What Can a Century Tell Us?
Looking at two art exhibitions that both survey 100 years of imagery, the more things change ...

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
Friday, July 13, 2007

One hundred years can be an intimidating span of time.

It's more time than most of us will ever live to see. It encompasses generations. Go backward from our own, and you'll reach our great-grandparents, perhaps even our great-great-grandparents -- ancestors whom most of us never met. And so much happens in a century -- it's the span from the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk to Voyager 1 passing the edge of the solar system -- that when you try to wrap your head around it all, it can set your mind reeling.

Thus, when two separate art exhibitions arrive in town boasting a century's worth of images each, it's only natural to feel a little cowed. Can one's visual senses even absorb, much less appreciate, all the artwork of 100 years? Well, if they really had to look at work that covers all of a century's major artists and movements, across all cultures and media, maybe not. But fortunately (for our overworked modern eyes, anyway), neither of these shows claims to be comprehensive; rather, each offers a representative look at a particular kind of artwork through the lens of a nicely focused collection. The Blanton Museum of Art's "A Century of Grace" draws from the holdings of New York's Dahesh Museum of Art, which includes works by artists who trained in the academies of Europe in the 19th and early-20th centuries; the Austin Museum of Art's "The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures" is culled from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Both shows are extremely manageable -- each covers its respective 100 years with fewer than 100 works of art -- while still managing to convey a sense of the epic time frame during which these images were created. And in the way they do that, they allow us to glimpse the impact of that long stretch of years on art and its making.

With "A Century in Pictures," we see an art form inventing itself, photography evolving from an almost purely documentary medium into one as expressive and versatile as any of the visual art's more traditional mediums. "A Century of Grace," by contrast, allows us to see one of Western art's centuries-long traditions -- representation of the human figure -- in a crucible of change, tested by the rapid expansion of industrialism and European imperialism, as well as developments in science and social attitudes. These progressions aren't laid out for us in linear fashion in either show. The curators for both exhibitions -- Anne Tucker for AMOA and Cheryl Snay for the Blanton -- forgo a strict chronological layout in favor of small groupings that relate to specific types of work or developments on the scene. In Snay's case, that means sections devoted to drawing (traditionally the foundation for figurative work), the academies (the accepted training ground for artists), and dominant genres of the day (mythological/allegorical images, religious scenes, domestic images). In Tucker's, it means groupings by documentary work, portraiture, landscapes, abstracts, and experimental imagery. With this approach, you might miss some of the simple satisfaction that comes from following the advancement of these art forms year by year, decade by decade, through their respective centuries, and getting a grasp on who was contemporaneous with whom requires some effort, but you can sense perhaps more keenly the variations taking place within certain movements or ways of working -- the shift in landscape photography from only natural settings to massive man-made structures as well, for instance. And both curators set works side by side that give an illuminating nod to time's passage, as with Snay's placement of Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1849 Michelangelo Showing a Pupil the Belvedere Torso, painted when the artist was 25, next to his Working in Marble, painted 41 years later. Being able to compare the work of the young and mature Gérôme is fascinating, especially since both depict artists and statues. To these eyes, it's the sculpture that feels more alive and convincing in the earlier work, the flesh that does in the later work.

Even without a timeline, the times make themselves felt in both exhibitions. Snay devotes a section to Orientalism, the movement fueled by Western Europe's imperialistic drive into the Near East, Middle East, and North Africa. In the first half of the 19th century, Europeans' awareness of the cultures of these lands was expanded to a whole new level, and they were captivated by the exoticism of the other. Artists -- some of whom traveled to these regions themselves -- made it the subject of many works, rendering it in extravagant style. The exposed flesh that dominates other sections of "A Century of Grace" is all but invisible here, the bodies swathed head-to-toe in thick fabrics with brilliant colors and rococo patterns. There's something so deliberate in the depiction of this foreignness as to give off an almost palpable sense of social trend and fashion.

