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Miami Art Museum Current Exhibitions

2011-08-18T15:47:34Z

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other

July 17 – October 16, 2011

The Board of Trustees of Miami Art Museum welcomes members and guests to the opening reception for Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, the Brazilian artist’s first mid-career survey. Neuenschwander will discuss her work during an Artist Talk beginning at 6:30pm. Exhibition visitors will experience an artificial rain environment through Neuenschwander’s viscerally beautiful installation, Rain Rains, and can help make others’ wishes come true while leaving one of their own in an immersive installation inspired by a tradition of a church in Bahia, Brazil. Visitors will also have the opportunity to describe their ‘first love’ to a police sketch artist, and the portrait will be an important part of Neuenschwander’s First Love installation. First Love sittings are available by appointment only during the opening reception and on weekends throughout the run of the exhibition. Contact firstlove@miamiartmuseum.org to schedule a sitting.)

Fresh Fruit Caipirinhas provided by Leblon Cachaca.

Schedule a Sitting for First Love

Weekends, by appointment only (see schedule below)

First Love participants receive FREE museum admission

Contact firstlove@miamiartmuseum.org to schedule an appointment

Be the first to participate in Rivane Neuenschwander’s First Love installation, the artist’s psychologically complex adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novella by the same name. In Neuenschwander’s version, visitors are invited to describe the face of their ‘first love’ to a police sketch artist. The portraits will hang in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. First Love participants receive FREE Museum admission. Sessions take approximately 1 ½ hours and are available on weekends. Contact firstlove@miamiartmuseum.org to schedule an appointment. Appointments available:

Saturday, July 16, 6pm and 7:30pm (Exhibition Preview)
Sunday, July 24, 12:30pm and 2pm
Sunday, July 31, 12:30pm and 2pm
Sunday, August 7, 12:30pm and 2pm
Saturday, August 13, 12:30pm and 2pm (Second Saturdays are Free for Families)
Sunday, August 28, 12:30pm and 2pm
Sunday, September 4, 12:30pm and 2pm
Saturday, September 10, 12:30pm and 2pm (Second Saturdays are Free for Families)
Sunday, September 18, 12:30pm and 2pm
Saturday, October 8, 12:30pm and 2pm (Second Saturdays are Free for Families)
Sunday, October 16, 12:30pm and 2pm

FIU student piano recital: “Journey through the Americas”

Saturday, October 16, 2011 ï 3-5pm

MAM Auditorium

Free and open to the public

Florida International University students from the Keyboard Studies program, under the direction of Jose Lopez, D.M.A., will present a musical journey showcasing piano works written by major composers from the Caribbean, Central and South America. For information, contact education@miamiartmuseum.org.

Second Saturdays are Free for Families presented by MetLife Foundation

(This program is on the second Saturday of every month. The following events will be themed around Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other.)

Raindrops Keep Falling…

August 13, 2011 ï 1-4pm, tour @ 2pm

Free and open to the public

Education@miamiartmuseum.org

Explore the galleries and find an artwork by Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander which references rain. Did you know that rain sticks are an ancient instrument thought to have originated in South America? Take the sound of rain home with you after creating a colorful rain stick in the auditorium workshop. Every second Saturday of the month, drop in to enjoy fun, interactive programs for visitors of all ages. Explore the Museum, find inspiration to create works of art and participate in hands-on activities led by education staff. Presented by MetLife Foundation. Additional support provided by Salon Miami, Inc.

Detective Descriptions

September 10, 2011 1-4pm, tour @ 2pm

Free and open to the public

Education@miamiartmuseum.org

Not your usual suspects! Be inspired by Rivane Neuenschwander’s “First Love” installation, an artwork in the plaza-level gallery that employs a real police sketch artist. Describe the facial characteristics of someone you love (possibly famous, but don’t give the name away) to a sketching partner in the hands-on workshop. Then switch roles. See if together you can produce identifiable portraits. Every second Saturday of the month, drop in to enjoy fun, interactive programs for visitors of all ages. Explore the Museum, find inspiration to create works of art and participate in hands-on activities led by education staff. Presented by MetLife Foundation. Additional support provided by Salon Miami, Inc.

# # #

Exhibition Organization and Support

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other is organized by the New Museum in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The presentation of the exhibition at Miami Art Museum is supported by donations to MAM’s Annual Exhibition Fund, a MetLife Foundation Museum and Community Connections grant and Funding Arts Network. Additional support for educational programming is provided by Espírito Santo Bank.

Walking

2011-06-02T18:17:55Z

by Henry David Thoreau

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil–to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks–who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return– prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again–if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man–then you are ready for a walk.

