It’s that time of year again, dear readers! With the change of the seasons comes a new edition of our billboards project, Park Pictures. We’ve been promoting Park Pictures here on Untitled for more than two years now, and we’re still going strong! As you may recall, our Pictures are three “billboards” installed along the paved walking trails, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. These billboards change regularly to feature new works by different artists, both from North Carolina and elsewhere.

Last spring Anthony Goicolea created three billboards in conjunction with his solo exhibition Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea. This time around we’ve commissioned three works by California-based artist Carolyn Janssen, who completed her master of fine arts degree at UNC–Chapel Hill in spring 2011. Janssen’s works are digitally crafted worlds created by the expert superposition of images from Janssen’s own daily environment, including multiple representations of herself. This consistent layering allows the artist an element of control as she focuses on the process itself. “I used individual objects in the same way I would use a single brushstroke,” Janssen notes, “building each scene mark by mark.” Janssen’s knowledge of art shines through in her works, which are reminiscent of traditional landscape painting as well as the complex scenes of Bosch and Breughel. The images also refer to video game worlds and science fiction tableaux, which keep Janssen’s works rooted in pop culture.

The subject matter of Janssen’s billboards pertains to an imaginary dystopic society populated solely by Amazon-esque women who, the artist notes, “question and commandeer the landscape, engaging in narratives and mini-dramas, in which they build, fight, kill, and rest. At times calm, at times acting in apprehension to a present or past disaster, the figures reflect on a landscape broken, uncertain, and strange.”

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

The latest installation features work by Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker. You may be familiar with Baker’s work; her painting The Betrayal is part of the Museum’s permanent collection and is on view on Level A in East Building.

Nancy’s billboards are fun and funky, an interesting take on existing works. “Borrowing from three exalted artists from the NCMA’s American collection, mingling highbrow and lowbrow taste, I offer up three reinvented and reconfigured tableaus of the American tradition of landscape painting,” Baker says.

Her willing (or unwilling) subjects? Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls, Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador, and Inness’s Under the Greenwood. But viewers might not recognize them—the paintings have been bisected and then digitally reflected back onto themselves, as if by a funhouse mirror or a kaleidoscope. Suddenly something familiar becomes something new, strange, and even a bit disturbing. Surrounding the altered landscapes is a border of jewels, flowers, staring eyes, and other strange elements, acting, as Baker puts it, as “a Looney Tunes memento mori, in stark contrast to the dreamy realism of the [original] paintings.”

Baker links this memento mori theme with the title of her billboard series: Home Sweet Home. As she notes, “The title, appropriated from John Howard Payne’s ubiquitous poem, reminds us that ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ However, the idea of home in [works such as] Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador has become an historical rendering of a world now on the verge of self-destruction. Through no fault of Mignot, this unreliable narrative of fecund nature is testimony to our desire for fantasy. Like the oeuvre of Norman Rockwell, art can be the greatest and most convincing propaganda.” Baker’s works allow us to ponder important questions of reality vs. fiction, and how that distinction—or lack thereof—affects the natural world today.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Our Bierstadt has a history in contemporary art! Check out this post from 2008, which links the painting to an artist at the Brooklyn Museum–Ed.

For the first time ever at the North Carolina Museum of Art, all four volumes of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America are currently on view.

Believe me, this has been a long time coming. From the transfer of the portfolios from the State Library to the Museum in 1974 to the five-year conservation and restoration program of 2002–2007, this migration has been worthy of a National Geographic documentary.

In the past the Museum has had the ability to show only one volume at a time, in a single case, because of a variety of physical, spatial, and conservation–related restrictions.

The Restrictions

1. Size of the books: really big. Each page is 40 by 26 inches. Not for nothing are they known as the Double Elephant Folios.

2. Size of the case: again, really big—73 inches long x 53 inches deep x 40 inches tall, including the protective glass hood.

3. Limited viewing. Only one page in one volume could be displayed at a time because of light restrictions.

4. Turning the pages—once each quarter—required:

• 8 people from 3 departments.
• 8 suction cups used by 4 strong people to remove the protective glass hood.
• Constant repair of the protective glass hood due to seam breakage during each opening.
• Extreme difficulty in closing the case due to a less-than-precise closure mechanism.

5. Size of the room: tiny. Less than 100 square feet—and it was really just a passageway between contemporary art galleries. In sum, there was no real gallery for the birds to roost in.

The Solutions

1. A dedicated gallery! The new 700-square-foot space allows all four volumes to be shown simultaneously. There are new in-gallery education panels and a reading area, and we can control light levels because the space is not a passageway.

