The Contemporary Collectors Council organizes four to six art trips per year. Each trip includes a combination of tours of museum exhibitions, artist studio visits, galleries, and visiting private collections, along with delicious lunches.
The Contemporary Collectors Council December foray in Laguna Beach included studio visits with artist Barbara Berk, a long-time resident of Laguna Beach . Berk is currently in a group exhibition at Coastline Community College, and is currently shown in a group exhibition at Joanne Artman Gallery through January 30th, 2011. The CCC went on a visit to Berk's remarkable home and saw first-hand the connections the artist makes between drawings and her performances.
In addition, a prominent and historically significant artist, Tony DeLap, spoke about his most recent body of work. DeLap recently had an exhibition at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico which received this review in the Albuquerque Journal.
Sandra and Jerry LeWinter generously hosted the CCC to a visit and tour of their private collection and home. The LeWinters collection includes work by Enrique Martinez Celaya, Kim Dingle, Yishai Judisman, and William Kentridge to name a few. The group was also treated to a tour of the 2010 California Biennial at OCMA curated by Sarah Brancroft.
The members of the CCC take a pose in front of Site Santa Fe
The beautiful scenery of the Santa Fe trip
To kick off the 2010-2011 season, the Contemporary Collectors Council (CCC) traveled to Santa Fe from September 22-25. Organized by CCC chair Johanna Felder and Jennifer Jacobs from the Jacobs Group, an ambitious itinerary was set with stunning and diverse private collections of William Miller, Richard and Betsy Ehrenberg, and Dr. Edward Okun.
CCC members take a tour with the Site Santa Fe lecturer
Members listening to a lecturer in the New Mexico Museum of Art
Karen Feuer Schwager, a member of the Contemporary Collectors Council and also a contemporary fine artist, took a memorable trip to LA's Chinatown with the CCC and she graciously contributed an entry about her adventure.
The CCC's destination for the day, Chinatown in Los Angeles
June 6th started as a mildly, foggy Laguna morning for the Contemporary Collectors Council's tour of Chinatown's gallery scene. There was a plethora of art to be experienced in LA’s nooks and crannies: including assemblages in gardens, muraled walls and painted cars. Our bus trip began with a video filling us in on the day’s itinerary pre- recorded by Grace Kook Anderson who was unable to join us, followed by a couple of excellent Georgia O’Keefe videos, provided by Johanna Felder, tempting us with a taste of what is expected from the September CCC trip to Santa Fe.
As we approached the CharlieJamesGallery, our first stop, I immediately faced a dietary challenge to my days “no dessert” resolution. There, in the entrance, lay a table overloaded with a variety of mouthwatering pastries: petite four, chocolate and sponge cakes, and several cakes delightfully decorated with colorful butter cream icing. As I waited for the aroma to erase my resolve completely, I realized with equivocal relief that the pastries were a realistic installation of embroidered sculptures.
The artist of this work, Orly Cogan, is a fiber artist who skillfully employs classic female crafts to contemporary imagery. Besides her representational approach to pastries, she also exhibited audacious and playful embroidery. Cogan often uses feminist and erotic images and sayings on vintage dollies, table cloths, and pillowcases.
Charlie James gave a great talk on Cogan’s process. (His helpful guidance continued throughout the day as he hosted our excursion to all the venues.) Next door, in the SabinaLeeGallery, we observed Dane Johnson’s stark acrylic paintings of his collected remnant pieces of lottery tickets.
Next, we saw stormy, manic, intensely drawn textured landscape images by Pierre Picot at the Jancar Gallery. Although Picot is a trained artist, his work, in my opinion, maintains a raw repetitious gestural outsider art quality.A few surprises lay tucked on the floor, such as intriguing works by Mary Lynn McCorkle who incorporated buckling, medium coated, rayon cloth which created a relief element to partially obscure an intricate painting.
On to theSamLeeGallery saw an exhibition of the richly detailed landscape photographs of Alia Malley. Malley’s photographs capture the moody, painterly effect of a John Constable scene and the feeling of a passing era. Her imagery displays secluded, rare city pockets of natural pastoral settings that are yet to be urbanized.
We took a needed brain break with a lunch of dim sum at Ocean Seafood.
Asad Faulwell talking about his culturally infused art
After lunch, we hopped on the bus to visit a young, edgy, emerging LA-based artist Asad Faulwell. Faulwell uses a culturally traditional Afghani approach to his large colorful paintings in which he combines contemporary secular figures from modern Middle Eastern history with Western and Eastern religious iconography to make subtle political statements.
