Forty Years of Looking
As the year turned, I realized with more than a modicum of surprise that I have been going to art exhibitions at galleries, arts centers, non-profit spaces, museums, and artists' studios for forty years, in Greater Cincinnati and across the country. It seems a fortuitous time to remember the art that has really stuck with me, even altered my perceptions of things, over this period, and to share these observations with readers.
Rather quickly into my meditations and ruminations, I became aware that the majority of art that's impacted me were in shows I saw before I went into the art business. That unbridled delight changed when I was looking as a critic, a curator, an art advisor; parts of my intellect detach when I've looked for professional reasons. I've generally lost the ability to look at art viscerally. I also know myself well enough that I've always been more engaged by content than by technique, and that I'm a Romantic rather than a Classicist or Duchampian. My original art history professor in college (1964-1968) also turned out to be correct on a number of points: one's taste doesn't change that much over time, although one's appreciation and understanding of other art may and usually does. (He also predicted that I'd become a collector: bear in mind, I was a political science major).
Bukang Kim. Mountain #1, 1987. Acrylic on paper, 42x42in. Photo courtesy of the artist.The first lecture I heard from current Cincinnati Art Museum director Aaron Betsky was summary: he believes that viewers of museum shows and collections are not looking for “transformative experiences” vis-a-vis art, but are rather seeking some connections with daily life. I seek the transformative.
Carl Solway's original exhibition of screen prints of Warhol Soup Cans (1970, I think) was an epiphany for me (I bought two for $150 each). Like the Germans, I saw the darker side of Pop Art right away, that undeniable emphasis on surfaces and consumer objects for which Warhol was to become so famous. Warhol's work has served as a cautionary note to and for me, and I've viewed Warhol as a seer ever since. Solway has exhibited so many superior print shows, and my favorites tended to be group shows. I came to love (and collect) work by Joan Snyder, Pat Steir, Ed Paschke, Alfred Leslie, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Longo, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Christo, Ed Rushca, de Kooning, dozens of others because of the Solway eye and prescience. I admit that I regret giving so many away to museums in my forties, believing that they would actually be used. My mistake. Solway first showed John Stewart's famous figures under satin sheets, and still exhibits the multi-talented Jay Bolotin. I first saw Cal Kowal's photogaphs at Solway's; his Unfamiliar House series still moves me with their elegaic senses of loss.
Beverly Erschell. Beyond the Trees, 2003, 32x36 inches. Photo courtesy of the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery The Millers of Miller Gallery on Hyde Park Square offered far more of a range of work than many are aware. (I've always had a special feeling for Barbara and Norman, because as newly marrieds they lived four houses from where I was a newly hatched child—I'd known them all my life.) Surprise finds here: the “Celia” images by David Hockney; early conceptual work by Dennis Oppenheim; underrated prints and sculpture by Marino Marini; prints by Thomas Hart Benton; a one-man print show by Günter Grass. I remember a poignant show by a Charles Frasier, who collaged envelopes dealing with memory and loss. I first came to know and love the paintings by Ft. Thomas, Kentucky native Beverly Erschell, whose retrospective book of her career came out in 2009. Classical portrait heads by a sculptor named Barkin frequently impressed one.
Valerie Shesko. July, 2004. Egg tempera on panel, 24x24in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The original Don Malton, founder of The Malton Gallery, probably had the most accessible range of art in the area. I still remember the absolute shock at first seeing Valerie Shesko's paintings. They can be as ethereal as the atmosphere itself; her landscapes combine abstracted concepts from the Hudson River School/Luminosts, with American Abstract Expressionist brushwork, and a definitive Chinese calligraphic sense of drawing and composing in her work. Shesko is one of America's great colorists. (I would later evolve most of my theories on beauty from examining her work, leading to around twelve exhibitions I've curated with 'Beauty' in the title. I've collected her work heavily, and sold, I believe, hundreds of them.) Malton also showed the exquisite prints of Art Werger and expressionist collages by English artist/poet Trevor Edmonds. He showed Andrea Knarr's mysterious and beautifully crafted prints, and the off-the-wall sexual spoofs of Lynn Rose.
Closson's downtown gallery, the city's oldest art gallery, showed one great artist after another in the early 1970's under the astute eye of Phyllis Weston's stewardship. I first saw some of the most elegant drawings on earth—colored pencil work of area fossils by Constance McClure, there, and later may have owned more of her work than that of any other artist. Her fascination with reviving old mediums—silver, copper, and goldpoint, as well as fresco—was as refreshing as was her determination to keep figure work alive and well and flourishing. Thousands of Art Academy students have raved about her teaching. Her often over-scaled drawings of her own family, taken from old photographs, are hauntingly beautiful; her draftsmanship is impeccable. McClure makes small watercolors when she travels, and they have an undeniable elegance and charm. (As my family got to know Connie, she asked the four of us to model for her nude. My wife, one stepson, and I all agreed to do so, but my older stepson declined. It became a running joke amongst us, that only in our family would it be considered abnormal not to have honored her request.)
