Houston Welcomes the American Association of Museums Conference!

The American Association of Museums (AAM), the world’s largest museum service organization, will hold its annual conference in Houston, bringing more than 5,000 museum professionals from around the world. The 105th AAM Annual Meeting and MuseumExpo™ will be held at the George R. Brown Convention Center from May 22-25, 2011.

Houston is excited to host the AAM conference and showcase the city's diverse museum, cultural and educational communities. The AAM conference and its 170 thought-provoking sessions will afford attendees from more than 55 countries the opportunity to advance leadership, deepen professional practices and promote innovation in museums that serve children, families and lifelong learners as informal education institutions. This marks the first time that this event will be held in Houston and Houston’s museum community is ready.

The AAM 2011 Local Host Committee has planned lots of exciting events and activities in conjunction with the conference for the community. From the PODA Project and free community performances at Discovery Green to a community service project at the Houston Museum of African American Culture to the first ever AAM Public Session Track to the Art Car Parade......there are lots of fun ways for Houstonians to participate! Visit www.aamhouston.org to sign up for blog notifications and keep up with all the exciting activities that are coming soon.

Houston is proud to host AAM’s first-ever Public Session Track, which extends beyond the traditional professional development and networking opportunities offered in the conference to sessions designed to build the relationship between museums and the communities they serve. Each Public Session Track is unique. Examples are a session for parents and caregivers, another for museum board members and trustees, another for folks who want a behind-the-scenes look at the world of collections and the role of the registrar in a museum. There’s also a special roundtable session for folks who want to get involved in our museum community….from donor to docent and everything in between.

• To read more about the Public Session Track, visit http://www.aam-us.org/am11/publicsessions.cfm.
  
• Keep up-to-date on what's happening this week on the American Association of Museums 2011 Annual Meeting blog http://aamhouston.wordpress.com/

What is your favorite piece in the exhibit "Lisa Gralnick: The Gold Standard"?

With the closing of Lisa Gralnick: The Gold Standard at the end of the month, we decided to ask the staff to share their favorite pieces from this expansive exhibition, which is comprised of Gralnick’s work from the past seven years. The show is up through Saturday, May 28, 2011. If you’ve visited the show, please share your favorites in the comments below!

Julie Farr, Executive Director, writes about enjoying the works in Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy. She loves that Gralnick honors the original intent of the gold by preserving people’s sentimentally charged objects as plaster artifacts of emotion.

Communications Director, Mary Headrick, is fascinated by all of Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy. "I like the dual effect of first seeing a piece that is visually intriguing and then reading the text, which gives each piece a deeper meaning. After you see a few pieces, the whole concept really clicks. They're all so clever. My favorites are probably Rhinoplasty, Zoloft, and the Italian Shoes.

Education Director, Carol Klahn, chose the Coin Collection Picture Gallery in Part III: Transubstantiation and the Historicized Object as her favorite because of her love of art history. She loves the ambiguity of the tiny paintings and that many of them seem to be variations on historical designs. She enjoys that there are many things that are familiar about the designs of the miniature gouache paintings, but that it is hard to pinpoint all of the influences. She also likes these because she is a fan of gouache paintings and loves the way they contrast with their gold frames.

An avid coffee drinker, Volunteer Coordinator, Marina Lewis enjoys Lisa Gralnick's #7 Starbucks Coffee. It reminds her of how expensive coffee can be and to enjoy it.

Lisa Gralnick, The Gold Standard Part I: #6 Zoloft (detail)
Plaster, gold and acrylic, Photo by: Jim Escalante

Curatorial Assistant, Ashley Powell, chose #6 Zoloft in Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy. She found the piece to be clever and a bit humorous because the artist has managed to put a price or value on happiness / mental health. She also likes the way Gralnick used only a portion of the gold needed to equal the monetary value on the medicine bottles, and with the rest of the gold she made a beautiful necklace with beads in the shape of Zoloft pills.

