Giants and Georgia O'Keeffe Elevate Atlanta's High

My Paris summer was a lot of things, from amazing in terms of five-ringed and French encounters to profound for life experiences while restoring faith in many aspects of the Olympic Family, a welcome change after Rio challenges and Tokyo's pandemic left me dismayed. 

 

With an abundance of stories to share, including two drafted but unpublished posts from the final days of the torch relay and the dazzling albeit drizzly opening ceremony (and hundreds of photos and Paris 2024 micro-moment impressions to share), I've struggled to decide how to get back to blogging, procrastinating around real-life and client work since August. 

That stops now with notes on two fresh fine art exhibitions underway at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, which kindly hosted me for media previews for both options.

The must-see, worth airfare and a sleepover show "Georgia O'Keeffe: 'My New Yorks'" (through Feb. 16) gave me goosebumps. 

First arranged and unveiled at the Chicago Art Institute, the exhibition features around 100 works, including several longtime favorites by the Wisconsin-born multimedia artist as well as several "new to my eyes" works from private collections or remote museums not yet experienced. 

"This exhibition offers the wonderful opportunity to highlight this important but perhaps unrecognized period of O'Keeffe's artistic life and demonstrate how [works] exemplify her innovation as a Modernist," said High Director Rand Suffolk. 

Showstopping works include:

• Taos Pueblo, which vividly captures the New Mexico destination circa 1929, on loan from the Eiteljorg Museum of Indianapolis

• Radiator Building-Night, New York, with all its radiant shades of blue, first experienced in its home gallery Crystal Bridges of Bentonville, Ark.
  

• A Celebration, at right, featuring all the clouds about which Jonie Mitchell sang, from Seattle Art Museum

• The Shelton With Sunspots, inserted atop this blog post, featuring O'Keeffe's home and studio address atop Manhattan from which many other urban works originated, here from Chicago Art Institute

• Abstract nature scenes via From The Lake No. 1 and From The Lake No. 3 from the Des Moines Art Center and Philadelphia Museum of Art, respectively

• The massive (seven feet tall) canvas Manhattan with a Rockefeller Center-like ivory tower affixed with pink, red and lilac roses in town from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington (don't miss the delicate pencil and ink artist sketch also on view nearby)

The exhibition's rich catalog from Yale University Press, edited by Chicago Arts Institute colleagues Sarah Kelly Ohler and Annelise K. Madsen, includes essays that detail O'Keeffe's daily life in Manhattan with a skyscraper vantage point. 

Trust me, you'll thank yourself for making time to view this exhibition. 

Meanwhile, also on view through Jan. 19 the High presents "Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys." 

Like the O'Keeffe gathering, this private collection presentation -- on its only Southeast stop after debuting at the Brooklyn Museum -- features about 100 works. 

Standout works include Kehinde Wiley's floor-to-ceiling portraits of the collection's namesake owners, coastal views by Barkley L Hendricks, an untitled work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and several photos by Gordon Parks, including multiple portraits of Muhammad Ali only a few years after his Olympic feats at Rome 196o. 

Another set of monumental canvases titled "A Puzzled Revolution" by Titus Kaphar blends likenesses of Ali's knockout of Sonny Liston with riffs from other icons like the nautical crew in "Watson and the Shark." 

Across the room, be sure to spend time with "You Shouldn't Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas" featuring a quilt-like assemblage of used jail uniforms arranged by Hank Willis Thomas. 

And around another corner, there's a small batch of BMX bikes (a reminder of their recent addition to the Paris Olympic cycling competition) and music studio production equipment. Word!

The final gallery also features four large portraits of dancers or gymnasts resembling Simone Biles, with the exhibit bookended by another giant -- the collection's largest -- Wiley canvas. 

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver

Banksy To Disney: It's A Small World, LOL!

If you boil down my public relations portfolio to three types of clients, the triumvirate includes, in no particular order, arts, Olympics and theme parks (more broadly "attractions").

