Art History

Bard Senior Art History majors, Monica Semczyk and Manu Del Peschio emulate Manet’s Bar At The Folies Bergère while interning during winter break at an opening at the Steven Harvey Gallery on the Lower East Side, NYC.

Rachel Heidenry, ’11, received a Fulbright Fellowship to study murals in El Salvador.  She recently emailed an update: “I split my time between San Salvador, the westernized capital, and Suchitoto, a small town about two hours north. In San Salvador, I tend to hop on the bus with my camera concealed in my backpack and head to spots where I know murals are. Once there, I photograph the murals from every angle and ask whoever I can for information. Often I just come across sprayed or painted walls, mostly graffiti or tags, documenting them through photography without knowing too much about their origins. In Suchitoto, life is much more laid-back. Based at the Centro Arte para la Paz (http://capsuchitoto.org/en/), I taught two drawing classes twice a week from October-December. One group was of young women, incredibly patient and eager to learn. The other was a mix of 10-12 yr olds (mostly boys) who struggled to draw for 2 hours without also practicing wrestling moves. Either way, it was a lot of fun and we ended the year with a final exhibition of students’ self-portraits while feasting on chocolate-carmel donuts.

So far, I have photographed over 300 painted walls, including fine art murals, community murals, graffiti, tags, advertisements, and political propaganda. I’ve conducted 3 formal interviews with established Salvadoran muralists, helping one get a commission to paint in Suchitoto. Informally, I have had countless conversations with Salvadorans about art and memory, finding support in my research and ideas. I also had the opportunity to design and paint a mural with a group of youth in Copapayo for the anniversary of the town’s massacre. This is just a little update to share with you all. I’m leaving out the countless pupusas, latin dance classes, and sponge-bob piñatas, but it is still a taste of my daily life and research. Also, please look at my photography blog (rheidenry.wordpress.com)

Clare Conniff’s Post-Grad ’11 Project

My whole life I have watched my grandfather, Jim Conniff, create weird and

wacky, but beautiful, art. When I was young I just thought of it as something he did for fun. I never realized how truly wrong I was until my last semester at Bard, when I took a course entitled “Outsider Art” with Susan Aberth. In the class Susan taught us about artists, usually termed outsider, folk, naïve, or visionary, that were removed from the accepted art world. The separation could be compulsory, as for artists in mental asylums or prisons, or it could be self-imposed. I spent most classes thinking about how much everything Susan was teaching us seemed applicable to my grandfather, who is now 91 years old, and his art. After graduation, I began to look more closely at my grandfather’s work. After he finished a piece, he would place it somewhere in his home, and for the most part, they remained wherever he put them, gathering dust, and, in some cases, breaking, until I started poking around. I took some pictures, asked him some questions, and eventually decided that I needed to do something about the rapid and ongoing decay of the art that had been sitting around his house for decades.

In order to raise money to preserve Jim’s art, I have started a fundraising campaign on a website called Kickstarter, a platform for funding creative projects through many small donations from varied sources. I am trying to raise funds in order to preserve Jim’s art. With the donations I receive, I will repair and clean the pieces, catalogue them, create a book, and interview Jim on camera. You can view my Kickstarter campaign at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1050509672/the-accidental-artist and read more about the project at theaccidentalartist.tumblr.com. The Kickstarter closes on January 22, and if I haven’t reached my goal of $5000, I will not receive any of the donations. Please check out my project and consider supporting it in whatever way you are able. Whether that means donating $10, $100, or just simply passing on the link to someone you think might be interested, thank you. I truly appreciate any help you can give me.

Prof. Tom Wolf will give a talk entitled “Isami Doi and Asian American Artists in New York Between the World Wars” at the Arts and Humanities Conference sponsored by the University of Hawaii, Monday, January 10, 2011.

Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, has published in the Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, November/December 2011 issue, “Xu Yong’s This Face,” an article about  Xu Young’s latest works marking his continued concern for the plight of prostitutes in China.

