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Episode No. 763 is a summer clips episode featuring artist Jes Fan. The Yale University Art Gallery is presenting "Jes Fan: Unbounded" through June 28. The exhibition spotlights how Fan makes sculptures that combine elegant abstract forms with an experimental and innovative approach to materials. Fan's sculptures often explore the porousness of identity, and incorporate living matter, such hormones, and fluids, such as glass. Fan's work has been exhibited in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the 2022 Venice Biennale, the 2021 New Museum Triennial at the New Museum, New York, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, and more. As mentioned on the program: Stills from Fan's 2023 video Palimpsest. Byung-Chul Han's book Saving Beauty. For more images, see Episode No. 658.
Episode No. 761 features artists Denzil Forrester and William Wylie. Forrester is featured in "Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 20. The exhibition explores and expands the visual, political, and spiritual histories of dancehall and reggaetón through contemporary art produced in the Caribbean, New York, London, and beyond. It was curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates with Cecilia González Godino, Iris Colburn, Nolan Jimbo, and nibia pastrana santiago. A catalogue will be published by the museum and DelMonico Books in July. It is available from Bookshop and Amazon for $60-65. The Grenada-born Forrester is best known for paintings that mine London's dub reggae culture and music clubs of the 1980s for subject and verve. The drawings he made in urban dance halls then continue to inform his work. His paintings are full of references to diaspora, the policing of Black people and culture in the UK, and dub reggae music itself. White Columns, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City have presented solo exhibitions of his work in the US; in the UK, Nottingham Contemporary, the Jackson Foundation Gallery, Cornwall have too. His work is in the collection of museums such as the Tate, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Wylie's new photobook is titled "The Eighty-Eight: Photographs from a Japanese Pilgrimage." It features pictures from Wylie's experience fo the Shikoku Pilgrimage, a trail that vists 88 temples associated with the Buddhist monk Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) on the island of Shikoku. The book was published by George F. Thompson Publishing in association with the Center for the Study of Place, and features an essay by Pico Iyer. Amazon offers it for about $42. This is Wylie's seventh book. His pictures are in the collection of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Air date: June 4, 2026.
If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects. In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge. So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below. Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejectshttps://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Substackhttps://substack.com/@theoccultrejects?r=7auau0&utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-pageCash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/TheOccultRejectsBIBLIOGRAPHYHidden Rooms, Holy Water, and the DeadWhite, L. Michael. The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, Volume I: Building God's House in the Roman World: Architectural Adaptation Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Trinity Press International, 1996. Key use: Essential source for early Christian architectural adaptation, especially the shift from domestic and semi-domestic gathering spaces toward more specialized Christian buildings. White's work is useful for showing that early Christian architecture develops inside a broader Roman social and architectural world, not in isolation.White, L. Michael. The Social Origins of Christian Architecture, Volume II: Texts and Monuments for the Christian Domus Ecclesiae in Its Environment. Trinity Press International, 1997. Key use: Companion volume for the textual and archaeological evidence behind the domus ecclesiae, early meeting spaces, and the built environment of pre-Constantinian Christianity.Yale University Art Gallery. “Christian Building.” Dura-Europos: Excavating Antiquity. Key use: Strong anchor for the Dura-Europos Christian building and its wall paintings. Yale notes that the Christian paintings were uncovered in 1932 and that Clark Hopkins described the murals as preserved from more than three-quarters of a century before Constantine recognized Christianity in 312.Yale News. “House Call: A New Study Rethinks Early Christian Landmark.” 2024. Key use: Useful cautionary source for not oversimplifying Dura-Europos as merely a domestic “house church.” The report highlights recent scholarship reexamining how domestic the Dura Christian building really was and why its architectural classification needs care.Smarthistory. “Dura-Europos.” Key use: Accessible overview of Dura-Europos as a multicultural Roman frontier site, including the adapted Christian building used as a meeting place and baptistery in the first half of the third century.Peppard, Michael. The World's Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria. Yale University Press, 2016. Key use: Major source for the Dura-Europos Christian building, its baptistery, biblical imagery, ritual use, and the danger of reading the site too simply through later church categories.Snyder, Graydon F. Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine. Mercer University Press, revised edition, 2003. Key use: Important archaeological source for Christian life before Constantine, especially material evidence for worship, burial, symbols, and everyday Christian practice before public imperial privilege. Mercer University Press identifies the book as focused on archaeological evidence of church life before Constantine.Jensen, Robin M. Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity: Ritual, Visual, and Theological Dimensions. Baker Academic, 2012. Key use: Core source for baptismal images, ritual meaning, water, initiation, death and rebirth, and the way visual programs frame baptismal practice.Jensen, Robin M. Understanding Early Christian Art. Routledge, 2000. Key use: Early Christian visual culture, catacomb imagery, baptismal scenes, Good Shepherd imagery, Jonah, Daniel, Lazarus, and the visual language of salvation and resurrection.Ferguson, Everett. Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Eerdmans, 2009. Key use: Major historical and theological source for baptismal practice, initiation, immersion, anointing, catechesis, and the development of baptismal rites.Johnson, Maxwell E. The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation. Liturgical Press. Key use: Development of initiation rites, catechumenate, baptism, post-baptismal rites, and how Christian initiation becomes structured over time.Spinks, Bryan D. Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent. Ashgate, 2006. Key use: Long-range ritual and theological development of baptism, useful for tracking how early baptismal space later becomes more formalized.Britannica. “Catacomb.” Key use: Baseline definition of catacombs as subterranean cemeteries composed of galleries or passages with recesses for tombs; useful for correcting the popular misconception that catacombs were primarily secret churches rather than burial landscapes.Stevenson, James. The Catacombs: Rediscovered Monuments of Early Christianity. Thames & Hudson, 1978. Key use: Classic overview of Roman catacombs, burial architecture, inscriptions, symbols, and early Christian memory.Rutgers, Leonard V. Subterranean Rome: In Search of the Roots of Christianity in the Catacombs of the Eternal City. Peeters, 2000. Key use: Catacombs as archaeological and social evidence, including burial practice, community identity, and the relationship between Jews, Christians, and Roman funerary culture.Fiocchi Nicolai, Vincenzo, Fabrizio Bisconti, and Danilo Mazzoleni. The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions. Schnell & Steiner, 2002. Key use: Detailed treatment of catacomb history, inscriptions, burial spaces, and visual programs.Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. University of Chicago Press, enlarged edition. Key use: Essential source for the holy dead, saint veneration, relics, tombs, pilgrimage, and the way corporeal remains became central to Christian religious life. The University of Chicago Press describes Brown's work as exploring how worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe.Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. Columbia University Press, 1988. Key use: Christian body theology, asceticism, holiness, discipline, and why the body is so central to late antique Christian imagination.Yasin, Ann Marie. Saints and Church Spaces in the Late Antique Mediterranean: Architecture, Cult, and Community. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Key use: Churches, saints, relics, cult practice, community identity, and how sacred spaces are organized around holy bodies and memory.Grabar, André. Martyrium: Recherches sur le culte des reliques et l'art chrétien antique. Key use: Classic work on martyr shrines, relic cult, and the relationship between architecture, art, and the holy dead.van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Key use: Separation, liminality, and incorporation. Crucial for baptism, catechumenate, thresholds, initiation, and the movement from outsider to insider.Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Key use: Liminality, threshold states, ritual transition, and communitas. Useful for baptism, catacomb descent, martyr devotion, and controlled access.Kilde, Jeanne Halgren. Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship. Oxford University Press, 2008. Key use: Christian buildings as arrangements of power, worship, divine presence, and embodied access. Useful for thresholds, sanctuary divisions, nave, altar, and congregation.Kieckhefer, Richard. Theology in Stone: Church Architecture from Byzantium to Berkeley. Oxford University Press, 2004. Key use: Church architecture as theology made spatial. Useful for altar, pulpit, nave, threshold, symbolic layout, and worship practice.Krautheimer, Richard. Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture. Yale University Press / Pelican History of Art. Key use: Classic architectural history for early Christian and Byzantine buildings, including the shift from pre-Constantinian spaces to basilicas, baptisteries, martyr shrines, and later monumental forms.Mathews, Thomas F. The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. Princeton University Press, 1993. Key use: Early Christian imagery, visual conflict, ritual meaning, and the development of Christian art within the Roman world.Elsner, Jaś. Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100–450. Oxford University Press, 1998. Key use: Roman visual culture, Christian adaptation, imperial imagery, and the shift into Christian public art and architecture.MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100–400. Yale University Press, 1984. Key use: Social and historical context for Christian expansion before and after Constantine, useful for understanding how Christian space changes as Christianity grows.Mango, Cyril. Byzantine Architecture. Key use: LonAlso want to remind people about the website, if you're into reading we have tons of information by multiple contributors, and we got t-shirts up on the site if you're interested. Fun fact, the art is all based on the eyeball. A
If you enjoy this episode, we're sure you will enjoy more content like this on The Occult Rejects. In fact, we have curated playlists on occult topics like grimoires, esoteric concepts and phenomena, occult history, analyzing true crime and cults with an occult lens, Para politics, and occultism in music. Whether you enjoy consuming your content visually or via audio, we've got you covered - and it will always be provided free of charge. So, if you enjoy what we do and want to support our work of providing accessible, free content on various platforms, please consider making a donation to the links provided below. Thank you and enjoy the episode!Links For The Occult Rejectshttps://linktr.ee/theoccultrejectsOccult Research Institutehttps://www.occultresearchinstitute.org/Cash Apphttps://cash.app/$theoccultrejectsVenmo@TheOccultRejectsBuy Me A Coffeebuymeacoffee.com/TheOccultRejectsPatreonhttps://www.patreon.com/TheOccultRejectsPart 2 — Core Citations / BibliographySecondary Works and Reference SourcesEncyclopaedia Britannica. “Perpetua.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Polycarp.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christianity: Relations between Christianity and the Roman Government and the Hellenistic Culture.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Decius.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Diocletian.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christianity: Catechesis: Instructing Candidates for Baptism.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Kerygma and Catechesis.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Exorcism.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Eucharist.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Early Christian Art.”Smarthistory. “Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome.”Vatican Museums. “Jonah Sarcophagus.”Yale News. “House Call: A New Study Rethinks Early Christian Landmark.”Yale News. “Yale Art Gallery Painting Might Be Oldest Known Image of the Virgin Mary.”Yale University Art Gallery. Materials on Dura-Europos and the Christian Building/Baptistery.Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Chi-Rho.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Paschal Controversies.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Melito of Sardis.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christology: Early History.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Docetism.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Adoptionism.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Cerinthus.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Theodotus the Tanner.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “St. Ignatius of Antioch.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Apologist.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Saint Justin Martyr.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “First Apology.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Dialogue with Trypho.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Celsus.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christianity: Apologetics: Defending the Faith.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Tertullian.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Athenagoras.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “First Letter of Clement.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “St. Cyprian.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Novatian.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Saint Irenaeus.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christianity: Aversion of Heresy: The Establishment of Orthodoxy.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “The Process of Canonization.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Late 2nd-Century Canons.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Muratorian Fragment.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Biblical Canon.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Codex.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christianity: Authority and Dissent.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Christianity: Relations between Christianity and Judaism.”Joshua Ezra Burns. “The Parting of the Ways in Contemporary Perspective.” In The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Cambridge University Press.Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, eds. The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Fortress Press.Judith Lieu. Neither Jew nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity. T&T Clark.Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Constantine I.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Arianism.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “First Council of Nicaea.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Saint Athanasius.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Festal Letters.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. “First Council of Constantinople.”Primary Texts UsedThe Martyrdom of Polycarp. Used for the early literary shaping of martyrdom, witness, bishop-martyr memory, and the theological interpretation of death.The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity. Used for imprisonment, trial, visions, martyrdom, and the rare preserved voice of a female Christian martyr.Apostolic Tradition, traditionally associated with Hippolytus. Used for baptismal preparation, catechumenal scrutiny, exorcism, fasting, vigil, renunciation, oil, and immersion.1 John 4. Used for the anti-docetic pressure around confessing Jesus Christ as having “come in the flesh.”Ignatius of Antioch. Letter to the Smyrnaeans. Used for Christ's real flesh, real suffering, Eucharistic theology, and bishop-centered unity.Ignatius of Antioch. Letter to the Philadelphians and related letters. Useful backup for episcopal unity, Eucharistic order, and anti-schismatic arguments.Melito of Sardis. On Pascha. Used for Paschal theology, Christ as Pascha, typology, and Christian interpretation of Passover.Justin Martyr. First Apology. Used for apologetics, public defense, accusations against Christians, Eucharistic misunderstanding, and Christian worship.Justin Martyr. Dialogue with Trypho. Used for Christian-Jewish polemic, scriptural inheritance, fulfillment arguments, and the hardening separation between Christianity and Judaism.Athenagoras. A Plea for the Christians / Embassy for the Christians. Used as a major example of second-century apologetics addressed to imperial authority.Athenagoras. On the Resurrection of the Dead. Used as a philosophical Christian defense of resurrection.Tertullian. Apology. Used for Latin apologetics, Christian defense against Roman accusation, and the combative posture toward pagan criticism.Tertullian. Prescription Against Heretics. Useful backup for rule of faith, public apostolic teaching, and anti-heretical boundary-making.Origen. Against Celsus. Used for Celsus' pagan critique and Origen's major intellectual defense of Christianity.Celsus. The True Word / True Doctrine. Survives mainly through Origen's quotations and refutations; used for educated pagan criticism of Christianity.First Letter of Clement. Used for early ministry order, Roman intervention in Corinth, appointed bishops and deacons, and the emerging logic of succession.Cyprian of Carthage. On the Unity of the Catholic Church. Used for episcopal unity, schism, discipline, and the theological seriousness of the bishop's office.Novatian. De Trinitate. Used as a witness to mid-third-century theological conflict and Roman Latin theology.Irenaeus. Against Heresies. Used for anti-gnostic consolidation, rule of truth, fourfold Gospel authority, apostolic succession, and public apostolic memory.Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History. Used for the Paschal controversy, Polycarp and Anicetus, Victor and Polycrates, Irenaeus' intervention, early church memory, and the broader historical framing.The Didachē. Used as part of the wider early Christian literary world that remained influential outside the final New Testament canon.Letter of Barnabas. Used for anti-Jewish polemic, allegorical reading of Hebrew Scripture, and Christian claims over Israel's inheritance.The Shepherd of Hermas. Used as an example of a beloved early Christian text that was widely read but later excluded from the New Testament canon.Apocalypse of Peter. Used as part of the wider early Christian apocalyptic library that circulated before the canon fully closed.Muratorian Fragment. Used for the late-second-century Roman list of recognized Christian writings and the emerging shape of the New Testament.Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catecheses. Used for post-baptismal instruction and the interpretation of initiation after the rite had been received.Ambrose of Milan. On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments. Used for mystagogical teaching, baptismal interpretation, anointing, and sacramental instruction.The Nicene Creed / First Council of Nicaea, 325. Used for creed formation, anti-Arian settlement attempts, and the conciliar compression of Christological conflict.Athanasius. Festal Letter 39. Used for the earliest surviving list matching the 27-book New Testament canon recognized in the mainstream tradition.Constantinopolitan Creed / First Council of Constantinople, 381. Used for the later stabilization and expansion of Nicene theological identity.Also want to remind people about the website, if you're into reading we have tons of information by multiple contributors, and we got t-shirts up on the site if you're interested. Fun fact, the art is all based on the eyeball. A
Doug Beube is a mixed-media artist working across numerous disciplines, including bookwork, collage, installation, sculpture, and photography. He holds a BFA from York University in Toronto, ON, and an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. He lectures and exhibits internationally and is the subject of the monograph Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex (2011). Beube received a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship in 2016 and served as curator of the Allan Chasanoff Bookwork Collection from 1993 to 2014, culminating in an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. His work has been exhibited internationally – in China, New Zealand, and across Europe – and he exhibits regularly throughout the United States. A solo retrospective of his artwork, curated by Buzz Spector, will open in April 2027 at Koffler Arts in Toronto. Doug has lived in Brooklyn, NY, since 1985.
Episode 519 / Cyrilla MozenterCyrilla Mozenter is known for her gouache-painted, pencil-drawn works on paper and hand stitched industrial wool felt pieces that include the transplantation of cutout letters, letter-derived and pictogram-like shapes. Her solo exhibitions include Problems of Art and Present Participle, 57W57 Arts, NY; See Why and the failed utopian, Lesley Heller Gallery, NY; the failed utopian & Other Stories, FiveMyles, Brooklyn; warm snow, Adam Baumgold Gallery, NY, and the Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY; More saints seen, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; and Very well saint, The Drawing Center, NY. She has produced two collaborative books with photographer/writer Philip Perkis: ar, AC Books, San Diego, 2023, and the bilingual Octave, anmoc press, Seoul, 2020. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received two fellowships from the NY Foundation for the Arts and two project grants from The Fifth Floor Foundation. She has been in residence at Pianpicollo Selvatico, Dieu Donné Papermill, and Instituto Municipal de Arte e Cultura-Rioarte. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Pratt Institute.
