Looking for Art in Little Rock, Arkansas

I was in Little Rock, Arkansas recently, looking for art. My daughter, Isabella Acosta Barna is on the youth Advisory Board (YAB) for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and their Empower Me kid's movement to stop childhood obesity. Her board meetings were held in the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The Clinton Library is a beautiful modern building with a Platinum LEED environmental rating.

While in Little Rock, I got about a few hours to myself during the afternoons to explore. I visited a few local museums and saw some very nice work. The Historic Arkansas Museum had some art as part of their exhibit: John Ellis and Don Shaw (a sculptor and painter) with the exhibit, Cosmic Interplay - Light and Darkness (ends Aug. 16, 2009); and Custom by Design - Contemporary Furniture Handmade in Arkansas (ends Jan. 10, 2010). The exhibits had their moments, but I wasn't captured by anything. (That "wow - I wish I'd made this" or "this is amazing" feeling).

I walked further south to the Arkansas Arts Center, a complex including a museum, children's theater and studio school. One of the exhibits there was of the French artist Paul Signac. A wealthy early 20th century industrialist invested in Signac's career and built a museum with a permanent collection of decades of Signac's work as the centerpiece. Seeing the artist's life's work through the decades I was struck by how the patronage of one man made this gift to the future (me, and others seeing this work) as well as supporting the artist during his lifetime.

My favorite contemporary work (also in Arkansas Arts Center,) was the contemporary artist Jun Kaneko's large ceramic pieces. Works in a series he called Dango -- a Japanese word for rounded form (he appears to be of Japanese ancestry). Kaneko's exhibit included drawings and smaller pieces also which didn't do much for me. I found his large pieces compelling.

Ben Whitehouse had his exhibit of paintings and photos titled, Ben Whitehouse: Observation. My favorite piece from his was the calendar of paintings of the same ocean scene for every day of March.

When visiting Little Rock, be sure to take the River Rail Electric Streetcar. It's only a dollar or two and it's a fun ride around Little Rock in a vintage (but air-conditioned) electric streetcar. The very charming driver was also a wonderful tour guide, pointing out landmarks along the route. The River Rail Electric Streetcar tour of Little Rock is the best bargain.

For a complete listing of Greater Little Rock Museums and Cultural Attractions see www.LittleRock.com. And be sure to eat at least one meal at The Flying Fish. It's a order-at-the-counter, seat-yourself diner with delicious local fare.

Try some Southern style microbrew at Boscos. They offer light and medium bodied microbrews that you can sip on their deck overlooking the riverfront when the weather is good. They're just down the street a short walk from the Flying Fish.

Art of the Tatoo - Portland Art Museum

Altering your looks is the status quo of our culture. Makeovers are featured in most every magazine and for the financially backed, an entire menu of plastic surgery lite and full course options abound. Change and reinvention are firmly embodied in the flesh around us.

After seeing Marking Portland: The Art of the Tattoo at the Portland Art Museum June 20 - Sept. 7, 2009, the choices offered by the question of change and reinvention expanded. Tattoos are the tool of choice for many Portlanders seeking to express themselves beyond a nip, tuck or new hairstyle.

My daughter, Isabella and I spent the afternoon in the Portland Art Museum, ending our stay with a rest on the benches downstairs and the slide show that was the exhibit, Marking Portland: The Art of the Tattoo.

Sitting on the bench was the Checkerboard Face Man. I introduced myself to him and he was very gracious regarding my interest in his tatoos. His name is Matt Gone and he's an artist who has used his body as his canvas, covering everything except his gums and palms of his feet with tattoos. Willamette Week featured a great piece describing his motivation and life experiences as a completely tattoed man.

Matt posed for me, pulling up his pant legs and shirt to expose his body covered in a checkerboard pattern of tatoos interspersed with colorful motifs. He's an affable man with quiet and unassuming body language that is at odds with his flamboyant markings.

I admire Matt's dedication to his personal vision. In the Willamette Week article Matt says that his wish is to preserve his skin for display after he dies. For Matt, reinvention never stops.

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Museums within Walking Distance of the San Jose, California Convention Center

Years ago San Jose, CA had the reputation of being the San Francisco Bay Area's very poor cousin. Well, the cousin won the lottery. Silicon Valley happened and the rest is history. Civic-minded investors poured a bunch of money into the area and it shows.

