Glenstone, a private art museum in Potomac, Md., looks forward to a $125 million expansion. Come 2016, a new series of exhibition spaces will be open five days a week, albeit by reservation only. Important works by mid-century moderns (Serra, Pollack, Johns, de Kooning) and contemporary artists are part of the collection of Mitchell and Emily Rales. Carol Vogel has the full story.
Category: Art and Architecture
Ephemera
Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 681 C at the National Gallery has collapsed. The pieces are going into storage.
Wall
You shouldn’t be a prisoner of your own ideas. Everyone gets into their own box and enunciates principles, if only in their own mind—you have your own constraints and your own structure that you think you’re following, and then you realize that what you’re saying is “I can do this, but I can’t do that.” And then at some point you say, “Well, why not?” and the answer is “Because I told myself I couldn’t.” If you keep telling yourself, “You can,” then you are liberated. If you’re totally constrained, all that’s left for you to do is break the mold. “Every wall is a door.”
—Sol LeWitt, BOMB Magazine, Fall 2003
The waxwing slain
Toronto’s glass-and-steel skyline is an architect’s delight, but quite deadly to fall migrant birds. Despite Canadian government regs that make newly-built towers less lethal, there is still great room for improvement. Ian Austen tours the city, and picks up a few carcasses, with Michal Mesure and volunteers for the Fatal Light Awareness Program.
VCU Rice Center
For my first field trip as part of the Virginia Native Plant Society’s annual meeting, we visited the Virginia Commonwealth University Inger and Walter Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences in Charles City County. The botanizing was what it was, but the education and lab facility was a stunner.
VCU acquired the property, on a bluff with a majestic view of the James River, via a gift from Walter Rice’s widow, Inger. She then went on to specify (and fund!) a state-of-the-art sustainably-built edifice. Panelled in American White-cedar, the building has achieved LEED platinum certification. Early plans called for solar panels on the roof, but they would have been shadowed by the huge oak that provides the shade in this image. So the panels were relocated to the research pier at the bottom of the bluff.
Vertical geothermal tubes provide some of the heating and cooling. I was surprised to learn that the permeable paving system for the entrance drive and parking area (a plastic grid over layers of sand and gravel) was one of the more expensive elements, blowing out the original $2M budget for the entire package.
The south-facing conference hall is naturally lit and ventilated. Knee-height casement windows are supplemented with industrial-strength ceiling fans, keeping temps in the room very comfortable (albeit on a breezy early fall day).
As we talked outside, our presenters were upstaged by a pair of chippering Bald Eagles, their arrival announced by an unhappy Blue Jay.
Along with research into Eastern Box Turtles and Prothonotary Warblers, the Center is in the midst of a wetland restoration project—one that was prompted by Nature herself. Kimages Creek, just to the east of the educattion building, was dammed in the 1920s by a real estate developer who sought to establish a hunting club. Although he busted almost immediately, the dam remained for the time being, impounding a body of water called Charles Lake (it’s still labelled as such on Yahoo!’s maps). The earthen dam, never well-maintained, was eventually breached by storms in the 2000s. Efforts are now underway to re-establish the tidal freshwater creek.
Land use in the area is exceptionally well-documented and mapped, owing to the place’s strategic importance during the American Civil War. Gen. George McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was encamped on the eastern side of Kimages Creek for a short period of time in 1862.
TILE
I kid you not, this building is at the end of the block of Degraw Street where my no-frills European-style hotel was located.
As evidenced by the newly-established hotel, Park Slope and Boerum Hill are encroaching on this industrial neighborhood of Gowanus. We passed a shiny new condo block on the west side of 4th Avenue. Degraw and Sackett Streets are painted with bike lanes.
Roosevelt Island and nearby
I took a vacation day Monday, before my training classes midweek, to explore some offbeat places in New York. I’d never been to Roosevelt Island before, so I got that tram ticket punched. The park at the southern tip of the island was closed, but the views across the East River from just outside are just as good.
At the northern point is a lovely, tiny lighthouse, dwarfing the Triborough Bridge in this perspective.
Back on the “mainland” of Manhattan, a painted advertising sign persists on 2nd Avenue. I look at the sloped lettering of PORTOVAULT and now I understand where Ben Katchor’s signs come from
Upcoming: 30
Artomatic 2012 will take place in the Transwestern Presidential Tower on Clark Street in Arlington, as announced by the Crystal City BID. The unjuried, free show celebrating local artists of all kinds runs 18 May to 24 June.
New camera
A new camera, and I’d always wanted to take some snaps from the 7th floor roof deck. Looking north, two domed houses of worship are visible, the golden United House of Prayer for All People, and on the distant heights, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The long horizontal roofline is Galbraith A.M.E. Zion Church.
Looking down into K Street, N.W., the vacant pavement, once a parking lot, has been fenced off for several weeks. Perhaps some new construction is afoot. Looking beyond to New York Avenue, N.W., the green awning marks the location of the old A. V. Ristorante; its aggressive street-level awning used to span the wide sidewalk. Also notice the backside of the billboard, inflected toward Maryland-bound commuters.