Sigrid Sandström earned a BFA at Academie Minerva, Groningen, The Netherlands (1997); attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2000); and received an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2001). Sandström has exhibited her work internationally in solo exhibitions at museums including Vandalorum Museum, Värnamo, Sweden; Västerås konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden; Frye Museum, Seattle, WA; and at galleries including Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; Perrotin Shanghai and Tokyo; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX; and Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden. Sandström's work is in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden; Malmö konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden; The Public art Agency, Sweden; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; Västerås konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Sandström is currently a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts, Helsinki, and has previously held positions as a professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2010-2020) and an Assistant Professor at Bard College, New York (2005-2010). Sandström lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Sigrid Sandström, Ravel V, 2025 Acrylic on canvas Frame 40″ x 59 ⁵⁄₈” x 1 ⁵⁄₈” Sigrid Sandström, Ravel X, 2025 Acrylic on canvas Frame 40″ x 59 ⁵⁄₈” x 1 ⁵⁄₈” Sigrid Sandström, Approaching Times Three, 2025 Acrylic on canvas Frame 40″ x 40″ x 1 ⁵⁄₈”
Lamar Peterson (b. 1974, St. Petersburg, Florida) is a painter whose work explores the psychological and social space between refuge and exposure. For more than two decades, he has rendered the everyday experiences of Black life with a language that merges stylized figuration, domestic ritual, and surreal distortion. Across both painting and collage, Peterson creates scenes where tranquility and unease coexist: suburban gardens bloom into uncanny environments, rooms soften and dissolve into landscape, and figures pursue moments of rest and care even as the outside world presses near. Peterson's visual vocabulary ranges from cartoon inflections and bold color to pared-down forms that verge on the symbolic. In his hands, a gesture—cooking a meal, tending a plant, pausing in thought—becomes a quietly radical act of autonomy. His subjects often appear in transitional spaces: windows, thresholds, and gardens that double as emotional terrain, reflecting the fragile distance between sanctuary and scrutiny, vulnerability and strength. Peterson has held solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects, New York; Carl Kostyál, Stockholm; and Fredericks & Freiser, New York, where he is represented. He has also had institutional solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Orlando Museum of Art; the University Art Museum at SUNY Albany; and the Rochester Art Center, among others. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, The Drawing Center, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Katonah Museum of Art, the International Print Center New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Peterson received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. He lives and works in Minneapolis, where he is Associate Professor of Drawing & Painting at the University of Minnesota. Lamar Peterson, The Proud Gardener, 2021, Oil on canvas, 70 x 85 inches. Courtesy Fredericks & Freiser, New York, Photo Credit: Cary Whittier Lamar Peterson, The Worrier, 2024, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches. Courtesy Fredericks & Freiser, New York, Photo Credit: Cary Whittier Lamar Peterson, Exhilarated, 2025, Mixed media and collage on paper, 17 x 12 inches. Courtesy Fredericks & Freiser, New York, Photo Credit: Cary Whittier
In this episode of Archispeak, we walk across the street in New Haven—literally and figuratively—to explore two masterworks by Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn. These buildings, separated by time but connected by place and purpose, offer a rare opportunity to see two giants of architecture in conversation across the street.We kick things off outside Paul Rudolph's brutalist Art and Architecture Building, a six-story monument to concrete, shadow play (which is Cormac's favorite), and interlocking geometries. From rough textures to zigzagging stair sequences, we unpack how Rudolph's massing, detail, and bold restraint create an intensely dynamic corner in the city.Then, just steps away, we head into Louis Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery. Built 20 years prior, it's a study in geometric discipline, restrained materiality, and the classic served-and-servant spatial philosophy. From triangular waffle slabs and coffered ceilings to floating stair treads, we peel back the layers of this early Kahn work and talk about how it set the stage for what came later in his career.We also announce a new series: What Makes This Building Great?, available exclusively on our YouTube channel, where we take our conversations further by sketching over photos and plans to peel back the onion of master works of architecture. These are the kinds of deep, nerdy dives we've always wanted to do—and we'd love your feedback as we build this series out.Head to our YouTube channel to watch the first episode featuring Kahn's Yale Center for British Art. And let us know what buildings you think are worthy of the title.-----Have a question for the hosts? Ask it at AskArchispeak.comThank you for listening to Archispeak. For more episodes please visit https://archispeakpodcast.com.Support Archispeak by making a donation.
Graham Marks produces exuberant, coil-built ceramics adorned with vibrant glazes, which combine functionalism with visual delight. Of late, Marks has embraced loose, sinuous forms from which coils of clay spill in dynamic and improvisatory compositions. His candelabras and flower vases contain a wild energy all their own, full of brash, linear abandon. In their merging of pattern and embellishment, they recall the intricate crafts of eighteenth-century France, bringing rococo flourishes to the timeless theme of utilitarian vessels. Marks taught ceramics at Kansas State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he was Head of Ceramics from 1986 to 1992. His work has been exhibited internationally and collected privately; it is held by numerous public institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Detroit Institute of Art, the Everson Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the Hermitage Museum, and the National Gallery of Australia. From 1992 to 1995, he studied acupuncture with J.R. Worsley, establishing a private practice which ran successfully for two and a half decades. In 2020, Marks returned to ceramics. He splits his time between Brooklyn and Alfred, NY. Graham Marks, Collection of Candelabras, 2023–24. Glazed stoneware, thrown, coiled, and pinched. Dimensions vary. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows. Photo by Joe Kramm Graham Marks, Pair of Candelabras, 2024. Glazed stoneware, thrown, coiled, and pinched. Dimensions vary. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows. Photo by Joe Kramm Graham Marks, Collection of Malinalco Candelabras, 2023. Glazed stoneware, thrown, coiled, and pinched. Dimensions vary. Courtesy of Hostler Burrows. Photo by Joe Kramm
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha closes out the year with photographer Keisha Scarville. Keisha and Sasha talk about her book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound (MACK), and Keisha's personal and unique use of archival imagery. Keisha and Sasha also discuss the ways in which Keisha has moved away from thinking of projects as discreet bodies of work, choosing instead, a much more holistic approach. https://keishascarville.com/home.html ||| https://www.mackbooks.us/products/lick-of-tongue-rub-of-finger-on-soft-wound-br-keisha-scarville Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including the Studio Museum of Harlem, Huxley-Parlour in London, ICA Philadelphia, Contact Gallery in Toronto, The Caribbean Cultural Center, Lightwork, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Higher Pictures. Recent group exhibitions include The Rose at the lumber room, Portland, Oregon (curated by Justine Kurland); If I Had a Hammer - Fotofest Biennial, Houston (2022); and All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2020, curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons). Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the George Eastman House, Denver Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Lightwork, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Baxter Street CCNY, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition, her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Small Axe, and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is a recipient of the 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund and awarded the inaugural Saltzman Prize in Photography earlier this year. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023 Aperture/Paris Photobook Awards. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com
Episode No. 684 features curators Akili Tommasino and Mark Mitchell. Tommasino is the curator of "Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-now" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The exhibition examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt from the American centennial, through the Harlem Renaissance, to the present. "Flight into Egypt" is on view through February 17, 2025. The fascinating catalogue was published by the Met. Amazon and Bookshop offer it for $45-50. Artists in the exhibition who are previous MAN Podcast guests include: Lauren Halsey; Julie Mehretu: Episode No. 82, No. 255; No. 417; Robert Pruitt; Betye Saar; Lorna Simpson; and Fred Wilson. Mitchell curated "The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876-1917," which is at the Yale University Art Gallery through January 5, 2025. The exhibition looks at how two generations of post-Civil War artists adopted the human figure as their focus (partly in response to the mass death of the Civil War era). "The Dance of Life" particularly focuses on studies related to artistic commissions for major US public sites such as the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, Washington, and the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg. YUAG published a valuable catalogue It's available from Amazon and Bookshop for $50-60. Instagram: Akili Tommasino, Tyler Green. Air date: December 12, 2024.
*Audio recording of a panel orgnized by friend of the show Frances Hasso. Video edition coming soon!* Convened by Dr. Frances S. Hasso, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, History, and Sociology, as part of The Palestine Seminar at Duke University https://gendersexualityfeminist.duke.edu/literary-gaza-hybrid Speakers “My Age is Thirty-five Years Old and Five Wars" Basman Aldirawi Basman Aldirawi (also Basman Derawi) is a Palestinian and Gazan, a refugee from Bi'r al-Saba`, and currently in Egypt due to the aggression on Gaza. He works as a physiotherapist at the Gaza Ministry of Health and since 2018 has been a member of the Gaza Poets Society, the first spoken word community in Gaza. He has contributed dozens of stories and poems to many online platforms and publications, including We Are Not Numbers (2019), Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (2022), and the We Are Not Numbers online platform that gives a voice to the victims of Israeli aggression in Gaza/Palestine. "The Demon of Gaza" Esmat Elhalaby Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of transnational history at the University of Toronto. He works principally on the intellectual history of West and South Asia, particularly colonial and anti-colonial thought. “The 5 Stages of Grief, According to a Palestinian” Samah Serour Fadil Samah Serour Fadil is an Afro-Palestinian writer, editor and translator. Her work has been featured at the Yale University Art Gallery, Fresno State University and The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, among others. “Tent in the Sky” Alaa Na`eem `Ali Al-Qatrawi: Alaa Na`eem `Ali al-Qatrawi completed her PhD in 2022 in Arabic Literature and Criticism at the Islamic University in Gaza, focused on the poetry of Adonis. Her MA thesis at the Islamic University, which examined Ahmed Bakhit's poetry, won the Award for Best MA thesis in the Humanities in 2015. Dr. Al-Qatrawi is an accomplished poet and short story and operetta writer, winning among others the Abdulaziz Al-Babtain Award for the best poetry collection in the category of young poets in 2022, first in the Union of Palestinian Writers Competition in 2015, first in the Ministry of Culture's poetry competition among all Palestinian universities in 2013, first in short stories in the Arab world in the international competition organized by Chinese Books and Dar Fadaat Publishing House in Amman (2019), and first in the Letter to Jerusalem competition (2010). She works as an Arabic Language teacher in UNRWA schools at the elementary and secondary levels. She has previously worked as a linguist and screenwriter for UNRWA children's programming. Dr. Alaa's Instagram and Facebook pages. Sponsor Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Duke University Co-Sponsor(s) Asian & Middle Eastern Studies Program (AMES); History Department; Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC); Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program
Learning through experience requires us to shift from the purely intellectual to a more holistic engagement. I try to create that shift by opening each of my leadership classes with some form of art—a poem, a piece of music or a visual work. It's a way of helping my students, many of whom are management or law students, executives, or leaders in their fields, step out of their typical "brain-bound" mindset and into a space where they can let their thoughts, emotions and values guide their learning. For many, it's an inconvenient and unfamiliar approach, but it's exactly what I believe opens their minds and hearts to walking an unconventional path toward growth. Dr. Liliana Milkova and I share a passion for this type of experiential learning. The Nolan Curator of Education at Yale University Art Gallery, Liliana uses art to foster reflective, perspective-shifting experiences to encourage people to slow down and engage deeply with what they see and feel. Drawing on her upbringing in Bulgaria and her extensive work in art education, she shares how object-based learning can transform the way we think and connect with others. I encourage you to experience this episode by watching, versus just listening. Join us as we explore how art can shift the way we think, learn, connect and grow. Watch this episode on YouTube. Key Topics 02:19 Learning from Cultural Heritage – Growing up in Bulgaria, surrounded by historical objects, fostered Liliana's deep connection to experiential learning, teaching her to engage with the world through observation, curiosity and reflection. 09:38 Teaching Through Art – "Teaching through art" rather than "teaching about art" catalyzes deeper, shared learning experiences—making abstract concepts more tangible through observation and personal interpretation. 14:37 Object-Based Learning – Through careful observation and multisensory experiences, learners develop critical thinking skills and form deeper connections with content. 18:00 Collaborative Learning and Perspective-Taking – Exercises like "Back-to-Back Drawing" improve communication and empathy by describing and interpreting objects from different angles. 32:39 Learning How to Learn – Developing individual strategies for processing information and engaging with experiences helps to build confidence and adapt to new situations by embracing diverse ways of thinking. 42:43 Reflection and Slowing Down – Slow down to fully engage with an object and allow time for deeper reflection. Creating space for shared insights and dialogue enhances the learning experience. Resources Explore the Yale University Art Gallery Collection The University Museums and Collections Journal (UMACJ) on how university STEM and medicine classes are utlizing art collection in teaching and learning Object-based learning resources Object Based Learning: A Powerful Pedagogy for Higher Education: A powerful pedagogy for higher education — Queen's University Belfast Engaging the Senses: Object-Based Learning in Higher Education - 1st E (routledge.com)
Send us a Text Message.In this episode, Will Wright interviews Phoebe Petrovic, an investigative reporter with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network. The discussion centers around her latest story on Pastor Matthew Trewhella. Trewhella, who was once an extremist anti-abortion activist, has gained influence within certain GOP circles through his book "The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates." This doctrine, rooted in 16th-century Protestant resistance theory, advocates for local officials to defy laws they deem unjust based on their interpretation of God's law.Phoebe explains Trewhella's transformation from a militant activist to a thought leader embraced by some mainstream Republicans. She highlights how his ideas have permeated various political and social arenas, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, where his doctrine provided a framework for resisting government mandates. The episode delves into Trewhella's influence on Second Amendment sanctuaries, local governance, and his broader impact on the far-right movement.Read Phoebe's Report: https://www.propublica.org/article/matthew-trewhella-pastor-activist-republican-politicsGuest Bio:Phoebe is a radio journalist whose work has aired on “Reveal,” NPR's “Morning Edition” and “Here & Now.” In the past year, she served as a general assignment reporter at Wisconsin Public Radio through the Lee Ester News Fellowship and editorial radio intern at “Reveal,” where she helped cover family separation and other immigration stories. She earned her B.A. from Yale University, where she founded and led audio projects including Herald Audio, the first-ever audio section of an undergraduate publication, and “Small-Great Objects,” the first-ever podcast series installed at Yale University Art Gallery.Phoebe covers criminal justice, in particular, the issues revolving around prosecutorial misconduct and unethical conduct in Wisconsin. Her first major project is a podcast and multimedia exploration of the myriad obstacles facing defendants when the prosecution is tainted by misconduct — and how that system could be improved.Support the Show.To learn more about the show, contact our hosts, or recommend future guests, click on the links below: Website: https://www.faithfulpoliticspodcast.com/ Faithful Host: Josh@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com Political Host: Will@faithfulpoliticspodcast.com Twitter: @FaithfulPolitik Instagram: faithful_politics Facebook: FaithfulPoliticsPodcast LinkedIn: faithfulpolitics Subscribe to our Substack: https://faithfulpolitics.substack.com/
Fine china and crystal, earthenware and artisan glassware – it doesn't matter what you have – it can all be transformed into a personal expression of your welcoming hospitality. On this week's show, we speak with some of the nation's finest tableware experts for an education and some inspiration. First, we chat with Susan Gravely, founder of Vietri, the lifestyle company that has brightened American tables with artisan-crafted Italian dinnerware for decades. Susan discusses her life lessons in setting a stylish table and the book she penned to celebrate Vietri's 40th anniversary – Italy on a Plate. Then, John Stuart Gordon offers his thoughts on the role silver flatware played in the dining rituals of the 19th century. John has the unique honor of curating American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery, creating for himself the perfect marriage of passion and career. Finally, we hear from Antiques Roadshow appraiser Nick Dawes. Nick's expertise gives him a remarkable view into the lives of people and their ancestors through the relics that they bring to the PBS show. His visit to the Historic New Orleans Collection's Antiques Forum gave us the opportunity to tap his vast knowledge of ceramics and glass. For more of all things Louisiana Eats, be sure to visit us at PoppyTooker.com.
Fine china and crystal, earthenware and artisan glassware – it doesn't matter what you have – it can all be transformed into a personal expression of your welcoming hospitality. On this week's show, we speak with some of the nation's finest tableware experts for an education and some inspiration. First, we chat with Susan Gravely, founder of Vietri, the lifestyle company that has brightened American tables with artisan-crafted Italian dinnerware for decades. Susan discusses her life lessons in setting a stylish table and the book she penned to celebrate Vietri's 40th anniversary – Italy on a Plate. Then, John Stuart Gordon offers his thoughts on the role silver flatware played in the dining rituals of the 19th century. John has the unique honor of curating American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery, creating for himself the perfect marriage of passion and career. Finally, we hear from Antiques Roadshow appraiser Nick Dawes. Nick's expertise gives him a remarkable view into the lives of people and their ancestors through the relics that they bring to the PBS show. His visit to the Historic New Orleans Collection's Antiques Forum gave us the opportunity to tap his vast knowledge of ceramics and glass. For more of all things Louisiana Eats, be sure to visit us at PoppyTooker.com.
Richard Serra, one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years, a linchpin of the post-minimalist scene in late 1960s and early 1970s New York and later the creator of vast steel ellipses and spirals, died on Tuesday 26 March. We mark the passing of this titan of sculpture with Donna De Salvo, the senior adjunct curator of special projects at the Dia Foundation, whose Dia Beacon space has several major works by Serra on permanent view. There are a host of exhibitions focusing on expressionist art in the US and Europe in 2024 and in this episode we focus on two of them. The first ever Käthe Kollwitz retrospective in New York is taking place at the Museum of Modern Art or MoMA, while other shows dedicated to her are taking place in Frankfurt and Stockholm. We speak to Starr Figura, the curator of MoMA's show, which opens this weekend, about Kollwitz's extraordinary work and life. Then, we talk to Natalia Sidlina, the curator of Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, a major survey opening at Tate Modern next month of the German Expressionist group, which looks anew at the deep friendships that formed the basis of the group, their international outlook and their multidisciplinary output.Richard Serra's work is on long-term view across five galleries at Dia Beacon, New York, US.Käthe Kollwitz, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 31 March-20 July; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, until 9 June; SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, 7 November-25 February 2025.Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, Tate Modern, London, 25 April-20 October 2024; Gabriele Münter: the Great Expressionist Woman Painter, Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, 12 November-9 February 2025.Further expressionist exhibitions in 2024: The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, until 27 May; Munch to Kirchner: The Heins Collection of Modern and Expressionist Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, US, until 5 January 2025; Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, US, until 23 June; Erich Heckel, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium, 12 October-25 January 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Kathleen and Christopher Sleboda run Draw Down Books, a publishing project and bookshop focused on graphic design, typography, and printed matter. They also work as graphic designers for clients and teach at Boston University, RISD, and the University of Connecticut. Previously, Christopher was Director of Graphic Design at the Yale University Art Gallery for 15 years and Kathleen worked as an archivist at the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale. In this episode, Jarrett talks with them about experimental publishing, publishing as a form of community building, and the continued relevance of printed matter. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm/248-kathleen-christopher-sleboda. — If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us on Patreon and get bonus content, transcripts, and our monthly newsletter! www.patreon.com/surfacepodcast
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Jim Goldberg discuss his new book, Coming and Going, published by MACK, which is a very personal story but also a book about storytelling itself. Jim talks about his lifelong interest in social justice and Sasha and Jim connect Jim's work to both Jazz and Punk music. Sasha also announces the first ever participants in the PhotoWork Foundation Fellowship. https://jimgoldberg.com/ https://www.mackbooks.us/collections/frontpage/products/coming-and-going-br-jim-goldberg Jim Goldberg's innovative and multidisciplinary approach to documentary makes him a landmark photographer and social practitioner of our times. His work often examines the lives of neglected, ignored, or otherwise outside-the-mainstream populations through long-term, in depth collaborations which investigate the nature of American myths about class, power, and happiness. A prolific and influential bookmaker, Goldberg's recent books include Ruby Every Fall, Nazraeli Press (2014); The Last Son, Super Labo (2016); Raised By Wolves Bootleg (2016), Candy, Yale University Press (2017), Darrell & Patricia, Pier 24 Photography (2018) and Gene (2018). Goldberg has exhibited widely, including shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMOMA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery. His work is also regularly featured in group exhibitions around the world. Public collections including MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty, the National Gallery, LACMA, MFA Boston, The High Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Library of Congress, MFA Houston, National Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Goldberg has received three National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships in Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, among many other honors and grants. Goldberg is Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts. He is represented by Casemore Kirkeby Gallery in San Francisco. Goldberg joined Magnum Photos in 2002. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com
Jacques Vesery, a celebrated artist and sculptor, and Minda Gold, a compassionate family physician bring a thoughtful and personal perspective to the question, 'what does good work mean to you'? In this episode, they share their personal stories, diverse experiences, and the profound insights they've gained over 33 years of marriage. As Jacques' hands bring wood to life and Minda tends to her patients personally through direct primary care, they explore the intersections of art and medicine, the pursuit of fulfillment, and the importance of living your values, even when it doesn't receive recognition. Together, they'll inspire you to embrace creativity, prioritize nature, and connect with the threads that bind us all. Key Takeaways: Explore the challenges and rewards of balancing artistry with the demands of medicine and the importance of staying true to one's vision. Gain insights into the power of collaboration, building supportive communities, and the impact of art on connecting people across cultures. Learn about the direct primary care movement and how it is changing the way doctors are able to care for their patients. Embrace the significance of slowing down and reconnecting with nature. Creating art with integrity, and finding fulfillment in throughout life's twists and turns. Resources Mentioned: Jacques Vesery Art New England Direct Primary Care Association The Peace Gallery About Minda: Minda, a dedicated family physician, champions the benefits of the direct primary care movement. Direct Primary Care doctors actually spend time with their patients, with standard appointment lengths ranging from thirty minutes to an hour or more. DPC takes out the middleman, cuts through the layers of bureaucratic complexity and provides good, old-fashioned customer service — it is the best of old fashioned medicine in modern times Minda has navigated a diverse range of experiences, from marine biology to the evolution of how she chooses to practice medicine. Minda lives and practices in Damariscotta, Maine, USA. About Jacques: Jacques Vesery is an Artist/ Sculptor from Damariscotta and has lived in Maine for over 25 years. Striving to create an illusion of reality, his vision and inspiration begins with repetitive patterns derived from the 'golden mean' or 'divine proportions'. The marriage of pattern, form and proportion conveys a sense ofgrowth from within each of his pieces. His work is in numerous public and private collections includingthe Detroit Institute of Art, The Renwick Gallery-Smithsonian American Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Peabody-Essex Museum, The Carnegie Museum and Permanent Museum collections in France, Turkey and Japan. He has participated in many collaborative art projects around the world and was lead artist for two such events, “The Kopru Project” in Eskisehir, Turkey 2015 and “Brick by Brick” in Nepal 2016. Jacques recently taught “Collaboration” at Harvard University for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences fortwo semesters as well. His work has been included in over 30 publications including '100 Artists of New England', 'Scratching the Surface', 'Wood Art Today', 'Natured Transformed', 'New Masters of Woodturning'and the Fine Art of Wood'.
