Tag: Florida

Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

In 1986, the Tampa Museum of Art acquired 175 ancient objects from the eminent collection of Joseph Veach Noble, thought to comprise the largest private collection of Athenian vases in North America at the time. This acquisition became the cornerstone of the Museum’s burgeoning permanent collection of antiquities. This article (1) highlights significant events in the life and career of Mr. Noble; (2) presents the significant personalities and events which led to the acquisition of his collection by the Tampa Museum of Art;  (3) assesses the importance of that collection; and (4) passes in review some of the more interesting objects in the extraordinary exhibition currently on view at the Museum.

JOSEPH VEACH NOBLE 
It’s funny sometimes, isn’t it, when an accidental hobby develops into a life-long pursuit which is successfully integrated into one’s professional life? The trajectory of the life and career of Joseph Veach Noble, whose career and collection are being celebrated by the Tampa Museum of Art, is a case in point. (Figure 1)

Figure 1
Joseph Veach Noble, captured in a pensive moment in this photograph taken in 1965, as he thinks about an Attic, black-figure Pan-Athenaic amphora after consulting the seminal work by John Beazley. Vases such as these were awarded to victors of athletic contests staged at Athens, which feature an image of the goddess Athena, the patron of that city.
(Yousuf Karsh (Armenian-born Canadian, 1908-2002), Portrait of Joseph Veach Noble (black and white photograph). Library and Archives Canada, 1987-054, vol. 197, sitting 12547, no. 35.
Photograph courtesy of the Yousuf Karsh Archive)

THE FORMATIVE YEARS
Mr. Noble was born in Philadelphia in 1920. He honed his collecting interests early in life when as a child, he trudged up and down the planted rows of vegetables on his paternal aunt’s small farm in rural New Jersey in search of native American arrow-heads; later, he also collected fossils. His interest in antiquity was piqued during the Saturday mornings spent at programs for school-aged students hosted by the University of Pennsylvania for which he, as a young, project leader, created models of pharaonic and Roman imperial villas, reinforced by visits to the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia with its collection of casts of classical sculpture, and his study of Latin in high school. He took art classes, drawing still-lives in charcoal or conte crayon. Noble would while away the evening hours at home learning how to photograph and develop negatives in the family kitchen turned darkroom by his father who had worked his way through dental school from income earned by photographing dentures and restorations

EMPLOYMENT NOT A DEGREE
Mr. Noble enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania as a pre-med student, but never graduated because concurrent with attending classes he was also a member of the non-university affiliated Photographic Club of Philadelphia which enabled him to exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Six of his photographs are on view in the present exhibition from which one can gain an impression of the scope of his work. (Figure 2) By his own admission, Mr. Noble explained how he impulsively responded to a  random call to that Club for a full-time still photographer from a Philadelphia-based firm specializing in what one now terms film. He put his academic studies on the back-burner by attending night classes. He soon abandoned college altogether to devote himself to his full time post  in 1946 which, shortly after his hire, required him to master the art of cinematography. Two years later he produced and directed, Photography in Science, which won the 1948 Venice Film Festival award for scientific documentaries. Thereafter Mr. Noble was hired by  Film Counselors, Inc. in New York as their  Executive Vice-President. He now had motive and opportunity for pursuing his collecting interests in earnest as his quotidian included repeated visits to dealers in New York City and an ever-increasing awareness of dealers abroad, whose inventory could be perused through catalogues and photographs. 

Figure 2
Youth by Joseph Veach Noble Mr. Noble’s interests in photography, nurtured in his youth by his father, eventually led to his career as a cinematographer.

(Joseph Veach Noble (American, 1920-2007), Youth (black and white photograph; undated, ca. 1945-1956). Tampa Museum of Art, Gift of Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1991.009.002)

A VERY CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Mr. Noble’s eureka moment occurred  in 1953 when he acquired a very large vase, 21 inches in height, which was described as an Etruscan vase representing a mounted  Amazon. Mr. Noble, justifiably proud of this recent acquisition, showed its photo to a European dealer who chanced to be in New York at that time. The dealer urged Mr. Noble to contact Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer, the assistant curator in the Greek and Roman Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who, it was reported, was in the process of writing a book about the Amazons, those legendary, formidable female warriors of ancient Greek mythology. And so an  appointment was arranged for November.

As an art advisor myself, I am often placed in a seemingly awkward situation in which I am obliged to inform a collector of a mistake. As Dr. von Bothmer recalls the meeting, his assessment of that vase was ruthless.  The vase was not Etruscan. It was created in Apulia, in South Italy. Furthermore, the subject was not a mounted Amazon, but rather a  generic South Italian warrior. I t was the dealer who was to be faulted for the erroneous information, but the collector should have been more circumspect in his blanket acceptance of the data. The critique, admittedly disappointing, made a profound impression upon Mr. Noble, who volunteered that, undaunted, he would still seek out that curator’s opinion in future. 

HANDS-ON EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY    
On subsequent visits, Dr. von Bothmer introduced Mr. Noble to his colleague, Christine Alexander. She then orchestrated his European trip in 1954, a kind of pub crawl during which the Noble family visited museums and  dealers in Rome, London, and Paris.  The culmination of that trip was a personal visit with Homer and Dorothy Thompson, stalwarts of the excavations of the Agora, or market place, of ancient Athens, which was the flag ship of the archaeological activities in Greece of the  American School of Classical Studies. That meeting reinforced Mr. Noble’s  interest in the technical processes by which Greek vases were crafted as he mined Athenian clay for use in his experiments at home involving a kiln in the basement of his home. On view in the current exhibition are examples of the actual objects that Mr. Noble fired in that kiln. (Figure 4)

Figure 4
These four plaques represent some of the examples of experimental archaeology which Mr. Noble conducted using the kiln in the basement of his home. Here he is experimenting with the chemical composition of the black glaze used by potters in ancient Athens.
(Noble’s experiments [ceramic plaques; undated, ca. early 1960s]. Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection)

Every cloud has a silver lining.  A few months later, in January, Professor A. D. Trendall, an internationally recognized authority on South Italian vases who was based in Australia, came to the States and was shown photos of the vase. Professor Trendall’s research had enabled him to group those vases into categories. Mr. Noble’s vase was an outstanding exemplar of one of his groups. In keeping with academic practice, since most of the classical vases were neither signed by potter nor painter,  vases are assigned a name generally based on their present location. Accordingly Professor Trendall assigned that specific group of  Apulian vases to The Maplewood Painter, named after the town in suburban New Jersey in which Mr. and Mrs. Noble were residing.  (figure 3)

Figure 3a-b
Dr. Dietrich von Bothmer’s ruthless critique of this vase which revealed that the mounted warrior was not an Amazon but rather a generic depiction of a warrior cemented his friendship and collaboration with Mr. Noble. This vase was then to become known as the eponymous Maplewood Painter vase, the name given to this classification of vessels by Prof. A. D. Trendall, in honor of the Noble’s hometown in New Jersey where Mr. Noble’s collection was housed.
(Eponymous Maplewood Painter vase (ceramic column krater; Apulia, Italy; late Classical period, ca. 360-350 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, Museum Purchase in part with funds donated by Mr. and Mrs. William Knight Zewadski, 1986.102)

ULTERIOR MOTIVES
Contact with Dr. von Bothmer continued. He, then, with a hidden agenda of his own, introduced Mr. Noble to Mr. James Joseph Rorimer, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Noble’s account of that visit, in the director’s Manhattan apartment, is fascinating because it demonstrated how Mr. Rorimer’s very long and drawn out conversation was actually, in hindsight, a camouflaged job interview, which lead to Mr. Noble’s appointment in 1956 as that institution’s Operating Administrator.  

SCIENCE IN THE SERVICE OF ART
Now, as a colleague of Dr. von Bothmer, Mr. Noble could spend his time every day before his official duties began and after they had ended in prolonged contact with an enormous collection of Greek vases. He now had added resources at his disposal to continue his research into the technical processes by which Greek vases were manufactured because Mr. Noble, as Dr. Suzanne Murray, remarked, 

….not only collected the finer examples, but also was interested in the pots that showed mistakes: misfiring that failed to turn figures from red to black, spalling that showed the clay had not been properly prepped, ancient repairs to broken vessels. These less-than-perfect products helped Mr. Noble with his research.

Many of these “mistakes” are on view in this exhibition. (figure 5 )

Figure 5
Mr. Noble was interested in “mistakes” made by ancient potters. This lump of clay is a fragment of a type of wine cup called a kylix. The potter probably crumpled the cup while it was still malleable because its shape did not come out successfully, as compared to Figure 11. Perhaps it was used as a support in the kiln as it was actually fired in this state. It is among the oldest artefacts in the Noble collection.
(Crumpled wine cup (ceramic kylix fragment; Pylos, Messenia, Greece; Mycenaean period, ca. 1400 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.005)

Mr. Noble was also keenly aware of the fact that Ms. Gisela Marie Augusta Richter, a former curator and predecessor of Dr. von Bothmer, had taken classes in throwing and firing pottery which provided her with the hands-on knowledge from which to draw for her publications about aspects of Greek vases. As instructive as those publications were, and still are, their subject matter was restricted to the physical manipulation of the clay, whereas Mr. Noble’s concerns focused on the chemistry involved, such as the component elements of the glazes used and how those elements were effected by the temperature within the kiln. He summarized the results of his investigations in an article published in 1960, which he expanded into a book published five years later. So significant were his observations that a revised  edition, published in 1988, still remains one of the first go-to sources.

FINGERING A FORGERY WITH A PEN KNIFE AND A PRIVATE EYE 
In the late 1950’s, during one of his by now routine visits through the museum’s galleries, his attention was drawn to a monumental, Etruscan terracotta statue of a warrior which had been given pride of place by virtue of  the way it was exhibited. (Figure 6) It had become in many ways the trade mark for the museum’s classical collections, although some nay-sayers were progressively expressing grave reservations about its authenticity. Aware of the controversy, Mr. Noble’s attention was arrested by the presence of its black glaze. He reasoned that an analysis of the chemical composition of that glaze might help resolve the question of its authenticity. In order to do so, he needed a sample, which he candidly admitted he obtained by surreptitiously taking his pen-knife out of one of his pockets which he used to scrape off a sample of the glaze when the attention of the gallery’s guard was temporarily distracted. In possession of that precious sample, Mr. Noble recognized he faced a conundrum. If the glaze were tested by the museum’s own staff and deemed to be ancient, conspiracy theorists could claim the analysis was rigged so as not to condemn the authenticity of the warrior. He, therefore, resolved to entrust the sample to a disinterested, but highly competent, third party who would analyze the sample in confidence. Within a short period of time, the results of the spectroscopic analysis were received which revealed that the coloring agent for the glaze was manganese, not iron. Magnanese was never  employed before the late Medieval period; it was iron on which the potters of ancient vases exclusively relied as their coloring agent.  

