Both 2D and 3D works are eligible. Judges will select three winning entries in each category to be prominently displayed in the gallery’s Main Street window for two weeks, before being moved into the gallery. All entries will be on display and priced for sale, according to Nancy Faris, Art Uptown vice president.

“Our Dog Days Art Show last August was so popular with local artists that we decided to hold another juried show in January and open it up both to 2D and 3D works of art,” related Ms. Faris. She noted that 72 local artists were represented in the August competiton, along with Art Uptown’s 27 member artists.

Artists 21 and older can submit one or two 2D or 3D works in any media in the January show, but only one work per artist will be accepted for the exhibition. Work must be for sale and priced. The gallery takes 25% commission on all sales.

Receiving date is Saturday, Jan. 5, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Artists should bring their work to the gallery on that day and fill out an entry form. Entry fee is $20 for each entry. Overall size is limited to 30”x30”, including frame; plexiglas only. Works must be wired for hanging. Rejected work pick-up will be Monday, Jan 7, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Final pickup of work is Friday, Jan. 25, 6-9 pm.

For more information, call or stop in at Art Uptown, 1367 Main St., Sarasota. Tel. 941-955-5409, www.artuptown.com.

Photo attachment: A Chorus Line – Sabal Palms.jpg

“A Chorus Line – Sabal Palms,” an acrylic-resist painting by Art Uptown artist Cecile Moran, sets the theme for the gallery’s “January in Paradise” juried art competition Jan 5-25 at Art Uptown, 1367 Main St., Sarasota.

Editorial Contact:

Richard Stewart

Art Uptown Publicity

Tel. 813-289-8149

Subtitle: Hyper-Organic Art

By: Michael Keel

Photos By: Rob Evans

So who is Ian Ross and why did I choose to share Graffiti art with our readers? The simple answer equals dedication, originality, perseverance and imagery that makes your head spin back a few times. I can honestly say graffiti art is something I thought I would never be into. Through mutual friends Ian and I have come together, someone asked, “So you cover artists and travel articles for your writing? Do you know Ian in Mill Valley?” I Googled him, flipped through his portfolio and saw an artist with the humble face of determination, canvases full of color, tricky imagery and instantly Ian gained a new fan. He comes from Mill Valley, CA. He is a surfer, family man, loving husband and an artist.

Ross has always known he is an artist and has a clear memory of riding in the back of a station wagon on his way to kindergarten and realizing he looked at the world differently; he was an artist. His parents are both artists that ran a graphic design business from home before the computer age; so basically, he grew up in an art studio. Marin County, CA. influences his work the most. Ross constantly references patterns and forms in nature in a graffiti-style aesthetic.  The contrast of San Francisco’s urban density to the protected open spaces of Marin still fuels his inspiration to this day.

Ross describes his work as “Hyper-organic” and it’s primarily inspired by the act of painting in the moment without a plan and reacting to the composition as it evolves.  Ross says, “Painting ‘live’ for the last ten-plus years in front of an audience has helped my style progress.” During 2011 while he worked primarily from a studio at Facebook Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA., he was definitely influenced by the raw passion of David Choe. Ross also travelled to the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas to see Shepard Fairey’s largest public installation to date and then painted a mural in the hotel as well. In Miami this year during Art Basel,  Ross was lucky enough to meet Ron English, and see some canvases by SABER, Swoon, and Roa, to name a few. He was also extremely moved by the mural work of Os Gemeos, Jeff Soto, Kofie, Chor Boogie, and the list continues. Ross says, “But right now my favorite artists in the world are known as En Masse, and they hail from Montreal.”

The most important part about achieving your dreams and pushing through the rough patches is your work ethic. Ross says, “No matter what you are working on, or what has slowed you down, the only thing that will help the situation is to keep working. I tell this to everyone I can, and it’s a pretty simple formula.”  His ceramics professors in college taught him all that matters is hard work and when the going gets tough, keep working, don’t stop, and never give up.  Any true artist knows this, whether instinctually or from their own life experience.

Now that Ian is on the official road of being a successful artist, more business is involved and balancing everything is key. Ross says, “I hope I have handled this as well as possible!  I have found some of the most talented artists are often the worst with real world responsibilities, but these challenges are what make us professionals.  The most important thing you can do is listen to the people you care about, who care about you, and be flexible.” In the early days, Ross used to paint live four or five nights a week for free just to gain exposure. Any form of art requires constant promoting, hard-work and dedication. Facebook and social media are also crucial these days. Ross says, “Use social media, keep painting, and never give up!”

Ian’s style has evolved but remains exactly the same by way of his process. Ross says, “I paint without the burden of intention.” Meaning he really enjoys letting each painting find its own way, adjusting to the colors and composition as he goes. Ross’s work is very psychological and deep, and he believes all the forms and patterns that show up repeatedly, are referencing experiences in his life that affected his personality and his tastes.  Ross says, “I find that with each piece I paint, the conversation I am having with my work becomes more complex.”

By the time you have read this Ross will have already had a successful solo show in NYC. In the midst of all of these shows, he has a few other mural projects going on as well. He is also planning to open his own gallery/studio space in San Francisco this summer; so keep an eye out. Ross enjoys abstract subject matter and he feels that the mystery in a piece of art can be timeless and captivating.

Ross has painted all over the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, LA, San Diego, NYC, Miami, London, Prague, Munich, and hopefully Hong Kong this year.  He really enjoys painting large scale murals that will be experienced by a high volume of people on a daily basis. Ross says, “I like to surprise the viewer, and then hopefully make them stop for a second to investigate my subject matter. I have some paintings hanging in the trees too.” 

Although Ross is riding the success horse right now, he still has quite a few goals ahead. He would love to paint a yacht for the America’s cup, the exterior of a very large building on Sunset Blvd., an old WWII fighter plane, and maybe another dance floor if possible. These are all projects that are somewhat in the works; but still a bit far off.  Ross’s next large scale project will be his outdoor mural in the SOMA district of San Francisco, that will be visible from the Bay Bridge. Ross says, “Besides that I am down for just about anything!”

Being a full time artist requires the ultimate sacrifice, I personally know this, from being a photographer/writer myself and people do not realize just how much artists have to bleed, sweat and cry through mountains of frustration; but the pay-off is well worth it. Not just the money, but the smiles, accomplishment, the gratification that you shared something positive with the world, or something that is a statement or piece of you.  Ross says “If you have another job you are not a full time artist. It’s extremely challenging, frustrating and more gratifying than I can possibly explain. I feel so very fortunate to be able to do what I love for a living, and my main goal in the near future is to help other artists do the same. Imagine what our world would be like if everyone enjoyed what they do for a living?!”

