In North Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), is now presenting "Ed Ruscha: On the Road," a collection of drawings and paintings inspired by passages from famed novel by Jack Kerouac. This exhibit is organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, curated by Douglas Fogle. It's up though Sept. 2, 2012. For more info, see www.mocanomi.org
As a follow-up to my previous blog post, I'm refining the book pitch for my memoir. I know it's not in good-to-go shape yet, but it is much better than the previous one I made at the Pitch-o-Rama at the Writers Institute in early May at MDC. I really fell flat on my ass with that one (figuratively, I mean).
So here's my current book pitch (a very short summary of the essence of the book someone wants to write, designed to interest a book publisher, or not):
I wake up every morning and praise God that I'm not dead or drooling in a wheelchair, and that the rest of my family is alive and well. One rainy day our lives changed instantly in a car crash as we drove our son to start college. Yet I'll never remember this life-changing event. In a flash I was knocked into the black nothingness of a coma and hospitalized for a month while I tried to remember who I was and re-learn basic skills I'd always taken for granted, like talking, walking, sipping coffee, even the typing I did as a journalist. Today I'm blessed to look as if my life has returned to normal, but now I live with my "new normal": dealing with the post-traumantic stress disorder dreadfully familiar to those who've suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car crash, football game, or war zone. I've said good-bye to my former life and income: I lost my newspaper job. Driving on expressways gives me the creeps. Painful reminders of my past trigger flashbacks, also bad dreams that seem real until I wake up to realize I'm not being strangled, or that someone I know isn't amputating my feet.
First things first: More visual arts news connected to Miami
So very sad to report the death of feminist art historian and retired University of Miami professor Paula Hays Harper on June 3, 2012. When I read The Miami Herald obit by my former colleague Elinor Brecher in the paper on June 13, 2012, I cried and cried, even though I had known she had been quite sick for such a long time. Mark your calendar, if you will be in Miami then, for the memorial service her friends are planning at noon on July 20 at The Wolfsonian Florida International University, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach 33139.
Had to share this touching email comment I received re Paula from Billie G. Lynn, Associate Professor of Sculpture at University of Miami:
"She was a great teacher and I loved her sense of humor. . .sooooo wicked and yet right on! The students of the future will miss her and not know quite what is missing, but I'll be sure to tell them about her. As you well know, no one knows the hour of their death, as the bumper sticker says: 'Live like it's your last day on Earth because one day you'll be right.'
"She as a great woman, let's honor her by living outrageously."
For particularly noteworthy exhibits in Miami this summer, check out my Summer Critic's Choice at www.artcircuits.com In the June ARTnews, you might like to catch my review of Rita Ackermann solo show at MOCA in North Miami, page 98. Also note in that issue on page 42 story about how ARTnews has won a prize for its excellence in journalism.
Sebastian Spreng tells me about an exhibit of 150 artworks by Julio Larraz, who lives in Miami, opening July 11, 2012 at 6:30 pm and up through the last week in Sept. 2012 at Galleria D'Arte Contini, Via S. Marco 2765 / 30124 in Venice, Italy. To rsvp call this Miami ph number: 305-665-3334. For more info about this exhibit, see www.continiarte.com
Tina Spiro tells me she has been invited for the second time in a row to exhibit at Beijing Biennale, this time for 2012, at the National Museum of China. Her tryptych oil painting "Rembrandt 2012: Back to the Future" will be featured to represent Jamaica. Other news: Tina (who used to live and work here and has since moved to Jamaica but we keep in touch via email) has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Gallery of Jamaica and asked to serve as the chair of the Exhibitions Committee of that institution.
Joel Hoffman, director of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, has created a blog to document the process of replacing Vizcaya's Courtyard skylight. It's really been an eyesore for years in that quite beautiful place. Plans are to finish this project in September. Find the link to his blog at the homepage at www.vizcaya.org
My BFF Rosie Gordon-Wallace tells me about this exhibit, which sounds quite exciting and impressive. Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator presents this in partnership with the Miami Dade College Art Gallery System and MDC Live!:
"Milagros: Portal Culture" by Felici Asteinza
National Performance Network / Visual Artists Network Residency
Opening night reception is Thurs. June 28, from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Blvd. Artist Talk is Friday, June 29 at 1 pm. This exhibit continues through July 27, 2012 as a DVCAI Caribbean Crossroads exhibition series. All programs are free and open to the public.
