One of the greatest parts of my job is being able to get away from my desk during installation week.  Besides the fact that I can wear my comfortable jeans and high tops, I watch an artist I respect and admire work with my colleagues and create a new experience for our visitors.  Since October I have anxiously been waiting to hear from Latifa Echakhch and find out the final details of the exhibition.  Over the course of the last three days, I have been in awe of her careful consideration of every detail.

In 2010 I invited Latifa to participate in our Currents series.  Each artist in the series is provided access to our permanent collection and asked to present a body of work that is inspired by what they find.  Latifa chose to consider lithographs from the Schiller Collection. Made from 1930-1950, most of the prints look at economic, political and social issues in America.  Over the last several years Latifa has created projects that consider cultural icons and the ways in which people use or abuse ideas around difference.  Her interest in the democratic nature of printing has been a part of a few of these projects, and I was please to know that our collection inspired her to think about these ideas more deeply.

Last year I sent her a list of the hundreds of prints included in the Schiller Collection.  Latifa carefully considered each image, choosing 16 as reference points for her latest installation.  In addition, she has found the perfect icon of the American West to spark our imaginations and encourage us to rethink our assumptions.  I mean really, when is the last time you’ve seen a tumbleweed?

Columbus Museum of Art’s Currents: Latifah Echakhch exhibition will be on view January 13, 2012 – April 1, 2012. The Currents series is supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

From August 23 through September 4, 2011, you can take home your own piece of Syjuco’s plastic fabric for your own creations. Just stop in the Museum and ask for up to five yards of free fabric. As a special benefit, CMA members can request up to 10 yards of fabric for free. Just show your membership card.

In a recent staff meeting ideas bandied about for the fabric included a Slip ‘n Slide, a tent and the shopping bag that also served as inspiration for the exhibition. Stephanie Syjuco commissioned local Columbus artist Sharon Stewart to create things to inspire our visitors. Look for her clutch, wallet and cape creations next week.

Share photos of your Pattern Migration creations with Stephanie, CMA and the world by uploading them to: www.flickr.com and tag with CMASyjuco.

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

A week before an exhibition opens is always an exciting time. It’s when vision becomes reality.

This year, as part of our CURRENTS series with living artists, I invited Stephanie Syjuco to exhibit a new project.  My hope for the series is to provide a platform for artists to create new work as well as find creative ways to explore the Museum’s collection of more than 10,000 objects. Syjuco has received wide acclaim for her work in sculpture and installation over the past 15 years with exhibitions at SFMOMA, P.S.1/MOMA and more. I was excited to be able to bring her work and ideas to the Columbus community.

I sent Stephanie information about our collection, and within a few weeks she told me she was particularly interested in the African and Asian sculptures. Stephanie’s work often reappropriates designs to question ideas of authenticity, value and economic globalization.  Her initial thought was to consider the difference in perceived value between sculptures considered “high quality” and those thought to have been made for the tourist trade.

It was clear, however, that Stephanie needed the opportunity to see everything in person, so last summer she visited the CMA and began to carefully look through our collection. This time became crucial to her creative process, allowing her to discover what would instead become the basis for her exhibition, the Don and Jean Stuck Coverlet Collection. Consisting of more than 300 nineteenth-century hand-woven coverlets the textiles provided the visual basis for Stephanie’s most recent research, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on skilled craftsman. With the advent of machines capable of creating more and more products, faster and cheaper than could be made by hand, many craftsman of consumer goods found themselves losing business and unable to provide for their families in the late nineteenth century. The Stuck Coverlet collection was created by European immigrants to the US who came here with the hopes of creating a cottage industry that could continue to thrive.

Syjuco used the inspiration of the CMA coverlets as the basis for Stephanie Syjuco: Pattern Migrations, which opens June 24, 2011 at CMA. It’s a mind-bending take on labor, capitalism, immigration and cultural biography. Stay tuned for more.

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

Lisa Dent, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Alsoudani left Bagdad in 1999 after he and his family lost everything during Saddam’s regime.  After arriving in the United States, he worked his way through the Maine College of Art and later received his MFA from Yale University.

