ArtsBeat

'Emancipation Approximation' at the Albright-Knox

Kara Walker's series "Emancipation Approximation" is on view in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Albright-Knox.

As part of "ECHO: Sampling Visual Culture," a glimpse into the wide-ranging art of appropriation in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the entirety of Kara Walker's silkscreen series, "Emancipation Approximation," is on view in its own dedicated gallery. It is not to be missed.

Every time I think about Walker's work, which uses cut-paper silhouettes to weave a powerful and unsettling narrative about racism in the Antebellum south and its modern legacy, I come back to a penetrating review of that body of work by the Washington Post's Robin Givhan. It's worth reading and re-reading, to get a sense not only of the power of Walker's series, but what it says about our society today. Here's an excerpt:

Walker, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, doesn't approach racism with the detachment of a historian. But she is not the type to indulge in tearful catharsis or the egocentric bloviation that tends to flow out of the ubiquitous town hall meeting: Pass the mike and let me tell you how my suffering is worse than yours.

Walker concedes that point right away. Everyone -- black and white -- has suffered because of slavery's legacy. Everyone has baggage -- huge steamer trunks filled with issues of self-esteem, entitlement and disenfranchisement. But while making allowances for that, she also argues that the fallout from slavery is a tangled web of grotesquerie, violence and absurdity. And everyone -- white and black -- has some culpability.

Burchfield and Cornell: a summer of Buffalo in New York City

Left: Charles Burchfield's watercolor "The Four Seasons." Right: Kate Burton as Katharine Cornell and Bobby Steggert as the young Pete Gurney star in A.R. Gurney's play "The Grand Manner" in New York City.

Last summer, New York City played host to a major exhibition featuring artists who got their start at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, the Buffalo gallery whose mid-70s founding is the stuff of art world legend. This summer, Buffalo's dramatic and artistic legacy is again the subject of two well-received projects now on offer in the Big Apple.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is displaying the work of the late Buffalo watercolorist Charles Burchfield, who painted nature in his own mesmerizing, singular style in the small hamlet of Gardenville (in West Seneca). Meanwhile, in Lincoln Center Theatre's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, Buffalo-born playwright A.R. Gurney's new show about fellow Buffalonian Katharine Cornell, "The Grand Manner," opened on Sunday.

The reviews are in, and they're generally glowing.

Art meets science

Timothy Frerichs, associate professor of art at the State University of New York at Fredonia, will give a talk next Thursday at the Central Library at noon called "Linnaeus' Gardens." His work challenges the traditional ways we observe nature -- he uses art as a tool for scientific investigation and representation. In his artistic statement on his Web site, he writes:

"My projects are based on site-specific walks of primarily transitional landscapes.  During the walks, I gather and record found objects from the site. These objects along with other researched site imagery are used to create my works. I strive to create a visual dialogue examining how collecting and collection processes (whether scientific or cultural) represent our perceptions of the natural world. I am especially interested in how these perceptions change."

At the talk, Frerichs will discuss his experience as a Visiting Artist at the Linneaus Gardens in Uppsala, Sweden, the oldest botanical garden in Sweden. His work dealt with plant classification. (Botany and art? It seems like Frerichs has a pretty fascinating collection of interests)

But then again, Vladimir Nabokov was an entomologist before he became a writer. I wonder how both communities -- scientific and artistic -- feel about this mixing of disciplines.

The talk is presented in conjunction with the library's exhibition "In the Garden: the Art of Botanical Illustration" (June 1 to Sept. 26) and as part of the National Buffalo Garden Festival (June 18-July 25).

 --Allison Eck

Biennial envy: Torontonians look south

A week ago, The Toronto Star ran a piece by art critic Murray White about Toronto's long talked-about plans for a biennial exhibition that would highlight the city's many talented but under-appreciated artists. Albright-Knox Art Gallery Director Louis Grachos, who White interviewed, told me about the story at Art Alive over the weekend, reflecting happily on the fact that Buffalo's upcoming "Beyond/In Western New York" exhibition is drawing increased attention from north of the border.

This year's version of "Beyond/In" promises to be the most ambitious and wide-ranging collaborative art exhibition ever attempted in the region, and is expected to draw significant international attention, even more so than the 2007 version. In addition to scores of regional artists, it will feature such internationally known artists as Didier Pasquette, who will be walking on a tightrope across a Western New York landmark and Andy Goldsworthy, the British sculptor known for his environmentally themed pieces and earthworks. The show will also draw about a third of its participants from Toronto, hence the attention from our Canadian compadres.

