By ANNA RUSSELL
ON THE WALL behind Yasuo Minagawa's desk hangs a signed black-and-white photograph of the Olympic gold-medalist Greg Louganis, arms outstretched in mid-dive. Mr. Minagawa framed the photo himself, using a process he likened to diving, a sport he has practiced weekly for more than 20 years. In both activities, the framer said, accuracy and accountability are everything. "Mistake is enemy number one," he said.
On the far western edge of Manhattan, the framer and his small staff are hand-making minimalist wooden frames with the precision of an Olympic diver. He has framed artwork for some of the biggest names in the art world—including Peter Beard, Urs Fischer and Mariana Cook—with a recent show for Sherrie Levine at the Whitney and one for Alice Neel at the David Zwirner Gallery.
Born in Japan, Mr. Minagawa, 67, studied law before coming to the U.S. in 1973 as an aspiring artist. He began building frames for his artist friends and then quickly expanded. He taught himself his craft by meticulously dismantling and then rebuilding wooden frames piece by piece. Since launching Minagawa Art Lines in the early '80s, he has attracted a loyal following of artists, curators and gallery owners—from the Gagosian Gallery to the Paula Cooper Gallery—enamored with frames so carefully constructed that they become part of the artwork itself. On painted frames, the color completely conceals the wood grain, and the seams between the corners are almost invisible. "I have some artists who will only use Yasuo," said gallery owner Paula Cooper of the Paula Cooper Gallery. "The craftsmanship is absolutely impeccable."
To achieve the soft gray color, ideal for black and white photographs, real graphite pigment is added to a liquid stain base. The frames range from $200 to $20,000 apiece and take about five weeks to cycle through the labor-intensive process. During that time they move through the rooms at Mr. Minagawa's studio—framing, finishing and fitting—until they emerge ready to be hung. On a hot morning in July, the wiry Mr. Minagawa moved easily among the workbenches and machines in the large framing room. Poised over a manual miter trimmer, used to cut precise angles, he positioned the blade against the end of a frame side and pressed down, sending curled shavings to the floor. Mr. Minagawa repeated the process until he achieved a perfect 45-degree angle: one half of a frame corner. "That's what I want," he said. "Nothing more, nothing less." Once he has the sides of his frame cut down and angled, he attaches them with wood glue and hidden metal screws, using old-fashioned Swiss clamps to hold the corners together as they dry. Though many framers have long since switched to power tools, Mr. Minagawa has maintained the use of manual tools, which he insists make a smoother surface. The frames, which he moves in and out of the building through a freight elevator at the back of the studio, can weigh as much as 500 pounds by the time they are finished. About 60% of them are built from standard designs that he has developed over the years. The others require custom designs. For one piece, made from coffee grounds, Mr. Minagawa designed a boxlike frame, with a removable glass lid lined in wood, so viewers could also open it and smell the work. "I came up with the idea it should be sealed in when no one's looking at it," he said. Mr. Minagawa makes all his frames from domestic wood. He favors hard woods, like maple or white oak, because they last longer, but he sometimes uses softer woods like ash or mahogany. He once used more exotic woods but stopped when he learned of the destruction to the rain forest. The shift in wood triggered a shift in focus for Mr. Minagawa. His wood choices limited, he turned to finishing to distinguish his frames. He has since become known for his homemade stains and paints, which he customizes by adding pigments to stain bases. The recipes are "industry secrets," he said with a smile. “For one piece, made from coffee grounds, he created a frame that allowed viewers to smell the work.” Passing through a narrow corridor hung with frames, Mr. Minagawa ducked into the finishing room. Seated on a high stool, a staffer was dipping a block of wood wrapped in sandpaper in water, sanding the bumps and irregularities out of a frame's paint layer. This process, called "wet-sanding," is repeated for each layer applied to the frame—sometimes, as in the case of white lacquer, that means as many as 13 layers. Between each coat, the framer must wait for the paint to dry before he can sand it down. Mr. Minagawa often works closely with artists to create a custom color. Artist Dan Colen, for instance, said he sometimes consults Mr. Minagawa and Yuko Kosaka, Mr. Minagawa's office manager of 16 years, before finishing his piece so that the frame and the art work together. "It's really just an extension of the art," said Mr. Colen. Threading his way back through the corridor, Mr. Minagawa opened the door to the fitting room. One of his staff used a blade to make precise cuts on a backing board. Before a photograph or a drawing is framed, Mr. Minagawa determines how it will be spaced and attached. Spacing, where the slightest bit of an inch can make a difference, is equally important, if more subjective, said the framer. "I guess I have somehow good eyes for it," said Mr. Minagawa. "If I see the artwork, I usually know what to do with it."
