31st Annual Mayor's Arts Awards special honorees and finalists

Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (DCCAH) have announced the special honorees and finalists of the 31st Annual Mayor's Arts Awards.

My good bud, printmaker and visual artist (and DMV treasure) Lou Stovall will receive the Mayor's Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement. Stovall is the founder of Workshop, Inc., and it a master printmaker who has been commissioned to print works of such noted artists as Josef Albers, Peter Blume, Alexander Calder, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Loïs Mailou Jones and others.

Theatre producer Julianne Brienza will receive the Mayor's Arts Award for Visionary Leadership. Brienza is a founder and current president and chief executive officer of Capital Fringe, which connects multi-disciplinary artistic experiences to over 40,000 audiences annually and has grown to become the second largest unjuried Fringe Festival in the United States.

Poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller will receive the Mayor's Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. Miller is the author of several collections of poetry, and his anthology "In Search of Color Everywhere" was awarded the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award in 1994. He has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine in the United States, and was founder and director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, which presented African American poets and poets of color to the general public.

"Our three special honorees represent some of the brightest, most accomplished talents in the District of Columbia," said Arthur Espinoza, Jr., Executive Director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. "The impact of their work is felt locally, nationally and internationally. They, along with all this year's award finalists, represent the incredible richness and depth of our city's creative communities."
In addition to the special honorees, awards will be presented to DC-based individual artists and organizations in the following categories: Outstanding New Artist, Excellence in the Humanities, Outstanding Student, Excellence in the Arts. Excellence in Arts Teaching and Excellence in the Creative Industries.

The 2016 Mayor's Arts Award finalists are: Story District, Michael Janis, DC Jazz Festival, Washington Improv Theatre, Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital, Washington Performing Arts, DC Shorts, Pan American Symphony Orchestra, Post Classical Ensemble, Cory L. Stowers, Falun Dafa Association of Washington, Carolyn Malachi, One Common Unity, Sandy Bellamy, Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, Dance Metro DC, Stone Soup Films, Leron Boyd, DC SCORES, Project Create, Amanda Swift, LifePieces to Masterpieces, Washington Performing Arts, Dawn Johnson, Inner City-Inner Child, Young Playwrights' Theater, Split This Rock, Max Tyler Gibbons, Tara Campbell and Maverick Lemons.


My bet is on Michael Janis... of course!

The 31st Annual Mayor's Arts Awards will be presented on Thursday, September 22 at 7:00 PM at the Historic Lincoln Theatre, 1215 U Street NW, Washington, DC. Admission is free and open to the public. This year, the annual awards are presented as part of 202Creates, a new initiative of Mayor Bowser's that showcases the diversity of the District's creative economy. For more information, visit www.dcarts.dc.gov or call 202-724-5613.

Sam Gilliam, David Kordansky and the gem...

The WaPo's Geoff Edgers checked in over the weekend with a really good (and exceptionally rare) WaPo article on a DMV artist, although as the most causal observer of the planet's visual arts scene would note, Sam Gilliam in not a "local" artist in the pejorative way that some (not me) like to apply that label.


People in the arts love labels!


Sam Gilliam never did, and will never do... and that's a major reason why I admire the DMV's most famous artist.


Sam previous descent into "oblivion" may have been grossly exaggerated, and he certainly never traded art for detergent -- as once claimed in this article (On the other hand, I once traded art for clams when I used to sell my art school assignments at the Pike Place Market in Seattle), but Sam did, apparently trade artwork for dental work.


I currently trade artwork for my laundry services and my laundry guy (who happens to be one of the biggest DMV art collectors, if not the biggest, in the region), has a lot of my work.


But Sam Gilliam's work certainly never rose to the commodity price level that an artist of his stature should command.


If you doubt that, then check what his work goes for in the secondary market, where as late as 2016 you can pick up a signed and numbered litho for $350 (this one went for $140! and this "photoprint" sold for $20 bucks six years ago!), or a bit earlier an original double sided painting for $1,400!


Check out recent past secondary market sales here.