Fine china and crystal, earthenware and artisan glassware – it doesn't matter what you have – it can all be transformed into a personal expression of your welcoming hospitality. On this week's show, we speak with some of the nation's finest tableware experts for an education and some inspiration. First, we chat with Susan Gravely, founder of Vietri, the lifestyle company that has brightened American tables with artisan-crafted Italian dinnerware for the past 40 years. Susan discusses her life lessons in setting a stylish table and the book she penned to celebrate Vietri's anniversary – Italy on a Plate. Then, John Stuart Gordon offers his thoughts on the role silver flatware played in the dining rituals of the 19th century. John has the unique honor of curating American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery, creating for himself the perfect marriage of passion and career. Finally, we hear from Antiques Roadshow appraiser Nick Dawes. Nick's expertise gives him a remarkable view into the lives of people and their ancestors through the relics that they bring to the PBS show. His visit to the Historic New Orleans Collection's Antiques Forum gave us the opportunity to tap his vast knowledge of ceramics and glass. For more of all things Louisiana Eats, be sure to visit us at PoppyTooker.com.
Fine china and crystal, earthenware and artisan glassware – it doesn't matter what you have – it can all be transformed into a personal expression of your welcoming hospitality. On this week's show, we speak with some of the nation's finest tableware experts for an education and some inspiration. First, we chat with Susan Gravely, founder of Vietri, the lifestyle company that has brightened American tables with artisan-crafted Italian dinnerware for the past 40 years. Susan discusses her life lessons in setting a stylish table and the book she penned to celebrate Vietri's anniversary – Italy on a Plate. Then, John Stuart Gordon offers his thoughts on the role silver flatware played in the dining rituals of the 19th century. John has the unique honor of curating American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery, creating for himself the perfect marriage of passion and career. Finally, we hear from Antiques Roadshow appraiser Nick Dawes. Nick's expertise gives him a remarkable view into the lives of people and their ancestors through the relics that they bring to the PBS show. His visit to the Historic New Orleans Collection's Antiques Forum gave us the opportunity to tap his vast knowledge of ceramics and glass. For more of all things Louisiana Eats, be sure to visit us at PoppyTooker.com.
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer and educator, Andrew Moore take a deep dive into the history of Andrew's ever evolving processes and practices. Andrew talks about his varied influences from both the modern and post-modern art world movements. Sasha and Andrew also discuss how his photography kept moving him closer and closer to home culminating in work made in the Hudson Valley where he resides. LINKS HERE https://www.andrewlmoore.com https://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/andrew-moore American photographer Andrew Moore (born 1957) is widely acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over many years, which record the effect of time on the natural and built landscape. These series include work made in Cuba, Russia, Bosnia, Times Square, Detroit, The Great Plains, and most recently, the American South. Moore's photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Library of Congress amongst many other institutions. He has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014, and has as well been award grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the J M Kaplan Fund. His most recent book, Blue Alabama, with a preface by Imani Perry and story by Madison Smartt Bell was released in the fall of 2019. His previous work on the lands and people along the 100th Meridian in the US, called Dirt Meridian, has a preface by Kent Haruf and was exhibited at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. An earlier book, the bestselling Detroit Disassembled, included an essay by the late Poet Laureate Philip Levine, and an exhibition of the same title opened at the Akron Museum of Art before also traveling to the Queens Museum of Art, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Moore's other books include: Inside Havana (2002), Governors Island (2004) and Russia, Beyond Utopia (2005) and Cuba (2012). Additionally, his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Artnews, The Bitter Southerner, Harpers, National Geographic, New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME, Vogue and Wired. Moore produced and photographed "How to Draw a Bunny," a pop art mystery feature film on the artist Ray Johnson. The movie premiered at the 2002 Sundance Festival, where it won a Special Jury prize. Mr. Moore was a lecturer on photography in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University from 2001 to 2010. Presently he teaches a graduate seminar in the MFA Photography Video and Related Media program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. This podcast is sponsored by picturehouse + thesmalldarkroom. https://phtsdr.com
Natalie Frank was born in Austin, TX and received her Master of Fine Arts in 2006 from Columbia University, New York, NY and her Bachelor of Arts in 2002 from Yale University, New Haven, CT. In 2004, Frank was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Art, Oslo, Norway. Natalie has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; Salon 94, New York, NY; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Half Gallery, New York, NY; Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin, TX; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY; ACME., Los Angeles, CA; Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome, Italy; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX; and The Drawing Center, New York, NY. She has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT; The Corcoran, Washington, D.C.; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; London Museum of Design, London, United Kingdom; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; National Academy Museum, New York, NY; New York Academy of Art, New York, NY; Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. Her work may be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; The Bunker, Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, FL; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, and elsewhere.
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://thecitylife.org/2023/05/09/nyc-yale-university-art-gallery-acquires-matthew-szosz-sculpture-from-heller-gallery-exhibit/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/citylifeorg/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/citylifeorg/support
Ep.147 features Titus Kaphar, an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and installations examine the history of representation by transforming its styles and mediums with formal innovations to emphasize the physicality and dimensionality of the canvas and materials themselves. His practice seeks to dislodge history from its status as the “past” in order to unearth its contemporary relevance, and to reveal something of what has been lost and to investigate the power of a rewritten history. Kaphar's commitment to social engagement has led him to move beyond traditional modes of artistic expression to establish NXTHVN, a new national arts model that empowers emerging artists and curators of color through education and access. Through intergenerational mentorship, professional development and cross-sector collaboration, NXTHVN accelerates professional careers in the arts. https://www.nxthvn.com/ Titus Kaphar (b. 1976, Kalamazoo, Michigan) lives and works in New Haven, CT. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of numerous prizes and awards including a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Art for Justice Fund grant, a 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant, and a 2015 Creative Capital grant. Kaphar's work, Analogous Colors, was featured on the cover of the June 15, 2020 issue of TIME. His work is included in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the 21C Museum Collection; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, amongst others. Photo credit: @mariosorrenti Artist Book release kapharstudio.com NXTHVN nxthvn.com Gagosian Titus Kaphar | Gagosian Ted Talks https://www.ted.com/speakers/titus_kaphar MacArthur Foundation https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2018/titus-kaphar NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/arts/design/yale-new-haven-titus-kaphar.html New Haven Register https://www.nhregister.com/entertainment/article/documentary-New-Haven-CT-Oscars-shut-up-and-paint-17696612.php Art for Justice Fund https://artforjusticefund.org/grantee/titus-kaphar/ PBS POV | POV Shorts: Shut Up and Paint | Season 35 | Episode 501 | PBS Metropolitan Museum Titus Kaphar | Contour of Loss | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org) Kennedy Center https://www.kennedy-center.org/whats-on/explore-by-genre/hip-hop/2022-2023/black-thought-streams-of-thought/ MoMA https://www.moma.org/artists/48017 Brooklyn Museum https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/titus_kaphar C& https://contemporaryand.com/exhibition/one-titus-kaphar/ Surface Magazine https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/titus-kaphar-film-shut-up-and-paint/ Whitewall https://whitewall.art/art/titus-kaphar-taps-into-history-and-intuition-in-new-alters-at-gagosian Hyperallergic https://hyperallergic.com/tag/titus-kaphar/ Ocula https://ocula.com/artists/titus-kaphar/ Artnet https://news.artnet.com/market/gagosian-titus-kaphar-nxthvn-1901048 Deadline https://deadline.com/2022/12/shut-up-and-paint-dctv-short-documentary-directors-titus-kaphar-alex-mallis-interview-news-1235200025/ Tribeca Film Festival https://tribecafilm.com/films/shut-up-and-paint-2022 Short of the Week https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2022/12/11/shut-up-and-paint/ KGBH https://www.wgbh.org/news/arts/2022/11/11/open-studio-artist-titus-kaphar-takes-on-mass-incarceration Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Kaphar Culture Magazine https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2020/09/23/nxthvn-is-a-new-kind-of-space-built-to-uplift-artists-and-curators-of-color AVANews https://avanewsblog.com/2021/04/supporting-inclusive-art/ Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/titus-kaphar
What you'll learn in this episode: What jewelry can tell us about the aesthetics and values of a particular era. Why sustainability in the jewelry industry is essential, and why the definition of “sustainable” is much broader than we might think. Why maintaining purpose is the key to making our world and our creative work better. Why the term “ethical jewelry” is less about materials and more about our choices as consumers and makers. How Lisa decides which topics deserve attention at Initiatives in Art and Culture's conferences. About Lisa Koenigsberg Lisa Koenigsberg is President and Founder, Initiatives in Art and Culture (IAC) and an internationally recognized thought-leader in visual culture. Koenigsberg's work is characterized by commitment to authenticity, artisanry, materials, sustainability, and responsible practice. Over 20 years ago, she established IAC's multi-disciplinary conference series on visual culture and has since been responsible for launching its web-based webinars and other offerings. She has held leadership positions at NYU where she also served on the faculty, at several major museums, and at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Koenigsberg's writings have appeared in such books as The Art of Collecting (ed. D. Jensen), Auspicious Vision: Edward Wales Root and American Modernism, Architecture: A Place for Women (eds. E. P. Berkeley and M. McQuaid), The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame (ed. E. Wilner), in journals such as Gems and Jewellery (the publication of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain), American Art Journal, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, as well as in magazines and in Trendvision's Trendbook. A frequent speaker, she has also organized symposia and special sessions at universities, museums, and professional organizations throughout the US and abroad, including at the State Art Collections of Dresden, NYU, City University Graduate Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the Norton Museum of Art, and the United Nations, and has organized and chaired sessions at the American Association of Museums, the Goldsmiths Company (London), the Society of Architectural Historians, Yale University Art Gallery, the Aspen Institute, and the Jewelry Industry Summit and at JCK. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and from Yale University from which she received her PhD. She is president of the Board of the Morris–Jumel Museum, a trustee of Glessner House in Chicago, and is a member of the Advisory Board of Ethical Metalsmiths and of the board of the NY Silver Society. Additional Resources: Initiatives in Art and Culture Instagram Initiatives in Art and Culture Facebook Initiatives in Art and Culture Linkedin Initiatives in Art and Culture Linktr.ee Lisa Koenigsberg Linkedin Photos are available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: What is sustainable jewelry? According to Lisa Koenigsberg, it's about much more than the materials used. As founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture (IAC), Lisa has organized dozens of conferences to encourage people to explore sustainability, stores of value, visual culture and more, all through the lens of jewelry. She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about what visual culture is and why it's significant; what it means for makers and jewelry professionals to maintain purpose; and what we can expect from IAC's upcoming conferences. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week. Today, my guest is Lisa Koenigsberg speaking to us from New York and environs back east. She is the founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture, which is focused on a number of issues such as women in western art. There's also a conference, which I just noticed, on arts and crafts in the art world. She is an internationally recognized authority on material culture. This July, she is chairing an important conference called “Maintaining Purpose” with a focus on how to make something we all love, jewelry. We'll learn more about her jewelry journey today and hear more about the conference. I didn't go into all the details of the conference and her background because it would take too long. Lisa, welcome to the program. Lisa: Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Sharon: Tell us about your jewelry journey. Were you a jeweler? Were you educated as a jeweler? Lisa: No, I am not a jeweler. I am the child of two people who are very object-driven and, of course, a mother with extraordinary taste. But in terms of how you might say I studied jewelry, jewelry was part of what we looked at when thinking about—a term I find not felicitous, but I'll use it for the moment—decorative arts, so fitting into the range of the useful and the beautiful. Silver, for example. Jewelry certainly had a space there, and that was the earliest point for me that was non-life-driven. One of the great blessings that happened to me was that I did my graduate work at Yale. That was when the arts and crafts movement wasn't codified in the same way it is now. We sat around and talked about it in the back room of the American Arts office. There were objects there, and we had the opportunity to hold, see, explore. At the time, I also used to wash silver and jewelry for an extraordinary dealer who wrote a wonderful book, Rosalie Roberian. One of the things that did was give me a sense of weight, dimension, proportion, of engaging closely with materiality. Although the arts and crafts is one dimension, I think that illustrates well one of the things that has been so important for me, which is looking for the opportunity to hold, the opportunity to talk with makers. For example, every year, The Goldsmiths' Company in the U.K. does something called the Goldsmiths' Fair. At the Goldsmiths' Fair, there is one week with 67 or so makers. During that time, you can go and speak with any of the makers, explore the work in your hand, look closely at it. I think the journey of looking is probably one of the most important things. I've been interested in jewelry as a manifestation of the aesthetic of any era for a very long time as well. My background and training are cross-disciplinary. I'm an American studies person. For me, one of the things I always look for is what we are seeing as characteristic of an age, for example. I see jewelry as very much a part of the tangible expressions of an era. For example, if you're talking about a brooch, you can be working on a sculpture for the body, similarly with neckwear. It's one of the most intriguing forms of expression there is. Making jewelry, the impulse to craft out of whatever the culture sees as precious material, is one of the innate impulses we have, along with the urge to adorn. If you step back and think about it, jewelry is intertwined with so many events of state, events of faith, events of heart. The Pope, for example, wears the Fisherman's Ring, and at the passing of each Pope, that ring is shattered; a new ring is made. We're all currently fixated on the crown jewels as Charles' coronation comes up. All of that is actually jewelry. It's jewelry indicative of state, of lineage, obviously of aesthetics. The band that many of us wear on one left or right ring finger, as simple or as elaborate as it may be, that is jewelry. It's a signifier. It's also invested with tremendous emotion. Jewelry plays an enormously powerful role in culture. It's another kind of historical document. So, if we look at jewelry, we can learn things. For example, you can explore the kinds of ornament it was thought only men wore, but by actually going back and looking, as it was done in the exhibition “Golden Kingdoms,” you can see that women also wore certain kinds of major ceremonial ornament. You can learn from the inscriptions. You can learn about stylistic transmission from the aesthetics. One of the things we don't think about so much is what we leave behind. When we go and look at how we have explored previous cultures, past cultures, one of the things we see is that the documents are often what have been termed luxury arts. They are art that are made of objects that are deemed precious within a culture. They demonstrate a certain egis over resources and talent, but they also serve as documents of that culture. They tell us things about religion, about aesthetics, about faith, about ritual. We need to be thinking about that with regard to jewelry in our own age as well. What are we leaving behind? Sharon: You cover so many things in Initiatives in Art and Culture. You talk about gems and sustainability and art. It's so many things. How did you start this, and what is the conference about? Lisa: I founded Initiatives in Art and Culture in 2004. One of the reasons it was started is because I had developed a series of conferences that had, at their core, a concern for visual culture. What does visual culture tell you? Because there is much to be learned about materiality. What's it made of? How do we get those materials? And that opens the door to discussing sustainability. Then, what's done with those materials? What are the forms? What are the means of expression, whether it's three-dimensional, such as a ring, or two-dimensional, except that it really has a third dimension, however subtle it may be. So, within the category of good, better or best, what differentiates an object from another? Then taking it a step further, what does that object mean in terms of the way we use it, in terms of its place in society, in terms of what it says? Beyond that, how is it linked to the time, or does it presage the future in some way? I'm sure I've left out some foci related to political and social concerns, but it's that wholeness that is inherent in visual culture. That is the focus of what IAC does. We have deep commitment to artistry and materials as well as a commitment to responsible practice. Sharon: Several questions. Were you always interested in all of this, or is it something your professors taught you and you learned as you read? It's not the way I would look at something. I think it's really interesting. How did you start looking at this? Lisa: I was born into a family that was and remains very visually engaged and involved with art, very involved with looking. Well before I had what one might think of as a professor, I had my parents, who in effect included me in their world of looking from moment one. My experience of art, of objects, has been part of my life since the very beginning. For us, a shared experience was very often looking, whether it was going to an exhibition or a trip planned specifically to see certain things. This was very much part of my world, or the world I was lucky enough to be born into. That included the people that were friends of my parents, and that included curators and collectors and people who were very engaged in the world of looking. My mother herself is a very well-recognized either fiber artist or artist who does sculpture using wire to explore grid and void. I say that to avoid the nomenclature wars. I was very lucky to have some extraordinary teachers, but one of the best teachers I had was in high school. We reenacted the Ruskin Whistler trial. I was the attorney for Ruskin, so I had to know all about each one of the witnesses, each one of the people who appeared and testified in the trial, and that made art come alive in a way that was exceptional. Another thing was that during those years, there was something called the myth and image school. It's the idea that an era has emblems that are representative, that are invested with particular meaning. There may be a flip side to that emblem or a parallel that represents its opposite, but this idea, one which is very cross-disciplinary and often ranges through literature and art, was incredibly formative for me. This is the stuff my teachers exposed me to when I was 13, 14. I was reading these books because they had read them in school, in college, and they shared them with us. For me, going to university—I went to Johns Hopkins and did a BA/MA in history—it was, on the one hand, a new chapter and transformative, but on the other hand, it was in some ways a continuation of what I had been doing all the way along. Sharon: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like—I've watched your conferences for a long time, and it seems that you focus on art and gems and other things. This idea of maintaining purpose and an emphasis on sustainability seems to be in the last few years. Am I incorrect? Do you just put on a conference when you think it's a really important subject and it's coming to the fore? Lisa: Sustainability is a dicey word when it comes to what exactly that means. At root, it is to survive, but in our thinking, sustainability is linked to responsible practice, which can involve how you source materials, how you make an object, what the circumstances and conditions of that making are. We actually have been interested in that since the first project. It was called “Green,” and it was in 2008. The reason that happened was there was an increasing concern with what was then called sustainability, which was often associated with the color green. We had something I definitely want to revive, which is a conference of 20 years of looking at fashion jewels, the zeitgeist of culture, photography, literature, etc. This term sustainability was being used, green was being used, and one of the things I didn't want to do was a superficial one-off. So, we decided that for the 10th year—I think it was the 10th year—of that conference, we would do something called “Green: Sustainability, Significance, and Style.” In that conference we looked at color, of course; we even looked at green diamonds, but we also looked at coral and organic material that's made into jewelry. The issues pertaining to coral were at peak interest at that point, and we did quite a lot in that conference with gold. That was the first time I worked with Toby Pomeroy, with whom I've been fortunate enough to be both friends and colleagues since then. At that point, Toby had done something that was then radical, which was to approach the refiner Hoover & Strong to see if it could be demonstrated that the materials, the scrap, that he came in with was the only material that was in the batch that was refined and that it remained segregated from everything else. That was what you might call an exploration in chain of custody, in the sense that he had a sense of origin of these materials and he wanted to ensure that he could attest to their integrity. Hoover & Strong met the challenge. At that point, Toby was making quite a lot of jewelry, and there was a term that was being used called Eco Loops. Toby has since gone on to do remarkable work with regard to mercury elimination, and he will be involved in the conference, “Maintaining Purpose,” that we are doing. With “Maintaining Purpose”—and actually with the “Green” conference, we had Mike Kowalski, who was then the chair of Tiffany, involved in the conference. There was a great deal of focus on things like land reclamation and after-mining and that sort of thing. Having said that, one thing I'd like to stress is that one of our speakers, who at that point was the head of Bono's RED, got up and said, “I know you're all wondering, ‘What's a red person doing at a green conference?'” I felt as if I had been hit over the head with pipe, because I had never thought about environmental sustainability or integrity as being isolated from social condition and well-being. Now, when you look at the 17 SDG, you'll see so many different issues broken out, but one of the things I thought was, “Gosh, we've got to do red now,” because this is a split I wasn't thinking about or perceiving. Green and red basically led to the creation of a conference. Our initial thinking was to do a conference that would look at precious substances. We did a coral conference; we did a diamond conference, which we were very privileged to do. We had wonderful support from Sally Morrison for that project. Then I woke up and realized we had never done gold, so effectively what happened is that the conference on precious substances became the Gold Conference. The Gold Conference is now entering its 13th year. We broadened gold to include gold and diamonds because we wanted to draw people's attention to stores of value, which these materials are, and also comparative approaches to things like mining, whether it's formalized or otherwise. And also because, of course, metal and stone go together. That's not to say we do not explore and include focus on other stones. We're very proud that Cruzeiro Mines, which is a tourmaline and rubellite mine from Brazil that has exemplary practices and absolutely beautiful stones, is participating in this year's conference. But the way the Gold and Diamond Conference evolved was it came to use jewelry as a lens for a 360-degree approach to the life and the issues associated with the material in question. On the one hand, you have great artistry, like Giovanni Corvaja. We were privileged to have Daniel Brush speak, whose loss I feel keenly. Every year we welcome wonderful jewelers. At the same time, we think about the issues related to extracting material or recycling material and what those words mean. What is recycling? We have repurposed since the dawn of time, so what gives something that halo of recycling? Do we have to think about what we're using? And, of course, jewelry is a created object. What are the environmental ramifications of extracting, creating the jewelry business writ large? Often in our heads, we think about jewelry and we see a craftsperson, a maker. That aspect of things is very dear to our hearts, and we're keenly interested in artisanry. At the same time, you have other aspects to this jewelry industry, large corporations that produce for particular market segments. You have the luxe maison. In some ways, they're all compatriots in a world, in other ways competitors in a world, and yet bound together by a common concern for ensuring that this world we have continues. Without this world, without this air, without this earth, we are nothing. We can't make anything. We have effaced ourselves. I think there is a point of critical mass that's been reached where there is a deep and general concern. One of the things I fear and that I hope I can help with is building community to encourage people to keep going forward despite the fears that we may have about doing something a different way. Last year our conference was “Boldly Building the Future.” How do you boldly build the future? We have many declarations that have been stated about gold, for example. There was a declaration drafted and shepherded through for the gold industry by LBMA and the World Gold Council. They have principles. Principles are not blueprints. How do you get from that vision, the abstract vision, to its implementation? How do you transform? We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.
