За нашу дружбу! Allan Gamborg and his updated Soviet Digital Art website.

Regular readers will recall that over the years, I've repeatedly doffed my уша́нка (ushanka -- it's the furry cap) in the general direction of Allan Gamborg.

It's hard to believe 33 years have passed since I first met Allan, Kim Andersen and Kim Wiesener during the rambunctious summer of '87. These three Danes of the apocalypse have been artfully weaving in and out of my travel narratives ever since, as during this famous escapade (in Allan's own words):

For example, I still think of the evening in that Belgian beer place (2000?), where all got complete rat-assed and the party just dissolved in utter chaos.

Ah, those were the daze.

Allan has lived in Moscow for more than two decades, and somewhere around his third or fourth career in the workaday world he assumed yet another identity: purveyor and advocate of Soviet-era art and artists.

You need not have an opinion about Vladimir Putin, or be a dirty rotten Commie, to enjoy Allan's web site. You merely must appreciate art.

Today an update arrived.

Dear Friends,

I hope you are all well and safe in these turbulent times.

I have been spending a significant part of the time in self isolation updating my art database with photos, descriptions and artists’ biographies.

All this material you can find online - art works and descriptions - for about 900 (mainly Soviet) artists.

If you have a free minute (or some vacant days), and wish to relax with some art – please visit.

Artist Portfolios

Best wishes,

Allan

Here's the full story.

This website is dedicated to Soviet Art and Socialist Realism in the 20th century. We feature a large number of Soviet and socialist fine arts and posters as well as applied arts and design of that period.

The artists featured were active in the Soviet Union from the 1920s through the 1970s, and their works cover Russian avant-garde, socialist realism as well as the non-official underground art of the 1960s and 1970s.

The collection contains Soviet fine arts, mural designs, graphics, prints and USSR posters, and a unique assortment of applied arts, textile and fashion designs, and tapestries of the 1950s and 1960s. We also show a number of theater designs, including costumes, set designs and curtains. Another specialty of the gallery is children's book illustrations of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thematically, we often focus on Soviet art works and posters telling stories about people and their city or village, work, industry, culture, politics, and works of art illustrating the era and its history as a whole. Specific topics include Soviet agriculture, sports, theater and ballet.

The artists featured were taught by the most famous artists of the late 19th and the early 20th century, and studyed at the most prestigious art schools of the Soviet Union at the time: The VKhuTeMas, the Polygraphical Institute, the Surikov Institute, the Repin Institute, the MIPIDI, and the Moscow Textile Institute.

Most artists featured led a “double” artistic life. On the one hand, they were all members of the state controlled Artists’ Union, being on the state budget of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, producing Soviet art works in support of Soviet ideology, socialist realism, propaganda posters, etc. On the other hand, they took every opportunity to paint for themselves, i.e. painting themes and in styles they personally preferred. Working on genres such as landscape, cityscape and still-life was a manifestation of artists' independence from official ideology.

Many of these works of art were lost to the dust of artists' studios. Here we aim at showing both aspects of the artists’ works.

The return of the swizzle stick as accessible pop art.

Louisville's Galt House Hotel has embarked on an $80 million renovation that includes two new restaurants and quite a lot more. Last evening at the Food & Dining Magazine web site I posted a brief news piece about Swizzle, the hotel's forthcoming 25th-floor eatery retrofit. In this quote from the info release, management explains the name.

Swizzle will be the Galt House Hotel’s new 25th floor restaurant, debuting in Spring 2020

"Perched 25 stories above River Road, Swizzle is inspired by a restaurant of the same name that operated on Chestnut Street in downtown Louisville in the 1940s and 50s. Back then, the spot was named for the drink stirrers that could mix a patron’s cocktail with just a quick swirl and was billed as the “headquarters for grand food. During the golden era of supper clubs, a swizzle stick was symbolic of a fun night out—of well executed American cuisine, free-flowing cocktails, and memories made with friends and family,” said Scott Shoenberger, President and CEO of the Al J. Schneider Company."

For my own reading pleasure, and now yours, here's further background on the swizzle stick comeback.