HYPERLINK “http://www.transcendentalists.com/1thorea.html”

Robert Smithson

2011-06-12T04:18:51Z

If I searched hard enough I could probably find documentation of some of the work, conceptual art work, that I made in 1971. It may not seem important at this point since I haven’t claimed it in my art practice, but maybe I should. Should have.

My real interest with looking at these Smithson works, however, is to point to the formal similarities between them and my own work done in the past five years or so. And, those trees look like mangroves with the spreading root system. The mirrors harken back to my practice, again lacking much documentation, of working with mirrors and reflective surfaces in 1970 before I went to study at Calif. College of the Arts in 1971. I’m not even sure I knew who Robert Smithson was in 1970-71. My practice was focused on photography, not sculpture, even though I did, and continue to work with three dimensional objects in three dimensional space.

“Photography squares everything. Every kind of random view is caught in a rectangular format so that the romantic idea of going to the beyond, of the infinite is checked by this so that things become measured. The artist is contorting, distorting his figures instead of just accepting the photograph.”

Robert Smithson – Mirror & Nature I

Robert Smithson – Mirror & Nature II

“I do think an interesting thing would be to check the behavior of Cezanne and the motivation to the site. Instead of thinking in formalist terms – we’ve gotten to such a high degree of abstraction out of that – where the Cubists claimed Cezanne and made his work into a kind of empty, formalism, we now have to reintroduce a kind of physicality; the actual place rather than the tendency to decoration which is a studio thing, because the Cubists brought Cezanne back into the studio.”

Text excerpted from ROBERT SMITHSON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS, 2nd Edition, edited by Jack Flam, The University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California; University of California Press, LTD. London, England; 1996
Originally published: The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy
Holt, New York, New York University Press, 1979 – ISBN # 0-520-20385-2

Biography on Robert Smithson

“The sculptor, essayist, and filmmaker Robert Smithson (1938-1973) is most known for his site-specific environmental earth works.”

“Smithson continued to explore entropy and chaos in his dialectical series entitled Site/NonSite. In these sculptures Smithson expanded the cartographic aspect of his field trips to disrupt the premises of traditional sculpture. The Non-Site, consisting of bins filled with material collected from specific locations, refers back to the Site from which it was gathered. The bins are displayed in geometric structures and matched with maps and photographs, thus forming a continuous dialogue between the artist’s activity, the object that signifies that activity, and the site in nature from which the object was formed. These Site/NonSite works undermined the museum/gallery location even as they made the transformational actions of the artist on raw matter in its original unbounded state even more explicit.”

“For the last two years of his life Smithson sought to use his art as a resource that would mediate between ecology and industry. He contacted many land mining corporations, offering his services as an artist-consultant for land reclamation. He wished to make art out of the decay of discarded land at such sites, thereby restoring art to an everyday function within society.”

The latter citations seems to fit my current concerns to a large extent, although I have not up to this point pursued a direction of mediation between ecology and industry. It would seem to make a lot of sense to look more closely at Smithson’s practice as we have a great deal of similar concerns as well as interests, and processes.

…on the relationship between technology, art and politics

2011-06-12T19:05:29Z

Site and Non-Site: Heidegger, Turrell, Smithson [Paperback]

“The notion of site-specific art is one that has been used extensively within art theory and practice since the late 1960s. However, in the process of its various utilisations and interpretations the concept would seem to have been emptied almost entirely of meaning such that, in the words of Miwon Kwon, it becomes merely a token of criticality or progressivity. Many works throughout history have had a specific relation to a site. What, if anything, distinguishes modern and contemporary works that draw on the concept or to which it is ascribed? By revisiting the philosophical basis of the problem through an analysis of the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dr Christopher Townson addresses the problem of the meaning of site-specificity as a concept, then elaborating this through case studies on James Turrell and Robert Smithson. As a consequence, significant conclusions can be drawn not only with regard to site-specific art past and present but also for art history as a discipline.”

Christopher Townson (PhD Essex) (a researcher in philosophy and art history with a particular focus on the relationship between technology, art and politics)
Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller (May 6, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3639339711
ISBN-13: 978-3639339710

A few days ago I served as juror for an show that had awards, and prize monies. I do not like to enter my work in such exhibitions for many reasons. However, I was questioned by two artists as to why I selected one work over another work, the one that was not selected asking the question. After giving my answer, they both huffed away, obviously upset that the juror’s eyes were clouded and unable to recognize the superiority of their art. Also, their act was one of intimidation which I will not discuss at the moment.

A couple of times during the evening, while talking to a few non-artists, I insisted the artist must step away from their work to let it stand on its own, without having to believe that artist’s words were the only valid ones available. Obviously, that is one of the most difficult things to do, yet it must be done.