I was recently traveling and spent time at the San Jose, California McEnery Convention Center (150 West San Carlos St. San Jose, CA 95113). A clean and sleek neighborhood of bistros, fountains, coffee houses and museums begins within 100 feet of the McEnery Convention Center. I had a couple of free hours, so I first visited the San Jose Museum of Art. The exhibit Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon was fun. It seemed fitting to have this type of exhibit in Silicon Valley and it was an interesting counterpoint to my visit to The Tech Museum of Innovation nearby.

One of my favorite pieces in the Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon was Michael Salter's piece, a twenty feet tall robot sculpture made out of styrofoam computer packing material titled, Giant Styro. Salter made the piece specifically for the space. It was whimsical to look at, yet at the same time, realizing just how many styrofoam packing materials are sent all over the world with every computer purchase and the subsequent environmental impact of the computer, it had a bit of a dark edge (maybe medium-gray is a better description). The exhibit covered mostly the playful and toy-like friendly images of robots that are brought to mind in short stories by Isaac Asimov. There wasn't much in this exhibit to do with the postmodern ironic/destructive robot images from movies like Terminator and Robo Cop.

All in all -- I like that the San Jose Art Museum and The Tech Museum of Innovation are so close to each other. In a symbolic way it's as though the civic minded citizens of San Jose are reminding all of us that art and science need each other to create the kind of cities we will want to live in.

And if you have more time, there's the cozy San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles to visit just a few blocks away.

Museum Vist: Chakaia Booker at the Kemper Museum

Black rubber tires sized for all manner of car, truck, bike and other conveyances are the medium artist Chakaia Booker has worked in almost exclusively since the early 1990's. This past weekend I visited the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri and saw Booker's exhibit.

I happened to be in town and didn't have any pre-conceived ideas about Chakaia Booker's work. I'd never seen it before. Not because she's not well known, but because I dropped my subscription to the art magazines. (Maybe I'll start up again.)

The first thing I noticed were the sensual textures and engaging shapes of her sculptures along with the strong scent of industrial rubber tires. I don't particularly like the scent, so the combination of the odor with the pleasing visuals was interesting. Overall the feeling of Booker's work for me is sensual, thoughtful, loving and sometimes (just a little) disgusting in a visceral, gooey way that is curiously friendly. Her large hanging chandelier-like sculpture is the piece I'm thinking of that fits the visceral-gooey description. Seeing the graceful beauty of bird shapes and candles under the gooey blackness I thought of both the Adam's Family comedy (the chandelier would be great over the Adam's table) and the havoc left behind by the Exxon Valdez. I appreciate the emotional resonance of that piece -- it was quite beautiful.

The exhibit includes about 20 sculptures completed during the past 7 years. Here's an excerpt from exhibit pamphlet describing her work:

"Through a physically demanding process of slicing, twisting and weaving found rubber (primarily from bikes, cars and farm equipment), she forms dynamic, whimsical sculptures that fuse ecological concerns with questions about racial, and economic differences, globalization, and existing sociopolitical power structures."

See more of Chakaia Booker's work on her website at http://www.chakaiabooker.com/

www.CristinaAcosta.com

Art and Craft in Oaxaca Mexico

In February I traveled with an artist friend to the colonial city of Oaxaca, Mexico in the state of Oaxaca. We traveled around the city, shopped and visited the pyramids at Monte Alban. Not only did I get a chance to practice Spanish and explore, I was able to visit with local artists.

Located in the south of Mexico, this capitol city is in the mountains at about 6,000 feet elevation. The geography looks a lot like San Diego County in the U.S. did during the 1970's. It's dry and hilly with farms. The city is many centuries old and is the home to about 600,000 people. The presence of indigenous people from any of the 16 formally registered indigenous communities gives the city a unique flavor that I found especially interesting.

We stayed at Casa Colonial, a Bed & Breakfast type of funky/charming hotel about 6 blocks from the city center (a city center is called the "Zocalo" in Mexico.) In the Zocalo, the markets (mercados) and surrounding villages are many artists and artisans selling items the area is famous for: Woodcarvings of fanciful creatures, black-clay pottery, green-glazed terra cotta pottery, and woven goods like shawls and rugs.

Some of the handwork is what I call production-work. Production-work is obvious when you see many of the same thing made almost exactly same way. Other work was much more artistic. This was especially true of the much more expensive pieces, where an artist took the risk to invest a lot of time into the work in the hope that the piece would sell. After a week of looking at so much handwork I realized that often the difference between art and craft can be purely economic. Without supporting sales the artist can't take the risk to invest time into involved pieces, therefore they'll put more time into creating small (and predictable) tourist trinkets.

