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Artists in Central New York
The 63rd Exhibition of Central New York Artists opens on March 3, but you can have a preview by visiting not one, but two area solo shows by artists whose work was selected for it.
Jonathan Kirk / Machines: Fragments and Reveries will be on view just a few more days, til February 1, at the Clifford Gallery, Colgate University.
Jonathan Kirk, Isambard’s Kingdom
It’s a beautiful and interesting exhibition of sculpture that ruminates on, among other things, the wonders of engineering and the delight of making things with one’s own hands and imagination.
Jonathan Kirk, Old King Cole
Christine Heller, who will create a drawing mural at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, is doing something similar at the Kirkland Art Center, Clinton, NY. Her show there is The Anatomy of Time: Line/Body/Action, on view from January 24-March 9, with a reception on January 31 from 5 to 7 p.m.
Christine Heller working in her studio.
It’s an excellent winter for art in Central New York. See you in the galleries.
Gale Farley Photography
The PrattMWP Art Gallery kicks off the spring 2013 semester with a great show of photography by Gale Farley. Farley will talk about his work at the opening reception, 4 p.m. Friday, January 25.
Gale Farley, untitled photograph
Farley’s photographs are gorgeously composed studies in form, texture, and light. The meeting of building gables becomes a trio of triangles; a brilliant white, gnarled branch stands in relief against rippling water; markings on a parking lot resemble abstract painting.
Gale Farley, untitled photograph
The eye continues to move between recognition of forms and their abstraction.
Gale Farley, untitled photograph
Farley’s work startles in the best possible way, making us more alert to our surroundings and the beauty found therein.
Gale Farley, untitled photograph
Since moving to the Mohawk Valley in 1981, Gale Farley has operated a commercial photography studio. He was previously an adjunct instructor at Mohawk Valley Community College and is currently an Associate Professor of Photographic Technology at Herkimer County Community College. He holds an undergraduate degree in Photography from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas and an M.F.A. in Photography from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Mr. Farley’s work is held in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Art, MWPAI.
Gale Farley, untitled photograph
An Exciting 2013 at MWPAI
Our fans can tell you that life at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute has been hopping these past few months. Museum of Art Director, Anna T. D’Ambrosio, is moved by your enthusiastic support: “the exceptionally warm responses from our visitors is what stands out in my mind as a highlight of 2012, the kind people who have stopped me in the hall or parking lot to express how much the Museum and the Institute mean to them.”
You can count on more fun and more interesting art, music and classes for 2013. What’s happening?
The first Art after Five party of the year kicks off 2013 on Thursday, January 10 at 5:30. Our theme is “Jazz, Jeans, and Java,” with tastings courtesy of the Utica Coffee Roasting Company and musical performances by Monk Rowe and Ann Carey.
In just a few weeks, January 26 at 1 p.m., there will be a great For Kids and Family show by Luminescent Classic Tales. They present two well-known stories—The Ugly Ducking and The Tortoise and the Hare—with a twist. You can call it a “glowing” interpretation. Check this for more info. Looks pretty cool, doesn’t it?
And there are some faboloso upcoming Great Artists Series performances. On January 29, 7:30 see Live at Birdland—some quintessential big band jazz—and on February 27 at 7:30 the incomparable Chieftains to warm us into the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day. Visit the Institute website for all the details you need.
The Chieftains with Paddy Moloney and Special Guests
Have you signed up for Community Ed art classes yet? The semester starts on January 22 with classes in dance and art for kids, teens and adults with subjects that include jewelry making, quilting, drawing, painting, sculpture, you name it. Become an Institute member and save on the cost, too.
There will be some great art exhibitions at the Museum this year, including the next installment of the Artists of Central New York Exhibition, featuring 29 artists working within a one hundred-mile radius of Utica. Some exceptional talent calls this regional home and we are lucky to have them. The show will be on view between March 3 and April 28.
Our big summer exhibition is The Prints of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, on view between June 9 and September 8. Lots more on this one in upcoming posts.
And don’t forget the usual suspects like Art and Yoga, Book Group, and Lunch Art Videos.
We look forward to sharing some good times with you in 2013. Keep in touch!
Happening Holidays at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute
Visiting relatives at your house for the holidays? Kids home from school? Come on down to the Institute for the 2012 Holiday Break, December 26 through December 29.
There are lots of things going on, from drop-in crafts to story times to special films. Not to mention, of course, great exhibitions – Victorian Yuletide, Paper Visions, and Seeing the World Within: Charles Seliger in the 1940s.
Charles Selger (1926-2009), Don Quixote, 1944
On Friday and Saturday preschoolers and their caregivers are invited to Art Story: Every Picture Tells a Story. This program offers an introduction to art through an Eric Carle picture book and artwork in the exhibition Seeing the World Within. Enjoy a 45-minute program for children ages 3 to 5 that includes a simple take-home craft. This is free and open to all.