Figure 6
The monumental “Etruscan warrior” which was exposed as a modern forgery by Mr. Noble because of his analysis of the black glaze found on its surfaces and his orchestration of cloak-and-dagger face-to-face encounters with the forger.

(Colossal Etruscan terracotta warrior (Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 21.195). Image taken from Gisela M. A. Richter, “Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” MMA Papers 6 (1937), pl. 1)

Realizing that corroborating evidence would substantially support his case, Mr. Noble then enlisted Dr. von Bothmer’s assistance. Like every competent curator who meticulously tracks the art market, Dr. von Bothmer  had maintained files of dealers, their inventories, their associates, and other data that he deem so necessary to document the provenance, or chain-of-possession, of the classical vases which were the area of his expertise. The two then collated the data from those files with the museum’s own acquisition records which revealed that the warrior had been acquired in pieces over the course of three separate purchases made in 1915, 1916, and 1921.The pieces were then re-assembled by the museum. The vendor’s identify was known, but Dr.von Bothmer’s files revealed that that antiquarian often worked in partnership with another individual who might be able to shed additional light on the purchases. Via a complicated series of cloak-and-dagger operations not unlike those detailed in detective novels, Mr. Noble, via his  cinematic connections, secured the services of a private investigator who traveled to Rome and tracked down the partner who was then actively manufacturing fake, bronze Etruscan statuettes for the tourist trade. Maneuvering like a chess master  because of the partner’s steadfast reluctance to discuss the matter, Mr. Noble then successfully arranged for Dr. von Bothmer, primed in advance on  how to conduct the conversation,  to travel to Rome for a face-to-face, during which the partner admitted that he had indeed used bioxide of manganese in  his manufacturing of the warrior. Bingo!  The museum went public in February 1961 with its announcement on Valentine’s Day that the warrior was indeed counterfeit. 

WITH SOME HELP FROM TUTANKHAMUN
Among the objects which were included in the acquisition of the Noble collection is a wooden box, across the lid of which in black ink was scrawled the warning, CAUTION! NATRON. Handle & Unpack with Care. The contents of that box together with other items including linen, pottery vases, and floral wreaths, were part of a find which was excavated by Theodore M. Davis in the Valley of the Kings. The entire find was subsequently associated with the funeral of Tutankhamun, the contents of which were collected by the mortuary priests and purposefully buried in a pit dug expressly for their interment in keeping with religious requirements which prohibited their disposal as trash. In compliance with all existing laws, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was permitted to acquire as acquisitions a selection of objects from that find.

Other hand-written notations on that same lid indicate that the box contained a bag of natron,  a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate (or soda ash) and sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda), along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. (Figure 7) Natron was the primary material employed to desiccate, or dry out, the body, during the mummification process.

Figure 7
The box containing two bags of natron, a naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate and sodium bicarbonate (also called baking soda), along with small quantities of sodium chloride and sodium sulfate from the so-called Embalmers’ Cache of Tutankhamun. Mr. Noble used that material in his use of experimental archaeology which help him to document the technological processes by which ancient Egyptian faience was manufactures. That box and its contents are on view in this exhibition together with examples of the results of Mr. Noble’s experimentation.

(Bag of natron (linen bag; Valley of the Kings, West Thebes, Egypt; New Kingdom, 18th Dynasty, ca. 1323 bce) and Noble’s experiments (faience figurines and steatite; undated, ca. late 1960s), on view in the exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection. Photography: Paige Bosca)

But Mr. Noble understood that natron was also used as a principal ingredient in the manufacture of ancient Egyptian faience, anciently termed tekhenit, a glazed material, generally turquoise-blue in color, which was used to create a wide variety of  shining, glistening objects from beads for jewelry to deluxe vases. (Figure 8) His exploration of the technique by which faience was manufactured went hand-in-glove with his work on the black glaze used in the creation of Greek pottery. In 1969 Mr. Noble published the results of his research about the processes by which ancient Egyptian faience was manufactured.

Figure 8
An original, faience aryballos, or ointment flask, from the collection of Mr. Noble, which he used in conjunction with his experimental archaeology to document the technical processes by which faience, an ancient glazed material, was manufactured. The diamond pattern on the walls of this flask were intentionally created so that the vase would not slip from the grasp of the fingers of its owner while applying its slippery contents.

(Diamond-patterned oil flask (faience aryballos; Rhodes, Greece; Archaic period, ca. 600-550 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.006)

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

Mr. Noble resigned his position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970 in order to assume the role of director of the Museum of the City of New York.  Despite that change in his employment status, Mr. Noble’s reputation as a scholar and consummate connoisseur and collector of classical vases continued unabated and was universally recognized. And as a collector and museum official, he was accustomed to the common practice of lending objects to institutions for temporary exhibitions. So, it was only a matter of course that he was asked and consented to loan three of his vases to the very first exhibition of antiquities ever mounted by the Tampa Museum of Art. That show, Styles and Lifestyles of the Ancient World, premiered here on March 1, 1983.  Ms. Genevieve Linnehan, the Curator of Collections (1979-1992) at the Tampa Museum of Art whose speciality was modern art, organized the exhibition, enlisting the assistance of Mr. William Knight Zewadski (“Bill’) and  Dr. Suzanne Murray, who had earned her doctorate in ancient art from the University of Minnesota and was affiliated with the University of South Florida.

THE ART OF NETWORKING

PAUL JENNEWEIN AND JOSEPH NOBLE
Paul Jennewein of Philadelphia was a noted American sculptor whose oeuvre included the massive sculptural pediment adorning the façade of the south east entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (figure 9)  Jim Jennewein, his son, and Joseph Noble both fellow Philadelphians, were friends who also shared their mutual service on the board of Brookgreen Gardens. It was Joseph Noble who had suggested to Paul Jennewein that he leave his lifework of sculpture to Tampa. That suggestion turned into a bequest in 1978, when approximately 2,500 sculptures, models, drawings, medals, and related ephemera from his estate were bequeathed to the Tampa Bay Art. Part of that collection is now on exhibition C.Paul Jennewein (April 16, 2023–2025) at the Museum through 2025. 

Figure 9
These models for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the Philadelphia-based artist C. Paul Jennewein are part of his estate bequeathed to the Tampa Museum of Art. His friendship with Mr. Noble enabled members of his family to network with the team from Tampa Bay in the initial discussions with Mr. Noble which led to the eventual acquisition of the Noble collection by the Tampa Museum of Art.

(C. Paul Jennewein (German-American, 1890-1978), models for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on view in Sketches and Sculptures: A Study of C. Paul Jennewein at the Tampa Museum of Art, June 13, 2020 – February 28, 2021. Photography: Philip LaDeau)

Jim Jennewein’s wife, Joan, would later recall a conversation in which her father-in-law stated that Mr. Noble was reluctant to donate  his collection to a large, established institution where it would get lost. If on the other hand, it was given to a smaller museum it would really be seen. Armed with such a position, Jim Jennewein then suggested to Mr. Noble on May 12, 1984 that he give the collection to the Tampa Museum of Art. Mr. Noble countered  by stating that he would be willing to sell the collection to the Tampa Museum of Art for one million dollars.

Mr. Zewadski then picked up the ball and continued to run with it. On November 26, 1984 Mr. Noble sent Mr. Zewadski the card catalogue together with seven volumes of photographs of his collection. Mr. Andy Maass then  wrote to Mr. Noble, who incidentally was Mr. Maass’s first employer,  on February 13, 1985, explaining that although he was only two months into his tenure as director of the Tampa Museum of Art he would be interested in the loan of the collection for a temporary exhibition which would run from December 1985 through February 1986. 

AN UNFORESEEN PROBLEM
The planning for such an exhibition ran into a snag because Ms. Genevieve Linnehan was scheduled to take maternity leave. She was of the opinion, which was widely-shared by others, that any effort to acquire the Noble collection would be enhanced by the presence of an individual with an advanced degree in ancient art. The issue was satisfactorily resolved when Dr. Murray, who had already collaborated with Ms. Genevieve Linnehan and Mr. Zewadski on the first exhibition of antiquities at the museum, agreed to serve as the guest curator for the Noble collection.

THE ON-SITE PERSONAL INSPECTION
Mr. Zewadski mobilized Mr. Maass and Dr. Murray on May 22, 1985, for a road trip that brought them to New York and New Jersey where they visited the offices of Mr. Noble in the city and his home in Maplewood.  Dr. Murray recalls that the visit was great fun. She saw the Maplewood Krater (Figure 3) sitting on a TV console and the Neptune statue (Figure 10)  standing on the stair landing.

It was such a unique combination of the mundane and modern with the precious and antique. He then produced the gold necklace and earrings to show us—so delicate—which his wife had never seen, and seemed a little \reluctant to include in the deal!

The visit concluded with trip to Drew University where some of Mr. Noble’s vases were featured in a loan exhibition. Days later Mr. Zewadski sent the seven volumes of photographs of the Noble collection together with numerous copies of articles which had been published about that collection to Mr. Maass.

Figure 10
The statue of Poseidon/Neptune, the Graeco-Roman god of the sea, which Dr. Murray described as seeing for the first time on a landing of the staircase in the Maplewood home of the Nobles. This statue was one of the sources of inspiration for the special loan exhibition, Poseidon and the Sea: Myth, Cult, and Daily Life, mounted by former curator, Dr. Seth D. Pevnik, which ran at Tampa from June-November 2014 before moving on to its second venue at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska.

(Neptune with Dolphin (marble sculpture; Rome, Italy; Roman Imperial period, ca. 50-100 ce), on view in the exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.135. Photography: Paige Bosca)

A STRATEGY FOR THE FINANCIAL PACKAGE
Moving quickly within a month, Mr. Maass then formally requested the museum’s board to consider the acquisition of the collection which lead to the immediate formation of a subcommittee of the museum’s Acquisitions Committee whose members were so tasked.  The City of Tampa then pledged a contribution of $250,000.00, representing  25% of the asking price.

On July 29, 1985 Mr. Maass wrote to Mr. Norman Hickey, the [Hillsborough] County Administrator, seeking a contribution from the county. He pointed out that the one million dollar price tag was a good deal because the collection had been appraised at $1,737,250.00.  Furthermore, if the $250,000.00 were to be used as a downpayment, the collection could be on view as early as December. On September 3, after a very convincing presentation by Messrs. Zewadski and Maass, who aggressively advocated for the purchase, the County voted to commit a quarter of a million dollars, payable over four years, to be applied to the purchase price.

There were still some loose ends to tie up, but the acquisition of the Noble collection for the Tampa Museum of Art was now a done deal, which was celebrated on October 26, at Pavillion V, the gala benefit of the Tampa Museum of Art which foregrounded Mr. Noble as the honoree. (Figure 11)

Figure 11
The principles at Pavillion V (October 26, 1985 ) the gala benefit of the Tampa Museum of Art which foregrounded Mr. Noble as the honoree. From left to right, Mr. Willian Knight Zedwadski, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Veach Noble, Dr. Richard E. and Mary Perry, whose endowment funds the Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art, currently held by Dr. Branko van Oppen de Ruiter.