Milagros: Portal Culture
Felici Asteinza, Caribbean artist whose one week NPN/VAN community residency is June 24-30, 2012 will create Milagros: Portal Culture, presenting a series of community partnership projects and programs, including a collaborative community-making / collecting project where artists and musicians guide participants through creation and collection of art and sound. Working with her artist group Alvin Fillastre, Evan Galbick and Elestial Sound, visitors to MDC Art Gallery System at the Freedom Tower will experience first hand the process and creation of building the installation performance space, culminating in an on-site, one-night artist musician performance.
Felici's artwork explores the ritualistic nature of creating. These multi-layered collages are embedded with re-discovered residue from the artist's studio as well as images reflecting anxieties and greed. Elaborate, precise lines become the glue between elements, creating a rhythmic, activated field.
Elestial Sound Records is a sustainable record label run by solar panels in the northern California mountains, also supporting an abundane of cutting-edge musicians from Florida. Their music plays while the installation is created, making a truly collaborative venture between the visual and music arts. The Freedom Tower's architecture has guided this site-specific installation.
WOULD LOVE TO GET COMMENTS FOR MY BLOG ABOUT WHAT READERS THOUGHT ABOUT THIS EVENT: The live performance will take place ONLY during the opening reception, Thursday, June 28 from 6-9 pm at the Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne, 3rd Floor.
For more info about Felici, see www.milagrosartcollective.blogspot.com For more info about Diaspora Cultural Arts Incubator, see www.diasporavibevirtualgallery.com For more info about Miami Dade College Art Gallery system, see http://www.mdc.edu/ags For more info about MDC Live! Performing Arts Series, see http://www.mdc.edu/main/mdclive
This program is sponsored by the National Performance Network (NPN) Visual Arts Network (VAN) funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, partnered with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. For more info about NPN and VAN, please see http://www.npnweb.org
Rustin Levenson, that art conservator extraordinaire, tells me how she is cleaning up Salvador Dali, his artwork, that is! See "Four Salvador Dali masterworks cleaned, repaired in public" by Lennie Bennett, Tampa Bay Times Art Critc (thank goodness Tampa residents have one for THEIR paper!) See http://www.tampabay.com
Cernuda Arte and Cernuda Family Collection have loaned 13 artworks to "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World," a remarkable collaborative group of exhibitions in New York now on view at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Queens Museum of Art. Congrats to this gallery and collection! The loaned artworks are by Esteban Chartrand, Victor Patricio Landaluze, Domingo Ramos, Jose Cuchi Arnau, Oscar Garcia Rivera, Carlos Enriquez, Rene Portocarrero, Fedelio Ponce, Roberto Diago, Jose Bedia.
And now here's the "vintage" part of my blog. . .
CINEMATIC IN STYLE AND SIZE, RUSCHA'S ART ADMIRED WORLDWIDE by Elisa Turner, from Miami Herald April 2001
"Ed Ruscha" at the Miami Art Museum is a traveling survey that charts one American artist's journeys along open roads and crowded urban intersections.
Often characterized as a Los Angeles practitioner of Pop art, Ruscha (pronounced ROO-shay) resists that label, as does the lyrical and deadpan variety of the 50-plus paintings, books, drawings and photography that make up this survey covering nearly 40 years of an inventive and internationally admired career.
Organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, this not-to-be-missed show is accompanied by a 196-page hard-bound catalog. Unusual among museum tomes, this catalog contains essays of exceptional insight and clarity by Kerry Brougher, chief curator at the Hirshhorn, and Neal Benezra, the Art Institute of Chicago's deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art.
They discuss important precedents for Ruscha's work, including Jasper Johns's famous 1955 Pop painting, "Target with Four Faces." Another critical influence was Robert Frank's often surreal 1958 book of photographs, "The Americans," showing bleak highways dotted with cafes and filling stations.