But enough about these small things... there's another gem in this article about Gilliam.


That gem of information is something that I have been hollering about for years... here it is:

Then David Kordansky called. The Los Angeles gallerist was one more person who felt that Gilliam needed more attention. 

When they met in 2012, Kordansky found Gilliam’s work being shown in the District, New Mexico and what he calls “decentralized markets outside the art market essentially.” 

“It needed to be brought to the curators. It needed to be seen at the international art fairs..." Kordansky says.

The bolded words are the gem... bolding is mine, and Kordansky hit the nail right on the head.


Read the whole article here, and pay homage to this great master.


PS - My own secondary market record at the same auction house makes Sam's look great... cough, cough... and they misspelled my name!

Sam Gilliam Finally Takes Off

From Bloomberg:

In the late 1960s, the American artist Sam Gilliam started to make “drape paintings,” wherein he would cover canvases with paint and hang them from the wall without stretchers. The paintings became sculpture, and the paint itself—acrylic pigment mixed with resin—a type of construction material.

 Much like the output of his contemporaries (Gilliam came a few years after Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland), his work falls in the Color Field genre of painting, an abstract, postwar movement that turned canvases into flat picture planes. But unlike those same contemporaries, Gilliam has been almost entirely neglected by the art market until fairly recently. This April, his work achieved its highest auction result ever, when a 1969 painting with a high estimate of $60,000 sold for $197,000 at Swann Auctions in New York. In contrast, Frankenthaler’s auction record is $2.8 million; Noland’s auction record is $2.1 million; and Louis’s is just under $3 million, or approximately 1,400 percent more than Gilliam's best.

The curious case of artist Rachel Dolezal

If by now you don't know who Rachel Dolezal is, and what her immense deception was, then you just got on the Internets for the first time ever a few minutes ago and came to this website on your first click ever.

In summary, Rachel Dolezal is a white female artist and professor, whom for the last few years has deceived people into believing that she was African-American, or as she prefers to be called: black.

She's not, her parents and adopted brothers (who are black) have "outed" her, and by now pretty much the entire planet knows this. There are many hypothesis already submitted to make your head spin as to why this person did this, and although this charade leaves a distasteful taste in my mind, I'm trying really hard not to judge this lady for this action. The Twitter world is also having a lot of fun with her, and there are a lot of funny memes floating around as well. That's a photo of her as a young girl in Montana.

She has plenty of other detractors which are also vectors into forming an opinion about Dolezal, and one thing emerges clear: she can fabricate a tall tale.

In an interview with The Easterner, the newspaper for Eastern Washington University, Dolezal said that she was born in a “Montana teepee.” She added that her family “hunted their food with bows and arrows.” 

She has also said that as a child, she and her parents lived in Colorado and South Africa. Her parents say all of that is false and that Dolezal never lived in either place.

She has stated that while living in South Africa (which she never did) with her parents, they beat her with a baboon whip, whatever that is; punishing her and her siblings by "skin complexion." 

As BuzzFeed reports, according to her father, her “oldest son Izaiah,” is actually her adopted brother; her parents have adopted four black children.

In another issue of The Easterner, Dolezal reportedly told a reporter that the man who raised her with her mother is her stepfather. Her parents have denied that.

In January, a photo of Dolezal and a black man appeared on the Spokane NAACP's Facebook page, and the man was identified as Dolezal's father. A similar photo then appeared in her personal Facebook account where she identified the man as her "Dad." Subsequently the man has been identified as Albert Wilkerson - a black man from North Idaho who had volunteered at the Human Rights Education Institute in the past when Dolezal was in charge of that organization's educational programs.

In one of her classes, she allegedly asked for a Hispanic student to volunteer for class questions. When a white Hispanic student raised her hand, Dolezal allegedly told the student that she "didn't look Hispanic" and asked for another volunteer. That takes "cojones!"

She has a local DMV connection:  She went to Howard University for her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, where she also taught undergraduate art students, and was around the DMV until around 2005. As as far as I can figure out, the switch to "black" happened around the time that she headed out West, and then, according to Buzzfeed, she reportedly told her adoptive brother (who is black) not to “blow her cover”, as that's where apparently she started "passing as black."