Asher Gallery Manager, Suzanne Sippel’s favorite is #4 Violin in Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy. She appreciates this piece because it was cast from Gralnick’s own violin and the investment the artist has in this piece because of that incredibly personal touch. She also identifies with this piece because Gralnick is displaying herself as not only an artist but a musician as well.

Lisa Gralnick, The Gold Standard Part I: #4 Violin
Plaster, gold, violin strings and acrylic
Photo by: Jim Escalante

Asher Gallery Sales Associate and Gallery Attendant, M’kina Tapscott, chose # 3 Cell Phone in Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy as her favorite because this piece works on multiple layers. It is a historical account of technology because of its dated and antique look, resembling a home phone of today more than a cell phone. The work is also a documentation of the price of gold at that time and how it has increased over the years.

Asher Gallery Sales Associate, Zoya Tommy, likes the #1 Sink in Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy because it is the focal point of the show. She is interested in the way it’s positioned in the show and the way it stands out because of its isolation. She also appreciates this piece because of its domesticity and she has seen other works that use sinks and finds it interesting to see how different artists work with this subject.
 
#17 Duncan Painting in Frame in Part I: Commodification and the Sensible Economy is Curator, Anna Walker’s favorite. She appreciates that it is a reference to an art object, a painting in this case, and how the value would usually be based on the image. However, Gralnick has removed the image, causing the viewer to confront how we value art. Walker also likes how well executed the gold corner of the piece is, from transitions in texture from canvas to frame.

Jenny Lynn Weitz, Web and Marketing Assistant, likes every single piece from Part II: Phenomenology and Substantialism because of the heavily personal stories behind each melted item. “I think that Lisa did a great job cataloguing the owner’s reasoning for selling their valuable gold belongings to her to melt, and then create the pieces for Part III. Through the label descriptions, we can see that some of the items in Part II are there because of broken marriages, deceased relatives, economic hardship, all of which are incredible emotional, intriguing… it makes me want to know more about all the previous owners, see pictures of them or know how they feel about this exhibition.”

View of Part II: Phenomenology and Substantialism
Photo by Jack Zilker

Nyala Wright, Associate Director of Fundraising, chose the Fourteen Unusually Small Rings in Part III: Transubstantiation and the Historicized Object because of their delicateness and beauty. They make her wish she had tiny fingers so she could wear them.

If you've had a chance to visit the exhibition share your favorite below. We hope you will stop by to see this great show before it closes May 28!

Curator Anna Walker on Texas Biennial Art

You may have been reading about different exhibitions around Houston that are participating in the 2011 Texas Biennial.   Our exhibition, Joan Son – Part Geometry, Part Zen: A Personal Exploration through Paper, is part of this event. However, the Texas Biennial is new to Houston and began as an artist-driven event in Austin, Texas, that has grown to include many cities across the state.

The other weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a Contemporary Arts Curators’ Meeting in Austin, co-hosted by the 2011 Texas Biennial and Arthouse at the Jones Center. (The day of panels and discussions was well covered by Kelly Klaasmeyer of Glasstire.) While the Curators’ meeting was productive and engaging, I wanted to take time to share a few images of work I saw over that weekend. Hopefully, you will find your way up to Austin in the coming weeks and be able to see some of these great shows.

Debra Broz is trained in china restoration and has work in the current exhibit, New Art in Austin, at the Austin Museum of Art. Pictured here is lepus loprachoa (cockatoo hare). Other works from her Oddities series include feeding, pictured below.

Debra Broz, lepus loprachoa (cockatoo hare).

Debra Broz, feeding.

On display at the Pump Project Art Complex is work by Gabriel Dawe, as part of the 2011 Texas Biennial. Dawe creates large-scale installations with sewing thread, a material traditionally used in “women’s work,” and had an electrifying piece in the corner of the space. A piece from plexus no. 4 at the Dallas Contemporary is pictured below.

Gabriel Dawe, plexus no. 4.

Also part of the 2011 Texas Biennial, Margarita Cabrera’s project, Florezca, involves selling indigenous Mexican folk art and craft from a repurposed taco truck.  Cabrera works at the intersection of contemporary art and collaborative social projects, and all of the proceeds go back to the artisans to promote fair labor and trade.

