more architecture biennial and chicago

Thursday started with shlepping my suitcase from Karen's to the Congress Hotel. While I waited for my room to be ready, I stopped in at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. The exhibition on view was "Grace of Intention: Photography, Architecture and the Monument" which included this haunting "Fengjie III (Monument to Progress and Prosperity), Chongqing Municipality" (2007), by Nadav Kander, part of his "Yangtze, the Long River" series. The show also included works by Iman Issa whose work I met through the "Monuments" show at Lismore Castle Arts. That show came into my scope through the work of Pablo Bronstein. The Issa works in "Grace of Intention" were each entitled "Materials for a sculpture ..." Really good show.

After I checked into the hotel, I took the El up to Andersonville for a visit to Women & Children First bookstore, a favorite store of Nicole Gotthelf with whom I was going to have supper. The store was full of good stuff as well as holiday shoppers. Somehow, holiday shoppers at an independent bookstore are quite easy to take.

Snacked at Taste of Lebanon and then took the Clark Street bus back down toward the Loop and checked out the Barbara Kasten show and installation at the Graham Foundation. Really great. The show was on all three public floors of the foundation which is in the 1902-1903 Madlener House. Lots more information about the foundation on their website but they are a great supporter of architectural publications and programs that "foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society."

The Kasten "Scenario" installation on the third floor, in the ballroom, commissioned for the Biennial, was a lovely play of color, shape, and shadow across a simple set of plaster boxes. Reality and illusion.

Then off to Wicker Park for a stop at Quimby's Bookstore ("specialists in the importation, distribution, & sale of unusual publications, aberrant periodicals, saucy comic booklets, and assorted fancies" and lots and lots of zines) which hadn't been on my radar but Michael Donovan, VR person at the U of Chicago, asked if I'd been there when I went to Myopic Books. I found the catalog from the Palais de Tokyo for the Ugo Rondinone show "I [heart] John Giorno" at Quimby's. Then supper with Nicole at Club Lucky.

Today was rather quieter but this whole week has been such a wonderful visit to Biennial locations and to Chicago at large, and time with friends. I went out to the lakefront to see "Chicago Horizon" by Ultramoderne, the winner of the BP Prize competition to design a lakefront pavilion in conjunction with the Biennial. Ultramoderne is a collaboration of architects Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest, and structural engineer Brett Schneider, based in Providence, R.I.

Then lunch with Helen Schmierer at Miss Ricky's, a new faux diner at the recently-opened Virgin Hotel. Then I sort of diddled away the rest of the afternoon with a visit to Bookworks up on Clark that I had noticed from the bus back from Andersonville, to Lucky Horseshoe Saloon, and to the Thai restaurant nearby for some pad thai before heading back to the hotel.

"community cataloging" at Stony Island Arts Bank

I saw a picture of this amazing book room that is part of the Stony Island Arts Bank, one of the Rebuild Foundation's buildings in Chicago, and was pretty excited that one of their "community cataloging" exercises would take place while I was in town for the Architecture Biennial. The vision was that we would see how community would build metadata. Well, it didn't turn out quite like that but it was interesting to see how an arts organization might look at a collection of books in a creative way. The books, by the way, belonged to the Johnson Publishing Company, the publishers of Ebony and Jet.

Our project was counting slides from the Art Institute of Chicago that are now one of the Rebuild collections. The approach was much more archival than library. Collection-level rather than item-level cataloging. They anticipate that users will make connections from the images rather than use them as illustrations as an art historian might.

Whatever, it was great to see the renovated bank and how it had become an art space. There was a model on the second floor that indicates there might be a garden of related spaces for performance and observation next to the bank building.

The bank is several long blocks South of the University of Chicago campus. The rain had stopped so I didn't get all wet again on my way up to the campus.

I stopped in at the Logan Center gallery (So-called Utopias), the Renaissance Society (drawings by Paul McCarthy), and the Smart Museum of Art (expressionism from Central and Eastern Europe) before heading back to the Loop. A ceramic work entitled Translated Vases by Yeesookyung in the permanent collection galleries at the Smart played nicely off No Light For Whom by Jörg Immendorff in the expressionist show.

how many art trips do you take in a year?

