Just a quick post with a few shots from the grant show, which ends with a reception benefiting the Textile Center of Minnesota on Friday, October 14th. Thanks again to the Jerome Foundation and to the Textile Center of Minnesota for their support. The grant year went by so quickly, it seems like a blur.
Spaces Between, Jerome Fiber Artist Project Grant Exhibition
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Cube, Cube II
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View from the Ramp
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Saguaro ribs, Saguaro National Forest
I owe at least two people posts, and apologize for not completing them in a timely manner as promised. I mention this not just as an acknowledgment of obligations I’ve yet to fulfill but because of an observation I made over the weekend. Sometimes some of the most important lessons have to be learned over and over again. To put it gently, not only are times extra challenging for emerging artists, it’s a rough go for most art professionals. I’ve been worried that the necessities of my life: a day job, a side business, freelance work, and the rest are taking up so much time that I don’t have enough left for the studio and it’s detrimental to my career. How to do more with less? How can I make adjustments to my way of working without making it something false? I was in Tucson this weekend for the opening of the Structures show at Conrad Wilde. This is my second visit, and each time I become more fond of the local art community, dear and supportive people, all at least as busy as I if not more so. Nearly all of us have secondary and tertiary sources of income. We are entrepreneurs, designers, teachers, writers, museum workers, and some of us are lucky enough to have family to support our endeavors not only emotionally but financially. This is why I am continually mystified as to how the romantic myth of the solitary creator persists. We are not alone, nor can we afford to be. We must care as diligently for our friends, colleagues, clients, dealers, critics, teachers, lovers, and families as we do our work. Without them none of our success would be possible. Thank you all. Here are few shots from the show. Apologies to the other artists, who I didn’t cover as well as I should have. There’s more information about them at www.conradwildegallery.com.
Drawings by David Longwell. far left
Miles Conrad's encaustic sculptures
A closeup of one of the units.
Another view
Colony got a great spot
Two drawings by Tim Mosman
Relief III
Relief VI
A luminous work by Carrie Seid, not in the Structures show
This is my first-ever blog entry, and I’m not much of a blog follower, so bear with me, gentle reader.
This place is for cataloging ideas, ranting, questioning, and sometimes answering. In addition to working out my ideas about art and keeping bits of stuff together, I’ll probably write some pieces pertinent to Mexican modernist design and decorative arts and whatever else I’m into at the moment.
I’m reading about Donald Judd right now and he’s really growing on me. I never expected to embrace Minimal art because at first glance it seemed so soulless and inaccessible, but when I heard Judd say that figurative painting is dishonest in that it attempts to create the illusion of space, my interest was piqued. There’s nothing dishonest about a work that is intended to be nothing more than what anyone can see. In a time when so much just plain bad painting and sculpture is being produced and sold, and neither content nor craft seems a prerequisite for something to be considered a work of art, Judd’s proclamation is a breath of fresh air. Today, it seems, we have an overabundance of work that appears to have content but is as shallow and meaningless as the culture that produced it.
Minimal art simply is what it is, he said (although “it is what it is where it is” might be more accurate in his view). Furthermore, he noted, minimalist sculpture must be impeccably crafted in order for it to be effective, and so it was. He didn’t feel the need to be confessional, clever, or cynical; he was a methodical, cerebral sculptor who had a terrific eye for color and materials and made his work look effortless.
Someone once told me that art has to be “beautiful”; I’ll tackle that mess some other day and say for now that good art can be so many things, and beautiful is only one of them.
