhibition to show how the art was installed in the Steins’ residences. Additional themes covered in the exhibition include Sarah Stein’s role in the formation of the Académie Matisse, the influential art school that operated from 1908 to 1911; Sarah and Michael’s commission of a villa from Le Corbusier; and Gertrude’s later collaborations with Juan Gris, Élie Lascaux, Francis Rose, and Virgil Thomson.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (colloquially The Met) is an art museum on the eastern edge of Central Park, along “Museum Mile” in New York City, United States. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial
 departments. The main building, often called “the Met”, is one of the world’s largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location, at “The Cloisters”, in Upper Manhattan, which features medieval art. Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens. The founders included businessmen and financiers, as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day, who wanted to open a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. It opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. Today, the Met measures almost 1/4-mile (400 m) long and occupies more than 2,000,000 square feet (190,000 m2). The Met’s permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by seventeen separate curatorial departments, each with a specialized staff of curators and scholars, as well as four dedicated conservation departments and a department of scientific research.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. After negotiations with the City of New York in 1871, the Met was granted the land between the East Park Drive, Fifth Avenue, and the 79th and 85th Street Transverse Roads in Central Park. A red-brick and stone “mausoleum” was designed by American architect Calvert Vaux and his collaborator Jacob Wrey Mould. Vaux’s ambitious building was not well-received; the building’s High Victorian Gothic style being already dated prior to completion, and the president of the Met termed the project “a mistake.” Within 20 years, a new architectural plan engulfing the Vaux building was already being executed. Since that time, many additions have been made including the distinctive Beaux-Arts Fifth Avenue facade, Great Hall, and Grand Stairway. These were designed by architect and Met trustee Richard Morris Hunt, but completed by his son, Richard Howland Hunt in 1902 after his father’s death. The wings that completed the Fifth Avenue facade in the 1910s were designed by the firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The modernistic sides and rear of the museum were the work of Roche, Dinkeloo, and Associates in the 1970s and 1980s. Visit the museum’s website at http://www.metmuseum.org/

Courtesy of Art Knowledge News.

The World’s Most Difficult Museum

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Reduced to its bare particulars, it can sound like one of the strangest museums in the world. It holds no special exhibitions, it has no web site, admission to the public is free, but it can take as long as six months to get in. For those who succeed in getting in, there are treasures on the order of John Singer Sargent, Asher B. Durand and Jacob Lawrence to be seen. But works by two of the most famous artists in the collection, Cézanne (a still life and a handful of landscapes) and Monet (a gauzy view of the Seine), are kept out of public view. For a few years the collection’s lone Grandma Moses painting was seen almost exclusively by a pre-teenage girl from Georgia named Amy Carter and her friends. Add to all this the longstanding tradition that privileged guests are allowed to use some of the historical artifacts as desks and to eat off of others, and it can be a curator’s nightmare. But it is never boring, caring for the collection of the 210-year-old museum that one of its residents, Thomas Jefferson, described as palatial enough for “two emperors, one pope and the Grand Lama,” and a later one, Harry S. Truman, bemoaned as “a great white jail.”

“It is a museum but it’s also the White House, and so it’s a working house,” said William G. Allman, who has worked in the curator’s office here for 35 years, and has been chief curator since 2002. “There are times when you run screaming, telling somebody, ‘You can’t put those hot television lights up against the portrait of Washington!’ You worry about someone spilling a drink on something. Sometimes somebody breaks a piece of furniture. But it’s the nature of it. It’s a place where people actually live.” As if to underscore his point a black-and-white blur, Bo, the Obamas’ Portuguese water dog, could be seen through the window, racing across the South Lawn, for the moment not posing his own threat to the art in the house that has become his own.

Like most of his six predecessors since the office of the White House curator was created by Jacqueline Kennedy in 1961, Mr. Allman has worked almost as hard at keeping a low profile as he does at overseeing the 50,000 objects that are cataloged as part of the house’s permanent collection, from the fish forks in the state silver service to the 1938 Steinway grand piano with heroic gold-leafed eagles for legs. “The residence staff here prides itself on being behind the scenes,” he said.