The Swizzle Stick Makes a Modern Comeback (Punch Drink)

A smart means of visual marketing, swizzle sticks have made a comeback—many of them with colorful, over-the-top designs. Leah Mennies on the visual range of swizzle stick 2.0 and the bars that have adopted them as calling cards.

In a moment when everything from rainbow bagels to milkshakes topped with entire pieces of cake is engineered purely for the photo-sharing potential on Instagram, an eye-catching swizzle stick is just smart business—working as a sort of social media geotag that’s embedded in the cocktail itself. This is, in a sense, the original purpose of a swizzle stick, after all.

Digital Soviet Art presents "DDR posters of the 1960s-1970s."

Erhard Grüttner sampling.

It's been a while -- about a year, to be exact.

За нашу дружбу! All the best to Allan Gamborg and his revamped Soviet Digital Art website.

Allan's latest exhibit is an obvious sweet spot for me.

---

Dear Friends

I am pleased to invite you to a unique exhibition I have organized at the Goethe Institute in Moscow, of DDR posters of the 1960s-1970s, by two famous East German designers and graphics artists of the period – Erhard Grüttner and Rolf Felix Müller. There are around 30 posters on show, for example to plays by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Maksim Gorky, amongst others from the Dresden Staatsoper and the Dresden Staatsschauspiel.

The posters were salvaged from the deep archives of Moscow artist Ruben Suryaninov (born 1930). Ruben Suryaninov is a fabulous poster artist, and during the 1960s and 1970s he made friends with the two artists, and in the process created a collection of their posters.

See virtual shows of the two artists here, (and of artist Ruben Suryaninov)

Erhard Grüttner

Rolf Felix Müller

Ruben Suryaninov

Address of the Goethe Institute: Leninsky Prospekt 95, Moscow

Opening hours Monday-Friday 9.00-20.00, Saturday 9.00-17.00 – until July 13

Best wishes,

Allan

Digital Soviet Art

100 years of Bauhaus: toward a universal language of design.

It's a three-part documentary film, and well worth the time.

Part 1 of 3

Part 2 of 3

Part 3 of 3

За нашу дружбу! All the best to Allan Gamborg and his revamped Soviet Digital Art website.

Regular readers will recall that over the years, I've repeatedly doffed my уша́нка (ushanka -- it's the furry cap) in the general direction of Allan Gamborg.

It's hard to believe 31 years have passed since I first met Allan, Kim Andersen and Kim Wiesener during the rambunctious summer of '87. These three Danes of the apocalypse have been artfully weaving in and out of my travel narratives ever since, as during this famous escapade (in Allan's own words):

For example, I still think of the evening in that Belgian beer place (2000?), where all got complete rat-assed and the party just dissolved in utter chaos.

Ah, those were the daze.

Allan has lived in Moscow for 20 years or so, and somewhere around his third or fourth career in the workaday world, he assumed yet another identity: Purveyor and advocate of Soviet-era art and artists. You need not have an opinion about Vladimir Putin, or be a dirty rotten Commie, to enjoy Allan's web site. You merely must appreciate art.

Dear Friends,

I am happy to announce a brand new version of our website with Soviet Fine Art and graphics and posters - www.digitalsovietart.com

We have an improved design, new functions, better usability, and also full mobile support for all your devices.

The site is also true bilingual now – both in English and Russian (теперь и на русском языке)

Please enjoy – and do let me know if you have any comments -))

Very best wishes,

Allan

Here's the full story.

This website is dedicated to Soviet Art and Socialist Realism in the 20th century. We feature a large number of Soviet and socialist fine arts and posters as well as applied arts and design of that period.

The artists featured were active in the Soviet Union from the 1920s through the 1970s, and their works cover Russian avant-garde, socialist realism as well as the non-official underground art of the 1960s and 1970s.