Alsoudani’s imagery is based on his experience of intense political turmoil, but also belongs to the long tradition in art history of depictions of war and atrocity.  In reference to Alsoudani’s work, critics have cited Picasso’s Guernica and Goya’s Disasters of War paintings.  Alsoudani’s paintings are similarly monumental in size, but contain a fluidity and vibrancy all his own.

We’re excited to be able to include this drawing when we unveil our new installation of the permanent collection after renovations have been completed.  In the meantime, pick up Ahmed Alsoudani, a monograph with an essay by Shamim Momin, recently published by Hatje Canz Verlag.

~Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

While many of her works were not in the studio and had to be discussed while huddled over her laptop, it was clear that her command of the materials and consideration of the ideas she was grappling with was impressive.  As she put it, Daneille is “fascinated with how everyday materials can be manipulated” and considers artist Lee Bontecou as a key inspiration.   She often incorporates motors in order to activate her sculptures.  In many cases I thought her additions of those elements made her works that much more enticing.

She’s in the midst of preparing for an exhibition at Cynthia Reeves Gallery.  I am excited to see what she will come up with next.  From the looks of the experiments I saw with sugar in her studio, her works will be palatable to anyone who comes through the space.

Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Melissa will be at the Riffe Gallery again on Sunday, November 13 from 2-4pm as part of the Quilt National ’09 exhibition programming.   She will be teaching some basic quilting techniques to children rather than speaking about her work, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind a few questions!  Take the opportunity to meet this young, local artist if you can.

Lisa Dent
-Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

On the exact same weekend, artist Stephanie Syjuco set up her project, “Copystand: an autonomous manufacturing zone,” at the Frieze Art Fair.  In what she calls a “counterfeiting event,” Syjuco and a team of artists took over a booth at the prestigious, international art fair.  Over the course of the 4 day event the artists re-created other artworks found within the fair and displayed them as they were completed.  All of the”copies” were for sale, and for a fraction of the price of the original.

As someone who grew up in the age of hip-hop, and later became educated in the ideas of conceptual art practice, pulling inspiration from other sources sometimes feels as natural as sleeping.  And when you hear Syjuco talk about the project, she is clearly aware of the historical, artistic and economic forces around her.  It’s the lie that Fairey told that seems to get to people.  Syjuco, on the other hand, puts it out there for all to know and see.

I’m curious to see where all this will lead.  Are you?

-Lisa Dent, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

In 2002 I had landed back in my hometown of San Francisco just a year before California College of Arts (CCA) announced that it was dropping “and Crafts” from its name.  The chaos and confusion this created among artists in the area was palpable.  While CCA seemed to be making an effort to provide an atmosphere of integration and mutual respect, there were other signs that the merging of aesthetics was challenging, awkward and sometimes forced.  For instance, when I met Julie Travis, a young MFA student who had been accepted into the program through the ceramics department, she needed to remind me that in order to find her studio I had to visit the Oakland campus.  Her studio, inside the early 1922 campus building, was far removed from the San Francisco campus created in the 1980s, where all but two of the MFA students were given studio space.  The other student who was placed in Oakland worked in glass.  As the two navigated through the rigorous work schedules and ongoing criticism necessary to complete their degrees, both seemed to have the added endeavor of providing plausible reasons for working in glass or clay in the first place.

Dale Chihuly has spent the better part of 40 years within this critical debate, albeit without the discussions hindering his artistic output.  He has even created a haven in Washington state, his own little part of the world to explore and encourage working with glass.

In his essay written in 1997, Donald Kuspit writes, “…Chihuly effects an iconic reprise of the problematic relationship between craft and art-ultimately the relationship between the decorative and the expressive-in the very act of reconciling them.” His extensive list of projects and output can cloud some of his earliest successful examples.  The best aspects of Chihuly Illuminated highlight these successes, and show his formidable desire to push past long held ideas as to what the glass arts were and are for many of us today.

Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

Take a look at the article here.  Go Keturah!

Lisa Dent
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art