That's more true of "A Century in Pictures," where shifts in dress and hairstyles are apparent throughout, as are significant moments in the historical record. Here's the Great Depression, as captured by Dorothea Lange in her South-in-a-nutshell Plantation Overseer (1936) and Russell Lee in his telling domestic scene FSA Clients at Home, Hidalgo County (1939). And there's the space race, represented by a surprisingly artful image by astronaut Pete Conrad of his Apollo 12 colleague Alan Bean collecting lunar samples on the surface of the moon. (The composition has a beautiful balance to it, and the sharp contrasts of sun-drenched spacesuit and inky lunar sky are hypnotic.) Of course, telling us the time is the nature of the medium; photography was developed to record the world around us. But beyond the physical history documented here, there's also a sense of the spirit of the times in parts of the AMOA exhibit -- specifically, the experimental spirit that characterized the Sixties and the search for identity and equality that reached a new prominence in that decade. Tucker includes several images that explore gender issues for women, and they're among the most daring in the exhibit, in terms of pushing the form. You have images split or replicated or assembled in a collage. You can almost feel a restlessness in the photographers as they seek new forms of language to express new attitudes in society.

In a sense, that attitude pervades "A Century in Pictures." Here's this new art form, the show shows us, with artists flooding to it to see what they can do with it. And it turns out they can do everything with it: capture history, make portraits, isolate elements of the world into abstract forms, make images about making images. It points up the restless curiosity of the race, our incessant drive to explore and discover, as well as to change and transform. In that sense, "A Century in Pictures" is the more exhilarating of the two shows. Again and again, its images seem to be racing forward, testing the form's limits, taking it -- and us -- places we've never been before. As you leap from Eadweard Muybridge's stunning panorama of 1877 San Francisco (an image to thrill the historian in you) to Imogen Cunningham's breathtakingly elegant close-up of a magnolia bud (1925) to Weegee's riotous candid shot of two teens smooching at a 3-D movie (so much of its time -- the Fifties -- and so thrillingly of the moment) to Joan Lyons' politically charged split image of a young woman in 1977, the variety and energy of the works generate an underlying buzz in the exhibition that seems fitting for the century it documents. Here we are, being propelled faster and faster through the world, in automobiles, in aircraft, on electronic impulses, and our art is keeping pace.

"A Century of Grace" can't offer that kind of velocity rush from the technological drive of the past 100 years, but then it isn't even trying to. As its title makes clear, this exhibit intends to turn the clock back to a point when time wasn't so much of the essence, when an artist's energies were invested in studying form and steeping in tradition, the better to render the human form with the utmost of refinement, of beauty, of grace. What binds the show together is not so much what changes over the broad expanse of the 19th century as what doesn't change. Across the gallery, from drawing to sculpture to painting, from biblical illustration to orientalist portrait to scene of country life, the figures share the same sensuous curves, no matter the decade. The limp body of the crucified Christ in Paul Delaroche's Lamentation from 1820 boasts the same delicate arcs and voluptuous turns along his form as the hunched bather in Jules Dalou's bronze cast eight decades later. Position yourself at the entryway to the gallery with "Master Drawings From the Yale University Art Gallery," and you can take in both Jean-Jacques Pradier's Standing Sappho, circa 1850, and Adolphe-William Bouguereau's The Water Girl, painted in 1885, in a single glance. Despite the differences in medium and genre, you can see that same elegant tilt of the hip, the same blissful slope to the shoulders, the same smooth curve to the jaw and line in the arms, the same weight in the left hand where it rests. Turn your head to the left until you can catch Joseph Bail's A Letter From His Father -- an image that in its down-home character and execution seems to anticipate Norman Rockwell -- and you might see in the farm boy's swaying back an arch akin to Sappho's. It's like that throughout the exhibit: the arch of a back, the ripple of muscles under a forearm, the arc of an instep, the crook of an arm, the bend of a leg -- curves echoing one another, connecting work to work to work in a way that shows how constant our view of the human form is and how deep our desire to depict it is. To see that endure across a span as intimidating as a century is both lovely and inspiring.