2. New cases—four of them!—one for each volume. They’re each the same size as the old Audubon case, but with greatly improved construction. Pneumatic lifts allow art handlers to open the glass hoods with the greatest of ease (no more suction cups). Pullout decks give greater physical access to the books for safe page turning. And the cases close with a one-handed gentle mechanism and a self-locking system.

That’s right. Thanks to modern technology, what used to take eight people now takes only two or three. Our new cases, made by Glasbau Hahn of Germany, are the crème de la crème of museum casework and a capital investment that will last a lifetime. Unlock with a key, lift open the hood, pull out the deck, turn the page, add a new label, and close the case. It’s that easy. It now takes more time to coordinate the three people with a key than to get access to the book. Our work is more efficient, and the Museum can show more birds than ever before.

One word of caution for visitors to Audubon: you’re being watched. The new gallery is under surveillance by a few feathered friends on loan from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, so be warned—unless you foresee an Alfred Hitchcock moment in your future, please don’t touch the birds.

As the curator of contemporary art, I try to see as much current art as I possibly can—visiting artists’ studios, going to gallery and museum shows, attending art fairs, looking at art magazines and auction catalogues, and reading online journals and blogs. I am always looking for ideas for potential acquisitions for the Museum’s permanent collection and ideas for exhibitions and artists’ projects. The contemporary art world is huge and virtually impossible to keep up with without traveling. I try to go to New York several times a year, occasionally get to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, and have often wished I could go to some of the international art fairs and exhibitions.

Thanks to generous funding provided for curatorial travel and research by a Mellon Foundation Bridge Grant, I traveled to Brazil in September for the first time.

The purpose of the trip was to attend the opening of the Bienal de São Paulo (a gigantic international contemporary art exhibition), to see a new sculpture park (Inhotim in Belo Horizonte), and to visit museums, galleries, and artists’ studios in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The contemporary art world has become increasingly global over the past decade, and the who’s who in the art world (artists, gallery dealers, collectors) are contemporary nomads who circle the globe, going to one art fair after another, trying to keep up with the next new thing—São Paulo in September, Frieze Art Fair in London in October, Istanbul Biennial in October, Art Basel Miami Beach in December, the Armory Show in New York in March, Art Basel in Switzerland in June, Venice Biennale in June . . . and on it goes.

In its 60^th year, the Bienal de São Paulo featured 161 artists from all over the world and filled a three-story convention center. During the two days in São Paulo, I also went to several contemporary galleries, the state art museum, and the studios of several artists, including the painter Caetano de Almeida. In Rio de Janeiro, I visited an incredible private collection of contemporary Brazilian art (in a penthouse overlooking Copacabana Beach) and went to several galleries and museums, including Museu é o Mundo, which had an amazing Hélio Oiticica show, and the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi, which was designed by the world-renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It is a fantastic space-age building that looks as if it belongs in a Jetsons cartoon.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to Inhotim, a new sculpture park in Brumadinho, which felt like the middle of nowhere after an hour and a half bus ride from Belo Horizonte. This 3,000-acre sculpture park and botanical garden is filled with thousands of unusual plants (including one of the world’s largest collections of palm trees—over 1,300 species!) and over 500 works of art by international contemporary artists. As you wander through the park, on foot or by golf cart, you come across outdoor sculptures by artists including Dan Graham, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Olafur Eliasson, and Yayoi Kusama, among many others. You can also wander in and out of mini galleries or pavilions that are scattered throughout the park and feature highly ambitious and complicated artworks by current contemporary art “stars” including Janet Cardiff, Doug Aitken, and Matthew Barney.  The Brazilian collector who built the park, Bernardo Paz, invites artists to make their “dream project” at Inhotim, and it appears that the sky is the limit. Chris Burden’s immense Beam Drop consists of 71 steel beams dropped by crane into a cement foundation. Matthew Barney’s project includes a massive mirrored double dome housing an installation with a gigantic dirt-encrusted backhoe and a separate gallery that features a video filmed during Carnival.

Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion is a round, transparent glass pavilion perched on top of a hill. You enter an empty room with a 360-degree view of the landscape that is filled with an ambient sound that is constantly changing—rumbling, whispering, groaning, creaking. The sound comes from a live microphone that has been placed at the bottom of a 600-foot-deep hole in the middle of the pavilion and amplified in the space so that you are listening to the inside of the earth in real time.

My two favorites were Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s sound installation, 40 Part Motet, which consists of a room filled with 40 freestanding speakers playing the Salisbury Cathedral Choir performing a 16^th-century motet, and Yayoi Kusama’s floating garden installation, Narcissus Garden, made up of 500 stainless steel spheres that float in a rooftop water garden, constantly moving and re-forming, and reflecting you back to yourself, like Narcissus, hundreds of times over.