(Courtesy of M.r. William Knight Zewadski)

MORE WORK IS NEEDED
The Noble Collection Committee, whose members  initially convened in  Mr. Zewadski’s offices at Trenam Law in Tampa,  realized that fundraising required persistent dedication by many people. Lead editorial support by the Tampa Tribune promoted the cause. Donations  came from many individuals, the community, and every member of the Museum staff.  Noble Collection Committee also addressed a host of related issues including the logistics involved in creating an exhibition.

BEHIND THE SCENES 
As one who has been personally involved in over thirty international loan exhibitions over the course of my career, I can only concur with Dr. Murray’s recollections

When the collection arrived at TMA, I was able to help unpack the vases, which was an incredible experience. For an art historian to handle these objects was a gift, although some of the vases, like the very wide, shallow kylix with Herakles and the Nemean lion, seemed so impossibly designed that you wondered at their longevity. (Figure 12)

Figure 12
The kylix, a cup for drinking wine, which, as Dr. Murray recalled, as she unpacked it for the exhibition, was so delicately and fragilely designed that she wondered how it survived the millennia still intact. The shape of this vessel recalls the original appearance of the misfired kylix (Figure 4) that Mr. Noble intentionally collected as one of his potter’s “mistakes.” The view taken depicts the Greek hero Heracles wrestling the Nemean lion, the very first of his legendary Twelve Labors and the one that established the lion skin as his trademark attribute.

(Heracles wrestling the Nemean Lion (ceramic kylix; Attica, Greece; Archaic period, ca. 510-500 bce). Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.085)

Dr. Murray then collaborated with Mr. Bob Hellier, the long-serving, very talented Chief Preparator of the Tampa Museum of Art, whose responsibilities included the  handling of objects and physically placing them in exhibition cases. Both were confronted with the challenges of displaying the antiquities. Dr. Murray discussed the matter with Mr. Hellier. She  recommended that the vases be displayed in a way that would maximize their visibility because some  were decorated on both sides whereas others were decorated on both their exteriors and interiors. These then had to be arranged into comprehensible groupings with similar themes and subject matter, such as portrayals of myths, sport, warfare, and daily life. Dr. Murray was also responsible for generating copy for labels and other didactic materials such as wall panels which provided the visitor with valuable information about the exhibition. The accompanying, exhibition catalogue was also on her to-do-list. She observed

The catalogue came out beautifully, a joint effort between Bob Hellier and myself. It contained a complete listing of  JVN’s collection, as well as a selection of focus pieces for which I wrote individual essays (several of these had color plates). 

Visitors to Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector should also be aware of the fact that the issues which Dr. Murray and Mr. Hellier were obliged to solve were similar to those resolved by  Dr. Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter, Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art, and staff of the Tampa Museum of Art in their collaborative work on this exhibition.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Over the course of the next three years with a Florida State Legislative fund drive in place, and the continuing efforts of individuals such as Messrs. Frank Harvey, Ben Norbaum, with assistance from Mr. Charles W. (“Jack”) Sahlman and State Senator John Grant, and attractive terms from Barnett Bank, the financial obligation for the acquisition of the Noble collection was discharged, the final payment having been made in late September 1988. 

A NEVER ENDING STORY
Dr. Murray recalls that

when I began teaching my Archaeology of Greece course in the History Department at the University of South Florida, the Noble acquisition provided a fantastic teaching collection, as it did for others. Students were amazed that Tampa had such things.

It subsequently generated the specialized position, the Richard E. Perry Curator of Greek and Roman Art with generous contributions from Costas Lemonopoulos and Dr. and Mrs. Richard E. Perry. This position, which is currently held by Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter,  is said to be the most heavily endowed curatorship of any museum in the United States. 

The lessons gained from this survey of the life and career of Joseph Veach Noble are simple:  Collectors in partnership with museum curators enable collectors to hone their aesthetic judgements, create unlimited opportunities for scientific research, and open pathways for financial support. Such partnerships often result in arrangements by which those private collections enter the public domain where the objects themselves serve as vectors enabling visitors to expand their cultural horizons with an enhanced understanding of a shared past. Such collector-curator partnerships are invariably win-win scenarios. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
This article could not have been written if it were  not for the willingness of William Knight Zewadski, a principal mover and shaker of the effort to bring the Noble collection to Tampa, to share unselfishly his vast knowledge, insights, personal experiences, notes, and corporate memory with me.

I also wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Suzanne Murray for her willingness to share her first-hand experiences with me about her involvement with the events associated with the Noble collection in her capacity as guest curator.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM
For more information about the exhibition, Joseph Veach Noble: Through the Eye of a Collector, on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through February 19, 2026, visit the Museum’s website. The Museum has partnered with the Hillsborough County Public Schools to provide a unique tour experience to students in grades 3-8. In 2024, this program, facilitated by visits, discussions, and art-making projects, will serve nearly 15,000 students from the HCPS Transformation Network.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya [Tokyo]. During his career “Dr. Bob” has curated exhibitions of both  ancient and contemporary art in the States, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Switzerland. He advises collectors and is also a certified, USPAP-compliant member of the Appraisers Association of America. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files

More is More

EMBELLISH ME: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth

by Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi

One of the most significant imperatives of the exhibition philosophy of the Tampa Museum of Art is to present visually stimulating works of art which are not only possessed of superior aesthetic qualities in their own right but whose subject matter is relevant. That relevance is formulated by asking its visitors to view those works of art within the context of current international discourse about pressing social issues. The permanent exhibition, Identity in the Ancient World, explores such issues as ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as lived experiences resonating with similar issues impacting upon our contemporary society.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is its parallel, temporary loan exhibition, showcasing a panorama of stimulating eye candy reveling in glorious patterns and captivating decorative motifs. But like the themes articulated in the Identity exhibition, Embellish Me engages its visitors in an equally compelling art historical discourse, what is art and who decides what is art.

For about a decade from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s a group of artists on the East and West Coast participated in a movement now known as P&D, the Pattern and Decoration Movement. The participating members, mostly women, understood that artistic discourse was dominated by men who, it seemed, arbitrarily and somewhat disparagingly dumped textiles, basketry, and the like into the pejorative “craft” category, effectively divorcing those creations from the supposedly superior category of “fine art.” That hierarchical categorization had an unfortunate misogynist side effect, because, traditionally, from the dawn of civilization women were the dominant weavers of textiles and baskets. The P&D movement’s imperative, therefore, was to set aside such rigid hierarchies and in so doing, intercalate the contributions of women into the ages-old continuum of visual creations. The movers and shakers of P&D also correctly observed that textiles and baskets were themselves often imbued, as a result of the materials used and the patterns employed, with an intrinsic sensuality effected by their retinal-commanding ornament.

The combined oeuvre of the participants of the P&D Movement offered a viable alternative to what some have termed the general manliness of modernism. It demolished the artificial boundaries traditionally separating fine art from craft. Significantly P&D succeeded in elevating the status of women as artists in their own right. 

Joanna Robotham, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tampa since 2016, collaborated with Dr. Amy Galpin, former Chief Curator at the Frost Art Museum (now Executive Director and Chief Curator at MOAD in Miami) on Embellish Me. Robotham reinforces the added significance of this exhibition for our Tampa Bay community because, as she rightly stresses, the works of view are from the collection of Norma Canelas Roth (1943-2022), and her husband, William. Mrs. Roth was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, is an alumna of the University of South Florida, and lived most of her life right here in the Sunshine State. Early on she recognized the marginalization of women artists because they were often ignored, and hence neglected, by mainstream gallerists and collectors. 

Figure 1. Installation view of the exhibition Embellish Me at the Tampa Museum of Art.
Photograph by Paige Boscia. Courtesy of the Museum.

The exhibition space is sumptuously designed (Figure 1) with its aubergine-colored accent walls and strategically-placed benches affording visitors various vantage points from which to contemplate the works of art, each one of which occupies its own environment. Every work stands alone and proud, there is no clutter, there is no crowding.

Figure 2. Betty Woodman (1930-2018). Untitled, 1981.

Among the works of art on view are an exuberant vase (Figure 2) potted by ceramist Betty Woodman, one of the mainstays of P&D. The vase is noteworthy for both its size and consummate polychromatic effects. 

Figure 3. Joyce Scott (born 1948). Necklace (Skeletons), 1994.

The necklace (Figure 3) by Joyce Scott, created from glass beads and semi-precious stones, is a deceptive masterpiece in miniature because it deserves more than a passing glance. This work, informed by Scott’s Afro-American heritage, alludes to current social issues by virtue of the initially inconspicuous skeletons which are subtly intercalated into its overall, seeming ornamental design. 

Figure 4. Jane Kaufman (1938-2021). Screen, 1979.

Equally deceptive and likewise worthy of contemplation is the screen (Figure 4) by Jane Kaufman, a leader of P&D. She transformed the skills of embroidery and sewing, taught to her by her Russian-born grandmother, by introducing bugle beads and metallic threads, often glued together, into her compositions. She also foregrounded feathers into her oeuvre, as seen in this exacting, meticulously designed screen in which each pheasant feather appears to be so identical that one’s first impression is that they had been mechanically reproduced rather than being selectively plucked from nature.

Figure 5. Tony Robbin (born 1943). 1978-21, 1978.

Toby Robbin was a member of an improvisational theater group and a member of a men’s consciousness-raising group before joining the P&D. There his oeuvre concentrated on illusion effective by compositions of polyvalent geometric patterns. The repeated patterns of shape and color in 1978-21 (Figure 5) are a tour de force, oscillating as they do between the linear and the painterly, the static and the kinetic. 

Figure 6. Lucas Samaras (1936-2024). Reconstruction #39, 1978.

Lucas Samaras participated in P&D, particularly in the 1970’s when he began his Reconstruction series, of which Reconstruction #39 (Figure 6) is representative. He composes his geometric motifs from swatches of fabric which he combines into compositions with a sewing machine. The resulting works of art purposefully resonate with the aesthetic concerns of the Russian Suprematist Art Movement in which the traditional distinction between foreground and background are blurred.

Embellish Me, therefore, engages not only the visitor’s eye with its dazzling array of decorative, polychromatic ornamentation but challenges the visitor to reassess the place of ornament within one’s own environment. That mental engagement may force one to rethink the attraction that we have either for patterned bed sheets or for wallpaper. And that rethinking should awaken everyone to the role that pattern and ornament have played in the visual culture of virtually every civilization since the beginning of time.

Embellish Me: Works from the Collection of Norma Canelas Roth and William Roth is organized by the Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami, and presented in collaboration with the Tampa Museum of Art. The exhibition is on view through July 28, 2024.

