Cassilhaus

SABBATICAL WEEK FOURTEEN

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Residency, Captiva Island, Florida

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For the most part, getting access to the programs I am interested in visiting has involved simply writing a letter of introduction, usually to the Executive Director of an organization, explaining the intent of my sabbatical trip and talking a bit about our program at Cassilhaus. Doors have been generously opened around the county. Early in my research I discovered the unparallelled arts philanthropy work of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in NYC and their residency program on Captiva Island Florida. They have no less than 5 separate grant programs to support artists and arts organizations.  I spent hours on their website and I found a video about a conference that took place on Captiva in 2015 for their SEED grantees that I thought would be the all time motherlode for my research-a week-long convening of more than 30 innovative and mostly emerging arts organization from all over the US that the Foundation had identified as up and coming and worthy of support. ALL OF THESE ORGANIZATIONS' TOP PEOPLE WERE THERE TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE. I found out that the summit was every two years but there was zero information about it on the web. I couldn't even find a date for 2017 and I desperately wanted to find a way to be invited. I contacted Christopher Rauschenberg, Bob's son, who is President of the Foundation Board and a major force in the photo world. I had met him at various photo conferences. He advised me that the summit was just for grantees but offered that Ann Brady, who directs the residency on Captiva, would be happy to talk with me about their amazing (but unrelated to the SEED summit) residency program. I contacted Ann and gently pleaded my case.  She kindly agreed to show me around and talk with me about their program but not during the summit and said that only the director of philanthropy in NY, Risë Wilson, could authorize an outside observer coming to the SEED summit. Undaunted, I put on my charm shoes and contacted Risë and we hit it off. After a brief conversation she invited me to come as an observer for the first two days of the conference.  I WAS IN! AND it was in Florida where I was already headed AND the dates were perfect for my schedule AND for 2017 they had added all (more than 20) of their Artist as Activist grantees, some of the top social practice leaders in all media and fields, to the summit cohort. Kid in a candy store!!!

The experience was incredible. On Monday Ann Brady spent over two hours with me on the deck of Rauschenberg's Fish House (third photo above) giving me the benefit of her 20 years of experience in the residency world and making me feel very much at home there.  That evening we had dinner and orientation with the entire group and some fun ice breaker exercises.

Ann and Risë

On Tuesday I was able to sit in on several of the excellent content sessions on non-profit management etc. and Tuesday night was the "artist showcase" where several artists from among our ranks performed for the group.  I was blown away. It was also a great opportunity to get to know a bit about the participants and their organizations and I have already set up meetings with two groups later in my trip.

 

I had to drag myself away from Captiva but I was due in Dallas. I serve on the collections committee at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University with Nancy Nasher, whose father Ray endowed the museum. At an April meeting I told her I would be in Dallas in May and she insisted I attend "the most unusual and amazing musical event I would ever experience"-a fund raiser called Cancer Blows featuring 20 of the world's top trumpeters.  Unusual indeed! It was quite an affair and I got the VIP treatment as Nancy and her husband David were the lead sponsors.

Arturo Sandoval was amazing!  I was shocked to learn that Doc Severinsen was still alive!  Quite a dresser.

I had a wonderful chance to reconnect with my cousin Carol and her husband John who hosted me in Dallas.  We were pretty close growing up but I hadn't seen her in a long time.

Ellen and I decided to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary by spending 13 days together on the road so she flew into San Antonio and I drove down from Dallas to connect with her and stay with her nephew and his family there.  We launched the hash tag #thirteenyearsthirteendays to track our trip on Instagram.  I have been using the hashtag #frankssabbatical on my whole trip.

Ellen joined me the next day for an interview with Veronique Le Melle, the Executive director of Artpace, in San Antonio. They have a distinguished history and an amazing list of artist alumni including Mark Bradford, William Cordova, Dario Robleto, Christian Marclay, Glenn Ligon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Tracey Moffat. They have an unusual model where for each artist-in-residence session they appoint a curator who selects one international artist, one US artist, and one artist from Texas to form a collaborating cohort.

