The Dutch Room: Absence and Desire
Thursday, March 11 at 6:30pm Buy Tickets

With Artist-in-Residence Elaine Reichek
and Curator of Contemporary Art Pieranna Cavalchini
Moderated by Alan Chong, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection

The Gardner Museum’s Dutch Room is marked by the absence of six works of art stolen in 1990. While the Gardner theft has evoked stories and speculation, it is also experienced by many as a painful loss. In this Room Views conversation, Curator Alan Chong will frame the history of the Dutch Room; Curator Pieranna Cavalchini will discuss how several artists have responded to this absence; and Elaine Reichek, Artist-in-Residence in 2001, will share her experience of this particular room and her web project madamimadam.

Conceptual artist Elaine Reichek has worked in many different mediums. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, OH; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; De Appel, Amsterdam, Holland; and The Tel Aviv Art Museum, Israel. Reichek lives and works in New York. Program followed by a wine reception around the courtyard.

The Room Views series offers new ways of understanding the Gardner Museum, not only in terms of Isabella Gardner’s intentions for her installations but also how contemporary approaches shed light on the creative process.

Tickets: $10 General Public; $5 Museum Members & Seniors; FREE Students
Tickets are available online, through the Gardner Box Office at 617 278 5156, or at the door (pending availability). Handling charges apply to tickets purchased online or by phone.

So, in other words, it’s taken us some time to get back into the swing of things. But we ARE back, and we have a great semester planned.

First up…

Our first spring meeting! It’ll be March 17th, 530-630 in the GSLIS student lounge. So, be sure to come, and help us spread the word! We’ll be discussing upcoming events, ideas, as well as general interests. Refreshments will be provided. And don’t worry if you have class at 6 – just come for what time you can. Say hi, grab a snack, and let us know you’re around. And be sure to sign up for our mailing list – if you have not done so already.

Also, this April, is the ARLIS/NA conference. And the exciting thing, is this year, it will be in Boston!
Registration, tour descriptions and preliminary program listings can all be found at the ARLIS/NA website. And remember, LISSA does offer reimbursement funds for registration and fees.
More information will be provided at the meeting.

Of course, we are still planning the trip to the Music Library, as well as a few other fun tours. So, come to the meeting, where all will be revealed.

Just a few quick annoucements from the the most Listserve posting:

1. GSLIS student Shanna Strunk has asked for me to post this announcement:

I need a friend and/or replacement at the ICA working in the library/archive
under the registrars Janet and Shelby. I hope you will pass this information
along to anyone whom you think will enjoy working at the ICA.
http://www.icaboston.org/about/working-at-the-ica/volunteer/internship/library/
Currently I am working on entering the monographs from the ICA Library into
LibraryThing. Additional projects include cleaning up the printed material
files, updating reference files and preparing for the 75th anniversary in 2011.

2. Amy Deschenes of the GSLIS group ASSIST was hoping to find an arty student
to design a new logo for their group. If you are interested in this volunteer
design opportunity, please email her directly at: amy.deschenes@simmons.edu

ALSO: ARLIS Spring Conference:
The ARLIS/NA 2010 annual conference

Boston, April 23-26

at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center.

SAVE THE DATE(S)

(More details to follow.)

Good luck everyone, with the last week of classes, and expect some new exciting posts here in celebration in the days to come.

Alli is asking for anyone to RSVP by Friday, November 13th, by emailing her at bjorndahl@simmons.edu.

The Open Studios is asking that anyone who attends brings one non-perishable food item for a food drive hosted. All items will be donated to the Greater Boston Food Bank.

Also, it’s not too late to donate for the Tech Lab Art Show! Please email Alli (again, bjorndahl@simmons.edu) to make arrangements for donation, and if you have already put in an entry, all work will be up soon…

And while we are at it, have some more “diversions”:

“There’s a reason why we find it easier to “get” modern art than avant-garde music, and it’s not just about our natural conservatism and our love of Mozart.”

And some very interesting architechture.

POINT. LINE. FENCE.
Felix Lembersky 1913 – 1970
Paintings and Drawings

November 5 – 23, 2009
Gallery talk: Wednesday, November 11, 3:30 – 4:30pm
Reception and book signing: 5 – 8pm

Newbury College Art Gallery
Academic Center – Library
150 Fisher Avenue
Brookline, MA 02445
T. 617 730 7071
Gallery Hours
Monday–Thursday 8am–9pm
Friday 8am–5pm
Saturday 8am–4pm

Newbury College Art Gallery is pleased to announce Point. Line. Fence., the first solo exhibition in New England of the late Russian artist Felix Lembersky. The exhibition coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the cultural divide between the West and countries of the Eastern block.