The NCMA’s Museum Park seems tiny in comparison to Inhotim, but I came back full of ideas and plans for future park projects. Next stop, Miami in December.

Sometimes I need a little extra inspiration to lace up my running shoes and go for a jog. With the scorching summer temperatures giving way to cooler weather, I changed into my running clothes after a recent day of work and headed out to the Museum Park. I grew up visiting the Museum, but the farthest I had ever gotten into the Park was the theater.

Eager to get outside and squeeze a bit of exercise into my schedule as a journalism student at UNC-CH and marketing intern at the Museum, I chose the Explorer Trail. The scenic 2.3-mile path winds past the Museum, beside the newly terraced pond, along rolling hills, and through shady woodlands, offering a comprehensive view of the Park.

Dramatic works of art scattered throughout the grassy fields and along the tree-lined trails make the Park a unique setting for running. I stretched on benches constructed from remnants of the former youth prison that once stood on the grounds, pounded across pavement tattooed with floral designs, and ran between skyscraping circles. The art kept the run interesting as the works appeared in the distance, serving as an incentive to push forward. A monumental human form sprawled across the top of a ridge, while another one curled up into a ball in the woods. Towering sculptures like surreal tree trunks made for a dreamlike landscape. I had seen many pictures of the Park before, but the pieces were much more powerful in the natural setting. And for a tired runner, they offered a great excuse to rest and take a breather.

The trail was fairly quiet, with the occasional bicyclist whizzing by me on the downhill and a few fellow runners passing by with a casual wave. The scenery and seclusion the Museum Park offers is just the incentive I needed to get out and enjoy this refreshing fall weather.

The second phase, funded by a grant from the Clean water Management Trust Fund, is a very innovative retention of storm water run off from the new building, landscape and adjoining parking areas into a series of planted terraces. It is under construction now and will be partially planted this fall, with the balance planted in May/June. By October 2010, we will be able to dedicate this ambitious project as part of a progressive green initiative at NCMA.

One sculpture in the Park that has always inspired my contemplation is Steven Siegel’s To see Jennie smile. This 24-foot-tall sculpture incorporated over 20,000 pounds of News & Observer newspapers. Siegel and a team of 50 volunteers spent two weeks installing the work in 2006. Community involvement is an important aspect of the artist’s work. as reflected by the title of the piece. In an interview with the artist, Siegel tells his story of a volunteer inspiring his naming of the work.
Download audio file (siegel.mp3)
Using specific materials to emphasize the ephemeral nature of our landscapes, Siegel always inspires discussion about environment and art. Visitors have often asked whether the newspapers are detrimental to the environment, as they are expected to decompose in the landscape during the piece’s lifetime. (The answer is no: the newspaper uses vegetable-based inks, and the glossy inserts were removed before installation.) I have found myself staring at the top of the sculpture among the trees and wondering if the local birds have taken part in the work as they construct their nests.

In June 2009, a conversation began among staff members regarding To see Jennie smile. We began to notice the sculpture leaning slightly to the right. Staff members of the Planning and Design, Conservation, and Curatorial departments decided to monitor the changes in the sculpture over the next six months. We photographed Jennie at various stages of deterioration and finally made the decision to remove the piece. On May 20 the NCMA staff said our goodbyes to a work of art that has delighted us, and the public. for four years.

The deinstallation took just a couple of hours and was pretty painless. After wrapping the entire piece in black landscaping fabric, the crew was able to pull the sculpture to the ground with a backhoe. The discarded newspapers and wood infrastructure were hauled off in a large truck. The staff, visitors, and the inhabitants of the Park will surely miss Jennie—especially the 3-foot-long black snake that had taken up residence inside it.

I revisited the sculpture’s footprint last week in search of remnants of the past. I performed my own little archaeological dig at the base of a tree and found small bits of Jennie. The ongoing presence of the work in the landscape—even after deinstallation—actually made me smile!

These remnants called to mind a quote in an interview with Siegel in Sculpture magazine:

“I believe that we are the landscape, not only by our physical presence, but also by the messes we leave and the way we reconfigure all of the material around us—from the roadway to the recycling of cans to nuclear waste. Our presence is there in every molecule.” Excerpt from an interview with the artist and John K. Grande, a contributing editor for Sculpture, and curator of earth art at Canada’s Royal Botanical Gardens.

Photo by mjanssen via Flickr

“I’ve always wanted to go to Lucama” may not have the same ring as “I’ve always wanted to see the Loch Ness Monster and Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel”. But all three are equally true for me. Last week one of these wishes came true when I hit the road with a few colleagues to visit Vollis Simpson at his workshop outside of Lucama. Since Mr. Simpson’s wind machines are known and enjoyed across the state and country, we went to get video and audio of him speaking about his work to be used on new cell phone tours which will debut in April 2010. His Wind Machine is a sort of solitary beacon on the hill in the Museum Park, but there is much more where that came from at his workshop.