The collection contains Soviet fine arts, mural designs, graphics, prints and USSR posters, and a unique assortment of applied arts, textile and fashion designs, and tapestries of the 1950s and 1960s. We also show a number of theater designs, including costumes, set designs and curtains. Another specialty of the gallery is children's book illustrations of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thematically, we often focus on Soviet art works and posters telling stories about people and their city or village, work, industry, culture, politics, and works of art illustrating the era and its history as a whole. Specific topics include Soviet agriculture, sports, theater and ballet.

The artists featured were taught by the most famous artists of the late 19th and the early 20th century, and studyed at the most prestigious art schools of the Soviet Union at the time: The VKhuTeMas, the Polygraphical Institute, the Surikov Institute, the Repin Institute, the MIPIDI, and the Moscow Textile Institute.

Most artists featured led a “double” artistic life. On the one hand, they were all members of the state controlled Artists’ Union, being on the state budget of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, producing Soviet art works in support of Soviet ideology, socialist realism, propaganda posters, etc. On the other hand, they took every opportunity to paint for themselves, i.e. painting themes and in styles they personally preferred. Working on genres such as landscape, cityscape and still-life was a manifestation of artists' independence from official ideology.

Many of these works of art were lost to the dust of artists' studios. Here we aim at showing both aspects of the artists’ works.

Max Beckmann's prescient vision of the Gahanist inner circle is stunningly accurate. How did he know?

And how did that chihuahua get into Bird's Hell?

Vision of hell: Max Beckmann (The Economist)

​There’s a reason the German artist’s “Hölle der Vögel” (“Bird’s Hell”) is known as Germany’s “Guernica”. Painted in 1937-38, it has vicious plumed birds, huge loudspeakers, a screeching figure giving the Nazi salute and a desperate man whose naked back is being scored with a knife.

Great injuries to the soul can do this to a man.

Max Beckmann (The Art Story)

After enduring a "great injury to his soul" during World War I, Max Beckmann channeled his experience of modern life into expressive images that haunt the viewer with their intensity of emotion and symbolism. Despite his early leanings toward academicism and Expressionism, he became one of the main artists associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement and created scathing visual critiques of the tumultuous interwar period. In later works, Beckmann strove toward open-ended stories that juxtaposed scenes from reality, dreams, myths, and fables. Throughout his career, he firmly opposed the turn toward abstract art and maintained his desire to "get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting." Beckmann's prowess at subtly layering figures and signs, as well as color and shadow, allowed him to successfully translate his reality into mesmerizing narrative paintings throughout his prolific career.

I'd like to know more, and will.

"My heart beats more for a rougher, commoner, more vulgar art...one that offers direct access to the terrible, the crude, the magnificent, the ordinary, the grotesque and the banal in life. An art that can always be right there for us, in the realest things of life."-- Max Beckmann

THE BEER BEAT: Making light switch covers great again, and other examples of stewed cranberries tasting like prunes.

File under: Slow news day. 

Or maybe "any publicity is good publicity," this coming from the guy who put Lenin (and Che) on the Red Room wall.

Nude Donald Trump painting at Against the Grain getting jeers and cheers, by Elizabeth Kramer (Courier-Journal)

A tiny detail on a small work of art in the men's restroom at Against the Grain Brewery has elicited a big reaction from customers.

The art in question is a replica of a nude painting of President Donald Trump — a 2016 work called "Make America Great Again" by Los Angeles-based artist Illma Gore. It's on a light switch in the men's restroom that a regular customer at Against the Grain put up without asking about four months ago, said general manager Shane Benton.

“We let it ride,” Benton said. “It’s art."

I'm reminded of the scene in the Marx Brothers' film Animal Crackers.

Capt. Spaulding (Groucho): Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west, and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.

Was it art or politics when I added a photo of Gus Hall, head of the Communist Party USA, next to Lenin in the Red Room? After all, Hall ran for president on more than one occasion.

(Owner Sam) Cruz said he has never considered getting rid of the art.

“We are 'Against The Grain,'” he said. “There is a lot in a name and definitely being fearless when it comes to standing by our values as it pertains to self-expression, which is a part of that.”

He added that image of the nude Trump does not express the company’s political values.

This Swiss fellow disagrees with Sam.