Dr. Robert Steven Bianchi, a critical art historian, is currently chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum Shibuya in Tokyo. During his career, he has curated exhibitions of contemporary art in New York City, Antibes, and Tokyo. He has previously written about exhibitions in the Tampa Bay area for Bay Art Files. 

Fee-Fi-Faux-Pfaff

Fee-Fi-Faux-Pfaff by Jonathan Talit

Any museum exhibition that even hints at celebrating debauchery is welcome in my book. At the time of this writing, American culture has sustained a “No-Fun Zone” mentality for at least a decade. I’m not naïve enough to expect outright fun in any museum, but there’s no reason exhibitions can’t be titillating, even sleazy. Museums themselves, however, seem dead set on convincing the public of how fun and carefree they are through a glut of programming like Teens’ Night, yoga classes, dance performances, and concerts. These programs are often hosted directly inside, and thus interrupt, the galleries. Designed to give the impression of “accessibility,” these programs can’t disguise the reality that museums are perpetually stern institutions. Museums are largely about propriety. I accept that – I’m an adult.

There is no horror quite like organized fun. Admittedly, my thirst for anything remotely stimulating has sometimes led me to initially qualify things as good in the negative: this TV show wasn’t as preachy as it could’ve been, that movie wasn’t as predictable as most movies lately, etc. When I heard that Judy Pfaff had an exhibition in Florida, about Florida, I had every reason to be primed to enjoy it.

It turns out Pfaff has a history with Florida; in particular: Sarasota. Known primarily for her engulfing multimedia installations, Judy Pfaff has worked as a prominent visual artist for over fifty years. In 1981, she had her first solo museum exhibition at the John and Marble Ringling Museum of Art. Just over a decade ago, she was invited back to Sarasota by the educational program ARTmuse. This program was created by the Sarasota Art Museum’s founders as an embryonic platform for what would ultimately become the brick-and-mortar museum itself. Things have come full circle as Pfaff has an exhibition up at the Sarasota Art Museum titled Picking Up the Pieces.



The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains the most vibrant work and the least like installation. While they have oblong shapes, flex in multiple directions, and even reach out towards the viewer, each artwork is discernably contained. It isn’t that hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. “My mind is wired as a painter,” Pfaff admits, and that primary sensibility is on display here.

Multiple panels line the wall of various shapes and sizes. They all appear to be made of acrylic. Some are intrinsically pigmented, others superficially by staining the surface with resin.  Most of these panels have “limbs” that extend outward, complicating their initial flatness. These extensions are mostly welded steel lines that blossom into other forms: more panels, crescent shapes for leaves, tubes of neon twisting jaggedly. The long arm of Alexander Calder can’t be ignored. Flashes of Frank Stella blink within these works, too. Specifically, Stella’s wall sculptures that seem equally inspired by fluorescent lighting, the Art Deco revival of the 1980s, and cocaine.

Regardless of how saturated and active these panels are, they all maintain a degree of translucency. Some light can pass through, some sections disguise themselves against the supporting wall, some areas let you see yourself looking at them. Moments like these are reminders that the materials here aren’t actually moving, aren’t really fluid, aren’t truly alive, but are entirely fake.

In fact, Pfaff’s work relishes in all things fake. This is a key point that isn’t directly addressed in the supporting text. There’s no question that, “Pfaff’s impressions of Florida’s sun-soaked, life-affirming landscape, fecund nature, and leisurely rhythm of life,” are presented. There are “…a plethora of readymade faux flowers, fruits, and vegetables…and three-dimensional elements that resemble flora and foliage,” all over these galleries. However, that’s only half right. There should be more emphasis on the word “faux,” as I see Pfaff’s work as a celebration of Florida’s evident natural life and obvious affinity for the artificial. That is Florida’s power: the cheap but seamless harmony of the natural and the synthetic worlds; a shotgun wedding between the Jurassic and the plastic.

This unorthodox synthesis is evident in this room’s only free-standing sculptures. In the center, a long table extends diagonally across the gallery next to a lawn chair. Or, it used to be a lawn chair. The tight network of warp and weft has become just the slightest bit molten, the littlest bit loose. Now, the plastic strings are frozen in limbo: a permanent refractory period. The table itself is smeared with detritus. Before the viewer lies an opulent spread of fake deserts, plastic bags, half-drunk cocktails, fabric flowers, and neon lights, all entombed in goo. Neon is a sharp analogy to Florida, as neon is a natural element but registers as otherworldly and disposable: hypnotic garbage.

As fun as these works are, they are often too literal. Fake fruits and fake flowers are used to represent…Florida’s real fruits and real flowers? That’s a bit too on the nose for me. Other works, like the two-panel pieces on the righthand wall, entertain more subtlety. The first, measuring at about 3’ x 3’, is an orange panel erupting into circular steel shapes. Lacing those shapes are small lights that blink in a gentle rhythm akin to Christmas lights. This all reads like flowers and bees without literally being those things. It’s also one of the pieces with the darkest color palettes: could those lights be little stars? The piece is backlit with surreal blue and green lights that recall a gas station at night. The panel piece to its right is a larger rug with a multicolored neon light zipping through it like a waterslide.

With all this activity, one almost misses the rug-turned-tablecloth that flows off the table at almost completely ninety- degrees. Itself covered in resin, it looks like roadkill in the final stages of rigor mortis, or a stray sock in a teenage boy’s room.  One can hear the sound it would make if it fell on the floor. Across the gallery, another rug undulates like a tongue as it belches a small meal of plastic margarita glasses.

All these are richer strategies than “cocktail glasses to represent cocktail glasses.” Still, the work encapsulates Pfaff’s acute sense of the fun, futureless frivolity of Florida. This state is the perpetual butt of cheap jokes and single-minded analyses: heralded as a bastion of freedom and family values, derided from afar as “America’s dick,” or grimly presented as the canary in the coal mine of right-wing fascism and censorship that’s ready at a moment’s notice to leap onto the country writ large.

Florida is much richer and dumber than all that. It’s a place of off-season carnivals, dinosaurs past their prime, strip malls, strip clubs, loose morals, endless lawsuits, lush landscape, low taxes, low education, violent storms, finger foods, and the brisk exchange of fluids. The weather is nice, and the people are mean. It values transience and expedience: cheap thrills year-round. Obviously, this means no community, no history and no future, and absolutely no real obligations.  That’s not exactly a role model. But what history matters in a place so relentlessly present? What future could ever happen in a state that is designed with no attention span? That has one season? Whose main business is tourism: strangers leaving just as quickly as they came? Pfaff astutely and lovingly distills Florida’s Multiple Personality Disorder into more digestible forms without reducing its amusement and frustration.

One gleans quite a different reading from the exhibition documents and the title itself, Picking Up the Pieces.  Both the title of the exhibit and the title of a large-scale installation in the second room, refer to Hurricane Ian. According to the museum text, Picking Up the Pieces is inspired by, “Hurricane Ian’s devastating impact on southwestern Florida in September 2022.” The text continues to correctly describe Hurricane Ian’s “bewildering chaos and tumult” and the “indelible mark” it left in its “aftermath.” Some of this aftermath is presented in a video projection that accompanies the installation.  Pfaff herself bore witness to Ian’s “destructive power” at Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island.

Words like these are apt descriptions of the damage caused by Hurricane Ian. What’s less apt is the implied equivalence between the somber memories of Hurricane Ian and the experience of Pfaff’s work here. Yes, twisted metal, pools of plastic, flying panels, and shorn fabric abound. Random objects from drinking glasses, neon lights, seashells, and honeycomb cardboard stock are married by the stirring forces of wind and flood. Natural disasters make their own mixed media installations out of our lives. Pfaff communicates that point well enough.

The issue is that Pfaff’s work just isn’t that sad. She may have felt sadness seeing what Hurricane Ian left behind – who wouldn’t? – but that’s her business. Sorrow is not evident in these galleries. But the supporting text and the dismal documentary-style of the video imply a mournful experience that just isn’t there, and a degree of chaos when the work is usually quite prim, for better or worse.

That said, the second room is notably more muted in color. Starburst candy colors are out, and the paler shades of taupe, beige, and grey are in. Largely, this is the result of a material swap: cardboard, polyurethane foam, concrete slabs, aged wood, and a monochromatic video dominate this room. There are still colored acrylic panels and neon lights, but they’re accents against a quieter backdrop. Speaking of backdrops, the room’s architecture lends to this new atmosphere. Instead of having the titanium white gallery walls of the first room, the second room exposes the weathered bricks of the original building, a former high school. These bricks, in their smeared glory, contribute heavily to the industrial, nautical feeling of the gallery. Dimmed lights allow viewers to see the video projection, obviously, but also induce a hush.

The centerpiece is a large installation of steel pipes, stone, colored panels, LED light strips, and sailboats suspended mid-air.  They don’t move, but you can. Viewers can walk through this space, around these objects and their various harnessing apparatuses, to get the simulated, safer, lower-resolution experience that they’re in the eye of the hurricane. A single skylight window beams down soft, natural light roughly in the installation’s center. The power cords of the LED strips, the unnatural light in the room, are disguised, hilariously, by flooring tape with a “wood floor” image on their backside. Some large strips of that same tape are slapped against the gallery walls where their camouflage does them less good.

Again, where’s the doom and gloom?  Viewers are impressed by this installation, not depressed. “How did they get these pieces in here?” “How do they all stay still?” “Who could think of this?” “Why is this so fun?” These are a few of the questions I overheard other visitors compelled to ask out loud. Some visitors preoccupied themselves with the logistics of how it was assembled, a common and distracting Achielle’s heel of most installation art. Many people, however, easily let go of those questions and drifted off into the museum VR-experience of matter swirling around them. My personal favorite of these Twister floating objects are the sunflowers and their towering stalks sealed in intergalactic platinum paint.


Well, if you don’t find sadness in this exhibit yourself, it’ll be handed to you. Opposite the installation is a large wall with a projected video. This video documents various sites of the destruction of Hurricane Ian from the vantage point of a car window. Collapsed buildings, enormous boats slammed into one another, long stretches of land filled with scrap: all presented in black and white, in case you didn’t register how solemn this is supposed to be. This is a flimsy juxtaposition to the vibrance and Fantasia-style animation of dead objects in the rest of the gallery. It’s a needless bummer. Presumably, the viewer is supposed to interpret this pairing as evidence of the exhibition’s sophisticated duality: holding the vividness and pleasure of the natural world with its hazardous potential for carnage. How mature.

This just belies Pfaff’s organic interests and the obvious effects of her work. It’s just as useless to insist on even a shred of this exhibit being mournful as it is to insist on Goya being happy-go-lucky. Quieter, yes. In fact, the artwork lining the walls surrounding the installation are some of the best works by Judy Pfaff that I’ve ever seen. On the left, two enormous wall pieces comingle cardboard, foam, and metal until they look like mutated hornet’s nests. When you get closer, the layering of colors, adjustments from gloss to matte, and degrees of opacity are so rich that they deserve the same reverent vocabulary used to describe oil painting. The porous cardboard stock rhymes nicely with the aforementioned sunflowers.