Vollis met us at the door when we arrived and helped us move buckets of propellers to make way for our seats. He talked about how he began making wind machines during World War II, how busy he likes to stay today, his many visitors, and the proper care for a wind machine. Whirligigs like grease!

On the way to his workshop we walked to an adjacent field where several of Vollis’ wind machines are set near a small pond. His shop is filled with hundreds of small sculptures and the working parts for his larger creations. Now in his early nineties, Vollis doesn’t eat as much ice cream and chocolate as he used to, but we all got a kick out of the twirling mechanism he built out of ice scream scoops.

With over thirty minutes of tape, we have a lot to work with to find the best minute to use for the cell phone tour. Be sure to visit next spring to hear the final cut on the tour. In the meantime, come visit Vollis’ Wind Machine in the Museum Park.

While the installations are well underway in the white galleries, another dimension has begun: installation of the first of 2,000+ square yards of curtains. They are specifically designed and fabricated to control light for the collection, while softening the contrast between interior and exterior thus helping the eye to adjust for art viewing. They are three varieties of white.

Silver

The new building canopy at the entrance is nearing completion. Semi-reflective glass is being installed into the polished silver framework, reflecting the building and landscape on either side. The most dazzling aspect of the canopy is the polished stainless steel ceiling, reflecting visitors moving in and out of the gallery building.

Green

While the new building is green in the “eco” sense of the word it is also being surrounded by a green landscape. The first trees have arrived on site! Finally. This is the icing on the cake. During the next few weeks, over 200 trees will be installed and will radically change the context of the building. By early December the site will be green with all the landscape elements complete.

Red

The pond project is entering its last phase after final design approval. This is not only a landscape project that will help connect the park and buildings, but a progressive demonstration of sustainable design. The pond and swale are integral parts of a global water management system for the entire site from the “rings” to the new building.  Some 20,000 plants will be installed, with a new path connecting the Museum trail to the Amphitheater. It will be North Carolina red clay for just a few more months.

Gray

Lots of noise in the Museum’s existing lobby is due to jackhammering as part of the existing floor is removed to make space for a white oak floor, just like in the new building. It’s a very strange sight to see the lobby completely gutted back to the exterior walls. By January the space will be complete but for now it is about as gray as gray can be with concrete and dust.

The interplay of traditional craftsmanship with contemporary art and architecture has a fascinating history in North Carolina—Black Mountain College is a prime example—and Jack has his own place in that story. And now, in a serendipitous sequence of events, Jack’s legacy and some 100 tons of Western North Carolina have found an unlikely home in the sleek new building at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The intersection of art and nature is a hallmark element of the new building. No where is this to be more evident than in the narrow glass-clad South Court—which slices into the building, bringing the surrounding landscape into the middle of the classical gallery. And unlike the new building’s four other courtyards, which feature paved surfaces and sculpture, the South Court is intended to be a natural, contemplative space. And large native rocks are the central element of that vision.

Jesse Turner, a landscape designer with Lappas + Havener, knew that the Museum was looking for large-scale boulders. He immediately thought of the Owen family, close family friends from his childhood in western North Carolina. Jesse called his father, John Turner, director of the Southern Highlands Reserve. John worked with Jack for more than 30 years at the Reserve, where Jack was responsible for all the rock work throughout the 120-acre private native plant garden and research center. John contacted Jack’s son Travis, who followed in his father’s footsteps and runs the family quarry and rock business, located 50 miles southeast of Asheville, N.C.

Travis agreed to donate 14 boulders from Canton, N.C. in memory of his father to the Museum. He selected each of the rocks, and in June came to the Museum to direct their placement in the narrow strip of dirt, in a careful, thoughtful arrangement—just as his father would have done.

Transporting and placing the granite rocks, some as heavy as 15 tons, is no easy task, and required the goodwill and help of many. Travis enlisted the help of two cousins, who drove all the way from Florida to lend their 18-wheelers. Once the boulders arrived at the Museum, placing them inside the glass courtyards required the expert use of a crane donated by Earl Johnson of Southern Industrial Constructors.

John Turner couldn’t think of a more fitting tribute for his good friend and colleague. “Jack had a unique ability to see rocks in their natural environment and picture them in a placed setting, in a way that made a statement.”

The late Jack Owen

In April 2010, when you gaze across the new building’s South Court, you’ll see more than a bunch of moss-covered boulders—you’ll see an installation that celebrates the people of our state who create art out of their everyday work.