Patricia Renick. Stegowagenvolkssaurus, 1974. Steel, Glass. Property of Northern Kentucky University. Courtesy of Steely Library. Photo by Michael Providenti, 23 Jan 2009.
Patricia Renick's sculptures first caught my eye at Closson's downtown—spoofs of academics' heads, resting on classical pillars. Her two masterpieces move me to this day, as do the memories of Pat explaining how she talked Volkswagen—and later the U.S. Army—into giving her a car and helicopter, which became monumental sculptures proposing the obsolescence of the automobile and of war. These sculptures were exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center, as were Renick's funereal, sarcophagi-like figures of women sleeping/floating in boats, suspended from the CAC's ceiling (two different shows of them, about twenty years apart). Renick would later transform the entire art world's ideas about women sculptors.
Sally Schrohenloher's awesome still lives, often fruit upon lace tablecloths, were often shown at Closson's; I've never seen better still life paintings still. And Closson's introduced David Miretsky, newly arrived from Russia (I served as his translator at his original opening). Beginning with icon-esque miniature portraits, Miretsky moved into monumentally-scaled paintings of extraordinary satire of new Russian immigrants. I also first saw the truly outstanding work of Cole Carothers at Closson's.
Frank Herrmann. Gardening of Orders, 1989. Acrylic on canvas, 96"x160". Photo courtesy of the artist.
Toni Birckhead's now closed gallery never had a bad show. Her eye tended towards the formalist, the cerebral. Artists whose work I particularly remember and admire include Frank Herrmann, now a Guggenheim winner; Kim Krause; Deborah Morrissey-McGaff's transformed paintings; McCrystle Wood; John Pierson; Dennis Harrington's sculptures, and the versatility gifted Peter Huttinger's challengingly exciting oeuvre (the gates which were installed outside the CAC—in the Federal Reserve Garden—were phenomenal; his images of rabbits were precursors of Jeff Koons). Stephanie Cooper's sculptures and Dennis Puhalla's paintings and drawings remain strong decades later. So do drawings by Kathie Johnson and Jan Harrison, and photographs by Barry Andersen. Birckhead also gave the city many of its public sculptures; I've long been a fan of the George Rickey.
When, next door, Michael Lowe mounted temporary shows, his extraordinary eye found expressive printmakers like Rita Zimmerman and Charles Grund. I first saw Ana England's amazing sculpture at an NKU show.
Ana England. Chrysalis, 1993. Carved plywood and paint, 11"x52"x20". Photo courtesy of the artist.
Images, the photography-only gallery, is most sorely missed. Nary a mediocre photograph graced those doors: we saw Jerry Uelsmann and Arthur Tress, Harry Callahan, Arnold Newman, and many whose names I blush to admit I've forgotten.
The Arts Consortium was a hidden asset in the white art community—but the raku sculptures of invented architectural fragments by Althea Thompson remain strong thirty-five years later, as do paintings by Tom Phelps and Ken Leslie, and sculpture by Jimi Jones. I also first heard the amazing Kathy Wade sing there.
Exhibition view of 'The Vital Gesture: Franz Kline in Retrospect' at the Cincinnati Art Museum, November 27, 1985- March 2, 1986. Photo courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum.The two exhibitions I most remember at the Cincinnati Art Museum are the Franz Kline painting show and the first exhibition of Thom Shaw's phenomenal woodcuts. Prints curator Kristin Spangenberg also found first-rate work by (then) Soviet-dominated Eastern European printmakers which were as compelling as the novels and plays emanating therefrom. Ruth Meyer's shows at the Taft Museum were uniformly superior—never has a museum here had better exhibitions. Louise Bourgeois sculptures, Brad Davis paintings, and a wonderfully sophisticated painting show called 'Cavaliers and Cardinals' still give me pleasure in my mind's eye.
The short-lived WCET Gallery first exposed me to the work of both Kevin Kelly and Bukang Kim, the latter a painter I believe to be the area's greatest. Dealers in older art occasionally showcase a living artist, and we owe the discovery of the hugely gifted Carl Samson to Mary Ran Gallery, and of Tom Bacher and his peculiarly moving luminescent paintings to the Cincinnati Art Galleries. Mary Ran also showed superior work by Leslie Shiels and Jack Meanwell.