Arts has always been intertwined with politics, even when such slogans as l’art pour l’art were professed. From mimetic to corrective tool, art served its given purpose and was influenced and shaped by different social conditions and circumstances. Artistic production never solely replicated reality. Even during Realism it had its purpose of showing the brutality or beauty of everyday life to viewers. In the Nazi and Soviet visual culture was heavily encumbered with additional meanings supportive of ideological stances. Some creatives succumbed to ideological burden and created works that glorified political regimes, while in contrast to such attitudes, alternative artistic practices developed, often confounded to groups with limited access to public domain.

Speaking of fearless self-expression in local beer culture, here is my favorite example.

Not that soiled drawers reflect my political values, or anything like that.

(insert smiley face and LOL here)

The life and art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Apologies for being a day tardy in marking International Women's Day 2017.

Imagine ... Georgia O’Keeffe: By Myself

We visit the farm where she was born, the New York college where she studied back in 1906, the skyscraper hotel where she lived with Stieglitz, Lake George where she often felt suffocated but did much of her most beautiful work and the legendary landscapes of New Mexico, with her two extraordinary houses there. We find an inspiring, honest and witty woman, and a truly original artist.

O'Keeffe was a true American original.

About Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant and intriguing artists of the twentieth century, known internationally for her boldly innovative art. Her distinct flowers, dramatic cityscapes, glowing landscapes, and images of bones against the stark desert sky are iconic and original contributions to American Modernism.

Bolshie art, and how El Lissitzky got under my skin, though I couldn't afford to keep him there.

El Lissitzky.

My curiosity was aroused when I saw the name of Lazar Markovich Lissitzky. For a while in 2008, his "Lenin Tribune" (above; a Constructivist moving speaker's podium) was a big influence in my thinking about the design for Bank Street Brewhouse.

That's because I was determined to illustrate that when almost every other entrepreneur wants to be in a "historic" building, I'd take the modern one.

Little came of all this, as we had plenty of other bills to pay. But it was a damned fine fantasy while it lasted.

Reds, whites and truths: A century after the Russian revolution, a showcase of its art (The Economist)

At the Royal Academy, a sinister history lurks beyond the frame

ALTHOUGH it marks the centenary of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the true inspiration for the Royal Academy’s new exhibition is 1932. In that year, a vast retrospective entitled “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic” took place in the Russian State Museum in Leningrad. Curated by Nikolai Punin, an avant-garde luminary, it was meant to be the zenith of the radical artistic current that had been growing in Russia for decades. Instead, it was a swansong. Within years, many of the thousands of paintings featured would disappear into hidden store cupboards, trampled beneath the inescapable march of state-backed socialist realism. Punin himself, accused of “anti-Soviet activity”, was to die, starving, in a desolate gulag north of the Arctic Circle.

“Revolution: 1917-1932” covers the same 15 years as Punin’s show. The period has suffered some neglect. The myth goes that in the years after the Bolshevik revolution, bland socialist realism stomped on the avant-garde. In fact, after the revolution but before Stalinism tightened its grip on culture, there was a frenzied gasp of creative brilliance. Artistic, technological and political innovations clashed and co-existed. Kazimir Malevich turned the geometry of suprematism to figurative portraits of peasant farmers. Pavel Filonov would use the kaleidoscope fragments of his “formula” paintings to depict tractor factories. Buildings designed by El Lissitzky riffed on the crooked perspectives of photo-montage, and on the uncompromising functionality of industrial machinery.

Robert Mapplethorpe, the First Amendment, and "a generation of artists ... wiped out by AIDS."

When Robert Mapplethorpe died in 1989, I was tantalizingly close to completing my period of employment at UMI-Data Courier, and getting back to Europe to work for the Commies in East Berlin.

My snazzy job title at Data Courier was "associate editor," or some such. For a year and a half, I read and abstract magazine articles for an emerging CD Rom data base, and although the spirit-crushing corporate mentality chafed, it wasn't a bad gig at all, and my closest experience to grad school.

They paid me to learn. Writing the abstracts could be done in one's sleep, and overall, it was a means to an end.