A version of this article appeared August 11, 2012, on page C11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sought by Art Stars, Famed for Frames.
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© 2012 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com
August 8, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY
Gagosian GalleryThe installation of Mr. Chamberlain’s works outside the Seagram Building.
The plaza of the Seagram Building, which has been the stage for a procession of supersized contemporary art installations over the last few years, is about to sprout a forest of tinfoil tentacles. Or at least a bunch of towering, sinuous things that appear to be made of foil, created by the sculptor John Chamberlain, who died in 2011.
Beginning Friday and continuing through Nov. 16, the plaza will host four sculptures made by Mr. Chamberlain from a body of work that detoured from his signature material – scrap automotive metal – and toward a much more pliable material. In the mid-1970s he began to make small pieces by twisting and shaping household foil into forms that resembled renegade ropes or elephant trunks or anemone tentacles. The pieces were then enlarged into full-scale sculptures made out of industrial aluminum, one of which – a kind of upside-down, dromedary version – was featured in the middle of the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda during the museum’s retrospective of Mr. Chamberlain’s work this year.
The Seagram exhibition, presented by the Gagosian Gallery, will include pieces rising as high as 15 feet, made from 2008 to 2010 in silver, green and copper-colored aluminum.
The display will not be the first time the curves and sharp angles of Chamberlain works have been set against the rigid lines of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building. In 1984, Mr. Chamberlain’s “American Tableau,” a monumental automotive-steel piece evoking a skyline or a line of pedestrians, was created for temporary display in the plaza.
August 8, 2012
By PATRICIA COHEN
Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Property taxes are now part of the museum’s revenue.
The Detroit Institute of Arts was saved from devastating budget cuts Tuesday night after voters in three Michigan counties agreed to institute a property tax increase earmarked specifically for the museum.
The levy — known as a millage tax — is expected to raise $23 million a year and put the arts institute on secure financial footing for the first time in two decades. In exchange residents of the contributing counties — Wayne (which includes Detroit) and its suburban neighbors Macomb and Oakland — will receive free museum admission. The new funds will also support extra programming for older visitors and students, and expand operating hours.
“We are thrilled,” said Graham W. J. Beal, the institute’s director, who gathered with supporters at the museum Tuesday night to await the count and then celebrate the proposal’s passage.
The institute now becomes one of a handful of American museums, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the St. Louis Art Museum, that rely on property taxes for a portion of their revenues. But Detroit’s is unusual among major urban museums because it does not have a large endowment and receives no financial support from either the city or the state.
As a result the museum’s leaders felt they had to ask taxpayers if they would be willing to pay to support its mission. Though they answered yes, Christine Anagnos, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said Tuesday night’s vote does not presage broader change. “I think Detroit is a special situation,” she said, referring to the complete withdrawal of government funds. “I don’t think this is a trend.”
The institute’s holdings range from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman artifacts to contemporary American masterpieces. But starting two decades ago both Michigan and the city of Detroit began withdrawing their financial support, and neither money drawn from the institution’s endowment or operating revenues could keep pace. Admissions and food and merchandise sales generate about $3.5 million a year, or just 15 percent of the annual budget.
Last month The Detroit Free Press noted that all of the city’s cultural institutions have traditionally been underendowed and suggested that was possibly a side effect of the “new-model mentality of the auto industry,” which encouraged yearly rather than long-term donations.
The institute underwent a major renovation in 2007 only to experience a severe round of cutbacks two years later, when it reduced its operating budget from $34 million to $25.4 million and eliminated more than 60 full- and part-time positions, or nearly 20 percent of its work force.
The millage tax takes advantage of the fact that the vast majority of the institute’s 400,000 yearly visitors — 79 percent — live in one of the three counties. The 0.2-mill tax will last for 10 years and will cost each homeowner approximately $15 a year for every $150,000 of a home’s fair market value, according to a fact sheet put out by the arts institute. A designated tax to support the Detroit Zoo was approved by county voters in 2008.
