13 posts tagged “posters”
I scooted over to Milwaukee yesterday, to meet up at the Milwaukee Art Museum with Ethan Lasser, a curator from Chipstone, and, in yet another capacity of working together, good ol' Rebecca Zorach. Ethan walked us through the galleries that house the combined Chipstone + Milwaukee Art Museum displays of American decorative arts. Ethan and his team are doing some really innovative curatorial work, truly bringing rare, masterfully crafted objects into contemporary relevance, and doing it without sacrificing the preciousness. Hard to describe their exhibition strategies fully. Some of the strategies are really simple, but very effective. For example, simply elevating chairs, such that eye-level apprehension of the chairs brings fresh shapes, detail, and negative space to the viewer's eye:
The video brings in issues of historical memory, antebellum realities and myths, spoken word performance, early American economics, spectres of chattel slavery, dreams of miscegenation, and layers of beauty that expands on the aesthetics of the object itself.
Ethan, Rebecca, and I gathered to talk over Theaster's upcoming project at MAM, which will be much bigger than this installation, and think about producing texts to accompany it.
After the meeting I took advantage of the complimentary museum entry to see the Warhol Last Decade show. For anybody with any interest in Warhol (and that really should be just about anybody), the show is recommended.
But the real surprises for me were 1) the War Bonds posters in the halls of the offices (where Ethan took us for a few minutes), and 2) the temporary show of art by veterans.
I am a total sucker for old posters, of course, so the War Bonds propaganda got me and my camera going, quick.
As one would expect, the art work by veterans was intense, bringing home the war experience in ways we just don't see in the news. I was happy to see a contribution by our anti-war comrade and Iraq War vet Aaron Hughes. It was a painting titled "Checkpoint."
Of course, this being the Milwaukee Art Museum, just getting to spend some time in the sparsely visited space on a weekday was a treat. Especially since this time we got to see the insides of the Saarinen War Memorial part of the complex, as well as enjoy the grand entry lobby (which I think is called the Windhover Gallery).
Here is the scan of the first flyer I've designed and drawn for a Madison event. The gig is a benefit show being played by my pal Bill's band, Bonobo Secret Handshake. The beneficiery is the Madison Arcatao Sister City Project, and the occasion is the celebration of the recent elections victory of the FMLN in El Salvador!
The original was hand drawn. Bill caught a typo and made some digital adjustments, which I will correct by hand later (he still has the original!). And he added the WORT logo at the bottom. Next time, I'll hand draw that, too.
And speaking of World War II, check out this video I shot the other day, over at Lewis Koch's East Side work studio.
Lewis Koch shows WW II posters from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.
So there have at least three kind of intense things happening while I've been in Austria. One was the sudden disappearance and subsequent discovery of the drowned artist-organizer Barbara Pitschmann, who had some role in organizing the art events happening in Linz a couple of weeks ago. Another is the violent attack that took place in a Sikh temple, setting off unrest in Punjab. But the thing I've been following with most interest remains the upcoming European Parliament elections.
This pic is of the same line of FPÖ posters I blogged on more than a week ago. I've noticed that as the June 7 election approaches, their posters are getting increasingly defaced. Here's what they're looking like now. So, clearly, somebody is not having any of the FPÖ crap.
Until May 31 I will be working in this space at Neulerchenfelder Strasse 8, first floor, in the 16th District of Vienna. Amos Kennedy will be there with me, and there are some interesting art projects on the second and third floors, too.
My cellphone in Austria is 43.650.9504732.
On Thursday I made it to the opening of the Just Seeds' exhibition in the Union Art Gallery on the UWM campus. The Union Art Gallery is one of the most difficult exhibition spaces I know of. The room footprint is highly irregular, the wall surface is that indestructible gray-tan pebbly Seventies concrete, and the ceilings are about twenty-five feet hight. In other words, it'd be a wonderful space for some really ambitious soft sculpture. But for 2-d work, it is sometimes a challenge to simply keep the space from completely overwhelming the art work. The fifteen Just Seeds members triumphed over the space and produced the most natural-feeling installation I've ever seen in that gallery, the conceit being a gallery representation of a crumbling highway overpass. That is to say, what Milwaukee will be one of these days.