What you'll learn in this episode: What jewelry can tell us about the aesthetics and values of a particular era. Why sustainability in the jewelry industry is essential, and why the definition of “sustainable” is much broader than we might think. Why maintaining purpose is the key to making our world and our creative work better. Why the term “ethical jewelry” is less about materials and more about our choices as consumers and makers. How Lisa decides which topics deserve attention at Initiatives in Art and Culture's conferences. About Lisa Koenigsberg Lisa Koenigsberg is President and Founder, Initiatives in Art and Culture (IAC) and an internationally recognized thought-leader in visual culture. Koenigsberg's work is characterized by commitment to authenticity, artisanry, materials, sustainability, and responsible practice. Over 20 years ago, she established IAC's multi-disciplinary conference series on visual culture and has since been responsible for launching its web-based webinars and other offerings. She has held leadership positions at NYU where she also served on the faculty, at several major museums, and at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Koenigsberg's writings have appeared in such books as The Art of Collecting (ed. D. Jensen), Auspicious Vision: Edward Wales Root and American Modernism, Architecture: A Place for Women (eds. E. P. Berkeley and M. McQuaid), The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame (ed. E. Wilner), in journals such as Gems and Jewellery (the publication of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain), American Art Journal, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, and Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, as well as in magazines and in Trendvision's Trendbook. A frequent speaker, she has also organized symposia and special sessions at universities, museums, and professional organizations throughout the US and abroad, including at the State Art Collections of Dresden, NYU, City University Graduate Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the Norton Museum of Art, and the United Nations, and has organized and chaired sessions at the American Association of Museums, the Goldsmiths Company (London), the Society of Architectural Historians, Yale University Art Gallery, the Aspen Institute, and the Jewelry Industry Summit and at JCK. She holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and from Yale University from which she received her PhD. She is president of the Board of the Morris–Jumel Museum, a trustee of Glessner House in Chicago, and is a member of the Advisory Board of Ethical Metalsmiths and of the board of the NY Silver Society. Additional Resources: Initiatives in Art and Culture Instagram Initiatives in Art and Culture Facebook Initiatives in Art and Culture Linkedin Initiatives in Art and Culture Linktr.ee Lisa Koenigsberg Linkedin Photos are available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: What is sustainable jewelry? According to Lisa Koenigsberg, it's about much more than the materials used. As founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture (IAC), Lisa has organized dozens of conferences to encourage people to explore sustainability, stores of value, visual culture and more, all through the lens of jewelry. She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about what visual culture is and why it's significant; what it means for makers and jewelry professionals to maintain purpose; and what we can expect from IAC's upcoming conferences. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week. Today, my guest is Lisa Koenigsberg speaking to us from New York and environs back east. She is the founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture, which is focused on a number of issues such as women in western art. There's also a conference, which I just noticed, on arts and crafts in the art world. She is an internationally recognized authority on material culture. This July, she is chairing an important conference called “Maintaining Purpose” with a focus on how to make something we all love, jewelry. We'll learn more about her jewelry journey today and hear more about the conference. I didn't go into all the details of the conference and her background because it would take too long. Lisa, welcome to the program. Lisa: Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Sharon: Tell us about your jewelry journey. Were you a jeweler? Were you educated as a jeweler? Lisa: No, I am not a jeweler. I am the child of two people who are very object-driven and, of course, a mother with extraordinary taste. But in terms of how you might say I studied jewelry, jewelry was part of what we looked at when thinking about—a term I find not felicitous, but I'll use it for the moment—decorative arts, so fitting into the range of the useful and the beautiful. Silver, for example. Jewelry certainly had a space there, and that was the earliest point for me that was non-life-driven. One of the great blessings that happened to me was that I did my graduate work at Yale. That was when the arts and crafts movement wasn't codified in the same way it is now. We sat around and talked about it in the back room of the American Arts office. There were objects there, and we had the opportunity to hold, see, explore. At the time, I also used to wash silver and jewelry for an extraordinary dealer who wrote a wonderful book, Rosalie Roberian. One of the things that did was give me a sense of weight, dimension, proportion, of engaging closely with materiality. Although the arts and crafts is one dimension, I think that illustrates well one of the things that has been so important for me, which is looking for the opportunity to hold, the opportunity to talk with makers. For example, every year, The Goldsmiths' Company in the U.K. does something called the Goldsmiths' Fair. At the Goldsmiths' Fair, there is one week with 67 or so makers. During that time, you can go and speak with any of the makers, explore the work in your hand, look closely at it. I think the journey of looking is probably one of the most important things. I've been interested in jewelry as a manifestation of the aesthetic of any era for a very long time as well. My background and training are cross-disciplinary. I'm an American studies person. For me, one of the things I always look for is what we are seeing as characteristic of an age, for example. I see jewelry as very much a part of the tangible expressions of an era. For example, if you're talking about a brooch, you can be working on a sculpture for the body, similarly with neckwear. It's one of the most intriguing forms of expression there is. Making jewelry, the impulse to craft out of whatever the culture sees as precious material, is one of the innate impulses we have, along with the urge to adorn. If you step back and think about it, jewelry is intertwined with so many events of state, events of faith, events of heart. The Pope, for example, wears the Fisherman's Ring, and at the passing of each Pope, that ring is shattered; a new ring is made. We're all currently fixated on the crown jewels as Charles' coronation comes up. All of that is actually jewelry. It's jewelry indicative of state, of lineage, obviously of aesthetics. The band that many of us wear on one left or right ring finger, as simple or as elaborate as it may be, that is jewelry. It's a signifier. It's also invested with tremendous emotion. Jewelry plays an enormously powerful role in culture. It's another kind of historical document. So, if we look at jewelry, we can learn things. For example, you can explore the kinds of ornament it was thought only men wore, but by actually going back and looking, as it was done in the exhibition “Golden Kingdoms,” you can see that women also wore certain kinds of major ceremonial ornament. You can learn from the inscriptions. You can learn about stylistic transmission from the aesthetics. One of the things we don't think about so much is what we leave behind. When we go and look at how we have explored previous cultures, past cultures, one of the things we see is that the documents are often what have been termed luxury arts. They are art that are made of objects that are deemed precious within a culture. They demonstrate a certain egis over resources and talent, but they also serve as documents of that culture. They tell us things about religion, about aesthetics, about faith, about ritual. We need to be thinking about that with regard to jewelry in our own age as well. What are we leaving behind? Sharon: You cover so many things in Initiatives in Art and Culture. You talk about gems and sustainability and art. It's so many things. How did you start this, and what is the conference about? Lisa: I founded Initiatives in Art and Culture in 2004. One of the reasons it was started is because I had developed a series of conferences that had, at their core, a concern for visual culture. What does visual culture tell you? Because there is much to be learned about materiality. What's it made of? How do we get those materials? And that opens the door to discussing sustainability. Then, what's done with those materials? What are the forms? What are the means of expression, whether it's three-dimensional, such as a ring, or two-dimensional, except that it really has a third dimension, however subtle it may be. So, within the category of good, better or best, what differentiates an object from another? Then taking it a step further, what does that object mean in terms of the way we use it, in terms of its place in society, in terms of what it says? Beyond that, how is it linked to the time, or does it presage the future in some way? I'm sure I've left out some foci related to political and social concerns, but it's that wholeness that is inherent in visual culture. That is the focus of what IAC does. We have deep commitment to artistry and materials as well as a commitment to responsible practice. Sharon: Several questions. Were you always interested in all of this, or is it something your professors taught you and you learned as you read? It's not the way I would look at something. I think it's really interesting. How did you start looking at this? Lisa: I was born into a family that was and remains very visually engaged and involved with art, very involved with looking. Well before I had what one might think of as a professor, I had my parents, who in effect included me in their world of looking from moment one. My experience of art, of objects, has been part of my life since the very beginning. For us, a shared experience was very often looking, whether it was going to an exhibition or a trip planned specifically to see certain things. This was very much part of my world, or the world I was lucky enough to be born into. That included the people that were friends of my parents, and that included curators and collectors and people who were very engaged in the world of looking. My mother herself is a very well-recognized either fiber artist or artist who does sculpture using wire to explore grid and void. I say that to avoid the nomenclature wars. I was very lucky to have some extraordinary teachers, but one of the best teachers I had was in high school. We reenacted the Ruskin Whistler trial. I was the attorney for Ruskin, so I had to know all about each one of the witnesses, each one of the people who appeared and testified in the trial, and that made art come alive in a way that was exceptional. Another thing was that during those years, there was something called the myth and image school. It's the idea that an era has emblems that are representative, that are invested with particular meaning. There may be a flip side to that emblem or a parallel that represents its opposite, but this idea, one which is very cross-disciplinary and often ranges through literature and art, was incredibly formative for me. This is the stuff my teachers exposed me to when I was 13, 14. I was reading these books because they had read them in school, in college, and they shared them with us. For me, going to university—I went to Johns Hopkins and did a BA/MA in history—it was, on the one hand, a new chapter and transformative, but on the other hand, it was in some ways a continuation of what I had been doing all the way along. Sharon: Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like—I've watched your conferences for a long time, and it seems that you focus on art and gems and other things. This idea of maintaining purpose and an emphasis on sustainability seems to be in the last few years. Am I incorrect? Do you just put on a conference when you think it's a really important subject and it's coming to the fore? Lisa: Sustainability is a dicey word when it comes to what exactly that means. At root, it is to survive, but in our thinking, sustainability is linked to responsible practice, which can involve how you source materials, how you make an object, what the circumstances and conditions of that making are. We actually have been interested in that since the first project. It was called “Green,” and it was in 2008. The reason that happened was there was an increasing concern with what was then called sustainability, which was often associated with the color green. We had something I definitely want to revive, which is a conference of 20 years of looking at fashion jewels, the zeitgeist of culture, photography, literature, etc. This term sustainability was being used, green was being used, and one of the things I didn't want to do was a superficial one-off. So, we decided that for the 10th year—I think it was the 10th year—of that conference, we would do something called “Green: Sustainability, Significance, and Style.” In that conference we looked at color, of course; we even looked at green diamonds, but we also looked at coral and organic material that's made into jewelry. The issues pertaining to coral were at peak interest at that point, and we did quite a lot in that conference with gold. That was the first time I worked with Toby Pomeroy, with whom I've been fortunate enough to be both friends and colleagues since then. At that point, Toby had done something that was then radical, which was to approach the refiner Hoover & Strong to see if it could be demonstrated that the materials, the scrap, that he came in with was the only material that was in the batch that was refined and that it remained segregated from everything else. That was what you might call an exploration in chain of custody, in the sense that he had a sense of origin of these materials and he wanted to ensure that he could attest to their integrity. Hoover & Strong met the challenge. At that point, Toby was making quite a lot of jewelry, and there was a term that was being used called Eco Loops. Toby has since gone on to do remarkable work with regard to mercury elimination, and he will be involved in the conference, “Maintaining Purpose,” that we are doing. With “Maintaining Purpose”—and actually with the “Green” conference, we had Mike Kowalski, who was then the chair of Tiffany, involved in the conference. There was a great deal of focus on things like land reclamation and after-mining and that sort of thing. Having said that, one thing I'd like to stress is that one of our speakers, who at that point was the head of Bono's RED, got up and said, “I know you're all wondering, ‘What's a red person doing at a green conference?'” I felt as if I had been hit over the head with pipe, because I had never thought about environmental sustainability or integrity as being isolated from social condition and well-being. Now, when you look at the 17 SDG, you'll see so many different issues broken out, but one of the things I thought was, “Gosh, we've got to do red now,” because this is a split I wasn't thinking about or perceiving. Green and red basically led to the creation of a conference. Our initial thinking was to do a conference that would look at precious substances. We did a coral conference; we did a diamond conference, which we were very privileged to do. We had wonderful support from Sally Morrison for that project. Then I woke up and realized we had never done gold, so effectively what happened is that the conference on precious substances became the Gold Conference. The Gold Conference is now entering its 13th year. We broadened gold to include gold and diamonds because we wanted to draw people's attention to stores of value, which these materials are, and also comparative approaches to things like mining, whether it's formalized or otherwise. And also because, of course, metal and stone go together. That's not to say we do not explore and include focus on other stones. We're very proud that Cruzeiro Mines, which is a tourmaline and rubellite mine from Brazil that has exemplary practices and absolutely beautiful stones, is participating in this year's conference. But the way the Gold and Diamond Conference evolved was it came to use jewelry as a lens for a 360-degree approach to the life and the issues associated with the material in question. On the one hand, you have great artistry, like Giovanni Corvaja. We were privileged to have Daniel Brush speak, whose loss I feel keenly. Every year we welcome wonderful jewelers. At the same time, we think about the issues related to extracting material or recycling material and what those words mean. What is recycling? We have repurposed since the dawn of time, so what gives something that halo of recycling? Do we have to think about what we're using? And, of course, jewelry is a created object. What are the environmental ramifications of extracting, creating the jewelry business writ large? Often in our heads, we think about jewelry and we see a craftsperson, a maker. That aspect of things is very dear to our hearts, and we're keenly interested in artisanry. At the same time, you have other aspects to this jewelry industry, large corporations that produce for particular market segments. You have the luxe maison. In some ways, they're all compatriots in a world, in other ways competitors in a world, and yet bound together by a common concern for ensuring that this world we have continues. Without this world, without this air, without this earth, we are nothing. We can't make anything. We have effaced ourselves. I think there is a point of critical mass that's been reached where there is a deep and general concern. One of the things I fear and that I hope I can help with is building community to encourage people to keep going forward despite the fears that we may have about doing something a different way. Last year our conference was “Boldly Building the Future.” How do you boldly build the future? We have many declarations that have been stated about gold, for example. There was a declaration drafted and shepherded through for the gold industry by LBMA and the World Gold Council. They have principles. Principles are not blueprints. How do you get from that vision, the abstract vision, to its implementation? How do you transform? We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.