Ross’s art process moved from the canvas to the streets.  He doesn’t have a graffiti background; he has just been exposed to the art form for a very long time.  Ross is most inspired by the artwork he see’s on the street, so he is doing more and more murals these days.  Ross will always be growing as an artist, which is the most important part of the artist’s journey.  Ross says, “We should always find new ways to take risks, to challenge ourselves creatively, and hopefully continue to grow and evolve in the process.  There is nothing wrong with a little healthy competition; it keeps you on your toes!”  Ross’s most proud piece of work was painted over recently. It was next to the freeway in Marin CA., almost one million people a day drove by it.  Ross says “Now I would say my proudest piece is actually a body of work inside the Startup HQ co-working space on Harrison and 5^th in San Francisco.  I did ten huge murals in eight days there last month.  One hundred hours of working time total.”  He is also extremely proud of everything he has done inside Facebook HQ and also the seventy foot mural at The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas.

Ross recently got married to the love of his life (and his business manager) Daniele and they are planning on opening up their own gallery/studio/event space this summer in San Francisco.  Please follow ianrossart on Facebook, twitter, and instagram to stay informed.  They will be giving away art on a regular basis, raising money for charities that they support at each show, and teach classes in the space in various genres with numerous guest artists. For anyone reading this, please check Ian Ross’s work out online and please support artists and your community in any way you can.  Ian Ross would like to thank all of his supporters and anyone reading this article.

Tucked away in Mar Vista, Art House Live inhabits an old tomato market that dates back to 1913. We have renovated the interior to include a storefront gallery space and a fully functioning studio/performance room.

PROMO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf1j7B8bMvI&feature=youtu.be

MOONCHILD:
Amber Navran, Max Bryk and Andris Mattson form this LA based neo-soul trio. This trio of musicians based in Los Angeles aims to bring a new sound to the neo-soul genre while drawing upon other influences such as Erykah Badu, Bon Iver, John Coltrane and D’Angelo. Max, Andris, and Amber met at USC where they all studied jazz performance. After touring together as a horn section in 2011, they began co-writing and recording their first album “Be Free.” “Be Free” which was released in April 2012, featuring soloists Ben Wendel, Russell Ferrante, John Daversa, and rapper Harry Mack. In May of 2012, Moonchild embarked on their first west coast tour culminating with a show in LA at the Key Club opening for neo-soul producer/singer Georgia Anne Muldrow. You can listen to and purchase Moonchild’s record at their website: http://thisismoonchild.com/

KUH∞LIDA:
Kuh-Lida is an experimental beat project of Chicago native and composer Myles Emmons, whose interest in mass production of beats and avant-beat making sparked the beginning of the Kuh-Lida project about one year ago. Combining future sounds with blips, drips, and strips, the music is only progressing and growing. Kuh-Lida is currently a resident dj and projection artist for Art House Live. On this night he will be doing a special collaboration with others in the Art House Live family, including Katie Boeck and Stephen Becker. His new mixtape, Money Hustard, is available for free download on his Bandcamp page: www.kuh-lida.bandcamp.com

WONDR:
Wondr is the moniker of Kyle Hamon. He is a staple act of the 6-Bit collective, a group of Los Angeles natives devoted to creating new, innovative sounds with an emphasis on collaboration and web-savviness.

http://6bitcollective.com/wondr/

8:00 PM
$10 Donation (Goes to artists and maintaining the space)
Beer/Wine/Food available

3815 Grand View Blvd
Mar Vista, CA 90066

Questions? Comments? Need a friend?
Hit up Jordan Alper: jordan.alper@gmail.com

“Trompe l’oeil was once a measure of how well an artist could paint, but over the last century skill alone has rarely been enough to make an artwork interesting,” says artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor, who was inspired to learn wood inlay in graduate school after seeing the Duke of Urbino’s Renaissance studiolo, installed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its fantastic trompe l’oeil books and instruments. Taylor adapts the painstaking marquetry technique to render slices of destitution in American life, including a corner piece recently on view at James Cohan Gallery in New York that appears to be layers of peeling linoleum flooring.

“I’m not really trying to fool the eye into thinking that the flooring is actual, but I am using trompe l’oeil in materials not as malleable as paint, hoping to create a perceptual experience that stops viewers and invites them to consider the subject more deeply,” the artist says.

“Trompe l’oeil is the hook that draws us in,” says curator Siri Engberg, who has brought together more than 50 artists trafficking in the hyperreal for her show “Lifelike,” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 27. “Then comes the moment of the uncanny—what am I really looking at? These are things that are very pedestrian and potentially overlooked—a paper bag, an eraser, a sleeping bag—that the artist has brought back to life either through very different materials or just through sheer, systematic labor.”

For “Lifelike,” Yoshihiro Suda carved what looks like weeds growing out of a crack in the floor in a remote corner of the gallery, using magnolia wood painted to perfect verisimilitude. The piece is so inconspicuous that viewers could easily walk by without noticing it. Jud Nelson made a dead ringer for a stuffed white Hefty garbage bag that on closer inspection proves to be chiseled from marble. Its undulating surfaces summon up ideas of classical drapery.

Also in the show is what looks like a child’s plastic chair with a box of tissues on it, by Robert Gober. With time comes the nagging feeling that something’s a little off—the flowers on the tissue box are actually hand painted, the chair is curiously modeled—and then the label reveals that it’s all made of bronze.

“When you know that the painted tissue box is bronze, you know that it is unnaturally heavy, and then the meanings start to flow from the physical thing itself,” Gober has said about this piece, which is based on items present in his psychiatrist’s office. “This object was the silent companion to my talking cure.”

“It’s a meditation on the object and the elevation of the mundane,” says Tom Sachs, who, for his recent show at Sperone Westwater in New York, placed exact facsimiles of a car battery and a cinder block on a “plywood” pedestal, all cast from bronze. “I love batteries because they store all that potential energy, and the cinder block is one of those incredible miracle materials that has provided housing for people who previously wouldn’t have been able to afford it.” Sachs recognized that not all viewers noticed the transformation in materials.

All of these artists play with the space of the encounter, which Engberg argues stretches back to Marcel Duchamp’s practice of plucking ordinary objects from life and placing them in the context of the museum as “readymades.” But rather than just taking a urinal, say, and putting it in a gallery, contemporary artists are “taking an object from life, lovingly remaking it, and putting it in the gallery.” Elizabeth Armstrong, curator of contemporary art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, calls it the “reverse readymade,” a phenomenon she has seen over the last decade or two. “It’s taking Duchamp and standing him on his head—this notion of returning to what art used to be, beautifully crafted handmade objects, but in fact they look like throwaways.”