From time to time there are overlaps among these genres of business.

Olympics meets arts at the Cultural Olympiad. Or theme parks coincide with the Games as sports venues become attractions (like Beijing's Water Cube turned water park), or new destinations are born around an Olympiad (the new-in-2014 Sochi World theme park, for instance). 

But unless you count art museums as attractions -- as my client International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA) does for their membership base of permanently-affixed destinations for fun and learning -- it's less common for the news cycle to blend theme parks and the arts.

And that's not all that's uncommon about the new art installation titled Dismaland now open on the west coast of England. 

In case you haven't read the reports and seen the videos or photo galleries, Dismaland is perhaps the world's first 'bemusement park' now open in Weston-super-Mare, a coastal town three hours from London by train.

The hometown newspaper Weston, Worle & Somerset Mercury has some great galleries and daily updates like the pop-up park's first wedding.

Dismaland is presented by the artist Banksy, who recruited a few dozen other modern and contemporary artists for his secret-until-last-week installation at an abandoned beach side pool attraction named the Tropicana.

While the Weston-super-Mare locals were told a movie production would take over the abandoned Tropicana for a feature film setting, Banksy & Co. quietly assembled numerous rides and experiences inside its walls.

A wave of publicity began around August 18 as external signage and black flags went up, and by last Friday several global news outlets carried the story of Dismaland's opening weekend.

The installation remains in operation through much of September. 

Banksy has some major league art friends. Two favorite names -- Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer -- leaped off the screen when my friend Brian first told me of early Dismaland reports in the Wall Street Journal.

A look at the complete list of artists yields a who's who compilation of known or rising stars of modern and contemporary artists, skewing heavy on the cynical scale through their conversation piece (and critically acclaimed, bold and unforgettable) creations. 

I fell in love with Holzer's work at her Walker Arts Center installation in Minneapolis in 1991, on my
first 'adult' visit to a museum during the autumn of my college freshman year.

She had me at Truisms and her carved benches at the High Museum of Art (a client from time to time) and other museums always make me smile. 

My first Hirst encounter arrived in 2012 at the Tate Modern's Cultural Olympiad exhibition the day after the London Olympics ended three years ago.

Something about a bovine head decomposing in a fly-filled glass box, or a great white shark encased in jello, or a live butterfly room followed by several canvases made from tens of thousands of butterfly wings, not surprisingly stays with the museum visitor.

Hirst's anatomically correct (inside and out) carvings of male and female medical school models, and gazillion-dollar diamond-encrusted skulls, also made an impression. 

Banksy's Oscar-nominated documentary film "Exit Through The Gift Shop" introduced me to his work -- then mostly a distinctive graffiti or tagging pieces -- making me an instant fan.

Banksy's Olympic street art intrigued me on the lead up to London 2012 (though I never did find any of it in person, likely due to collectors' theft or authority figures covering up Banksy's handiwork).

I theorize that one episode within "Exit Through The Gift Shop" itself created the foundation for Dismaland.

In the documentary, Banksy and a filmmaker accomplice embarked on a mission to install a temporary work of art -- an inflatable 'Guantanamo Bay prisoner' -- inside a fenced ride area of Disneyland. After purchasing tickets and making their way through the Happiest Place On Earth, Banksy did successfully deploy the smuggled work while cameras rolled.

It's safe to say Disneyland's security team was not amused.

According to the documentary narration, "While Banksy went on the rides, [the filmmaker] was introduced to a different side of the Magic Kingdom."

I won't spoil the film by revealing details of that experience, but it's a solid bet the shared adventure and its outcome planted many seeds for today's Dismaland, and last week's installation opening may be the result of more than five years of planning.

And, oh what bemusements await Dismaland visitors!