The visually stunning family film, Microcosmos, is screened several times during Holiday Break. It captures the fun and adventure of a spectacular hidden universe revealed in a breathtaking, close-up view unlike anything you’ve ever seen! Utilizing special macroscopic photographic techniques, filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou created this fascinating, spectacular look at the hidden worlds in the life cycle of an ordinary meadow in France. Insects become gigantic beasts, blades of grass turn into towering monuments and raindrops form puddles that resemble vast oceans. The filmmakers find humor, drama and beauty in the lives of these tiny flora and fauna as caterpillars transform themselves into butterflies, beetles struggle with their day’s foraging, and snails reproduce their species. Tours of the Seliger show are scheduled following the 2 p.m. screenings and at 6 p.m. before the evening screening.
Check out the schedule on the Institute’s website and make plans to join us for some entertaining art stuff.
Happy Musical Holidays
This weekend I programmed my IPod with a holiday playlist of pop songs, with multiple versions of “The Christmas Song” (Brave Combo, Les Brown and His Band of Renown, Vince Guaraldi) and “Merry Christmas Baby” (Chuck Berry, Lionel Hampton and Otis Redding) as well as the Ronettes’ “Sleigh Ride” (my favorite version of the song), “Christmas Night in Harlem” by Louis Armstrong and “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses.
I’ve never been a big fan of the sentiments expressed in the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – the part about difference and not letting him join reindeer games – but how can I help from loving the Temptations’ version of the song, right?
Next step is to visit the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Library’s music collection because – whoa – what a choice to be found there! Talk about something for everyone. There is holiday music sung by Dolly Parton, Frank Sinatra, and Luciano Pavarotti. There are recordings of Christmas Oratorio by Bach and Saint-Saens. There is holiday medieval music performed by Chanticleer and holiday jazz by Oscar Peterson. Henry Mancini more your taste? No problem. And what about this title: “What if Mozart Wrote ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus?’” Mmm, okay.
Get thee to the MWP Library for some excellent holiday music. It’ll make your spirits bright, promise.
Oh Jazzy Night!
We’re looking forward to Hilary Kole’s Concert in the Court here 8 p.m. Saturday, December 8.
She is a remarkable performer who has worked with jazz legends such as the late and truly great Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, John Pizzarelli, David Frishberg, Monty Alexander, Benny Green, Freddy Cole, Alan Broadbent, and Cedar Walton. In New York City, Kole has performed at all the best venues, including Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Town Hall, Birdland, The Blue Note, and the Iridium.
Stephen Holden of the New York Times raves:
Ms. Kole’s poised, sultry ballad-singing has always been easy on the ears. But her smooth melodic lines have never been so consistently infused with literary subtext, which spells the difference between sounded pretty, and having something to say.
Visit Ms. Kole’s website for a preview of this captivating artist.
See you Saturday night!
Thanks to Empire Recycling for sponsoring this event.
All photographs by Carol Friedman.
When Andy Met Mick
Several of us at the Museum are gearing up for summer 2013’s Warholiana bash here. We’re reading dairies and watching YouTube videos and enjoying it a lot because Andy is so quotable and his friends and associates were all so colorful.
Here is his story, from his memoir Popism, about meeting Mick Jagger, who was just about 20 years old at the time:
This spring of ’63 I had met a just-married, twenty-two-year-old beauty named Jane Holzer. Nicky Haslam took me to a dinner at her Park Avenue apartment. David Bailey was there, and he’s brought the lead singer in a rock-n-roll group called the Rolling Stones that was then playing the northern cities of England. Mick Jagger was a friend of Bailey’s and Nicky’s . . .
’We met him when he was Chrissy Shrimpton’s maid,’ Nicky told me, “Jean’s younger sister. She put an ad in the paper – ‘Cleaner wanted’ – and up turned Mick. He was a student at the London School of Economics; he was just cleaning flats to pay his way. And then she fell in love with him. We kept telling her, ‘But Chrissy, he’s so awful looking,’ and she’d say, ‘Not really.’
Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey
So, stay tuned for The Prints of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, which includes Warhol’s portrait of Jagger, plus lots of other folks.
The Prints of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again will be on view at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute from June 9-September 8, 2013. It’s organized and circulated by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh.
So Long Sphinx
See the “Scarab Vase” and all the treasures in Shadow of the Sphinx now because the exhibition will close in 11 days!
Adelaide Alsop Robineau (1865-1929)
The Apotheosis of the Toiler (The Scarab Vase)
1910, porcelain
The Museum of Art was fortunate to borrow the so-called “Scarab Vase” for this all-things-Egyptian extravaganza because in early 1989 it was stolen from the Everson Museum of Art, which has owned it for decades. This is the February 15, 1989, account reported by the Los Angeles Times:
Syracuse, N.Y.: A vase valued at $500,000 and considered one of the best-known pieces of ceramics in the world has been stolen from a museum here.