Armstrong is showing a number of artists making such works in the exhibition “More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness,” opening at SITE Santa Fe in July and traveling to Minneapolis next March. Among the curious objects on view will be old-fashioned boxing gloves by Dario Robleto that are actually made from a mind-boggling list of materials: cast-and-carved bone charcoal, a melted vinyl record of Leadbelly’s “The Titanic,” broken male hand bones, ground coal, horsehair, dirt, pigments, lead salvaged from the sea, string, and rust.

“He mixes them as an alchemist would to make these poetic relics,” says Armstrong, noting that viewers would have to read the label to know that the gloves weren’t “real.” “He’s interested in moments in our history as Americans when different groups were kept out of the center, whether African Americans or American Indians, and asking us to think about these moments again through objects.”

While some artists make mimetic still-life objects for contemplation, others turn to figuration. Duane Hanson was a pioneer in this mode, with his perfect one-to-one–scale
doppelgangers—a museum guard or tackily dressed tourists—going almost unnoticed in the gallery until you realize that they are frozen in space. In “Lifelike,” Engberg has included Hanson’s Janitor, from 1973, as a precursor to more recent pieces by Charles Ray, Ron Mueck, and Evan Penny. These contemporary sculptors all give immediate cues that their figures aren’t real—shifts in scale, radical cropping of the body, nudity in the gallery context—yet employ uncanny realism, down to individual hairs and pores.

“The real part has to be particularly real in order for it to be an interesting confrontation; on some level the brain needs to be confused,” says Penny, noting that, paradoxically, the more detailed the information that is given, the more strange and unstable the figure becomes.

“With a highly illusionistic painting, you’re not going to stand in front of it and feel your heart pound. But I think with a sculptural object you’re more likely to have that type of visceral experience. You’re standing in front of something that is apparently like you, with that direct equation to your own body and your own mortality.”

A retrospective of Penny’s work titled “Re Figured,” currently on view at the Museo delle Arti Catanzaro in Italy, travels in September to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

The Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow, who died in 1973, was another forerunner for contemporary artists working with illusionistic fragments of the body, although her work has previously not been widely shown outside her country. On view through April 29 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and then the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a survey of Szapocznikow’s sculpture modeled directly from her body—lips, limbs, belly, breasts—cast again and again in voluptuous, dewy, skinlike polyester resin, sometimes served up on dishes like dessert.

Hammer Museum curator Allegra Pesenti says that when Szapocznikow became ill with cancer, her practice of using herself as her principal subject took on new urgency. “This is a form of memento mori,” says Pesenti. “She realizes it’s her own body that is impermanent.” When Pesenti visited the artist’s son, who had his mother’s work stored in his garage, she received a shock. “I’ll never forget the startling ffect of him moving the flashlight across all these cantilevered limbs sticking out,” she says. “It was really like taking her back to the living in a way.”

Not all is discomfort and mortality in the realm of contemporary trompe l’oeil. There’s an aspect of playfulness—a strong element of traditional trompe l’oeil painting—that also unfolds, particularly with artists making three-dimensional environments. For “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” on view last year at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, curator David McFadden gathered the work of several dozen artists who create teasingly believable scenes in miniature scale—whether Joe Fig’s entirely convincing tiny studio with Jackson Pollock slinging paint onto canvas or Patrick Jacobs’s persuasive landscapes viewed through peepholes.

“When we looked at Alan Wolfson’s subway station in ‘Otherworldly,’ which was reduced to 1/28th the size of reality, there was no question it was not a real place,” says McFadden. “But we’re willing to suspend disbelief and move into that space as if it’s real because of the virtuosity. I think there’s a kind of childhood thrill in being able to pretend again.”

Engberg sees a trickster humor in the plays of scale many artists in “Lifelike” engage in—whether Maurizio Cattelan’s seven-inch-tall elevator with changing lights and doors that open and close or Robert Therrien’s gargantuan folding table and chairs that give viewers an Alice in Wonderland sensation of the shrinking body. “There’s a wonderful performative aspect when we encounter these works,” says Engberg. “These artists are interested in sprinkling a bit of spectacle into the experience.”

Keith Edmier kept the scale, and every other element of his childhood home in suburban Chicago, as true to life as he could when he fabricated Bremen Towne (2008). In “Lifelike,” viewers can walk through his wood-paneled kitchen with a harvest-gold linoleum floor and be transported back to a very specific 1970s moment. “It’s the mold that essentially shaped me,” says Edmier, who went to extraordinary lengths to precisely reconstruct all the furniture, appliances, and wall and floor coverings that he could see in the background of family photographs. When he couldn’t find an exact dinette set on eBay, he sculpted it. When he couldn’t locate the wallpaper, he redrew the pattern and had it custom made.

“There were moments when we were building it where I’d just look at the corner of the room and for a second lose all perspective. I actually went back in time. In some ways my whole memory of that house is now all connected to this re-creation. I don’t want to say it was therapy, but it was pretty healing.”

The way that illusion can transport viewers to another world, even if just momentarily, is a strong component in the work of Leandro Erlich, included in both “More Real?” and “Lifelike.” At SITE Santa Fe, his Stuck Elevator (2011) will be one of the first things viewers see—a door halfway open and yielding a view of a lit elevator shaft that appears to descend some 20 stories. “You really have to stick your head way in to see that it’s a mirror,” says Armstrong. “It has the fun of a magic trick. Right at the beginning, I wanted viewers to see how easily we are deceived,” the curator continues. “I felt it was really essential to connect this fun that we have with deception with a parallel world where it’s really quite dangerous and having a huge impact on our cultural psyche.”

“The notion of ‘truthiness,’” says Armstrong, referring to the word coined by the comedian and fake-news reporter Stephen Colbert, “this slippage of fact and fiction, is a major cultural shift of our time and one that artists are also trying to interrogate.”

This sale will feature a group of rare, early pieces by Michele Oka Doner as well as a fine selection of works by the late Ralph Bacerra. Additionally, the sale will offer important pieces by Georges Jeanclos, Michael Lucero, David Regan, and Akio Takamori.

Surveying the visual evidence in the city’s first retrospective of Rothko’s work, the answer seems to be “no.” The Portland Art Museum organized this unique and long overdue exhibition, which includes 44 paintings, dating from 1926 to 1969, the year before the painter’s death. Among the lenders are Seattle private collectors and the Rothko family. Several of the paintings have rarely, or never, been on public view.

Later in life Rothko claimed he “hated Portland” and felt he “didn’t belong” there, but the schism between his early and later artistic development probably has little to do with these grumpy assessments. David Anfam, author of the catalogue raisonné of Rothko’s paintings, expressed the inevitable frustration viewers and curators feel as they search for affinities between Rothko’s mature canvases and the early work of Marcus Rothkowitz. “Rothko’s abstractions insert themselves between us and everything that went before them,” Anfam points out. “Struck by their uniqueness, we seek clues to their origins. . . . [But] causal links seem to snap when we attempt to connect the artist’s beginnings to the degree of refinement that he subsequently attained.” And yet, Anfam correctly observes, the “shadowy corners of an imaginative horizon” revealed in Rothkowitz’s early works ensure their fascination.