In the The Eastener interview we learn that:

She met her now ex-husband and afterward moved to Washington D.C. in 1999 where they married and where Dolezal furthered her education in the fine arts at Howard University, graduating with a master’s degree.

“I’m a creator, and so whether that’s painting, whether that’s creating organizationally or creating curriculum, whatever, I like to create things,” she said.

During her time at Howard, her paintings sold quite well in convention centers around the nation, the highest for around $10,000

She met her now ex-husband and afterward moved to Washington D.C. in 1999 where they married and where Doležal furthered her education in the fine arts at Howard University, graduating with a master’s degree.

“I’m a creator, and so whether that’s painting, whether that’s creating organizationally or creating curriculum, whatever, I like to create things,” she said.

During her time at Howard, her paintings sold quite well in convention centers around the nation, the highest for around $10,000.

- See more at: http://easterneronline.com/35006/eagle-life/a-life-to-be-heard/#sthash.1aUk3liU.l9olZOOM.dpuf

She met her now ex-husband and afterward moved to Washington D.C. in 1999 where they married and where Doležal furthered her education in the fine arts at Howard University, graduating with a master’s degree.

“I’m a creator, and so whether that’s painting, whether that’s creating organizationally or creating curriculum, whatever, I like to create things,” she said.

During her time at Howard, her paintings sold quite well in convention centers around the nation, the highest for around $10,000.

- See more at: http://easterneronline.com/35006/eagle-life/a-life-to-be-heard/#sthash.1aUk3liU.l9olZOOM.dpuf

Dolezal is thus a trained, apparently widely exhibited artist, and is/was an Art Instructor at North Idaho College, and an Adjunct Professor of African American Culture at Eastern Washington University, . You can see her artwork here.

Let me be the first one to say that I have no knowledge of any "art circuit" where artists or galleries sell artwork in convention centers, unless Dolezal is talking about art fairs. But let's not dwell on that too long, maybe there is an art circuit, outside of my radar (rather unlikely) and NOT art fairs, where artists sell their work in "convention centers." But even art fairs where in their infancy stage in 1999!

But let's believe her for a minute, and this is getting harder by the second the more we learn about this person. If Rachel Dolezal, as a student at Howard, was selling artwork for as high as $10,000 in 1999, she was not only the top priced student at Howard ever, but also the top priced student in the DMV ever, and at the very top of the artist food chain in the DMV, right along with Sam Gilliam in 1999.

But I had never heard of her until her deceit was exposed a few days ago... in the last few years I've mentored two art students from Howard, and I suspect  that they've never heard of her either... someone popping paintings for up to $10K in 1999 in DC would have been a legend in her school, around the art crowd in the DMV, and in the radar of every art dealer in the city.

And thus, I don't believe Dolezal on this giant art lie either.

Another thing bugs me; there's an impressive level of technical skill in this 2011 Dolezal painting in the way that the paint is handled, the treatment of the light and the wood surfaces... (Update: see http://dcartnews.blogspot.com/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-totally-busted-as-artist.html for a new theory on how some of these very realistic paintings may have been done):

"Recognition" by Rachel Dolezal
Acrylic on Elkhide"
60"x36" c. 2011

That is simply and completely missing from this painting below, which is done in an exceedingly amateurish fashion; almost as if it is the work of another artist:

"Utterance" by Rachel Dolezal
Acrylic on Strips of Elkhide
72"x40" c. 2011

The manner in which the perspective of the figure, the treatment of the hands, and the disaster that is the manner in which the white wood and white bricks have been handled, show a much less skilled artist. This is white straight off the tube with a little black added to make a colorless gray in order to separate the wood slats and bricks and add shadows. The skin tones on the man are also straight out of the tube amateur time.

Both paintings were apparently done in 2011... see where I'm going?