What does that have to do with site specific art? And my practice in particular?

There are times, especially in including my own case, that we artists want to lock in on our vision so laser like that other viewpoints are not sought out, and even rejected. Rejection, and then questioning was what lead me to an important breakthrough back in 1991. Surrealism, remember that term?

Here, all of a sudden, comes Andy Goldsworthy (after viewing a feature movie on him), Richard Long, now Robert Smithson. Long and Smithson I was much more familiar with than Goldsworthy. They all three have some overlap in their practices that include what I have been working on, and what I am pushing more towards. The idea of Site/Non Site has to be looked at a bit closer since that is how I’m working, although the Non Site has been mostly online. That needs to change. That will change.

So, as I move forward in my own practice I must step back and keep my eyes and ears open because others may be seeing something very different than my original intention.

Walking As Knowing As Making

2011-06-14T16:40:42Z

Several times in the past few days the name of Miwon Kwon has come up in my research. Yes, I know her. She was my academic advisor while in grad school. She really helped me, guided me in the art making, and writing processes. Also turned up were the names: Gregg Bordowitz, and Doug Ashford. They were both invaluable to my graduate studies, although they may not realize how much.

At any rate, the notions of site specificity, place are what is really involved in working with mangroves along the intercoastal (in Miami-Dade, Broward, and St. Lucie Counties). I walk. I walk in site specific places that bring me inner joy, inner peace, and yet stir my excitement for the possibilities of an environment that also embraces me with its smells, its light and dark, its textures, its aural play upon my body, its capability of transporting me to another time, its importance to our coastal environment.

WALKING AS KNOWING AS MAKING // A PERIPATETIC INVESTIGATION OF PLACE
SPRING 2005 // UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS @ URBANA-CHAMPAIGN

In early spring of 2004 the New York Times reported on a recent study of aging adults. An inconspicuous three sentence news brief, noticeable only upon the closest of readings, stated in no uncertain terms: WALK MORE, THINK BETTER, “…In a study done by researchers at the University of Illinois, 41 adults ages 58 to 78 began an exercise program that gradually increased to 45-minute walks three times a week. After three months the participants increased brain activity and had an 11 percent improvement on decision-making tests.” That the conclusion seems rather self-evident suggests both a general recognition of the diminished role of walking in our contemporary lives and an intuitive understanding that walking is somehow good for us. It’s as though our bodies possess some vestigial memory of their own evolutionary heritage or as if our minds had indirectly absorbed fragments of the ongoing conversation facilitated by people such as Paul Shepard, Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, and Henry David Thoreau.

Despite its ubiquity in the everyday walking is an activity obscured by its own practical functionality. It is employed literally and understood metaphorically as a slow, inefficient, and increasingly anachronistic means to a predetermined end. Rarely is walking considered as a distinct mode of acting, knowing, and making. As its necessity diminishes and its applications rarefy, the potential of walking as critical, creative, and subversive tool appears only to grow. Conceived of as a conversation between the body and the world, walking becomes a reciprocal and simultaneous act of both interpretation and manipulation; an embodied and active way of shaping and being shaped that operates on a scale and at a pace embedded in something seemingly more authentic and real.

Based in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois, Walking as Knowing as Making is a multifaceted effort that seeks to nurture both a theoretical and applied approach to knowing and interpreting place as we experience and construct it through walking. Using the walk as a guiding metaphor the format of this symposium has been designed to encourage a sustained, rigorous, and layered yet experimental, diffuse, and meandering consideration of walking and its associated activities, systems, and values. Between February and May 2005 we will bring to campus a diverse group of scholars, activists, and pedestrians to present ideas, engage in conversation, generate questions, tell stories, and, of course, walk. Supplementing and also weaving together this series of convergences will be a new interdisciplinary course about walking, an informal film series about place, a reading group, a series of informational and experimental walks and tours, production of a monthly sound collage for broadcast on local community radio stations, a museum exhibition, and a digital and print archive of all the events and activities.

Set in what was once a vast expanse of tallgrass prairie and what is now a relatively homogeneous landscape dominated by corn and soybean, the apotheosis of modern industrialized agriculture, the University of Illinois provides a unique, if not slightly ironic context in which to consider walking as a distinct way of knowing. Far from any traditional destinations and lacking all but the slightest topographic variation, walking in central Illinois often seems an anomaly – acutely out of sync, both spatially and temporally, with our lives, the land, and our expectations for how the two should interact. Given its history this region does however offer fertile ground for any consideration of the relationship between ways of knowing and ways of making. The prairie, perceived by early European settlers to be nothing more than a stubborn impediment to progress, was eventually tamed by the application of an unwavering grid and the invention of the stainless steel plow and steam engine. It is precisely from the vantage of these signature products of the Englightenment and Industrial Revolution that we can begin to understand the present day configuration and composition of Illinois.