I am currently a first-year graduate student at Columbia University’s Historic Preservation Program. The curriculum uses New York City as a laboratory for exploring a wide array of issues pertaining to the preservation of the built environment, such as research and documentation, city planning, structures and materials, architectural history and theory. I have already undertaken such projects as surveying and documenting the Dula family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, visiting and and writing a presentation on the Pieter Wyckoff House in Brooklyn (the oldest surviving Dutch house in New York State), and researching a loft building at 450-460 Park Avenue South and a rowhouse at 8 East 36th Street as part of a study area in Murray Hill. Additionally, I travelled to Buffalo to attend the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s annual conference, where I sat in on lectures regarding land banks and neighborhood conservation districts, and got to take tours of Buffalo’s architectural landmarks including Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building (1896) and Minoru Yamasaki’s M&T Bank (1967). Outside of school, I attended a committee meeting for Landmark West, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and read personal testimony at a public hearing at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in support of a proposed historic district. In Columbia’s program, I am learning, along with my colleagues, about how to assess a building or neighborhood’s significance as well as how the broad scope of preservation can be economically as well as culturally beneficial to society in the long term. I hope to continue focusing on neighborhood planning and community revitalization, and am pursuing a dual degree with Urban Planning.

Prof. Noah Chasin, Art History, participated in a panel discussion after the premier of the film “Urbanized” at the Toronto International Film Festival.

MAN ABOUT TOWN: November 2011

The winter art season in New York is in full swing, with more interesting exhibitions than any one person can see.  One major blockbuster is the vast survey of the career of William DeKooning at MoMA (through January 9).

Beginning with early realist works he made while a youth in Holland, it traces his path through 1930s flayed figures and still lifes, followed by the richly complicated black and white paintings of the post World War II years, to his most famous works, the Women of the mid 1950s, to his powerfully gestural landscapes.

DeKooning famously reworked his paintings constantly, scraping out, painting over, until the final product was a record of his painting processes.  He developed a unique style that combined the spatial ambiguities and geometries of Cubism with the spontaneous organic forms of biomorphic Surrealism. Almost every painting is layered with gestural strokes of paint that question their own power by being overlapped, partially erased, or otherwise canceled, and it takes a lot of time to thoroughly see a single painting, particularly if one also wants to think about the artist’s unusual sense of color.

The popular MoMA exhibition features 200 works spread out over 15,000 square feet.  How to see it all?  A friend of mine has visited the show 4 times and intends to return 4 more; he is a MoMA member so he takes advantage of the member’s privilege of entering the Museum at 9:30, an hour before it officially opens.  That’s one way.

But even spending an hour running through it when it’s crowded will give a strong sense of DeKooning’s amazing career as a painter, leaving one with an experience that is emotional, complex, rewarding, and perhaps unfinished—like his paintings.

In the near vicinity of MoMA there are some wonderful exhibitions that you can see without having to squeeze around someone to look at a painting like at the DeKooning  show.

Alexander Calder’s dozen sculptures, mostly mobiles, all from 1941, demonstrate the wonderful lightness and precise whimsy of the inventive sculptor at his best (Pace 32 East 57^th, through December 23).

Harvey Quaytman has a richly austere show of abstract paintings at David McKee (745 Fifth Avenue, through December 23). All are composed of rectangular forms in square canvases.  But Quayman, who died in 2002, was inventive with materials and highly sensitive to them.  He will put two whites next to each other and they differ because one has ground glass mixed into the pigment creating a color and texture that subtly contrasts with its neighbor.

These are set against chocolaty brown areas made of iron rust, or deep matte blues and blacks painted over warmer colors that are allowed to sparkle through in tiny highlights.

R.H. Quayman, one of the hottest painters on the art scene today, is his daughter (and a Bard alum), and although her paintings are very different you can see his legacy in her refined shades of white and gray, and her hyper sensitivity to the physical edges of her paintings.

Erica Lome, class of 2011, is a curatorial intern at the Museum of Arts and Design.  She is assisting in the development of a contemporary Japanese design show,  “Beauty in All Things,” and part of her responsibilities is to promote the works in the show through a weekly blog on the MAD website.  The show opens November 22nd.  She also reviews Japanese art shows in galleries and museums on her blog.  Please visit:

http://www.madblog.org/category/beauty-in-all-things/

Alexander Gray Associates seeks a general gallery intern prepared to commit to an intensive, hands-on, gallery training four month internship, beginning immediately.

For more information about the gallery visit:
http://www.alexandergray.com or contact intenship@alexandergray.com for more information about the internship and application process.