Cassilhaus

SABBATICAL WEEK TWO

 

 

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper.

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

 

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

 

--Dag Hammarskjöld

 

On Sunday the 12th I said goodbye to Columbus and headed north to Decatur just outside of Atlanta. I was hosted by my dear friend Judy who I met the very first day of my freshman year at Duke and we've been friends for 40 years!

She was an exquisite hostess and I was excited about staying in one place for a week.  She even had a loaner cat for me named Luckie! I am really missing Ellen and Jaco and Joni.

There is an incredibly art scene in the Atlanta area. I had set up a bunch of meetings in advance. I met first with Jennifer Schwartz who runs the unique and innovative Crusade for Art. She indeed is a one woman crusade to expand the collector base and market for emerging photographic artists. Check out her site and see the cool programs she has initiated.  One is a $10,000 annual grant to the person who proposes the most innovative way to expand the market for photography. My favorite winner is the 2014 Start with Art program. I'd love to start a program like it in Durham in my spare time.

On Tuesday I had a studio visit with photographer Jerry Siegel. I love Jerry's work but I had never met him.

One of his incredibly potent portrait pieces was in the Do Good Show that we had at Cassilhaus. He is a very sweet guy and he showed me several bodies of work that I had never seen before.

He also gave me his stunning monograph Facing South featuring his portraits of southern artists.

Later in the day I visited AIR Serenbe, the artist in residence program associated with the planned Serenbe community Southwest of Atlanta. I met with the Executive Director Brandon Hinman and learned of their innovative funding model for their Focus Fellowships and there incredible National Advisory Board that proposes and selects artists.

I've done a fair amount of research on residency programs for this trip and one that kept coming up was the Hambidge Center Residency located on a stunning 600 acre site in far North Georgia right on the NC border.  it is the oldest residency program in the Southeast and was started by Mary Hambidge in 1934. 8-10 artists come at a time and form a cohort that shares a meal multiple nights a week. This dynamic interaction is something we don't have at Cassilhaus because we can accommodate only 1 artist or a collaborating couple at a time and it was energizing to witness. The executive director Jamie Badoud lives in Atlanta and travels the two hours up to Hambidge every other week and he generously offered to drive with me up there so I could pick his brain and also offered to put me up for the night.  We were joined by his brand new director of developement Kate who was also making her first trip there.

Jamie saw my big camera bag and asked if I would make some photos of the artists in their studios that they could use on their website. Here The Kates, a new music and contemporary dance collaboration duo, talk about their process with Jamie.

Several of the artists in the current cohort have been at Hambidge before.  Returning multi-media artist from Atlanta Ashley Anderson was working on a cyanotype project involving video game imagery.

One of the things that I was most excited about in visiting Hambidge was that Jamie and his Board have just completed a strategic visioning process for the next 3 years and that is the process I am just beginning to think about. Jamie was very generous in sharing his experience in so many areas of interest for me. On the way back to Atlanta Jamie treated me to a fabulous detour to Mountain House Modern, the Scogin/Elam designed home of one of their supporters. Chester and Steven gave us the grand tour!

On Friday I had an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G meeting with Amy Miller, the Executive Director of Atlanta Celebrates Photography.  I didn't go there to talk with her about my work with our own Click! photography festival but rather just to meet her and pick her brain about residency and art center programs of interest but she spent a ton of time giving me valuable insights and experience in dealing with the growth of a photo festival. They are way further along in their development than the fledgling Click! Festival and her help was invaluable.

I capped off the week with a trip with Judy to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta which had an exhibition of three of my photo heroes up-Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, and Richard Avedon.

The star of our visit was a stainless steel piece by Anish Kapoor from 2010.

 

 

That's all for now. I'm off to Alabama!

 

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK ONE

A reminder to those who receive this post via email subscription that formatting will be better and reading easier if you go directly to my blog here to read.

