Beth Katleman (@rococobabe) on Her Ceramic Curiosities in @nytimes

January 12, 2011

Beth Katleman on Her Ceramic Curiosities

By PENELOPE GREEN

Beth Katleman is a ceramic artist who plays with dainty forms and techniques, subverting traditional shapes to her own mischievous ends. Her delicate earthenware reliefs in wild colors recall the 18th-century porcelain rooms of European royalty — except when you look closely, you might see the Campbell Soup kids brandishing a safety razor among the rococo flowers and vines, or the Pillsbury Doughboy tucked inside an ornate doorway.
 In the late 1990s, Ms. Katleman was invited by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center to be an artist in residence. She performed her work at Kohler, the kitchen-and-bath company that is a major funder of the center, embellishing sinks, bidets and toilets with an explosion of earthenware reliefs in Jordan Almond colors. In 1998, one toilet made its way into the Christmas windows at Barneys New York; that same year, another was included in a show called “Bathroom” at the Thomas Healy Gallery, nestled in between work by Andy Warhol and John Waters.

Recently, she has been working in porcelain, casting cheap toys and curios — grinning snails, fake Barbies from China, thumbnail-size pencil sharpeners molded into world monuments — in ghostly white ceramic, and creating tiny tableaus from them. Next week, she is installing “Folly” at the Jane Hartsook Gallery on Jones Street, setting 50 miniature landscapes on a wall painted bright turquoise. It looks like the wallpaper in an English country estate, pastoral and graphic, except that the three-dimensional landscapes cast spooky shadows and, as your eye adjusts, you find all of Ms. Katleman’s favorite kitschy objects rendered as precisely as Lladro figurines.

I know this is old history, but before the Kohler center’s invitation, had you ever worked in toilets before?

I had not! For a while, these were the things I was best known for. I thought, Oh no. I’ll be forever known as the toilet artist. I have one set in our apartment. Sammy and Natasha, my 8-year-olds, think everyone’s mom makes toilets.

To clarify, Kohler invites a few artists a year to use their factory to make sculpture; it’s called the Arts/Industry program. It doesn’t have anything to do with their product line, but I just really wanted to make a toilet.

I’ll bet toilets pose special challenges as a medium. What were they?

Well, when they are fired, they are like liquid glass. I think they fire at 2,500 degrees. They hand it to you right out of the mold, and I just piled stuff on. They told me none of it would come out, that the toilet would warp or bend. When it didn’t, the Kohler engineer brought his boss to the studio. They couldn’t believe it hadn’t collapsed. Yes, it’s a challenging medium.

Your new medium puts you in terrific company, with artists who mess around with wallpaper and also with toile, which your landscapes recall. I am remembering when Virgil Marti made wallpaper from the school photos of boys who had bullied him in junior high, and the toile embroidered by Richard Saja, a Brooklyn textile artist, who stitches cockroaches and flames and other impish images onto pillows and sofas.

There’s been a tradition of artists inspired by wallpaper. It’s so polite. It’s domestic and cozy. You think, English country houses. You feel comfortable. You are used to feeling like it’s in the background, and that it’s safe. So, as an artist, you can use that to mess with people’s heads. Wallpaper puts people’s defenses down, and you can exploit that a little bit.

Where do you find all the gewgaws for your pieces? Do you have a favorite flea market?

Since the 26th Street flea markets are no longer, I shop online. I get immersed in these weird subcultures, like the fairy garden Web sites where little old ladies who make fairy gardens find the tiny bridges and such.

The World War II diorama sites are good, and ones for souvenir miniatures — there are whole Web sites devoted to miniature buildings. My miniature buildings are from pencil sharpeners. Friends will e-mail me, “There’s a sharpener of Mount Rushmore on eBay!”

I also collect vintage Playmobil plants. I find contemporary ones in my kids’ toys, and at kids’ birthday parties. You don’t want to invite me over.

“Folly” runs from Jan. 20 to Feb. 17 at the Jane Hartsook Gallery, at Greenwich House Pottery, 16 Jones Street, second floor; Ms. Katleman’s “Folly” sculptures will be for sale ($2,400 to $4,500 each). Information: (212) 991-0003, greenwichhouse.org or bethkatleman.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2011

 

An article last Thursday about Beth Katleman, a ceramic artist, misidentified the group that provided her with an artist-in-residence position in the late 1990s. It was the John Michael Kohler Arts Center — not Kohler, the kitchen and bath company, which helps finance the arts center.

 

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 25, 2011

 

A Spare Times entry in some editions on Friday about a display of 50 miniature landscapes by the ceramic artist Beth Katleman at Greenwich House Pottery in Manhattan misstated the address. It is 16 Jones Street, not 16 Great Jones Street.