Last venue, but not the least, was an extravagantly catered cocktail hour at the home of Tim Campbell and his husband Steve Machado. Campbell, a self taught building designer, created a four-story industrial construction which is beautifully designed to present his art collection of politically charged, contemporary, figurative, and conceptual work merged with antique African and Far Eastern artifacts. Climbing the impressive grated stairwell to the main floor gave me a feeling of being in an Escher litho and, as I looked below to see the switch back overlapping grid pattern and my curious fellow travelers passing in alternate directions below me, a slight feeling of vertigo.
A painting by Travis Somerville dominated the dining room. Somerville’s bold work is based on racial and political themes. We are fortunate that he is currently participating inLagunaArt Museum’s exhibition Art Shack.
The sky was darkening as we drove through the canyon to Laguna’s calming pastoral scene of the goats munching on the dry grassy hills. An end to a memorable day!
Contemporary Collectors Council listen in on a lecture
The group started the day by exploring the Curiosities of the Curio, which celebrates the collecting of ktischy objects we hold with sentimental value. The small works that resemble curio, the bizarre objects, are inspired by personal momentos ranging from family heirlooms to random objects one finds at a thrift store. Throughout the exhibition, the works continuously provoked a sense of curiousity among the group as they encountered pieces such as Laurie Hogin's peculiar portraits of odd spotted bunnies and pink and green monkey-people banging on drums that resembled human skulls. Moira Hahn's Japanese prints portraying parrot-headed geishas as opposed to beautiful women emphasized the strangeness of these curios.
Next up, the group visited the private collection of Andi Campognone. This private rendevous for the CCC not only included works of Campognone, but also incorporated the paintings of Alex Couwenberg, which are similar to the works of Karl Benjamin.
After Lunch, they visited the Pomona College Museum of Art which held three different exhibitions. The first exhibition was Helen Pashgian's Working in Light. As a pioneer light and space artist, her use of industrial materials offer a various range of optical and color possibilites. In these works Pashgian brings together small scultpures from the past and current larger-sized light columns as she continues her work to portray the spatial qualities of color in light.
The Project Series 40:Amanda Ross-Ho exhibition was next the list. Ross-Ho's site specific installation concentrated on the mutability and materiality of context. She incorporates paintings, sculpture and installation pieces that observe the boundaries of exhibition space, the direct and indirect products of creative expression, and the connectivity of the visual world.
Finally, the group visited Famous for 15: From Andy Warhol to your Camera-Phone. As Warhol stated "In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," this exhibition circles around the idea of that statement. The exhibition observes the curiosities of instantaneous fame based on the modernization of technology, primarily photography, and the connection of that fame to camera-phones photos.
In addition to the exhibitions, the group also visted two mural sites: Rico Lebrun's Genisis and Jose Clemente Orozco's Prometheus. LeBrun's mural serves to portray a visual and symbolic center through the display of Noah sheltering a child. Surrounding Noah are also represenations of other significant places and people of the Bible; the Deluge, Job, Sodom and Gomorrah, Cain and Abel, and Adam and Eve. Orozco, who is also known as one of "los tres grandes," the three great Mexican muralists, painted Prometheus as his first work in America and also the first Mexican mural in North America, and thus began the Mexican Mural Movement.
The shallow pool from Dividing the Light
James Turrell's metal canopy shading the seating area
The group made one last stop at Pomona College at James Turrell's Skyspace: Dividing the Light. In a piece that incoporates the use of lighting elements, a floating metal canopy, and a transparent courtyard, Turrell's installation helps to heightens the audience's awareness of light, sky and space.
Karl Benjamin showing pieces of his work
Finally, at the end of the day, the Contemporary Collectors Council visited the studio of Karl Benjamin. The group was given the opportunity to talk to the artist about how he created the genesis of geometric abstraction. As a self taught artist, he started his career as a grade school teacher. His intesity in art evolved and eventually he became a member of the "Four Abstract Classicists," which started with an exhibition in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. As a leading member of the "Hard Edge" movement, Benjamin focused on saturated and sunny colors that resonates with one another in the environment of his geometric designs and gave way to an assortment of shapes and patterns.
The Contemporary Collectors Council had another lively and successful trip, this time, to Riverside on Saturday, January 30. We had a dynamic group of council members and we’re fortunate enough to include Peter Clothier’s reflection of this trip. This is from Peter’s blog The Buddha Diaries.
Before it gets left behind, I need to report on that remarkable and entertaining day, last Saturday, in the company of members of the Contemporary Collectors Council at the LagunaArt Museum. As new members of this Council (we become more rooted, slowly, in the Laguna Beach community), Ellie and I signed up for the day trip to Riverside, to become acquainted with the art life of that city.