The Portland exhibition offers an ideal opportunity to test Anfam’s observations. In paintings from the mid-1920s and early 1930s Rothkowitz emulates Cézanne, Rouault, and Milton Avery, but his sources become more obscure in one of his first urban scenes, City Phantasy (1934), a dour canvas never before on public view. Wedged in a V-shape between two corridors of tall buildings, figures with lumpy bodies and scowling masklike faces apparently watch a structure on fire. Both Freud and the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein distinguish “phantasy” from “fantasy,” an imagined unreality. For Klein “phantasy” is the means by which infants link feelings with objects and develop imagination: Rothko was a children’s art teacher in the 1930s and could have been referencing Klein with his title.

In the early 1940s, invoking Jungian conceptions of universal emotions embodied in myths, Rothko links feelings with fragments of human bodies, bones, claws, and antique statuary. By the mid-1940s, when he relies on automatism to conjure hybrid beings such as the ones in Hierarchical Birds (1944), we are clearly en route to the command of color and light we identify with the artist’s celebrated field paintings.

The exhibition includes two especially stunning and disparate examples of Rothko’s mature achievements: an eleven-foot-high dark-purple-and-gray 1963 canvas from the National Gallery of Art, rarely exhibited because of its size, and a 1969 brown-and-beige composition loaned by the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, where colors are whipped horizontally across the bottom and vertically from the top. The Portland survey offers some evidence that the ancestry of these surfaces extends to sgraffiti effects in Rothkowitz’s late-1930s canvases, but a primary lesson here is that the critic Harold Rosenberg was probably right: the ultimate format Rothko developed for his painting was the framework of another self, a passionate anti-self, another state of being.

Easy description and classification still evade pieces by the Lalannes, who worked together—almost always in separate studios—from 1956 until François-Xavier’s death in December 2008, at the age of 81. They decided early on to exhibit their creations under the name “Les Lalanne” and never cared much for other labels. “Museums don’t know where to put us,” François-Xavier said in 1998.

Collectors have never had that problem, and interest in the Lalannes’ work continues to gain momentum internationally. Last December saw a new auction record, when a group of ten epoxy-stone sheep, designed around 1979, went for $7.47 million at Christie’s Important 20th Century Decorative Art & Design sale in New York. And on May 4, also in New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery will debut a large exhibition on the Lalannes. “She’s working on all kinds of new things,” says Kasmin, who has represented the artists since 2006, “and there is a fair amount of work that he made that hasn’t been seen, so I’m very much concentrating on that.” Works on view at the gallery will include several of Claude’s “Choupattes,” patinated bronze cabbages perched on chicken feet, with prices beginning at $280,000.

Born in Agen, France, in 1927, François-Xavier attended art school at the Académie Julian in Paris and set up a studio in Montparnasse, where he befriended such neighbors as Constantin Brancusi, Jean Tinguely, and American sculptor James Metcalf. He met Paris-born Claude Dupeux, who studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, at a show of his paintings in 1952. The pair embarked on a series of design jobs—windows for Christian Dior (where they met a young Yves Saint Laurent, who would become one of their greatest patrons), set design for choreographer Maurice Béjart—before having their first “joint solo show,” at Paris’s Galerie J. in 1964. Among the pieces there were a brass rhino desk and Claude’s first “Choupattes.” Metcalf called it “a fine exhibition of contemporary objects useful to the extent you find them useful,” and John Ashbery filed a favorable review for the New York Herald Tribune.

“We started with certain techniques that we developed with time and with which we evolved,” says Claude, now in her late 80s. “The notion of utility is evident from the start. For us, it adds a different way of looking at a work of art.” Their parallel but distinct practices—his deliberate and architectural, hers improvisational and organic—were introduced to American audiences in 1967, when the Art Institute of Chicago hosted a show that included a flock of sheep and La Mouche, a four-foot-long brass fly with Plexiglas wings that open to reveal a handcrafted toilet. In 1972, their foam bed in the form of a can of sardines was exhibited at Leo Castelli’s “Furniture by Artists” show in New York, alongside Donald Judd’s steel tables and Robert Rauschenberg’s rubber-tire lamp. Critics were intrigued, but many viewers didn’t know what to make of the Lalannes’ meticulously crafted zoomorphic sculptures at a time when abstract art prevailed in the United States.

In the following decades, as the couple racked up retrospectives and commissions in France, their pieces gradually entered American collections through the championing of interior designers like Jacques Grange and Peter Marino and began to show up more frequently at sales of decorative arts and design in New York. Kasmin’s exhibitions, including a 2009 display along Manhattan’s Park Avenue, have stoked the American market for Les Lalanne, while dealer Ben Brown has reintroduced their works to London collectors. His 2007 exhibition of bronze creatures and leafy furniture was the first Lalanne show in England since 1976.

At the farm in Ury, France, where the couple moved in 1967, Claude continues to create tables draped in bronze crocodile skins, called “Crococonsoles,” and vermeil necklaces made from electroplated lettuce leaves. Kasmin remembers his first visit to the Lalannes’ sprawling, wisteria-swaddled world (about an hour’s drive from Paris) as an immersive experience. “I became aware that this home was an industrious environment, as there would be at least five or six people welding and doing all kinds of metalwork in the workshop and the cobbled courtyard,” he writes in his introduction to Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne: Art. Work. Life., a book of photographs coming out in May from Skira Rizzoli. “The sculptures in the house and gardens were never the same on any visit.”

As for the recent auction record at Christie’s, Kasmin describes his reaction as “surprised but not that surprised,” explaining, “With Lalanne, once people decide that they want something, they’re determined to get it. There have been a few occasions where results have gone completely crazy, and it’s people that just want the work.”

“We’ve seen very strong prices for Lalanne going back to 2005 and 2006 at auction, and it is the blue-chip thing of the market these days,” says James Zemaitis, director of Sotheby’s 20th-century design department. Lalanne pieces, in fact, emerged at the top of the December design sales at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

At the peak of the latter’s auction was the Lalannes’ sleek bronze Centaure, which sold for $542,500, nearly double its high estimate. The seven-foot-tall half-man, half-horse, executed in 1983, was a rare collaboration between husband and wife. “Our architect friend Paul Chemetov was in charge of building the French embassy in New Delhi. He wanted us to make a sculpture for the embassy as long as we built it together,” Claude says of the statue’s genesis. “François made the animal, and I made the man.”
Stephanie Murg is a New York–based writer covering art and design. She blogs at UnBeige.com.