I'm on the road on the first leg of my trip and it's already a wild and wonderful ride. 1100 miles. 4 states. 2 time zones. I got off to a rough start with being sick the whole first week but soldiering on. Even though I've done a sabbatical like this twice before in 1986 (South Pacific) and 2000 (Western US)  this still feels like nothing I've ever done before. The last two were pre-cell phone, email, GPS, bluetooth, iTunes, phone apps, airbnb etc.  I had paper maps, an FM radio, and pay phone booths and I stayed in youth hostels and cheap hotels. Now I've got voice activated GPS (Samantha), Google Maps, screens full of iPhone apps, Siri DJing virtually unlimited music and streaming it to my car stereo, video Facetime calls, and constant connection with text and email.  Generous friends and strangers are putting me up and taking me under their wings. Figuring out exactly how to "disconnect" is an interesting conundrum but my stress level is down markedly and my anti-Trump shield has been deployed.

Charleston, SC and my friends Mark Sloan and Michelle Van Parys welcomed me for the first 4 days of my journey and put me up in a wonderful apartment at the College of Charleston as a visiting "scholar."

I did a bit of walking around the city but mostly just needed to unwind and unpack my car and my mind to figure out what the next few months might look like.  Mark directs the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and has been a mentor to me for some time. Everything he does at the Halsey is at a world class level and he has much to teach. I listened and took a lot of notes.  I also got a detailed advance look at the artists and work in the amazing new Southbound photography exhibit that he and co-curator Mark Long have spent the last few years putting together and that will debut at the Halsey and travel widely afterwards. What a treat-SO MUCH incredible work and many artists that I was not previously familiar with.

Meetings had to be held over food. It's a pretty giant mix of topics running around in my brain for this trip. Everything from the nitty gritty details of best practices for running an arts organization and artist residency to bigger and longer range topics like governance, engaging your community, defining your audience, and thinking about legacy issues. I am figuring out the questions as I go.

One of the challenges I anticipated was finding a way to keep up my exercise routine on the road. My wonderful cousins Sean (an Olympic swimmer) and Renee connected me to an amazing website to locate public swimming pools worldwide and it has been amazing. I have already swum at 4 different pools!

On the 9th I headed to Augusta GA to see an exhibition called The Female Lens at the Morris Museum with work from the Do Good Fund collection of Southern Photography.  There was a panel discussion and Q&A with the Director Alan Rothschild and two of the represented artists, Jill Frank and Tamara Reynolds.

Alan has been a friend since our Do Good show at Cassilhaus and I was thrilled to meet and share an evening with Jill and Tamara whose work I knew but had never met. I discovered at the last moment that I had a long lost cousin Jill Uhler in Aiken, SC, very close to Augusta, who hosted me for the evening and was able to join me for the talk and dinner afterwards.

 

Word on the street had it that the Possum Trot in Seale, AL was not to be missed on Friday night so I headed there next.

 

Seale is also the home of The Museum of Wonder and my artist friend Butch Anthony. I met Butch about 20 years ago at an artist retreat and purchased a table from him that we have on our deck. He is a lovable character and an amazing artist.

 

The land where the museum sits has been in his family for generations and he has been working on it since he was a child.

I couldn't resist taking this one home and adding it to our collection.  We are definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Another of Butch's recent initiatives is the world's first drive-thru art gallery.

The drive-thru is just up the road from Butch's house and he drove 6! of us there in a huge white Cadillac that he recently bought from Leon Russell. Butch of course has added quite a bit of adornment.

Columbus GA, home of Alan Rothschild and the Do Good Fund, is right across the Chattahoochee River from Seale and was one of the first points of interest I put on my sabbatical map. I spent the weekend picking Alan's brain about a score of topics and he was amazingly generous.  I love his model of getting his collection out to the people in often non traditional venues.  His collection is always working and not gathering dust in storage! As an attorney he was also a wealth of information about governance and legacy issues. One of the highlights of my weekend that Alan arranged was a private tour of Pasaquan, a visionary art environment in Buena Vista GA by its director Mike McFall.  My pictures will not do it justice.  Check out a basic video here and a detailed video on the complete restoration of the site by the Kohler Foundation here.

