Runaway Clowns by Lucille Blanch.
Oil paintings and drawings and lithographs and sculptures and photographs, including one of Milton Greene’s iconoclastic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, were stacked everywhere in both places.
Now, starting Friday, August 27, everything will be hung as part of a one week preview exhibition at WAAM, with daily viewing hours beginning at noon daily.
As usual it’s a potpourri of riches, all affordably priced…at least in terms of opening bids, heavens help the greed in us should everyone start wanting what we are lusting after.
There are classic art posters for Matisse and Leger shows in Paris and elsewhere, a lovely anonymously-created Orientalist oil painting of an Eastern Marketplace, plenty of classic Woodstock artist etchings and sketches, a colorful Calder lithograph, a Dean Young Blondie original; some gorgeous Haitian pieces.
There are abstracts and modernist pieces, contemporary works and academic studies. Robert Henris and Konrad Cramers and John Pikes and Doris Lees and Arnold Blanches and all manner of associated Woodstock artists. A drawing of John Carlson by none other than Enrico Caruso. A number of Hervey White publications. Ceramics and jewels and what-have-yous. Mary Franks and Leslie Benders. Rich Pantells and Milton Glasers. A Tricia Cline mixed media wonder. A lovely painting by Sally Avery of her husband, Milton.
The high-end items, at least as anticipated by expected bid amounts, include works by James Ormsbee Chapin and Frank Swift Chase in the $2000 to $3000 range, a painting by the sculptor George Rickey from the 1930s at $3000 to $4000, a lovely John Fenton piece, The Forest Murmers, priced between $2500 and 3500. Then things rise…with a work attributed to Joseph Stella asking between $3000 and $4000; a painting by Jennie Magafan in the $2,500 range alongside an abstracted man by Rolph Scarlett in the $5000 range. At the top of the pyramid? A lovely egg tempura piece by Ethel Magafan starting around $5000, a Lucille Blanch piece, Runaway Clowns, expected to get between $6000 and $8000, and finally a Romare Bearden jazz improvisation asking between $8000 and $10,000.
Get over there while the looking’s good and see what’s come out of some of our town’s homes, and now seems headed back into others. As well as what our comnmunity’s created all these years.
Gallery hours for this preview at WAAM, located at 28 Tinker Street in the center of town, are Friday and Saturday, noon to 6 p.m., and Sunday through Thursday, noon to 5 p.m.
The actual auction starts at 1 p.m. Sunday, September 5 in WAAM’s main gallery.
To see what’s available online, and bid already, visit www.woodstockart.org.
For further information call 679-2940.++
WAAM elections go smoothly
Sunday morning, August 22, The Woodstock Artist Association and Museum held its annual General Membership Meeting and Elections. Incumbents won across the board, maintaining a string of stable years for the recently-embroiled organization, and according to Executive Director Josephine Bloodgood, attendance was light and discussion civil and relatively short.
Harriet Livathinos and Frances Clair Garofalo won open Active Member seats over longstanding active member Maralyn Master. Garofalo, a photographer and painter, owns the Zena Framing Gallery and Livathinos is former owner of an arts oriented temporary employment agency in New York City.
For the Associate Members portion of the board, winners were Leonard Levitan, the current board chairman, lawyer Barbara Klippert, who has been serving as pro bono counsel for the organization, and Sylvia Leonard Wolf, professional art appraiser and Levitan’s wife. Also running was Marls Dudley, who currently serves on the organization’s by-laws committee.
Active members may vote for both Active and Associate member candidates, while WAAM Associate members may only vote for Associate candidates. Voting ballots went out weeks ago.
“The meeting was pretty quiet. Lots of people expressed a feeling of confidence in the Board and appreciated the level professionalism in procedures,” Bloodgood related. “Meredith Rosier, Howard Goldson, and Christina Varga all ‘retired’ this year and were thanked for their service.”
The Board gave an update on the progress of proposed bylaws changes, which will be going out to members in the next month, after the auction. An open call to members was sent last winter inviting input on such matters, after which a committee met over the course of several months to put together approved by the Board at the last monthly Board meeting in July.