“It’s the Mona Lisa of ceramics,” Ronald Kuchta, art director of the Everson Museum, said of the Scarab Vase, made in 1910 by potter Adelaide Alsop Robineau of Syracuse. The Scarab Vase was apparently removed from the Everson’s Falcone Gallery between 7:30 a.m. Monday and 10 a.m. Tuesday, while the museum was closed to the public, Kuchta said. A thief removed four screws holding a plexiglass cover over the vase, took the 17-inch-tall aqua-tinted work, and substituted a less valuable copper vase.
The vase was recovered and returned to the Everson before long, whew!, but since that time it has never left the museum. Until now.
Adelaide Alsop Robineau
working on “The Scarab Vase”
The Scarab Vase is actually called The Apotheosis of the Toiler because it took Adelaide Alsop Robineau (1865-1929) more than 1000 hours of painstaking effort to create its exquisite, intricate design. Mrs. Robineau was a remarkable talent who studied painting with William Merritt Chase and ceramics with Charles Binns at Alfred University. She became internationally influential in the studio pottery movement at the turn of the 20th century by exhibiting her work widely, and with her husband, Samuel, publishing the journal Keramic Studio and operating the Four Winds studio and kiln in Syracuse.
See it now!
Exhibiting History in an Art Museum
MWPAI will be presenting “The First Step to Freedom: Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation,” an unprecedented display of the only surviving version of the document in Lincoln’s handwriting October 6 and 7.
Since this exhibition was announced, I have been asked, “What does this have to do with art?”
Good question.
Let me begin to answer this by saying my knowledge of “art” is very limited. Prior to my coming here, the only artists I was truly knowledgeable of were the ones who illustrated Mad magazine.
However, since my chosen academic discipline has always been history, I became very excited about seeing this document. I also began to ponder the “justification” of displaying this exhibition in an art museum.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, an estimated 645,000 Africans were brought to what is now the United States. By 1860 the slave population in the United States had grown to four million.
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the preliminary proclamation. It stated that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state of the Confederacy that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. None returned and The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by Lincoln on January 1, 1863, based on the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. It proclaimed all slaves in Confederate territory to be forever free by ordering the Union Army to treat slaves in Confederate states as free. The Proclamation did not itself outlaw slavery. It did, however, make the destruction of slavery an explicit war goal.
Slavery was made illegal everywhere in the U.S. by 13th Amendment, which took effect in December 1865.
Almost 100 years after the nation’s founding the declaration that “all men are created equal” began to take reality.
So, back to the original question, “What does this document have to do with art?”
Directly, nothing.
However, The Emancipation Proclamation did much more than begin the process to abolish slavery. This document is a declaration of freedom, which has everything to do with art.
“The First Step to Freedom: Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation”
Something very exciting is happening at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute November 6 and 7. A rare Civil War document, handwritten by President Lincoln, will be on view.
MWPAI will exhibit the only surviving version of Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a document in Lincoln’s handwriting, November 6 and 7 in the Museum of Art. The Museum will observe extended hours, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. both days.
Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in
Abraham Lincoln’s handwriting
MWPAI President Anthony Spiridigloizzi said, “We are honored to be able to present this to our community.”
The exhibition, The First Step to Freedom: Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, was organized by The New York State Museum, a division of the New York State Education Department, and will include historical background and interpretation of the document. Also included is the manuscript of a speech written and delivered in New York City in September 1962 by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Proclamation’s centennial.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking in New York City, 1962,
on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation
State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. noted the exhibition incorporates collections and images from the New York State Library and the New York State Archives. He said the documents stand as important markers in the path to freedom and equality for African-Americans and are among New York State’s greatest treasures.
Although Lincoln’s handwritten final Emancipation Proclamation burned in the Chicago fire in 1871, the preliminary Proclamation survived the State Capitol fire of 1911 and has been preserved by the State Library. Lincoln’s handwritten preliminary Proclamation, issued 150 years ago in the midst of the Civil War, is the only surviving copy of this document in Lincoln’s own handwriting. Lincoln donated it to the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which raffled the document at an Albany Army Relief Association Fair in 1864. It was later purchased by the New York State Legislature.
“This unique freedom document did nothing less than change the Civil War—and change American history,” Harold Holzer, award-winning Lincoln historian, said. “In a very real way, this one-of-a-kind relic testifies not only to Lincoln’s resolve to expand freedom, but New York’s resolve to preserve it.”
The First Step to Freedom: Abraham Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is sponsored locally by Trainor Associates and Trainor Digital.
Admission is free and open to the public.