By Zoe Larkins.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s major cultural institutions, including the National Gallery and the National Museum, which are both in the capital Sarajevo, are in danger of closing indefinitely due to a lack of funding and government support. Staff, many of whom have been not been paid for months, have responded by organising events and exhibitions to bring attention to the crisis. The situation stems from the country’s dysfunctional administrative system and the lack of a national cultural ministry.

The National Museum, which was founded in 1888, is open to the public “for now”, said Andrijana Pravidur, a curator at the institution, in a statement issued on 2 March. Employees have not been paid in seven months and endure “almost impossible working conditions”.

The National Gallery closed to the public last September. It had been without a director and chief financial officer since May. The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also in Sarajevo, was forced to shut its doors on 4 January after running out of money for maintenance and heating. Staff at both institutions have worked without pay since the respective closures.

The National and University Library, which has had no heating since early January, is next on the list of anticipated closures.

Access to important archives and collections will be lost if the museums and libraries close. The National Gallery was founded in 1946 and its holdings include Balkan art ranging from 15th- and 16th-century icons to pieces by contemporary Bosnian artists, and works by the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler. The National Museum’s collection includes the Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript from Spain.

These and other cultural institutions in Sarajevo, including the National Film Archive, have operated on a hand-to-mouth basis since the Dayton Agreement ended the Bosnian War in 1995. The treaty did not establish a national cultural ministry, leaving the maintenance of the national museums and libraries to local governments. Since 1995, cultural institutions have received small grants intermittently from the national government, mainly from the ministry of civil affairs and the cultural ministries of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its ten cantons.

The current crisis is a result of national elections held in 2010, which failed to create a coalition with a parliamentary majority. Without a functioning government, there was no funding for cultural institutions last year.

Museum administrators in Sarajevo say that grants from the new government, formed this February, will not solve the structural problem affecting the institutions. They believe that the institutions need to be funded at a national level if they are to operate effectively in the future. They also want a national cultural ministry to be created.

The Sarajevo-based artist Damir Niksic occupied the National Gallery for 84 days after it closed in September. Niksic also occupied the National Museum as a protest against its threatened closure in January.

Niksic says: “It is time for one ministry of culture and education to create a solid cultural policy and an educational programme that will create a new image, new culture, contemporary and all-inclusive, based on a cosmopolitan tradition in Bosnia, not just on cultural, religious, ethnic and racist tribal divisions.”

Julien Anfruns, the director general of the International Council of Museums, sees the closure of cultural institutions in Sarajevo as an international issue—a violation of the [council’s] ethical code to protect and promote cultural heritage. “We believe that the museum is a symbol of cultural dialogue, especially in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where cultural diversity is very important in recent history,” he says.

Staff at the National Gallery and the historical museum have organised exhibitions and reopened venues temporarily to bring attention to their plight. In February, the historical museum invited the public to view the permanent collection for “Open Doors Week”. The National Gallery opened on 29 February for an exhibition of photographs of protests in Bosnia from 1990 to 1992 by Milomir Kovacevic. Ivana Udovicic, a curator at the National Gallery, says: “This exhibition relates to our protests and our actual position. We also wanted to underline that nothing has changed since 1 September.”

In the past decade, the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has established museums and libraries that compete for funding with the national institutions in Sarajevo. Many Serbs do not believe that the national institutions represent their history. “Dayton ended the fighting, but tension has continued, and it is expressed in the cultural sphere,” says the Bosnian-born art historian Azra Aksamija, a co-creator of the Cultureshutdown.net website, which aims to raise awareness about the situation in Bosnia.

Last summer, thanks to an innovative new program at the Dallas Museum of Art, nine-year-old Dennis Schultze achieved an important milestone in his life, one that comes easily to most children his age: he went to day camp. “This is the first place I’ve ever been able to drop him off,” says his mother, Rachel Schultze. “The teachers know the language of autism.”

Dennis has benefited from a relatively new and growing effort by the nation’s art museums to embrace children with autism. The programs they offer typically combine studio work with enjoying museum treasures. Often the entire family is welcome to share the experience. “The fit is perfect, because art gives the students a universal form of communication,” says Elizabeth Kerns, director of education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida.

Autistic children are sometimes disruptive and difficult to handle—and may elicit hostility from uncomprehending visitors. But if museums open their doors early just for them, the children and their families can relax and enjoy the experience of being around art. “Disabled children can be loud or have a meltdown,” says Laura Lynch, director of education at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York. “It’s really comforting when you can create a safe place where this is allowed.”

For art museums, establishing a welcoming environment takes a concerted effort. Many museums hire specialists in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to aid in developing curricula and teaching staff educators about the condition. Local autism advocacy groups will often help pilot the new programs and later find participants. Organizations such as Museum Access Consortium in the greater New York area facilitate conferences and panel discussions and assist educators in exchanging information and ideas.

“We do a lot of sharing of information,” says Michelle López, senior coordinator of ArtAccess, a program at the Queens Museum of Art in New York. “We’re all connected.” In Boston, for example, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Science, and the Boston Children’s Museum were recently awarded a joint grant to improve access for people on the autism spectrum. Trainers from the Massachusetts chapter of the Autism Society met with educators from all three institutions to help them plan their new programs, and the educators continue to work together.

At the Nassau County museum, accessibility consultant Pearl Rosen helped design a training session and manual for its Autism & the Arts volunteers, who are often teenagers from area high schools fulfilling their community-service requirements. “Sit with the group, talk about your ideas, choices, things you notice,” her manual counsels. “Give compliments, ask opinions, demonstrate being polite and caring. . . . You will be modeling appropriate normal interaction.”

Working with ASD children requires special preparation. Parents are often offered “social story” sheets to read with their children in advance of a visit. These use simple pictures that explain the experience, from walking in the front door to encountering guards to looking at sculpture to making work in the studio. “There will be lots of people here,” reads part of the Dallas Museum’s social story. “I can touch and feel things in the Young Learners Gallery.”

Most museums report an enthusiastic response to programming for autistic children. “We tried this as an experiment,” Dallas access-program manager Amanda Blake says of her original Autism Awareness Family Celebration, in 2009. “I really had no idea how successful it would be.” Enrollment was limited to 250 for that first event, she reports, “but we had 300 people on a waiting list.” Blake now enrolls 500 for the quarterly gatherings. The museum also offers a summer day camp.

In Jacksonville, MOCA has elected to work directly with schoolchildren and their classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, and occupational and speech therapists. Twelve schools have cycled through the museum’s Rainbow Artists program since its inception, in 2008, serving 35 to 40 students each year. A key part of the initiative is encouraging teachers to take the art-making experiences they observe at the museum back into their own classrooms. “We don’t have an official teacher training program yet, but that would be a natural progression,” says Kerns.