With that in mind I bought a rug, a wood carving, etc., etc., to support the local artists. Shopping isn't usually my thing, but in Oaxaca I really got into it. Calling the process "collecting" instead of "shopping" seems to be my magic spin. Happy travels!

Photos: Rugs - This vendor makes and sells the rugs produced by his entire family. He had a binder of press clips and an artist resume.
Woodworker: The man in the center owns the business. The men in the family carve the figures from copal wood. The women do the painting.
Textile Dyes: This woman is the wife of a famous weaver and a wonderful weaver in her own right. Here she is demonstrating crushing the natural plant materials to make powdered dye. Note the skeins of wool hanging behind her.

Exhibit - Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte, NC

There is the South and there is the New South. I didn't really know this until I toured Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's a history/cultural museum that begins the exhibits with a time-line hinging on the birth of the New South (1865 when the US Civil War ended with the defeat of the South). I highly recommend visiting this museum as the first thing you do in the city. It's within a 15 minute walk of the Convention Center and between Reid's Fine Grocery and the Mint Museum.

I didn't really know what to expect in this part of the South, though I had some ideas and some of them weren't very flattering. That's why I recommend visiting this museum first. It taught me a lot about the stew of cultural courage, the confederacy and change that are the history of the New South. The remainder of my stay was enriched by the understanding and knowledge I gleaned from the exhibits.

Touring the downstairs dioramas and exhibits, I was toured through Southern history from 1865 to now. It wasn't until I saw the the exhibit upstairs: Comic Stripped, A Revealing Look at Southern Stereotypes in Cartoons (Sept. 7, '07 to April 13, '08) that I realized just how much of my knowledge of the South was shaped by the daily comics.

I LOVE reading the newspaper comics and will read them all, even those I don't really like. I've read the newspaper comics for most everyday day of my entire life. For a few years, I studied comics so that I could draw them as part of my art job painting windows. Touring the Comic Stripped. . . exhibit I realized that cartoons I didn't even care about enough to actively dislike had shaped my perceptions of the South. Lil' Abner, Pogo, Snuffy Smith and others were part of the exhibit. The exhibit puts the viewer head-to-head with Southern Stereotypes. It gave me a wake-up call. Stereotypes I didn't know I had became apparent to me. It was an interesting exhibit to see before I headed to the Discovery Museum later to see the traveling Norman Rockwell Exhibit.
www.CristinaAcosta.com

Exhibit - Mint Museum of Craft and Design, NC

Charlotte, North Carolina has a vibrant arts community. Visiting last week, I was on a quest to find everything artistic that I could within a 40 minute walk (each way) from the Convention Center. The Mint Museum of Craft and Design is a nice place to spend a couple of hours and it's only a short walk from the Reid's Fine Foods grocery store. The Reid building has long slim plastic panels embellishing the exterior that sound to the touch. Sit outside and have a deli lunch and watch the people go by. The majority will take a few side-steps to touch the panels and wait for the sound of human giggles or musical chimes.

The dividing line between Art and Craft is not a clear one to me. In the pre-1970's U.S.A. it was an easier designation. Most anything a woman made or most anything anybody made from a non-European nation was a craft. That left the obvious utilitarian arts (U.S.A. and Euro made) like silver- smithing, ceramics and furniture to occupy the center stage of Craft (with a capital "C", the kind of Craft that makes it to a museum). I'd often hear my teachers talk about the point when fine craft could become fine art. This argument was made by men born before the time that fast-food, fast-clothing and fast-everything took over our culture.

So here's my observation: Images which used to be firmly in the "art" camp are now so easy to produce with a camera and computer software, that they often don't seem very "fine" or artistic to me. And now that the majority of stuff most Americans own isn't made by anybody they've ever met, seen or have the faintest idea where their country is on a map, the handmade object is turning into "art" and the machine-made image is sorta still "art".

My trip to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a respite. I knew that the moment I walked through the door, my convoluted decision making process could go off the random setting. Somebody else had made the decision and everything beyond the door was both art and craft. What a relief!

Norman Rockwell - How "Real" is Realism?

Rockwell's America: Celebrating the Art of Norman Rockwell is a traveling interactive exhibit of Norman Rockwell's images that explores his impact as an artist who in the process of creating images that imagined and conveyed events and moments in his experience of American life, contributed to the American vision. Along with other work he painted 322 Saturday Evening Post magazine covers during the decades from 1920's through the 1960's.

Last week I toured the Rockwell's America exhibit at Discovery Place (a science museum) in Charlotte, North Carolina with my family. After sitting in a darkened room and watching the introductory video for 6 minutes, the attendant parted the curtains on one side of the room and invited all of us in the room to proceed through the exhibit.