But this year marks the 50th anniversary of both the curator’s office and the White House Historical Association, the non-profit organization that supports the acquisition and conservation of White House art and artifacts. And so Mr. Allman was recently persuaded by Obama staffers to emerge from the relative anonymity of his office (in a windowless former servants’ dining room, near the White House bowling alley on the ground floor) and to talk about the role he has played in shaping the house’s art and décor through seven administrations (which explains how he remembers that Grandma Moses’s pastoral scene “July Fourth” once graced Amy Carter’s bedroom). On a recent sunny afternoon he showed a visitor around the hushed and largely deserted ground floor and first floor of the house, through the historic public rooms, Blue, Green, Red, East, that are the nation’s domestic patrimony and the curator’s primary responsibility.

The second and third floors, the first family’s residence, are less his domain, though he advises on its art and décor. And especially since 2009, when the Obamas made
headlines by borrowing pieces by the kind of adventurous contemporary artists, including Ed Ruscha, Glenn Ligon and Susan Rothenberg, who had never been seen before in the White House, the dialogue between the upper and lower levels of the house has begun to change aesthetic assumptions here in ways that Mr. Allman said he had never experienced before. It has, for example, led to a thorough modernization of the wish list that the White House Historical Association and the curator’s office keep (along with the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, appointed by the president) to guide their purchases of works by American artists not yet represented in the house’s permanent collection. Before the Obama administration the list had not yet made its way, art-historically, up to Abstract Expressionism. It included Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and other lyrical 20th century realists, and, in the work of Arthur Dove, it dipped one toe tentatively into abstraction. There are still no purely abstract works in the collection now, though a Georgia O’Keeffe donated in 1998 plays with it, those that the Obamas added are all on loan from other museums and galleries.

“We realized as we came into an administration that had more of an affection for abstract art that we really needed to update our list,” Mr. Allman said. So now that list is longer, about 50 artists, and includes New York School names like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, along with others like Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. The change has prompted Mr. Allman, 58, whose main expertise lies mostly in silver and furniture, to survey the 18th and 19th century portraits and landscapes on the house’s walls and for the first time to try envisioning something like Franz Kline’s volcanic black-on-white slashes hanging in their august company. “Do we think those things are going to go together?” he said. “Hmm. Maybe not now, but that’s the nice thing about the kind of place this is, that maybe someday it will.”

Mr. Allman, whose job requires a phenomenal breadth of historical knowledge, much of it having little to do with art, concedes that he has never had to focus much on American art made during his lifetime. He recounted an exchange with Michael Smith, the California decorator who advises the Obamas and who helped them pick the art for their living spaces. “Michael said to me, ‘Now you’re a modern art expert,’ ” he recalled. “And I said, ‘How did that happen?’” But while there might be gaps in his expertise, many who have worked with him over the years say that Mr. Allman, a boyish-faced man with an unabashedly folksy manner, has mastered a kind of diplomatic dexterity that may be more important to his job.

In a historic house that is continuously inhabited, and always under political scrutiny, art decisions are never just aesthetic. When President Obama requested that a portrait of Truman replace one of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Cabinet Room, he was in essence reversing a Bush administration policy (one that had also been the policy of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush White Houses). When the first lady changed her mind in 2009 about hanging a painting by the African-American artist Alma W. Thomas in her office, some critics accused her of giving in to conservative commentators who criticized the painting as a fraud because it reworked and paid homage to a famous Matisse collage. The first lady’s office took great pains to say that the removal had nothing to do with politics; the painting just didn’t fit the space where it had been intended to hang.

Leslie Greene Bowman, a former member of the White House preservation committee and president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, recounted a reupholstery crisis several years ago involving the red Empire chairs in the second-floor Cross Hall in the White House, a frequent stage for televised events. The historically accurate red chosen for the fabric looked practically nuclear on camera. So Mr. Allman quietly managed to find a shade that would horrify neither historians nor network producers. “It’s the kind of situation where lots of curators would have put their foot down, but Bill has a sense of humor about these things,” she said. “It was color theory in action. These are the kinds of challenges that curators never have to face in a regular museum,” she said. Mr. Allman likes to point out that while it might not be a regular museum, the White House is indeed a museum under federal legislation, Public Law 87-286, passed in 1961. And in 1988 it was even accredited by the American Association of Museums. “Now I think that in the process they conceded that we didn’t meet some of their standards,” he said, smiling. “Most museums have all these complicated long-range plans. Our long-range plan? It’s pretty much just to make it through the next inauguration.”