GM Host: Steve di Costanzo Dr. Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye the director of the Housatonic Museum of Art will talk about their Spring series lecture. Jennifer Reynolds-Kaye most recently served as a consultant at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and as an Art History lecturer at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut. She held previous positions at a variety of museums and organizations, including the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Southern California, and participated in the Getty Leadership Institute NextGen program, among others.
To hear the rest of this discussion, receive bonus content, exclusive interviews, support independent media and to help make this program possible, please join us on Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow Direct link to this broadcast's Patreon podcast with Bryce Greene: https://www.patreon.com/posts/nordstream-more-79929800 German-based artist Adam Broomberg talks about being smeared and literally canceled by German officials as an antisemite for the crime of defending Palestinian Human Rights and criticizing Israel. Broomberg, who is Jewish and who lost relatives in the Nazi Holocaust talks about having his latest show canceled by the German Government and what he's observed in Palestine. Then, journalist Bryce Greene updates us on the latest news about the Nordstream Pipeline explosion, discusses the smearing of journalist Seymour Hersh and talks to us about how Facebook is protecting Nazis to protect the Proxy War in Ukraine. Adam Broomberg (b. 1970, Johannesburg) is an artist, activist and educator. He currently lives and works in Berlin. He is on the faculty of the MA Photography & Society program at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague which he co-designed. His work is held in major public and private collections including Centres Pompidou, MoMA, The Stedelijk Museum, Tate, Yale University Art Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum. Bryce Greene is a student, writer, organizer and media critic based in Indianapolis. He is a contributor to Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting ***Please support The Katie Halper Show *** For bonus content, exclusive interviews, to support independent media and to help make this program possible, please join us on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/3rQPRRfZ Follow Katie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kthalps
In 1775, a smallpox outbreak struck the Continental Northern Army. With many of the soldiers too sick to fight, their attempted capture of Quebec on December 31, 1775, was a devastating failure, the first major defeat of the Revolutionary War for the Americans, and cost General Richard Montgomery his life. Eventually, George Washington, the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, realized that the only way to avoid repeated outbreaks was to order mass inoculation of the amy, a controversial and risky decision that proved successful. Joining me to help us learn more about smallpox inoculation during the American Revolution is Dr. Andrew M. Wehrman, Associate professor of history at Central Michigan University, and author of The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution. Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The episode image is: “The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775,” a painting by John Trumbull from 1786; photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery; public domain. Additional Sources: “How an Enslaved African Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox,” by Erin Blakemore, History.com, February 1, 2019. “The origins of inoculation,” by Arthur Boylston, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2012), 105(7), 309–313. “On This Day in 1721, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Inoculates his Son Against Smallpox,” Boston.gov, June 26, 2017. “Smallpox, Inoculation, and the Revolutionary War,” Boston National Historical Park, National Park Service. “Letter from John Adams to Abigail Smith, 13 April 1764 [electronic edition],” Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society. “How a public health crisis nearly derailed the American Revolution,” by Andrew Lawler, National Geographic, April 16, 2020. “Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination.” by Stefan Riedel, Proceedings (Baylor University. Medical Center) 2005, 18(1), 21–25. “History of the Smallpox Vaccine,” The World Health Organization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ep.132 features Rico Gatson, a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, identity, popular culture and spirituality, through sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and public art projects. Over the course of almost two decades, he has been celebrated for politically layered artworks, often based on significant moments in black history. From the Watts Riots, the formation of the Black Panthers, to the election of President Barack Obama are a few subjects touched upon in his work. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Essl Museum, Austria, Vienna and The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. In 2019 completed a large commission for MTA Arts and Design in titled “Beacons”; eight permanent large-scale mosaics of prominent figures associated with and installed in a subway station in the Bronx. His work is featured in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Denver Art Museum, The Cheekwood Museum, The Kempner Museum and The Yale University Art Gallery. His work is also included in numerous private collections. Headshot photo courtesy of the Artist Artist https://ricogatson.com/ Miles McEnery https://www.milesmcenery.com/artists/rico-gatson Issuu Nov 2022 Publication https://issuu.com/amy-nyc/docs/rico_gatson_pages_22581d0e587ad7 Art Rabbit https://www.artrabbit.com/events/rico-gatson-spectral-visions Feldman Gallery https://feldmangallery.com/artist-home/rico-gatson Studio Museum of Harlem https://studiomuseum.org/artist/rico-gatson Ocula https://ocula.com/art-galleries/miles-mcenery-gallery/artworks/rico-gatson/untitled-triple-consciousness/ SVA https://sva.edu/faculty/rico-gatson Christies Real Estate https://www.christiesrealestate.com/blog/creative-spirit-in-the-studio-with-artist-rico-gatson/ Anderson Ranch https://www.andersonranch.org/people/rico-gatson/ Sugar Hill Museum https://www.sugarhillmuseum.org/rico-gatson Artnet https://www.artnet.com/artists/rico-gatson/events Art for Change https://artforchange.com/collections/rico-gatson Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rico_Gatson
This week on “Out of Office: A Travel Podcast,” Kiernan takes us on a tour of his home turf: New Haven, Connecticut! It's all apizza (a-BEETZ!), fake medieval buildings, dinosaurs, and New England charm. Plus, a BRAND NEW RICK STEVES'S SERIES! Things we talked about on today's episode: Ryan's new bastard podcast “Red Pen” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/red-pen-a-grammar-podcast/id1658608663 Rick Steves's new show https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/video/tv-show/art Wooster Square https://www.ctvisit.com/listings/wooster-square Pepe's https://order.pepespizzeria.com/ Sally's https://www.sallysapizza.com/ Modern http://modernapizza.com/ Da Legna x Nolo https://jet2nolo.com/ Zuppardi's https://zuppardisapizza.com/ Bar https://www.yelp.com/biz/bar-new-haven Beinecke Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beinecke_Rare_Book_%26_Manuscript_Library Gutenberg Bible page turning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKXDGFOoxvc Harkness Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harkness_Tower Taft seat in Woolsey Hall https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/19/nyregion/a-president-s-custom-seat-still-best-in-the-house.html Crypt societies https://archive.curbed.com/2018/6/21/17484316/yale-secret-society-tomb-history-skull-bones Yale University Art Gallery https://artgallery.yale.edu/ Yale Center for British Art https://britishart.yale.edu/ Peabody Museum https://peabody.yale.edu/ “The Age of Reptiles” mural https://news.yale.edu/2019/12/02/peabodys-iconic-dinosaur-mural-gets-check-ahead-museum-renovation Atticus Bookstore https://atticusnhv.com/ Book Trader Cafe http://www.booktradercafe.net/ The Coffee Pedaler https://www.facebook.com/thecoffeepedalernewhaven/ “Bones and All” https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/bones-and-all-midwest-setting-explained Art of the Brick https://artofthebrickexhibit.com/
https://tallenlawson.com T. Allen Lawson is drawn to the quieter side of life. Over time he has developed a discipline of patiently observing and studying the often unnoticed rhythms and subtleties of his surroundings. In his paintings he strives to build layers and textures with pigment to create the abstraction and nuanced depth he feels in nature and the world around him. Tim studied drawing and portraiture at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He furthered his formal studies attending the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. A lifelong student, his dedication to and love of his profession is always evolving as his interests and influences continue to challenge him. T. Allen Lawson has won numerous awards which include: Founder's Prize, Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts; Golden Thunderbird Award, Maynard Dixon Country; Red Smith Memorial Award (twice), National Museum of Wildlife Art. At the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, he has won the Spirit of the West Award, the William Weiss Purchase Award, and the Juror's Choice Award. At the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, he has won the Prix de West Purchase Award, the Robert Lougheed Memorial Artists' Choice Award (twice), the Directors' Choice for Outstanding Landscape and the Donald Teague Memorial Award. He was chosen by the President and First Lady to create the painting for the official White House Christmas card in 2008. His work is shown in public collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Denver Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Brinton Museum, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Forbes Magazine Collection, Tia Collection, Wells Fargo.
https://tallenlawson.com T. Allen Lawson is drawn to the quieter side of life. Over time he has developed a discipline of patiently observing and studying the often unnoticed rhythms and subtleties of his surroundings. In his paintings he strives to build layers and textures with pigment to create the abstraction and nuanced depth he feels in nature and the world around him. Tim studied drawing and portraiture at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He furthered his formal studies attending the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. A lifelong student, his dedication to and love of his profession is always evolving as his interests and influences continue to challenge him. T. Allen Lawson has won numerous awards which include: Founder's Prize, Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts; Golden Thunderbird Award, Maynard Dixon Country; Red Smith Memorial Award (twice), National Museum of Wildlife Art. At the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, he has won the Spirit of the West Award, the William Weiss Purchase Award, and the Juror's Choice Award. At the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, he has won the Prix de West Purchase Award, the Robert Lougheed Memorial Artists' Choice Award (twice), the Directors' Choice for Outstanding Landscape and the Donald Teague Memorial Award. He was chosen by the President and First Lady to create the painting for the official White House Christmas card in 2008. His work is shown in public collections including the Smithsonian Institution, Denver Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Brinton Museum, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Forbes Magazine Collection, Tia Collection, Wells Fargo.
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, we revisit episode 35 where Sasha and photographer Curran Hatleberg discuss his journey from studying painting in undergrad to receiving his MFA in photography at Yale. They discuss his upcoming monograph due out this spring in 2022, as well as the books he's already published, as solo monographs and in concert with his partner, the artist Cynthia Daignault. They drill down on the importance of working collaboratively, both with his photographic subjects, as well as with his wider support group. https://curranhatleberg.com https://tbwbooks.com/products/rivers-dream Curran Hatleberg received his MFA from Yale University in 2010. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, Higher Pictures, and Fraenkel Gallery. Hatleberg has taught photography at numerous institutions, including Yale University and Cooper Union. He is the recipient of a 2020 Maryland State Arts Council Grant, a 2015 Magnum Emergency Fund grant, a 2014 Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer's Fellowship grant, and the 2010 Richard Benson Prize for excellence in photography. Hatleberg's work is held in various museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF MoMA, KADIST, the Center for Contemporary Photography, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Lost Coast, his first monograph, was released by TBW Books in fall 2016. Somewhere Someone, a collaborative artist book with Cynthia Daignault, was released by Hassla Books in fall 2017. His second monograph, will be published by TBW Books in 2021. Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co
What you'll learn in this episode: Why the best modernist pieces are fetching record prices at auction today How “Messengers of Modernism” helped legitimize modernist jewelry as an art form The difference between modern jewelry and modernist jewelry Who the most influential modernist jewelers were and where they drew their inspiration from Why modernist jewelry was a source of empowerment for women About Toni Greenbaum Toni Greenbaum is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960 (Montréal: Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Flammarion, 1996), Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2019) and “Jewelers in Wonderland,” an essay on Sam Kramer and Karl Fritsch for Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947-2019 (New York: Museum of Arts and Design and Arnoldsche, 2021), along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications. Greenbaum has lectured internationally at institutions such as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah. She has worked on exhibitions for several museums, including the Victoria and Albert in London, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. Additional Resources: Link to Purchase Books Toni's Instagram The Jewelry Library Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Once misunderstood as an illegitimate art form, modernist jewelry has come into its own, now fetching five and six-figure prices at auction. Modernist jewelry likely wouldn't have come this far without the work of Toni Greenbaum, an art historian, professor and author of “Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry, 1940 to 1960.” She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the history of modernist jewelry; why it sets the women who wear it apart; and where collectors should start if they want to add modernist pieces to their collections. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. If you haven't heard part one, please go to TheJewelryJourney.com. Today my guest is art historian, professor and author Toni Greenbaum. She is the author of the iconic tome, “Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry, 1940 to 1960,” which analyzes the output of America's modernist jewelers. Welcome back. Do you think that if you had looked up and seen Sam Kramer's shop, would you have been attracted? Toni: Oh, my god, I would have been up in a shot. Are you kidding? I would have tumbled up those stairs had I known it was there. I never even knew what it was, but I was always seeking out that aesthetic, that kind of thing. Like I said, my mother would buy handmade jewelry, silver jewelry, and I loved what she bought. I would go to galleries with her. When I say gallery, they were more like shops; they were like shop-galleries, multimedia boutiques, not specifically jewelry, that would carry handmade jewelry. I loved it. Had I seen Sam Kramer's shop, I would have been up like a shot. The same thing with Art Smith. I would have been down those steps like a shot, but I didn't know they were there, and I was too busy running after boys and going to the coffee shops in Greenwich Village to look carefully. Sharon: Out here, I don't know if you would have had those influences. Toni: You had a few shops. You're in the Los Angeles area? Sharon: Yeah. Toni: There were a few shops in L.A., not so much in Northern California. There was Nanny's in San Francisco, which was a craft gallery that carried a lot of jewelers. In Southern California there were a few studio shops, but I don't know how prominent they were. I don't know how obvious they were. I don't think that they were as much on people's radar as the ones in New York. Sharon: When you say studio jewelers, was everything one-off, handmade? Toni: Yes—well, not necessarily one-off. Generally, what these jewelers would do—this is the best generalization—for the larger, more expensive, more involved pieces, they would make one. When they sold it, they'd make another one, and when they sold that, they'd make another one. If the style was popular, they would also have what they would think of as production lines—earrings, cuff links, tie bars that they would replicate, but they were not cast usually. At that time, very little of it was cast. It was hand-wrought, so there were minor differences in each of the examples. But unless we get into the business records of these jewelers, we don't really know exactly how many they made of each design. Sharon: Why is it, do you think, that modernist jewelry has been so popular today? Toni: Oh, that's a good question. That's a very good question. I think a lot has to do with Fifty/50 Gallery's promotion. Fifty/50 was on Broadway at 12th Street, and it was a multimedia gallery that specialized in mid-20th century material. There were three very smart, very savvy, very charismatic owners who truly loved the material like I love it, and when you love something so much, when you have a passion, it's very easy to make other people love it also. I think a lot of the answer to that question is Fifty/50's promotion. They were also a very educative gallery. They were smart, and they knew how to give people the information they needed to know they were buying something special. I think it appeals to a certain kind of person. Blanche Brown was an art historian in the midcentury who was married to Arthur Danto, who was a philosopher who taught art history at Columbia. His wife, Blanche Brown, was also an art historian. She did a lot of writing, and she would talk about the modernist jewelry, which she loved. It was a badge that she and her cohort would wear with pride because it showed them to be aesthetically aware, politically progressive. It made them stand apart from women who were wearing diamonds and precious jewelry just to show how wealthy their husbands were, which was in the 1940s and 1950s, the women who would wear this jewelry. So, for women like Blanche Brown and women through the 1960s, 70s, 80s and even now—well, now it's different because we have all the contemporary jewelers—but I think it set these women apart. It made them special in a way. It set them apart from the women who were wearing the Cartier and the Van Cleef and Arpels. You dress for your peers. You dress to make your peers admire you, if not be envious. Within the Bohemian subculture of the 1950s, within the Beat Generation of the 1950s and through the 1960s and the hippies in the 1970s, it set apart that kind of woman. Remember, also, feminism was starting to become a very important aspect of lifestyle. I think when “The Feminine Mystique” came out around 1963—I would have to check it—women were starting to feel empowered. They wanted to show themselves to be intelligent and secure and powerful, and I think modernist jewelry imparted that message when one wore it. It's not that different than people who wear the contemporary jewelry we love so much now. Art Jewelry Forum says it's jewelry that makes you think, and that is what I think a lot of us relate to in that jewelry. It's jewelry with a real concept behind it. Sharon: That leads me to the next question. I know the biographies repeat themselves. When I was looking up information about you, they said you're an expert in modernist and contemporary jewelry. Contemporary can mean anything. Would you agree with the contemporary aspect? Toni: I don't view myself as an expert in contemporary. I think I know more than a lot of people about it only because I study it. It's very hard to keep up because there are so many new jewelers popping up all the time. The name of my course that I teach at Pratt is Theory and Criticism of Contemporary Jewelry. Because of that, I do have to keep up to the day because it's a required course for the juniors majoring in jewelry studies, and I feel a responsibility to make them aware of what's happening right at that point I'm teaching it. Things are changing so much in our field, but I don't view myself as an expert. I just think I know a lot about it. It's not my field of expertise, and there's so much. You've got German jewelers, and you've got Chinese jewelers, and you've got Australian and New Zealand jewelers, and you've got Swedish jewelers. All over the world. You've got Estonia, a little, small country, as these major jewelers. They are each individual disciplines in and of themselves. Sharon: How is it that you wrote the catalogue that became “Messengers of Modernism”? Were you asked to write the catalogue? Toni: Yeah, I was hired by David Hanks and Associates, which was and still is the curatorial firm. They're American, but they work for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. At that time, there was a separate Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, and that's really where Messengers of Modernism—it came under the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts. Now, it has been absorbed into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It's just one building. It was a separate building. Basically I was hired by the museum to write the catalogue. Sharon: And how did it become a book? Toni: It is a book. Sharon: Yes, but how did it become—it was a catalogue. Toni: It's a book, but it functions as the catalogue in the next edition. Sharon: Right, but I was saying that you wrote the catalogue, and then you said it was published by Flammarion in Paris. Did they say, “Oh, let's take it and make it a book?” How did it transform? Toni: It was always a book, but it functioned as the catalogue for a particular collection, which is their collection of modernist jewelry. Many exhibitions, even painting exhibitions, when you go to a museum and view a painting exhibition and you buy the accompanying text, it's the catalogue of the exhibition. Sharon: Yes, but a lot of those don't become books per se. That's why I was wondering, did somebody at the publishers see your catalogue and say, “This would make a great book?” I have never seen the exhibition, but I have the book. Toni: I think this is a semantic conversation more than anything else. It has become, as I said, the standard text, mostly because nothing else really exists, except I believe Marbeth Schon wrote a book on the modernist jewelers which is more encyclopedic. This book, “Messengers of Modernism,” first of all, it puts the collection in the context of studio craft from the turn of the century up until then, which was then the present. The book was published in 1996. I think what you're saying is it's more important than what we think of as a museum catalogue and it's become a standard text. Sharon: Yeah. Toni: It was always conceived as a book about modernist jewelry; it was just focusing on this one collection. What I'm saying is people would say, “Well, why isn't this one in the book? Why did you leave this one out?” and I said, “Well, I didn't leave this one out. This is a book about a finite collection that's in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.” If I were writing a book about modernist jewelry, of course I would have included Claire Falkenstein, but she wasn't in their collection, so it's not in that book. That was basically what I meant. Sharon: Is there a volume two that's going to be coming out with the ones that weren't in the collection that you think should be in the book? Toni: That book was published in 1996. We're already in 2022. People are always asking me, but one never knows. Sharon: I guess you don't need an exhibition to write a catalogue. Toni: No, to write a book, of course you don't. Sharon: To write a book. What's on your radar? What do you think you have next? Is it in the realm of modernism that you would be writing about? Toni: That's really what I write about. I lecture about contemporary jewelry to my students and occasionally to the public, but my area of expertise is modernism. There are cardiologists that have a part of their practice in general medicine, but if somebody has a gastrointestinal problem, they're going to send them to a gastroenterologist. I can deal with the broad strokes, which I do, but unless it's one specific jeweler that I would write about, I would not attempt a book about contemporary jewelry. I would stick with modernism, what I feel very confident and comfortable with. Sharon: If somebody who's passionate about jewelry but not wealthy said they want to start building a modernist collection, where would they start? Toni: That is another good question. First of all, they would really have to comb the auctions. If they were very serious about collecting important works, I would send them to Mark McDonald, who's the premier dealer in this material. He was one of the partners of Fifty/50. Sharon: Right, does he still work in that area? Didn't they close the store? Yeah, they closed the store. Toni: Yeah, two of the partners tragically died. Mark had Gansevoort Gallery after. That was on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District here in New York, which was a wonderful gallery also specializing in modernist material, multimedia. Then he had a shop up in Hudson, New York, for many years, right opposite Ornamentum Gallery. That closed, but he still deals privately. He is the most knowledgeable dealer in the period that I know of. If anybody was really serious about starting to collect modernist jewelry, he would be the person I recommend they go to. Sharon: It sounds like somebody to collaborate with if you're writing your next book. Toni: We always collaborate. We're good friends and we always collaborate. Sharon: Where do you see the market for modernist jewelry? Do you see it continuing to grow? Is it flat? Is it growing? Toni: Yes, the best of it will continue to grow. There was an auction right before the pandemic hit. I think it was February of 2020, right before we got slammed. It was an auction that was organized by David Rago Auction in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Wright, which is also an auction gallery specializing in modern and modernism from Chicago. Mark McDonald curated the collection, and the idea behind that exhibition was it was going to go from modernist jewelry from the mid-20th century up to the present and show the lineage and the inheritance from the modernist jewelers. It also included Europeans, and there was some wonderful modernist jewelry in that exhibition that sold very well—the move star pieces, the big pieces. Then there was—I guess a year ago, no more than that—there was an auction at Bonhams auction house which was one couple's collection of modernist jewelry, artist jewelry—and by artists, I mean Picasso and Max Ernst, modernist artists. They collected a lot of Mexican jewelry and two of Art Smith's most major bracelets, his modern cuff and his lava cuff. I always forget which sold for what, but these were copper and brass cuffs. One sold for $18,000 and one sold for $13,000. I think the modern cuff was $18,000 and the lava cuff was $13,000. If anybody comes to my lecture tomorrow for GemEx, I talk about both of them in detail. This is big money. Five figures is very big money for these items, but these are the best of the best, the majors of the major by Art Smith. Art Smith is currently very, very coveted. Sharon: Who's your favorite of the modernist jewelers? Who would you say? Toni: Well, I have two favorites. There are three that are the most important, so let's say three favorites. One is Art Smith, and the reason is because the designs are just brilliant. They really take the body into consideration, negative space into consideration, and they're just spectacularly designed and beautiful to wear. Sam Kramer, the best of his work, the really weird, crazy, surrealist pieces like the one that's on the cover and the back of the Sam Kramer book. Margaret de Patta, who was from the San Francisco Bay area, and she was diametrically opposite to these two because her work was based upon constructivism. She had studied under Moholy-Nagy, the Hungarian constructivist painter, sculptor, photographer. Her work is architectural based upon these eccentrically cut stones. She would be inspired by the rutilations, which are the inclusions within quartz, and she would design her structures around them. I would say those are my three favorites. Sharon: That's interesting. I wouldn't have thought of Margaret de Patta. I guess I think of her in a different category. I don't know why. Toni: She's one of the most important modernist jewelers. She founded that whole San Francisco Bay Area MAG, the Metal Arts Guild. She was their guru. Sharon: When I think of San Francisco at that time, I think of all the jewelry I bought when I was 16 and then I said, “What did I want this for?” Now I see it in the flea markets for 14 times the price I paid for it. Toni: Right. Sharon: But who knew. Anyway, Toni, thank you so much. It's been so great to have you. We really learned a lot. It's a real treat. Thank you. Toni: I had a great time also. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.