My introduction to Mapplethorpe's work came less from the actual images than the backlash they produced.

ARTS AND FIRST AMENDMENT: Public funding of controversial art, by Bill Kenworthy (First Amendment Center)

Throughout history artists have produced works which tested society’s standards of decency. Society, or parts of it, may respond to these controversial works with harsh criticism and scorn. In free societies, artists may produce any type of work that their talent, imagination and means can support, whether it is controversial or not. However, the question arises: Do artists have the same freedom when their art is publicly funded by taxpayer dollars?

On one side, Jesse Helms; on the other, Mapplethorpe. It makes it remarkable easy to pick your team. There is a new documentary film about Mapplethorpe, prompting reflections about how far we've come since the 1980s -- and haven't.

A generation of artists were wiped out by Aids and we barely talk about it, by Suzanne Moore (The Guardian)

... I was explaining this to my 25-year-old daughter. She understood what happened, but said, “I just can’t imagine it”. And somehow nor can I, but we lived through it. HIV, we say, is now no longer a death sentence. But, of course, it is in many parts of the world. South Africa has a 19% HIV rate. Russian is only just starting to admit the scale of its problem with an estimate of 1.5 million people with HIV. Neither homosexuality nor addiction can be spoken about in Putin’s Russia.

Mapplethorpe’s work was censored by US senator Jesse Helms who, like many Republicans, saw Aids as a punishment for homosexuality. Nancy and Ronald Reagan pretty much signed up to this line. Republicans banned needle exchanges. The Catholic church banned condoms. Mapplethorpe’s work is shot through the lens of his Catholic upbringing, the black mass and rituals of S&M – his composition, his invocation of the devil not as a metaphor, but as a living presence.

He was but one of a generation of artists, activists and athletes wiped out by Aids. Why don’t we speak about this anymore?

Hieronymus Bosch would have adored New Albany.

I suspect that my experience isn't unique, in that Hieronymus Bosch first came to my attention as mentioned in passing in No One Here Gets Out Alive, the 1980 biography of Jim Morrison by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman. From there, it was off to the library, and later to European museums to see the paintings up close and personal.

Here's a decent old-school documentary about Hieronymus Bosch. View it at YouTube, and you'll find a collection of links to source material.

"Stock the Shelves" at the Carnegie Center this April.

Today's second post about books.

Verbatim from Laura:

---

During the month of April, we're asking for your help to "Stock the Shelves" in our new family space with new or gently-used art books!

Since the move of the Yenawine Dioramas from the Carnegie Center for Art and History to the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library in November 2015, Carnegie Center staff has been busy planning a new family space in the gallery area where the dioramas were displayed – the Yenawine Dioramas were the Carnegie Center’s main activity especially for families for many years. One feature will be a number of bookshelves that families can peruse to learn more about art and artists, and now the Carnegie Center needs your help to “stock the shelves”!

Parents and children are shown enjoying our 2008 exhibit The Art of Reading. This exhibit featured artworks on the theme of family literacy by 13 local artists, as well as a Storybook Castle children's activity gallery with reading-related crafts and a cozy reading area. Photos courtesy of the Community Foundation of Southern Indiana.

The Carnegie Center is seeking new or gently used, art-related coffee table books and art-related hardback books for children. Each book received will be fitted with a special Carnegie Center bookplate to recognize the donor. The Stock the Shelves Art Book Drive will take place April 1-30, 2016, and donors can drop books off at the Carnegie Center during regular museum hours (Tuesday-Saturday, 10:00 am-5:30 pm).

As a department of the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library, the Carnegie Center is also holding the Stock the Shelves Art Book Drive in conjunction with National Library Week, April 10-16, 2016. First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special - participate. The 2016 National Library Week theme is “Libraries Transform”, and as both a former Carnegie Library, and a current department of the NA-FC Public Library, the Carnegie Center for Art and History is a longtime advocate for the transformative power of libraries, museums, learning, and art.

Thank you, and we hope you can help us round up some great art books for our new family space.

Laura Wilkins, Marketing

A diary entry about video documentaries and the personal process of recovery.