The Work
Lembersky was first known in Leningrad during and after World War II as a master portraitist whose penetrating and nuanced work focused on the psychological state of his sitters. Rooted in the classical academic tradition and influenced by Rembrandt and El Greco, he reduced his color palette in this early work to nearly monochrome and employed a dramatic chiaroscuro to heighten the emotional eloquence of his subjects. His rendering of the human body diminished its materiality, suggesting the spiritual struggle of individuals coping with war and its aftermath. A decade later, he led the reform in Soviet art that reintroduced non-representational pictorial devices banned by Stalin in the early 1930s.

Lembersky’s work represents a synthesis of the theoretically antithetical elements of the Russian avant-garde, Socialist Realism, Non-conformism, and European modernism, united to communicate an intensely personal and spiritual vision. He brought together elements of Cubism, Primitivism, Russian icons, folk art, stage design, and faux –children’s drawings. Mining Judeo-Christian themes and symbols, he created compositions that function as metaphors for human experience. He internalized war, terror, and destruction followed by resurrection, a cycle he understood to be inevitably repetitive through history. He gradually dissolved the boundaries between the human body and the landscape, fusing their forms into an integral whole. Through his expressive, non-mimetic color and pulsing shifts of space, contour, and shadow, he created complex pictorial riddles that can be experienced both emotionally and analytically.

The Exhibition
The present selection is focused on Lembersky’s portraits of workers and other figures he encountered in his daily life, and the industrial and residential landscapes in which they lived and functioned. The drawings and paintings on view show the way the artist moved from an objective description of the world to an evocation of what he perceived to be the inner forces that give it life. In the townscapes, he used the motif of the fence to position the viewer on the outside while providing controlled access through gates and paths. Perspectival rendering and architectural details suggest the possibility of movement through an actual place, while the smears, contours, and overlays of color on the surface of the canvas offer an alternate, interior reality. The interplay of objectivity and subjectivity holds Lembersky’s works in dynamic tension and gives the eye and mind ample space in which to wander.

The show features four periods of the artist’s oeuvre. The first comprises portraits made during and following World War II. The second includes thematic compositions such as Execution: Babii Yar, named after the site of a massacre of Jews by the Nazis in Kiev, Ukraine, and created during Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign (the Doctor’s Plot), when official rhetoric denied the Holocaust. The third period is represented by landscapes in the Ural Mountains executed during the late 1950s. These images are poetic and romanticized views of the land between Europe and Asia at the Siberian border. Rich in natural resources, this region is the birthplace of Russia’s industrialization. Lembersky showed its natural beauty and fairytale qualities, echoing local legends that depict the mountains as a fire serpent with bones made of iron ore, blood of oil, and scales of malachite and diamonds. At the same time, he described industry as a relentless force in a pristine natural setting. The fourth period is represented by non-mimetic, symbolic compositions of the 1960s.

The show is co-curated by Lucy Flint, an independent art consultant, and architect Yelena Lembersky, the artist’s granddaughter. A short documentary film created by a team of Emerson College students will be screened during the opening. The exhibition is co-sponsored by Newbury College and the Uniterra Foundation, Cambridge, MA.

The Artist
Lembersky lived through a period of enormous violence. He was born in Poland in 1913. At the outbreak of World War I, his family evacuated to Ukraine. He was five when the communist revolution arrived, soon escalating into civil war. In the 1930s he was witness to the Ukrainian famine in which several million farmers died during a state takeover of their land. When World War II erupted, he was wounded, and lived through the Siege of Leningrad. His parents perished in the Holocaust.

Lembersky’s art education began in the 1920s in Ukraine, where he was exposed to the Russian avant-garde, an important later influence. He moved to Leningrad to study easel painting at the elite Academy of Art in Leningrad in the 1930s. During his lifetime, his work was shown in major exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad. In recent years, solo exhibitions of his work have been organized in New York, Michigan, and Russia. He is represented in the holdings of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University. In 2009, Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Art was awarded a prize for the exhibition and limited-edition catalogue Feliks Lemberskii: Tvortsi Uzniki Sovesti at Intermuseum–2009, a national museum convention held in Moscow.

Publication
The Newbury College exhibition coincides with the publication of Felix Lembersky 1913 – 1970: Paintings and Drawings, a fully illustrated bilingual (English/Russian) monograph resulting from an international collaboration. The book is distributed by the Uniterra Foundation, MIPP International, and East View Information Services, Inc.

