VOL 06 ISSUE
5 
April 30, 2007
BACK ISSUES | ° | ¤ | CURRENT ISSUE
VOL 06 ISSUE
5 BACK ISSUES | ° | ¤ | CURRENT ISSUE |
| SPIRIT LOONS: HOOVER'S WILD CALL AT AMRC GALA AUCTION | ||||
 GALA-DEE-DAH
spirit invades the atrium and galleries of the Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center
each spring as 400 paying customers eschew their overalls in favor of evening wear and
come bargain shopping for original art by many of Alaska's best established creatives. In
a central position, Aleut John Hoover's carved redwood Spirit Loons, like the
creatures themselves, took a humbly assertive pride of place in the photo at the right.
Betty Atkinson's Mentasta Mountains from Nebesna Road, Erin Pollock's Untitled
female portrait, and Steve Gordon's Fireweed and Parsnips are also visible in the
background. Most of the more than 130 items contributed were offered in silent
auction form while these four were among those presented at outcry auction in the atrium
of the museum as the culmination of the dinner party event. Feature artist Atkinson
was last year's Popular artist, Pollock was Feature artist last year and Popular artist
the year before, Duke Russell similarly (cf Issue # 604). This year's People's
choice award fell on the Alaskana style landscape painting Autumn on the Kenai River
(not shown), by Denise Quinn Keelan. |
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FIELD CUT: USIBELLI WELD
PANNER The Gala Auction Committee brought big improvements to
this annual event this year, showing a bit more sensitivity to the artists by exhibiting
the work longer, hosting a well publicized opening reception, and producing a document
sharing biographical artist statements. Collectors of Alaskan art would do well to
seek out this seven page 2007 Gala Artist Guide at the front desk while they last.
The official Gala handout had further information about the Live Auction artists, and
mixed in the names of the 100 artists with more than 40 corporate contributors in a list
of supporters at the Thank You level. Everyone from Alaska Airlines and Allure Day Spa to Tuliqi, LLC and the Turnagain House is happy to make the association with the Museum and to increase business and brand awareness by offering flights to y, three hours of mud, dinner for 2, cruise for u, coffee beans and carriage rides. If this were the New Testament and the Museum Atrium the high temple, artists might wish for a prophet to overturn the tables of these money changers in order to improve their own competitive positions. The Museum holds a wine-bibbing fund-raiser at the other end of the year where these types of enticements to contribute to their success are the premier attraction. During the Gala, the emphasis on art could be a little more focused by reducing or excluding these ancillary offers. The proportion of 400 patrons and 100 artists is already dicey and the Museum's mission statement propounds support for art and art practicioners without explicitly including hairdressers and breweries. Artists from all over Alaska and the Pacific Northwest (like Hoover and Michele Usibelli, whose Field Cut is shown above left) send work hoping that the association with the museum will increase business and brand awareness. Their view of the auction process is more in tune with outgoing Director Pat Wolf: "I invite you to bid generously and participate actively in the evening's events in order to ensure a success." The hope is that the market prices listed will be exceeded; the reality is that fewer than a dozen of the 100 artists (including Hoover) achieved this. Another dozen artists (including Usibelli) achieved from 80-100% of their asking prices; twenty-one artists (including Dot Bardarson, a detail of whose watercolor Fish Flies is shown at left) garnered between 50 and 80 percent, and 22 artists (including Keelan) saw their work go at half price, with a single patron meeting the minimum listed bid. ARTISTS MATH: nearly a quarter of the artist's generous contributions were declined by the market! OUCH! It is small consolation that every auction of every type buys in a few items for lack of a responsive bidder. HOME GROWN: LINDSEY TOMATOES Focus is the power that allowed Susan Lindsey's still life Home Grown, shown at left, both to shine and to show reflections of the shine in a depicted marble shelf. Hours of dedication to a work pay off in the acknowledgement of art savants and in this case the market. Lindsey's work sold at outcry auction at $1800, nearly twice the asking price. Her study of tomatoes offers a placid balance and a three element story celebrating ripening without hinting of later stages. Buyers also corrected artist's asking prices upwards in the cases of Diana Lund, Donna Beller, Ron Senungetuk, James Von der Heydt, Don Kolstad, Renate Martin, Brenda Milan, Dana Tindall, and Luz Maskell Nino. No-one in this group had set prices above $1000. |
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TOTEMIC PLATE:MARCUCCI VALUED Of those willing to set prices in four figures, all saw buyers good-naturedly capitalizing on the bake sale mentality with mostly modest corrections downward. For respected abstract artist and Gala committee member Kim Marcucci, whose Totemic Plate is shown at left, selling at 94% of her asking price is confirmatory. Nonetheless, this painting has been featured in the traveled edition of the Museum's 31st annual Juried Exibition all last year and was the cover for the 2006 'holiday' card. Astute appraisal knows that this adds value to Totemic Plate well beyond Marcucci's less celebrated works. The Gala is an opportunity to add to the value of everyone's collections when buyers reward distinguished pieces commensurately. The auctioneer, former mayor Rick Mystrom, brings his own celebrity and personality to the event and sadly is lacking in any apparent expertise on visual art in general and local artists in particular. It is mandatory in art auctions to share reasons to bid competitively on different works to encourage bidders, and Mystrom seems to find himself without anything to say after early rounds of generic auction cajolery. The highest priced works donated to the Museum's success, by Gordon, Marcucci, and Russell, are still selling for much less than $5000. The Museum needs to set among its goals an improvement in its own role in valuation of artwork. The five figure barrier for paintings by living artists has been bridged by only a few among local artists, while artists outside enjoy a burdgeoning market economy supported by their institutions. | |||
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GREATLAND PASSAGE:
EMBELLISHED Alaskan artists still buy into supporting their local
institutions, taking 25% or less as their share of auction sales and donating 75% and up
to the Museum, which by the way has a Foundation recently bulked up by multi-million
dollar contributions from the Feds, the State, the MOA, the Rasmusons, and an impressive
list of civic minded patrons with large prominent local businesses in the lead.