In 2009 she created the below gorgeous piece (Update: see http://dcartnews.blogspot.com/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-totally-busted-as-artist.html for a new theory on how some of these very realistic paintings may have been done)::

"Visitation" by Rachel Dolezal
86"x33" c.2009
Acrylic on Stitched and Sculpted Elkhide

She describes it as:

This one-of-a-kind original features seven different elkhides sewn together with invisible nylon thread, then soaked and sculpted for a free-form piece that defies the need for a frame. The warm tones are rendered in a classical style with acrylic paint and finished with a satin varnish, for ease of maintenance and display.

She adds in her website that the piece is/was "On Tour in Maryland."

But also in 2009 she paints this rather pedestrian work:

"Sabrina"
Oil on Canvas by Rachel Dolezal
18"x24" c. 2009
 

She tells us that this painting features the "artist's younger sister while living in South Africa." It is/was on sale for $1,000 while "On Tour in Mississippi."

Are you starting to see the difference in the way in which the technical skill shows up in some work and it is non-existent in others? That's a head scratcher... and by the way, let's not forget that she never lived in South Africa... I'll let someone else find out if she has an adopted sister named Sabrina, but from what I can tell, she has no sister named Sabrina; The Dolezals’ adopted children are apparently named: Ezra, Izaiah, Esther and Zach.

Two years earlier she was painting like this:

"Untitled" by Rachel Dolezal

Oilstick drawing on sculpted Elkhide, with sculpted Elkhide frame
32"x40"c. 2007

"Miscarriage" by Rachel Dolezal

Size and Media Unknown

c. 2007

Those of you who have read my art criticism over the years know that I encourage artists to explore and visit all forms of styles and subjects and at all costs avoid the Mondrian trap (getting stuck in one style for the rest of your life), but instead follow the Picasso model and re-invent yourself every few years, or the Richter model and explore several avenues at once.

To some extent Dolezal does that, and most of the collages on her website are quite good, bordering on spectacular.

But there's something that bothers me about the also spectacular drift in technical skill in the 2009 - 2011 examples that I have shown above (Update: see http://dcartnews.blogspot.com/2015/06/rachel-dolezal-totally-busted-as-artist.html for a new theory on how some of these very realistic paintings may have been done).

And given Dolezal's now confirmed string of lies, fabrications and abuses, it plants a question in my head as to the authenticity of some of these works.

And after exhaustive search of the Internets for a digital footprint of this artist's works since 1999, I have come up with pretty much zip until 2007, when one image shows up in someone else's blog. Some of her work has already popped up in EBay from earlier periods, and signed by her married name of Rachel Moore, which is a much more common name and yet, plenty of other female artists' works by that name show up in search, but none that I can associate to Dolezal, but at least seems to prove that in 2005 she was "selling" work in the DMV directly, as verified by one of the owners of the pieces being offered on EBay.

For such a financially successful artist, selling works for as high as $10K while a student, the fact that (until recently) almost zero about her art exists on the Interwebs, is both odd and telling.

Update: Part II here and Part III here.

Update 2: After seeing more of Dolezal's work from when she was an active artist in the DMV, it is clear that she's quite a talented painter. It seems to me that she has the technical skill to create work like "Recognition" and "Visitation." This makes the other rather amateurish works displayed above even more puzzling.

Update  3: After reviewing the evidence submitted to me by Dave Castillo, it is clear that Rachel Dolezal is the artist that painted "Sabrina", and "Utterance" and the last two images in this post. The other, more skilled works, now appear to be photo transfers that have been treated with an acrylic medium to make them look like an original painting. See the evidence here.

John Anderson on "Washington Matters"

Read John Anderson's reviews of the Katzen's "Washington Matters" exhibition here. The show is derived from the recently published book Washington Art Matters: Art Life in the Capital 1940–1990 - a terrific book that represents the closing project of the Washington Arts Museum. You can buy the book on Amazon here for less that $11!