Right here in Houston, Box 13 is a place to go to see more great work by artists from the 2011 Texas Biennial. I particularly like the upstairs installation by Laurie Frick, A long walk thru cardboard, pictured below.

Laurie Frick, A long walk thru cardboard.

Anna Walker, Curator

Houston Center for Contemporary Craft

Opening of Joan Son Exhibit Tomorrow!

Please join us tomorrow evening for the official opening of this fantastic exhibit with celebrated paper artist Joan Son.  

Joan Son - Part Geometry, Part Zen:
A Personal Exploration through Paper
April 9 – August 13, 2011

Reception with the Artist
Friday, April 29, 5:30 - 8:00 PM

Joan Son, Grounder, detail. Paper. 2011. Photo by Ashley Powell.

Joan Son, Winds of Grace, installation view at HCCC.
Paper. 2011. Photo by Ashley Powell.

In her solo exhibition, Joan Son – Part Geometry, Part Zen: A Personal Exploration through Paper, celebrated paper and origami artist, Joan Son, focuses on the themes of the elements found in nature—fire, water, earth and air. Known for her large-scale installations of origami butterflies, Son has covered the walls of the Artist Hall with nearly 500 butterflies. In addition to this colorful installation, the exhibit features sculptural and traditional artworks made throughout the Houston artist’s career.

Joan Son has worked in the medium of paper, based in the discipline of origami, since 1993, when she debuted her art in the windows of Tiffany & Co. However, her interest in origami began many years earlier, when she folded her first paper crane as a teenager. She has created numerous large-scale installations for public and private venues, as well as small works for museum shops, such as the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Her work has been exhibited in many Houston venues, including the C.G. Jung Center, the Chase Bank Lobby Gallery, Archway Gallery, the Williams Tower Gallery and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, where she was a participating artist in CraftTexas 2008. All of her works are crafted one at a time, using the finest Japanese and international papers. She is a member of Origami USA and attends their conventions in New York City, where she studies with origami masters from around the world.

In celebration of contemporary visual art in Texas, HCCC is participating in the 2011 Texas Biennial project by joining in with over 60 arts organizations across the state with this exhibition. The full list of participating organizations and further information on the project, including the 2011 Texas Biennial exhibition on view in Austin, Houston and San Antonio, from April 9 - May 14, is available at www.texasbiennial.org.

Curatorial Assistant, Ashley Powell, on Installing Michelle Samour’s Lightbox

Michelle Samour’s show, Truth and Transience, is comprised of three parts. The pieces Eyes of God: Conversations about Science and Faith and Bundle are both wall installations. The third piece in the exhibit, Reflecting Pools: Beautiful Viruses, is a 10-by-3.5-foot light box that sits on the floor in the middle of the gallery radiating fluorescent light. The light box was constructed specifically for this installation and is filled with bright hand-made paper shapes the artist calls viruses.

The imagery Samour uses to create her viruses is from actual diseases such as SARS, Smallpox, Ebola, Avian and AIDS. She has created a self-contained aquatic garden of viruses that invites the viewer to contemplate the heavy issues that surround disease and medicine in our contemporary society—such as efforts to control the spread of disease; the control of mass hysteria; the creation of vaccinations; and the political, social and economic factors that surround development of vaccines.

Michelle Samour, Reflecting Pools: Beautiful Viruses (detail),
Pigmented hand poured paper/vellum, light. Photo by Robert Schoen.

Samour makes these viruses out of abaca, a fiber found from the banana tree. She mixes the abaca fibers with water and macerates them in a machine called a beater until it resembles a fluid paste. The fluid paste or slurry is then colored with light, fast pigments. The shapes that are floating in Reflecting Pools: Beautiful Viruses are drawn using a squeeze bottle. The slurry is simply squeezed out of the bottle into various shapes, pressed and then dried.