In some ways, the shows both reinforce the idea of how much remains constant beyond the confines of a lifetime or passage of generations. In "A Century in Pictures," Anne Tucker has placed side by side two landscapes, one by Ansel Adams and one by Lynn Davis. Adams is rightly considered one of the great masters of the form, and Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada shows why; he's caught the Western range at its most monumental, rising brightly into the heavy sky, towering like a primeval giant over a pasture still sunk in darkest shadow. Adams made that image in 1944, the year that Lynn Davis was born, and now an image of hers sits next to his. Sun Set/Ocean also captures nature in all its vastness: a broad gray expanse of water under a great lowering sky, with a small white orb suspended between the two. The photographs complement each other, not only as portrayals of the day at its beginning and at its end but as parts of one tradition, the grand natural landscape. They were made a half-century apart, but they share the same sky, that same sun, the same view of nature. It's a sign that much may change over 100 years, but some things endure: the vault above, the earth below, our impulse to celebrate what we see, to record it and transform it and treasure the view.

"The Target Collection of American Photography: A Century in Pictures" is on display through Aug. 12 at the Austin Museum of Art, 823 Congress. For more information, call 495-9224 or visit www.amoa.org.

"A Century of Grace: 19th-Century Masterworks From the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York" is on display through Aug. 5 at the Blanton Museum of Art, MLK at Congress. For more information, call 471-7324 or visit www.blantonmuseum.org.

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Arthouse exhibit spotlights 'New American Talent'

By Minnie Pilli
The Daily Texan
Monday, July 16, 2007

Although I had heard people talk about the charming Arthouse at the Jones Center downtown on occasion, I admittedly never took the time to pay it a visit in the two years I've been living in Austin. With the relaxing, or should I say boring, schedule that summer is known to bring, a friend and I decided to explore a particular exhibit one afternoon. I had no idea what I was missing out on.

The New American Talent exhibition is an annual competition open to all artists living and working in the United States with a different curator judging each year. This year's winners were chosen by Anne Ellegood, curator of the Hirshborn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. These 46 artists, five of whom are from our very own city of Austin, will be showcased until Aug. 19.

It is quite refreshing to see an exhibit so innovate, exploring themes both relevant and controversial, ranging from post Sept. 11 fears expressed through a shopping mall security guard to opposing Black viewpoints of the n-word. If there is one thing to be learned through this showcase, it is that modernity is the age of transforming simplicity into beauty. After all, Picasso said, "First you have to be able to draw a straight line." Indeed Rothfus, an artist featured in the exhibit, uses the basic straight line to compose her winning work, "Untitled (highway one)," accentuating the minimal framework of a satellite tower, despite its vast purpose.

My personal favorite was a work using colored pencil on paper titled "Rainbow Highway," which was at first glance amusing yet perplexing. As an artist who muses the question "Who has power?," Suzanne Wright conveys her resentment towards technology, cleverly comparing a bridge inserted into her backside with man's force. Her work, although not what I'd call representative of most pieces in the exhibition, has much in common with the majority of artists as far as their tendencies to explore architecture made manifest in the future, technology and progress.

Dave Woody, one of the featured artists and a resident of Austin, describes the New American Talent exhibit as "cohesive and strong, with the curator's taste really coming through this year in particular." His works are three portraits of people whom I later came to find out were friends of Woody's. The photographed subjects all have some sort of physical imperfection. According to Woody, these pieces explore "the fragility of skin and the beauty of bruises." Although Amelia has a black eye, the portrait conveys "the way she is comfortable with presenting herself in [that] way." Woody graduated with an MFA at The University of Texas and will soon be teaching photography at Colorado State University.

