When we visit the gallery, James Fuentes, the direcor of the gallery as its name, were discussing Recent development of the gallery and his own experience.
James mention a really interesting thing is the opinion of online gallery. He didn’t focus too much in online galleries at the beginning, because it makes gallery too commercial.However, the situation force him to create online program and the gallery decided to open the online program but it must be special and distinctive. For example, the website use a CAD drawing of like our facade and the street that the gallery located. Right now, James believes that online and physical spaces are both really important to the gallery.They are reciprocal.
Taking about how to successfully operate a gallery, james said that keeping up with the times is really significant since the art world in NYC are growing really fast. For operating a gallery, james suggest that being an art advisor or museum curator will be a good way to start, because it’s a important way to understand how people is showing there work and consider if it is relevant to our own show. You can get most information from the gallery instead of artist or digital media.
Spencer Brownstone is a contemporary art gallery located in New York. Jay Cho, the director at Spencer Brownstone, took us and visit to the gallery. He showed us Ariel Orozco’s Have a Seat and Let Me Tell You. After entering the main room, you will encounter a series of circular lights. The lights embedded in the four separate panels flash slowly in a familiar pattern.
Jay mentioned the preparations for this exhibit, which tooks two days and three nights to make everything Including independent lighting fixtures embedded in lamps and a control panel behind the paint of the house.Jay told us that it’s not just as simple as putting on the drawing board, everything needs careful planning.
Jay also mention that the gallery didn’t put all investments on digital. Unlike Other galleries more focusing on sales, Spencer Brownstone focus on specialty and programming and having strong exhibition. However, Spencer Brownstone still have website for exhibition because the whole industry is tend to have digital resource.
Brie Ruais combines sculpture and abstract concepts to compose her work, most of the works are inspired by natural landscapes and interestingly, the weight of the sculpture are considered to matches the artist’s own weight which is 132 lbs.
Brie Ruais’s work, Screenshot from class zoom meeting
This is the artwork we saw in Brie’s studio which is called Desiccated. She made this work on the floor and let the clay dry naturally as dry sand in the desert. This work is like depicting a bird’s-eye view in the desert. The segmentation and grid also refers to the pattern of the dessert.
Brie Ruais’s picture, Screenshot from class zoom meeting
In order to obtain references to the natural landscape, brie needs to go to the field to work. She use drone to take this beautiful picture in 500 to 1000 feet heigh. She also need to investigate the relationship between land and resources, and study how the pictures match the proportions of her works.
Most of brie’s works were completed on the ground first, and then be put on the wall. However, transporting clay from floor to the wall is not a simple process. Brie needs to drill holes in the clay when it is hard or even wet and use different styles of screws to make it almost transparent in the work.
Kenny Schachter Collector, curator, art dealer, artist, and of course his most famous identity: art critic.Kenny Schachter, who was originally a lawyer, realized that he had to do something creative before entering the art world. In the past thirty years, he has tried various roles in the contemporary art industry.
Kenny Schachter mentions that nowadays, there are more and more art fairs around the world, which indeed provides a very good way for people to choose their favorite artworks, which meets the needs of the market. In the past, people may spend three hours to see an exhibition in a city, but in the end it is not what they like. However, these art fairs show more and more similar appearances. You go to every place and find that the works on display are the same.
He also discrbe the process of auction for art and how to determine the value of an artwork. There’s many association when judge a piece of artwork. First, the process of making artwork is import.For example, Do you spend time and money to make the art for profit. Second, galleries are more important than the artists themselves. Have you already spent money on group shows in community. Has worked and seen before, has worked in collective before as you’re just selling it on their own. Auctions are one of the biggest resources for understanding artworks and the market we are about to auction and deciding the value of the artwork
Saisha Grayson is a curator, writer, art historian and teacher focused on the intersections of contemporary art, performance, film, video, feminist politics, and cultural activism. In March 2018, she became the curator of time based media at Smithsonian American Art Museum(SMMA) in Washington D.C., where she is working on exhibitions, collection-building and performance art and moving image programming.
Before Saisha Grayson became the curator of time based media, she never thought she would participate in this career. Her first job was in a non government organization which focus on Eastern European politics and trying to make a nuclear disarmament. Then she got a job doing fundraising development for a dance company and starting to learn about art curation. Then she was working for a company that did communication strategy and public relations for art museums so that she can touching and working with artisits. She focused on exhibitions supporting the main curator for Brooklyn Museum. And she finally become the curator of SMMA.
Nam Jun Paik， electronic superhighway: continental US, 1995 SAAM
Many people are not familiar with time based media. And Saisha Grayson explained that time-based media is the fine art with duration built into its form, such as film, vedio , slide show and so on. She metioned that time-based media is the work that need to spend time on and change over the time , something that is not physically but can be showed in space. The electronic superhighway continental USone of the most iconic works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. it’s also a great example of the way that media art really brings us into new spaces of understanding about both who we are and what country we live in.
Holly Shen is deputy director of the San Jose Museum of art. She is a leader proficient in art and culture with multidisciplinary experience in production of shows and exhibitions, strategic thinking, audience participation and creative marketing, social impact, and digital content and storytelling. Be inspired by art, technology and new perspectives to promote fair access to artistic and creative learning opportunities.
