labricoleuse | Entries tagged with dc

The Textile Museum in DC has an amazing exhibit running right now, if you are a fan of mid-20th century textile designs--Art by the Yard: Women Design Mid-Century Britain. It features the work of three designers--Lucienne Day, Jacqueline Groag, and Marian Mahler.

The textiles are all exhibited in lengths of yardage hung as artworks, and often exhibited alongside furniture and furnishing designs of the time, or with period magazine features on the artists. Many are hung in such a way that you can get both an extremely close view of the print and weave, as well as a distance view of the large interior design prints. Most fascinating, i thought, was the clear aesthetic path Groag took from her early days at the Vienna Werkstatte to her print designs of midcentury. A great exhibit for fans of the set-dressing on Mad Men! On view through Sept 12, 2010.

I enjoyed it, as a fan of that mid-century graphical aesthetic typified in companies like Marimekko, but i'm really looking forward to the next exhibit forthcoming in the Museum's color series--I saw the catalogue for Red, made a special trip to see Blue, and the next one coming in April 2011 is Green, my favorite color! I'll definitely be back up for that next year...

For the past couple months, there's been so much gloom and doom in the news for the performing arts--theatres laying off half their staffs, chopping their seasons, opera and ballet companies declaring bankruptcy... I could go on and on--in fact, i have, in several previous posts. There have been some bright spots, communities pulling together to save their local theatres and dance companies and such, but this is the brightest spot yet:

Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, has announced an initiative to help save struggling companies, by helping them help themselves.

Here's a quote:

He said his team could devote significant time and up to $500,000 in expenses to provide emergency planning for fundraising, budgeting, marketing or other strategies as box office revenues decline and donations and endowments run dry.

On Tuesday, Kaiser officially unveiled the Arts in Crisis initiative, designed to advise failing organizations on how to most effectively stay afloat. Kaiser espouses a theory I'm a major proponent of--to cut your actual chaff, not your programming or your creative teams, if at all possible:

Kaiser's first piece of advice for struggling groups: Focus on generating revenue.

"Too often the nature of survival is to focus on cutting costs," he said. "The second is when we do have to cut costs, cut programming last, not first. I fear that's not what's happening now." [emphasis mine]

Cutting back on artistic innovations and programming makes it harder for a group to recover and compete for funding, he said "and you appear as a less exciting organization" - a mantra Kaiser repeats from lessons developed through the Kennedy Center's arts management institute.

Some organizations who've already benefited from the aid of the Kennedy Center team include the Lousiana Philharmonic Orchestra (whom they helped to survive the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and the New York City Opera.

So y'all, we grassroots have our part to play here. Get the word out there!

If your local theatre or opera or ballet company is struggling and needs help, forward them this link, where they can request aid and counseling from Arts in Crisis.

By the same token, if you're an arts administrator who'd like to mentor struggling organizations who need your help, check out this link because Arts in Crisis wants your assistance!

And, just so it's not all bureaucracy and budget crises up in here, i'll talk about millinery while i'm at it.

With all the talk in the news about Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat (here's an article on the "church hat" tradition, using Ms. Franklin's hat as an example), i have to share my own Opening Night hat, which is quite similar in its giant-bow focal point, but at the same time quite different.

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Even though i went to see this exhibit a week ago, I wanted to wait to write about it until i'd finished reading the companion book, Zaida Ben Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer by Frank A. Goodyear III.

About a year ago or so, i discovered the photography of Miss Ben Yusuf while doing some research on her mother, Anna Ben Yusuf, author of the 1908 resource text on millinery techniques, Edwardian Hats. Zaida also worked as a milliner, both before and after she set up shop as a portrait photographer, writing magazine articles on "DIY" millinery techniques for magazines of the time and eventually accepting a leadership role in a milliners' trade organization. Ben Yusuf has been a role model of mine ever since--i am particularly drawn to women of earlier eras who blended craft and art as career fields and who were self-sufficient and independent.

At the time when i was avidly combing millinery sources for evidence of her writing, i discovered that portraiture historian Frank Goodyear had been doing his own inquiry into her work from the photography perspective. I wrote to him and he contacted me, and though we only spoke the once, it was so exciting to talk to another person--perhaps the only other person on earth at the time--who not only recognized her name but knew facts about her life and work. (Mr. Goodyear knew far more than i did, in fact, as her photographic career is much more extensively documented in publication than her millinery career.) It was so gratifying and I've been looking forward to Goodyear's exhibit and book ever since!

The exhibit opened in April and i decided to stop in DC to see it on my way up to NYC this summer. Mr. Goodyear has done an amazing job assembling her work from many disparate collections, though according to the companion book there are still loads of lost images she was known to have made. The book reads like a Who's Who of fin de siecle artistic, scientific, and political realms; Ben Yusuf really photographed a staggering number of successful people in her short photographic career (she only worked for maybe a decade or two as a portraiture photographer, bookending that with millinery endeavors). You can check out some of the portraits in the web exhibit online at the NPG website.