Bylaws had been shifted and then declared illegally changes several years ago under a previous WAAM administration.
“I should also mention that we’re about on track with the budget, but as always depend on the success of the auction and year end gifts to cover expenses and help us plan for 2011,” added Bloodgood, noting that jurying for the all solo room shows for the coming year will take place next Friday, September 3, by the National Academy Museum’s Senior Curator, Bruce Weber. “Full steam ahead…”++
Art in a new context
We all know Lenny Kislin’s got a goodly bit of the gambler in him. Consider his involvement in putting together this Thursday’s poker tournament at INDIE, or his move from selling antiques to making art a few years back. Or his way with exhibiting art at Oriole 9, for which he’s been curating over the last few years.
Yet even Kislin and his wife Nancy say his latest gamble, to try and sell his assemblist art at last week’s New York International Gift Fair at the Javits Center in Manhattan, was a bit hair-raising and far-fetched. At least, back before he sold 21 new smaller pieces at the Fair for prices ranging between $700 and $900 apiece.
Wholesale, mind you. Alongside making a host of key contacts, including several new galleries nationwide, as well as a number of top decorators now keen on placing Kislin’s work in the homes and apartments they’re redoing.
“We made a kind of educated guess,” Kislin said of his success this week. “There are so many people who attend the gift show we figured we’d be able to catch someone’s attention.”
The trick, he added, was getting his work in to the heavily-juried exhibition. Fortunately, Nancy had navigated the Gift Fair before for their daughter Jessie’s jewelry business, and knew the ropes.
Then there was creating new pieces that were smaller, and more affordable, than much of what Kislin’s become known for locally.
He said what made a difference seemed to be how his stuff ended up standing out among everything else on view…he found a new context for his art, in other words.
At the same time, Kislin pointed out how, lagging gallery sales to the contrary, his experience at both Oriole 9 and at last week’s International Gift Fair have revealed to him an ongoing interest in art, even when actual purchases are difficult.
So…how did the artist and his wife celebrate their luck and calculated success after the big weekend?
“I slept in my bed for a whole day,” Kislin said. “It was a long haul, a tough show. But fortunately, it was also workable…”++
Contradictions in culture
There’s a new show up in the new gallery that opened out Route 212 and over the line into Saugerties, next to where Lucky Chocolates once was (and Fionn Reilly’s new Image Factory keeps a steady stream of events happening these days). Enigmatically entitled “show untitled,” the latest Thaddeus Kwiat Projects exhibition features some fascinatingly Pop (yet intriguingly spiritually-metaphored) paintings by Kira Greene, whose patterned works, rich in layering, resemble both turn of the century European tromp l’oiel and Islamic art…as well as Greene’s birth in South Korea.
“Kira Greene’s paintings and drawings negotiate the duality and dichotomy of her existence as an Asian immigrant woman in America. As an outsider, Greene is more aware of the contradictions in the plurality of cultures in the present American society,” she writes of herself in her artist statement. “As a feminist, she is repulsed and demoralized by the objectification of female bodies in art history and popular culture, yet she finds herself strongly attracted to the sensuality of these images. This paradox has led her to combine the rigidity of patterns with the imagery of desire in the female body. In her most recent work, she replaces the body with the images of lusciously styled food while heightening the complexity with the mixture of patterns and icons derived from various Western and Eastern sources. The food, both in harmony and clash with its surroundings, is the body (literally and metaphorically) and the surrogate for desire to consume and control.”
Showing with Greene is the British artist, illustrator, musician and photographer Conor Foy, whose cartoon-y works have a sly sense of the surreal and deeply meaningful to them, and small mixed media works on plexiglass by Cynthia Fetty, principal owner of the gallery.
The show is up through September 26 with an artists’ reception planned for5 p.m.-8 p.m. Saturday, September 18.
Thaddeus Kwiat Projects, a spinoff of the late Posie Kviat Gallery in Hudson, is located at 1536 Route 212, Studio #C in Saugerties, near Jolly Market. Hours are Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, noon to 6 p.m. For further information, or appointments, call 917-456-7496.++
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