Until August 11, the top floor of the American University Museum presents a 50-year retrospective of D.C. art between 1940 and 1989, and it feels much like a multifarious Washington Project for the Arts auction. On view are some muscular works by Jim Sanborn and Robin Rose, as well as a few old standards by Martin Puryear, Sam Gilliam, and Kenneth Noland. But, with more than 80 artists represented in the exhibit—most by a single piece—the show doesn't distill the working careers of the artists involved or offer a coherent sense of identity or movement happening in D.C. The only exception is the featured work from the late 1950s and early '60s, when seemingly every artist in Washington was under the spell of Abstract Expressionism and the so-called Washington Color School. After that, District art hopped all over the map.

Of course, this is an exhibit of some compromise, pulled together in limited time. American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, a consistent supporter of D.C. art, found a hole for an exhibit last year when he learned The Washington Arts Museum was publishing Washington Art Matters, a book on local art from 1940 to 1989. Earlier this year, the book's authors gave Rasmussen a list of artists to include in the show, and the museum got to work plucking the relevant art from private collections and three area museums in under 10 weeks (the museum already owned about a third of the work).

Washington Art Matters, written by Jean Lawlor Cohen, Sidney Lawrence, Elizabeth Tebow, and Benjamin Forgey, is, by the authors' own admission, "well intentioned." Unfortunately, it struggles with the same hurdles the exhibit does. This summary of 50 years of Washington art, condensed into 213 pages, often reads like a summary of a summary.

Anytime that a "summary of 50 years of Washington art, condensed into 213 pages, often reads like a summary of a summary" is put into an art show, some art will be blurred.

In fact, at any group art shows, some art will be blurred.

Anderson's piece is a very good read of this show, and showcases this talented critic's finely tuned and wise insights into the DMV visual arts scene... and it also manages to focus on the Pyrrhic task of trying to write a book and then put up an exhibition that tries to sum up 50 years of anything...

If my first of the three planned books on DC visual artists drew so much air intake (every once in a while I still get an email from an artist being pissed off that he/she wasn't included in the first volume, and there's still one included artist who still fumes because he wasn't included on the cover - even though I had zip to do with that part), can you imagine what a book attempting to discuss 50 years of DC area art achieves in that area?

I was once advised that my first volume listing 100 artists would piss off 10,000 unlisted artists... 200 or so will be somewhat tranquilized by the next two volumes, but I can only think of how many 1940-1989 DC artists feel "excluded" from this volume - that's the real Pyrrhic task for the authors (Jean Lawlor Cohen, Sidney Lawrence, Elizabeth Tebow, and Benjamin Forgey), all of whom must be congratulated on the creation of this important and much needed documentation.

 Anderson asks way too much of this show when he writes:

But, with more than 80 artists represented in the exhibit—most by a single piece—the show doesn't distill the working careers of the artists involved or offer a coherent sense of identity or movement happening in D.C.

I'm not sure that it is possible to distill an entire career in such a setting - even retrospectives struggle to show an artist's career if that artists has had a few decades of production. I am also always puzzled why in the visual arts, we're always looking for a sense of order or as he puts it coherence. It is impossible to ask a diverse group of contemporary artists, much less an entire city or region to all collapse into a identifiable and coherent sense of identity - I challenge anyone to show me such a phenomenom in the last 150 years. In fact, the last time that this happened was probably in the 1800s, but we're still using it as a litmus test somehow.

I betcha that even in the halcyon days of the Washington Color School (I loved this part from Anderson's review: "Perhaps the most significant event that separates us from other cities is that Clement Greenberg came here, the colorful staining of canvas was declared a "school," and the recognition made the art-survey books" - the dude is so right!) there was a truckload of DMV artists who weren't staining canvasses or painting lines.

With respect to the latter, I am still astonished to see how many DMV area shows (two will open today/this weekend) include artwork by living artists who are essentially channeling the stripe painters of the 1960s and are yet being shown in 2013. I have never seen a Washington Color Schoolish type artwork in any art fair around the world in the last decade, but here in the DMV both recent graduates and older artists continue to channel Noland, Davis, etc. Somebody should write about that...

