Archive for March, 2010
The man responsible for conceiving the initial idea for the Papers of William F. Cody documentary editing project, “one of the most significant scholarly works in the history of the Center,” is leaving the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (BBHC) to take a new post as Director of the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Dr. Kurt Graham has, in four years of phenomenal expansion at the BBHC, made possible the digitizing of “tens of thousands of historical photographs, documents, correspondence, and maps…” Graham spearheaded the launching of the digital project–now available on line–throughout the U.S. and Europe. Graham’s tenure also brought new staff and equipment, updated space, and a remarkable $1.5 million in grant monies to the BBHC.   The Papers of William F. Cody launched with editors throughout the U.S. and Europe.
Graham, the Housel Director of the McCracken Research Library and Co-director of the Cody Institute for Western American Studies at BBHC, is the creative force that made it all happen. So says Maryanne Andrus, Director of Education and Co-director for Western American Studies.
According to Andrus, as managing editor, Graham “…assembled a team of editors in the United States and Europe who are producing edited print volumes and a digital archive of Cody-related material. This papers project will literally take Bill Cody and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the world once again and will be a feather in the cap of the Historical Center for many years to come.” The project, she says, is among the most significant scholarly works in the BBHC’s history.
Graham, who was raised in Wyoming’s Big Horn country, says he’s not leaving because of a sense of running his course at the BBHC; rather, an opportunity to direct the Salt Lake institution “fell out of the sky.” He says he and his family will miss Cody and the experience of being such an integral part of the BBHC’s evolution as a potent cultural presence.
“Kurt’s myriad contributions to the Center in leadership and scholarship have been stunning,” Andrus continues. “His vision for extending the reach of the Center beyond the walls of the museum will be sorely missed. Under his direction, the McCracken has taken on a completely different look and feel. The McCracken is a completely different institution than it was before.”
For more information, phone the BBHC at 307.578.4014.  To see the BBHC’s digital collections, click here.
Half a mile from the county fair
And the rain keep pourin down
Me and billy standin there
With a silver half a crown
Hands are full of a fishin rod
And the tackle on our backs
We just stood there gettin wet
With our backs against the fence
Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Oh, the water
Let it run all over me…
The Art of Water, a public art exhibition celebrating the beauty and role of water in the Teton Watershed and its surrounding area, is on exhibit at the 
Driggs City Center. Opening day March 24, will include an open-to-the-public reception 5:30-7:30 pm, at the Driggs Senior Center. Â The exhibition, a collection of photography, paintings and sculptures, courtesy of Friends of the Teton River and the Teton Arts Council, hangs through the month of June, 2010.
March 24th’s schedule of events:
5:30: Welcome by FTR and TAC representatives
Gallery open for viewing 5:30-7:30 PM
6:00: Sounds of the Teton: Audio recording natural sounds on the Teton River
Audio recording artist Charlie Otto
6:15: Performances of Poetry and Prose
Poet Garl Drake
Poet Ty Mack
Author Bruce Smithhammer
6:30: Healing Waters: A journey into the waters of Idaho, California, and Chile
Filmmaker Joe Lindsay
6:45:Â River Songs
Singer/songwriters Thomas Sneed and Ted Wells
7:30 Closing thoughts by FTR and TAC representatives
Participating artists include: Bart Walker, Kelly Sullivan, Dorothy Galloway, Marcia LeMire, Dan Burgette, Sue Tyler, Marina Nell, Teri Manigalt, Beach Huntsman, Carole Flaherty, Anna Taylor, Rosemary Thomas, Claire Vitucci, Cynthia Guild Stoetzer, Philbin De Got, Mary Lou Oslund, Virginia Grosse, Michele Farrier, Shauna Crandall, Tami Milligan, Nancy Nielson and Rosemary Franz.
The exhibition pays homage to the river’s fresh water and the creative personalities interpreting its particular bountiful beauty.   A light meal of soup, along with bread by the new local bakery 460 Bread will be provided.
For more information and a schedule of the evening’s events, visit www.tetonwater.org. Megan Hatch is the Friends of the Teton River contact. Email Megan at megan@tetonwater.org. Phone:  208.354.3871.
The University of Wyoming’s Art Museum has a great blog (I’d be happy to trade links with them) with lots of cool information on what’s going on in the arts in Laramie and around Wyoming. Last summer I met a representative—and please forgive my forgetting her name—of the university’s Artmobile Program, who tipped me off about the bus and its mission.