Outdoor highlights (er, lowlights) spotted online so far include:

• Entry queues for several hundred ticket holders (with wait times authentic to many theme park experiences), after which guests are curtly greeted by black and white-clad security guards and signs banning everything from weapons to underwear
  
• One Shamu-like orca leaping from a toilet toward an awaiting trainer's hoop
• A park bench on which a woman is swarmed, Hitchcock-style, by attacking seagulls
• Midway games including 'Topple the Anvil' (featuring the metal tools straight out of Looney Toons' Coyote and Road Runner episodes), and 'Hook the Duck' at which players attempt to rescue petroleum-covered rubber duckies from an oil spill (hint: the hooks are mismatched for an impossible latch)
• More oil spill adventures on an unplayable golf putting green nicknamed "Mini Gulf" (the top half of the "o" rusted and broke off)
  
• A not-so-merry-go-round carousel ridden by protesters and a knife-wielding purveyor of lasagna
• Park employees clad in day-glow "Dismal" branded vests, with some offering black Mylar balloons bearing the message "I AM AN IMBECILE"
• A massive, pretzel-bent tanker truck sculpture, with matching impractical picnic tables belched out of (and still attached to) rolled sheet metal (or is that bath tissue?)
• Motorized boat game through which players steer Mediterranean refugees or pursuant coast guard cutters 
  
• Children's sandbox play area with built-in micro-loan bank charging only 5,000 percent interest
• Caricature artist who only sketches the backs of her customer's heads
• Selfie holes featuring blank outlines or cutouts for group photos with ISIS soldiers
• A new twist on the pop-up puppet show featuring Punch & Judy
• Book burning featuring glowing works by local author James Joyce
• Several "traditional" Banksy street art works spray-painted about the Dismalandscape.

The creepiest and perhaps coolest, edgiest works are inside a custom-built castle, the centerpiece of the installation. Inside its doors visitors explore:

• An fan-suspended beach ball precariously hovering over a few dozen skyward-pointing (and sharpened) steak knives
• A miniature urban landscape featuring only police and media crews in the hours after a Ferguson, Missouri-like violent event
  
• Canvases featuring a truck full of weapons-clad ISIS soldiers (driven by Cookie Monster) and pollution-blackened Los Angeles skyline with one surviving color billboard for the real Disneyland
• Holzer's latest, brilliant word-infused works, including one stating (paraphrased here), "Keep Your Church Out of My Sex Life and I'll Stop Having Sex In Your Church"
• Bumper car demonstration featuring The Grim Reaper with soundtrack provided by Blue Oyster Cult

The most shocking work of Dismaland may be Cinderella's overturned golden carriage featuring a dying princess hanging out of the crashed vehicle, illuminated only by the strobe flashes of paparazzi cameras.

With the approaching anniversary of Princess Diana's fatal crash in Paris, this work is bound to remain a conversation piece (it takes one's breath away).

Looking at the actual rides installed at Dismaland with some knowledge of what buyers seek at IAAPA Attractions Expo each November, I cannot help wondering whether Banksy or any of the other artists attended the trade show in Orlando in recent years.

After all, some IAAPA member ride manufacturers likely provided the customized carousel, space ride (made to look like a camping trailer gone off its hitch), miniature Ferris wheel, the aforementioned bumper cars and other on-site thrills. What remains unclear is whether paying customers are allowed on the rides (for safety's sake, I hope if rides are permitted then operator protocols are in place).

I've been pricing flights to London and train tickets to Weston-super-Mare and for about $1,800 for a five-day journey from Atlanta, a trek to Dismaland my be slightly out of my budget. But then again, a week in Orange County, California, might be about the same range, right?

Since Dismaland includes its own signs instructing everyone to "Exit Through The Gift Shop" one might expect an expensive glossy catalog may soon be available as an alternative. Consider this blogger delightfully Banksy-bemused.

Most photos via Reuters except the Damien Hirst image at Tate Modern photo by Nicholas Wolaver

Two's Company At The Dalí Museum

For those who love Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso as much as this blogger, the time is now to book a flight or plan a road trip to St. Petersburg, Fla.