Interestingly, the company contracted to build the new expansion is listed as a Gold level
contributor. How does that work, exactly? The right hand washes the left, or
does the left wash the right. Artists have to play the game to stake a claim, and the Museum at least assembles their top financial contributors and encourages them to add to their art collection. For Palmer's Shane Lamb, technology has supplied an answer to how to maximize the value of his production. The detail of his Greatland Passage, shown at left, gives an indication to the attention shown in his original painting of an Alaska Railroad passenger line on Knik Flats. Framed and hung like a painting, the original has been reproduced digitally on canvas by a wide format printer. Lamb goes in with little touches of white and select spot colors to add the value of a personal touch while admitting up front that the finished work is part of an edition of reproductions from the original. The index image for this issue shows a closer detail of Passage. With Congress set once more to ignore legislation allowing artists to take market value of their donations to museums, Lamb and others like him are not merely breaking the rules of tradition, they are actively rewriting them in reponse to the new century. |
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GOODBYE:POINT OF VIEW AT
AMRC Also at the Museum for the summer of 2007, the Point of View
series continues with Sonya Kelliher Combs invited to be the artist choosing from among
the Museum's collections. Kelliher-Combs was raised in Nome and according to a copy
of her BIA card, is 3/8 Eskimo/Indian by Blood Degree. This card, which few
outside the native community know exists, is reproduced with disarming candor on the
unusually thoughtful catalog associated with the show, named Con-Census after the
row of most of the Museum's collections of skin garments seen in the background of the
photo at left, all facing north and each with a little stand bearing a copy of another
persons BIA card. "Although I know the basis for the Certificate of Indian
Blood, and its justification, there are reasons to argue against its existence. Carry a
card to authenticate our race --- what other groups have a certificate quantifying their
ethnic background?" Kelliher-Combs has benefited from special attention awarded her status, including a recent $20,000 fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. This honor has previously accrued to John Hoover, among others. Using acrylic polymers and walrus stomach in her own current artwork also depends on special dispensation from the Marine Mammals Act for cardholders. She also shines a light on the Silver Hand in Brand, not shown, which exhibits indigenous footwear arrayed as an almost commercial display with stacks of shoe boxes with the distinctive logo of this artist promotional effort available exclusively to cardholders. In the foreground of the picture above, Goodbye, an array of winter gloves and mittens lined with fur on the outside , some wearing memory strings and all facing south, serves as a memorial to suicides. Seen without the overlays, each of these three displays offers interesting elements of craftsmanship and how to be styling without woven cloth. At the sparsely attended opening reception, Kelliher-Combs graciously explained a bit about her thinking while dressed in her own fancy wardrobe items, some made for her by family members. It is these types of gifts of love and the communality represented by the many implied hands of Goodbye that can heal victims and prevent perpetrators of this baleful rejection of life which plagues not only the Alaskan Native community and too many others worldwide. |
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FORGIVE YOU FATHER:COMBS
BITE Bringing this almost exclusively Native made exhibition to light
is a grand stroke in itself, and the Museum's collections hold many more interesting items
condensed into catalog photographs arrayed along the east wall of the gallery. Stone
chip ulu knives with bone handles are redolent of a pre-industrial culture, and household
items like dishes and bowls are carved and shaped from wood or bark. Several of these
vessels are spotlighted around the exhibition, each filled with products of the white man
from a more modern time. Wine bottle corks and pull-tab lottery stubs fill large
baskets. Smaller vessels in the photo at left hold iridescent rosary beads in a set piece
acidly titled Forgive You Father for You Have Sinned. Like anything
good and Roman Catholic, this display holds a powerful charge of accusation and guilt. Kelliher-Combs has put together an aesthetically pleasing, historically informative, and politically challenging exhibition so polite and quiet you might never know you're about to be jabbed with a stick. Congratulations to her and to Director Pat Wolf who initiated and supported this unique program which has produced such chrono-synchronistically infundibulous results over the years. |