First, some annoucements…
1) On Wednesday, October 28th, Melissa Hulme, Betsy Boyle, and I will be helping to table for the event up at Paretsky Conference Center. Come say hi, have some lunch, and be sure to take a bookmark!

2) EVENT ANNOUCEMENT:
You’ve probably seen the flyers for “Artist in Libraries”, but even so…
Artists in Libraries” Panel Discussion
Hosted by the GSLIS Panopticon/ARLIS Student Chapter
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
6:00-7:30 pm
Kotzen Center, located on the main floor of Lefavour Hall, Simmons College

Light snacks will be provided!

Again, stop by! Learn about this unique take on the library career path, and possibly make a contact or two…

3) We are still taking entries for the Tech Lab art show. Please do let one of us know if you have anything to show.

That all being said, some links.

1) ArtSTOR is currently working with Tufts University to digitize a collection of stained glass. While most of the Collection is French, some Austrian and German pieces are also included.
More information (and pictures!) available on the ArtSTOR site.

2) Also, kind of a cool google search.

…woodcuts! of Mount Fuji.
All woodcuts created by Katsushkia Hokusai.

Which one is your particular favorite?

And hope to see everyone at the Artists in Libraries panel!!

So, given I’ve now received 3 emails in regards to this, probably a good idea to post. I apologize, of course, if you too, have seen this 3 times also. But if not, look! News!

It’s time. It’s time for us to make this Art Show a reality! We are looking for
art to display in the GSLIS tech lab for the rest of the semester (or however
long you’ll allow us to share your work!).

Also, details about an Opening or Closing Party coming soon! If you have any
questions or concerns about the Art Show, please feel free to shoot us a comment here, or to contact Ally or Betsy directly.

So… let’s start creating?

First link tonight comes by way of ArLiSNAP’s (the Midwestern counterpart to ArLiS/NE) blog.

Citing an article originally posted by ACRLog, the article takes a spin on the article “12 Things Newspapers Should Do To Survive”, only applies it to libraries. So, what made the top 12?
Things like: Put the Web First, Charge for Quotes, and Offer Unique Content in Print.

The last listed here seems especially pertinent given the digital world we are entering as librarians, archivists, and visual communicators. Full article can be found here.

I’d be interested to hear what you have to say. Do you think the advice (as it is) written in this article relevant to what we want/hope to one day do in our professions? What parts of the advice would you change? Would you add? Or deem not relevant?

Second link tonight comes from the blog Dark Roasted Blend, (if you’re not reading this feed, I highly recommend it), in the form of Astronomical Clocks.

Article gives a brief overview of the history of the clocks and time herself, with some gorgeous photos as well. Given that these are the original clocks, including some from the Medieval periods, all are in very excellent condition.

Also, not from my Google Reader, but another “oh, look! Pretty!” link -

MassArt has a collection of artist’s books, portions of the collection being viewable to students and individuals.

No word on hours or times to view, but two numbers are listed on the bottom of the page. I’m particularly fond of this one, I have to say.

Also, Harvard Art Museum is starting a series of lectures, the first being on “Buddha’s Hand”.

According to the website: “Each lecture will look deeply at a single work of art, inviting interpretations that probe beneath the surface. Approaching each work from multiple perspectives, we will examine the techniques, contexts, and stories that helped shape these exceptional works…”

Ticket prices are slightly steep on a student budget. $18 for a single lecture, and $90 for the whole series. (Buddha would count as single lecture). No price for student tickets, although you do save if you are a member of the museum.

More information found at the Arts Boston site.

Main Points:
1. Ann Kordas – currently works at the Mary Baker Eddy Library. A graduate of Simmons College with past experience in art libraries.
She is looking for a VOLUNTEER to help 4-6hrs/wk for the fall semester in book conservation. Has approx. 100 books, all in various needs of repair, and unable to do all herself, would like someone to come in to help. While some experience in conservation and bookbinding is recommended, it is not required.
Please contact Ann Kordas, if interested.
email: kardosa@mbelibrary.org
Might be wise to mention you’re with Panopticon.

2. Collaboration with SCCoSA
SCCoSA is trying to put together an “Obsolete Media Collection”, to be used as both a teaching tool and hands-on visual. They’ll need help with outreach, acquiring objects, as well the final display, set to go up in the Spring.
We do have two reps for this project. Contact information will follow.