Kaywin Feldman, the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which receives 42 percent of its budget from a similar property tax in Hennepin County, said the millage “has been a part of the story of the success of the museum all along.”
In St. Louis the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District supports five institutions. “This is a firm commitment from taxpayers, and is much more stable,” said J. Patrick Dougherty, the district’s executive director. He said the millage tax there has escaped the sort of anti-tax opposition found elsewhere.
Over the next decade the Detroit Institute of Arts will focus on building its $98 million endowment to $400 million, a goal museum officials concede is ambitious, particularly given the uncertain state of the economy.
The museum, which raised $2.5 million to campaign for the tax, emphasized the economic benefits, noting that the institute spent more than $7 million on goods and services in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties last year.
The city technically owns the institute’s Beaux-Arts building and more than 60,000-piece collection, which includes Diego Rivera’s monumental frescoes, and works by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Rembrandt, Rubens, Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Munch and more. In handouts museum officials noted that selling art to support operating costs violates accepted museum practices. The city is also prohibited from selling any part of the collection.
Pam Marcil, the institute’s director of public relations, said the museum expects to see proceeds from the new tax in January.
On Wednesday morning Mr. Beal said that the museum was immediately fulfilling its pledge to offer county residents free entry. He invited them over to see the museum’s current exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, and glimpse a rare Vermeer, “Woman Holding a Balance,” on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
National Galleries of Scotland A poster advertising an exhibition of work by Picasso and modern British artists at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.By DAVE ITZKOFF
August 8, 2012With a presumable sigh and some acerbic remarks from a Scottish museum, the Edinburgh Airport has agreed to remove the image of a nude portrait painted by Picasso being used to advertise a local exhibition after some travelers complained about it, BBC News reported.
The painting, “Nude Woman in a Red Armchair,” appeared on a poster at the airport advertising an exhibition on Picasso and modern British art at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. After some departing passengers expressed concerns about the picture, which offers a stylized depiction of Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s mistress and the mother of one of his daughters, Maya, the airport and the National Galleries of Scotland have agreed to put a white cover over it and replace it with a different image from the exhibition – though not without a rejoinder from gallery officials.
John Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, told the BBC: “It is obviously bizarre that all kinds of images of women in various states of dress and undress can be used in contemporary advertising without comment, but somehow a painted nude by one of the world’s most famous artists is found to be disturbing and has to be removed.”
Mr. Leighton continued, “I hope that the public will come and see the real thing, which is a joyous and affectionate portrait of one of Picasso’s favorite models, an image that has been shown around the world.”
A spokeswoman for the airport told the BBC, “While we considered the content of the poster appropriate for use in the airport terminal, we were happy to ask the exhibition organizers for an alternative following feedback from some of our passengers.”
By Adam Lindemann
August 7, 2012
In early 2010, when the news broke that a respected art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, had been named director of the financially struggling Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the museum’s decision was widely considered a controversial one. This had, of course, happened before: back in the early 1960s, Walter Hopps left his partnership in Los Angeles’s fabled Ferus Gallery to head up the Pasadena Art Museum, where he went on to a successful museum career that included a now-famous Marcel Duchamp exhibition. But who ever said the art world has a long memory? In fact, there have been many role changes in the past few years, including Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison’s departure from the museum to work for Sotheby’s, and Picasso guru John Richardson and, more recently, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator emeritus John Elderfield joining the ranks at Gagosian Gallery. As well-financed galleries regularly put on blockbuster shows that are ballsier and more spontaneous than slow-moving museums could ever manage, the role of today’s art institution—and its staff—is at risk and thus up for grabs. Veteran curators are not immune to the smell of money, so it’s no surprise that some of them deservedly want to cash in a few chips. What made the MOCA appointment unusual in this context was that Mr. Deitch went in the opposite direction, giving up his eponymous commercial gallery in order to run a nonprofit institution that needed reinventing. Ironically, instead of receiving praise for his decision to focus on art instead of art commerce, he has been dogged by suspicion, accusations and mistrust from the beginning of his tenure.