Susan Sontag once said that an artist is someone who is interested in everything. The College of Fine and Applied Arts is, in this way, uniquely positioned within the University. Eschewing reflexive specialization while encouraging critical experimentation, the College is ideally suited to engage an expansive subject that moves casually between and through the gamut of academic disciplines all the while resisting easy classification and appropriation.

It is our challenge to re-learn this place on foot and with imagination. Please join us for what we hope will be a stimulating conversation about walking…

I walk 2-3 times per week as a way to clear my thoughts when I get bogged down. I find it invigorating, refreshing, and healthful. The beauty of my iPhone is using it to take aural or visual notes with ease, with the ability to upload (if desired), save, and/or share while walking. In the urban environment my walking is usually more health motived, while my rural and nature walks are more intellectual and creative. Evidence of that is in the many years of images I maintain of wooded Minnesota near the Canadian border.

On the way to work! (2005)

MN Boundary Waters area Lake Burntside (2006)
(searching an island in the lake for blueberries)

MN Boundary Waters area Low Lake
Raptors spotted: osprey, vulture, harrier hawk. Near the cabin, next to the road a female deer.

Hungry bear on the back deck! (2008)

…removed from spaces and time

2011-06-14T17:33:15Z

More important research information is being found, and I’m using these few pages as reminders, and launching points for further investigations.

Miwon Kwon and Steven Wright

ILA (Islands of LA) is an experiment. One of the ideas it experiments with is the place of “cultural theory” in the practical sphere. Along these lines, some posts on this blog will highlight questions, thinkers, challenges, artists, projects, theories that relate to the way ILA is approaching this.

Here are two:

MIWON KWON (from One Place After Another)
“Certainly, site-specific art can lead to the unearthing of repressed histories, help provide greater visibility to marginalized groups and issues, and initiate the re(dis)covery of “minor” places so far ignored by the dominant culture. But inasmuch as the current socioeconomic order thrives on the (artificial) production and (mas) consumption of difference (for difference sake), the siting of art in “real” places can also be a means to extract the social and historical dimensions of these places in order to variously serve the thematic drive of an artist, satisfy institutional demographic profiles, or fulfill the fiscal needs of a city. ”

STEVEN WRIGHT
Beyond contemplative value: operative value

[There exist] art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, raising the possibility of a new status for art in the absence of artworks, authorship or spectatorship. Envisaging art in terms of competence rather than performance, process rather than outcome, poses a distinct challenge for the art world because in losing its visibility as such, art has only its history to fall back on. For practices whose self-understanding stems from the visual arts tradition, not to mention for the normative institutions that govern it, the problem cannot be merely wished away for if it is not visible, art eludes all control, all prescription, in short, all ‘policing’. If ever more artists seem prepared to deliberately impair their work’s coefficient of artistic visibility, is it not in order to give teeth to the sort of consensus-busting power to which art often lays claim?

In contexts often far removed from art-specific spaces and time, the past few years have witnessed the emergence of a broad range of such practices, which, in spite of certain affinities and indeed, in some cases, of undeniable kinship, can only be described as art-related rather than art-specific activities, often laying no particular claim to art status. In many cases, these forms of symbolic production, implicitly questioning and even shattering the borders of art, live up to art’s promises far more effectively than those practices upheld and underwritten by current artistic conventions. Yet the status of these art-related activities, has never been the object of sustained scrutiny (they are usually written off as conceptual leftovers of the seventies). Even contemporary aesthetic philosophy tends to invoke them as evidence only insofar as they are predefined as not art, in a hasty endeavor to again secure the borderlines of what is conventionally known as art.

Art-related practice
There is, of course, a context for this shake-up of the status of art and the artist, bequeathed by the twentieth century: artistic activity itself is developing on a massive scale and in a mind-boggling variety of forms, and the production of meaning, form and knowledge is no longer the exclusive preserve of professionals of expression. One finds artistic skills and competencies at work in a variety of areas far beyond the confines of the symbolic economy of the art world, and the practices which they inform are in many cases never designated and domesticated as art. The fact that this sort of art-related creativity seeks no particular validation from the art world, that it pays scant heed to the values and conventions underpinning it, should by no means inhibit us from charting its genealogy and identifying its inherent rationality. And yet, aesthetic philosophy, persisting as it does in construing art as an enigma to be deciphered, as an object begging interpretation, seems decidedly ill-equipped to theorize art in this expanded sense. Beyond both the well-worn logic of appropriation, which consists of recuperating as art all description of objects and activities not intended as such; and beyond the converse, though symmetrical logic consisting of using artistic practices — those, in other words, initiated and managed by artists — to stake out and claim new territories for art, it seems worth pursuing use-value in this particular direction though on the basis of an extraterritoriality and reciprocity that prefigure an unforeseen future for it.