Even though this trip to Chicago was primarily to see the Chicago Architecture Biennial, I was flummoxed when Karen asked me how many art trips I take in a year. I guess I just don't think of them in those terms. My conference trips usually include some time in museums and/or galleries with a good bunch of architectural sightseeing. Still, this trip is more "art trip" than most. I got here late Sunday afternoon and spent the evening with Karen, her daughter Catherine, and Bella (dog), Napoleon (Leo), Sam, and Mouse. The latter three are cats but I still haven't really seen the elusive Sam. She disappears into the cupboard when a stranger arrives.

Monday morning, I left with Karen (who still has to go work at ALA) and stopped at the Chicago Cultural Center (ex central library) to get my Biennial bearings. Good. It really worked because there is a daily overview tour of the exhibits in the center, this being the first time that they have devoted all of the gallery spaces to a single exhibition.

The structure in the background is House No. 11 (Corridor House) by MOS Architects of New York. The rooms are gone, only the corridors remain, but it's still got plenty of room. The small works on stands in the foreground are street detritus as models of possible buildings with small figurines sharing the pedestals. Found architecture, by Sou Fujimoto Architects.

The tour was fine but its special value was the overview. Then, off to meet Anne and Leigh for lunch at Tesori for a satisfying margherita pizza. Anne had a burger.

Leigh split off to run errands and Anne and I went back to Ryerson so I could chat briefly with the new head librarian (Doug Litts) and go out the back door of the library into the galleries. The David Adjaye show was delightful.

I really like his architecture as does much of the world these days. He has finished a number of esteemed buildings, such as two branches of the D.C. Public Library and some U.K. Idea Stores (public library and community center), the just opened Aïshti Foundation in Beirut and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, and Sugar Hill Housing in Harlem. The first Adjaye building I visited was the modest Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. The show included great models and supporting materials as well as some really good videos and a sound installation done in collaboration with his brother Peter Adjaye. Pretty close to sated when I was done with the exhibition so I skipped through a few galleries, and then went and got my coat from the library and headed back to Karen's.

Tuesday started with an expedition. I'd had the address of Myopic Books -- 1564 North Milwaukee Avenue, in the Wicker Park neighborhood -- on my Chicago list for a few years but hadn't made it out to the Damen Avenue stop on the Blue Line. That is also close to The 606, a new urban park space above street level on an abandoned rail line. Its plantings aren't as fancy as the High Line in NYC, it's more of a bike passage though the pedestrian accommodation is fine, but it does give that wonderful freedom from the street craziness without removing you from the urban mix. And good views further afield.

Back to North Michigan Avenue. The Graham Foundation isn't open on Tuesday so I headed for the Museum of Contemporary Art which always provides a good experience. First, lunch (kale and grain salad with a very tasty small baguette). Even though the third-floor galleries were closed for installation, the American surrealism show on the first floor included some really wonderful works, a fine mix of early "classical" surrealism as well as much more recent works. A great Jess painting that looked just a tad Bosch-like (yes, I did make my flight reservation to go see the 500-year memorial exhibition in the spring in Den Bosch, another admittedly art trip) and a group of small paintings by Forrest Bess. I also really enjoyed the small exhibition of riffs on columns by Ania Jaworska.

I finished up Tuesday with some more time in the Chicago Cultural Center and the annex across Randolph Street with three installations including one from Assemble. They just received the 2015 Turner Prize. I think I did their authority record for the Avery Index and it was fun to know a lot of the architects in the Biennial from my indexing.

President Buchanan

How could I have forgotten official residences when I started using Pinterest a while ago? It goes way back: Judith Holliday was collecting library postcards and I loved finding her exotic (mostly not vintage) cards of libraries as I traveled about. She said I needed a category and I wanted something architectural and picked official residences. I quickly had plenty of postcards of the White House and the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg. I had spent much of my childhood in official residences; my dad was a pastor and we lived in the parsonage. What I mean by official residence is the domicile that comes with a position. I've got postcards of jailer's houses, parsonages, college president's houses, governor's mansions, palaces, and other types. I don't think I have a maid's room or the Downton Abbey lower level, but they'd fit. I include the houses of U.S. presidents other than the White House since many of the presidents used them during their term in a semi-official (or totally official) way. Besides, they're often nice houses.