On the back wall, a horizontal steel frame acts as the skeleton for a billowing mass of plastic. It reads almost like a color spectrum, beginning on the left with some green and deep blues, transforming into violet and red, and then evaporating into translucency. A select amount of LED and neon lights breathe the most tender amount of life into this rubble. Beneath the circulating web of plastic neurons is the cortex: a multicolored disco ball. Despite the mass of material blocking out much of its already faint light, it spins faithfully: beaming out whatever signal it can.

The wall closest to the video projection holds a similar sculpture. This time, there’s no color: just steel, a white LED light, and translucent plastic. No disco ball, either. Unlike its sister sculpture, this one appears devoid of life. Backlit by the sterile white LED light, it suspends like a ghost waiting to cross over. Or maybe that’s pessimistic: what if its blankness isn’t the end of life, but the beginning, like a stem cell?

Underneath that is a large display of objects not dissimilar from the sordid table in the first room. This piece is more securely (i.e. more conservatively) positioned near a wall against which a large LED light projects. It appears to be a slab of concrete coated with foam tinted in various shades of blue, resin, seashells, plants, and dilapidated pottery. Both the seashells and the plastic twinkle as one walks by. Small orifices gape while masses of urethane foam crest and rock, all giving the appearance of a seafloor caught in the moment where the current stops just before shifting directions.

In my mind, these artworks display the most technical acumen and emotional resonance of the work on view. That said, their resonance is not that potent. If there’s any sadness in this exhibition, it’s the realization that the work isn’t as loose or audacious as their initial jolt suggests. After the sugar rush comes the crash. Granted, it’s not a major crash, there’s interesting and fun artwork here, but there is a noticeable dip in enthusiasm once one takes a second lap through the galleries.

While Pfaff’s piquant visual interests are obvious, so is her ultimate conventionalism.  There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the brashness of the work ques the viewer up for an experience that is, frankly, rather innocuous. Just as exotic sea life and reptiles flaunt vibrant colors and dizzying patterns to signal danger, I wish these works had more of the venom I felt they promised me. Alas, I left the gallery not sucking out the symbolic poison or asking a loved one to urinate on my metaphorical jellyfish sting.

Picking Up the Pieces has the distinct feeling of butterflies in one’s stomach as they get ready for a party – the imagined possibilities of laughter, music, dancing, getting buzzed, getting laid, blowing off steam. Then, they get to the party and it’s just a little smaller, just a little quieter, the lights a little too bright, the decor a little too neat, the conversations a little stiff, the people a little more sober than one had hoped, the specter of etiquette hiding just behind the door.

The exhibition Judy Pfaff: Picking Up the Pieces is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, through Sunday, March 24, 2024.

Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in Orlando. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money. 

Tom Jones: Here We Stand

An exhibition review of Tom Jones: Here We Stand

by Sabrina Hughes

By turns witty, moving, and poignant, the exhibition Tom Jones: Here We Stand at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, makes a clear statement that Indigenous Nations remain connected to their past while ensuring their values are projected into the future. Tom Jones is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. 

This is the first major retrospective of Jones’ career and features more than 100 photographic works in more than a dozen series. Tom Jones: Here We Stand originated at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. The exhibition was co-curated by Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, Senior Curator of Photography at the MFA, and Graeme Reid, Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. 

Here We Stand showcases Jones’ photographic vision ranging from intimate shots inside his relatives’ homes, to acerbic wit recording appropriated Native names and iconography in the American landscape, to majestic and monumental portraits with hand-beaded embellishments. 

Jones’ early series Dear America pairs enlarged collaged historical vernacular photos with diegetic captions that force viewers to confront their assumptions about the Native history they may have learned. 

Tom Jones, Sweet Land of Liberty, 2002, Inkjet print and ink.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.
Tom Jones, Long May Our Land Be Bright, 2002 Inkjet print and ink.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.

In the image Sweet Land of Liberty, which collages a 19th-century group portrait of Sioux with a jaunty white hunter who has harvested a raccoon, Jones has written a short summary of the largest one-day mass execution in American history–when Abraham Lincoln approved death sentences for 38 Sioux men on December 26, 1862. Jones employs a similar technique with the image Long May Our Land Be Bright, half of a 19th-century stereographic image from Taos Pueblo. In this text inscription, however, Jones celebrates that the Red Willow People of Taos Pueblo have maintained their cultural integrity despite centuries of invasions by colonizers. 

The beaded portraits in the Strong Unrelenting Spirits series build on the technique Jones used in Dear America, adding intricate beadwork to the large-scale portraits. Members of the Ho-Chunk nation pose in front of a stark black background, many in traditional ceremonial garb. These portraits are striking in their size as well as in the subjects’ appearance. What, in reproduction, appears to be designs drawn on the black background behind each individual is actually intricate beadwork applied to the surface of the photograph itself.

Tom Jones, Bryson Funmaker, from Strong Unrelenting Spirits series, 2020, Inkjet print and beadwork. On loan from Mike and Linda Schmudlach. Image credit: Museum of Wisconsin Art.

Even before European colonizers introduced colorful glass beads in trade, for centuries Indigenous artisans created beads from stones, bones, and shells, and used them to create jewelry and embellish clothing. 

For Jones, the beadwork on these photographs represent a ritual encounter with ancestors. “Beading is a metaphor for our ancestors watching over us. I am also referencing an experience I had when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My mother took me to see a Sioux medicine man named Robert Stead. He led the call to the spirits, the women began to sing, and the ancestors appeared as orbs of light.” Strong Unrelenting Spirits eschews the formalism of photographic portraits that seek only to show what is before the camera. Combining the realism of photographic portraiture with the spiritual experience of light orbs further cements a Native visual language that can combine the visible and ethereal presences of one’s experience. 

Tom Jones, Fire Pit, from I am an Indian First and an Artist Second series, 2008, Inkjet print.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Museum of Wisconsin Art.

A recurring theme in Jones’ work is the appropriation and commodification of Native culture in America. Two series, The North American Landscape and I am an Indian First and an Artist Second, use plastic figures from Cowboys and Indians playsets to wryly reference the way Native culture has been repackaged and sold as a product. The images in the series “Native” Commodity are deadpan documentary representations of Indigenous culture co-opted by the tourism industry. The series Studies in Cultural Appropriation also presents a witty question: if Native designs are readily appropriated by corporations, why not make use of a variety of Indigenous material designs for high fashion? 

Tom Jones, Blake Funmaker, 2020, Inkjet print.
On loan from the Artist. Image credit: Bay Art Files.

One of the most striking photographs in the exhibition is a portrait of Blake Funmaker (2020) in ceremonial regalia that includes an embroidered and beaded face mask. COVID-19 was a particular danger to Native American communities. Noreen Goldman, demographer and social epidemiologist at Princeton University reports, “Elevated COVID-19 death rates among Native Americans serve as a stark reminder of the legacies of historical mistreatment and the continued failure of governments to meet basic needs of this population.” To promote the protection of the community during the pandemic, the Ho-Chunk Nation Department of Health commissioned Jones to photograph members of his community with facemasks as part of their full regalia. 

What is consistent across the diverse bodies of work is the existence of a Native photographic language, one that blends traditional Indigenous art forms imbued with ritual, spirituality, and heritage with the detail and historicity lent to a subject by the medium of photography. In contrast to white photographers who have perpetuated the idea that Indigenous nations have vanished or are frozen in a romanticized past, Jones’ visual language instead reinforces that Native peoples are resisting erasure and maintaining their identities despite attempts by colonizers to assimilate them. 

Tom Jones: Here We Stand is on view at the Museum of Fine Art, St.Petersburg through August 27, 2023. The exhibition originated at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. A catalogue, including a major essay by Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase in the MFA Store. Installation photography photo credit: Darcy Schuller, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

About the artist

Tom Jones is an artist, curator, writer, and educator. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Master of Fine Arts in Photography, and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. Jones is currently a Professor of Photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For more information about the artist, visit his website.

About the author

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and is an adjunct instructor at USF, and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Revisiting DFAC

FALL 2020 AT THE DUNEDIN FINE ART CENTER

R. Lynn Whitelaw

Over the past 15 years Catherine Bergmann has served as the Curatorial Director at the Dunedin Fine Art Center where she has organized over 300 thoughtful and thematic exhibitions for the Center’s seven galleries.  Last year she was recognized by Creative Loafing magazine as “Best of the Bay” Visual Art Curator.  Her innovative and engaging exhibitions have drawn on connections with artists from Florida, the southeastern United States, and invitational exhibitions open to artists from around the country and internationally.  In 2017 Nathan Beard joined the curatorial team and became the Assistant Curator in 2019.  Together the critical eye of Bergmann and Beard, both also well-established visual artists, have put together some of the most creative and original contemporary art exhibitions being presented in the Tampa Bay area.  

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Spring exhibitions had to be altered and experienced virtually as the Center was forced to close for three months.  Summer exhibitions opened to the public under the banner of the “Art of Social Distancing” with limited access to the galleries. Re-envisioned shows used the mantra, “The Distance Brings Us Closer,” and included the engaging show, I’ve Come to Look for America, with thirteen diverse artists “representing the complex cultural fabric of our county, and beyond that – our humanity.”  

Catherine Bergmann and Nathan Beard in front of paintings by Carol Dameron and Herb Snitzer included in the exhibition Between | Us which is on view through October 18, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.

The Fall 2020 DFAC exhibitions have opened despite the logistics of organizing shows during a pandemic. Three new exhibitions expand our appreciation of the creative talents in our community while challenging us to open our minds to new artistic expression.  Between | Us, co-curated by Bergmann and Beard, is on view through Oct. 18 and documents six “It” art couples working in the Tampa Bay area.  The show provides a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the work of these highly regarded artists.  The well-written wall text and artist statements afford a personal look into the media, processes, and “creative partnering” of these couples, and the mutual respect, collaborative support, and years of encouragement for aesthetic, community, and even social issues as hallmarks of their artistic successes.  

Between | Us: A collaborative print by artists Mickett and Robert Stackhouse. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
Between | Us: Carrie Jadus, Walking with Scissors I + II, 2020, oil on panel and Mark Aeling, Lip Series 2 of 10: A Cutting Remark, 2017, stainless steel scissors. Photo courtesy of the artists.

The artists include painters and retired art educators, Dolores Coe and Bruce Marsh; painter Carol Dameron and photographer Herb Snitzer (Herb even includes an endearing painting of his wife); painter Carrie Jadus and sculptor Mark Aeling; painter/emeritus art educator Mernet Larsen and multi-media artist Roger Palmer; joint collaborators and multi-media artists Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse; and, photographer Janelle Young and multi-media artist /art educator Ryan McCullough.  This is a celebratory exhibition and gallery viewers will greatly appreciate and learn from its engaging theme.