Due to the impact of COVID-19, the city’s income has dropped significantly which directly affected the normal operation of the museum. The museum chooses to close and open digital program. However, SJMA is located in Silicon Valley and take the advantage of that. The digital catalog of the museum was opened in advance by using resource from Silicon Valley.
Comparing virtual museums and physical museums, Holly Shen thinks that no virtual product can replace people and things，but they will become an integral part of our museum. She mention that Virtual projects should be used to make people love museums more instead of losing interest in it. SJMA will open a virtual gallery tour which might be a program that exist after reopening the museum. This is for the people who can come to the museum.
Catalogs for a few landmark Jewish Museum shows, clockwise from top left: 1966’s “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors”; a Frank Stella painting in the 1963 show “Toward a New Abstraction”; a work by Nicolas Schöffer in 1965’s “2 Kinetic Sculptors: Nicolas Schöffer and Jean Tinguely”; the cover image to Jasper Johns’s 1964 retrospective; a work by Yves Klein in his 1967 retrospective; 1957’s “Artists of the New York School: Second Generation.”Credit…Weichia Huang/The Jewish Museum
By Arthur Lubow
Published July 23, 2020Updated July 28, 2020
The Jewish Museum in New York is a cultural museum and a repository of cultural works of art. As a pioneer in the Jewish Museum of the United States, it has more than 26000 collections and the largest collection of Jewish culture and art outside Israel. In 1904, the museum was not open to the public until 1947. It not only focuses on Jewish history and culture, but also focuses on modern and contemporary art. The museum has exhibitions throughout the year, such as cultural and serial exhibitions, Jewish tours and other thematic exhibitions.
It is a relatively new museum with modern oil paintings. The Jews are people who have experienced too much suffering. They were persecuted by the Nazis during the Second World War, and many Jews were displaced by the war. The walls of the exhibition hall are deep purple blue, which seems to be able to speak, revealing too much sadness, sadness and reluctance. It’s a heavy feeling to enter the museum. After seeing these exhibits, apart from melancholy and sadness, people’s search for love and thinking about redemption are more important. These insights after the visit may be the greatest significance of establishing this museum.
The show for which McShine is best remembered — and which is one of the most celebrated exhibitions of the late 20th century — is “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” from 1966. McShine assembled works by East Coast, California and British sculptors, early in their careers, who shared what we now call a Minimalist aesthetic. Here for the first time together were artists like Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Larry Bell, Anne Truitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Morris and Ronald Bladen, who used various materials (painted steel or aluminum, colored plastic, coated glass) in different ways (structured repetition of prefabricated units, heroically scaled steel) but shared an interest in machine-made objects, smooth planes of vibrant color and the removal of the sculpture from a pedestal. “It had tremendous impact because it was really the first show including those artists,” says the dealer Paula Cooper, who went on to represent many of the show’s contributors at the eponymous New York gallery that she founded in 1968. “I think it was the beginning.”
“Primary Structures” had its eye trained so thoroughly on the future that it would take years for its importance to be recognized. Judy Chicago, then known as Judy Gerowitz, exhibited “Rainbow Pickett,” a sequence of six brightly painted wooden beams that leaned against the wall. “I got nowhere with a lot of that big sculpture,” she says. “My male peers would get picked up and be on the choo-choo train, and I had to constantly start over again. After a decade and a half of that, I changed direction.” Robert Grosvenor, who installed “Transoxiana,” a 31-foot-high V-shaped sculpture of painted wood and steel that was destroyed after the exhibition, says the show “had no impact whatsoever” on his career. For Hunter, too, “Primary Structures” did little to help his standing at the museum. He was forced to resign in October 1967.
Hunter’s replacement, Karl Katz, who had been a curator at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, had a reputation as being “open to pretty much anything,” says the curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman, who in 1970 organized “Using Walls,” with a group of artists — the roster included Richard Artschwager, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Tuttle, Sol LeWitt and Bochner — who drew and painted directly onto the museum’s walls. But Katz’s daredevil spirit would also indirectly end the museum’s improbable run as the primary promoter of the avant-garde. His 1970 exhibition “Software: Information Technology and Its New Meaning for Art” was a flawed but visionary look at the impact of computer science on art. Everything in the show — the exhibitions, the performing artists — ran on programmed instructions or were issued from a prescribed system. Those artists included Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth and Nam June Paik, most of whom were still largely unknown to the general public. The day before “Software” opened, Katz gave a tour to the seminary chancellor, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, and a representative of the Smithsonian, which wanted to stage the show and therefore defray some of its costs. The three men viewed Nicholas Negroponte’s installation, “Seek,” in which a computer-controlled claw moved 2,000 metal-coated plastic cubes of a maze navigated by gerbils. Then they advanced to a video recording by Les Levine. As Katz recalls in his memoir, all was fine until they got to the footage that depicted the artist stark naked in the company of two equally unclad women. The rabbi sputtered in furious disbelief.
“I think, Mr. Katz, that this is the end,” he said.
And it was. A fire at the Smithsonian, coupled with technical failures in the challenging show, led to the cancellation of the Smithsonian showing, and “Software” finished at least $50,000 over budget. The combination of salaciousness and shortfall was insurmountable, and the seminary declared it would no longer subsidize a program that was not “basically Jewish.” Katz submitted his resignation the next day.