Photo credit: The Red Egg, by Oskar Kokoschka.

Starting just before Christmas of 2015, I commenced an obsession with YouTube documentaries. First came a wave of videos about Eastern European history during the Communist era. Then I shifted into more current events in and around Estonia, where we have a holiday booked later this year.

Reading a biography of poet/crackpot Ezra Pound shifted my gaze to documentaries about writers, first Englishmen (Larkin, Burgess, Amis), then expatriated Americans in Europe (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), but also a few Americans remaining in America (Philip Roth, John Steinbeck).

In turn, this recently yielded to visual artists, primarily painters: Kokoschka and Schiele from Austria; Englishmen Sickert, Bomberg and Nash; Magritte and de Lempicka in Paris (1928). For the first time, maybe ever, modern trends in painting that began with impression are beginning to make sense to me. There's hope yet.

Admittedly, apart from a film about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, these various immersions are occurring within the familiar outline of the "Western" canon. There have been far too few about women. I'll need to do something about this, and will. It's a start, nothing more.

Previously I likened being at loose ends after 25 years in business as feeling as though I'd awakened from a coma. Now it's becoming even clearer, in the sense that dormant personal interests submerged beneath the weight of My Life in Beer are bubbling to the surface again. They never went away. There simply was too much drama and distractions to indulge them properly.

It's like picking up where I left off in 1990, and being back in school; not the required courses, but the electives. I get out of bed each morning enthused by the opportunity to learn. It's priceless.

Yes, I'm damned lucky to have this time to think. Not everyone gets the chance, and I recognize my good fortune in having it.

Introspection is one of those hackneyed double-edged swords, because it leads you to good places as well as bad. The following essay, published at my beer blog earlier in the week, is an example of what I think will be arriving more often as post-business time passes. It's time for me to write the history of that 25-year span.

If I'm up to it. After all, I'm a posterity kind of guy.

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Can I get a “do-over” on Naughty Girl?

... Previous generations of humanity, living and dying prior to the advent of mass communications, missed the sheer thrill of screwing up, watching one’s screw-up instantly become grist for a potentially global audience, and then be reminded of it at regular intervals forever after.

"Creative placemaking practitioners use artistic interventions to bring new perspectives (beyond just aesthetics) to communities."

Chattanooga Terrain Art Park; from the article below.

"Successful use of creative placemaking requires making the people part of the resilience equation work. To do this, cities have to treat creatives with the same gravity afforded other community development assets and colleagues."

Didn't I just have this conversation with a local artist, standing on the corner, facing Main Street, and lamenting that whenever New Albany's governmental functionaries (read: DemoDisneyDixecratic operatives) get involved with artistic expression, the inevitable results are different versions of the same "Dogs Playing Poker" motif?

That's what happens with agoraphobia. You must control every situation, lest the walls start closing in.

Putting the Arts to Work for City Resilience: Creative Placemaking, by Jason Schupbach (100 Resilient Cities)

I recently attended a major convening of community development and arts professionals where Ben Hecht from Living Cities said, and I’m paraphrasing here, "The science of how to do the technical parts of community development is well understood – how to build water infrastructure, housing units, transportation systems - but we as community development officials have forgotten about the ‘people’ part of the equation. How do we build places where people actually want to live their lives? How do we build strong social ties? The secret lies partly in the arts."

Chevolution.

The documentary tells the story of what might be the world's most famous photograph. A former fashion photographer named Alberto Korda was taking pictures at a public memorial in Havana when Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara suddenly appeared. Korda had barely enough time to squeeze off two exposures, one of which much later became the basis for militancy, art and metaphor all over the word.

Korda received little for it, and the notion of Che's image transmuting into a mainstay of global capitalism transcends mere irony. It prompted roughly two hours of chat in my household alone. Can a photograph of a Communist revolutionary icon be brandished by non-communist money grubbers without all participants straining ideological credulity? To me, the original photograph taken by Korda remains a one-off, wonderful fluke. It's an accident with a life of its own, and the documentary is worth your time.

Understanding like a sledgehammer: getting art from the other side.