These vibrant and beautifully translucent papers were carefully distributed and organized on a layer of milk plexi-glass and then glass. Samour first worked slowly and purposefully, positioning the viruses on the layer of milk plexi-glass. After the works were in place, the next step of the installation was inserting the sheet of glass on top of one layer of plexi-glass and abaca. Unloading the glass and carrying it into the gallery was an arduous task and required the strength of three men: Alfonso Cipriano, head carpenter at MFAH; his supervisor; and Randall Dorn, Facilities and Operations Manager at HCCC.

Above from left to right:
Randall Dorn, Facilities and Operations Manager at HCCC; MFAH staff member;
Alfonso Cipriano, MFAH Head Carpenter; Anna Walker, Curator at HCCC;
and Ashley Powell, Curatorial Assistant at HCCC.

Once the glass was in the gallery, all of us, including Michelle Samour, Curator Anna Walker and myself, cleaned the surface of the glass. We made sure to remove any and all smudges, dirt, fingerprints, etc., so that this labor-intensive task of lowering the glass down into the box only had to happen once. Handles with giant suction cups were attached to one side of the glass, and the rest of us stood back, held our breath and watched as the glass was lifted and then slowly lowered into the light box. Once that was in place Samour added another layer of abaca viruses. The two layers provide a sense of depth to the light box and it takes on the appearance of a pool of water containing floating microscopic agents, reminiscent of what would be seen if these viruses were viewed under a microscope. I think a sense of relief washed over all of us after this part of the show had been safely put together, and the exhibition was two thirds of the way complete.

Alfonso Cipriano (MFAH Head Carpenter) and
HCCC Curator, Anna Walker.

Ashley Powell
Curatorial Assistant
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft

Curatorial Assistant, Ashley Powell on Michelle Samour’s Installation

A couple of weeks ago Anna Walker, Curator, and I had the fantastic opportunity to assist artist Michelle Samour in the installation of her show, Truth and Transience, which is now up in the small gallery through May 15, 2011. Getting to know the artists, being able to watch them work and becoming a part of the creative process is always an awesome experience and working with Samour was no exception.

The show includes two wall installations, with the walls covered in hand-made pigmented abaca paper circles that have designs meticulously painted in gouache. In the middle of the gallery is a 10 by 3 ½ foot light box that glows.

Curator, Anna Walker, installing Michelle Samour's
Eyes of God: Conversations about Science and Faith

The piece, Eyes of God: Conversations about Science and Faith, was the first piece of the exhibition to go up. Samour brought a template the size and shape of the space she wanted to fill with her abaca circles. This template, which you can see in the picture above, was taped on the gallery wall and provided the exact area for her abaca circles. The oval shape resembles a giant open eye similar to the Eye of Providence (or the all-seeing eye of God) found on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, which also appears on the Unites State’s one-dollar bill.

Anna Walker and Curatorial Assistant, Ashley Powell, arranging the abaca circles of
Michelle Samour's  Eyes of God: Conversations about Science and Faith.

Afterwards, the template was brought down and stretched across six eight-foot tables. All of the beautiful, vibrant and translucent abaca circles were then taken out and arranged onto the paper template. To help arrange the circles the template was divided into four quadrants. We used blown up photographs of a previous installation as our guide and worked one quadrant at a time, leaning and stretching across the tables to deposit the circles of paper onto the template. It quickly became an amusing puzzle of trying to replicate the arrangement in the photos. All the while, we noticed the patterns Samour had created with the specific placement of the various colors and sizes of circles.

The artist installing the pieces she made for the exhibition.

Once we had all of the abaca circles in their place on the table, it was time for us to hand them to Samour, one by one, as she stood on a ladder and recreated the piece on the wall. She would sporadically stop to improvise and switch the order of the pieces or slightly alter their placement. We started handing her the circles from the very center of the 4 quadrants and gradually worked our way out one circular layer at a time. The further along we got, the more interesting the installation became visually. As the individual pieces were viewed collectively on the wall, they start creating a three dimensional optical illusion. The entire form started to take shape. Once we were done, there was an excellent sense of accomplishment. I was thrilled to have been able to participate and to have the up close and personal vantage point to view how Michelle Samour works. Stop by HCCC to see the finished installation, the exhibit is open through May 15!