My overall experience at the exhibit was pleasant, offering a peaceful and open environment in which patrons are comfortable to explore, undisturbed. The design of the museum is accommodating for more of the majestic pieces that require lighting only attainable by placement in mysterious nooks, such as Wonjung Choi's "Fish in the Rain: I Feel I Have Butterflies in my Stomach." These transparent figurines of fish swimming through the air with butterflies in their tummies cast beautiful shadows on their wall, making for a humorous and extraordinary presentation.

Located at the corner of seventh Street and Congress Avenue, Arthouse can easily be overlooked by patrons visiting the Austin Museum of Art. Next time you go downtown for a cultural experience, bear in mind that the New American Talent exhibit is not only free to the public and is devoted to showcasing the work of rising contemporary artists, but also will, in the words of Ellegood, encourage one to "get a real foothold upon where we are, who we are and what our futures might bring us."

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Arthouse: America's Got Talent!

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
Friday, July 20, 2007

Local juried shows such as Austin Museum of Art's triennial "New Art in Austin," the nonprofit Texas Biennial, and Arthouse's annual "New American Talent" exhibition all aim to promote emerging artists. Juried exhibitions serve the important function of opening new doors to cooperation, community awareness, new audiences, and business networks. One significant difference that distinguishes "New American Talent" from the others is that a solitary juror picks all the works. This gives focus; this show carries the personality and specific interests of the curator. This year that person is Anne Ellegood, curator for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and next Thursday, July 26, Arthouse is open late, so you can see "New American Talent: the Twenty-Second Exhibition" and, after cultivating your own reactions, hear Ellegood offer her insights into the show.

On the Arthouse website, Ellegood has already described her selection of works this way: "Every one of these artists has something to put forward about the world -- their observations, experiences, criticisms, and passions -- and yet each one does so in his or her own way." Vagueness is understandable here considering the topic of the show -- new American talent -- is overly broad. Most jurors just seem to concentrate on the "talent" aspect, which means works that get them personally excited. You might get a better sense of where Ellegood's coming from by knowing that while she worked for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, she organized exhibits with titles like "Superficial: The Surfaces of Architecture in a Digital Age"; "Out of Site: Fictional Architectural Spaces"; and "Candice Breitz: Babel Series." This distinct interest in how architecture acts culturally -- as fantasy, as prototype, as urban reality -- is conveyed in this show. For example, former Austinite/current Houstonian Mark Schatz presents a wavy cardboard chair sculpture called Moving Gehry.

And speaking of homegrown artists, it's worth noting that the Texan talent pool makes its mark on this show. Of the 45 artists chosen for "New American Talent" by Ellegood, nine are from California, eight are from New York, and 15 are from Texas, leaving 13 from all the other states. Part of this may be just regional awareness, but selection is based on the images only. The art available in our state is of a certain caliber, and experts from other states agree! Texans have talent!

"New American Talent: The 22nd Exhibition" is on view through Aug. 19 at Arthouse at the Jones Center, 700 Congress. Talking Art With Anne Ellegood will take place Thursday, July 26, 7pm, at Arthouse. For more information, visit www.arthousetexas.org.

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Jan Heaton: Watercolor in her blood

By Barry Pineo
Austin Chronicle
Friday, July 27, 2007

For most of her professional life, Austin's Jan Heaton has worked as a graphic designer, illustrator, and calligrapher. Five years ago, after getting laid off from her longtime advertising job, Heaton decided to search for a place to show her beloved watercolors. Since then, she's had her work included in collections around the country, as well as gaining representation from galleries in Houston and Atlanta. About to open her fifth show at Wally Workman Gallery, Heaton shares a little about how she became an artist and how she makes her art.

Austin Chronicle: When did you start painting?

Jan Heaton: I started painting when I could hold a paintbrush. Very young. My mom was an illustrator, and my dad was a graphic designer and display artist. We didn't have television, so we did a lot of art projects. My mom would set up a still life on the dining room table and give us charcoal. It was snowy in Michigan, and we were always drawing and looking at things and recording what we saw.