Looking to the southeast down Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., the white dome will be familiar to some. The sloping red brick roofline is the Pension Building, home to the National Building Museum.
Mens sana in corpore sano
On my way up and down J Street (so you know I wasn’t in downtown D.C.) to visit Mom I passed this charming brick and terra cotta edifice, which turns out to be the Sacramento Turn Verein, now a German language and culture society.
Riding the wave of German immigration in the mid 19th century, the American Turnerbund movement established athletic clubs in Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; and elsewhere. It had its roots in a nationalistic yet democratic student movement in the early 1800’s, founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.
Jahn’s nationalistic spirit contributed to his role as a promoter of “patriotic gymnastics,” recognized as a strong force in Prussia’s liberation. The gymnastic exercises that he introduced were intended to infuse his students with a patriotic love of freedom that would make them capable of bearing arms for their country, in the name of war of liberation.
American Turners opposed slavery and served in the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War.
bobrauschenbergamerica
I recently worked on a project in which the director spent a fair amount of time arranging actors in space so that viewers could observe how the actions of one character affected another. That principle of basic stagecraft is sublimely flouted by Forum Theatre’s production of Charles L. Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica. The black box of Round House Theatre’s Silver Spring second stage is configured galley style, and director Derek Goldman often positions his players at opposite ends of the playing space, so we in the audience ping-pong from one to another, watching reactions. Often there are little wordless subplots going on in the corners of the stage, bits of nonsense worthy of Ernie Kovacs, and we just don’t know where to look.
It’s an exuberant production of Mee’s dramatic collage that matches the tone of sculptor Robert Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional assemblages of castoffs and intimate materials. Consider Carl’s (Aaron Reeder’s) joyful dance with a load of laundry, or the zany movie scenario described by Becker (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) and acted out by the ensemble cast, or the delicious batch of martinis mixed by Phil’s Girl (Chelsey Christensen). The grounded Annie Houston (as Bob’s Mom) digs into Rauschenberg’s small town roots with a narration fit for an old photo album but set on a slideshow of the artist’s works. In this yard sale of the mind, people expound on astronomy while slurping a Texas picnic’s worth of watermelon, or rant about sexual politics while stuffing cake in their mouths. Or beat the crap out of an aluminum trash can with a baseball bat. Or just tell silly chicken jokes.
The final tableau, in which all of Rauschenberg’s ladders to the stars and bathtubs and old license plates are brought center stage into one meta-assemblage, is sublime.
- bobrauschenbergamerica, by Charles L. Mee, directed by Derek Goldman, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland
Better view desired
Dale Tucker goes birding in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as part of the museum’s Connections series of narrated slideshows.
AF of L
For the past year-plus that I’ve been commuting to downtown, I had often admired this trim little building standing by itself on a trapezoidal pentagonal lot on the northwest corner of 9th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. A plaque at the corner identifies it with the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada.
Alas, last week I noticed construction fencing walling off the building. The lights were still on inside the building, but I feared that it would soon go under the ball. The Circulator stop out front has been decommissioned.
That seems less likely, since the building is listed (item 74002154) in the National Register of Historic Places as the American Federation of Labor building. The Sullivanesque edifice was built in 1915 by Milburn, Heister & Company, and served as headquarters for the AF of L for 40 years until its merger with the CIO, at which point the plumbers moved in.
The United Association is now headquartered in Annapolis. I didn’t track down the current owner or tenants.
Upcoming: 27
Via ArtsJournal, Irene Lacher chats with Laurie Anderson about Delusion (the piece she’s bringing to the Smith Center at the end of this week), an exhibition in Brazil, and an imagined project:
…I was in a green room with Yo-Yo Ma, about to give a commencement speech. And it was very hot and very boring, and we were sitting around and talking about different fantasies. And I said, “My fantasy is playing a concert and I look out and it’s all dogs.” And so, he said, “That’s my fantasy too.” And I said, “Whoa, that’s amazing.” We said, “OK, the first one that gets to do it has to invite the other one.”
[Untitled]
Vesela Sretenović: Is your lack of interest in making representational or narrative paintings the reason you avoid giving titles to your works?
Robert Ryman: Actually, titles came simply for identification purposes, and nothing was titled until it went out someplace. That’s why most of the small works from the early 1960s that have rarely been shown are still untitled.
VS: In the mid 1960s you started to use titles that were playful and associative, like Lugano, Archive, General, Pace, Courier, Spectrum, etc. You would think they had meaning, until you realized they were brands of paint, office supplies, shipping companies, or industrial materials. Was this an intentional tease?
RR: No, it was just a matter of finding a title that wasn’t so easy to associate with something specific. There was one title, Signet 20, that was from the brush I used, and someone called me and wanted to know if there was another Signet. But it was because it was a number 20 brush—there were not 19 previous Signets. The title Standard was from the company where I got the steel. Standard was just a word that couldn’t make one think of a landscape or a sunset or something.
Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, 2010 (Phillips Collection exhibition catalog)