This Sunday on the Mosaic of Art we meet DR. ADRIENNE VON LATES. She's Director of Education at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida. (here's a slide show). After describing how she came to her position, she introduces us to the museum's history and the shared goal of integrating the past with the present, working both with artists and museum patrons.
A lot of people feel baffled by art from any period - not just contemporary art, because they feel, Well that's not part of my culture. And so our approach is, it doesn't matter what culture you come from; there's always a space to enter. Also it's the choices that the museum makes to find points of entry; to produce accessible exhibitions; to invite contemporary artists to be in dialogue with the past; to sort of illuminate how the past can still refresh us and lead us to new thinking. - A.V.L.
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courtesy Bass Museum of Art |
About the Bass Museum's mission: We've had a director here, Sylvia Karman Cubina, for almost 2 years, whose background is in contemporary art. She worked with (collector) Rosa de la Cruz... and her concept for the museum is something called the Endless Renaissance where we will combine the contemporary with the art of the past, so that contemporaries are always looking to the past and in some ways past art can predict the way we look at the world today, because there are themes; there are archetypes there are shapes; there are approaches to looking that sort of continue throughout time.
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FRANCESCO BOTTICINI, Portrait of a Young Man courtesy Bass Museum of Art |
The Nudist Museum is the exhibition of paintings by ELLEN HARVEY that von Lates presented. Ellen Harvey is a person who has had an interesting career. She started out as a lawyer at Yale and decided she wanted to indulge her passion for painting. She remembers that when she was 10 years old, going to a museum with her parents, she was fascinated by all the nudity. She just fixated on all the flesh and she knew she was being naughty. So one of her naughty fantasies is to just focus on nude objects, nude figures in museum collections, so we gave her mostly black and white photographs or jpegs of low resolution... Most of them were religious -- a lot of Madonna and childs... lots of little cupids... (S)he started working in grisaille or grayscale and only highlighted the fleshy parts that she loved. In some cases, like this bronze statue over here from the Art Deco, she took it upon herself to flesh them out, to give them flesh colors which they don't have.
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JORDAENS, Cornucopia |
ELLEN HARVEY, Nudist Museum; detail
courtesy the artist and Bass Museum of Art
She got all these used picture frames, and she painted on top of them and let the paint drip from them.. creating more of a kind of haunted display of little objects coming to life. You can see just by the way that she's presenting it that it's a little off beat and is again a reflection of her sense of humor and the fact that she is not being deadly serious in her approach to all these little naked bodies.
ELLEN HARVEY, Nudist Museum; detail
courtesy the artist and Bass Museum of Art
In conversation with the audience, the question was raised: You're a contemporary artist; why are you looking at all this old stuff? And she (Harvey) says, because it allows her to fantasize and to re-imagine and have a kind of dialogue with these pieces, and people appreciated that.
ELLEN HARVEY, Nudist Museum; installation view
courtesy the artist and Bass Museum of Art
People are curious about what they're looking at, and it's pretty clear that these are not the straight kinds of copies. And of course we're not going to keep this; it's all going to go back to the artist... It's almost more like a performance; it's performing here for a month and letting people sort of riff off of them and see what they want in them. Regarding the educational value of this exhibition, von Lates said, It's an example of the mission of the Museum right now, which is to have living artists re-examine and intervene with our collection. So it's an example of what we're allowing artists to do...
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ELLEN HARVEY, Nudist Museum; installation view courtesy the artist and Bass Museum of Art |
We are looking for artists who are willing to engage with history and see it in new ways and hopefully inspire our visitors to see how an artist interprets the emotional relationships or the color value or tries to see it in human terms.
MARCELLUS COFFERMANS, Holy Family with Angel
courtesy Bass Museum of Art
Please tune in to www.blogtalkradio.com/MosaicOfArt at 3 pm EDT on Sunday to hear the full conversation. (Register if you like, so you can join the chat room) Adrienne von Lates' delight in her work shines through and brings both the collection and the exhibition to life.
Can't make it Sunday? Don't worry. Shows are archived.
Thanks!
George Fishman, producer/host