Yesterday's New York Times had an article about "The other presidents' houses: lesser-known homes can have their own rewards" by Robert Strauss.

This is Wheatland, the Federal-style house of President James Buchanan, in Lancaster, Pa. The picture is by Will Figg for the Times and accompanies the article. Buchanan bought the estate in 1848 (before he became president, 1857-1861) and lived there until he died in 1868. He was the only bachelor president and has been rumored to have been bisexual or homosexual.

Just before the Civil War, Buchanan was upset that Lancaster residents weren't renting rooms to Franklin & Marshall College students when there weren't enough rooms on campus. So he rented out some rooms and got the neighbors upset. My mind, naturally, meandered to the pleasure of having some young men, presumably most of the students were men, around the house. Probably nothing in it since Buchanan was in the White House and they are only rumors but still ...

By the way, the lacuna of "Official residences" in LCSH was remedied about a dozen years ago when I proposed it as a new subject heading. The narrower term is "Parsonages."

adkins and motherwell

http://belfryarts.com/2015/07/28/kenneth-adkins-new-work/

I went to the exhibition closer for the Kenneth Adkins show at The Belfry in Hornell last night. I really liked the paintings and had a good talk with Ian McMahon, one of the gallerists. This painting is from the exhibition page and is one of his obituary paintings.

Now it's Sunday and I'm doing my regular Sunday duty at the ceramics library and looking at the 2002 MIT Press book on Black Mountain College. There's a show on Black Mountain College at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston that I'm looking forward to seeing when I'm there for ALA in January. Meanwhile, this Robert Motherwell from the Art Institute of Chicago (Málaga, 1950) caught my eye in the MIT book:

The background story is probably pretty different but the visuals resonate.

[sic]

This correction was in yesterday's New York Times:

A film review on Wednesday about Laurie Anderson's "Heart of a Dog," which is partly a meditation on loss and love, misspelled the surname of an artist who died in 1978 and was a friend of Ms. Anderson. He was Gordon Matta-Clark, not Matta-Clarke.

I would have loved to have him as part of the family.

Here pictured is Bingo, seen in the Urban Alchemy show at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts: http://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org/ The work was done in 1974 and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It was on display at the Albright-Knox in the "Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-Garde in the 1970s" show.

Here's the review of "Heart of a Dog" by Manohla Dargis from the Times with a short video.

cities and Jews

This year's Lefkowitz Lecture in Jewish Studies at Alfred University was given by Deborah Dash Moore who teaches at the University of Michigan. Her topic was the "Urban Origins of American Judaism" which is also the title of her most recent book (published by University of Georgia Press in 2014).

I really enjoyed the lecture though she started out by saying that Alfred was probably as far from a city as she could imagine. Sigh.

Dash Moore divided her comments into three sections: synagogues, streets, photographs. The sections blended nicely. I enjoyed seeing the pictures of the Touro Synagogue in Newport (the only extant synagogue building from colonial times) and Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati which I was happy to visit when SAH met there some years ago. It's a Moorish Revival pile across the street from a Catholic cathedral and near a no-longer-standing Episcopal church, with the three religious buildings across the way from the city hall. She noted the importance of them near the center of civic power and prestige. Perhaps the Moorish Revival building brought in the Muslims too. Into the 20th century, she showed a picture of the Brooklyn Jewish Center (1920s) which had a pool, gym, and restaurant. She didn't speculate on whether the building of a Jewish community center was related to people not being on the street as much because they had bigger houses, or drove more, or wanted to be with their kind, or it was a reaction to discrimination. Other national and ethnic groups, of course, also had community centers, and I can blame almost anything on our car-oriented culture.

She talked for a while about the rhythm of street life following the Jewish calendar. That is, people shopped on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, in preparation for the Sabbath. I wonder if she knew that Alfred was observant of the Sabbath until the 1950s. The stores and post office in Alfred were closed on the Sabbath (Saturday) because the town was founded by Sabbatarian Baptists (Seventh-day Baptists). See, Alfred is more like a city than you might imagine.

Lots to think and muse about. I might just have to read the book.

refugees and peacemaking

Today's New York Times has an article about refugees stuck in a "grinding U.S. process" as they await permission to come to the land of the free. We've increased the turmoil with our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our adventures in Syria, Israel, and Palestine. We've helped make it well nigh impossible to peacefully survive in a wide swath of the Middle East and South Asia.