Courtesy of Art Knowledge News.

Integrated Project Delivery Means Integrated Project Sales for Healthcare Vendors

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“Forget about Integrated Project Delivery – Integrated Project Sales is what we need!”

The big buzz word lately has been “Integrated Project Delivery.” That is great for the hospitals. What about us vendors? I want to make this year’s buzz word “Integrated Project Sales.”

You automatically get the Integrated Project Delivery when we vendors form teams to provide more complete projects to Healthcare. Today everyone thinks it is smart to make the Designers, Builders and subcontractors part of the team from the beginning of a project. But this doesn’t consider whether they have worked together in the past successfully. It also misses the opportunity to add all the other parts that make up a successful project. What if you formed a team of local “Experts” and marketed your team together as a one stop resource to Healthcare? What if you made realtors, bankers, lawyers, furniture suppliers, CPAs, insurance agents, art consultants and others a part of your team? Then you could find out about all the other vendors projects and become involved (when appropriate and invited) before the project gets out on the street and becomes about “best price” instead of “best value.” Now what you would have from your team is Integrated Project Sales, and the healthcare client would receive the maximum value because you would begin to work together with your teammates more and more often. This would mean that you would begin to find the strong suits of your teammates and their parts of the project that they don’t care to do so you can fill the gaps. We as sales persons to the industry want our clients to receive the best value from our projects, but what we really care about is SALES. If we don’t make the sale, we don’t have a chance to help the client with “best value.” By combining the sales leads of a group of 50 vendors who provide different services to Healthcare, and each of us referring the other teammates to each project, we can boost our close rates by 1000% this year. See www.healthcarebusinessreferrals.com for a plug and play system that will easily get this done for your firm. Let’s start a movement this year to Integrate our Sales!

-Brad Hollett, LEED AP, BD+C and a Medical Office Expert

Jen Jones Brings You “The Art Stars of New Orleans”

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Jen Jones brings you “THE ART STARS OF NEW ORLEANS”
a.k.a. The First Sin City comes to the First Coast
Friday, February 24, 2012
5-8 pm
One Night VIP Opening ONLY!
CoRK (Corner of Rosselle & King Streets in Riverside)
2689 Rosselle St., Jacksonville, FL 32204
With musical guest Cyrus GQ
The NOLA Arts District is Dripping with Creativity!
Includes:
Georges Schmidt
Frank Kelley, Jr.
Steve Martin
Eileen O’Donnell
Tony Mose
David Sullivan
…and their friends…

Cynthia Walburn Featured This Sunday at Biscottis

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Artist Cynthia Walburn will be opening “Impressionism at its Most Serene” this Sunday, February 12th from 4 to 6 pm at Biscottis. Please come and meet the artist.

Free gourmet appetizers will be served, along with half-priced fine wine.

About Cynthia Walburn:

Florida artist Cynthia Walburn was born in Southern California and grew up in South Florida. Upon graduation from the University of Florida at Gainesville, Ms. Walburn moved to North Florida where she has resided for over twenty years. Cynthia is formally trained in the fields of architecture and interior design, and had a deep love of painting since childhood. Her mother’s twin sister was a professional artist and gallery owner in Coral Gables, Florida where she developed her love for the arts. Attending art shows in South Florida (especially Coconut Grove) and growing up in a lush tropical environment enriched her strong love for art and nature. Now living in North Florida, the beaches, marshes, and Saint Johns River as well as numerous pools and fountains provide much of the inspiration for her work.
Cynthia has experimented with many forms of applied and fine arts including wall paintings, and large scale site commissions, since the early 1980’s.  Her works are featured in numerous private and corporate collections including The Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art – Café Nola, Superstock Corporate Offices, Vestcor Corporate Offices, Jacksonville Mayors Office, Nemours Children’s Hospital Corporate Offices, and a two story multiple canvas commission at the Baptist Heart Hospital in Jacksonville.  She is also a champion of children’s and art therapy based programs in North Florida.  Don’t miss meeting her this Sunday!