After our interview we headed off to one of our lifetime bucket list items-a visit to one of the art world Meccas, the small West Texas town of Marfa. You need to be dedicated.  Marfa is basically three hours from ANYTHING. First off who knew that the legal speed limit was actually 80mph anywhere???

Ellen wanted to take the slow Southern backroads route. The drive was stunningly beautiful. We were in West Texas reverie. So much so that we forgot to fill up the car and ended up having a white knuckle adventure with dreams of spending the night on the side of the road.  At 10 o'clock at night without any cell or internet service we realized we were 70 miles from the next gas station, were on E, and to add insult to injury were driving a diesel car and didn't even know if the distant gas station was open or if it had diesel. The VW Jetta's 46mpg paid off.  We got to a gas station with 12 miles left on our range indicator but the station was closed.  There was a trucker there at the 24 hour diesel pump and he put a code in for us to use the pump and we filled up!  I have never been so happy to see a gas station in my life. We pulled off to celebrate the stars.

Marfa did not disappoint. Incredible vibe and people and we had a fabulous airbnb. Lavish brunch our first morning on the back deck.

Marfa is home to the Chinati Foundation which houses the estate collection of a vast trove of work by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, John Chamberlin, Robert Irwin, Roni Horn, and others.  We took the 5 hour!!! complete collection tour and it felt like we only got a short look.  Particularly breathtaking were the 100 untitled works in milled aluminum by Donald Judd from 1982-86 and the single untitled fluorescent light installation across SIX ENTIRE BUILDINGS! by Dan Flavin.

photos from the Chinati website

More Judd work in concrete outside of the exhibition buildings.

Another amazing treat at Chinati was a newly completed installation occupying an entire building by Robert Irwin.

We spent a lot of time just walking around town.

 

A few years ago when we were in Austin we bought a print called Women's Studies at Flatbed Press by an artist named Julie Speed. The piece is actually up in a show called Exquisite Corpse at Cassilhaus as we speak. Download Exquisite Corpse Gallery Guide

Just by chance I found out she lived in Marfa and I contacted her and she graciously invited us over for cocktails and a studio tour.  Amazing work and a great human to boot! We also got to meet her wonderful and very accomplished musician partner Fran Christina.

 

 

At the suggestion of our Chinati tour guide, we took a drive out route 2810 almost to the Mexican border, what she said was Donald Judd's favorite drive, to have a picnic and watch the stars.

My trusty steed logged its 8000th mile.

I used a 30 second exposure and a flashlight to "paint" a portrait of Ellen gazing at the stars.

Another night we checked off another bucket list item by going to Prada Marfa, a permanent public art installation in the form of a fake Prada boutique right on the highway near Valentine TX.  Again we used the 30 second exposure and flashlight technique to take a night shot and illuminate the sign and logo for the photograph.

 

 

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find the dark, too blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

            --Wendell Berry

SABBATICAL WEEK THIRTEEN

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Off to Miami! When I have gone to Art Basel Miami in the past, I have stayed with our wonderful friends Arnoldo and Mirta in South Miami. Ellen went to college with Arnoldo and they have a fabulous place with a guest house and they put me up for the week. I was living large.

One of my issues so far is that I haven't found a whole lot of residency or exhibition programs based in private homes and I was looking for more models close to Cassilhaus.  I hit paydirt with the Fountainhead Residency. A wonderful couple, Dan and Kathryn Mikesell, collected contemporary art, started inviting artists to their home, fell in love with living and working with artists of all stripes, established a residency program in a house beside theirs, and they have established life-long bonds with their artists and it is the richest experience they have ever had. Sound familiar???

I interviewed Kathryn for several hours and just couldn't believe how much our stories overlapped.  They have many more artists than we do (3 at a time and 30-40/year) and I was astonished to find that they have no staff and do everything themselves!  I thought I was overextended. So many wonderful stories and so many great ideas gleaned. This is by far the closest analog I've found to what we are doing at Cassilhaus and I now have an amazing sounding board for ideas and issues going forward. The most significant thing that will come out of this sabbatical research is a singular network of residency and community arts program professionals that I can tap in the future.