Albright-Knox announces joint acquisition with Tate Modern

If you've visited the Albright-Knox Art Gallery any time since January, you may have seen a curious stack of papers sitting on the gallery floor. You may, if you were there at the right time, have glimpsed someone actually removing a sheet from the stack -- thus bucking that age-old museum rule about patrons keeping their hands off the art. But what you may not have known is that the Albright-Knox acquired this untitled piece by Félix González-Torres with the help of the London's Tate gallery.

After the final details of the deal were put through, the folks at the Albright-Knox got the OK today to name the institution with whom they shared the costs of the work. (I reported on the acquisition, along with some other recent works purchased by the gallery, here.) This is the first joint acquisition the gallery has made with an overseas institution. Co-purchases, like Rachel Whiteread's gigantic inverted staircase (co-owned with Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art), are becoming more common in the museum world as budgets are stretched and competition with wealthy private collectors stiffens.

Native Buffalonian appointed director of New Orleans Museum of Art

 

Susan Taylor takes over as director of the New Orleans Museum of Art on Sept. 1 / Photo courtesy New Orleans Museum of Art

Doug MacCash of the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Susan Taylor, a Buffalo native and former director of the Princeton University Art Museum, has been named director of the New Orleans Museum of Art. On Sept. 1, Taylor will replace outgoing director John Bullard, who has led the respected institution for more than 35 years.

Before assuming the directorship of the Princeton museum, Taylor served a 12-year term as director of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College. In his article on the appointment, MacCash notes the importance of Taylor's upbringing in Buffalo to her successful career as an art historian and museum administrator:

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., 54 year ago, Taylor said her interest in art was first kindled as a child in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in her hometown, where she encountered strange paintings by such artists as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg — although she admits that she didn’t understand avant-garde art until much later. 

--Colin Dabkowski

CEPA packed with exhibitions

Last week, four new exhibitions opened up in the Market Arcade Building (617 Main St.), headquarters of the ever-active CEPA Gallery. I wrote briefly about the shows in last week's Gusto, but thought it would be helpful to post a slideshow of some of the work in the exhibitions to whet your appetites.

The shows include an exhibition of wordy monotpyes by Edgar Heap of Birds, a collection of assemblages by Sally Rebl, some architectural photographs by Biff Henrich and, perhaps most alluringly, a preview of the works that will go on the block for CEPA's upcoming auction on April 24.

--Colin Dabkowski

Buffalo's new culture club

As I wrote in my column in today's Spotlight section, a select group of local cultural organizations have banded together to form a broad new advocacy group.

The Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance, cast by its creators as a grassroots effort to get more people to acknowledge and invest in the arts, will direct its efforts both at local perceptions about the arts and culture and at sources of public funding and policy.

The organizers of the GBCA made no secret of their intent to enlist all of Western New York's non-profit cultural groups in their ambitious attempt to weave the arts more deeply into the identity of the Buffalo Niagara region. But at this point, specifics are obviously lacking.

So what's your take on this new group? Is it an exercise in futility to try to wring more attention and dollars out of a state government already facing massive deficits? Does it even make sense to treat the arts in the same way as manufacturing, or, say, tourism? How should the GBCA get started on its momentous task?

Let's brainstorm.

--Colin Dabkowski

Alec Soth on Mardi Gras

As Lent comes to a close, The New York Times Web site is featuring a short video shot by Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth on Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It's unlike most of the countless photo essays produced yearly on the iconic event in that it contains no scenes of revelry -- at least not directly -- and it is saturated not with a sense of joy, but with that particularly Sothian mixture of desolation, desperation and isolation that characterizes much of his work.

Soth's "NIAGARA" series, shot in 2004-05 in locations around Niagara Falls, will go on view at CEPA Gallery as part of this fall's citywide "Beyond/In Western New York" exhibition. The image below, "Falls Manor," is part of the series.

--Colin Dabkowski

Ted Nash's 'Portrait in Seven Shades' makes jazz out of visual art

I just got off the phone with Ted Nash, a reed player with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and composer of "Portrait in Seven Shades," which Nash and the orchestra will perform on March 20 in the University at Buffalo's Center for the Arts. Nash's suite is based on the lives and work seven seminal 19th and 20th century painters: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Salvador Dalí and van Gogh.

Look for an article by Jeff Simon (with a sidebar by me) in the March 19 edition of Gusto. But in the meantime, to whet your appetite, check out this fascinating series of blog entries and videos by Nash on MoMA's blog, in which he reflects on the influence of the artists he chose to represent in the suite.

--Colin Dabkowski