Alan, Caretaker Charles, and Mike

It has been an extraordinary first week.  My head is spinning with ideas and questions.  This doesn't feel like a vacation and it doesn't feel like work but I am not exactly sure what it is.  I do know that it is an extraordinary opportunity and that I am blessed to have a wife, a family, a business partner, an amazing circle of friends, and a community that supports my doing it. I have always been lucky with pretty special travel karma and this trip has already proven that it is not waning.  Each door I open leads to several more and I have been met with nothing but generosity of spirit and sharing of experiences. Thank you. I need to check the batteries in the Trump shield. I will report on week two in Atlanta and points north in my next post.

 

 

 

TAKE A RISK

TRUST YOURSELF

NEVER GIVE UP

T-shirt spotted in New Zealand on my first sabbatical trip that has become my travel mantra.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CASSILHAUS 2.0 SABBATICAL JOURNEY

Ellen saying goodbye yesterday morning.

 

Today starts a great adventure!  Under the general rubric of Cassilhaus 2.0 and with an eye toward learning best practices, increasing our impact in the community, and laying the initial framework for a legacy beyond our own stewardship, I am embarking on an ambitious five month sabbatical journey throughout the US to visit arts/community-focused individuals, organizations, and institutions that share some similar programming and structural characteristics to our own and who are interested in sharing experiences and expertise for our (hopefully) mutual benefit. As a member of the Alliance of Artist Communities I also hope to visit select residency programs throughout the US.

I'm kicking things off in Charleston, SC with my dear friend and mentor Mark Sloan, a former Cassilhaus AIR and director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art here. Stay tuned to this channel for updates on the trip. You can also follow me on Instagram @cassilhaus. Hopefully I can also get caught up on overdue blog posts from recent exhibitions and AIRs.  Hope springs eternal.......

Frank

 

It is counterintuitive to welcome insecurity as a sign that something good is beginning. I have never greeted it as a friend. But I know that that is where the work is done, and that premature comfort is a pretty good sign that nothing much is happening.

-- Sean Kernan

 

For an idea that does not at first seem insane, there is no hope.

--Albert Einstein

 

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. 

--Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Sometimes you have to go out there to get in there.

 --Trish Thomas

 

ALAN BUR JOHNSON

Alan Bur Johnson's work is not easy to categorize.  It is a fascinating mix of art and science.  I first saw his work in the home of my friend Lisa Sette who represents Alan's work at her gallery in Phoenix AZ. The piece was a dazzler from his Swarm series. (Click to enlarge photos)

The bulk of his work involves photo scan transparencies of insect and other specimens sandwiched together inside metal rings and mounted to the wall with dissection pins. The assemblages can get quite large and are extremely time intensive to install.

We've known and trusted Lisa Sette for a long time and had already hosted two of her other artists, Marie Navarre and Mayme Kratz in our residency program with wild success so we jumped at the chance to have Alan join us in August 2016.  The timing of his visit was such that he arrived the day before we were to have the 3rd annual Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator Camp and he really wanted to have one of his pieces up for them to see so the poor guy had to spend his first 24 hours here working to install a new piece called Mapping Avienne.  I asked Alan about the title--"Nola Avienne.  Dear friend, unusual artist, phlebotomist and bee keeper, just to name a few.  Her work addresses her body, as a result of injuries received falling through a trap door on a stage.  She did a series of paintings on vellum based upon scans of her brain.  I purchased one at the time I was composing this piece.  Uncanny similarities between the two pieces"

Alan starts with a highly detailed template that indicated the location of every unique element and the distance off the wall that it will mount.

He then inserts a pin at each mount point to mark the wall and then moves the template to the side and begins the installation.  All of the components are stored in a binder.

 

Alan had these tiny springs fabricated that hold each ring against the head of the pin so it does not flap freely in the breeze but still allows enough movement that the pieces feel alive.

Like several artists before him, the 1600 acres of Duke Forest below Cassilhaus was a huge draw for Alan.  He spent countless hours in the woods collecting specimens for future pieces. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.

I hope to visit Alan in Jerome AZ this summer.  Maybe I will find something that came out of his wanderings.  Thank you Alan!

 

"Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person's heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure. Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn't there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn't that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother's breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh."   --Deepak Chopra