Throughout his career, Ruscha has melded photography and painting, building upon these sources by adding his droll trove of "found words," as he describes them in his book of word drawings "They Called Her Styrene" (Phaidon), published last year. The book reprises the down-to-earth poetry of brand names, billboards, comic-book exclamatory phrases and movie lingo that weaves throughout his MAM show, forming a witty narrative that occasionally turns sublime and poignant.
Ruscha also exploits the myth-making devices of Hollywood's dream factory, and plants that wide-angle cinematic style where we would least expect it. You find the reminder of a film director's eye in his unfolding photographic strip of gas stations or in his monumental 1963 painting of a Standard Oil station in Texas.
The dramatic, looming perpsective in this signature painting recalls the image of a speeding train seen in countless movies particularly, as Brougher points out, in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
In the '80s and '90s, Ruscha produced some of his most pared-down but evocative work, stripping his palette to foggy shades of light gray and inky black. The work reminds us of the romantic gloom of his old black-and-white movies, a feeling that remains pervasive whether his subject is a fading mythic shot of Native American tents or a 1950s car struggling toward a mountain pass.
"Like everyone else, I'm a frustrated film director," Ruscha once said.
He is clearly not a frustrated storyteller, inviting us to read his cinematic landscapes left to right, just as we would the lines of a script, poem or novel. That mix of language and landscape finds eloquent expression in his murals, which are on permanent view in the rotunda and elsewhere at Miami-Dade's Main Library.
In the rotunda, Shakespeare's line "words without thoughts never to heaven go" graces a lush stream of sunset paintings. And individual segments of his word paintings make sly homage to their surroundings, like the awkward layers of the word "sure" in the science section.
"We have people coming from all over the world not because they want to check out books, but because they want to see his paintings," says Barbara Young, the library's art services director. "It's really like turning pages as you move through the library."
Ruscha's mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go" and 56 painted lunettes are on permanent display at the Main Library, 101 W. Flagler St.
SIGN LANGUAGE PAINTER ED RUSCHA, WHOSE WORK IS NOW ON VIEW AT THE MIAMI ART MUSEUM, CAPTURES THE DRIVE-BY POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Elisa Turner, from The Miami Herald April 2001
Ed Ruscha sounds sure he made the right move when he gave up that day job as a professional sign painter.
"Computers," he explains with a slight smile, "would have put me out of business."
There's no such danger of that happening now. A well-connected Los Angeles artist, he counts actor Dennis Hopper and Miami Heat Coach Pat Riley as friends. He has even posed in a Gap ad and played a bit part in a film about radio talk shows.
But best of all, he transformed his commercial training into a brilliant international art career years ago.
Today his paintings can fetch as much as $400,000.
Still, you sense that he must have painted a bundle of bang-up signs. Right now he's standing in front of one of his sleek paintings at the Miami Art Museum. It's a snowy scene that tries too hard to sparkle, like a billboard selling some mountain valley's bottled water.
As a witty riff on commercial art and photography, it's labeled with meticulous signage.
"I call that typeface Boy Scout Utility Modern," he says with affectionate pride, his cornflower blue eyes flashing beneath barely spiked silver hair. "If a lineman from the telephone company got the job of a designing a poster for the annual picnic, well, that's the typeface he would use."
Signs are still on the artist's mind, as you can see in the remarkable survey "Ed Ruscha," which runs through June 3 at Miami Art Museum. The exhibition includes more than 50 paintings, drawings and books spanning nearly four decades. And looking at his vision of everything from parking lots and film credits to sublime sunbursts, it's clear that Ruscha remains a professional sign painter--though on the big scale of a California thoroughfare.
With a laconic sense of humor and a love for journeys westward, Ruscha's art points us toward a truly American cinematic flow of roads and words whisking past our dusty windshields. The paintings include a behind-the-scenes view of the famous letters spelling out "Hollywood" next to a freeway. Then there's his empty, apocalyptic map of Sunset Boulevard and his grand painting of the signage for a Standard Oil gas station in Amarillo, Texas.
Works like this have made him the art world's terse but telling road writer.
"There's glory," he insists in an interview at MAM, "in word combinations for somebody selling tires."
In the 1960s, Ruscha's affection for drive-by ordinariness earned him acclaim as an L.A.-styled Pop artist. That's not a title he likes, nor one suitable to the plot twists of his career.