The exhibition Heroes + Sheroes is an intriguing look at “shining a light on those who’ve shown us the light” was co-curated by Bergmann and Beard.  Each curator selected a “Hero” and a “Shero,” including musician (Ronny Elliott), artist (Joan Duff-Bohrer); humanitarian/entrepreneur (Andre Heller), and poet (Hilary DePolo), respectively.   The “four celebrants” were then asked to invite their Heroes or Sheroes to participate in the exhibition, thus making for a highly original and insightful exhibition to inspire “the many faces and forms greatness takes in our midst.”   

Heroes + Sheroes: Gallery installation. On view through December 24, 2020. Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.

Vespertine is an impressively poetic and cerebral multi-media exhibition curated by Nathan Beard.  The word “vespertine” is defined as “of, relating to, or flourishing in the evening.”  The reference, as defined by Beard is “the daylit logic of scientific and technological concepts or processes, … while probing the shadowed and paradoxical possibilities of the unknown …”.    In organizing the show, Beard thoughtfully examined the work of artists who represent a scientific or technological searching for a liminal space of becoming.  The nine invited artists include three from the Tampa Bay area: Elizabeth A. Baker, McArthur Freeman, II, and Luke Myers.  Myers, an MFA student at USF, is fascinated with bugs, specifically the Florida Deep-digger scarab beetle (Peltotrupes profundus).  Through video he documents the transformative “poetry” of the inch-long scarab moving “more than a pound of sand, one mouthful at a time” up from depths of as much as ten feet below. Massachusetts artist Lisa Nilsson, with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, explores the topography of human anatomy through scientific reproduction of lateral cross-sections intricately created through the collage of Japanese mulberry paper and the gilt edges of old books.  She represents one of the six artists Beard selected from around the country, including Julia Buntaine Hoel, Kysa Johnson, Anne Mondro, Elsa Muñoz, and Michael Reedy.  Each of the artists in Verspertine incorporates fascinating approaches, utilizing either traditional media to explore macro- or micro-cosmic worlds or newer media, like video, transposed scientific data, and 3-D printing, to convey their artistic and scientific discoveries.  If you spend time studying the bios and statements of these artists, you may realize we are on the cusp of artistic evolution.

Vespertine: Gallery installation.
Photo courtesy of the Dunedin Fine Art Center.
Vespertine: Lisa Nilsson, Male Pelvis, 2012, Mulberry paper collage. 
Courtesy of the artist and Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, NY.

Additional exhibitions on view through the end of the year are Hold Me, an invitational exhibit by contemporary ceramic artists from around the nation and PHANTOMS and Bandits, a tribute to the Center’s past Wearable Art Runway events.   Lastly, if the above exhibitions have not convinced you to visit to the Dunedin Fine Art Center soon, the show lining one of the hallway galleries is Velvet Elvis.  Artists were invited to create their own kitschy versions of the nostalgic art form on supplied velvet canvases.  Velvet Elvis is a fundraiser, so purchase tickets before October 18th for a chance to win your favorite piece – and as Elvis would say, “Thank you, thank you very-much!” 

For more information about these exhibitions and related programming,
visit the Dunedin Fine Art Center website.

R. Lynn Whitelaw was the founding director and chief curator of the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, located on the Tarpon Springs Campus of St. Petersburg College. In 2015, Mr. Whitelaw was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Association of Museums. An active independent curator and writer, he has served on numerous statewide and local boards and art committees and has been a judge for over 18 outdoor art shows and juried exhibitions throughout the state of Florida.

Light Through Her Hands: Patricia Cronin at the Tampa Museum of Art

Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Eleanor Eichenbaum

Artist Patricia Cronin’s “Aphrodite and the Lure of Antiquity” is the inaugural exhibition in the Tampa Museum’s Conversations with the Collection, which puts contemporary art in dialogue with classical antiquities. The exhibit fills two large galleries and the outdoor terrace on the Museum’s second floor. Cronin, a widely recognized Brooklyn-based artist, offers a show that is thoughtful, feminist, materially dazzling, and asks dimensional questions of the fragment and the whole.

The exhibition features three main series of works, all of which engage materially and conceptually. The works feature tactile media; from stone to glass to blue painter’s tarps, to create a densely layered experience. The works echo with female multiplicity— the woman as artist, the woman as symbol, the woman as present, the woman as absent. Cronin interrogates what is missing – in the history of women, of women artists, and in physical reality. Sculptures may be partial, paintings may contain traces, negative space may be charged.

Walking through the exhibition, a viewer threads connections between thoughts and works. Seams – flickering lines of betweenness— are integral to the character of the show. Cronin’s works hinge on the possibility of questions made visible, of touching the ephemeral through noticing the absent.

Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.

The gallery closest to the stairs, where the visitor arrives, features works from the Aphrodite Reimagined series. Cronin’s mastery of material choices resonates in this cool bluish room where the sculptural pieces converse with the layered works on the walls. Large paintings with gossamer transparencies depict outlines of individual Aphrodite sculptures from various museum collections. The paintings show the different presences of these particular Aphrodites; the form of the sculptural body is featured in relief, the background rendered as an aqueous field. Viewing these many traces of Aphrodites, a viewer may consider multiplicities in Aphrodite’s symbolic identities and in the histories of these sculptures. Cronin’s paintings are soft and illuminate the ineffable space between line and body. These works conjure what is ghostly, what is fluid— a seam of the permeable that runs through the show.

Of particular interest is Cronin’s Aphrodite (Metropolitan Museum): a two-part sculpture made of deep green cast glass displayed on a pedestal, its two halves set apart by a cushion of space. This piece is Cronin’s first work in cast glass and displays the sculptural body as impression. The seam, a site of joining to create a potential whole, is rendered visible here through the two halves that the viewer may work to visually assemble. In addition to its watery translucence, the apt material choice holds the moment the molten glass stills. This quiet interrogation of the momentary resonates in the exhibition.

Cronin’s moving Memorial to a Marriage and works that focus on the 19th-century American female sculptor Harriet Hosmer share the next large gallery. These works amplify questions of presence and absence. Memorial to a Marriage is functional as an iteration of memorial sculpture in Woodlawn Cemetery for Cronin and her wife, the artist Deborah Kass. They are depicted in marble, asleep and embracing under folds of sheets. The sculpture witnesses the connected lives of two female artists and holds both tenderness and contemplative melancholy. The creamy stone is perhaps the exhibition’s most taut moment of absence, as it materializes questions of mortality. Memorial to a Marriage was initially created in 2002 and predates the legalization of gay marriage by the United States Supreme Court by thirteen years. Another kind of booming absence – one of equality.

Through the project Harriet Hosmer: Lost and Found, A Catalogue Raisonne, Cronin illuminates Hosmer’s work and asks that the viewer see the artist’s works that have been lost to history. Cronin renders these lost works as watery shimmering outlines on paper and as towering abstractions on fabric – revealing each as a glance, a shadow, a ghost. The threads of what was lost are realized in two monumental wall-mounted silk pieces: Queen of Naples and Ghost. The fabric cascades far above the viewer’s height and the air in the gallery animate these pieces with slight billows. The works are both subtle and imposing, like an urgent but hazy memory or like blinking in a dark room trying to find her.


Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files
.
Installation view of the exhibition "Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection" at the Tampa Museum of Art. Photo: Bay Art Files.

The her that the viewer ultimately finds is Cronin’s outdoor sculpture, Aphrodite Reimagined. She towers above the viewer and dialogues with light and landscape, her face towards the Hillsborough River. The piece, a whole composite Aphrodite, was inspired by a fragmentary 1st-century AD sculpture in the Museum’s classical antiquities collection. In fact, the viewer may encounter the ancient marble torso on display in the gallery, before proceeding to the terrace. This impression of the fragmentary flashes and is enforced in Cronin’s monumental, Aphrodite Reimagined. Strikingly, her legs, feet, arms, hands, and head are translucent resin, pale green and watery while the draped torso is gray and fixed in stone. Outside, these glassy hands catch light. Light slips through them – a prismatic recasting of stubborn histories. Hands, the means by which we count, gesture, touch, and hold are rendered physically anew from a material that mimics absence and calls attention to what we can now see.

Eleanor Eichenbaum is a writer and educator based in St. Petersburg, Florida. She is also an independent curator of visual arts and has organized exhibits in New York, New Jersey, and California.

Patricia Cronin, Aphrodite, and the Lure of Antiquity: Conversations with the Collection is on view at the Tampa Museum of Art through March 17, 2019.
For more information, visit the museum’s website at tampamuseum.org.

Faces in the Crowd

Faces in the Crowd

By Sabrina Hughes

 

 

Miki Kratsman’s exhibition People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) is a challenging exhibition, but maybe not for the reasons you would think. Though it deals with the emotionally and politically charged subject matter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the subject matter itself is blunt and direct, a presentation of visual facts. Miki Kratsman: People I Met doesn’t ask viewers to do much more than to look, and continue to look, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

Kratsman is an Argentinian-born Israeli photographer who began his career as a photojournalist before he began to exhibit in an artistic context. The photographs in the exhibition borrow the aesthetics and content of journalism but subtly transcend the strict ethics of non-interference that is the photojournalist’s code. One senses the presence of Kratsman’s own compassion to create work inviting viewers to take a prolonged look at faces and places that may be otherwise easily passed over with a glance.

 

Installation view of Miki Kratsman: People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

 

 

The dominant work in the USFCAM galleries is the project that gives the exhibition its name. The installation People I Met in the Lee and Victor Leavengood Gallery is an ongoing (2010-2018) collaboration between Kratsman and the Palestinian individuals who have borne witness to and participated in the decades-long conflict. Two-thousand grainy portraits fill three gallery walls, a scale that is challenging to describe and overwhelming to experience. Some people are looking straight at the camera and some gaze elsewhere. Kratsman’s source images are his own photographs from his career as a photojournalist, from 1993 to 2012. He delves into his archives to look behind the central subject matter and to create new images that isolate the faces of the countless bystanders.

 

Installation view of the exhibition Miki Kratsman: People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

 

Detail of the installation of the exhibition Miki Kratsman: People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

 

 

The photos, and especially some of the expressions on the people’s faces, make me wonder what was happening in the foreground of the photos these were excerpted from. What are they witnessing–what is making them smile or shout? And to speak more broadly to their original context, what or who are we overlooking in the background of the billions of images that have already been made? Whose daily routines brought them into the path of some newsworthy event, and therefore into the frame of the photojournalist present to document it? What photos are you in, unknowingly? Who were you then and are you different now? Most importantly, who is interested in what happened to you after the shutter clicked?

The photos are not only intended to be seen on gallery walls, in fact, they were first disseminated digitally. Kratsman posts the excerpted portraits to a Facebook Page dedicated to the project. More than twenty-thousand followers of the page see the images and comment on the photos of people they know, people they knew, or sometimes photos they recognize as themselves. Kratsman is literally picking faces from the crowds dispersed years ago and crowdsourcing the reply to the question “Do you know who this person is and what is his condition right now?” In the exhibition, some of these responses from the Page’s followers have been engraved on brass plaques. “My teacher, he was in prison but now he is out.” “He was the best man in Jordan Valley. Now he is dead.”