(Here is an other essay he has wrote: Users and Usership of Art: Challenging Expert Culture.)

Fractals: Love for Math of the Natural World

2011-06-30T03:22:54Z

Several years ago I saw this strange book about African mathematics. I thought it odd, looked at more info on Amazon, and came away very impressed. Enough impressed I ended up emailing the author. Of course, at this point I know he doesn’t remember our exchanges but I do. It was about teaching math to young kids through African textiles. At the time I wasn’t aware of a strong relationship to fractals, but that author, Ron Eglash, has certainly discovered it.

Let’s take this journey…

For centuries, fractal-like irregular shapes were considered beyond the boundaries of mathematical understanding. Now, mathematicians have finally begun mapping this uncharted territory. Their remarkable findings are deepening our understanding of nature and stimulating a new wave of scientific, medical, and artistic innovation stretching from the ecology of the rain forest to fashion design. The documentary highlights a host of filmmakers, fashion designers, physicians, and researchers who are using fractal geometry to innovate and inspire.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Hold on a second, here’s why fractals are now important to me. Ron Eglash has a TED.com talk that you must view. The link to the video and transcript is below.

“I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.” This is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families while researching the intriguing fractal patterns he noticed in villages across the continent. He talks about his work exploring the rigorous fractal math underpinning African architecture, art and even hair braiding — and his cool math tools for students.(Recorded June 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania. Duration: 16:51.)

NEW: Watch the video, and Read the transcript >>

Clathrus ruber, the Basket Stinkhorn

2011-07-02T20:58:06Z

In 2006, when I first remember seeing one of these, I was totally surprised to see it. I had no idea what it was because it didn’t look like a mushroom. Today when I returned from my 6 km walk to the beach and back, I noticed it. It’s been raining every day for the past five days, and finally I was able to get outdoors!

Clathrus ruber, the Basket Stinkhorn

Clathrus ruber, the Basket Stinkhorn – Day 2

2011-07-04T17:00:14Z

These things puff up and die off pretty quickly. I haven’t been up the street yet today, but I’m sure it’s just about gone. There were two others coming up, with the white outer caps breaking through the wood chips.

I went on my longer walk yesterday afternoon of 6+ km, down where they’ll shoot off fireworks tonight. I like going a bit further, even though walking the opposite direction through the business district of Las Olas as times gets little crowds and I have to walk out in the street to keep my pace, even though it’s not terribly fast.

It’s a holiday, but I still have to work on some art, or read, or make something. I got invited out, but I wasn’t told exactly where. No email reply either. Time for another attempt, maybe. Otherwise, I’ll just head down to the beach and check out the fireworks later tonight.

Clathrus ruber, the Basket Stinkhorn – Day 3

2011-07-04T22:16:24Z

As mentioned earlier, these mushrooms don’t last very long. Today, the third day I’ve seen it, the mushroom has withered to a moist mass of glutinous material. There are three more growing nearby, so there will be more. They do, however, look very strange, and smell like rotting meat (although I didn’t get on my hands and knees to check this one out).

Footbridge to unspoiled Jack Island

2011-07-06T19:41:10Z

Here’s a story about Jack Island from the Sun-Sentinel, 2008. As of today’s posting, the concrete footbridge is closed:

Photo: Onajide Shabaka

sun-sentinel.com/travel/sfl-jackislandbrmar30,0,230118.story

South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

Taking the footbridge to unspoiled Jack Island

By Alan Snel

Special correspondent

March 30, 2008

Nature lover Leslie McGuirk has lived in the Vero Beach area since 1999 and thought she knew all the cool environmental havens in the area.

But the children’s book author and illustrator was pleasantly surprised when, for the first time, she recently sauntered along the trails of Jack Island State Preserve, a lush mangrove island tucked away in the Intracoastal off Route A1A, a mile north of the Fort Pierce Inlet.

It’s easy to pass the preserve’s entrance road that leads to a small parking lot. Jack Island visitors need to stroll along a footbridge to reach this spit of land (1,342 acres) that is dominated by mangroves, trail-side ghost crabs and an impressive array of bird life.

“You have to walk the bridge to get to the island,” McGuirk said, “which means there will never be a car in there. Any time you can get into nature and get into the woods, it’s great. Most people who live on the coast don’t think about walking in the woods. They’re thinking about walking on the beach.”