I Graduated!

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Exciting news! I recently graduated from the Jacksonville Women’s Business Center’s Financial MattersSM, and I am the first recipient of the Linda Larkin Smith Scholarship.

The Jacksonville Women’s Business Center (JWBC), a department of the JAX Chamber Foundation, celebrated 17 new graduates of Financial MattersSM including Jennifer Jones, the first recipient of the Linda Larkin Smith Scholarship for a woman business owner from the artistic community.

“The Financial MattersSM program offers an invaluable business mentoring experience,” said Jones, owner of Jen Jones Art Consulting. “I am honored to be the recipient of the first ever Linda Larkin Smith Financial MattersSM Scholarship, and I am extremely proud to represent her dream of keeping the Jacksonville arts community flourishing and alive. The program provided me with the understanding and knowledge to make better business decisions, particularly now when the arts community is facing so many economic challenges.”

The Financial MattersSM program links a woman business owner with a hand-selected pair of local, professional, volunteer mentors from the banking, accounting or financial industries. Business owners learn how to use financial reports and information as management tools.

“This program provides a sound foundation of utilizing company financial statements and basic accounting functions to better manage their business,” said Karen Farah, vice president/commercial banker at FirstAtlanticBank, who along with Certified Public Accountant Kristen Black, served as Jones’ mentors. “The Chamber is a tour de force when it comes to match-making professionals for their mutual benefit.”

The Financial MattersSM scholarship honors Linda Larkin Smith, JWBC Advisory Board member and financial planner, who died April 2010. Smith was vice president of investments at Raymond James & Associates, which is funding the scholarship and one of the first sponsors and mentors of the Financial MattersSM mentoring program in 2005. Smith’s family and colleagues from Raymond James & Associates attended the graduation.

Beginning April 1, JWBC will accept applications for Financial MattersSM. Qualified applicants can apply in April for the Linda Larkin Smith Scholarship. For information on The Financial MattersSM program qualifications and scholarship guidelines, visit www.myjaxchamber.com or contact JWBC Director Pat Blanchard at (904) 366-6640 or pat.blanchard@myjaxchamber.com.

About JAX Chamber
The JAX Chamber is the business membership organization dedicated to driving quality economic growth in Northeast Florida to make this region the best place to work, live and play.

About the Jacksonville Women’s Business Center
The Jacksonville Women’s Business Center (JWBC) is a department of the JAX Chamber Foundation. It provides mentoring, entrepreneurial education, consulting and business connections to advance the success of women entrepreneurs at every stage of business development. JWBC primarily serves aspiring and existing women business owners in the seven-county area while also serving all entrepreneurs through programs such as LaunchPad. The JWBC is funded in part by a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.”

Courtesy of Citybizlist.

Facebook Going Public to Make Graffiti Artist David Choe a Very Rich Man

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This is quite a controversial/thought provoking article, thought you would enjoy reading it too.  This man leads the epitomy of what I would term an oxymoronic life.   Let me know YOUR thoughts.   Jen

When Facebook announced its $5 billion public offering on Wednesday February 1st, a great many people became millionaires and billionaires (at least on paper). Some of them are very well known, such as Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder, ot
hers are family members or friends, who invested in the company during its early days. However, a Los Angeles graffiti artist, David Choe stands to join the art elite, potentially making more money from the sale than Sotheby’s record-breaking $200.7m (£127m) 2008 sale of a collection of work by Damien Hirst.

In 2005, David Choe was first commissioned by Facebook’s then president, Sean parker. to paint murals for the Facebook head office in Palo Alto. Offered the choice of a fee in the “thousands of dollars” or shares in the company, Choe elected to take the shares. Mark Zuckerberg then later asked Choe to paint art for its second office in 2007. Artworks from the original Palo Alto office building were removed, and can now be seen in Facebook offices around the world, and the company have maintained their relationship with Choe, who is currently painting their new offices in Menlo Park, California.