It's funny, in addition to portrait historians, i think costume designers and production specicialists are the folks who spend the most time really deeply analyzing portraiture--it's one of the primary sources of period research on the specifics of what people wore. As such, i'm used to looking more at the attire of the portrait subject than his/her face, and my experience of this exhibit and the entire National Portrait Gallery was informed by that. What an overload of excellent little details! If you're at all interested in historical costuming, the NPG is a great museum to wander through on a lazy afternoon (and, bonus, admission is free).

There are a number of other noteworthy exhibits there right now, from a focus on Kathryn Hepburn to "Recognize: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture," which includes the paintings of Kehinde Wiley, whose work i'd read about and been interested in seeing for ages. Wiley creates huge larger-than-life-size portraits of black celebrities, layered over and backdropped with ornate floral and scrollwork patterns typical of like, Rococo textiles. I also really enjoyed "Ballyhoo: Posters as Portraiture", a collection that spans nearly two centuries of poster art and celebrity.

In reading Goodyear's companion volume, i realized that in working at the Public Theatre right now, i'm less than a block from Ben Yusuf's first 5th Ave studio location, just up from Union Square (which is the subway stop i take every morning). The book mentioned that she married late in life to a textile designer and possibly settled in Brooklyn--i have a vague notion that perhaps this summer i'll comb through a couple old Brooklyn cemeteries in search of her lost grave. We'll see if that happens. It'd make a nice weekend picnic afternoon.

Unrelated, being in NYC this summer reminds me every now and then of these little details that separate city living from rural or town life. Not the huge obvious things like 2934892384 more people and skyscrapers, but the stuff you tend to actually forget, like that your cell battery life is way shorter if you ride the subway regularly and it's forced to do a lot of time searching for service. Speaking of riding the subway, i need to head into work soon. I think i'll be going to a couple of exhibits this weekend and seeing at least one play, so maybe there will also be time to blog about that.

I'll be arriving in NYC tonight, and I will most likely be beginning work on Monday at an as-yet-undisclosed location. (I need to find out whether i have their permission to cover anything about the job in the blog or not.)

On the drive up, i stopped in DC to visit some friends and catch a couple of exhibits at local museums. (I'm posting this from there--DC that is--before heading out for the rest of my drive.) The first one i'll talk about is BLUE, currently running through September 18th at the Textile Museum.

BLUE is a followup to the museum's 2007 exhibit, RED, and is similar in theme--it collects together the work of five artists currently working with blue dye as a medium, along with a historical section featuring a range of garments and textiles from various historical periods, cultures, and traditions, all in the thematic hue.

I think my favorite of the modern artists featured was Shihoko Fukumoto, who had several pieces shown. My favorite was Morning Mist 1999, a tea ceremony room made of indigo dyed linen on a delicate frame. It just looked like the most peaceful space to sit inside of.

Some of the highlights from the historical section were the 19th-century Japanese fireman's coat, essentially a large indigo-dyed quilted garment kind of like a kimono, and a tiny preserved piece of cloth dyed in indigo with a horse woven into it from the 5th century. (Many of the historical pieces are depicted on the website's image section, actually.)

At the end of the exhibit was a film room showing sections of a documentary on indigo, which was fascinating.

Upstairs from BLUE was another exhibit of accessories and clothing from Bolivia, including some really cool embroidered and beaded hats, and a hands-on informational section for "textile novices" explaining common vocabulary terms used when referring to textiles, including samples of different kinds of fiber before and after processing, and different styles of weaving.

In the Bolivia exhibit, aside from the beaded hats my favorite thing was a finely-woven shawl depicting both with traditional figures like horses and chickens and more modern images like airplanes and guitars. They also had some really amazing embroidered coca-leaf bags and some extremely finely-knit caps, pouches, and tiny dolls. Honestly, these things must've been knit with like, toothpicks.

The Textile Museum also has an extensive library on its top floor, but by the time we got through the exhibit, it was after hours. I'd love to go check it out next time i'm in DC, though! I did get to make a run through the gift shop, where i bought a couple of Maiwa Productions' documentaries, one on indigo production and one on natural dyestuffs. There was of course a huge amount of amazing fiber art and books and other publications, but i figured i'd invest in the videos, in case i decide to use them in the dyeing class i teach in spring. Students often ask about natural dyeing and indigo, and it'd be cool to have some footage to look at on those topics instead of just book-stuff. So far i've watched part of the indigo documentary and it's really fascinating, showing harvesting processes and the vat setups at indigo farms that have been around for centuries over in India and such.

Also, if you hit the Textile Museum while in DC, i recommend taking the metro and walking--the walk up S Street takes you past a lot of foreign consulates, some of which have really amazing architecture, landscaping, and sculpture outside!