As many museums report, teachers are often surprised at the level of social interaction art programs elicit from their students—and at the level of work the students are capable of. “Children with autism spend their school days learning to be as ‘typical’ as possible,” writes consultant Lisa Jo Rudy in her article “Full Spectrum: Addressing the Needs of Kids with Autism” in Museum magazine. “Mu­seums, though, are about passions and unique abilities.”

A number of institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, have opted not to offer specific programming for ASD children, but to include them in “all access” sessions for the developmentally disabled. They also design tours and events for groups of students from special schools or residential group homes.

Many museum art programs culminate in celebrations during Autism Awareness Month, every April, established several years ago by the United Nations to “shine a bright light on autism as a growing global health crisis.” These festivals, often organized around an exhibition, “send a message to others about how autistic children see the world,” says Jacksonville-based disabilities specialist Mae Barker. The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville hosts more than 2,000 children with a range of disabilities at its four-day festival every spring. In Hernando, Mississippi, the DeSoto Arts Council will hold its third annual Autism Awareness celebration on April 15. With the autism advocacy organization the BOLD Initiative, the Mississippi Arts Commission, and the DeSoto Board of Supervisors as sponsors, the Arts Council convened weekend art classes in March for ASD children and helped train teenage volunteers to work with younger students. Local artists led workshops, including fiber artist Patricia Holmberg, who brought in wool from her own animals and taught students to felt.

The classes conclude with a countywide open studio and festival that DeSoto Arts Council executive director Vicky Neyman says is designed “to show the world what these kids are capable of.” She says that young artists enjoy standing by their work and explaining it to visitors. “We’ve found children being conversational who usually don’t say much.” News of the classes spread quickly after the first season. “The first year, we struggled to get ten kids into the program. This year we have 60.”

Back in Dallas, Dennis Schultze and his mother have become more frequent visitors to the museum since his positive experiences at last summer’s day camp and in quarterly workshops.

Dennis is so comfortable in the building, his mother says, that “he now wants to wave at all the guards, because he thinks he knows them.”

Gail Gregg is an artist and writer based in New York City.

If you’re renowned street artist Mark Jenkins, however, you can do things like this:

Image courtesy of Mark Jekins

Image courtesy of Mark Jenkins

Image courtesy of Mark Jenkins

Jenkins creates the memorable installations, well, because he can. And because they’re super cool.

“Once I have the finished sculpture, I’ll put it out on the street or in nature or somewhere where it interacts with the environment,” he says in an awesome making-of video (below). “Really it’s the idea of turning the street into a stage , so this urban theater has a life of its own.”

Jenkins will take a break from making amazing tape art to judge yours in the Scotch off the Roll Tape Sculpting contest, which wraps up on March 24^th.

Jim Kazanjian’s surreal landscapes offer phantasmagoric visions of a where-is-this world, defined by impossibly complex architecture and M.C.Escher-esque black-and-white graphics. Inspired by the imaginary realms of cult author H.P. Lovecraft—whose wild, cosmic short stories set the mold for much of the 20th century’s best science fiction—Kazanjian’s aim is to redress the “misunderstanding that photography has a kind of built-in objectivity…to defamiliarize the familiar.”

It is our trust in photography’s inherent connection with naturalism, then, that makes the deliberate verisimilitude of his works so intriguingly disorienting. And the delightful confusion doesn’t end there: Even the question of whether Kazanjian’s art is photography at all is open to debate, given that he doesn’t shoot any of his own pictures, but rather manipulates “assemblages” of found photographs.

Grotjahn, whose paintings have brought upwards of $1 million at auction, sued Valentine in early 2010, after the collector resold several of Grotjahn’s works at a profit without remitting California’s state-mandated five percent royalty, according to court papers.

Under the terms of the California Resale Royalty Act (CRRA), an artist is entitled to five percent of the amount of a sale whenever a work of fine art is resold and either the seller resides in California or the sale takes place in California.

After months of legal wrangling, during which the case was shifted from state to federal court, and then ultimately remanded back to state court, Valentine agreed to pay the royalties, plus interest, as well as a portion of the attorney fees incurred by Grotjahn. The settlement amount totaled just over $150,000. Of this, roughly $70,000 was allocated to address royalty fees while approximately $85,000 was for Grotjahn’s legal fees.

The settlement marks a major development in the long running debate over artist resale rights in the U.S., particularly since Sotheby’s and Christie’s are currently defending class action suits brought against them in California for the same issue.

Last month, the auction houses responded to the suits by filing a joint motion to dismiss the cases. They outline—at length—the reasons why they view the application of the CRRA as interfering with United States interstate and foreign commerce regulations.

The number of visitors to last March’s Art Dubai art fair, now in its sixth edition and held each year at the Madinat Jumeirah resort in Dubai, reached 20,000, surpassing the 2010 total of 18,000 and the 2009 result of 14,000 visitors, organizers said. The 2011 edition also saw 60 museum groups in attendance.

Christie’s two-part Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish art sales, held in Dubai in October, earned a combined $7.3 million and saw 43 new auction records, 22 of which were for artists under 35 years of age. According to Isabelle de La Bruyère, director of Middle Eastern art at Christie’s, since 2006, when Christie’s held its inaugural auction in Dubai, “85 percent of our buyers were from the region”—that is, were collectors in the Middle East. At Christie’s most recent Dubai auction in October, that number was down to just 60 percent, “and the rest is international. I think that 60-40 division is our greatest success, because we have increased the buyer base substantially, which has made the market sustainable.”

For the first couple of years that Christie’s held sales in Dubai, she noted, collectors mostly purchased on the basis of nationality—Turkish collectors bought Turkish artists, Egyptian collectors bought Egyptian artists, and so on. “Clients tended to buy names they know whose work was focused on the societies they lived in,” she said.

After 2008, however, there was “an enormous amount of cross-buying,” with buyers from South America, North America, Europe, Africa and Asia all competing for artworks. “Our client base has grown 500 percent. The collectors we are sending out announcements to number in the thousands.”

The work of contemporary Middle Eastern artists is being sold more frequently not only in the Middle East, but in galleries and auction houses in London and New York. The highest auction price to date—$1 million for an oil and acrylic painting by Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri—was achieved at Bonhams Dubai in 2008.

Sotheby’s has also achieved strong prices for Moshiri’s work at its London sales of contemporary art. These include £337,250 ($672,170), for Moshiri’s Kennedy Salt and Pepper Shaker, 2005, sold at a July 2008 auction, and £397,250 ($641,670), for his Cowboy and Indian, 2007, which was sold in October 2009.

The highest auction prices for works by Iraq-born painter Ahmed Alsoudani include £713,250 ($1.1 million), for Baghdad I, 2008, sold at Christie’s London in 2011, and £289,250 ($463,615), for an untitled 2007 painting in 2010 at Sotheby’s London.