Apropos of a conversational snippet I shared last month about finding heritage commonality in creative endeavor, I was recently reminded of this previous ditty via a beer and music fueled conversation about Buddhist monks with M and in responding to comments about an article about not "getting" a retrospective exhibit of British contemporary artist Tracey Emin's work. There are a couple references to authors not explained but it shouldn't matter much. It's mostly kind of true anyway.

For most of his adult life, my father poured concrete for a living—sidewalks, walls, swimming pools, a variety of physical structures with which people still interact. Through a combination of design, tool and material mastery, and intensive labor, that work remains an aesthetic and functional part of their everyday lives.

When I was about 12 years old, he created what he still believes to be the most significant piece of work of his career. It was a retaining wall commissioned by a local doctor. The doctor had been successful in his own career and wanted the design of his property to reflect that success. As such, my father constructed the type of wall one rarely sees serving a function as mundane as holding back a small piece of earth from a driveway. It was approximately sixty feet long, composed of an exposed aggregate mix so that the rocks in the concrete could be revealed, polished, and sealed, and was highlighted by a series of undulating curves that mimicked the surrounding landscape. It took him a couple of days to work out the design, several more to soak sheets of plywood until they were malleable enough to radius the curves without breaking, and still more to brace the entire form structure to be strong enough to hold the concrete while it cured.
   
Once the concrete itself was positioned in the forms, my father monitored it around the clock until such a time as the curing process reached perfect pitch and then hurriedly but delicately removed the support structure to facilitate the washing away of excess surface cement to reveal the aggregate, rubbing it down until it shined, and then sealing it from the elements. When he was finished, it was legitimately flawless; work of a quality possible only through years of applied imagination, trial and error, and hard won experience. And then the doctor didn’t pay him for it.
   
Accordingly, I found myself alongside my father a few months later, sledgehammer in hand, taking the meanest Little League cuts I could muster at the wall that was his masterpiece. It was around midnight on a Tuesday and I was convinced it might be the first time I saw the old man cry. It just made me swing harder.
   
After a short series of expletive-laced “how dare yous” from atop his porch – a smart move on his part as I generally avoid my father in a bad mood with a sledgehammer, too - the doctor called the police. When the officer arrived, my father produced a stack of unpaid bills, a notebook documenting unreturned phone calls, and one cancelled check, showing only that a deposit to cover some of the materials had been paid some months ago.
   
The officer asked how much of the work was covered by the check. “About half,” Dad answered. “Well,” the officer said, “it looks as if you’ve knocked down about half of it. As far as I’m concerned, you guys are even. I’d suggest we all stop here before this escalates.” And so we did, leaving a pile of rubble behind a Mercedes in the driveway bearing an “ARTS” bumper sticker.
   
Unsurprisingly, when Bedoya concerns himself with the inclusion of artists and ethnic groups in formal arts policymaking, I can appreciate it for what it is but I wonder where the plumbers, plasterers, and computer programmers fit in. They certainly figure into his notion of composing the world and the cultural “We”. I understand, too, they may be outside the scope of his particular research but to consistently not consider them as a part of the creation system as the arts often do is to reinforce art and cultural realms in general as elitist and unrelated to the populace at large.

Further, it inadvertently reinforces the idea that product rather than process is a primary determining factor in valuation. If one uses a creative process to produce a painting, one is an artist. If the same type of process is used to design and build a packing crate, one is a worker of another sort.  The delineation is forced by the context of product reception rather than any real difference in process. In not focusing on the similarities in those processes, art demands to be held and considered separately rather than be assimilated into normal support mechanisms. It’s in those similarities, though, that I believe art can prove more valuable to mainstream America.
   
As Campbell points out, arts funders and artists themselves have failed to engage the public. In thinking about what that means in terms of funding and support, we have to begin with a simple question asked of Jill Public: “Why don’t you value or support the arts?” The easiest answer for most people, I think, is “Because they don’t have anything to do with me.” Unfortunately, that answer is too often correct in addition to being easy.
   