I only got a glimpse of their wonderful collection.

Their newest artist, Kari Cholnoky, had just moved into the garage studio and was already amazingly far along on her project.

 

Not as similar to Cassilhaus but no less interesting was my visit to the de la Cruz Collection, the private museum of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz that houses their collection-one of the largest collections of Cuban art in the world-in a stunning space in downtown Miami.

I was fortunate to connect with Ibett Yanez (at left), the director of the de la Cruz museum, during my visit and she introduced me to Carlos and Rosa (center) and we had a wonderful meeting and I learned about their extraordinary educational and travel outreach programs which they support and fund entirely themselves. Ibett was very generous in connecting me with other interesting programs for my research as well.

 

It always helps to have friends with connections!  I had visited the spectacular Margulies Collection in Miami years ago and was blown away by their singular collection, particulary in photography. It turns out that my friend Arnoldo is good friends with the husband of legendary curator of the collection Katherine Hinds and he was able to organize a private tour and interview on a day that the museum was closed.  Katherine has been the curator of the collection since 1982 and is working on a comprehensive book about the collection.  She was delightful and gave me full access to the collection. 

For the past five years the collection has been acquiring an extensive collection of work by Anselm Keifer

I loved this piece by George Segal too.

 

 

Katherine also introduced me to "one of her favorite artists in Miami", Antonia Wright, a performance, video, and installation artist and Antonia was kind enough to meet me and give me a studio tour on very short notice. I have rarely had the opportunity to talk with a performance based artist and It was enlightening to learn of the years of study in meditation and tai chi she did to perform this piece with bees. (Click on the icon to go full screen)

 

 

 

Miami was a spectacular stop. Thanks to everyone for their kindness, generosity, and hospitality.

 

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee, And revery.

The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

--Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. Emily Dickinson
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/emilydicki163901.html?src=t_bee

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. Emily Dickinson
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/bee.html

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. Emily Dickinson
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/emilydicki163901.html?src=t_bee

SABBATICAL WEEKS TEN-TWELVE

 

I NEVER miss the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham. This was the 20th year and I have been to 17. I decided to take a mid-sabbatical break and spend three weeks at home and it was great to be with Ellen, Jaco, and Joni and be back in the hood with my friends. Some of my favorites this year at the festival were Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, Last Men in Aleppo, Strong Island, and Purple Dreams. I did some sabbatical prep while home but I won't bore you with the details. Just at the end of week twelve Ellen and I went to Orlando to celebrate her elevation to the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.  She received her medal at an investiture ceremony at the national conference and was one of only 4 Fellows from NC this year.  I am so incredibly proud of her and this important professional achievement.

Another famous woman gave the keynote.

With the next post I will pick up the sabbatical adventure again and Week Thirteen brings some amazing stops! Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK NINE

It had been a long time since I had driven in NYC and it was pretty harrowing getting out of the city and on my way south but I lived to tell this tale.   My first stop was Glenstone in Potomac MD.

Photos by Scott Frances and courtesy of Glenstone website

 

Glenstone is a stunning private museum set on 200 acres and housing the private post World War II collection of Mitchell and Emily Rales. The 25,000 sf museum was designed by noted late architect Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman and is surrounded by world class sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Andy Goldsworthy, and others. Landscape design is by Peter Walker and Partners. They show only work from their own collection and collect extremely deeply for the one artist shows that they mount. Emily is the Executive Director and Chief Curator. The collection is open to the public but with very limited group size to control the viewing experience. When I was there, there was an exhibition of the work of Roni Horn. Well into construction is another museum more than 5 times the size of the first to house their growing collection. The new project is being designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners.  There is a nice article in the New York Times about the couple.

