Mar
1
2010
Art News By Dan R. Goddard | 1 comment

CAM marches on in March

Read more on my blog Alamo City on Glasstire

Death of CAM Parade, Summer 2009

CAM is dead. Long live CAM.

Contemporary Art Month in San Antonio will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, but in temperate March rather than broiling July. A new generation of artists is in charge of the citywide celebration that began in July 1986 after a local museum canceled a much-anticipated show of contemporary artists. In response, the snubbed artists rallied to open the Blue Star Art Space, located in a 1920s-vintage warehouse district along the San Antonio River in the King William neighborhood.

Since then, the Blue Star Arts Complex has been the heart of San Antonio’s contemporary art scene, with several galleries and artists’ studios spread throughout the rambling warehouses. CAM, tied together by a calendar, became an annual summer tradition that encouraged all the city’s galleries and museums to show work by living artists. And every year since, people have complained that it was just too darn hot in July for gallery hopping.

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Mar
1
2010
Artists By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Danville Chadbourne’s moving retrospective

Read more on my blog Alamo City on Glasstire

Danville Chardbourne at Gallery Nord

San Antonio artist Danville Chadbourne’s weathered ceramic and painted wood assemblages might be the ancient artifacts of an unknown civilization. Made with clay, wood, stone, fiber and bone, the organic materials suggest a lost culture closely tied to nature. Representing a vast, sprawling world of the imagination, Chadbourne’s serene, abstract forms evoke a wide range of psychological and spiritual states.

His paintings and wall pieces look as if they are ripped from the wall of a temple. His indoor sculptures could be religious statues used in rituals. Influenced by science fiction as well as natural history and archaeology, Chadbourne sees his work as evidence of a once-great civilization that has declined and been forgotten, leaving behind a dusty trail of inexplicable objects.

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Mar
1
2010
Reviews By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

“Familiar Unknown” examines ceramics

Appeared in February 2010 Glasstire

Rebekah Bogard's animals (Courtesy Blue Star)

Seeking to reveal the range and depth of contemporary ceramics, curator Ovidio Giberga, head of the ceramics program at UTSA, showcases four female artists in “The Familiar Unknown” whose work reaffirms ceramics’ “historical relevance to global politics, economics, culture and the everyday human experience.” New technologies and the Internet, as well as improved ceramics education and scholarship, have pushed ceramic artists beyond the familiar landscape of vessels and decorative ware, changing the way ceramics are perceived and inspiring new ideas and methods.

Resembling alien pods or living organisms suspended from the ceiling in a kind of hive installation, Rebecca Hutchinson’s  ephemeral forms are made on site with found materials, including 900 handmade paper “blooms,” fibers, wood, wallpaper paste and unfired clay. The hanging forms deteriorate over time and only last for the run of a show – contradicting the notion that ceramics are supposed to last for centuries.  And rather than the bright colors of most ceramics, she uses a minimal palette of washed-out earth tones. The smell of the damp clay and rotting organic materials along with the cracking of the clay make it appear that the work is alive, though whether dying or birthing, it’s hard to tell. The arrangement of the forms determines the traffic patterns of viewers, compelling them to walk through the “Site Bloom,” making them feel a part of Hutchinson’s evolving ecosystem.

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Jan
27
2010
Art News By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Halff Collection, Vincent Valdez set for spring

Appeared in Jan. 2010 Glasstire

Childe Hassam's "Clearing Street" (1890) (Courtesy McNay Art Museum)

An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection

McNay Art Museum

Feb. 3-May 9

In the 1980s, San Antonians Marie and Hugh Halff assembled one of the finest private collections of American impressionists, dating from the 1870s to 1930. The Smithsonian Institution showcased the Halff collection to celebrate the 2007 re-opening of the American Art Museum in the restored Old Patent Office Building in Washington D.C. With key artists such as John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson, the 26 paintings span the period in American art known as “The Gilded Age” and range from the modern urbanism of Ernest Lawson’s Flatiron Building (1906-7) to the exoticism of Harry Siddons Mowbray’s Two Women (1893-96). Examining photography from the same era, the accompanying exhibit TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945 is drawn from the collections of the George Eastman House and includes photographers such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Frederick Evans, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz.