Life in L.A. has not been the only thing that has shaped his life, he says.
"The whole Western United States--I see it as a great, expansive land with the Grand Canyon and all these beautiful places that are really inspiring, and somehow that gets into my work," he says.
In fact, Ruscha, 63, is itching for another road trip, this time to Wyoming. Nudging him on is "Annals of the Former World," a book by John McPhee about geology in the Western states.
"It rekindled my interest to get in a car and go driving, just see the landscape and take a camera," he says. "I was seeing the parallel between his [McPhee's] interest in geology and my life as an artist. He was talking about flowing volcanic mud, full of rock fragments.
"Art history moves in the same way. It makes its own garbage and people learn from it. It's a rolling-never-stopping kind of thing."
On the road, he turns the radio dial to R&B or jazz.
"It's like a soundtrack for what I'm seeing," he says. "Looking out the window is almost like seeing a movie. You're constantly surprising yourself. I love driving just for that alone."
CROSSING COUNTRY
His love for long drives started early. After finishing high school in 1956, Ruscha climbed into his 6-year-old Ford and rolled across Route 66 from his home in Oklahoma City to art school in Los Angeles. It was a trip he repeated many times, finding some of his most famously deadpan images and making monuments out of mundane gas stations.
"I had a desperate need for gasoline and moving at the same time," he remembers. "I thought there was pictorial juice to these gas stations."
Late 1950s L.A. was a good place to be an artist. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was about to open and the new Ferus Gallery was a magnet for young local talent, also staging pioneer shows of collage art by Kurt Schwitters and the work of a new kid from New York named Andy Warhol.
And in 1963, Marcel Duchamp came to town. This pivotal figure in 20th Century art struck Ruscha as a brainy but down-to-earth alternative to the "chain-smoking, macho [Jackson] Pollock."
It was a fortuitous encounter, coming at a time when Ruscha was growing disenchanted with the heroic, painterly flourishes of Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Not only was Ruscha leaning toward the attention to ordinary items of daily life celebrated by Pop art, but he found that Duchamp suggested more deliberate ways to conceive ideas for art. Ruscha learned to plan art in his mind, as he did with commercial illustration or typesetting, and then execute it. Early works were a roiling mix of brand names and paint, but the brush strokes quickly turned thin and flat.
In the '60s and early '70s, he went through a startling range of approaches, painting with blueberry extract and photographing a typewriter tossed from the window of a speeding car.
During these turbulent years he married, and with wife Danna has a son Eddie, now a musician. The couple divorced in 1975, only to remarry 13 years later in the same county courthouse.
"I lived with other women and she lived with other men and we got back together," he says simply.
At about the same time, Ruscha did a series of "silhouette" paintings that evoked the look of film noir.
Riley, the Miami Heat coach who got to know Ruscha when Riley coached the L.A. Lakers, owns a work from this series showing a simple house as lonely refuge.
"People take a look at it, and it brings tears to their eyes," Riley says. "Here's a man who paints every day, who works very hard in his studio, but when he goes out he's a fun man to be around."
PUBLIC ART
In 1985, Ruscha tackled his first public artwork, the splendid mural "Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go," that lines the rotunda of the Main Library of the Miami-Dade Public Library System. Four years later his 56 lunette paintings were installed over arched windows around the library.
"I think it's one of the great pieces of public art in the last part of the 20th Century," MAM director Suzanne Delehanty says. "It's totally appropriate for the library, and I love the beautiful skies that are painted by the words."
"I was really nervous about accepting the job," says Ruscha, who admits he was daunted by the 128-foot circumference of the rotunda.
He felt too old to paint on the site, a la Michelangelo. But once the logistics were solved, he threw himself into the task, camping out all night inside the library to study Miami history.
Ruscha saw the project as "not just an architectural setting but a human setting," says Cesar Trasobares, then director of Miami-Dade Arts in Public Places, which commissioned the work. "As he got to know people here, he had a better sense for issues like language and local color."
That rare sense of language and local color has become Ruscha's signature.
"I can read the Yellow Pages like a novel," he insists. "I can just flip anywhere, and there seems to be a new frontier. It opens up to expose its innards, and the city is right there."