The Global War on Terror has been about as successful in bringing justice, liberty, and peace to the world as the War on Drugs. Perhaps the problem is the WAR part of both of these efforts.

Facing the article on the refugees is one about a concert in the Cathedral Plaza in Havana. There, Lang Lang played a Steinway while Cuban music superstar Chucho Valdés played another piano and the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra (conducted by American Marin Alsop) played Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, and works by Valdés and other Cuban composers. Steinway is contributing the piano to the Cuban Institute of Music.

I know it's not black-or-white, or just war-or-peace, and that it's been fifty years of embargo and distrust between Cuba and the United States. Cuban refugees have been mostly successfully absorbed into life in Florida and I wish more international relations and interactions could be on the music side.

Tania Bruguera

I had heard the name Tania Bruguera before I went to Cuba in May during the Biennal de La Habana but I certainly didn't know her work well. Others in the College Art group were well aware and Judith Rodenbeck participated in the reading of The origins of totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt at Bruguera's house. The September 2015 issue of Art in America has an interview with Bruguera by Travis Jeppesen. Just a few quotations:

"Also, we will have a big library [at the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism]. We'll put shelves on the walls. It will be a specialized library, for people working in art, activism, philosophy and politics."

"I'm an anticapitalist. So I'm present in the discourse. I believe that socialism is a better model, even if it has some problems. I'm afraid that Cuba will go in a direction that is completely contrary to the Revolution."

"And racism is coming back. Yesterday I was talking to a former student, a black artist whose work deals with these issues. She told me that she will no longer go to some private restaurants, because nobody there is black -- not the cook, not even the person who cleans. Everyone is white. Racism is, of course, related to classism. This is something we haven't seen for a long time in Cuba. We were color blind. We saw people for who they were, how they behaved -- not how much money they had or the color of their skin."

As I walked the streets in Havana, there did indeed seem to be a diversity and mixing of people that was authentic and positive. I've been reading The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by Michelle Alexander so colorblindness and racism are much in my thoughts. The interview shakes my idealism about the situation in Cuba, a little bit, but I am very glad that there continues to be movement on the normalization of relations between Cuba and the U.S.

Thursday adventures in Rochester

Thursday is usually one of my days to work at Scholes Library but I had a visit to the dermatologist in Rochester today. So it was off to the big city for a bit of adventure. I wanted to check the used bookstores to see if I could find of copy of The Gallery by John Horne Burns. I had finished not long ago the new biography on Burns entitled Dreadful: the short life and gay times of John Horne Burns by David Margolick. Imagine my delight that Greenwood Books had a copy and the added bonus was that it was a copy of the original 1947 Harper & Brothers edition that had belonged to the composer David Diamond. Franlee, the owner of Greenwood Books, said that she had bought several thousand of his books when his library was being cleared out. Normally I'd rather not have a marked copy but this copy had the marks of someone in whose notes I might be interested. On the way from the East End to the dermatologist, WXXI announced that they were going to be playing his fourth symphony tomorrow, 2015 being the centennial of his birth.

After I bought my book, I went over to Spot Coffee which is located in a former Chevrolet dealership.

I had last Thursday's New York Times with me, to read as I had a bagel snack and coffee. I was saddened to see the obituary for Phil Patton. I have enjoyed reading his essays and books since I was reading the chapter on Route 66 in Open road: a celebration of the American highway (1986) while sitting in a cafe named Route 66 in Amsterdam (yes, the one in the Netherlands). And I even saw a small version of the route sign on someone's mailbox post as I drove home.

Another article in the paper that especially caught my eye was a profile of fashion designer Nicole Hanley Mellon. She had been on a trip to Cuba in the spring. The article states that she "was initially confused by the Cuban capital. 'The first day we were there, it felt like there was no commerce. Each day, through conversation and observation, you peel off another layer.' She met a college student who was 'pretty candid and spoke about the way you're taught art to express a social issue or a political issue more than being personal, which I found interesting.'" This sense of the importance of social welfare and equality was something that seemed alive to me too when I was in Cuba in May. I just hope that Cuba doesn't become just another Caribbean island.