In episode 218 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on the word photograph, music and creativity, poetry and photography and positive news for some commissioned photographers. Plus this week, photographer Andrew Moore takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer's the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?' American photographer Andrew Moore is widely acclaimed for his photographic series, usually taken over many years, which record the effect of time on the natural and built landscape. These series include work made in Cuba, Russia, Bosnia, Times Square, Detroit, The Great Plains, and most recently, the American South. Moore's photographs are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Library of Congress amongst many other institutions. He received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2014, and has been award grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the J M Kaplan Fund. His most recent book, Blue Alabama, was released in 2019. His previous work on the lands and people along the 100th Meridian in the US, called Dirt Meridian, was exhibited at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. An earlier book, Detroit Disassembled, included an essay by the late Poet Laureate Philip Levine, and an exhibition of the same title opened at the Akron Museum of Art before also traveling to the Queens Museum of Art, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Moore's other books include: Inside Havana (2002), Governors Island (2004) and Russia, Beyond Utopia (2005) and Cuba (2012). Additionally, his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Artnews, The Bitter Southerner, Harpers, National Geographic, New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME, Vogue and Wired. Moore produced and photographed How to Draw a Bunny, a pop art mystery feature film on the artist Ray Johnson. The movie premiered at the 2002 Sundance Festival, where it won a Special Jury prize. www.andrewlmoore.com Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). © Grant Scott 2022
What you'll learn in this episode: Why the best modernist pieces are fetching record prices at auction today How “Messengers of Modernism” helped legitimize modernist jewelry as an art form The difference between modern jewelry and modernist jewelry Who the most influential modernist jewelers were and where they drew their inspiration from Why modernist jewelry was a source of empowerment for women About Toni Greenbaum Toni Greenbaum is a New York-based art historian specializing in twentieth and twenty-first century jewelry and metalwork. She wrote Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960 (Montréal: Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Flammarion, 1996), Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2019) and “Jewelers in Wonderland,” an essay on Sam Kramer and Karl Fritsch for Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947-2019 (New York: Museum of Arts and Design and Arnoldsche, 2021), along with numerous book chapters, exhibition catalogues, and essays for arts publications. Greenbaum has lectured internationally at institutions such as the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah. She has worked on exhibitions for several museums, including the Victoria and Albert in London, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, and Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York. Additional Resources: Link to Purchase Books Toni's Instagram The Jewelry Library Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Once misunderstood as an illegitimate art form, modernist jewelry has come into its own, now fetching five and six-figure prices at auction. Modernist jewelry likely wouldn't have come this far without the work of Toni Greenbaum, an art historian, professor and author of “Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry, 1940 to 1960.” She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about the history of modernist jewelry; why it sets the women who wear it apart; and where collectors should start if they want to add modernist pieces to their collections. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is a two-part Jewelry Journey Podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week. Today my guest is art historian, professor and author Toni Greenbaum. She is the author of the iconic tome, “Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry, 1940 to 1960,” which analyzes the output of America's modernist jewelers. Most recently, she authored “Sam Kramer: Jeweler on the Edge,” a biography of the jeweler Sam Kramer. Every time I say jeweler I think I'm using the world a little loosely, but we're so glad to have you here today. Thank you so much. Toni: I am so glad to be here, Sharon. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been many years coming. Sharon: I'm glad we connected. Tell me about your jewelry journey. It sounds very interesting. Toni: Well, there's a lot you don't know about my jewelry journey. My jewelry journey began when I was a preteen. I just became fascinated with Native American, particularly Navajo, jewelry that I would see in museum gift shops. I started to buy it when I was a teenager, what I could afford. In those days, I have to say museum gift shops were fabulous, particularly the Museum of Natural History gift shop, the Brooklyn Museum gift shop. They had a lot of ethnographic material of very high quality. So, I continued to buy Native American jewelry. My mother used to love handcrafted jewelry, and she would buy it in whatever craft shops or galleries she could find. Then eventually in my 20s and 30s, I got outpriced. Native American jewelry was becoming very, very fashionable, particularly in the late 60s, 1970s. I started to see something that looked, to me, very much like Native American jewelry, but it was signed. It had names on it, and some of them sounded kind of Mexican—in fact, they were Mexican. So, I started to buy Mexican jewelry because I could afford it. Then that became very popular when names like William Spratling and Los Castillo and Hector Aguilar became known. I saw something that looked like Mexican jewelry and Navajo jewelry, but it wasn't; it was made by Americans. In fact, it would come to be known as modernist jewelry. Then I got outpriced with that, but that's the start of my jewelry journey. Sharon: So, you liked jewelry from when you were a youth. Toni: Oh, from when I was a child. I was one of these little three, four-year-olds that was all decked out. My mother loved jewelry. I was an only child, and I was, at that time, the only grandchild. My grandparents spoiled me, and my parents spoiled me, and I loved jewelry, so I got a lot of jewelry. That and Frankie Avalon records. Sharon: Do you still collect modernist? You said you were getting outpriced. You write about it. Do you still collect it? Toni: Not really. The best of the modernist jewelry is extraordinarily expensive, and unfortunately, I want the best. If I see something when my husband and I are antiquing or at a flea market or at a show that has style and that's affordable, occasionally I'll buy it, but I would not say that I can buy the kind of jewelry I want in the modernist category any longer. I did buy several pieces in the early 1980s from Fifty/50 Gallery, when they were first putting modernist jewelry on the map in the commercial aspect. I was writing about it; they were selling it. They were always and still are. Mark McDonald still is so generous with me as far as getting images and aiding my research immeasurably. Back then, the modernist jewelry was affordable, and luckily I did buy some major pieces for a tenth of what they would get today. Sharon: Wow! When you say the best of modernist jewelry today, Calder was just astronomical. We'll put that aside. Toni: Even more astronomical: there's a Harry Bertoia necklace that somebody called my attention to that is coming up at an auction at Christie's. If they don't put that in their jewelry auctions, they'll put it in their design auctions. I think it's coming up at the end of June; I forget the exact day. The estimate on the Harry Bertoia necklace is $200,000 to $300,000—and this is a Harry Bertoia necklace. I'm just chomping at the bit to find out what it, in fact, is going to bring, but that's the estimate they put, at $200,000 to $300,000. Sharon: That's a lot of money. What holds your interest in modernist jewelry? Toni: The incredible but very subtle design aspect of it. Actually, tomorrow I'm going to be giving a talk on Art Smith for GemEx. Because my background is art history, one of the things I always do when I talk about these objects is to show how they were inspired by the modern art movements. This is, I think, what sets modernist jewelry apart from other categories of modern and contemporary jewelry. There are many inspirations, but it is that they are very much inspired by Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Biomorphism, etc., depending on the artist. Some are influenced by all of the above, and I think I saw that. I saw it implicitly before I began to analyze it in the jewelry. This jewelry is extraordinarily well-conceived. A lot of the craftsmanship is not pristine, but I have never been one for pristine craftsmanship. I love rough surfaces, and I love the process to show in the jewelry. Much of the modernist jewelry is irreverent—I use the word irreverent instead of sloppy—as far as the process is concerned. It was that hands-on, very direct approach, in addition to this wonderful design sense, which, again, came from the modern art movements. Most of the jewelers—not all of them, but most of them—lived either in New York or in Northern or Southern California and had access to museums, and these people were aesthetes. They would go to museums. They would see Miro's work; they would see Picasso's work, and they would definitely infuse their designs with that sensibility. Sharon: Do you think that jumped out at you, the fact that they were inspired by different art movements, because you studied art history? You teach it, or you did teach it at one time? Toni: No, just history of jewelry. I majored in art history, but I've never taught art history. I've taught history of jewelry. We can argue about whether jewelry is art or not, but history of jewelry is what I've taught. Sharon: I've taken basic art history, but I couldn't tell you some of the movements you're talking about. I can't identify the different movements. Do you think it jumped out at you because you're knowledgeable? Toni: Yes, definitely, because I would look at Art Smith and I would say, “That's Biomorphism.” I would see it. It was obvious. I would look at Sam Kramer and I would say, “This is Surrealism.” He was called a surrealist jeweler back in his day, when he was practicing and when he had his shop on 8th Street. I would look at Rebajes and I would see Cubism. Of course, it was because I was well-versed in those movements, because what I was always most interested in when I was studying art history were the more modern movements. Sharon: Did you think you would segue to jewelry in general? Was that something on your radar? Toni: That's a very interesting question because when I was in college, I had a nucleus of professors who happened to have come from Cranbrook. Sharon: I'm sorry, from where? Toni: Cranbrook School of Art. Sharon: O.K., Cranbrook. Toni: I actually took a metalsmithing class as an elective, just to see what it was because I was so interested in jewelry, although I was studying what I call legitimate art history. I was so interested in jewelry that I wanted to see what the process was. I probably was the worst jeweler that ever tried to make jewelry, but I learned what it is to make. I will tell you something else, Sharon, it is what has given me such respect for the jewelers, because when you try to do it yourself and you see how challenging it is, you really respect the people who do it miraculously even more. So, I took this class just to see what it was, and the teacher—I still remember his name. His name was Cunningham; I don't remember his first name. He was from Cranbrook, and he sent the class to a retail store in New York on 53rd Street, right opposite MOMA, called America House. Sharon: Called American House? Toni: America House. America House was the retail enterprise of the American Craft Council. They had the museum, which was then called the Museum of Contemporary Crafts; now it's called MAD, Museum of Arts and Design. They had the museum, and they had a magazine, Craft Horizons, which then became American Craft, and then they had this retail store. I went into America House—and this was the late 1960s—and I knew I had found my calling. I looked at this jewelry, which was really fine studio jewelry. It was done by Ronald Pearson; it was done by Jack Kripp. These were the people that America House carried. I couldn't afford to buy it. I did buy some of the jewelry when they went out of business and had a big sale in the early 1970s. At that time I couldn't, but I looked at the jewelry and the holloware, and I had never seen anything like it. Yes, I had seen Native American that I loved, and I had seen Mexican that I loved. I hadn't yet seen modernist; that wasn't going to come until the early 1980s. But here I saw this second generation of studio jewelers, and I said, “I don't know what I'm going to do with this professionally, but I know I've got to do something with it because this is who I am. This is what I love.” Back in the late 1960s, it was called applied arts. Anything that was not painting and sculpture was applied art. Ceramics was applied art; furniture was applied art; textiles, jewelry, any kind of metalwork was applied art. Nobody took it seriously as an academic discipline in America, here in this country. Then I went on to graduate school, still in art history. I was specializing in what was then contemporary art, particularly color field painting, but I just loved what was called the crafts, particularly the metalwork. I started to go to the library and research books on jewelry. I found books on jewelry, but they were all published in Europe, mostly England. There were things in other languages other than French, which I could read with a dictionary. There were books on jewelry history, but they were not written in America; everything was in Europe. So, I started to read voraciously about the history of jewelry, mostly the books that came out of the Victoria & Albert Museum. I read all about ancient jewelry and medieval jewelry and Renaissance jewelry. Graham Hughes, who was then the director of the V&A, had written a book, “Modern Jewelry,” and it had jewelry by artists, designed by Picasso and Max Ernst and Brach, including things that were handmade in England and all over Europe. I think even some of the early jewelers in our discipline were in that book. If I remember correctly, I think Friedrich Becker, for example, might have been in Graham Hughes' “Modern Jewelry,” because that was published, I believe, in the late 1960s. So, I saw there was a literature in studio jewelry; it just wasn't in America. Then I found a book on William Spratling, this Mexican jeweler whose work I had collected. It was not a book about his jewelry; it was an autobiography about himself that obviously he had written, but it was so rich in talking about the metalsmithing community in Taxco, Mexico, which is where he, as an American, went to study the colonial architecture. He wound up staying and renovating the silver mines that had been dormant since the 18th century. It was such a great story, and I said, “There's something here,” but no graduate advisor at that time, in the early 70s, was going to support you in wanting to do a thesis on applied art, no matter what the medium. But in the back of my mind, I always said, “I'm going to do something with this at some point.” Honestly, Sharon, I never thought I would live to see the day that this discipline is as rich as it is, with so much literature, with our publishers publishing all of these fantastic jewelry books, and other publishers, like Flammarion in Paris, which published “Messengers of Modernism.” Then there's the interest in Montreal at the Museum of Fine Arts, which is the museum that has the “Messengers of Modernism” collection. It has filtered into the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, obviously MAD. So many museums are welcoming. I never thought I would live to see the day. It really is so heartening. I don't have words to express how important this is, but I just started to do it. In the early 1970s or mid-1970s—I don't think my daughter was born yet. My son was a toddler. I would sit in my free moments and write an article about William Spratling, because he was American. He went to Mexico, but he was American. He was the only American I knew of that I could write about. Not that that article was published at that time, but I was doing the research and I was writing it. Sharon: That's interesting. If there had been a discipline of jewelry history or something in the applied arts, if an advisor had said, “Yes, I'll support you,” or “Why don't you go ahead and get your doctorate or your master's,” that's something you would have done? Toni: Totally, without even a thought, yes. Because when I was studying art history, I would look at Hans Holbein's paintings of Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, and all I would do was look at the jewelry they were wearing, the chains and the badges on their berets. I said, “Oh my god, that is so spectacular.” Then I learned that Holbein actually designed the jewelry, which a lot of people don't know. I said, “There is something to this.” I would look at 18th century paintings with women, with their pearls and rings and bracelets, and all I would do was look at the jewelry. I would have in a heartbeat. If I could have had a graduate advisor, I would have definitely pursued that. Sharon: When you say you never thought you'd live to see the day when modernist jewelry is so popular—not that it's so surprising, but you are one of the leaders of the movement. When I mentioned to somebody, “Oh, I like modernist jewelry,” the first thing they said was, “Well, have you read ‘Messengers of Modernism?'” As soon as I came home—I was on a trip—I got it. So, you are one of the leaders. Toni: Well, it is interesting. It is sort of the standard text, but people will say, “Well, why isn't Claire Falkenstein in the book? She's so important,” and I say, “It's looked upon as a standard text, but the fact is it's a catalogue to an exhibition. That was the collection.” Fifty/50 Gallery had a private collection. As I said before, they were at the forefront of promoting and selling modernist jewelry, but they did have a private collection. That collection went to Montreal in the 1990s because at that time, there wasn't an American museum that was interested in taking that collection. That book is the catalogue of that finite collection. So, there are people who are major modernist jewelers—Claire Falkenstein is one that comes to mind—that are not in that collection, so they're not in the book. There's a lot more to be said and written about that movement. Sharon: I'm sure you've been asked this a million times: What's the difference between modern and modernist jewelry? Toni: Modern is something that's up to date at a point in time, but modernist jewelry is—this is a word we adopted. The word existed, but we adopted it to define the mid-20th century studio jewelry, the post-war jewelry. It really goes from 1940 to the 1960s. That's it; that's the time limit of modernist jewelry. Again, it's a word we appropriated. We took that word and said, “We're going to call this category modernist jewelry because we have to call it something, so that's the term.” Modern means up to date. That's just a general word. Sharon: When you go to a show and see things that are in the modernist style, it's not truly modernist if it was done today, it wasn't done before 1960. Toni: Right, no. Modernist jewelry is work that's done in that particular timeframe and that also subscribes to what I was saying, this appropriation of motifs from the modern art movement. There was plenty of costume jewelry and fine jewelry being done post-war, and that is jewelry that is mid-20th century. You can call it mid-20th century modern, which confuses the issue even more, but it's not modernist jewelry. Modernist jewelry is jewelry that was done in the studio by a silversmith and was inspired by the great movements in modern art and some other inspirations. Art Smith was extremely motivated by African motifs, but also by Calder and by Biomorphism. It's not religious. There are certainly gray areas, but in general, that's modernist jewelry. Sharon: I feel envious when you talk about everything that was going in on New York. I have a passion, but there's no place on the West Coast that I would go to look at some of this stuff. Toni: I'll tell you one of the ironies, Sharon. Post-war, definitely through the 1950s and early 1960s, there must have been 13 to 15 studio shops by modernist jewelers. You had Sam Kramer on 8th Street and Art Smith on 4th Street and Polo Bell, who was on 4th Street and then he was on 8th Street, and Bill Tendler, and you had Jules Brenner, and Henry Steig was Uptown. Ed Wiener was all over the place. There were so many jewelers in New York, and I never knew about them. I never went to any of their shops. I used to hang out in the Village when I was a young teenager, walked on 4th Street; never saw Art Smith's shop. He was there from 1949 until 1977. I used to walk on 8th Street, and Sam Kramer was on the second floor. I never looked up, and I didn't know this kind of jewelry existed. In those days, like I said, I was still collecting Navajo.