Contemporary Art Month

San Antonio, various locations

March 2010

A 24-year-old tradition in July, Contemporary Art Month is celebrating its first quarter-century by moving to March to coincide with Luminaria , a one-night, citywide arts extravaganza founded by former Mayor Phil Hardberger. All of San Antonio’s museums and galleries participate in CAM by presenting contemporary exhibits by local, national and international artists, with the full calendar to be announced in mid-January. Luminaria brings in the performing arts with dance, theater and music on stages set up in Alamo Plaza and downtown streets, highlighted by giant projections on the sides of skyscrapers. Opening March 4, CAM’s centerpiece exhibit, “Amalgamations 25: 25 Artists for 25 Great Years,” at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center is being curated by Wayne Gilbert , a Houston artist known for using human ashes in his work.

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Jan
25
2010
Reviews By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Goudstikker collection “Reclaimed” from Nazis

Appeared in Jan. 2010 Glasstire

Jan ver der Heyden's "View of Nyenrode Castle on the Vecht" (Courtesy McNay Art Museum)

In 1940, the influential Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, his wife Desi and their one-year-old son Edo fled the invading Nazis on a cargo ship bound for England. But within 48 hours of their escape, he died in a freak accident, falling through an open hatch on the ship’s deck and breaking his neck.

Fortunately, though it would take more than 60 years for his heirs to benefit, Goudstikker carried in his breast pocket a little black book detailing his inventory of more than 1,400 works, mostly paintings, by artists such as Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Steen, Vincent van Gogh and Titian.

Hermann Göring, the Nazi’s second-in-command and a rapacious art collector, showed up on the doorstep of the Goudstikker art gallery in Amsterdam just two weeks after the 42-year-old art dealer’s death. Göring orchestrated a forced sale of the Goudstikker inventory in what is now recognized as one of the largest art thefts from an individual perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

In 2006, Marei von Saher, Edo’s widow, successfully concluded a 10-year legal battle with the Dutch government to reclaim 200 of Goudstikker’s paintings from the Dutch government – one of the first and largest claims to Nazi-looted art that has been resolved. Forty-six of the works can be seen in “Reclaimed; Paintings from the Collection of Jacques Goudstikker” on view through Jan. 10, 2010, at the McNay Art Museum.

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Jan
25
2010
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Michele Monseau’s “swing song”

Appeared in Winter 2009 Art Lies

Michele Monseau's "swing song" still (Courtesy McNay)

Generally, the landscapes at the McNay Art Museum, like landscapes everywhere, are anchored to the wall, the iron rule of the horizon line splitting land from sky at a satisfying and reassuring 90-degree angle to the floor. But Michele Monseau plays with our expectations of landscape etiquette with her video installation “swing song.” Mirror images of a reflective lake with a mountain in the background and dramatic clouds appear to dance with each other, rocking back and forth until you can feel a stomach-dropping sense of vertigo. Her rocking landscapes suggest a similar systemic failure to the rigidity of reality as the undulating Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse filmed in 1940. She shot the video at Canyon Lake near San Antonio, though the location doesn’t matter so much as the mythic elements of water, land and sky.

As the motion grows more violent and chaotic, the sense of landscape collapses and abstract forms emerge like a moving Rorschach test. A cascading soundtrack of rushing water, the artist’s humming voice and a reverberating bass provide a soothing contrast to the turbulence of the video. The clouds appear to reach out from the sky with long, ghostly fingers. The intersection of earth and sky begins to twist into a cosmic vortex that contorts the horizon line into a spiral and, briefly, transforms the lake into a mountain. The landscape appears to morp, but it doesn’t. Gradually, the motion slows and the world comes to rest when the horizon line is restored. Short but intense, “swing song” shakes up our perceptions of reality by upsetting our ho-hum preconceptions about the conservatism of the landscape genre.

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Jan
25
2010
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Leigh Anne Lester’s “Franken-flora”

Appeared in Fall 2009 Art Lies

Leigh Anne Lester's plant mutation (Courtesy artist)

Derived from historical botanicals, Leigh Anne Lester’s graphite and colored pencil drawings on translucent Mylar appear delicate and beautiful. However, each depicts what the artist calls “Franken-flora,” ominous amalgams inspired by the threats and promises of genetic modification. The boundaries between the naturally-occurring and the manmade blur as Lester combines various flowers, vines, seed pods and ferns into individual works of single organisms. Each hybrid portrayed has the potential to upset the natural order of the world, though usually under the guise of improving humankind’s chances of survival.