Peter Sumner, head of contemporary sales at the London office of Phillips de Pury & Company, said that since 2008, the auction house has “successfully integrated” the work of Middle Eastern artists “into a Western sale context alongside artists from all over the world.”

Said Sumner: “Many Middle Eastern and Iranian artists are expatriate artists who also have very well established collector bases around the world, predominantly in Paris, London and New York. A strong percentage of these collectors are Western collectors, while many others are expatriate Middle Eastern collectors.” He added that most of the auction house’s Middle Eastern contemporary art consignments “come from either London or Paris.”

As part of its effort to promote work by well-known and emerging Middle Eastern artists, Phillips is exhibiting the work of 21 Azerbaijani artists in London (Jan. 17–29) in a show titled “Fly to Baku: Contemporary Art from Azerbaijan.”

Contemporary work by Middle Eastern artists has been an area of growing collector interest around the world. Many of the most noted artists are from Iran, the most populous nation in the region.

Leila Heller, whose Manhattan gallery exhibits the work of a number of expatriate Iranian artists, said that Iranian artist Shoja Azari’s videos have doubled in price, from $12,000/20,000 to $22,000/40,000, within the past three years. “It’s not just collectors in Iran. There are buyers all over the world,” says Heller.

She noted that the prices of several other artists she represents—including Iran-born artists Shiva Ahmadi and Reza Derakshani, as well as Turkish artist Kezban Arca Batibeki, who creates acrylic and embroidered images on canvas—have all jumped considerably within the past five years. For instance, Derakshani’s work was priced $5,000/35,000, “when I started working with him” five years ago, and now his work is priced $25,000/150,000. Last year, a Christie’s sale in Dubai featured an auction record of $146,500, compared with an estimate of $80,000/120,000, for his Prelude in Pink, 2010–11, an oil and enamel on canvas.

The work of conceptual artist Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar, who won the 2009 Magic of Persia prize—was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2010.

Work by Y.Z. Kami, who was born in Tehran and currently lives in the U.S., was featured at the Istanbul Biennial (2005), New York’s Museum of Modern Art (2006) and the Venice Biennale (2007). With works already in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he is represented by the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan.

Work by Shirin Neshat, a filmmaker and photographer who was born in Qasvin, Iran, and lives in New York City, has been acquired by the Tate Gallery, London, the MoMA and Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York. She won the international award at the 1999 Venice Biennale for her video work and the Silver Lion in 2009 at the Venice Film Festival for her film Women without Men. Neshat has been represented by New York’s Barbara Gladstone Gallery since 2000.

In 2000, the artist’s still images sold for $2,000/3,000, but have reached $200,000 in the secondary market, according to Max Falkenstein, a director at Gladstone Gallery. At a Christie’s sale in Dubai in 2008, Neshat’s ink on gelatin silver print, Whispers, 1997, reached $265,000, far surpassing the $80,000/120,000 estimate.

New York-based Sundaram Tagore Gallery also has a focus on contemporary art from the Middle East. Gallery owner Sundaram Tagore told ARTnewsletter: “the interest in collecting contemporary Middle Eastern arts is growing by leaps and bounds.”

He credits the growth, in part, to the fact that “a number of major museums [are] being built in the Middle East in conjunction with some of the world’s leading museums, such as the Guggenheim, the Louvre and the International Center for Photography. These same institutions have started buying art for their forthcoming institutional venues.”

His gallery represents 28 contemporary artists from around the world, but among the Middle Eastern artists who have garnered growing collector interest are Syrian painter Ahmad Moualla, whose untitled mixed-media on canvas, 2011, sold for $36,000 (estimate: $30,000/40,000) at Ayyam Auctions in Dubai in 2011, and Iraqi artist Hassan Massoudy, whose untitled ink and pencil on paper, 1996, was sold at Christie’s Paris in 2009 for €1,500 ($2,066), compared with an estimate of €800/1,200.

Massoudy was one of the artists featured in the gallery’s recent exhibition “Written Images: Contemporary Calligraphy from the Middle East,” which ran Nov. 10–Dec. 3 and also included works by Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui, Qatari artist Yousef Ahmad and Syrian artist Khaled Al-Saa’i.

Other galleries showing contemporary art from the Middle East include Rose Issa Projects, Waterhouse & Dodd, Berardi and Sagharchi Projects and Osborne Samuel Gallery in London.

Experts expect the number of collectors of contemporary Middle Eastern art to keep growing and, with it, prices. “Traditionally, Iranians have bought carpets as an investment,” said Mamak Nourbakhsh, owner of Tehran’s Gallery Mamak. “Today, we see many rich Iranians buying artwork and in rather large numbers.”

Gallery owner Rose Issa noted that prices for a number of artists have gone up dramatically. Seven years ago, she says, Moshiri’s work was priced at $2,500, but jumped to $15,000/25,000 within two years of that, “and now everything starts at $100,000.”

The prices for another artist that she represents, Iranian photographer Farhad Ahrarnia, have jumped from $4,000/6,000 five years ago, to $30,000 today. At Sotheby’s London sale in 2009, her embroidered digital print The Flesh of Words, 2008, earned £15,000 ($24,505), against an estimate of £12,000/18,000.

PNC and Comcast will be the premier sponsors for the opening year of the Philadelphia campus of the Barnes Foundation. Both sponsors support the core principles of the Barnes Foundation in the areas of public access, education and community engagement. An official ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 19 will set in motion 10 days of special visits to the new building and gardens, concluding with 60 hours of free, round-the-clock open access to the public on the weekend of May 26, 27 and 28.

Chairman of the Barnes Foundation Board of Trustees, Dr. Bernard C. Watson said, “I am delighted that Comcast and PNC have made a major commitment to become our premier sponsors for the opening of our Philadelphia campus. Their generosity and support for our mission are deeply appreciated. The partnerships with PNC and Comcast will help to sustain the Barnes Foundation and make its collections and programs centerpieces of cultural life in the Philadelphia region, now and for generations to come.”

“We understand the importance of investing in the arts,” said Bill Mills, Regional President of PNC for Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey. “While the Barnes Foundation will have a tremendous economic impact for our region, even more important is the profound difference it will make for individuals who now have access to this art and the educational programs – including young children. We are pleased to announce that PNC and the Barnes are creating an early art education program through PNC Grow Up Great that we believe can become a national model.”

“As a Philadelphia-based company, we are proud to support the Barnes Foundation in bringing this renowned collection of artwork and its educational mission to its new campus in Philadelphia. This institution is truly a gift to our city and the entire nation,” said Dave Watson, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Comcast Cable.