 

Detail of the installation of the exhibition Miki Kratsman: People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum.  Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

 

 

The plaques are in conversation with the photographs but exist at a physical and interpretive remove from the anonymous portraits. We don’t know to whom the plaques refer. If any of the 2,000 individuals pictured in this iteration of People I Met have been identified, are dead or alive, or of unknown status, we viewers do not know. We are invited to consider the text and the image separately and perhaps to imagine more about the relationship between the sea of faces and the comparatively few who have been recognized and whose status is known.  

Kratsman’s People I Met runs counter to the emotional distance photojournalists must cultivate in order to do their job. Photojournalists often face criticism for taking a picture of a heinous scene rather than trying to help the people they photograph. Kratsman’s project of attempting to follow the thread of each individual’s life forward from when their paths crossed, always asking if they are in good health when a Facebook follower recognizes a friend or family member is a heartening gesture.

If the installation People I Met magnifies the sense of scale by isolating so many individual faces each affected by the conflict, the video 70 Meters… White T-Shirt (2017) does the opposite and compresses the impact. The video is a montage of every weapon discharge in the small village of Nabi Salih over the course of one year. After the sound of every gunshot, a rapid cut to the sound of another gunshot. We don’t always see where the shot is coming from and thankfully we never see anyone hit by a bullet. Watching the video, it all seems too brief. The shots come quickly and without reprieve (literally rapid-fire) but the acceleration of all of these incidents into the span of fewer than nine minutes seems to reduce the impact that these violent engagements have on the residents of the town. A shot that may change a life irrevocably is decontextualized and shortened to the length of time that the sound reverberates on the video.

Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016), the other two projects in the exhibition document Bedouin life in the Negev desert and towns that are targeted for demolition. In Bedouin Archive, photographs of individuals and buildings in various states of demolition are identified only with the latitude, longitude, altitude, image direction, and time stamp. A document in the truest sense to record where Kratsman was and when, and what was in front of his camera at that moment. If the villages are demolished and people scattered, these photographs serve as a map of sorts to locate the inhabitants in a time and place that may be lost.

 

Installation view of the exhibition Miki Kratsman: People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum.  Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

 

Installation view of the exhibition Miki Kratsman: People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

 

 

One of photography’s unique qualities in relation to other art media is its indexicality. Most photography operates on the principle that what the viewer sees on the print was at one time in front of the camera. Indexicality is photography’s mirror-like characteristic that most of us now take for granted; that which makes it possible to see photography as a presentation of facts, of truth. The person we see in the photo stood in front of the camera if only for a fraction of a second. These people were here. Some still are. I know that person, she is well. This building stood here at this time. This is what the village looked like. These are the sounds residents experienced regularly.

Once an artwork is released from the protected insularity of the artist’s studio into the world, the artist can no longer control its interpretation. Every individual who looks at a work brings her own subjective viewpoint and beliefs to bear. Remarkable in Kratsman’s work is his retention of a documentary viewpoint while treating such highly emotional and potentially polarizing subject matter. One does not engage in light discourse about Israeli-Palestinian relations. By its very nature, this body of work, in particular, has the potential to be highly polarizing. Yet, when in the gallery space, the exhibition seems instead to function as a document of life in this historical moment.

Kratsman’s photographs and videos open a space for questioning the monolithic perception of both Israeli and Palestinian identities and instead to think about the subjectivity of each person, photographer and photographed, as a sum of their experiences extending forward and backward in time from the split second recorded in the photograph.

 

 

 

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Miki Kratsman: People I Met is the first solo exhibition of this award-winning Israeli conceptual photographer to be presented in the United States and is on view at USFCAM through Saturday, December 8. It is the first exhibition organized by USFCAM’s newly appointed Curator-at-Large Christian Viveros-Fauné. A highly regarded international art critic and curator, Viveros-Fauné has also been named the 2018-2019 Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and Art History.

 

RELATED EVENT: Film on the Lawn

Friday, November 16, 2018
6 PM
Free and open to the public.

USFCAM presents the award-winning documentary 5 Broken Cameras as part of their outdoor Film on the Lawn series. A first-hand account of non-violent resistance in the West Bank village of Bil’in, documented over a span of many years by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat and then edited and co-directed by Israeli Guy Davidi, the documentary has been hailed as an important work of both cinematic and political activism. For more information about this free event, visit the Museum’s Facebook Event Page.

My Camera My Self(ie)

My Camera My Self(ie)

by Sabrina Hughes

 

In my History of Photography course, there is a class meeting on the syllabus dedicated to discussing selfies. I’m sure my undergraduate students roll their eyes when they see this and wait for me to deliver a punchline that never arrives. Discussing selfies, even uttering the word at all, feels like a relic of 2014, a simpler time. There can’t possibly be any more defenses or lamentations can there? Can’t we just stop talking about them?

Not quite yet. The exhibition This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, Florida once again revives the conversation between the art of photographic self-portraiture and the omnipresent culture of the selfie.

Malick Sidibé, Malick lui même (Malick himself), 1972, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Malick Sidibé, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

 

 

The term selfie is cute. It’s a truncated form of self-portrait, just as the image produced is, presumably, dashed off quickly, without forethought, without composition, without art. The word, like the photo itself, and a characteristic projected onto people who take selfies, is infantilizing. Selfies are immature. They are not and will never be serious art. They are not worth talking about. SELF PORTRAITS, on the other hand, are demonstrative of the skill of the artist. They can be political, satirical, cutting. They can be ART. This artificial dichotomy permeates all critical discussions of selfies, and is the very cornerstone of the exhibition.

To anyone without a background in art, the title of the exhibition simply seems to reiterate that claim that selfies are somehow lesser than. But it asks us to grant these self-portraits the benefit of the doubt. Don’t worry, these aren’t selfies. They belong here.

The title is a direct reference to Rene Magritte’s painting The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) from 1928, also in LACMA’s permanent collection which may give some insight into the curatorial decision to reference this work in the title. The painting, which depicts a pipe floating on a flat ecru background with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” inscribed in cursive script beneath plays with the ways meaning is ascribed to objects. This is not, in fact, a pipe. It is a painting.

 

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), 1928-29, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

 

 

This is Not a Selfie contends that the photographic self-portraits within are not selfies. They have loftier aspirations and have Something To Say. They are role play (like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #5 from 1977), they are explorations of identity (like Claude Cahun’s photocollage I.O.U. (Self-Pride) from 1929-30), they are political statements (like Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self Portrait from 1988, a clear commentary on the devastation caused by AIDS in the gay community). Self-portraits can be artificial (like Lucas Samaras Photo Transformation 8/19/76), they can be authentic (like Malick Sidibé’s head-to-toe Malick lui même from 1972), they can be deadly serious or playful (like William Wegman’s Half and Halfs from 1973). They can be anything. Except they can’t be selfies.

Claude Cahun, I.O.U. (Self-Pride) 1929-1930, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Estate of Claude Cahun, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

 

 

Certainly, a number of the photographs in the exhibition truly do not function within the art historical discourse of self-portraiture: they are not selfies. I think of Sherman’s Untitled Film Still series where she is very obviously not Cindy in front of the camera. She is an anonymous ingenue from a-movie-that-looks-familiar-but-you-can’t-quite-place-it. She is a fabrication. Likewise, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo of his recumbent torso and legs framing a street scene, for instance, seems less about him as a subject and more like a playful riff on his skill at finding a decisive moment even while he’s resting.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #5, 1977, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

 

 

In a number of the works, the photographers wear masks, turn their backs, or otherwise keep their face out of the camera’s sight. Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Untitled from The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (where everyone photographed for the project wears a rubber mask) confounds the viewer—it is hard to tell whether Meatyard also wears a mask or if his face is simply obscured in the shadow of his hat. Wolfgang Tillmans’ Lacanau-self (1986), a deadpan photo from the point of view of Tillmans’ eyes—what he would see as he’s looking down—may leave viewers asking what does or doesn’t make a self-portrait? Is it required that we see the artist’s face or any identifying characteristics at all? Lee Friedlander’s shadow reveals his proximity to a woman he follows on the street of New York City (1966), which is how his presence manifests in front of the camera while he remains safely behind it. Is a shadow a self-portrait? Shrug.

 

Imogen Cunningham, With grandchildren at the Fun House, 1955, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection; Photo by the author.

 

 

The real contradiction within the exhibition comes when the institution is left to perform the interpretive gymnastics of justifying how some of the images are different from selfies (spoiler: some aren’t any different! Does this invalidate them as art? No!). Photos by Imogen Cunningham (With grandchildren at the Fun House) and Ilse Bing (Self-Portrait in Mirrors) are no different in intent or execution than a mirror selfie that draws the ridicule of many on the internet for being vain or silly. Most poignant of the mirror selfies, and possibly of the entire exhibition, is Diane Arbus’s disarmingly intimate Self-portrait in mirror (1945) where the sometimes brutalizing photographer, pregnant with her first child, uses her full-length mirror and bulky view camera to create a gentle nude to send to her husband while he was overseas in the Army.

Berenice Abbott’s Portrait of the Author as a Young Woman is delightful, an analog distortion of her face to comic effect. One of my favorite images in the exhibition is 1001 Gesichter (1957) by Peter Keetman. Between Keetman’s face and the camera lens is a wet screen. His face beyond the screen is out of focus but thousands of tiny Keetmans are refracted in the water droplets suspended in the mesh and look back at us. Photographers experimenting with their photographic tools create playful images with water, mirrors, disco balls, and double- or long-exposures.

This is Not a Selfie invites us to consider the ways that, in the hands of artists, the self-portrait can be invested with any number of culturally important interpretations. I would invite a critical viewer to ask in response: why and how are selfies assumed to be devoid of these characteristics? What is the ideological difference between artists experimenting with mirror selfies and distortions, costumes, masks, or alternate selves and any one of us trying the same via our digital camera, facial recognition filters, and Instagram? Doesn’t the nearly ubiquitous access to cameras via our phones (which is what ushered in the explosion of selfies) encourage a new generation of photographers in this type of experimentation?

If I were discussing This is Not a Selfie with my History of Photography students, I would ask them to think carefully about what is at stake in the narrative of the exhibition. Before we discuss selfies in the course we have already spent two classes talking about how photography has functioned as a tool for marginalized groups, particularly in Jim Crow America. While, for example, African Americans were often portrayed in the popular media through a variety of insidious (and persistent) stereotypes, their personal photos of family and friends reveal the antithesis of that harmful view. We learn that photography has a unique ability to empower individuals and groups to conceive and represent the image that they, not others, want to show to the world. Photography is a powerful tool for self-fashioning. It’s within this context and with this groundwork that we finally approach the discussion of selfies as a product of other drives within the history of photography, the history of art, and the social history of photography in its most banal and everyday form: printed or digital personal albums. By the time the class comes around the students completely understand why selfies must be discussed.