Anderson ends his review by stating:

Of course, there's no question that D.C. has contributed to 20th century art in important ways, and nurtured significant artists, as it continues to do. But Washington Art Matters recycles old, whiny arguments to make that point, and the companion exhibit in the AU Museum was afforded too little time and not enough space to give D.C. art the exclamation point it too often seeks.

Sounds like John is challenging American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen to devote the entire Katzen to a Washington, DC show... cough, cough.

I'm going to see this show, and you have to go see it too... this is Washington, and this is visual art, and visual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists... so go and pay homage to your predecessors. Art school faculties around the region should also all take their classes to this exhibit, and I'd hope that all of our area's museum curators and directors would also take the opportunity to visit and learn about our area's visual arts footprint, but I know that this is asking too much of DMV art curators most of whom who'd rather take a cab to Dulles to fly and go see a group art show by Berlin artists in Germany than take a cab to American University to go see this show... feh!

And thank you to American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, whose drive and insight and skill  shows and demonstrates what a museum can do to become more than white walls that show pictures and instead essentially become a key part of a city. And thank you Jean Lawlor Cohen, Sidney Lawrence, Elizabeth Tebow, and Benjamin Forgey, for this intense and important labor of love.

Finally, there's a panel discussion at the Katzen on July 20 - details here.

Washington Art Matters: The 1980s
Saturday, July 20, 3 p.m.
American University Museum
Admission is free
Art Attack project artist Alberto Gaitán; curator-advocate Jim Mahoney; and on-the-scene writer Lee Fleming discuss the aesthetic and political issues of the 1980s. The panel is moderated by Sidney Lawrence, an emerging artist at the time and the Hirshhorn's PR person until 2003, who is one of the Washington Art Matters, Art Life in the Capital: 1940-1990's authors.

And a closing reception on August 10 at 5PM.

Pheo Para Alliance Fundraiser at the Katzen

The Pheo Para Alliance and
The Katzen Arts Center at The American University
cordially invite you to
THE HEALING ARTS
An Evening of Art, Discussion, Good Food, and
Live and Silent Auctions
Saturday, June 22 at 5:30pm
The American University Museum

Sponsorship Levels:
The Andy Warhol Table For 10: $10,000
The Georgia O’Keefe Table For 8: $6,000
The Larry Rivers Table For 6: $4,500
The Sam Gilliam Table For 4: $3,000

$350/person
$175/person for patients and artists

FUNDS RAISED WILL GO TO RESEARCH FOR FINDING A CURE FOR PHEO PARA.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
5:30-6:30 - Cocktails and Art Exhibit of Prominent Washington Artists (and also by yours truly, easily the prominest of all prominent DC area artists... cough, cough... I will be donating this work) . Silent Auction Opens.
 
6:45-7:15 - Panel Discussion “The Healing Arts”
Dr. Frederick Ognibene, Deputy Director Of Clinical Research Training, National Institutes of Health, Moderator
 
PANELISTS:
Susan B. Magee – Author, INTO THE LIGHT The Healing Art of Kalmon Aron
Shanti Norris – Executive Director of Smith Center for Healing And The Arts
Jerzy Sapieyevski – Award Winning Composer, Pianist, and Educator
Tim Tate – Mixed Media Sculptor, Co-Founder of  The Washington Glass School

Humanitarian Award Presentation to Dr. Antonio Tito Fojo (a fellow Cuban-American by the way).
 
7:30-9:30 – Dinner, Entertainment, Live Auction
 
9:30 – Grand Finale

PLEASE RSVP BY FRIDAY, JUNE 14
Checks payable to
Pheo Para Alliance can be sent to:
6111 Western Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20015
To register online, please visit
www.pheo-para-alliance.org

Pheo Para Alliance Fundraiser

The Pheo Para Alliance and
The Katzen Arts Center at The American University
cordially invite you to
THE HEALING ARTS
An Evening of Art, Discussion, Good Food, and
Live and Silent Auctions
Saturday, June 22 at 5:30pm
The American University Museum

Sponsorship Levels:
The Andy Warhol Table For 10: $10,000
The Georgia O’Keefe Table For 8: $6,000
The Larry Rivers Table For 6: $4,500
The Sam Gilliam Table For 4: $3,000

$350/person
$175/person for patients and artists

FUNDS RAISED WILL GO TO RESEARCH FOR FINDING A CURE FOR PHEO PARA.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:
5:30-6:30 - Cocktails and Art Exhibit of Prominent Washington Artists (and also by yours truly, easily the prominest of all prominent DC area artists... cough, cough... I will be donating this work) . Silent Auction Opens.
 