Back in the run up to the Iraq War in late 2002, and then after Bush ordered the attack in March of 2003, I worked with a grassroots neighborhood antiwar group called the Hyde Park Committee Against War & Racism. This group had been working at a local level since the week following September 11, 2001. I and about a dozen or more others started attending meetings regularly beginning in late 2002, driven to action and togetherness by the dismay and outrage over the impending war. Together with others in the group who were somehow art-identified, one of the ways I contributed was to help make signs and posters. It seemed entirely reasonable to expect that the artists take on this responsibility. In grassroots activist groups, all competencies are made available to the needs of the group. But what we, the art people in the group, didn't do then was seriously critique and evaluate of our creations, or, for that matter anybody else's, apart from the casual gripes or plaudits when seeing a political graphic that somehow catches attention.
HPCAWR is for all practical purposes history. There is a Yahoo Groups mailing list but not much else. Nonetheless, some of us who first met and worked together then continue to find ways to occasionally share work and ideas. One of my comrades from that time is Amy Partridge, and it was with her that Laurie Jo Reynolds and I kicked off the evening's discussion last Saturday night at Mess Hall. For Amy and I, it was what we didn't do earlier: make time to focus on the operations of political graphics. In the sense of this event capping a process of creation we had begun back then, and that we always were aware of as an exercise in modeling a form of activism, it was a nice way to close a circle.
Of course, it is six years later, and the political situation is very different. The issues in our minds and hearts are more dispersed, and range across many specific causes. Our starting point for the evening was the Just Seeds Ten Years of Critical Resistance portfolio, a suite of prints all addressing prison-related issues. From there we turned attentions to graphics created for the Tamms Year Ten campaign, also on display. The twenty or so people who joined us contributed many useful and sometimes brilliant insights. We went for a solid two hours, with a nice break for pizza and socializing in between two sessions of focused conversation.
When Aaron Hughes and a crew of vets from IVAW dropped in for the second half the circle was completed in another way. The question of political graphics in relation to the Iraq War resurfaced.
Speaking of posters, the show Signs of Change, organized by Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald, just closed. Eric Triantafillou wrote a thoughtful review of the show here.
Not sure why I'm posting this now, since these two men died a while ago. But I think remembrances and appreciations should be good anytime, not just in the immediate shadow of death.
Free Speech Movement vet Michael Rossman passed back in the spring. A friend of mine knew him through one of his sons. It was she who first told me about his incredible collection of political posters. She encouraged me to make contact, gave me his phone number and everything. Somehow, I just never did. That was a few years ago. And then a link to this video below arrived from Lincoln Cushing in an email posted to the Radical Art History List. RAHL is a service of the Radical Art Caucus, one of the College Art Association's affiliated societies.
Yes, of course. There are millions here. There are people I know. Including many from Chicago, and many who did their time in Chicago. They are in town for the openings of the Signs of Change show at Exit Art and the Democracy in America 'convergence' at the Park Avenue Armory. Those events are why I'm here, too!
I'll be saying something about the MRCC on Monday, Sept 22 at the Armory at 7 PM, as part of Red76's Battery Republic project. I won't have images–just talk. But I will have A Call to Farms books for (very reasonable!) purchase. See the full Battery Republic schedule here. Unfortunately for me, Trevor Paglen will be presenting at the same time, and his presentations are always great. Don't miss it if you haven't seen him speak. You'll never think of shadow players in the same way.
And then Red76 will be eating our way through Flushing on Tuesday, Sept 23:
11.45am – ?pm
LunchTime Topics – Postcards from Flushing.We are going lunch-hopping in Flushing. We will try new Chinese dishes, maybe some Korean bbq, probably some South Asian, too. While eating, we'll think and talk about, and absorb, the aesthetics and political questions presented by migration. I will have stamped postcards on hand so we can record our thoughts, drop them in mailboxes, and have them be a part of a steadily growing postcard project now on display at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and also collected online.
http://www.jot.org/projects.php
http://www.droppingknowledge.org/cms/fw/splash
http://www.prairie.org/programs/public-squareMeet at the Information Booth Clock in the main hall of Grand Central Terminal at 11.45am
