Susan Worsham Marine, Hotel Near Airport, Richmond VA, 2009 Archival Pigment Print
Week eight found me NYC bound and another chance to spend some time with Ellen. We stayed in Jersey City for the first time at our dear friends Melinda and Richard's place. What a stunning view from the rooftop garden across the Hudson to Manhattan.
We go to the AIPAD photography fair together each year and catch up with our friends in NY and in the photo world and see all of the new amazing photo work. This was the first year the fair was held at Pier 94 and it was a much bigger show than normal. I have been going almost every year since 1999. We made some terrific finds this year including the amazing Susan Worsham image at the top of this post that will be featured in the groundbreaking Southbound photography exhibition curated by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Director and Cassilhaus AIR alum Mark Sloan and College of Charleston Professor and soon-to-be Cassilhaus AIR Mark Long. We added this piece and the one below by Louis Stettner to our collection. I've been following Susan Paulsen's work for a while and her images stick with me for a long time. The Zanele Muholi image below just knocked me out. This is part of the self portrait series she was working on when she was at Cassilhaus.
Louis Stettner Thanksgiving Day Parade, NYC, 1974 Gelatin Silver Print
Susan Paulsen Armonk, 2008 Archival Pigment Print
Zanele Muholi Zamile, KwaThema, 2016 Gelatin Silver Print
That bastard Trump is even messing up my photo fairs. As a show of solidarity with artists and gallerists from countries suffering under his xenophobic travel ban, AIPAD left Tehran based Ag Galerie's booth empty but with this sign on the show floor.
We did get to meet and discover the work of a fantastic Iranian artist named Niloufar Banisadr and purchased the piece in her Polish Chair series below. The chair serves as a stand-in self portrait when she is unable to show her true self.
Her Paris Gallery was showing provocative self portraits in the niqab she shot in her twenties and is not able to show in her homeland or her website to this day.
I have a wonderful filmmaker friend in Chapel Hill named Olympia Stone. I saw her first film, The Collector, many years ago. It is a documentary about her father, Allan Stone, a famous New York gallerist who passed away in 2006 and his obsessive art collecting/hording exploits. Check out Olympia's other films about artists on her site, several of who were represented by her father. Sorry I don't know the name of the photographer of this wonderful portrait below.
I was having an unrelated email conversation with Olympia and told her I was headed from Woodstock to NYC and she exclaimed "you must go visit my Mom-she is right on the way!" I was a little bit taken aback and hadn't yet connected the dots that the house she lived in was the very same one featured in the film and still jam packed with art. Boy am I glad I took her up on the invitation! It was one of my greatest art experiences in my life. It is impossible for me to describe the depth and quality of art in their home and in deference to their privacy I don't want to include detailed photographs. Her mother Clare Stone, an equal partner in Allan's art obsession, could not have been more welcoming, delightful, and animated and knew the stories behind every piece. I was there for hours but barely scratched the surface. Talk about a kid in a candy store.
I think my favorite piece in the whole house is Thiebaud's portrait of Clare, Girl with the Blue Shoes, 1968. Having Clare stand in front of her portrait and tell me stories of sitting for the portrait almost 50 years ago was a once in a lifetime experience. What a stunner!
New York is, of course, the art capital of the universe and it did not disappoint on this trip. Although trying to stay focused on sabbatical related visits, I got to see the Whitney Biennial and the equally stunning Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection, a fantastic photo show at the Met called The Poetics of Place, Perpetual Revolution at ICP, Vija Celmins at Matthew Marks, Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar, and Vik Muniz at Sikkema Jenkins (possibly my favorite.)
photo by Ellen Cassilly
The above 4 are from the Whitney. Pardon me again for being a lousy note taker on artist's names. There was an amazing but sobering piece about artist student loan debt (image directly above) with quotes from artists including our own Lisa McCarty and a graph showing the combined student debt of all of the artists in the biennial.
I hadn't been to the Guggenheim in a while and I fell under the spell of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture like never before. I had fun for a few hours photographing the space (I peeked at the art too).
Back on the sabbatical trail I was incredibly lucky, thanks to my friend Tim Walter in Durham, to get a meeting with Bruce Payne who taught at Duke for decades and is now on the faculty at Baruch College where he leads the graduate program in arts administration. Bruce has taught and mentored thousands of students and has former students in amazing arts leadership roles throughout the world. He took me to a fabulous lunch at the members lounge at the Met. Of the many pearls of wisdom I gleaned from our meeting, one anecdote about the power of leveraging small amounts of funding to have larger impacts, stands out as a profound insight that I have already passed on to dozens of people and put into practice myself.
The story takes place in the late 70s before their was a Women's Studies department at Duke University. There was an informal women's caucus of female faculty. The Provost at the time went to the head of the caucus and said that Duke had received a windfall gift of $75,000 and he requested a proposal from them to use the grant to help women's studies and programming. They came back the next day and asked if they could spread the gift out over 3 years and the Provost was flabbergasted assuming they would jump at the chance to use it immediately to get a prominent visiting female faculty person or some other great immediate need. He asked how they could have an impact with only $25,000/year. The leaders of the women's caucus proposed a three year University-wide contest with $10,000 a year going to administer and promote the contest and $15000 toward five $3000 annual awards to any faculty person or department chair in any discipline that could re-imagine their syllabus "as if women mattered!". It was genius not only because of the 15 departments that had one or more of their syllabi refocused on the contributions of women but that ALL departments had to rethink their curriculum if they wanted to apply. Bruce contends that this was one major driving force behind Duke becoming a much more progressive and women-friendly institution than its peers. As wonderful as it would have been to have a top notch visiting scholar for a year, these small grants had a much larger and lifelong impact. This is my favorite story of the sabbatical so far.
The blessing and curse of traveling with your own car for months on end is that you don't have to worry about traveling light and can have such luxuries as two suitcases, a large computer monitor, your favorite water pillow, lots of camera gear and a tripod, gifts for the folks I am visiting, a cooler for fresh food, a humidifier etc. This is final load-out in one load! Headed home to NC for a few weeks!
INDEED!
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