David Choe (born 1976, Los Angeles, California) is a painter, muralist, graffiti artist and graphic novelist of Korean descent. In 1990, inspired by L.A. graffiti pioneers Mear One and Hex, Choe started venting his teenage anger by scrawling graffiti on bus benches, billboards and back alleys across the city. Immediately after graduating from high school, Choe departed on the first of many adventures, and spent the next two years freight-hopping, hitchhiking, hustling and stealing his way around the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When he returned to Los Angeles at the age of 21, he decided he needed formal training if he wanted to be a “real” artist, and enrolled in the only art school that accepted him, the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland. There he came under the influence of professor Barron Storey’s raw, intimate, painterly style. A week-long spell in an Oakland jail for graffiti provided an incentive to settle down a bit, he returned to his family home in Los Angeles, and began illustrating and writing for magazines including Hustler, Ray Gun and Vice. Around the same time, he began his ongoing relationship with the Asian pop culture store-cum-magazine Giant Robot, which has continued to be mutually beneficial to this day.

He also started showing his paintings to art galleries, which exhibited little interest. In defiance, Choe hung his work in a local ice cream shop, where the exhibition was so sucessful that it lasted for two years, with Choe replenishing pieces as they sold. Always fascinated by comics, especially the work of Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane,

Choe initially dreamed of a career as a comic book creator. In a single night in 1996, he wrote a 35-page tale of violent sexual obsession which, coupled with drawings and paintings that he created over the next couple of years, eventually became the graphic novel Slow Jams. Choe initially made about 200 copies of Slow Jams on a photocopier and gave them away at Comic-Con in 1998, hoping to interest a publisher. Later that year, he submitted Slow Jams for the Xeric Grant and was awarded $5,000 to self-publish a second, expanded edition of 1,000 which came out in 1999 with a cover price of $4. Over the next decade, Slow Jams became a cult phenomenon, and in recent years, increasingly rare copies of the graphic novel have changed hands on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

Having caught the attention of the entertainment and advertising industry with Slow Jams and that makeshift art exhibit, Choe soon found himself in great demand for commercial illustration and graphic design. Within a few years, he was successful enough to be able to turn down many offers of commercial work in order to concentrate on his own paintings and murals. Simultaneously, Choe’s best friend Harry Kim began documenting his life, often living with him while videotaping his frenzied art-making, colorful personal life and intimate thoughts. Over the next 10 years, Kim would capture thousands of hours of Choe’s everyday existence as an artist, footage which would eventually become the documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. All the while, Choe continued his obsessive traveling, from making an expedition to the jungles of the Congo to painting graffiti and murals around the globe alongside the world’s greatest urban artists for the street culture brand Upper Playground.

In late 2003, Choe arrived in Tokyo and was jailed within 24 hours. An undercover security guard had approached him threateningly, and due to the language barrier, he misunderstood the man’s intentions and reacted instinctively, punching him in the face. Choe ended up spending three months behind bars for violent assault, out of contact with his family or friends, and under threat of being imprisoned for two years. After three months, he was released on the condition that he leave Japan immediately and not return. His prison art has been the subject of constant speculation and interest ever since. Returning home to San Jose with a new perspective on life, Choe began the task of rebuilding himself from the ground up, focusing hard on his career and channeling his more self-destructive impulses into somewhat less risky pursuits such as gambling and drumming.

After holding several solo shows in San Jose and San Francisco, he was offered a solo exhibit at the Santa Rosa Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. He held his first New York solo exhibit, “Gardeners of Eden,” in 2007 at Jonathan Levine Gallery in Chelsea, and in 2008, he had his first UK solo exhibition, “Murderous Heart,” in both the London and Newcastle locations of Lazarides Gallery, simultaneously. It has often been said that Choe’s greatest artwork is his life, itself. Over the past 15 years, Choe has built a worldwide reputation for his raw, vibrant, frenetic imagery, exhibiting in galleries in Barcelona, Beijing, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, New York, and many places in between. He says he makes art because he has no other choice. “I don’t know how many times I have to say this—in all honesty and all kidding aside—without art I’d be 110% dead or in jail. I have a murderer’s blood coursing through my veins. I try to be good, but I’m just a bad man who happens to know how to wield a pencil and smear paint in fancy ways.” Visit the artist’s website at …http://www.davidchoe.com/

Courtesy of Art Knowledge News.