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03/28/2005: "" by Sue Spaid
After six weeks in Sanibel, I set sail for an interim stint in Longboat Key, a port that facilitated access to nearby Sarasota with its surfeit of modernist architect Paul Rudolph houses, Tampa and St. Pete. Several days after my return, I visited Louisville, Kentucky to round out the adventure. Kentucky in late March poses a posie respite for floral freaks like me.Sarasota:
In contrast to hurricane-toppled Sanibel, Sarasota and vicinity are super manicured. Sarasota's architecture reminded me of Los Angeles, plus its city center was a dead ringer for Beverly Hills. While Sarasota plays out its sleek Hollywood persona in spades, I never actually encountered any players. Endemic of this community's filmworld sensibility, the local Burns Court Theater hosts the Sarasota Film Society, which screens several fascinating film festivals each year.
During my first week, I saw the amazing film Watermarks there and trekked to the Ringling School of Art's library to view "illuminated Haggadah," which were actually facsimiles of rare historical documents. While at the school, I checked out the Selby Gallery's exhibition illustrations originally used as book covers or magazine illustrations. Unfortunately, the gallery's intense stench overwhelmed my senses.
Not surprisingly, the Sarasota School of Architecture (1941-1966), which heralds Paul Rudolph and Victor
Lundy, paralleled the architectural vision of Angeleno architects Gregory Ain, Craig Ellwood, John Lautner and Raphael Soriano. Nearing the end of my stay, I stopped by the History Center at 701 Tamiami Trail to study several books about the Sarasota School and to get the 21-page tally of every Sarasota School of Architecture building (also available online). Left of the History Center is Victor Lundy's Visitor's Center, while the nondescript Art Center, which was unfortunately closed for installation, is on its right. With the Sarasota über-list in hand, I could figure out who built what when and for whom, whenever I encountered a modernist structure. I made a half-day excursion to at least a dozen Rudolph buildings in Lido Shores, Sarasota, Siesta Key and Casey Key. I also visited the Florida House Learning Center on the campus of the Sarasota County Technical Institute. This prototype features commercially available strategies and products to conserve raw materials, energy and water, both indoor and out.
Satiated with modernism, I was ready to retroactively dive back into centuries of historical paintings on view at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and surge forward to the roaring 20s, the era during which this fascinating couple built their dramatic abode, the Ca d'Zan mansion, which owed more to earlier eras than its own. Norma Allen, our outstanding volunteer docent, made the experience come alive by requesting us to imagine ourselves as potential clients, guests of the Ringlings considering the purchase of land across the bay. One of the museum's hidden treats is their current exhibition of the large-scale environmental photographs of Ansel-Adams acolyte Clyde Butcher. I ended this day with a super delicious, however experimental, dinner at 5ONE7, a restaurant at 517 Burns Court. En route to dinner, I discovered Dion Johnson's paintings on view at Desiree/Snyder, so evidently, there are "real" art galleries here!
Art Center Sarasota- www.artsarasota.org
Florida House Learning Center- http://sarasota.extension.ufl.edu
The John and Mable Museum of Art- www.ringling.org
Tampa and St. Petersburg
I timed a visit with cousins to check out the Tampa art scene. Coincidently, my visit coincided with the annual "Mardi Gras" Tea, however tardy, at my cousin's Royal Tea Room, which stages several such thematic tea parties each year. Moulin Rouge, the featured tea, was accompanied by beignets, muffelatta sandwiches, pecan pralines and king cake. The next day, Palm Sunday, we attended church to watch my cousin perform in the handbell choir and ate brunch at the nearby Palma Ceia Country Club. I then head off to the Tampa Museum of Art, which featured several underwhelming exhibitions, yet like everybody else, they're in the middle of a huge campaign to raze the current structure and build Rafael Viñoly's state-of-the art museum, about 75 yards away, right on the river banks. The "New York Yankees and the American Dream," an exhibition organized by Yankee-Stadium adjacent Queens Museum of Art, displayed baseball memorabilia alongside works by artists like Wallace Berman, Janet Cohen, Devon Dikeou, David
Levinthal, Robert Longo, Ruben Ortiz-Torres and Raymond Pettibone. The Berman, one of his verifax negatives superimposed on a transistor radio, struck me given baseball's seminal relationship to radio, as well as the way a color-reversed Yankee uniform poses as an early pin-striped Stella painting. Cohen's nine-panel, color-coded analysis of each inning's hits, strikes, outs and runs, conceptualized baseball as text art. "Signs & Symbols: African American Quilts" offered insight into Africa's influence on American handiwork, yet only a handful struck me as some kind of wonderful.
I was concerned that the Dalì Museum in St. Pete might seem depleted, since I imagined it wiped out by its myriad loans (some 16) to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for its massive Dali survey (discussed here next month). Arriving the day after Dalìfest, I felt fortunate to discover plenty of Dalì's had been left behind. "Dalì Revealed" showcased a recent acquisition, not seen here since my first visit nearly twenty years ago. While I could have haggled over the vagaries of several didactic panels, the curators'
selection was thorough and their narrative was compelling. One such detail is the oft-repeated museological fact that Dalì joined the Surrealist Movement in 1929. His works were already recognizably surreal as early as 1926, so this fact erroneously suggests that his paintings followed, rather than complemented, or even inspired Surrealist efforts. The museum's project to present solo shows of Spanish artists infuses a wonderful experimental flavor to the Dalì enterprise. Jordi Colomer's global videos of text art and actions provided a window into different cultural values and interests. I headed back to Sarasota to catch the film "Born into Brothels" at the Burn's Court Cinema.
Tampa Museum of Art- www.TampaMuseum.com
Salvador Dali Museum- www.SalvadorDaliMuseumorg
Louisville, Kentucky
After driving to Lexington, Kentucky to pick up a new computer, I thought I'd swing by Louisville to visit the Speed Museum and the New Center for Contemporary Art. When I conceived this route, I had no idea the distance between cities was some 70 miles. As per usual, the exhibition associated with “Presence,” the Speed Museum’s series of eight consecutive solo exhibitions, was excellent. Valerie Sullivan Fuchs' single-channel projected video required watching it over and over before it began to make sense. Once it did, I realized the experience paralleled being wrapped inside time, flowing in every planar direction, which was different than anything else I had ever experienced. Both dizzying and nausea-inducing, the video aptly captured the relationship between time and memory. Another Speed exhibition, "Modern Art in the Making," assembled several of its collection’s gems, which I’d never seen before. The works include Giacomo Balla's superb drawing Lines of Velocity (1913), Pavel Tchelitchew's Alice B. Toklas portrait, a 1939 Yves Tanguy dreamscape, a large luscious Andre Masson canvas from 1925, a fascinating Balcomb Greene painting, Jean Arp's violet biomorphic wall relief and Max Ernst's hilarious, proto-conceptual bronze sculpture entitled Etes-Vous Niniche?. I really don't know which was funnier, the sculpture itself or the didactic panel explaining its enigmatic title.
Fortunately, the New Center was open when I drove through downtown en route to Cincinnati. Quite solid, the current exhibition features several Sarah Lasley's "Walk of Shame" paintings, Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries' flashy and flashing text-based Net art, a Ghada Amer stitched painting and Matt Weir's curious sculptures devised from sexed-up mannequins.
The Speed Art Museum- www.speedmuseum.org
The New Center for Contemporary Art- temporarily.... www.ncca.org