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- ARTIST OPPORTUNITIES- 5/16/07 deadline LOWER KUSKOKWIM KILBUCK ELEMENTARY seeks concept proposals for interior and exterior. Budget $96,000. Contact 269-6605 details online. 5/23/07 deadline ANCHORAGE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT renovations budget $700,000 for three sites. Contact Andrea Noble 907-269-6605. RFQ details online. 5/30/07 deadline ANCHORAGE MUSEUM seeking candidates for Curator of History Education and Registrar, not to mention Director. Contact Human Resource Director Jacquelyn Hoflich. 5/31/07 deadline ANCHORAGE MUSEUM CRAFTS WEEKENDS opportunities for Alaska artisans, artists and authors. Contact 343-6195. 6/1/07 deadline EILSEN VISITOR CENTER seeks proposals for a ~6'x16' fabric artwork for the interior. Budget $30,000 contact Kesler Woodward 907-474-8346 Alaska Natural History Association PO Box 136 Denali Park AK 99755. 6/6/07 deadline ALASKA WATERCOLOR SOCIETY seeks entries for 33rd annual juried exhibition, to be held at the Anchorage Museum at the Rasmuson Center. Combined prizes value $4500. Contact Jean Watson 333-4578. Details online. 6/30/07 deadline NEW AMERICAN PAINTING Pacific Coast edition jurored periodical $30 fee. Details online 8/1/07 deadline GOVERNOR'S AWARDS IN THE ARTS nominations solicited. The following categories will be chosen in 2007: Arts Advocacy; Business Leadership; Margaret Nick Cooke Award for Native Arts and Languages; Individual Artist. Details online. ASCA Art In Public Places with over $19 million dollars in commissions required by AK Statute 35.27 from the last three years' capital projects budgets alone. Print out ArtSceneAK's select list from this link.
FOUND OBJECT ART by Dorothy Spencer The research and documentation done by Anchorage's Julie Decker for her book on detritus art apparently didn't come to Spencer's attention in her national survey of artists working with second-hand materials. Everything arises anew for each new generation unaware of the past. ArtSceneAK recommends looking through this book and getting it out of your system. NEXT: STONED STICKS SHORTCUTS: Aggravated again?! Ecstatic?! Let us know you love us or hate us. Help correct attribution errors that you suspect. Tell us about your upcoming event or artist opportunity. Let us know about your website. Form makes it easy to try your hand at pumping or dumping. cf also ART IN ALASKA
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SELF SERVICE:
PREOCCUPATION
A show of works by students of of UAA sculpture professor Hugh McPeck at IGCA this month
included the provocative Self Service by Meg Fowler shown in the photo at
right. A cheerfully wicked expansion of the classical pudenda modesta pose
exemplified in Botticelli's Birth of Venus (on a half shell), this wax model
shows that Fowler has learned her anatomy lessons well. The figure at about half scale is
cropped by its open box frame. The protagonists gaze at least is modest, the half smile of
a minx relieving the viewer of the embarassments of an unwitting voyeur. Students everywhere are faced this time of the year with decisions about transition. Whether to spend the summer by the pool. Aren't there four more years in any serious degree program? Will only an MBA qualify a person to move boxes in a sufficiently prestigious museum? If college is a benefit, why does it curse its graduates with mind-boggling debt loads? How does an art student become an artist and when? Study these and other deep questions of art in the BACK ISSUE Index.
Thank you and Welcome to a new subscriber in Anchorage: "It's not opening. i give username & password and it doesn't go anywhere." --- FR . A house call revealed the google popup blocker after pulling down an icon from a menubar at the top of the page. Saatchi-Gallery.com SHOWDOWN round for your 10-star ratings includes ArtSceneAK publisher Donald R Ricker's Anchorage Bowl among the thousands of contenders.
From Florida: "Thought you might get a kick out of this ALASKAN TACOS place in Tampa. Unfortunately we had already eaten when we saw it." --- Cliff Desy Safán-Gerard invites you to her studio during the Venice Art Walk in California May 20. Register for a nominal fee of $50 which supports the Venice Family Clinic or: "If you would like to just come visit no fee is required. You will meet other art lovers and friends, have some wine and cheese and be able to see most recent work." From Anchorage's Linda Infante-Lyons: "Hope you are enjoying this spring weather. I wanted to let you know that I have an exhibit at the Artique this May. Stop by for the First Friday opening, if you can and say hello. I will also be offering oil painting classes at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art this summer." From Mat-Su College: "This is the first time we have had sculpture and metalsmithing for summer workshops. The price is right and the instructor from New Mexico is fantastic! D’Jean has a Masters Degree in Fine Arts, and teaches at the college level. She started an annual “Iron Pour” in New Mexico, and there is one planned for Alaska in 2008." --- Suzanne Bach In addition to the two workshops on campus, the following week you can make a mold and pour bronze at the Foundry in Palmer, from May 28-June 2, for $250 for one pound of bronze, (more if the piece is bigger). For more information about the Foundry Workshop, call the owner, Pat Garley 745-5527. I hope to see you in class! Check to see if your website is listed on the ART IN ALASKA page and let us know if you'd like to be included.
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text & photos © 2007 Donald R Ricker; artist's works pictured ©2007 to artists credited.
ArtSceneAK is published by Donald R Ricker and sponsored by
, a partial listing of links to Museums,
Galleries, and individual Artists around the state.
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