The purest expression of this conundrum is a deceptively alluring black-and-white realistic illustration, Amalgamate Fusion Untitled. A single root ball branches out into different plants, ranging from acorns to ferns. These unrelated florae appear to form a harmonious unity, though all they really share is Lester’s flawless draftsmanship. Viewers may admire the elegance of this new creation, but on close examination, the construction is obviously unnatural and somewhat menacing – a mutation. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Lester’s imagined genetic modification may seem like genius in the laboratory, but the impact for good or bad can’t be determined until it is set loose in the world.

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Jan
23
2010
Artists By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

Meg Langhorne romances nature

Appeared in Fall 2009 Art Lies

Meg Langhorne is inspired by romance novel covers (Courtesy Cactus Bra)

The rape of nature takes a romantic twist in San Antonio artist Meg Langhorne’s “Animal,” featuring exquisite gouache on paper paintings of burly, macho men embracing swooning creatures with deer heads attached to voluptuous women’s bodies. Derived from the covers of romance novels, these paperback book-size works are humorous but also a little sickening. Langhorne, who works in a used bookstore, has developed an appreciation for the artists who create these seductive images for the seemingly endless waves of romance novels washing across the shore of the American imagination.

While widely disdained, romance novels also are among the most wildly popular products of pop culture. Harlequin, for example, publishes 1,200 new titles annually. Romance is a $1.3 billion a year business satisfying 51 million mostly female readers, but the majority of the cover illustration artists are male. The covers are as codified and formulaic as the novels themselves, filled with masculine iconography such as swords, bulging biceps and bare chests.  But Langhorne also sees parallels between romance and hunting, which both require men to use all their predatory skills.

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Jan
23
2010
Reviews By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

“Communion of Saints” at David Shelton

Ann-Michele Morales' "Life's Pimples" (Courtesy David Shelton)

“A Communion of Saints” brings together 12 artists from cities that share a Spanish colonial heritage, six from Santa Barbara and six from San Antonio, to see if perhaps there are any similarities. But in a fragmented art world fractured along conceptual lines, it’s hard to see much of a sense of place.

Rather than dealing with local issues, they look inward, exploring personal concerns with universal implications. Curator Miki Garcia, executive director of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, has assembled a lively show brimming with wit and cleverness, revealing that what is most common to this group of artists is a quirky sense of humor.

Ann-Michelle Morales uses a rubbery frog/man/guinea pig figure that recalls simple but politically-charged Eastern European animation. The figure serves as a sad sack everyman in these dueling diptychs, though his troubles tend toward the romantic. In “Pomoandro,” he stands forlornly before Miss Perfect SA, an ad for a topless joint, and makes a target out of a background consisting of the phrase “HeShe” repeated endlessly in tiny handwritten letters. “Frustrated Chinaman” features a man staring through a keyhole at the confusion of China, with a background that reads “You Will Like It Here.” In “Abstract War,” he tries to fend off a swarm of bright splashes of color.

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Jan
12
2010
San Antonio By Dan R. Goddard | No comments yet

South Texas artists heart Blood and Tissue Center

Estevan Arredondo’s “Indigenous” (Courtesday South Texas Blood & Tissue

The South Texas Blood and Tissue Center strives to deliver the highest quality blood and tissue services for the lowest possible cost, but the center still manages to devote 1 percent of its construction budget to building a remarkable collection of contemporary art by San Antonio artists.

The center’s board recognizes the connection between healing the body and nurturing the soul. Many of the works in the center’s collection are made from recycled materials, celebrating the generous donors who share their life-giving blood.

The Donor Pavilion, the latest addition to the campus designed by Garza-Bomberger, features newly commissioned works ranging from a flock of box kites suspended over the main hallway by Stuart Allen, who created the reflective panels on the new Museum Reach of the San Antonio River, to a large photograph of an empty heart-shaped chocolate box by Chuck Ramirez, made poignant by the fact that the artist has undergone heart surgery.

“This is one of the best places in the city to see a broad range of work by local artists,” said Donna Simon, an artist who served on center’s selection committee. “I think the collection really does provide a glimpse into the city’s artistic soul.”

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