I was fortunate to find myself, on the bus, in a little four-seat nook, around a table in the company of the museum’s curator of exhibitions, Grace Kook Anderson (who took many of the photographs included here,) and two well-informed and eloquent fellow passengers. Our engrossing conversation about art, collections, trends, and the museum itself kept us fully occupied for the outward journey, leaving me surprised that we arrived so soon at our first destination, the home and studio of the British painter David Leapman.
This was a great stop. The house, a rather bland-looking tract home from the outside, was crammed with David’s paintings, large and small. (Please check out the "gallery" on his website, above, for better images than I could provide.) He’s a versatile painter who happily combines a remarkable diversity of approaches, from hard-edge minimalism to gestural abstraction, from figurative and narrative line-drawing to surfaces textured with diamond dust and glitter—all in a single canvas. The result is enchanting. David also proved to be an excellent speaker....
He describes his works in the words of the Romantic British poet and artist William Blake, as journeys “from innocence to experience.” The images he evokes—they are never quite explicit—tend to hover in the space of the painting, teasing the eye and mind without ever quite resolving themselves, existing in the realm of dream or fantasy against the solid, intense reality of their painted ground. The viewer is invited into the space in the same spirit as the painter himself, as a voyage of discovery that will never fully reveal its inner secrets. That David manages this in small, even tiny works as well as large canvases is testament to his thoroughly engaging skills.
We left David’s studio reluctantly, boarding our bus for the drive to another house that seemed, from the outside, no more than another tract home in a community of tract homes. The front door opened, however, into a rich fantasy land of art that fairly took your breath away. It seemed that every inch of wall, shelf and floor space was occupied with some object or other to amuse the eye. And I use that word with its old association with the muse… True collectors are an odd species. They don’t know where to stop. Their passion is consuming, and knows literally no bounds. As my late father-in-law, who was one, used to say, it’s an addiction.
To say that Connie Ransom and her husband are addicted to collecting seems a radical understatement. Connie herself...
... seen here, holding forth to the group, is a ceramic artist, so naturally, along with her own work, the shelves, high and low, are crowded with the work of potters, new and old, with stunning examples of the Native American tradition. There are glass objects, too, everywhere, along with an outstanding selection of Oaxacan animals...
... carved in wood with exquisite line detail. And art objects, assemblages, and paintings—hundreds of them, each finding its own space. The taste of these collectors ranges from elegant abstraction to landscape and raw political provocation. Their standard seems to be excellence, no matter what the medium or style. I was personally impressed not only by the diversity of the collection, but also by the evidence it offered that the quality of art objects has nothing to do with an artist’s fame or standing in the mainstream of American art. It's not all about celebrity and money. There are great numbers of wonderful artists at work in all parts of the country, whose names are not bandied about in the national art journals. If you’ll forgive the expression, they “persist.”
The natural vista outside the Ransom’s house is as compelling as the art within. Set at the very edge of the housing development, where civilization meets wilderness, the house is surrounded on two sides by towering boulders and, below, a deep ravine...
... savaged recently in dramatic fashion by a week of heavy rains. Across, on the other side of the ravine, a steep hillside where both flora and fauna flourish. A hawk’s nest adorns a distant telegraph pole, and we learn that coyote are frequent visitors, along with the occasional mountain lion. On a distinctly smaller scale, a hummingbird had built its tiny, immaculate nest in the branches of an evergreen tree outside the kitchen window; I was thrilled with the sight of the nest itself, but unfortunately missed what others saw—the mother bird herself, returning to feed her two recently-hatched young. (I hope to post a good picture in a separate entry.)
The next step of our trip brought us to a downtown plaza where, on the walk from our bus to the restaurant, we were surprised to pass a memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi—a statue of the great teacher and leader surrounded by inspirational quotations from both himself and others about his extraordinary contribution to the world. Nice, as one of our number noted, to have a peace memorial. We have too many of the war variety. On, then, to the restaurant, Phood, where Ellie and I were fortunate to enjoy a good lunch in the company of our next guide, Tyler Stallings, who was formerly the curator at the Laguna Art Museum and is now Director of the Sweeney Art Gallery of UC Riverside. It was good to have the opportunity to catch up with him, and to learn from him a good deal about the cultural life of the city and developments at the arts complex that includes the Sweeney, the California Museum of Photography next door, and the renovation of the adjacent old department store as a fine arts creative and research center for multiple media.
Tyler’s introduction prepared us for the next step along the way, a visit to that same complex of buildings. Our first stop was at the photography museum, where we met with the Executive Director of the complex, Jonathan Green, also a professor in the university’s ArtDepartment. He described the ambitious development project, and led us through a back door into the huge and splendid department store space which is currently under renovation...