The politics of self-representation cannot be overlooked and should not be dismissed. What is behind the pervasive urge to collectively disparage a form of self-representation that empowers the photographer-slash-subject in crafting and distributing their own image? Who is doing the disparaging and who benefits from the results? For instance, when Vogue, uncontested international arbiter of taste and high fashion, publishes an article calling selfies idiotic, readers are being told that they are not good enough as they are. It makes sense. Why should readers listen to Vogue (and therefore keep buying the magazines and the products from the magazine’s advertisers) if they started believing what their selfies tell them—that they are already enough?

 

Alfred Stieglitz, Self-Portrait, Cortina, 1890, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection; Snapchat photo by the author Sabrina Hughes.

 

 

For museums—elite cultural institutions responsible for defining what is or is not high art while collectively struggling to diversify their collections and expand the voices they represent—punching down at selfies feels like a cheap shot. Why can Alfred Stieglitz languor on a set of picturesque steps and set up his self-timer but we should not? Why can artists document moods or changes in their bodies but we are wrong to? Why not use the institutional platform to stand up for and legitimize the lineage of selfies as an integral part of the history of photography (one of the earliest photographs after its invention, Hippolyte Bayard’s Self Portrait as a Drowned Man from 1840, is a selfie after all) instead of creating a narrative that tries to create differences in practice, intent, or validity when there often is none?  

All of these questions invite one more: how should we view selfies if not as silly, vain, and disposable? Like any form of visual representation, selfies mean any number of things to each person who makes them. Just like the people that make selfies, they don’t have to hold to only one interpretation. Their ambiguity is their power. They mirror the depth and breadth of all of our various lives and experiences. For some of us, our very existence is political. Making ourselves visible as we want to be seen is a way to retain control of the means of representation rather than leaving it to those who want to control, influence, or sell to us. That is, in fact, how I define selfies to my classes. An image wherein the subject is also in control of the mode of representation. All selfies are political. We, and our selfies, contain multitudes. Take more selfies.

 

 

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

 

 

Conversation with a Curator: Really! This is (So) Not a Selfie

Thursday, October 25, 2018, at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg.
FREE with Museum admission, $10 on Thursdays after 5 pm.

The special exhibition This is Not a Selfie is curated from a single collection, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
This is Not a Selfie curator Eve Schillo, Assistant Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA, will be at the Museum on October 25th for a gallery talk to discuss the influence of the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection of self-portraiture photography in today’s world.

Lisa Anne Auerbach, Take This Knitting Machine and Shove It, 2009, inkjet print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, © Lisa Anne Auerbach, Courtesy of the artist and Gavlak Gallery, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

 

We can selfie if we want to

Snapchat photo by Sabrina Hughes, the author of the upcoming post titled: My Camera, My Sel(fie) using Alfred Stieglitz, Self-Portrait, Cortina, 1890, gelatin silver print, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection.

The upcoming essay by St. Petersburg photo historian Sabrina Hughes, My Camera My Self(ie), which will post on Bay Art Files next week, examines the complex relationship between photographic self-portraiture and the selfie. That such a relationship might exist and be scrutinized is explicitly suggested by the title of the current traveling exhibition at the MFA, St Petersburg, This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self- Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection. The title asserts that a clear distinction can be drawn between the two.

The Irmas Collection, on display at the MFA through November 25th, is a deep and rich survey of photographic self-portraiture by considerable artists and is, as such, definitely worthy of one’s time and attention and a visit. In conjunction with the exhibition there are also selfie stations situated in the galleries where one can photograph oneself with various backdrops; projected, optical and otherwise. To take the exhibition’s title at face value, as it were, we are being asked to make a comparison between the art on the walls and the selfie one might take whilst at the exhibition.

Undoubtedly, this is a complex and involved question. The fact that a comparison is being asked to be drawn, in itself, entertains the notion that there is a spectrum on which both can be assessed. There are commonalities between museum-quality photographic self-portraiture and the selfie, and that these two distinct practices should be fairly judged and reviewed one and together, at the same time, and in the same place is surely a provocative question.

It is one that Hughes insightfully and deftly examines in her Essay, My Camera, My Self(ie).  Alone, the artists and their works on display definitely deserve one’s time and attention. The issues raised in the essay, it is hoped, will add a further perspective that provokes thought and encourages discourse. And indeed, in addition, add to one’s overall enjoyment of this exhibition. That is our intention.

 

Disturbed by Delight – Caitlin Albritton

Disturbed by Delight

by Caitlin Albritton

“Woman dressed as a turkey arrested for shoplifting,” “Someone donated a loaded grenade launcher to Goodwill,” “Man claims wife was kidnapped by holograms”—please, don’t let this be a headline from Florida, a local might plead. I can’t begin to imagine how non-Floridians make sense of the Sunshine State: how can so many bizarre stories come out of a place so seemingly utopic? While this handle of land has been distilled into a variety of assumptions, Florida native Selina Román uses photography to usurp these presumptions by reveling in its beauty and strangeness in her solo exhibition A Liminal State at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art. While her exhibition encompasses five bodies of work, most of her solo show revolves around the Please Disturb series and the related Please Disturb: LRMA Edition.

Travel has always been a way to understand a place. In the heyday of road trips in the first few decades of the 20thcentury, the popularity of the automobile lifted the boundaries of economic status and permitted an escape from the everyday. What a better way to welcome Florida-bound tourists than with family-run motels that offer dreams of relaxing seas and palm tree paradise. Yet with contemporary travel, it’s no longer about the journey but getting to the destination as quickly as possible. Travel has lost its spark, while forgotten motels now serve as an embodied representation of Florida—with its own fantasies and unfulfilled dreams. Swaddled in a potentially unwashed comforter, this state encapsulates everything weird, sexy, funny, and mysterious about this peninsula.

So, let’s linger in these transient spaces a bit longer.

“What would happen if I brought a readymade to a motel?” I’d like to think this is how Román decided to turn dated Florida motel rooms into her temporary studio space for her Please Disturb series, inviting her friends and other guests in for intimate photoshoots full of vintage props and 80s beauty products: tasseled majorette uniforms, frilly swimming caps adorned with silk rosettes, and facial treatment masks, all haloed by a barrage of sequins that glitz like fish scales in the sultry lighting. The commissioned LRMA Edition is just as bedazzled, but instead of photographing people she knew, this was the first-time strangers—museum docents and members— had been invited to her room at the Tarpon Shores Inn.

Alter egos arise under the cover of costume.

There’s a bit of improvisation and performance on Román’s part in setting up these rooms, from the careful arrangement of costumes in open-plan closets to the posing of her models; there may be some ideas in mind, but for-the-most-part, all parties involved allow fluidity in the process. Instead of chastising our inherent interest in gazing at others, Roman’s admission of our society’s voyeuristic tendencies whispers to us: don’t mind if you do.

While motels are often the sites of her photographs, other innately Floridaesque locations insinuate the condition of transformation: beaches, fresh-water springs, or abandoned public pools as evidenced in the other series on display.

Ebb Tide, 2016. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist

What makes her photographs alluring is the fact that they resist direct eye contact; if our eyes are windows to the soul, most of Román’s are coyly shuttered (even the motel’s street-front signage is bashful, its watery reflection mirrored via pool in Ebb Tide). In 15thcentury Italian paintings, many painters would rely on the viewer’s disposition to read into relationships within the work. In a poetic treatise on painting by the artist-philosopher Leon Battista Alberti, he says, “Movements of the soul are recognized in movements of the body.” Searching for emotional keys in body language and relationships between the figures and their flirtatious props (as well as cheeky titles), Román mixes the familiar with the foreign to create moments of captivating uncanny.

Is the Fantasy Better than the Reality? 2012. Archival transparency print in a lightbox, 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

In looking for what questions Román’s work asks of us, I found one in the title of one of her pieces: Is the Fantasy Better than the Reality? an inkjet transparency lit from behind to create a soft blue glow in the background. A woman’s curvaceous silhouette lounges in waiting: a fishnet shirt is stretched over the morsel of breast we can fathom from our view behind her. Her short red wig glows from another light source, and we can make out the porous plastic material that makes up the wig’s artificial lining, not even trying to create a perfect camouflage of her natural hair that peeks out beneath it. After a while, you’ll notice it: the sliver of hairy chest she is leaning upon.

Low-Grade Euphoria, 2013. Archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

It feels too easy to say that, “Fantasy is better!” since each figure is wrapped up in their own alternate universe that escapes the dregs of real life. Either way, Román seems unwilling to show her cards on which she believes is “better,” equally considering both sides. Hints to this lie in how the perfect image of fantasy is disrupted in her iconic photos, from the awkwardness of a bathing-suit-clad body stuffed through a pool chair like in Low-Grade Euphoria, to the absurdity of wearing silicone lips that promise to make your jawline slenderer and more appealing, seen in Maybe She’s Born With It.

Maybe She’s Born With It, 2017. Archival inkjet print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist

 Glitter is good at hiding disheveled, grubby spaces, is it not?

So, perhaps the answer Román is getting at is that reality impedes imagination. Another rift in the fantasy comes from the prop vignettes throughout the exhibition. The solidity of these props grounds the viewer—Oh, this is what it really is! —slightly shattering the ephemerality of the images by gently steeping them in reality.

In a contemporary art scene where “meaning” feels prized over aesthetics, it seems that Román is also asking how uncanny or unconsidered beauty can be used purposefully to balance the weighted scales of daily burdens. How does the old Hollywood glamour in her LRMA Edition of Please Disturb empathetically portray the sensuality of an aging woman? How can we simmer in the magnificence of nostalgia without agonizing over the past? How can we celebrate and create an identity for transience by shedding a new light on all of the stuff we didn’t know we should be considering as instigators of awe and wonder?

For those who have yet to put their finger on the pulse of what makes this state tick, Roman’s provocative works are like being baptized in the heavily chlorinated waters of Floridian mythology: there’s an element of folklore that reaches towards the fantastic, yet is firmly rooted in reality. Deeply mysterious, it’s the kind of artwork that quivers the stillness of the imagination in an age of excessive data that tries to stifle it.

I am content in being a voyeur in these calm, intimate moments, where I am disturbed by delight.

 

Caitlin Albritton is an artist and freelance writer based in Tampa with a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. When she’s not looking at art throughout town, she can be found making it. You can keep up with her visual art on Instagram @caitlinalbritton or on her website.

In partnership with Smithsonian Museum Day where participating museums (such as the Leepa-Rattner) will have free admission, the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art will be hosting the event Concealed: A Photoshoot with Selina Románfrom 11 a.m.-1 p.m. on September 22, 2018,  for the last weekend of A Liminal State, which will be up through September 23rd. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own props and will have the opportunity to have a Polaroid of themselves to bring back home.