In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha and photographer, Mimi Plumb talk about the experience of organizing and editing work from over 30 years ago into books that are meaningful and relevant today. They also discuss the political and autobiographical nature of Mimi's work and how that still motivates her to make work today. https://www.mimiplumb.com https://www.instagram.com/mimi_plumb/ Aperture PhotoBook Club with Wendy Red Star: https://aperture.org/events/aperture-photobook-club-wendy-red-star-delegation/ Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged photographers concerned with California and the West. In the 1970s, Plumb explored subjects ranging from her suburban roots to the United Farm Workers movement in the fields as they organized for union elections. Her first book, Landfall, published by TBW Books in 2018, is a collection of her images from the 1980s, a dreamlike vision of an American dystopia encapsulating the anxieties of a world spinning out of balance. Landfall was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2019, and the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2019. Her second book, The White Sky, a memoir of her childhood growing up in suburbia, was published by Stanley/Barker in September 2020. The Golden City, her third book, published by Stanley/Barker in March 2022, focuses on her many years living in San Francisco. Plumb is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. She has received grants and fellowships from the California Humanities, the California Arts Council, the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography, and the Marin Arts Council. Her photographs are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse in Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Plumb received her MFA in Photography from SFAI in 1986, and her BFA in Photography from SFAI in 1976. Born in Berkeley, and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, Mimi Plumb has served on the faculties of the San Francisco Art Institute, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives in Berkeley, California. Find out more at https://photowork.pinecast.co
What you'll learn in this episode: Why we often have more information about gold than any other decorative object The difference between material culture and material studies, and how these fields shaped the study of art and jewelry What John wants visitors to take away from “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory and Power” Why history is much more global than we may think What it really means to curate, and why it's an essential job About John Stuart Gordon John Stuart Gordon is the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. He grew up among the redwoods of Northern California before venturing East and receiving a B.A. from Vassar College, an M.A. from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, and a PH.D. from Boston University. He works on all aspects of American design and has written on glass, American modernism, studio ceramics, and postmodernism. His exhibition projects have explored postwar American architecture, turned wood, and industrial design. In addition, he supervises the Furniture Study, the Gallery's expansive study collection of American furniture and wooden objects. Additional Resources: Yale University Art Gallery Website Yale University Art Gallery Instagram John Stuart Gordon Instagram Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Perhaps more than any other metal or gem, gold brings out strong reactions in people (and has for all of recorded history). That's what curator John Stuart Gordon wanted to explore with “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power,” a featured exhibition now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about why people have always been enchanted by gold; what he discovered while creating the exhibit; and why curation is more that just selecting a group of objects. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. Today, my guest is John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. Welcome back. I'm curious; I know you recently had a group from Christie's studying jewelry that came to visit your exhibit. I'm curious if they asked different questions, or if there's something that stood out in what they were asking that might have been different from a group studying something else. John: Every group is different. I love them all, and I learn so much from taking groups of visitors through because you start looking at objects through their lens. Recently a group of makers came through and, wow, that was a wonderful experience, because I could make a reference to, “Oh, look at the decoration on this,” and then, “Is it chaste or is it gadroon?” “What kind of anvil are they working with?” We have to answer these questions. There are some things I can't answer but a maker can identify easily, so I'm learning things. Maybe someone who's a collector or an appraiser is thinking about objects in a very different way, wanting to know how rare it is, if there are only a handful, where they are, how many are still in private collections, what's in the museum collection. One of my favorite tours was with a small group of young children who had a completely different set of preconceived notions. I had to explain what an 18th century whistle and bells would have been used for because they'd never seen one before. I had to talk about what kinds of child's toys they remembered from when they were kids, trying to relate. Every group has a slightly different lens, and you can never anticipate the questions they're going to ask. Sharon: Yes, they're coming at you from the weirdest angles. In putting this together, what surprised you most about gold in America? What surprised you most about putting this exhibit together? What made you say, “Gosh, I never knew that,” or “I never thought about that”? There's a lot, but what's the overriding question, let's say. John: It's such a nerdy answer, and I apologize for being such a nerd, but what surprised me the most was an archival discovery. Mind you, this all takes place against the background of lockdown and having way too much time on our hands and looking for distractions. I pulled a historical newspaper database that the library subscribes to, and I typed in the word “gold” and pushed enter. There were about three million responses that came back, and I just started reading my way through. Not all of them were interesting, but I was struck by the frequency with which people were discussing gold, and I was struck by the global knowledge at a very early period. I would find articles written in the 1720s in colonial Boston talking about the Spanish fleets leaving Havana Harbor with amounts of silver and gold onboard. They would describe how much gold, how much silver, was it coins, was it bars, was it unrefined. There was a newspaper report coming out of New York in the 1750s talking about a new gold strike at a mine in Central Europe. That was truly unexpected: to realize that this material was of such importance that people were talking about it on a daily basis, and that it was newsworthy on this global scale. People weren't just talking about what was going on in colonial Boston or colonial Philadelphia. They were talking about what was going on in Prussia and Bogota. I think we often think of early history as very insular, and we think of our present day as global. History has always been global, and it was a lovely reminder of how global our culture always has been. Sharon: That's interesting, especially talking about global. I just reread Hamilton. They're talking about Jefferson and Madison and everybody going over to France and coming back. I think about the boats, and I think, “Oh, my god.” I think of everybody as staying in place. You couldn't get me on one of those boats. What a voyage. But that was global. Everybody was communicating with everybody else. So, yes, it always has been that way, but it's very surprising, the movement that has been there for so long. We could go on and on about that. Let me ask you this: Yale Art Gallery just received a donation from Susan Grant Lewin of modern jewelry, art jewelry, on the cutting edge. At the museum and gallery, is the emphasis more on jewelry as part of material culture and decorative arts? Not every museum or art gallery would have been open to it. What's the philosophy there? John: Yes, we just received a gift of about two dozen pieces of contemporary jewelry from Susan Grant Lewin, who is a collector and scholar. We've also received a gift from the Enamel Arts Foundation, which is a foundation that collects and promotes enamel objects and jewelry. We have a long history of collecting jewelry, and it's based on historic collections. The core of the American decorative arts collection is the Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. It started coming to the art gallery in 1930. It's this rather storied collection. It covers everything you can imagine: furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, you name it. It was assembled by a man named Francis P. Garvan, who was a Yalee. He graduated in the late 19th century and he gave it in honor of his wife. His main love, after his wife and his family, was silver, and the collection at Yale is probably the most important collection of early American silver in any museum. Silversmiths and goldsmiths, the names are interchangeable, and it is mostly men at that period who were making silver objects and gold objects. They're also making jewelry. As you take the story forward, it doesn't change a lot. People who are trained as metalsmiths often will make holloware and/or jewelry. The fields are very closely allied, and the techniques are very closely allied. So for us, it makes complete sense to have this very important historical collection of metalwork go all the way up to the present. We have a lot of 20th century jewelry, now 21st century jewelry. We also have contemporary holloware because we like being able to tell a story in a very long arc. The way someone like Paul Revere is thinking about making an object and thinking about marketing himself is related to how someone graduating from SUNY New Paltz or RISD are thinking about how to make an object and how to market themselves. Often it's the same material, the same hammers, the same anvils. So, it's nice to show those continuities and then to bring in how every generation treats this material slightly differently. They have their own ideas and their own technologies. So, the Susan Grant Lewis Collection is a very experimental work. She has said she doesn't like stones, so you're not going to see a lot of gem setting and a lot of diamonds and rubies set in gold. There's nothing wrong with them, but she's more interested in people who are more out there, thinking about how you turn 3D printing into art or how you use found materials and construct narratives and make things that are more unexpected. Sharon: I just want to interrupt you a minute. SUNY New Paltz is the New York State University at New Paltz? John: State University of New York at New Paltz. Sorry, I gave you the shorthand. Sharon: I know RISD is the Rhode Island Institute— John: We're going to have to submit an index on how to understand all my acronyms. Yes, RISD is the Rhode Island School of Design. There are a handful of institutions that have really strong jewelry departments and really strong metalworking departments, among them Rhode Island School of Design, State University of New York at New Paltz. You can add Cranbrook, which is outside of Detroit. There's a whole group of them that are producing wonderful things. Sharon: So, you studied decorative arts. What was your master's in? John: I was an art historian. I was very lucky in college to have a professor who believed in material culture, and I asked, “Do I have to write about paintings?” and she said, “No, you don't.” I was very lucky to find that in college. Then I went to the Bard Graduate Center in New York. It was a much longer title, the Graduate Center for Material Culture and Design. It changes its name every two years. My master's was in kind of a history of design and material culture. Then to get a Ph.D., there are very few programs that allow people to focus on material culture. Luckily, there are more with every passing year. When I was going to school, Yale is one that's always focused on decorative arts and material culture. Boston University, their American studies program is a historically strong program that allows you to look at anything in the world as long as you can justify it. So, that's where I went. Sharon: Was jewelry like, “Oh yeah, and there's jewelry also,” or was jewelry part of the story, part of the material culture, the material objects that you might look at? Was it part of any of this? John: It was. I am at core a metals person. My master's thesis was written on the 1939 New York World's Fair, looking at one pavilion where Tiffany, Cartier and a few others had their big exhibition of silver, gold and, of course, jewelry. My entry into it was silver, but I had to learn all the jewelry as well. So, jewelry has always been part of my intellectual DNA, but it didn't really flourish until I got to Yale, and that would be because of my colleague, Patricia Kane. She has a deep knowledge and interest in jewelry. We have done a few jewelry exhibitions in the past, and she has seen it as part of the collection that should grow. I arrived at Yale as a scrappy, young curator seeing what was going on in the landscape, and the jewelry is amazing. One of my first conferences I went to was a craft conference. I met jewelers and metalsmiths, and it's a really approachable group. They're very friendly. They like talking about their ideas. They like talking about their work, which is really rewarding. Sharon: What were your ideas when you started as a curator? Did you have the idea, “Oh, I'd love to do exhibition work”? Curate has become such a word today. Everybody is curating something. John: Yes, my head is in my hands right now. One of my pet peeves is that people talk about curating their lunches. The word curate actually means to care for, so I think about the religious role of a curate. It's the same role. Our job is really to care for collections. If you care for your lunch, you can curate it, but if you're just selecting it, please use a different word. That idea of caring for objects, that's what really excited me as a curator; the idea that so much of what we do is getting to know a collection, to research it, to make sure it's being treated well, that things are stable when they go on loan, that when things need treatment, you work with a conservator or a scientist. I was really excited by that. Over the course of my career, I've become much broader in my thinking. When you come out of graduate school, you've spent years focusing down deeper and deeper on one small, little subject. I was still very focused on a very narrow subject when I became a curator. That was early 20th century design. I love it dearly, but over the years my blinders have come off. I love American modernism. I also love 17th century metalwork. I love 21st century glass. You realize you love everything in the world around you. Sharon: Would you say your definition of curate is still to care for? I'm thinking about when I polish my silver. I guess it's part of curating in a sense, taking care of things. John: Polishing your silver or your jewelry is actually one of the best ways to get to know it. We're one of the few collections where it's the curators who polish the silver. We hold onto that task because we don't do it very often, because it's better to leave things unpolished if you don't have to. But when it comes time to polish something, the opportunity to pick something up, to turn it over, to feel the weight of it, to look closely at the marks and the details, that's a really special thing, to get to know your objects so well by doing it. I give a hearty endorsement of silver polishing. It's also a great emotional therapy if you've had a tough day. But to your question, I even more strongly believe that the role of a curator is someone to care for their collections. Sharon: I really like that. It gives me a different perspective. John: Yeah, because what we're doing is not just physical care; it's emotional care. In today's culture we talk so much about self-care and these kinds of tropes, but that's a lot of what we're doing. We're understanding history through our objects. We're understanding the objects better to have something preserved for posterity, so it can tell future generations stories. Sharon: That's interesting. John, thank you so much. By the way, the exhibit ends in July, but the Susan Grant Lewin Collection is open through September. You'll be busy, it sounds like. John: “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power” closes July 10. The Susan Grant Lewin Collection of American Jewelry will be up through the fall. If you miss both of those or you're in a place where you can't get to New Haven, our collections are all online. All you have to do is go to our website, and you can just click through and spend a day looking at objects from the comfort of your living room. Sharon: Yes, and very nice photos. As I said, I was looking at them before we started. I was very interested. What was that used for? Where did it come from? I guess being in Los Angeles, I'll have to do that. I'll be doing that from my living room. John, thank you so much. This is very, very interesting. I learned a lot and you have given me a lot to think about, so thank you so much. John: Thank you for having me. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.
When the Seattle Art Museum opened the Olympic Sculpture Park on the urban waterfront in 2007, it changed the way people could interact with art and experience the city's environment. The fact that it's free and open to everyone makes the park one of the most inclusive places to see art in the Pacific Northwest. The sculpture park contains pieces like Alexander Calder's red sculpture The Eagle, Jaume Plensa's giant head Echo, and Neukom Vivarium, a 60-foot nurse log in a custom-designed greenhouse, among many others. Although many people believe that the greatest work of art at the park is the park itself and the way it connects with its surroundings. Because of the efforts of the Seattle Art Museum and the city, instead of being filled with private condo buildings, this former industrial site has become a welcoming part of the waterfront for the public to enjoy sculptures, activities, and the gorgeous Elliott Bay views. The new book Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park: A Place for Art, Environment, and an Open Mind, pays homage to the interconnected spirit of the park. Mimi Gardner Gates — the director of the Seattle Art Museum (1994–2009) at the time of the Sculpture Park's conception and creation — edited this collection of writings and images about the park and how public-private partnerships can create innovative civic spaces. Other contributors include Barry Bergdoll, Lisa Graziose Corrin, Renée Devine, Mark Dion, Teresita Fernández, Leonard Garfield, Jerry Gorovoy for Louise Bourgeois, Michael A. Manfredi, Lynda V. Mapes, Roy McMakin, Peter Reed, Pedro Reyes, Maggie Walker, and Marion Weiss. Seattle Times journalist Lynda V. Mapes and SAM curator Catharina Manchanda joined Gates in discussion about the remarkable waterfront park and how it might inspire future innovation in civic spaces. Mimi Gardner Gates was director of the Seattle Art Museum for fifteen years and is now director emerita, overseeing the Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas. Previously, she spent nineteen years at Yale University Art Gallery, the last seven-and-a-half of those years as director. She is a fellow of the Yale Corporation; Chairman of the Dunhuang Foundation; Chairman of the Blakemore Foundation; a trustee of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum; a trustee of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and serves on the boards of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Northwest African American Museum, the Terra Foundation, and Copper Canyon Press. Dr. Gates formerly chaired the National Indemnity Program at the National Endowment for the Arts and served on the Getty Leadership Institute Advisory Committee. Lynda V. Mapes is a journalist, author, and close observer of the natural world, and covers natural history, environmental topics, and issues related to Pacific Northwest indigenous cultures for The Seattle Times. Over the course of her career she has won numerous awards, including the international 2019 and 2012 Kavli gold award for science journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest professional science association. She has written six books, including Orca Shared Waters Shared Home, winner of the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award, and Elwha, a River Reborn. Catharina Manchanda joined the Seattle Art Museum as the Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art in 2011. Notable exhibitions for SAM include Pop Departures (2014-15), City Dwellers: Contemporary Art from India (2015), Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas (2017), and Frisson: The Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Collection (2021). Prior to joining SAM, she was the Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. She has also worked in curatorial positions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the recipient of numerous international awards including an Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Getty Library Research grant, and others. Buy the Book: Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park: A Place For Art, Environment, And An Open Mind from University Book Store Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here.