The art press has always assiduously followed Mr. Deitch’s moves; his entertainer’s knack for drawing a crowd is one of the main reasons he was chosen to lead the troubled and financially weak MOCA. True to form, he debuted with a newsworthy Dennis Hopper photography show, perhaps a nod to LA’s real art and entertainment history, and to the fact that Mr. Hopper, a real LA cult figure, was dying of cancer. Sadly, he died just before the show went up. Then there was the “Art in the Streets” exhibition, a story Mr. Deitch tells better than anyone, all the way from Basquiat to Banksy. The show was a windfall for the museum, attendance-wise, but the purists continued to gripe and turn up their noses. More recently he did the seriously great “Abstraction After Warhol” show currently on view at the museum, and no one can fault that one, though I’d bet it hasn’t been a crowd-pleaser.
There may have been disagreement in the art community over some of those programming decisions, but it wasn’t until two recent events that all hell broke loose. The dismissal of MOCA’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel, who had been at the museum for 22 years (and the decision not to replace him), was closely followed by Mr. Deitch’s confirmation of an upcoming exhibition dedicated to the era of disco, prompting all four artists on the museum’s board—the luminaries Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie—to resign in protest. In response, a lynch mob of art pundits have now joined the witch-hunt. During the initial uproar over Mr. Schimmel’s departure, Mr. Broad, a life trustee who rescued the museum with a $30 million matching grant in 2008, came out in defense of Mr. Deitch in an op-ed in the LA Times, but two weeks ago the paper was mysteriously in possession of a letter that former MOCA chief executive Charles Young wrote to his “friend” Mr. Broad, urging him to fire Mr. Deitch, and now rumors are flying around the art world that Mr. Deitch’s directorship cannot survive such a loss of face and faith.
“I hope that the four-alarm fire now enveloping MOCA has at least given you pause for thought about his appointment and your continued attempts to try to save him for a job for which many (including myself) believe he is unqualified,” Mr. Young wrote in his letter. But before hasty judgments, let’s consider the amnesia relating to why Mr. Deitch was brought in: the institution was under financial duress and had poor attendance for years, and so it tried a new direction with a new kind of director.
As for Paul Schimmel, his departure appears to have been long overdue. I’ve heard rumors from trustworthy sources that he had been shopping around for another position for many years, long before Mr. Deitch entered the picture. I’ve always respected Mr. Schimmel because he is one of the few curators out there who speaks his mind and sticks to his deep commitment to art and artists, but it’s quite possible that his strong opinions and charmingly gruff manner didn’t help him in today’s job market. I know for a fact that Mr. Schimmel was very unhappy with the selection of Mr. Deitch as his boss, and if I knew it he must also have let everyone in town know it.
The art snob in me agrees with much in Mr. Schimmel’s style of curating, but in LA, where a competitor museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and its photogenic director Michael Govan have been absorbing most of the donor dollars, that strategy wasn’t working, and so the board and its main benefactor made a change. Will it ultimately turn out to have been a bad move? It is far too soon to judge Mr. Deitch, but museum goers did increase from 149,000 the year before Mr. Deitch arrived to 402,000 in 2011. Mr. Deitch’s populist blockbuster shows brought people in the door—and that is what he was hired to do.
Then there are the criticisms leveled at Mr. Broad. Instead of the praise he deserves for saving MOCA with a $30 million matching grant, he has been the victim of absurd rumors and allegations related to the private museum he is planning for a site across the street from MOCA. The spiciest blog post, on Coagula Art Journal, went like this: “If MOCA is downsized into a celebrity-curated kunsthalle style circus, it will give the blue chip Broad museum across the street more Gravitas. And then of course when MOCA is broke yet again—who will save MOCA by purchasing the best paintings in the collection because the museum is more concerned with event programming? The Broad Museum across the street of course.” But not all the attacks and rumors have been so easy to laugh off. The respected and influential curator Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art, weighed in on the affair by heaping bitter criticism on Mr. Broad and his choice: “Dismissing Paul Schimmel in favor of Deitch is like cashing in all your value stocks and doubling down on junk bonds for the sake of a long-shot windfall.”
It always surprises me when patronage of the arts is met with this level of criticism and rebuke, and it certainly won’t encourage others to be generous with their gifts. As far as Mr. Deitch is concerned, his transition from gallerist to museum director was a natural progression; he always put the artists first and the commerce second. Those of us who’ve followed his gallery’s program always knew Jeffrey was never in it solely for the money: the zeitgeist was what his gallery, Deitch Projects, was about, and that’s what MOCA’s board wanted to bring to their museum. Messrs. Schimmel and Deitch were, understandably, oil and water from day one. The day Mr. Deitch was hired, Mr. Schimmel should have been retired with a respectable severance package, one befitting a 20-year veteran (I’m sure he’ll now turn up as an power-adviser at a major gallery just like Messrs. Richardson and Elderfield). I must assume the board was torn, and so for the past two years they decided not to decide, leaving the two men to quarrel in public. This was a clearly a mistake for all concerned, one that ended up further harming the institution’s reputation.