The Dalí Museum in The Sunshine City recently opened a new blockbuster exhibition "Picasso/Dalí, Dalí/Picasso" which was well worth a special day trip across Florida while in Orlando for work.

I likely would have driven from Atlanta for this one -- spectacular!

Featuring an assemblage of more than 90 items from 20 international museums and private collections, the Picasso:Dalí exhibition showcases how the two artists -- professional acquaintances and mutual admirers for 30+ years -- found inspiration or potential influence in each other's work.

The exhibition gallery entrance welcomes visitors with a pair of black and white photograph portraits of the artists, setting the tone for several side-by-side canvas (or other object) placements, as pleasant for the eyes as a expertly paired wine and charcuterie plate for the palate.

Since photography is not allowed in the galleries, many of the images (some paired, most not) in this post are corralled from the Internet or the 250-page full-color exhibition catalog (a good read).

For instance, both artists created depictions of female nudes bathing at the sea, motherly women in profile, self-portraits (and many images of their patrons), still-lifes, Spanish Civil War symbolism and influential women such as their wives and, in Dalí's case, his sister, whose double image gazes like a playing card.

I found the paired-for-comparison works as home runs around every corner of the third floor presentation. Also enjoyed reading Salvador's "Dalí News" newspaper with screaming headlines and reference to his own portrait of Picasso.

Several other publication samples -- original magazine features, exhibition programs and books -- are showcased throughout the exhibition. There are numerous drawings by both masters, once again mirroring themes.

A few items in the exhibition resonated as "stand alone" items for either artist. Picasso's "Minotauromachy" (a 1934 etching from the Museum of Modern Art) and the extra large canvas "Las Meninas" (from Museo Picasso) are favorites.

I later learned this enormous canvas is one of 58 created by the artist as influenced by the original by Diego Velázquez.

This colorful version, with a dog like figure in its foreground, also reminds me of a fourth Spanish artist, Javier Mariscal, and his creation "COBI" as mascot for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics (to what extent was Mariscal influenced by these works, I now wonder).

The Dalí "Portrait of Pablo" stunned me as did his "Profanation of the Host."

But the biggest Salvador surprise was the pre-surrealism "Venus and Cupids" (1925) with its conch-holding bather.

His enormous "Neo-Cubist Academy" may leave some chirping, "Hey, Sailor!"

In addition to "Picasso/Dalí, Dalí/Picasso" the museum offers a dazzling array of permanent collection works, splendid architectural features (a sky-lit spiral staircase of three levels), outdoor sculpture (including a "melting" bench with droopy clock) and flora reminiscent of Catalonia.

In the collection gallery I spent a lot of time studying each item on view before snapping a collage of close-up photos (some posted below). This was the first time to find so many Dalí watercolors in one place.

Though my eyes soaked in most of the currently-mounted paintings on a previous visit to St. Pete, and again when the museum loaned many items to Atlanta's High Museum of Art for "Dalí: The Late Work" (reviewed in two prior posts), I loved getting reacquainted with several favorites while learning about a few new-to-me paintings.

The massive "Galacidalacidesoxiribunucleicacid" with its surreal take on the discovery of DNA is a stunner. In spite of the museum and artist interpretation, it appeared to me more of an artistic
commentary on nuclear energy with "God" taking the form of a mushroom cloud extended before the gaze of Madonna (portrayed by Dalí's wife, Gala).

Love the Minute Men-like molecules with a rifle bead on one another. Reminded me of an all-time great with a family back story, also on view.

Please accept this strong recommendation to trek to The Dalí Museum in time for the current special exhibition on view through Feb. 16, 2015. Enjoy!

Images via The Dalí Museum, the "Picasso/Dalí, Dalí Picasso" catalog and numerous image sites including WikiArt, this site, this site , this one, that one and one more here. Selfie and outdoor images of The Dalí Museum by Nicholas Wolaver. All images are copyrighted and presented for reference only.