As a child I began studying art in the early 1970's. Adult artists I was around were still arguing about the merits of "modern" artists like Picasso. Though poles apart, many realistic/figurative artists and modern artists agreed on one thing: Norman Rockwell was "just an illustrator".

Seeing his images (there aren't any important originals in this exhibit) from the vantage point of 2008, those discussions seem silly. Norman Rockwell did more than paint. With his paintings he reflected and guided American culture. His images have been seen by more humans than ANY other artist in history!!

My first feeling seeing the dioramas of Norman Rockwell's world was one of sweet familiarity and nostalgia. My maternal grandparents loved Norman Rockwell's art and the Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell images pervaded their life. Unconsciously I melded Norman Rockwell's sweet images of small town America into my understanding of my Grandparent's lives. My grandfather, James Ira Wisner, was born in Missouri on a farm outside of Center, Missouri. His sister lived in Hannibal, MO and his other sisters remained in the Midwest their entire lives. For a few years he moved his wife and 5 California-born daughters back to Center, Missouri to be near his family. My grandmother, Alice would often shake her head when recalling the memory of the move, glad to be sitting in her Escondido, California home, savoring a sun-drenched retirement. As Catholics, the family had been the object of anti-Catholic prejudice and weren't a good fit in the tiny country town of less than 500 people. They lasted a few years, then returned to Southern California.

Despite the negative experience the family had, in retirement my grandparents set out on a road trip to Center, Missouri every few years. Like a bitter pain pill coated with a resilient, warm amber layer of gelatin, the images Norman Rockwell painted soothed my grandparents, seeming to have covered any bad memories of small town life with a patina of bucolic charm.

To most non-artists, Norman Rockwell is perceived to be a Realist. He isn't. And he is. Though several late images convey a loving and wise view of race relations, the majority of images are of white people. Looking at decades of magazine covers I began to hunt for brown faces. Rockwell painted during the years when American Indians were still not allowed to vote, their children were being forcibly educated in English-only boarding schools and more. Anti-Greaser laws in the American Southwest were in force against American Hispanics. American Africans were being lynched and denied voting rights in the American South. Jews were undergoing the worst world-wide persecution of a religious group in history. I looked in vain for images of American Indians, Asians, Hispanics and African Americans. Then I realized, brown faces weren't part of the Anglo American mythological mindset.

Norman Rockwell wasn't a naive country rube with a talent for art. He was born in New York and educated at some of the best art schools of the day. A bright talent from the beginning, he was selling his illustrations to national magazines before he was 18 years old. Of course living in New York City, a city of ethnicity would have inescapably brought Rockwell in contact with people that weren't Anglo, along with those Anglos that were very ethnic. You'd never know it looking at the first 3 decades of his work. The realism Norman Rockwell was painting was what I see as a mythological American Anglo concept. Again -- yes, he did paint images with other ethnicities, but this was towards the end of his career and does not include the majority of his work.

Until this exhibit, I hadn't ever really looked at a body of Norman Rockwell's work. I'd seen paintings, prints and illustrations for most of my life, but that isn't the same as paying attention to and understanding the effect those images were having on me.

Walking through the exhibit I was struck with a unexpected mix of feelings. I felt a nostalgia for a life that didn't really exist along with anger that I had "just" noticed that I, with my brown skin and Hispanic heritage from my father was left out of the story. In fact so were all of my paternal relatives & ancestors. I finally consciously recognized that the exclusion of the color brown from the majority of Norman Rockwell's images had contributed to how I saw myself. I could enter Norman Rockwell's vision of provincial life mentally from the portal of my maternal heritage, but the reality of my obvious ethnicity kept me from thinking of myself as a participant in that life.

The reality of imagery is that it both documents and creates. Because Norman Rockwell's images were so commercially successful that he contributed to defining America's perception of itself, he is a powerful and important artist to study. The realism Norman Rockwell painted wasn’t realism at all. It was an American Anglo myth he imagined & shared. I realized that the exclusion of the color brown from the majority of Norman Rockwell's images contributed to how Americans see themselves, a myth that in some form persists. Re-imagining that myth is the work of contemporary society.

I'm grateful for the experience of being able to view Rockwell's America: Celebrating the Art of Norman Rockwell. I learned more than I expected. And that's a good thing.

Photo: The exhibit encouraged viewers to sit at an easel and paint a self-portrait like Rockwell would often do. The mirrors were set at the perfect height for children, so I sketched a portrait of my husband, Randall Barna. All in all -- an inspiring exhibit.