The Barnes Foundation also launched today a new website www.barnesfoundation.org, which features a bold new look and expanded functionality. With an increase in demand expected when tickets go on sale, the website will utilize a new reservations system that will show up-to-the-minute ticket availability. The site will also feature a new cataloging system to vastly improve virtual access to the much-celebrated pieces in the Barnes collection. “The new, integrated website will allow visitors to get the most out of their Barnes experience before, during and after a visit,” said Barnes President and Executive Director, Derek Gillman. “We wanted it to be a virtual extension of the Barnes.”

About the Barnes Foundation
The Barnes Foundation was established by Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.” The Barnes holds one of the largest collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern paintings, with extensive holdings by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, Modigliani, Soutine and de Chirico, as well as Old Master paintings, important examples of African sculpture and Native American ceramics, American paintings and decorative arts, and antiquities from the Mediterranean region and Asia.

The Barnes will re-open on May 19, 2012 in a new state-of-the-art building, designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City, Philadelphia. The collection will be displayed in a Gallery that replicates the scale, proportion and configuration of the original galleries in Merion. The new building also will house a 5,000-square-foot space devoted to special exhibitions, as well as classrooms, a 150-seat auditorium, and much-needed facilities for painting conservation and research.

“We are fortunate to have remained open for the majority of the construction schedule
with the least amount of impact on the public during this period. We now need this time
to put the important finishing touches on the spaces and to prepare for our opening
celebrations in January. We look forward to the unveiling of the new wing and refreshed
Palace galleries and welcoming the public back to the Gardner,” said Anne Hawley,
Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the museum.

During the closed period, museum staff will move visitor amenities into the new wing,
install three opening exhibitions, and complete preservation and conservation work in the
historic galleries including the completion of its decade-long upgrade of lighting and
restoration of the Tapestry Room.

NEW YORK—On Nov. 17, a sale of American art at Swann Galleries set a new record for a work by social realist painter Robert Gwathmey, famous for his depictions of African-American life in the rural South. Prologue II, 1962, an oil on canvas, sold for $72,000, meeting the $60,000/90,000 estimate. The previous artist record of $33,350 was set in 1995.

“Nothing of this quality has come up at auction before,” explains Andrew Dintenfass, director of the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, which has exhibited the artist’s work for over 30 years. Though Gwathmey was a prolific artist, says Dintenfass, “we sold out every show,” leaving almost no work behind when the artist died in 1988.

The remaining pieces were passed on to the artist’s son Charles Gwathmey, the celebrated architect who designed the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Library at Harvard University in 1991, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s addition in 1992 and the Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College in 2008. According to Dintenfass, as Charles became increasingly prominent, his father “was eclipsed. He got lost in time.”

The Swann sale featured several other works by Robert Gwathmey; all five of the works on offer found buyers. Following the record price, another oil on canvas, entitled Southern Farmer, 1966, sold for $43,200, compared with an estimate of $40,000/60,000.

The three other lots, all works on paper, brought far more modest prices ranging from $1,500/8,400, compared with estimates ranging from $1,000/6,000.

“People have been reluctant to send his work to auction, because there wasn’t much going on at the auctions for him,” Dintenfass said, adding that major pieces put up for sale nowadays are more likely to be found in art galleries, where prices range from $100,000 to $200,000.

Jeffrey Bergen, owner of ACA Galleries, New York, has also handled numerous works by Gwathmey over the years. Bergen says the highest price he has privately sold a Gwathmey painting for is over $300,000. Bergen said that, in the coming year, he plans to have a show of Gwathmey’s works, either on their own or in combination with works by Philip Evergood.

In addition to oils, Gwathmey also painted in watercolors and gouaches, which range in price from $5,000 to $15,000, as well as produced a large number of color screenprints, priced $2,000/5,000, according to Dintenfass.

Many museums feature Gwathmey’s work in their collections, notes Dintenfass, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and both Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Other top prices paid at auction in past years for Gwathmey’s work include $31,250, against an estimate of $25,000/35,000, for the oil on canvas Peace, 1967, at Christie’s in 2010 and $28,000, compared with an estimate of $12,000/18,000, for the undated oil Picking Cotton at Sotheby’s in 2007. Most of the artist’s auction prices have been under $10,000.

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MEGGS ARTIST BIO

Initially recognized for his multi-layer street stencils and posters, Meggs has become a well respected member of Australia’s street art culture. With a background of graffiti, skateboarding, heavy metal and graphic design Meggs has developed his painting skills from street to galleries with a mixture of aerosol based character work and stencil based expressive canvases. Being a member of the renowned ‘Everfresh’ studio, a unique collective/studio space in Melbourne, has helped Meggs to develop skills in aerosol painting and screen printing and participate in numerous large scale solo and collective Everfresh mural works. He has recently applied his design knowledge to the art direction and production of the Everfresh:Blackbook, a 256 page book, documenting the life and works of the Everfresh artists from 2004-2010.

His street work, although often playful references to 1980′s skate graphics, still has an element of menace and much of his street and gallery work explores the notion of ‘duality’ and search for internal balance. Reflecting on personal experiences, music and social trends, Meggs produces energetic and subverted collages of hybrid characters & pop culture symbology that play with emotion, morals and personal rights in an attempt to balance visual form and intuitive abstraction.

Meggs has spread his street and gallery work as far as London, LA, SF, Tokyo, Paris, Singapore & Hong Kong and has collaborated on commercial projects with high-profile brands such as Stussy, Addict Clothing & Burton Snowboards. His artwork has sold through Artcurial Auctioneers in Paris, Leonard Joel Auctioneers in Sydney and Dreweatts in London. Meggs has recently had works on paper acquired and exhibited by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra and the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

Street artists are having a heavy impact on the art world as they convey critiques of political and socioeconomic issues. These modern-day Picasso’s and Da Vinci’s of graffiti have a unique ability to create awareness through cryptic and colorful campaigns. Finally, the scholars are standing up and taking notice.

According to (Landi 2011) “During a panel called “The Art of Pranks” at the College Art Association (CAA) conference in New York last February, a participant identified as Clark Stoeckley, “artivist,”  got up to speak on the topic of New York City pranksters, and identified himself as a member of the NYPD Vandal Squad Task Force. He explained that he was a former undercover detective in the East Village who became a “street-art archivist” and was eventually promoted to the rank of lieutenant for his insider knowledge of graffiti crews and activist groups”.

Street artists from Banksy and Shepard Fairey to the Guerrilla Girls and the artist known as Mat Benote (Make Art That Benefits Everyone Not Only the Elite) were mentioned in Stoeckleys’ accounts. In retrospect Stoecklys’ encounters with these elusive messengers of paint created a new found appreciation stating, “This is the stuff that really brightens our day,” he remarked about the graffiti, “and in many cases teaches cops like me a lesson about the Constitution.”

To that we here at WHOA say “Its about Time”!