What you'll learn in this episode: Why we often have more information about gold than any other decorative object The difference between material culture and material studies, and how these fields shaped the study of art and jewelry What John wants visitors to take away from “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory and Power” Why history is much more global than we may think What it really means to curate, and why it's an essential job About John Stuart Gordon John Stuart Gordon is the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. He grew up among the redwoods of Northern California before venturing East and receiving a B.A. from Vassar College, an M.A. from the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, and a PH.D. from Boston University. He works on all aspects of American design and has written on glass, American modernism, studio ceramics, and postmodernism. His exhibition projects have explored postwar American architecture, turned wood, and industrial design. In addition, he supervises the Furniture Study, the Gallery's expansive study collection of American furniture and wooden objects. Additional Resources: Yale University Art Gallery Website Yale University Art Gallery Instagram John Stuart Gordon Instagram Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Perhaps more than any other metal or gem, gold brings out strong reactions in people (and has for all of recorded history). That's what curator John Stuart Gordon wanted to explore with “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power,” a featured exhibition now on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about why people have always been enchanted by gold; what he discovered while creating the exhibit; and why curation is more that just selecting a group of objects. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is a two-part Jewelry Journey Podcast. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it comes out later this week. Today, my guest is John Stuart Gordon, the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. The Yale University Museum and Gallery is the oldest art museum in the western hemisphere associated with the university. John is going to be telling us today about one of the gallery's current feature exhibitions, “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power.” We'll hear all about the exhibit and John's journey today. John, welcome to the program. John: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I apologize; my endowed title is a total mouthful. Sharon: No, no. Who is Benjamin Attmore Hewitt? John: Benjamin Attmore Hewitt was a clinical psychologist who helped bring the idea of statistical study to psychology, and he was also a collector. He was an avid collector of federal furniture, and he was associated with the art gallery. He, in the early 80s, was a guest curator on an exhibit on card tables that we did called “The Work of Many Hands.” In the incredibly small world department, I'm joining you from my living room, where if I turn and look out my window, I'm looking at the house that he used to live in across the street from me. Sharon: Wow! Was that an old house that was built on federal plans or is it a modern house, the one he built or that that he has? John: It is a beautiful, Georgian-style house. It's quite gorgeous, and you can imagine it was perfect for his federal period collection. Sharon: It sounds gorgeous. John: It's just one of those small-world things, right? I ended up moving across the street from person who endowed my job. Sharon: Sounds gorgeous. So, tell us about your career path. Tell us how you ended up at the Yale University Art Gallery. John: Yes, it was a dream job for me. I grew up in San Francisco. I grew up in a household that loved art, so I'm one of those lucky people that grew up from childhood thinking art isn't scary; art isn't strange; art is something to be enjoyed. I always knew I wanted to be in the art world somehow. I went to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie for the history of art program. When I graduated, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but my first job was at Christie's auction house, and that was an amazing experience. You see everything when you work in an auction house. It's the fabulous things that get the headlines in the paper, but it's everything else that gives you an education. That was an incredible training for my eye. I'm a slow thinker. I like taking my time. I like spending time with objects. The constant hustle and bustle of the auction world was a little too much for me, so I went to grad school. I went to the Bard Graduate Center in New York and got my master's. Then I had an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of my colleagues there, the curator Amelia Peck, once said that if you would like a job at one of the great collections, you need a Ph.D. So, I said, “O.K.,” and I went to Boston University for a Ph.D. in American Studies. The whole time I was thinking, “I want to get a Ph.D. so I can get a job at a place like the Yale University Art Gallery,” because its collection is legendary. It was the collection that so many of my professors used when they were teaching their survey courses. It was a collection I knew, and it was my aspirational job. One day while I was studying for my orals, my college professor called me and said, “A job has opened up at the Yale University Art Gallery. You need to apply for it.” Being a grad student, I was like, “Oh, I'm a little busy right now. Maybe next week,” and she was like, “John, don't be stupid. These jobs don't come up very often. You really need to apply.” I was very lucky. I got the job. That was 15 years ago, and I have been there ever since. The collection is extraordinary. The museum was founded in 1832. It was one of the oldest museums in the country. Its American decorative arts collection formed very early on but really got going in 1930, so it's also a very old collection. In the 1970s, one of the former curators, Charles Montgomery, felt it needed to go clear up to the present. So, our collection really spans centuries, and with that kind of span, you never get tired. Sharon: It does. I was looking at your exhibit of gold online and I'm going, “Oh my god, this is going back.” I was looking at the gold collar you have and I thought, “This is really old.” What was that? The 3rd or 5th century or something like that? I can't even remember. John: The museum's collections are encyclopedic. It goes from ancient Babylon up to the present day. Luckily, my slice of it is just the American, which is enough of a handful. There are two of us in our department, Patricia Kane and myself, and between the two of us, we need to cover pre-contact to the present in every medium. So, it's enough to make your head spin some days. Sharon: What is it about the decorative arts that attracted you as opposed to another area of history that you could also go into museums for? John: That's a great question. I loved the idea that decorative arts are like a lens into our world. Everything we make and own is a lens, but decorative arts have a way of telling you stories about the way we used the technology that went into making them, what a particular culture or a time period found important, as you make objects to fulfill needs and to fulfill aspirations. I loved the idea that you could take anything from a necklace or a teapot or a chair, and if you look at it enough ways, you could know a lot about the goals and dreams and technologies and resources of a given time period. I loved that idea, reverse-engineering culture through objects. Sharon: That's interesting, yes. How did the gold exhibit come about? Was that something you and Patricia had been thinking about, or was that a directive from on high? How did that come about? John: The gold exhibition came about because of the pandemic, to be completely honest. Two years ago, the museum closed down, like many museums did at the beginning of the pandemic, and our exhibition calendar went out the window. Loans were cancelled, exhibitions were cancelled, and the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, Stephanie Wiles, put out a call for in-house exhibitions, exhibitions we could work on in our spare time. We didn't know how long this was going to last. We thought we were going be home for a few weeks, and she wanted exhibitions that would be easy to slot into the calendar when the museum reopened and that would really shine a light on our collections, because those would be easier for the curators to research. When I arrived at Yale in 2006, sitting on the shelf above my desk was a slim, little catalogue to an exhibition called “American Gold” that was done in 1963. I loved that little catalogue. I read it many times. I loved the material. Much of the material was drawn from Yale's collections because Yale has one of the strongest collections of early American gold. I thought, “Someday, maybe I'll revisit this.” It seemed amazing that no one had revisited this idea of gold since the 1960s because so much had changed about we think about the world, how we think about objects, what kind of theoretical models we use, and I thought I would do that exhibition at some point in the distant future. Then when our director said, “Are there are any ideas out there?” I said, “O.K., maybe I could do this now.” I suggested it, and it was a real treat. So, it was something that grew out of a spontaneous need but became a wonderful, wonderful research project. Sharon: So, the objects for the most part are taken from your collection as opposed to loans, O.K. Tell us about the exhibit “Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power.” Tell us more about the whole exhibit. What do you want people to learn from it? John: I was fascinated by the idea that gold is so compelling and so entrancing. There is something about this material that has been fascinating to humans for millennia. You think about the Egyptian pharaohs with their coffins covered in gold. Gold is the reason for so many wars and invasions, and all this is a sign of status. What is it about this material that has so much weight? I started talking to many of my colleagues, asking about the gold in their department, and we realized we could do a global show. It could be gigantic. It started getting away from me, and I realized, “O.K., let's just focus on one very narrow portion of this global story. We'll just focus on colonial American experience.” As I started looking at those objects, I was struck by something rather uncanny. In the history of decorative arts, most objects are anonymous. We don't know who made them. We don't know who owned them. We don't know how they traveled through time. With metalwork, we do tend to know a bit more because there are makers' marks. There's a whole history of guild systems that are looking at the purity of metals, and with gold we know even more information. I think probably more than almost any other material, we know who made gold objects and who owned them, and it's because they often are inscribed or engraved somehow, or family histories come down with them. I found that so fascinating. That became the structure for the show, really thinking about these objects that have histories and why they were owned, why they were made, why they were cherished, thinking about this important material and how it intersects with human life over the span of a few centuries. That's what I want visitors to take away. Most people think—well, we can actually do this right now. Sharon and everyone listening, just to yourself, think of three words that come to mind immediately when I say gold. Free associate. What are those words that come to mind? Sharon, I'm going to put you on the spot. What three words come to mind? Sharon: It's like a blue elephant. What do I think? Shiny, valuable and decorative. In terms of jewelry, I think decorative. Those are the words that come to mind. John: Shiny, valuable, decorative. I asked this question of a lot of people. Everyone I met for a while got that question, and value came up a lot. Then there were a lot of judgment terms, things like beauty or tacky. They were either positive or negative terms. People have an emotional, visceral reaction to gold. What I want people who visit the show to do is to move beyond those initial associations. We're drawn to it because it's valuable and we think it's beautiful, or we're skeptical of it because we think it might be gaudy. But I want them to really look at the objects and learn why someone might own something or why someone might want an object made out of this material. It's to move beyond those initial words into words about legacy and heritage or patriotism or pride, to get to that second layer. It's to let people know O.K., I'm going to think twice about what a gold ring might symbolize because I've looked at a gold ring that was all about mourning and commemorating the dead, or I've looked at something like a gold spoon that seemed a little flashy, but we know it was made by a Huguenot craftsman escaping religious persecution in New York, yet it was owned by someone who made their money selling slaves. Ideas of freedom and persecution are wrapped up in this material. There are so many stories that, once you start asking the objects, the stories come back to you in a way that I hope makes people pause when they leave the museum and see something else in their life. “Oh, that's an interesting idea.” Sharon: I think what strikes me is the fact that when you're talking about gold, artistry, memory and power over the years, the wars that have been fought, I think of the Aztecs and Incas, where it was so cherished. We talked a little about this. Material culture, material studies. You'll have to explain the difference. That sounds like something I didn't grow up hearing. Maybe because you're in that world, it's something you've heard about for a long time. But what is material culture and material studies, and how does it relate to this? John: That is such a big question. I'll try to do some honor to it. The idea of material culture as an academic field—and I'm sorry; I have to put on my dorky academic for a second—but the idea of material culture really came out in the 1960s and 1970s with this larger idea of a new history, a way of looking at the reinterpretation of historical sources, historical stories, questioning who has the right to tell history. It was a way to get away from just looking at the histories of wars and rulers, documenting dead white men written by more dead white men. Material culture is a way of looking holistically at the objects that are produced by a civilization and thinking about the everyday person or the person not on the throne. What can be learned from the things that are not just the dates of rules and wars? That field really transformed art history, history, American studies, anthropology, archaeology. It opened up various fields of study so that you could write an entire book about the development of the Coke bottle and have a valid historical discussion about everyday objects. What's been fascinating—I grew up in this world. To me, material culture is my language. I grew up being taught by people who were on the front wave of this, so I'm totally indoctrinated. In recent years, I've seen a subfield emerge just called material studies. It makes chuckle a bit because it's like material culture with the culture taken out, which is probably not true, but it's really just going into the actual “thinginess” of objects: thinking about the marble that a statue was carved from, or thinking about the wood used to make a chair and diving deep into this elemental level of what the material of our world is, where it comes from and what stories it tells. In terms of gold, your mentioning the Incas is, I think, a rather important reference, because where was the gold coming from? If we take an Inca material studies approach to this, we think about how, for many years, the Mediterranean in Europe, they weren't reusing and melting down and recycling the gold that was coming out of a very limited number of mines. Then suddenly, the Spanish discover or stumble across the New World, and they see these cities with temples filled with gold and palaces filled with gold, and they start looting them. As the conquistadors are conquering Central and South America, they're stripping the gold out, and then that gold is being melted down and being sent back to Europe. What does it mean to have this material that's so inherently fraught with conflict? What does it mean for a silversmith in Boston in the 18th century? He's sitting on the edge of an empire working a small amount of gold that's incredibly valuable because he has to get it from London. He's aware that the Spanish have all this access to gold through the New World, and it's circulating around him. Then how does all of this change when gold is discovered at Sutter's Mill in California in 1849, and suddenly there's a whole new and incredibly large source of gold? It's augmented by further strikes in Colorado, and the West begins creating more gold. Think about this material, how its rarity is tied to conquest and imperial control. There are some scientists who have been thinking, “Can we do tests on material to find out if there are little isotopes in the metal that can tell you whether the ring you're wearing today is gold that was from Northern California or from Afghanistan? Can we begin to map out the world and map out trade routes all based on scientific inquiry and matching scientific testing with archival research?” Your very quick dive into material culture versus material studies, it's endlessly fascinating. Sharon: I know people get their doctorates in material studies around things like that. I should have asked you this at the beginning. Did you consider yourself an artist when you grew up with all this art? Before art history, were you creative? Were your parents in the creative end of the arts or were they teaching? John: Being an artist was option number one, and I pursued that. Making art was a really important part of my childhood and developing a sense of identity. Then I learned about art history. I just loved art history, and I had to make that decision: would I go to art school or would I go to a liberal arts college? For me, art history won. I loved being able to parse out these stories and to look at objects and paintings and sculptures and think about all the different references. But having that history of making, I think, is very important. I have a lot of empathy for the skill and the creativity that goes into making.
Ep.108 features Nanette Carter was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. She majored in art history and studio art at Oberlin College, Ohio, and spent her junior year in Perugia, Italy. Carter graduated from Oberlin in 1976 and received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1978. Nanette Carter has received many grants, fellowships, and awards throughout her career. Most recently in 2021, Carter was granted The Anonymous was a Woman Award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions in Cuba, Syria, Italy, and Japan. In 2017, Carter was featured in Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction: 1960s to Today, a traveling museum exhibition featuring African American women artists that was organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. In 2021, Carter was the program curator and a participant in Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists at the Art Students League, New York. Last summer, Carter was included in the Parrish Art Museum's exhibition, Affinities for Abstraction: Women Artists on the Eastern End of Long Island curated by Alicia Longwell. Her solo exhibition at the Hunterdon Museum of Art, Clifton, New Jersey, Forms Follow Function: The Art of Nanette Carter recently closed. Currently, Carter has a solo exhibition featuring her most recent work at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea. The exhibition features collages from three series, including several large-scale examples. This summer Carter will be in group exhibitions at the Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, the Featherstone Gallery, Martha's Vineyard, and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. Carter's work is in numerous corporate and museum collections including, the Perez Museum, Miami, The National Museum of Fine Arts Museum in Havana, Cuba, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Saint Louis Art Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Yale University Art Gallery. Carter recently retired from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, where she was a professor of art for over 20 years. Photo Credit: Kenneth Laidlow Artist https://nanettecarter.com/ Work https://www.berrycampbell.com/artist/Nanette_Carter/works/ Berry Campbell https://www.berrycampbell.com/ Anonymous Was a Woman https://www.anonymouswasawoman.org/ ArtForum https://www.artforum.com/artguide/berry-campbell-11828/shape-shifting-203752 Culturetype https://www.culturetype.com/?s=nanette+carter Hyperallergic https://hyperallergic.com/650425/cinque-gallery-another-chapter-of-black-art-history/ Detroit Art Review https://detroitartreview.com/2021/11/nanette-carter-contemporaries-nnamdi/ 27 East https://www.27east.com/arts/lets-talk-art-abstract-artist-nanette-carter-1775638/
Four of the five artists from New Haven Artspace's exhibition "Footnotes and Other Embedded Stories" joined me for an hour-long discussion: Joseph Smolinski, Julia Rooney, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, and Leonard Galman (missing was Allison Minto). These five had all been chosen as Happy and Bob Doran Artists-in-Residence in a program co-sponsored by Artspace and the Yale University Art Gallery. We spoke about the residency experience, their practices as artists, and the vibrant exhibition that has resulted from this collaboration. https://artspacenewhaven.org/exhibitions/footnotes/
In episode 204 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on why photographers feel the need to label themselves, keeping photography simple, the importance of subject matter and trying to buy a camera. Plus this week photographer Mimi Plumb takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer's the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?' Born in Berkeley, California and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, Mimi Plumb received her MFA in Photography from SFAI in 1986, and her BFA in Photography from SFAI in 1976. She has served on the faculties of the San Francisco Art Institute, San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since the 1970s, Plumb has explored subjects ranging from her suburban roots to the United Farm Workers movement in the fields as they organized for union elections. Her first book, Landfall, published in 2018, and is a collection of her images from the 1980s. Landfall was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award 2019, and the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2019. Her second book, The White Sky, a memoir of her childhood growing up in suburbia, was published in September, 2020. The Golden City, her third book, was published early this year and focuses on her many years living in San Francisco. Her photographs are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Collection Deutsche Börse in Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pier 24, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. She is a 2017 recipient of the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, and has received grants and fellowships from the California Humanities, the California Arts Council, the James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography, and the Marin Arts Council. She lives in Berkeley, California. www.mimiplumb.com Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). © Grant Scott 2022
Tim Lawson is an exceptional contemporary American artist whose work is widely-recognized and on display in notable public collections like the Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and more. Tune in to learn more about his perspective on and lifelong experience with art. https://tallenlawson.com/
In episode 164 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering transferable skills, film making, finding answers with photography and challenging the status quo. Plus this week photographer Jason Langer takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer's the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?' Arizona born American photographer Jason Langer's love of photography dates back to his childhood in Ashland, Oregon. Groomed on a Mamiya C330 twin-lens reflex, he developed his work in a makeshift darkroom cum hall closet in his family home before moving on to more advanced technology at the University of Oregon, where he earned a degree in photography. Following graduation, Langer worked as an apprentice and printer for some of the San Francisco Bay Area's most renowned photographers, including Ruth Bernhard, Arthur Tress, and Michael Kenna, who became a lifelong mentor and friend. Langer descends from a tradition of photographers—George Krause, Ralph Gibson, Roy deCarava, Bill Brandt, Matt Mahurin—who photograph what is physically happening in the world, but a world in which the unexpected appears for brief glimpses before returning to generally accepted social norms. Langer's work has appeared in numerous publications including American Photo, Life, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, and Vanity Fair. In addition, his in the permanent and private collections of the Rutgers University, Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Zimmerli Art Museum. He has published three monographs: Secret City (2006), Possession (2013) and Twenty Years (2015). He is currently working on a fourth book titled Berlin. Langer is also a sought-after photography mentor, having taught at the Academy of Art University for 12 years and Santa Fe Workshops since 2014. www.jasonlanger.com You can now subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://www.getrevue.co/profile/unofphoto Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). What Does Photography Mean to You? including 89 photographers who have contributed to the A Photographic Life podcast is on sale now £9.99 https://bluecoatpress.co.uk/product/what-does-photography-mean-to-you/ © Grant Scott 2021
In episode 160 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed announcing that the doctor will see you now, considering the importance of Tik Tok and not getting left behind, being working class and photographers moving into teaching. Plus this week photographer Mark Steinmetz takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer's the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?' Mark Steinmetz was born in New York City and raised in the Boston suburbs of Cambridge and Newton until he was 12. He then moved to the midwest before, aged 21, he went to study photography at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. He left that MFA program after one semester and in mid 1983, aged 22, moved to Los Angeles in search of the photographer Garry Winogrand, whom he befriended. Steinmetz makes photographs "of ordinary people in the ordinary landscapes they inhabit", and "in the midst of activity". He finds many of his subjects whilst walking around but he has also spent time at Little League Baseball and summer camps. His work has been exhibited in many major institutions, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public collections featuring his work include Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Art Gallery; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Nazraeli Press has published nine monographs of his work, including South Central (2006); South East (2008), Greater Atlanta (2009), The Players (2015); and Angel City West (2016). Among other awards, Mark Steinmetz was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1994. Mark Steinmetz resides in Athens, Georgia. www.marksteinmetz.net You can now subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://www.getrevue.co/profile/unofphoto Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). Grant's book What Does Photography Mean to You? including 89 photographers who have contributed to the A Photographic Life podcast is on sale now £9.99 © Grant Scott 2021