3. Introductions
Hi!
It’s been mentioned some of you would like to know how to best get in contact with us officers. This blog certainly works. Officially, I am in charge of the updating, and comment approving, but the other officers are checking entries periodically as well, and are certainly happy to answer your questions.
We also have a listserve, which I know some of you signed up for at the meeting.
Want a reminded of just who you’re officers are?
Betsy Boyle – Co-Chair
Allison Bjorndahl – Co-Chair
Melissa Hulse – Treasurer
Stefanie Maclin – Blogger/Secretary

Please feel free to ask us any questions. I promise we don’t bite.

4. Upcoming Events
The JP Open Studios are this weekend. There’s a nifty website to be found here.
While not an official Panopticon event, I hope everyone has a chance to check it out. (I actually know some people showing in it, and let me tell you. There’s some fascinating stuff to be seen here.)
Also: Panopticon is planning a 2nd Tech Lab Art Show for the spring semester. Assistance still needed in curating, advertising, set-up and design. Submissions also needed.
Again, contacts have been established. More information will follow as it becomes available.
In November, the Fenway will have THEIR Open Studios, Nov. 14+15, 11-5. Some talk of getting a group together and making it an official sort of event. More information to follow. Please comment if you think you might be interested.

5. Darin Murphy
Currently the librarian at the Museum School (at the MFA), Darin Murphy is also involved with ARLIS&ARLIS/NE, the parent orginization (of a sort) of Panopticon. Currently, he’s the New England chapter president, and made the note that they are looking for volunteers in leadership.
Some other related points he mentioned:
the ARLIS National Conference is in April (4/23-26), and while it is still in the planning stages, it WILL be in Boston this year. There will be workshops, chances to networks, and as students, we get the discounted registration price.
Also as students, membership rates to join ARLIS/NE, which is the New England chapter, is only $8. $8!
The ARLIS Fall Business Meeting will be in October (10/16) in Williamstown, MA, and will be a joint venture with the Visual Resources Association. Again, a great chance to network.

The New York Artists’ Book Fair is coming up! Information can be found here.

6. We also have a tentative date of November 6th for a Career Panel. Those who were around last spring might have come to the one our last year co-chairs organized, and remember what a great thing it was! We’re hoping to have it be a “Grad Students in the Arts”, and are in talks of opening it to students from the MFA Musuem School and Mass Art also.

7. A few other ideas to keep in mind:
Tour of the BPL Digital Imagaing Library – anyone interested?
End of the semester craft night.

Details on both to come.

And that’s it! Have any questions? Leave a comment! Heck, leave a comment anyway. Tell me (us) what you’d like to see. What sort of events would you like to see what happen?

Think I missed a week in there. Apply humble apologies. In the meantime, have art!

Many of you are probably familiar with the wonderful world of Readers, that drop box of sorts which allows you to keep all your news, entertainment, sports updates and celebrity gossip in one place. Admittedly, I use GoogleReader, and as I have some tabs to close, take a peek into mine! (Be warned, it’s very much to do with art, libraries, archeology, current events, and books. I’m predictable, it seems.)

First. ARTStor recently announced a collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Always wanted to visit, but couldn’t afford the airfare? Well, now you can. In conjunction with the popular website, the SFMOMA now has over 26,000 items of its collection free on the internets to view, including paintings, sculptures and photographs. Visit the museum’s website for more in depth analysis.

From ArtPark (which I highly recommend for their occassional “Wordless Wednesdays”), Amy Whitaker has a new book out.

Called Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in Art Museums, Whitaker sets out to answer the age old question – why do we always feel tired walking around in art museums? At times funny and at times serious, this book “matter[s] for reasons that have less to do with art as we know it and more to do with business, politics, and the age-old question of how to live.”*

Finally. Have some photographs! From National Geographic, this particular section features all the winning photos from their 2009 contest so far.

Also. Need something to do this weekend? Visit the Peabody Essex Museum, just over in Salem MA (just a bus or commuter rail away), and while you’re there, be sure to view Surfland, by Joni Sternbach. A photographer, who works predominately with ferrotypes, or tintypes, the exhibit features not only an explanation as to her art, but also a diversity in its subjects and models. Buy the book in the giftstore, and remember to take a tour of the Yin Yu Tang house before you leave!

*directly quoted from the Museum Legs website, museumlegs.com

(This last one was not from my Reader, but I do have the PEM site bookmarked, so.) But even so? What sort of sites do you have in YOUR feed? What sort of hidden art treasures do you find? Post them here!