Several large condo buildings stand sentinel on the beach side of A1A. But across the road here at Jack Island, there’s a stark contrast — a serene and secluded refuge offering an up-close look at mangroves, small land crabs that scurry into their holes when they hear a shoe along the trail and birds that range from ospreys and great blue herons to pelicans and egrets.

“Not only do you get birds that are coming over from the ocean shore, but you’re also getting birds that like the brackish water,” said Tessa Sheridan, park services specialist for Fort Pierce Inlet State Park, which manages Jack Island State Preserve. The state has managed the preserve since 1963.

Jack Island State Preserve has a 4.2-mile dirt and grass trail that runs along its perimeter. In the last decade, the preserve’s top-drawing year was 1998-99, when nearly 37,000 visitors visited Jack Island. The number of visitors fell to 15,283 in 2004-05, when hurricanes struck Florida’s east coast.

About halfway along the main trail is a 30-foot tower, an easily accessible perch for observing the Indian River lagoon and the great blue herons, wood storks or ibises winging above the tree line of mangroves and hammocks.

There are also trails that crisscross the island if you want to walk a shorter distance. For example, one trail that cuts across the island to the observation tower is only a mile long. The trails are very easy to negotiate.

You will also see culverts. Jack Island is a natural island that also includes dredged debris that was used to make the dike and culvert system for flushing mosquitoes from their breeding areas. Mosquitoes like to lay their eggs in mud along the island, but, according to Sheridan, water is released through the big metal pipes to flood the areas normally used for breeding from April to October.

On weekends, you will see fishermen with lines dropped in the brackish waters, a mix of fresh and salt. Their catches will include mullet, snook and sheepshead.

The preserve is also ideal if you’re fishing for solitude.

“Where can you get to walk for more than an hour and not see anyone?” McGuirk asked. “The secret, hidden element is just so cool. Just to walk over that bridge is fun for people.”

Added Sheridan: “I just love standing on that bridge and wondering about all the things below my feet.”

Local runners have discovered the trail. In fact, the “Jack Island Cross Country Run” celebrates its 30th anniversary the second Saturday of December. Usually, about 100 runners participate.

“It’s a great example of the original Florida and how it was way back when,” said Mike Melton, an ultra-marathon runner and Jensen Beach money management planner who has sponsored the Jack Island race since 2003. “Jack Island has been mercifully left to be as the rest of the area has developed and lost its original character.”

Alan Snel’s last story for Travel was on biking State Road 17.

Copyright © 2011, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

111

2011-07-10T17:01:56Z

This year, July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This happens
Once every 823 years. This is called money bags. So, forward this to
Your friends and money will arrive within 4 days. Based on Chinese
Feng Shui. The one who does not forward…..will be without money.

Kinda interesting.

This year we’re going to experience four unusual dates.

1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11 and that’s not all…

Take the last two digits of the year in which you were born – now add the age you will be this year, the results will be 111 for everyone in whole world.

This is the year of The Money!!!

The proverb goes that if you send this to eight good friends money will appear in next four days as it is explained in Chinese FENGSHUI.

Those who don’t continue the chain won’t receive…….

It’s a mystery, but it’s worth a try. Good luck. (How do you do this without it being spam?)

Venice Biennale GENERATION BLANK by Jerry Saltz

2011-06-26T13:42:11Z

Venice Biennale GENERATION BLANK by Jerry Saltz:

“The beautiful, cerebral, ultimately content-free creations of art’s well-schooled young lions.

I went to Venice, and I came back worried. Every two years, the central attraction of the biennale is a kind of State of the Art World show. This year’s, called “ILLUMInations,” has its share of high points and artistic intensity. (Frances Stark’s animated video of her online masturbatory tryst with a younger man hooked me; Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which captivated New York earlier this year, rightly won the Gold Lion Prize for Best Artist.) Yet many times over — too many times for comfort — I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction — it was all there, all straight out of the 1970s, all dead in the water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of esthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.

There’s always conformity in art — fashions come in and out — but such obsessive devotion to a previous generation’s ideals and ideas is very wrong. It suggests these artists are too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, not really making their own work. That they are becoming a Lost Generation.

Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open. Yet these artists draw their histories and images only from a super-attenuated gene pool. It’s all parsing, all the time. Their art turns in on itself, becoming nothing more than coded language. It empties their work of content, becoming a way to avoid interior chaos. It’s also a kind of addiction and, by now, a new orthodoxy, one supported by institutions and loved by curators who also can’t let go of the same glory days.