It is, specifically, the Ann Simpson Artmobile Program, a statewide visual arts outreach. Named for former Senator Alan Simpson’s wife Ann, the ArtMobile provides interaction with visual arts to “…audiences across the 97,914 square miles of Wyoming, visiting K-12 schools, state park visitor centers, libraries, senior centers, and other community-accessible locations in towns throughout the state.” Funding for U.W.’s magic bus is provided by an anonymous donor and its contents and programs utilize exhibition artwork from the museum. Presentations and events are followed up by discussion and other activities.
The Artmobile visits remote Wyoming communities with programs geared for children and adults, reaching remote populations that otherwise lack exposu
re to visual arts.  For those people, the Artmobile is a breath of fresh air.  And fresh paint!  The Artmobile is even on Facebook.
Jackson is awash in arts initiatives; I’ve never seen U.W.’s Artmobile come to town but perhaps we should invite them. Do a little exchange, partner up! Might there be a new way to paint the Tetons? Even here, many residents and kids could benefit from additional arts exposure.   Funding for such enterprises is in flux, and in addition to its anonymous donor, the Artmobile operates with funding from the Julienne Michel Foundation, the FMC Corporation, Helga and Erivan Haub, and Ann and Alan Simpson, and the Wyoming Arts Council. The latter is funded by the Wyoming legislature via the National Endowment for the Arts.
Contact Artmobile’s curator Beth Wetzbarger to find out more.   307.399.2941 or email artmobile@uwyo.edu.    Beth, perhaps it was you I met last summer, in Jackson, at Jill Callaway’s pot luck?   A pleasure.
Item #2:
Art speed dating!
It’s already time for the UW Art Museum’s fifth annual 20:20 art slam. Presenters show 20 images of their work for a 20-second duration–total presentation time is 6 minutes, 40 seconds, allowing for 20 participants.
Visual artists from around the state may sign up, but sign up is done on a first-come, first-served basis. So, signing up is fast, too. You must submit your images in a PowerPoint format and submissions are due by Friday, April 9, 2010.   The show will take place in Casper at the Hilton Garden Inn on April 23, from 8-10 pm.
The museum notes that 20:20′s format is “borrowed from a program that was first developed in Japan by two architects who were looking for a new way to present design ideas in an upbeat and exciting way. Events like 20:20 now occur internationally as specially organized evening events where the focus is on sharing information and community participation.”
20:20 Statewide is another venue for sharing ideas about the visual arts from around Wyoming.  Saturday evening, April 24, a reception hosted by the Wyoming Arts Council will honor 2010′s visual arts fellowship recipients.   An artist roundtable discussion follows the awards.
For more information on 20:20, or to sign up, please contact UW Art Museum Assistant Curator Rachel Miller at 307.766.6621 or rmiller@uwyo.edu.
Chuck Close Self-Portrait Woodcut, 2009 Woodcut in 47 colors Image Size: 28 x 23 inches Paper Size: 35 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Edition of 70 Printed by Karl Hecksher Published by Pace Editions, Inc.
Now that Teton Art Lab (TAL) has taken up official residency as a Center for the Arts tenant, with representation on the Center’s website, newsletters, et cetera, TAL’s executive director Travis Walker is announcing some exciting shows.
Though Jackson’s 2010 September Fall Arts Festival is a ways off, TAL has sent word that its FAF highlight will be a show of woodblock prints of the works of famed artists Chuck Close, Richard Estes and Alex Katz.   The show represents the first time these works will be seen in Wyoming.  Each exhibition print is the work of New York City master print maker Karl Hecksher, who will also be teaching a class on traditional Japanese hand printing, Moku Hanga.
The exhibition runs September 10 – October 5, 2010.  Mark your calendars.
Close’s work knocks Walker out.
“In 1998, I saw an exhibition of Close’s work at the MoMA in NY,” says Walker. “It floored me. I had seen photorealistic work before, such as Richard Estes (also in the exhibit), but what he was doing with these images seemed pretty genius, an Escher like blend of math, art, and science. Close makes big pieces with fingerprints, paper pulp, and overlapping circles of color, that become little abstractions up close, but are photorealistic from a distance. Those fingerprint pieces are especially awesome.”
Walker feels the accessibility of Close’s work appeals to the TAL mission, because its so readily educational. Walker himself says he’s not previously been exposed to Estes’ photorealism. “When I was a kid, a Jackson Pollock said nothing to me, but the photorealistic stuff was really amazing, technically. How did they do that?”