Ashley Powell,
Curatorial Assistant
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft

Insight into Commonplace Artist Barbara Smith’s Keys

Barbara Smith has work in the current Artist Hall exhibition, Commonplace: Objects by Barbara Smith & Ryan Takaba, which ends Sunday, April 3, 2011. Smith recently received her MFA in Metal from State University of New York-New Paltz. She was gracious enough to take the time to explain her thoughts and process behind her works, which use a very common object: keys. 

Barbara Smith, TR47 USA, SC4, DO NOT DUPLICATE, Brown, (blank), Master, 622, DO NOT COPY SC9 (J&L), Chicago, Illinois, COO68, (blank), (blank), Master, DO NOT DUPLICATE, J, 23, AR4, USA1, GM, E71.
Brass, steel, masonite, pine, paint. 2010.
Photo by Ashley Powell, HCCC.

What do we do when a key becomes obsolete? When we move, get a new car, or buy a new padlock? Keys are familiar and intimate objects.  We carry them in a pocket or a bag. When we are not in transit, we set them aside in a special place.  We search for them when they are lost.  We give or share a key with someone we trust. The keys on a key ring are given order based on function. They are grouped based on place or frequency of use. They get me where I need to go and to where I should be. My key ring contains a narrative that only I can decode.

Barbara Smith, TR47 USA, SC4, DO NOT DUPLICATE, Brown, (blank), Master, 622, DO NOT COPY SC9 (J&L), Chicago, Illinois, COO68, (blank), (blank), Master, DO NOT DUPLICATE, J, 23, AR4, USA1, GM, E71.
Brass, steel, masonite, pine, paint. 2010.
Photo by Ashley Powell, HCCC.

To make TR47 USA, SC4, DO NOT DUPLICATE, Brown, (blank), Master, 622, DO NOT COPY SC9 (J&L), Chicago, Illinois, COO68, (blank), (blank), Master, DO NOT DUPLICATE, J, 23, AR4, USA1, GM, E71, I purchased a box of discarded keys.  The box came from Joplin, Missouri, marked “Rattle OK, keys.”  The contents of the box provoked a melancholic adoration.  Organized on rings, the keys were intensely personal assemblages of potential.  For two days I simply looked at the various configurations and reflected upon the individuals who had once used them. To who, where, and what did these keys belong?  Key chains told me about interests, travels, donations, brand loyalty, and banking preferences.  I looked at them long enough to know which set of keys gained two or more people access to the same places.  Here were people’s lives.  These lives were faceless, nameless, and timeless. While these keys could tell me a great deal, there was even more that I could never know. The history contained within them was both strange and familiar. Removing them from the key rings felt like dismantling a life.  The act of disrupting the order was accompanied by an acute sadness.  In touching them, I touched drawers, locks, and hands; in touching them, I did not know what I touched.

Untitled shots of work in progress, photo courtesy of the artist.

Keys are quiet carriers of intimate, personal narratives.  This latent information scattered as I removed the keys from their assigned places on the key rings.  Individual keys became absent and unknowable bodies and spaces. After cutting the blade away from every key, these fragments were recombined to give them a collective life.  I repetitively cut the keys apart and soldered them blade to blade. Progress was measured in small increments: the length of a line grew an inch at a time, and a pile of key heads on my bench grew to be a mound. Hundreds of keys combined to create a new, yet recognizable, form.  People and places met in a linear archive of tactile data.

Untitled shots of work in progress, photo courtesy of the artist.

When I sit down to make, my intention is to account for existence. Keys are intensely personal artifacts of this existence.  In TR47, each blade is a point along a timeline of thought and experience. Time, place, loss, and memory are reconsidered on both an individual and a collective level. When I gather, remake, and recombine keys, I participate in a fiction to both understand my own moment and express an understanding of my eventual absence.


Barbara Smith
http://www.borderlinebarbie.com/