Mitchell and Emily Rales in front of Richard Serra’s “Sylvester.”   Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

This was the absolute first place I found in my research and the first letter I wrote asking for a visit related to my sabbatical trip.  I initially rejected the idea of stopping here as I was initially looking for "places like Cassilhaus" and we don't have a whole lot in common with extremely wealthy collectors with private museums and no residency program. What got me was their singular education program.  We have been trying to beef up our own education and outreach and I thought I might learn a few things from them. Stockton Toler, Glenstone's Visitor Experience Director graciously agreed to show me around on a day the museum was closed and I was really inspired by the work he is doing.  He now has 43!! public middle and high schools in Montgomery County, MD visiting Glenstone on a regular basis.  Glenstone pays and arranges for all bus transportation and even pays reimbursement for substitute teachers. He works directly with the curriculum director for the entire county school system who facilitates connection with art teachers and makes sure their tours cover state learning requirements. While we were talking, Stockton walked me through the amazing Roni Horn show.  Hard to believe that all of this work from one artist is in a single collection!

Even more amazing on the education front is their new and first-of-its-kind  Emerging Professionals Program-a two year on the job program for recent BFA and MFA grads that offers full salary and benefits and concentrated exposure to a museum studies curriculum one full day a week while working as docents/guides the other 4 days. They had just admitted their first class of 9 students when I arrived and will be at full capacity next year when the new museum opens. After two years they will have exceptional experience to compete for highly competitive museum jobs.

Just before I left Stockton asked me if I wanted to see Andy Goldsworthy's amazing three stone and clay cabins entitled Boulder, Room, and Holes. They look identical from the outside but inside is a different story. The craftsmanship is astounding.

I was pretty fired up and as soon as I got home the following week I set up a meeting with Jessica Ruhle, the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Nasher Museum, to see how we could beef up our collaboration and better engage their existing network of school groups. Stay tuned!

 

 

I'd been wanting to visit my friend and amazing photographer Eliot Dudik for some time and I decided to add Charles City, VA to my flight path on the way home. This is Eliot in his studio which was a church in a previous lifetime.  His crazy house is an assemblage of a bunch of structures that have been moved to the site and connected into one. Eliot graciously put me up and I spent some time photographing his space.

Eliot calls photography book collecting a disease. :)

Eliot was recently hired to conceive, set up, and run the College of William and Mary's new photography program in the art department. I didn't know until my arrival in Williamsburg that W&M is the second oldest college in the country. They had no photo program prior to Eliot's arrival and he is hell bent on blazing some new trails. His is the only photo program in the country that starts first year students with 4x5" large format analog film cameras and traditional darkroom process. He wants his students to get out of the snapshot mentality of cellphone cameras and learn how to see and compose thoughtfully and carefully and learn the basics that the large format camera demands to make successful images.  He has almost single handedly built a state of the art darkroom and he is a popular professor with overflowing classes. He showed me some of his students' work and it was impressive.

During our Actual Size exhibition at Cassilhaus, Eliot brought a group of his students down to see the show and they took the back roads on the way and shot with their 4x5s.

Another project he worked on with his students to learn the basics of cameras and light was the building of a Camera Obscura on campus and then working with them to make prints of goings on on the quad inside the three-lens chamber.

Eliot has also started a book arts program and teaches his students about all aspects of making and binding of unique books as art objects. "Book" has a pretty broad interpretation in his class.  He posts a ton of his students' work on his Instagram feed @eliotdudik.  In collaboration with the W&M library each of his students will have their final book accessioned into the permanent collection of the library. Quite a coup for an undergraduate student.

Student work on display in the W&M library

 

I got back home just in time for my favorite event of the year in Durham-The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. It was the 20th year and I have been to about 18 of them. We always have family come to town for it and my sister Barb came for her 11th year and our niece Theresa and her husband Peter came from Nantucket and we had a great time.  Trailers for my favorites: Purple Dreams, Last Men in Aleppo, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, Quest, and Strong Island.

 

 In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

—Alfred Hitchcock

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK EIGHT

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!