It’s very often artists and arts groups themselves who assume (incorrectly) that their work is very different from other supposedly more practical forms. As a society, we are literally trained by arts organizations and funders to think that what they do has little commercial value, practical application, or common appeal. What they fail to realize, though, is that people actually believe them, even in instances where their natural inclination is to find similarities relatable and transferable to their own professions and experiences. The arts are often subject to inequitable treatment precisely because they choose to be. Until they change and choose differently, any expectation of the broader public changing is somewhat misguided.
   
Having told the earlier story about my father, one of my current interests is taking him to the types of contemporary art exhibits that even trained artists sometimes find challenging. It’s an educational process because he asks what I’m sure to some seem like wildly unsophisticated questions, most often directly of the artists. While he admittedly doesn’t always understand or even care about the conceptual underpinnings of particular works, he’s very clearly intrigued by the decision making processes and materials involved in creating such work. And as he verbally relates the artists’ answers back to his own work experiences, it’s most often the artists who learn something about their work that they’d never considered. As we move toward a more democratic participation in the arts and otherwise, it’s those conversations that perhaps matter most.

Weekend update: Thorpe Woodworking's Friday unveiling.

It's billed as "4 great artists under one roof," it includes the unveiling of Thomas' new table, glass artists, and wood carvings, and it's going on at Thorpe Woodworking on Friday, June 11, beginning at 6:00 p.m.

See the details at the Facebook invitation page.

We already glanced at a handful of downtown New Albany events on this most jam-packed of times: No sleep this weekend.

A portrait of Professor Erik(a) as a young man.

Actually, it's an illustration entitled Paper or Plastic by my designer and artist friend Robby Davis, who's not only participated in NABC, Derby City Espresso, and other local exhibitions, but just launched his new web site as well. Still, except for the books, it's an uncanny likeness.

Art and design updates.

Courtesy of Karen Gillenwater, Carnegie Center curator:


Joel Katz
"Designing for Understanding"
Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009
Reception: 6:00 p.m.
Lecture: 7:00 p.m.
Cressman Center for Visual Art
Free and open to the public

Joel Katz — designer, photographer, and teacher — is widely known for his information design and wayfinding systems. Major wayfinding projects include Center City Philadelphia; Central City Portland, Oregon; Downtown Omaha, Nebraska; and schematic design for the MIT Master Plan, which won an Honor Award from the SEGD.

He has taught at Yale, Rhode Island School of Design, University of the Arts, Philadelphia University, and the Moore College of Art & Design. Currently, he teaches "Issues in Information Design" at Philadelphia University, "Designing for Understanding" at the University of the Arts.

Joel Katz Design
Joel Katz Photography

For more information, call 502.852.3605 or 502.852-4483.

Sponsored By:
University of Louisville Hite Art Institute
Louisville Graphic Design Association

The LGDA is a non-profit organization of individuals representing all facets of design including graphic designers, web and motion designers, photographers, copy-writers, art directors and fine artists in all types of media from print to broadcast to digital. Established in 1988 by a handful of designers, the group is a standalone association unaffiliated with any national organization, although it interacts with other cities' design groups. The LGDA exists to enhance the quality of graphic design in its home community of Louisville, Kentucky. On a larger scale, the group strives to educated the general public and the business community about the pervasive role that design plays in our everyday lives.

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Also appearing nearby ... note the New Albany alley wood.

Yesterday's Gallery on Pearl ribbon cutting and grand opening reception.

Yesterday afternoon, a grand opening reception and ribbon cutting ceremony marked the official debut of the Gallery on Pearl, located in the White House Business Center at 222 Pearl.

According to Mike “The Human Turnstile” Kopp, Lopp Real Estate’s downtown New Albany impresario, exactly 48 people had come through the doors after one hour, and when Mrs. Confidential and I again walked past roughly an hour later (after a Bistro New Albany interlude), the gallery was still crowded with visitors.

The Tribune’s Eric Scott Campbell previewed the gallery in this February 27 news story: Gallery opens in downtown New Albany.

The Gallery on Pearl’s web site is up, but remains under construction. Bookmark it for future reference.