6:45-7:15 - Panel Discussion “The Healing Arts”
Dr. Frederick Ognibene, Deputy Director Of Clinical Research Training, National Institutes of Health, Moderator
 
PANELISTS:
Susan B. Magee – Author, INTO THE LIGHT The Healing Art of Kalmon Aron
Shanti Norris – Executive Director of Smith Center for Healing And The Arts
Jerzy Sapieyevski – Award Winning Composer, Pianist, and Educator
Tim Tate – Mixed Media Sculptor, Co-Founder of  The Washington Glass School

Humanitarian Award Presentation to Dr. Antonio Tito Fojo (a fellow Cuban-American by the way).
 
7:30-9:30 – Dinner, Entertainment, Live Auction
 
9:30 – Grand Finale

PLEASE RSVP BY FRIDAY, JUNE 14
Checks payable to
Pheo Para Alliance can be sent to:
6111 Western Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20015
To register online, please visit
www.pheo-para-alliance.org

Steven Cushner Interviewed by George Hemphill

Steven Cushner Interviewed by George Hemphill, December 2012

GH How is it that you came to irregularly shaped paintings, or why did you abandon traditional rectilinear canvases?

SC If I think about how I came to challenge the traditional format of painting, I think there were a number of threads that at some point came together. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the contemporary collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and three pieces in the collection really got to me. One was a Ben Nicholson geometric relief, one was a small wood construction by Jean Arp, and the third was a Claes Oldenburg soft drum set. I also began to look at the other pop artists, particularly early Tom Wesselman pieces, which combined real objects and collage, along with painted images. At the time, I did my own versions, multiple canvasses creating unusual shapes, three-dimensional objects resting on them, things like that. By the time I got to RISD in 1972, it was accepted truth that painting was dead. Most of our conversation was around the question of what painting could be if it wasn't what painting had been - flat, square or rectangular, a picture of something. Since this kind of painting no longer existed, we didn't learn how to paint, we learned how to think about painting, to think about painting as color, as shape, as object. We also thought it was our responsibility to create a new painting (ego). This was certainly in the air - you had Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, the whole Pattern and Decoration thing, and here in DC you had Sam Gilliam, who I had the opportunity to study with in graduate school. I started tentatively - building my own frames, decorating the frames, and framing with fake fur - things like that. At some point, I began cutting up my canvasses, collaging them back together, thinking about the canvas as an object, working from the inside out (not unlike Stella’s early Black paintings). This seemed like a new way to think about painting, not relying on the size and shape as a given, a field to work in.

GH Following the shaped paintings of 1991 to 1993 you returned to the traditional rectilinear stretched canvas. Why? 

SC At a certain point, I realized I wasn't going to redefine painting, I just wanted to be a painter, and I wanted to be a good painter (not an artist, not a revolutionary, just a PAINTER). I also realized that there were many kinds of painting that I hadn't addressed, or had ignored, or was ignorant of, and I needed the space to try them, and I needed the format, the tradition, and history of PAINTING (not art, photography, installation, sculpture, ideas - just the history of painting) to work from, to work against, to bounce off of.

GH Would you ever return to working in an unusual format?

SC I can't really see changing the shape of a painting now. At the time, the decision seemed to be not a choice, but a necessity - there was a need and an urgency to work that way. If I were to make that move now, it feels like it would come from a different place, and a false place - a contrived move, a choice, perhaps for novelty, but novelty is not as compelling as urgency.