Nancy Graves. Totem, 1970. Animal skin, steel, gauze, wax, oil paint, latex, acrylic, 102x36x36 inches. Courtesy of the Nancy Graves Foundation and Ameringer, McEnery, Yohe Fine Art, New York.The Contemporary Arts Center really provided an uncannily astute and challenging number of exhibitions which I remember vividly. Their original Nancy Graves show, back in the 1970s, was truly transformative. An anthropologist as well as artist, her interpretations of, and reach between art and science, were revolutionary. I think those haunting strips dangling from the ceiling at the CAC were camel skin. The exoticism of the materials presented as part of this show was a breakthrough in my visual thinking and vocabulary (later helping me appreciate artists such as Eva Hesse). Carl Solway Gallery contracted with Graves to make a series of prints based upon the landing on the Moon. The beauty and fascination of maps was as important to them as the artistic interpretations of aspects of the Moon.
Jennifer Bartlett's exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center would no doubt now be called an installation. Across the entire back wall of the Center were ceramic tiles with interpretive symbols, or pictograms, of a house. The primal nature of the symbol and its prominence in the origin of language was made both intellectually and visually clear, the images profoundly simplified, referring to the new look of graphic design, while alluding to geometric reductionism as well: these ideas were new to me then, and I learned from looking. (The CAC hired artist Sandy Rosen to be its first education director, probably in the early 1980s, who taught us to “walk the walls with our eyes.” ) When the Vogel Collection was shown there, I was mesmerized by Richard Tuttle's wire sculptures, which looked like drawings with wire, the shadows from the lights becoming an integral part of the work. These kinds of subtleties were new for me, but became common experiences if you went to the Contemporary Arts Center regularly and were willing to take a little time to learn to look. A show of Bruce Naumann's neon sculptures was brilliant and unusually prescient. Although I still believe that minimal art makes a minimal statement, I was much challenged by Carl Andre's sculptures.
Director Jack Bolton's first show (in the now old new Contemporary Arts Center) was called 'Eat Art.' Everything was edible, and everything made into an art form. I'd seen later famous performance artist Pat Olescko roaming around the University of Michigan campus in 1969-1970 while I was getting my Masters degree in Asian Art History, in the most bizarre clown-like outfits (she was a walking advertisement for a topless bar in nearby Toledo, OH), and we contacted her for the finale of 'Eat Art,' where she jumped out of an approximately 10' cake. And after the opening, a group of us came back to our apartment, including Jack and P.R. Director Sharon Lawson, who was worried about remembering to turn off all the lights before everyone left the CAC. I asked her what would happen to the giant popsicles Graeters had fabricated in freezer cases, with the lights off....did Sharon ever leave fast! (nothing got melted) Over 900 people attended that opening, and what I remember most, beyond the show or shows, was the fun we had, and how much of our lives, social and aesthetic, began to revolve around the CAC. We were never networking nor self-conscious about ourselves as 'young professionals.' It was rare to miss the gallery openings on West Fourth Street, when most of the contemporary galleries were 'clustered' there and opened on the same night every six weeks. Most of our social lives revolved around these evenings, the people we ran into and had a drink and burger with later (if you had the energy, you'd go to the Carnegie Arts Center or The Tangeman Gallery at UC).
As an aside, I believe that the best exhibition I have ever curated was 'Calligraphic Expressionism' at Xavier University's A.B. Cohen Gallery, June-August of 2008. All the artists, with one exception, live and work here. The show is a summary of most of my visual passions: Chinese and Japanese painting; the American Sublime; American Abstract Expressionism. Together, they represent the superb view of the Romantic, gestural landscape. Participants were Valerie Shesko; Bukang Kim; Kay Hurley; Trish Weeks; Frank Satogata; Kitty Uetz; Marsha Karagheusian-Murphy; New York Watercolorist John Holden.
'Calligraphic Expressionism' at Xavier University's A.B. Cohen Gallery, June-August of 2008. Curated by Daniel Brown. Featuring artists Valerie Shesko, Bukang Kim, Kay Hurley, Trish Weeks, Frank Satogata, Kitty Uetz, Marsha Karagheusian-Murphy, and John Holden. Photo Courtesy of Kay Hurley.
My mother's friend Ursula Laurens approached me at an opening of a print show at Carl Solway Gallery in which I had just bought an Ed Paschke print, wanting to know if I really did like the print (Paschke was part of the Chicago “Hairy Who” group), and when I assured her that I did, she told me that night was going to be the end of her own (extensively modernist) collection, as she tangibly found the art of no interest to her. She proposed that, as a collector, the same thing would eventually happen to me. When it did, also at Carl Solway Gallery—the shows were by Richard Milani and Jeff Koons, to whose work I felt no connection—I realized my era was over, too.
I've never stopped collecting—I'm still likely to buy a drawing by unknown local artists—but my active collecting period (1968-1987) had ended, and my professional concerns were different, and had remained so all along. I owe a great deal, however, to these dealers and artists and institutions, whose visions are part of the person I have become, and hope that whomever may have read this far may experience the multiplex complex joys of looking at new art and integrating it into your life and your intellect and emotions. As Marcel Proust reminds us in À la recherche du temps perdu, the live experience is most important and magical, and will sustain us indefinitely as memories which may be touchstones from one's own madeleine.