Now those who claim to love the institution are the ones who are putting it at risk. Charles Young was wrong to put down Mr. Deitch in writing; his rebuke, even if in a “private” correspondence with Mr. Broad, was not in the best interest of the institution he claims to care for. The same is true for those revered artists who left the board: to jump ship en masse at this critical juncture is not simply a rebuke of Mr. Deitch and the board’s direction for the museum; their actions have endangered the credibility and the future of the institution.
There is a popular misconception that museums are on rock-solid footing and that patron dollars grow on trees, but the truth is that, in the U.S., our public art institutions are fragile and subject to all sorts of riptides, especially because they receive virtually all of their funding from private donations. Those who purport to love art should not jeopardize the very institutions that preserve it. It’s a sad and irresponsible reaction to an unfortunate case of mismanagement. Right now it’s easy to sling mud and heap blame, and when famous artists join the ranks of those slinging, the situation quickly goes from bad to painfully ugly. I hope MOCA’s trustees will stick to their convictions, steady the ship and stay the course for better and worse. The worst way to weather a storm is to let it push you around. You end up buried in every swell, and that’s a sure recipe for getting dismasted.
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© 2012 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com
August 3, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY
The New York Times' Tony Smith with his sculpture “The Snake Is Out” in Bryant Park in 1967.
Art conservation can be a rarefied field, but a new project being announced by the North American branch of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art is taking a decidedly populist approach.
The group, which promotes collaboration among professional conservators, artists and collectors, has started a program in which members of the public are being asked to help locate, document and photograph outdoor sculptures made by the Minimalist artist Tony Smith, who created more than 100 such pieces. While many of the sculptures are in public spaces and are well-known, there is no complete inventory of the sites or condition of outdoor works by Mr. Smith, who died in 1980. (Sept. 23 will be the 100th anniversary of his birth.)
And so the conservation group is asking Smith fans to take their cameras and notebooks to “work together and complete the project by using two of the most-visited Web sites, Wikipedia and Flickr,” to “dramatically increase awareness about these works and therefore allow for the continued advocacy for their proper care and maintenance.” Information collected on the works will be organized and listed at the Wikipedia site WikiProject Public Art.
“We live in a world where every single one of the more than 500 television episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ has a well-researched Wikipedia article devoted to it, but by comparison there is practically no information about many of the greatest artworks of the 20thcentury,” said Richard McCoy, a member of the conservation group and a founder of WikiProject Public Art. “This project can serve as a model and demonstrate the importance of documenting contemporary art while highlighting the significance of one of America’s most renowned artists.”
By RANDY KENNEDY
August 3, 2012, 1:07 pm
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Fisk University
Georgia O’Keeffes’s “Radiator Building — Night, New York” (1927).
The long battle over the fate of Fisk University’s art collection is finally over.
After a decision in April by the Tennessee Supreme Court upholding a lower court decision, a plan has now been completed to allow Fisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville, to sell a 50 percent stake in its101-piece collection, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe, to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark., founded by the Walmart heiress Alice Walton.
Crystal Bridges will give the financially troubled university $30 million to be allowed to display the collection two out of every four years, along with the right of first refusal should the rest of the collection ever come up for sale.
Officials at Fisk had said that the school might be forced to close without the infusion of cash from the partial sale of the collection, whose annual display costs it has said it cannot afford. (Ms. Walton has pledged an additional $1 million to improve the university’s display facilities.)
The share plan, approved Thursday by the Davidson County Chancery Court in Nashville, was opposed by the Tennessee attorney general, who argued that it would inhibit future donations by overriding O’Keeffe’s stipulations that the collection never be sold or broken up.
The collection includes four works by O’Keeffe herself, along with 97 others – by artists including Picasso, Cézanne and Renoir – collected by O’Keeffe’s husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. O’Keeffe donated the works and her own paintings – including her well-known “Radiator Building – Night, New York” – in 1949, in recognition of the school’s mission to educate blacks at a time when Southern universities remained segregated.