 

U.S. Dept of @Interior Approves #Christo ‘Over the River’ #Art Project in #Colorado. #Eco impact?

Fascinating and challenging art project with serious environmental challenges.

via nytimes.com

The artist plans to install fabric over the Arkansas River.

By 
Published: November 7, 2011

DENVER — Federal regulators on Monday approved a $50 million installation of anchored fabric over the Arkansas River in southern Colorado by the artist Christo, whose larger-than-life vision has divided environmentalists, residents and politicians for years over questions of aesthetics, nature and economic impact.

Christo

The artist's drawing of the project, which will include eight suspended panel segments totaling 5.9 miles along a 42-mile stretch of the Arkansas River.

The project, “Over the River,” will include eight suspended panel segments totaling 5.9 miles along a 42-mile stretch of the river, about three hours southwest of Denver. Construction could begin next year, pending final local approvals, with the goal being a two-week display of the work as early as August 2014.

“Drawing visitors to Colorado to see this work will support jobs in the tourism industry and bring attention to the tremendous outdoor recreation opportunities,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. “We believe that steps have been taken to mitigate the environmental effects of this one-of-a-kind project.”

Christo, 76, said in an interview that the project had already made history for its interconnection of art and public participation, with a federal environmental impactstatement that drew thousands of comments.

Christo’s projects — from the wrapping of the ReichstagParliament building in Berlin in 1995 to “The Gates,” a meandering path of orange awnings through Central Park in New York in 2005 — have often generated heated debate in advance of their creation.

“We are elated,” Christo said. “Every artist in the world likes his or her work to make people think. Imagine how many people were thinking, how many professionals were thinking and writing in preparing that environmental impact statement.”

Permits are still needed from Fremont and Chaffee Counties, the Colorado Department of Transportation and the State Patrol. But Christo emphasized that those agencies had been working with the federal government all through the environmental impact study and were involved in shaping the mitigation measures included in Monday’s decision.

Federal officials said that “Over the River” could generate $121 million in economic output and draw 400,000 visitors, both during the construction — which could become its own tourist event — and the display itself.

Points of contention and controversy ranged from road safety in the narrow canyon highway through the installation zone, which extends from the towns of Salida to Cañon City, to potential impacts on wildlife, especially on the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep that habituate the Arkansas River canyon and are Colorado’s state mammal.

In May, the Colorado Wildlife Commission, an advisory panel to the state’s Division of Parks and Wildlife, urged federal officials to reject Christo’s proposal, specifically citing its concerns about the sheep, and whether the chaos and traffic of construction could keep them from crucial water sources. A local opposition group complained in August that federal regulators were being unduly swayed by Christo, and that phrases like “artistic vision” in the impact study, rather than neutral terms like “proposed project,” suggested a predisposition to let him have his way.

The decision announced Monday spelled out measures to protect the sheep, including restricting activity in lambing season and a Bighorn Sheep Adaptive Management Fund, paid for by Christo, who is covering the full cost of the project via the sale of his work.

 

Authorities in FL Seize Painting from The Mary Brogan Museum of Art @TheBrogan

A 16th century painting on loan to a Florida museum was seized Friday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents because it is suspected of having been looted during World War II. The Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Italy, had loaned Girolamo Romano’s 1538 painting, “Christ Carrying the Cross Dragged by a Rogue,” to the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee in March as part of an exhibition of Baroque painting.

Once on display, descendants of a former owner, Giuseppe Gentili, identified the painting as one that had been looted by the collaborationist Vichy government in France and illegally sold at auction in 1941, after the Gentili family had been forced to flee the Nazis. The Pinacoteca acquired the painting in 1998.

The Gentili family and Italian officials have been negotiating over the status of the painting, which the Brogan kept for safekeeping after the rest of the Baroque exhibit closed in September. Chucha Barber, the Brogan’s chief executive, said the museum’s contract with the Pinacoteca had been extended to November 6th during the negotiations. But Ms. Barber said the family told her the negotiations had broken down.

On Friday, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida, Pamela Marsh, filed a seizure complaint and supporting affidavit in court.

“Agents from homeland security surrounded the building this morning,” as the painting was loaded into a white vehicle and taken to an undisclosed location, Ms. Barber said.

In a statement, Ms. Marsh said that federal law prevents the painting from being returned until the ownership disputes are resolved: “Our interest is strictly to follow the law and safeguard this work until the courts determine rightful ownership.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office noted that a French court of Appeals in 1999 forced the Louvre Museum to return five paintings that had been owned by Gentili to the family after they had been sold at auction.
John Morton, director of customs and enforcement said; “It’s never too late to right a wrong.”

via artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com

Interesting story...