If I returned to shaped canvasses I wouldn't paint them the same now, but I would certainly reinvestigate the ideas and motivations that generated them, and I am constantly revisiting these ideas and patterns and gestures and places. I think what is different for me now is that I am no longer thinking too much about the bigger art world and how my paintings deal with, react to, accept or reject it, and I am no longer at all interested in or attempting intentionally to make work that is subversive, aggressive, in your face. Those thoughts came out of youthful, teenage somewhat immature (in a good way) attitudes. My paintings may still be aggressive or not easy at times, but probably as a result of still trying to surprise myself.

GH Do you consider your work to be pure abstraction or is there a subject?

SC I'm not sure what is meant by pure abstraction - these definitions get tricky. I would say these paintings are not non-objective (as we would describe classic Mondrian or most of Frank Stella's paintings: paintings referring to no thing). They are most definitely abstract - abstracted from many things - the gesture the body makes, curves and arcs; repetition (of shape, line and movement, and things I love to do again and again and again, not just in painting but in daily activity); and abstracted from things I see or feel in the natural world (the flow of water, the pattern of waves in the ocean).

GH Walter Hopps once suggested that the most significant American contribution to art may be the various refinements of abstract painting and that there may be an end to American abstraction. Might you be the last abstract painter?

SC I love this question about being the last abstract painter - I remember reading Philip Guston on this. He said Pollock wanted to be the last painter, and that he (Guston) wanted to be the first - I think by this he meant to go back to the beginning and start again, which is pretty much what he did. Probably in 1991, I thought that perhaps I could be the last abstract painter (ego talking), now I am much more interested in the beginning of abstraction - how did we get to it, and am constantly curious about those artists that had to figure it out - Matisse, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Stuart Davis. Clement Greenberg would also probably believe that there could be a last abstract painter (he was in for a surprise). And since I hope and think that my painting keeps developing, I hope there is no LAST anything. 

GH It has been over 20 years since you created the work being exhibited in the Hemphill show in 2013. Twenty years later do you think viewers will see the work differently? 

SC It’s an interesting question. Is it possible to not think of them as from the past, because we know they are of the past (1991 - 1993)? Does this change our response? Maybe if I can answer the questions for myself  - how do I see them? Are they alive for me? Would I do the same paintings now? They are very much alive for me and I react to them the way I react to most of my successful paintings  - did I do that?  I know that a painting is finished when I no longer see it, it no longer bothers me or calls out  " hey, this part isn't right, this area is unresolved." Until the painting is finished, it is constantly tapping you on the shoulder or biting at your ankles, asking to be paid attention to. So, when a painting is finished, it kind of disappears, and when you see it again, it seems surprisingly alive.

GH How has the art world changed in those twenty years? 

SC We all know how the market has changed, and this is not of much interest to me obviously. But artists have also changed. The whole idea of a painting being the result of an activity seems to have vanished, and I don't mean the idea of activity like Sol LeWitt. Maybe it is this idea that defines my generation of painters, or my neighborhood.

GH For you it’s the activity of painting not the painting itself?

SC I am thinking about how this has played out in literature. David Foster Wallace talks about Pynchon and the plotless novel, multiple possible non-endings, non-narrative structure, the reader completing the narrative, a non entertainment (Foster’s term). What followed is novels like The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, a novel about not being able to write a novel based on a marriage plot, or On Beauty by Zadie Smith, about the non resolution and opposing schools of thought about beauty and aesthetics put into an entertainment. I think this is perhaps the kind of painting I am after - one that recognizes that it is about painting but still a painting that has to fulfill all of the functions of painting - entertain the eye, spark the imagination of the viewer, and get into the ring with the entire history of painting.

GH Outside of the art world what has been the strongest influence on your work?

SC I have always said that I am much more influenced by my friends than by the larger art world. It happens that most of my friends are painters, but they are friends first. I have learned from all of them to go to work every day, because you never know what may be a good day in the studio, and you better be there just in case. I have learned to look at, pay attention to, and experience as much as possible. And I have learned to have an open attitude, to not predict or assume, and to take what comes along. Of course, these are great painting lessons, but they work pretty well for everything else too.

© 2012 HEMPHILL Fine Arts