Once it opens, as I understand it, the building will not only host exhibitions and performances, it will provide studios and working labs for video, photography and film—a truly creative environment that students can look forward to. In these days of severe academic retrenchment in California, it’s an encouraging sign that creativity and imagination will continue to occupy an important place in the system. No doubt it was all planned and funded before things came crashing down…
From there, we were led to the second floor of the photography museum for a visit to a fascinating exhibition documenting the history of the digital camera. That the entire history dates from only 1987 is pretty amazing, given the ubiquity of digital recording devices of all kinds today, from advanced camera systems to the cell phone that virtually everybody owns. I have talked elsewhere about the dizzying multiplication of visual images with which we are bombarded daily. Here, we were treated to the story of the technology that makes them possible, in the form of an exhaustive collection of the devices themselves, loaned to the museum by David Whitmore Hearst Jr. Ellie and I were happy to note that our old Canon Elph was included in a museum show!
Tyler Stallings led us, next, to the Sweeney Art Gallery and offered us a insightful tour of his own exhibition there, Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art—the title itself a witty twist on the junk science of “creationism.”
The show brings together the work of artists working in a diversity of media—from still photography to various forms of documentation, video and more traditional art media—to explore the fascinating possibilities of interspecies communication. There’s space here only for a couple of highlights: Carlee Fernandez, who mocks our casual human use of leather by turning real taxidermied animals into articles of luggage; Hilja Keading’s mural-sized video installation, where she films her fragile human self sharing a small space with an enormous live bear, revealing their tenuous, curiously tender co-existence; and another video by Corinna Schnitt, who places a slowly rotating camera at the center of a large, furnished living room into which alien environment she gradually introduces animals and birds of different species...
It’s in part a comment on the way we live, the way they live, their strangeness, our strangeness…
We could have spent much more time—and I much more space, here—on this show, but, as with all organized tours of this kind, the scheduled called. From the Sweeney, we walked up the street to the Riverside Art Museum to see curator Andi Campognone’s exhibition, Edenistic Diversions, a somewhat irreverent riff on the venerable tradition of landscape painting that includes the work of four artists, three of them working with large-scale installations (There's a nice installation shot at her website, above.) . We met with the curator, who had invited three of the artists to talk about their work: Kimber Berry, who creates massive flows of paint that spread from ceiling to wall and out across the floor, using color, light and movement to create a wrap-around effect (see her website); Rebecca Niederlander, whose floor-to-ceiling waterfall of delicate, white paper construction and vast, drifting clouds of knitted household wire and plastic insulated cable gracefully occupy the center of the exhibition space (see installation shot); and Lisa Adams, the most traditional in the rectangular format of her paintings, whose fascination with birds is the focal point of works that blend fanciful delight with the threat of ecological doom. One of her two paintings in the show is on the home page of her website. An interesting show, especially in conjunction with “Intelligent Design.” Artists are clearly paying attention to the vulnerable natural world, and to the dangerously dominant role we play in it.
Our last stop for the day was at Tio’s Tacos—not for the tacos: we had only recently finished lunch, but for the art. Tio, it turns out, is one of those wonderful obsessives who, like Simon Rodia of Watts Towers fame or Grandma Prisbey whose Bottle Village is unhappily deteriorating, is driven to turn detritus into art.
Tio has turned the back yard of his restaurant into a fantasy land where every imaginable piece of trash has been recycled...
... into objects and structures of hilarious beauty, from towering giants constructed out of bottles and cans to chapels...
... with burning incense, and shrines where fountains play and water runs. Tio has enlisted the help of family to the task, his delightful wife and three young daughters, but he must be up very early in the morning to work on his creation and get the tacos made and sold; he is also the chief chef in his own kitchen.
I was happy to be reminded that art is still not only the privilege of a wealthy elite in this country, but that a man like Tio is inspired by the same creative urge, and that those who come to enjoy his tacos are equally inspired by the results of his efforts. It was an English king—one of the Charleses?—who on first walking into the new, Christopher Wren-designed St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of London had destroyed the old one, declared it “awful, artful, and amusing.” The quote is often used to demonstrate how the meaning of words shifts over the centuries, but I like its double meanings. They seem to apply to Tio’s wonderful adventure.
Diversity, it seemed to me, was the theme of the day. All in all, a great day in Riverside. And we didn’t even stop at the famous Mission Inn!
In addition, a prominent and historically significant artist, Tony DeLap, spoke about his most recent body of work. DeLap recently had an exhibition at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico which received this review in the Albuquerque Journal.
Sandra and Jerry LeWinter generously hosted the CCC to a visit and tour of their private collection and home. The LeWinters collection includes work by Enrique Martinez Celaya, Kim Dingle, Yishai Judisman, and William Kentridge to name a few. The group was also treated to a tour of the 2010 California Biennial at OCMA curated by Sarah Brancroft.