Consider the most celebrated younger artists on hand in Venice. A wall label informs that Ryan Gander’s color-squares on the floor derive partly from Mondrian’s. This not only defangs Gander’s art; it makes it safe for consumption. It is art about understanding, not about experience. Rashid Johnson’s mirrored assemblages have luscious physicality but are marred by their reliance on familiar mementos drawn from the recent past. (Unlike his influence, Carol Bove, whose Venice installation of modernist-looking objects opens uncanny windows on seeing, scale and memory, Johnson uses those objects merely as a crutch.) Seth Price’s glossy paintings with rope look like a slick cross between Martin Kippenberger and Marcel Broodthaers, ready-made for critics who also love parsing out the isms of their elders. A feedback loop has formed; art is turned into a fixed shell game, moving the same pieces around a limited board. All this work is highly competent, extremely informed, and supremely cerebral. But it ends up part of some mannered International School of Silly Art.

Art schools are partly the villain here. (Never mind that I teach in them.) This generation of artists is the first to have been so widely credentialed, and its young members so fetishize the work beloved by their teachers that their work ceases to talk about anything else. Instead of enlarging our view of being human, it contains safe rehashing of received ideas about received ideas. This is a melancholy romance with artistic ruins, homesickness for a bygone era. This yearning may be earnest, but it stunts their work, and by turn the broader culture.”

JERRY SALTZ is art critic for New York magazine, where this essay first appeared. He can be reached at jerry_saltz@nymag.com.

(Via artnet Magazine.)

Broward County’s public art: It better be worth it

2011-06-27T12:15:17Z

Here we are back in the mode of politicians making decisions about art. I have been the recipient of a local (Broward) email campaign to protest the political policing of art decisions by being asked to show up at commission meetings. There is always somebody, a commissioner, a citizen, an artist, that dislikes a decision for selected art. Those with the purse strings are going to make the final decision, even with protests coming from both sides.

Commissioners question art projects for beaches, airport restrooms

The Giant Fish Tank was one of the designs submitted by Dwight Hoffman to wrap the shuttle fleet at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Total project cost to wrap 23 shuttles would be $125,000. (Broward County, Courtesy / June 25, 2011)

By Larry Barszewski, Sun Sentinel

If Broward County is going to be spending money on public art in lean budget years, commissioners say the art better be worth it.

Hurricane-resistant beach displays of pelicans-on-poles in Pompano Beach and Hollywood? Not when they’re going to cost $134,000 in beach renourishment funds.

A half-million dollars to create textured mosaics to place at the entrances of airport restrooms? Maybe travelers would appreciate upgrades to the bathroom fixtures more – or even clearer signage showing restroom locations.

“We’re in a different era now,” Vice Mayor John Rodstrom said. He said the county’s art appreciation has to be balanced against new economics.

“Think about the functionality of our restrooms and forget about the art,” he said.

Commissioners last week reviewed the county’s Public Art & Design Program. They liked many of the projects, but said parts of the program need to make more fiscal sense, and use a little common sense.

What’s the point of having a new $25,000 glass artwork paid for through the county’s art program sitting in storage for more than a year now, commissioners asked. The piece’s home was supposed to be a new Hispanic cultural center that hasn’t been built at the Main Library.

“Let the library find a suitable site where it will be appreciated and get it out of storage,” Broward Mayor Sue Gunzburger said.

Commissioners also want to have more say than just giving their opinions about the projects. They asked staff to bring back new rules that would require them to approve the artist design on any project costing more than $100,000. They will consider the projects and proposed rules Tuesday.

While Gunzburger complained that putting the projects on meeting agendas would divert commission attention from much more costly issues confronting the county, other commissioners wanted to make sure thay had a chance to vote against projects they did not like.

Commissioner Lois Wexler said it didn’t appear some projects received much scrutiny.

“I guess when we had money it really wasn’t questioned,” Wexler said. “It becomes painfully obvious that the process was a runaway train.”

But Gunzburger defended the art program.

“I really feel it’s the face of our community,” Gunzburger said. “The arts enhancements stand out.”

Another project that divided the commission was the proposed spending of more than $100,000 to create a special wrap with a giant aquarium theme for airport shuttle buses. Rodstrom questioned why the county would waste money for art on the sides of the shuttles when that space could be used for advertisements that would generate money for the county.

Commissioner Barbara Sharief and others supported the art wraps on shuttles.

“We’re trying to create a feel for when you arrive at the airport,” Sharief said. That’s why commissioners immediately dismissed one of the proposed shuttle wraps, which showed alligators ripping apart the shuttle.

However, even Sharief had problems with the aquarium design that included people on a pier. The initial drawings included whimsical views of a cigar-smoking fish and of sharks chomping threateningly close to people’s feet.

“This would be fine without all of the violent activity going on on the bottom,” she said.