AC: It's in your blood.

JH: It's in my blood. I don't know any other way of living. I'm an observer.

AC: An observer of what?

JH: Details. Color. Light. Values. Expressions. Silhouettes. Negative space. Positive space. Forms. Characters. I look at something, and I respond to it. And hopefully I can record it. And I think because of where I come from and the way my parents nurtured my brother and me as children, that you observed, you did a visual memory of all of these things that you're surrounded by.

AC: Why do you call it a visual memory?

JH: When I'm painting, I paint in my studio. I'll look at something, you know, maybe I'm driving down the road and I see a silhouette of a tree against the skyline, and visually I'll record this in my memory. Then, based on that memory, I'll start sketching, and then maybe sometimes a painting evolves out of that. I'm not like a plein air painter that goes on location and paints the building, the landscape, the trees, etc.

AC: How do you make your paintings?

JH: I buy paper on a roll that's 51 inches wide. I have a big Plexiglas top on my drawing table, so I just lay the whole thing flat and paint on it flat. I'm not painting upright on an easel because I use a lot of water.

AC: There's a richness in your colors that's really amazing. I assume that comes about as you layer this paint on.

JH: Most of my paintings [in the current Workman show] have at least 25 or 30 layers of paint. Every time you put on a layer with watercolor, you let it dry totally before you go in with the next. So it's a constant building up, a layering process.

AC: So why watercolor? And why only on 100% cotton paper?

JH: Because I love paper. There's something about watercolor and paper where the pigment actually becomes a part of the paper. It's not just sitting on top. The paint becomes a part of the substrate, which, I don't know, I'm totally enamored of it. I'm always discovering new things. New ways to push and explore the medium the more I paint. I love it.

"Jan Heaton: New Work" is on display July 28-Aug. 25 at Wall Workman Gallery, 1202 W. Sixth. For more information, call 472-7428 or visit www.wallyworkmangallery.com.

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Tom Hollenback at D Berman Gallery

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Tom Hollenback’s fluorescent plexiglass and steel constructions might at first seem just perfunctorily clever in the way that much minimalist sculpture is. The 13 works now on view at D Berman Gallery — all but one wall-based sculpture — are painstakingly neat and tidy. Ordinary home improvement store stainless steel studs form precise, elongated rectangles of varying dimensions on to which are attached panels of Day-Glo acrylic plexiglass. Hollenback riffs on the rectangular form, smartly displaying them solo in ‘Horizontal Flute’ or grouping them such as the trio ‘Flutes 1, 2, & 3.’

But whereas so much minimalist artwork remains cool, detached and cerebral, there’s a real visceral impact and sincere playfulness to Hollenback’s sculpture. And that feels refreshing and new.

For starters the pink, orange and green fluorescent plexiglass grabs and holds the light in intriguing ways. You’d think these geometric constructions are electrified light-boxes, but they’re not. No, the raw edges of the plexiglass glow with an almost preternatural intensity. And the stainless steel studs? Hollenback cuts out circles along some of the studs and lets other factory-made cutouts stay. Thus, these wall-hanging lightboxes cast intriguing reflections on the white gallery walls that you can view only when you peer into one of the cutouts or stand right up next to the wall. Who would think that such initially subtle artworks would demand such viewer interaction.

Hollenback, who until recently lived in San Antonio, impressed last year with his free-standing plexiglass and steel box in Arthouse’s ‘New American Talent.’ He has a similar phoneboothlike piece on view at D Berman. Walk inside and you’re encased in translucent, vibrant green glow. Who says the world doesn’t look better through lime green-colored glasses?

Hollenback thinks so. And he’s trying to challenge your initial impressions by smartly enticing you to wonder just how he transformed such ordinary materials into something simple and magic.

(‘Tom Hollenback’ continues noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays through Sept. 1 at (D Berman Gallery)[http://www.dbermangallery.com), 1701 Guadalupe St. Free. 477-8877.)

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