Walker says this is an unprecedented opportunity for Jackson residents to work with one of the world’s most noted print makers.  And, he giddily notes, the exhibit is free.
Hecksher is a friend of TAL board member David Gottfried. Schwing!  Hecksher, the founder, owner and director of K5 Editions LLC, has been printing in a variety of media since 1983. He spent the first three years after college as head printer at Prasada Press, collaborating with artists on stone and plate lithography. In 1986 he became a New York artist, printing editions at several major print studios.
Hecksher’s goal is to establish a more painterly approach to printmaking, one reflective of the individual artist’s touch; to make the print speak clearly and express the artist’s 
intentions. He’s been at it for two decades, honing his skills, and working with a full roster of noted artists.
A few years back, Walker took in a Portland, Oregon show of these prints and their matrixes.
” At the show there were these intricately carved wood blocks, stencils, paper screens, and etching plates that were just as beautiful as the prints themselves, side by side with the work to help viewers mentally grasp his process. It was truly mind blowing, from a printmakers perspective, to see the work involved in carving the blocks or etching the copper plates….At that time the Artlab was only a couple of months old, and we had only started to plan our printmaking studio. I knew if we ever did get a print program off of the ground, this work was something we should try and exhibit. So Dave made it happen with a few phone calls and a visit to Karl’s studio,” says Walker.
For his part, Hecksher is thrilled to be introducing his experience and method to Jackson artists. His hope is that students will develop their own personal approach to wood block printing.
(Photo, top Left: Chuck Close Self-Portrait Woodcut, 2009 Woodcut in 47 colors Image Size: 28 x 23 inches Paper Size: 35 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Edition of 70 Printed by Karl Hecksher Published by Pace Editions, Inc.)
Bonus Prelude: YouTube Rock Art Epic Sensation!
Now, back to work.
Perhaps Spring’s promise of fresh earth and sky is potent serum for new collaborations.  With Daylight Savings Time just days away, Altamira Fine Art announces a rare two-person show, No Limit. The exhibition joins the work of landscape artists John Felsing and Kathryn Mapes Turner. An opening reception takes place Thursday, March 11, 5-7:00 p.m. Â
Turner grew up on Grand Teton National Park’s Triangle X Ranch, her family’s homestead. Felsing has lived in his rural Michigan home twenty years; the artists have been friends for many years.  Strong rooted landscapes are part of humankind’s great collective unconscious and while Turner’s landscapes are traditionally loosely impressionistic, she’s not let go of realism. That would be difficult to do, growing up in the Valley of the Park, a landscape packed with every imaginable element but the sea. And understandable, because the urgent impulse to relate this true magnificence in recognizable form is a constant.  But in this show, I see a loosening of that emotional grip; a loosening that, far from letting go, allows more interpretation of light and form in.  The results may be less specific to geographical place, but not less specific to sense of place.
This may be Felsing’s influence; he has long been encouraging Turner’s painterly explorations. Felsing’s minimalistic, tonalist palette relates memory of 
place, Michigan’s more dissolved and meandering open territories. He describes his work as being adverse to labels, and his paintings are responses to moments. Viewers of Felsing’s paintings say they often have to step across the room to view his works before realizing their subjects as the paintings, up close, appear abstract.  Felsing thinks of his paintings as anything from portraits, to deductions, to music.
As in Whistler’s nocturnes, there is a meeting of the east–Asian–and Western influences in Felsing’s work. An essay I found on Whistler’s nocturnes says that for Whistler, “nocturne” is a reference to the tendency of French Romantic painters to relate art to music and a “binary color scheme.”
“I am not interested in reproducing what is visible, but in attempting to make things visible,” says Felsing. “Not until I visit a place repeatedly, do I feel enough intimacy to attempt a painting; only then does one realize that art grows out of love.”
(This is an active period for Michigan’s “state of mind” in the arts; playwright Sam Shepard, a long time Michigan resident, is currently enjoying both a successful New York run of a new play and a revival of one of his classics. His spare, tight stories are almost molecular in their scarce structure and prose.)
Turner, a partner in Trio Fine Art, is taking a spring break with this show, germinating a few new seeds. Â She continues to be fully associated with Trio.
No Limit remains on display through March 31.  For information, email Altamira Fine Art at connect@altamiraart.com.