“They need to take the dangling feet out,” Gunzburger said, exasperated. “Nothing like micromanaging art.”

lbarszewski@tribune.com or 954-356-4556

sun-sentinel.com/news/broward/fl-broward-public-art-20110625,0,3241229.story

Via: South Florida Sun-Sentinel © 2011

Sam Winston – Word Text Book

2011-07-25T11:02:54Z

London-based artist, Sam Winston, creates drawings, and books out of language, like a ‘concrete poet’. He cuts and splices up words, turning his art into vessels of emotion and multiple meanings.

Winston has been in Miami since his Fountainhead Residency earlier this year. He was also a participant of the O, Miami poetry festival.

Winston grew up dyslexic, so his interest in words came from having a difficulty watching people use the writing system in a way he couldn’t use it. I think he’s got a very good handle of his own system. Winston calls an intersection between art and language — the gap between those two places.

Since 1999 I collated scraps of paper, diary notes and typed word document all pertaining to this one idea I was trying to express through a story. (Via: http://www.samwinston.com)

Sam Winston
“Orphan,” 2011
Japanese Tosa Washi paper, printed text
20 unbound pages comprising full artist book

Courtesy of Dorsch Gallery

It’s OK to Eat the Art

2011-07-27T12:29:39Z

It’s OK to Eat the Art:

“How Jennifer Rubell found her place at the table as an artist—by first catering it.

Becoming a conceptual artist ‘was a huge leap of faith on Jennifer’s part,’ says her mother. ‘Just imagine your parents thinking you’re the bad artist in the family.’ After all, her parents were far too knowledgeable to be able to be unconditionally supportive. ‘For years we said, “It’s so difficult to be friends with an artist whose work you don’t like,”‘ says her father. It would be hard for Jennifer not to internalize this. Besides, ‘Look at how many collectors’ children are artists,’ she says. ‘It’s a number approaching zero. And because of my parents, even if I was half-decent, I knew people would think it was handed to me.’”

More…

(Via nymag.com: Art.)

Three Bundles

2011-04-02T17:00:44Z

“Three Bundles”
seeds, plant materials, cotton string
72 x 24 x 8 in.
(sculpture containing three medicinal herb bundles)

Spirit Bundles

2011-04-06T05:01:43Z

Found Bundle

Oct., 2008 – Annapolis, Maryland, is a fascinating Colonial city on Chesapeake Bay. Mark Leone of the University of Maryland and his many colleagues have spent years uncovering the diverse and vibrant city of 300 years ago. Their research has yielded intriguing hints of the traditional African beliefs that thrived underground here during the 18th century—caches of artefacts that once formed ritual bundles. Now Matthew Cochran, a doctoral student at University College London, has found an intact one, a clay container about the size of a football found at a depth of 1.2m in Fleet Street, near the state capital building. Part of a stone axe projected from it. While being excavated, a corner of the bundle split open, exposing iron nails and pins inside. X-rays revealed a jumble of iron nails and copper pins, also lead shot. The 25 cm high container bore impressions of the cloth or leather that once formed the outer wrapping of the bundle. Pottery found nearby dates the bundle to about AD 1700. Interestingly, it once lay in a street gutter, which is a strange place for a supposedly clandestine object. Mark Leone points out that magic and witchcraft were commonplace in Annapolis at the time, even among Europeans, so African practices may also have been more in the open than in later times.

The experts are puzzling over the bundle. Stone axe blades were symbols of Shango, the god of thunder and lightning among the Fon and Yoruba of Benin. Metal worked in fire had, and still has, powerful associations for the Mande, Yoruba, and other West African peoples, which may be why the nails and pins were sealed inside clay. Sacred bundles are still widely used by traditional practitioners in West Africa, a way of rallying spiritual powers at times of personal crisis. Presumably the Annapolis bundle belonged to a recent immigrant, who still valued the spiritual beliefs of his or her homeland. This remarkable discovery gives powerful validation of the importance of ritual activity in early African-American communities.

Photo: Matthew M. Palus

ARTIFACT An X-ray, a photograph and a schematic drawing of a clay “bundle” filled with about 300 pieces of metal and a stone axe. The object dates to 1700 and differs from religious caches previously found in Maryland. (NYTimes.com originally published October, 2008)

Univ. of Maryland Archaeologists Find Unique, Early U.S. Relic of African Worship

Untitled (vulture painting)

2011-04-22T03:59:31Z

“Untitled (vulture painting)”
guano on roofing paper (detail)
72 x 24 in. / 182 x 61 cm

Sky Lust: Kissimmee River Florida

2011-05-01T21:08:18Z

“Sky Lust: Kissimmee River Florida from 60,000 ft.”
color film, fluorescent tubes
dimensions variable

(installation at 18Rabbit Gallery)