Art-Full Life

On a recent visit to one of MICA’s three thesis shows, three  projects caught my eye …

For his thesis show, Calder Brannock parked a 1967 camping trailer outside the Fox Building. His project, Adventure: The Camper Contemporary Residency Program, takes groups of artists on excursions around Baltimore and beyond. Artists create work and Calder then exhibits their art works in this portable museum space. “I trust them to make the work,” says Calder.  And they trust him to take the camper out into the world. In late 2009, he and his colleagues traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach, where they attracted visitors from the global marketplace to this authentic space.

Calder is an artist who doubles as a docent—that person museum visitors wish stood at the ready in every gallery of contemporary art, able to explain anything that puzzles you. I met him at his exhibition’s opening, where he was dressed in a bright blue one-piece uniform, looking professional and official. He stood at the camper’s door, ready to greet visitors or to lure passers-by inside.

The exhibition inside Calder’s camper featured work from two trips to Curtis Bay on the Chesapeake coastline along the border between Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County. The first group designed and fabricated boats out of children’s pool rafts and then floated in the water. They found sunken boats and floating marine debris. Colin Benjamin’s assemblage of found objects—pieces of wood, a buoy, some tape to hold its parts together—is inscribed poignantly “Send help, please. Thank you sincerely.”

A second group visiting Curtis Bay explored the abandoned shoreline, where they discovered a colony of makeshift huts decorated with pornography, apparently a popular cruising place for lovers. Adam Junior responds with a miniature bronzed sculpture, Monument for Fort Armistead.  At first glance, it looks like two movie heroes struggling on a stage, but on closer examination, it is a record of a clandestine tryst.

Following the camper, MICA’s thesis show continued inside more conventional gallery space, but with the usual MICA lack of convention.  Graham Coreil-Allen presented The Typology of New Public Sites. On maps (available for viewers to take with them), Graham renamed various parts of the urban landscape with titles—Zoomscape, Unseen Field, Monumental Isolation.  As the artist declared, the sites are described “playfully,” yet in a way that “challenges the authority of how public space is represented.

Graham has conducted tours of these New Public Sites—by car, bike, and light rail—but however his audiences pass through these spaces again, they’ll see it with fresh eyes.

After taking in Graham’s work, I left the exhibition and as I walked to my car, I saw five young men who had applied a bucket of blood-red paint liberally to their arms, legs, faces, and clothes. One white t-shirt looked like an Abstract Expressionist print, with the addition of a large hand print. I couldn’t resist asking what they were doing. “We’re making a zombie advertisement,” said one zombie pointing to another with bloody lips. “It’s his final project.”

Ian Farmer, the artist orchestrating this project, was kind enough to share these photos.  Don’t worry, even after you’ve seen these zombies, you won’t be afraid to visit Mount Royal!

To follow up on how non-zombie MICA graduates fan out into the Baltimore art and culture scene, go see Graham Coreil-Allen’s fabulous video piece, Specter Polis, on view at Creative Alliance through June 18, or catch his talk at 7 p.m. on May 27.

Many of the works in MICA’s recent thesis exhibitions take up questions that plague us in Baltimore, across the nation, and around the world.

In The N Word? by Jeffery Kent (Founder of Sub-Basement Artist Studios), a floating gun made of glitter squirts fluid into the face of a cartoon-like black male, whose whitened lips open in a blood-red gasp.  Though the perpetrator is absent, everyone is implicated in the act.

In his Obscene, the featured word is spelled backwards (made out of clippings from porn magazines) and is placed above the silhouette of a machine gun. The accompanying text explains young men are trained to drop fire on people but their commanders won’t allow them to write a curse word on their airplane because it is obscene.

Jeffrey’s Communapitalist juxtaposes two world economic systems.  A massive skull, with a Soviet flag emblazoned on its forehead, floats over an American flag. Here, the material of choice is acrylic and shredded paper, the detritus of production in every system.

On the opposite gallery wall, Michel Modell’s watercolors take up the anti-war theme with less apparent confrontation but equal power.  In a series of four fresh watercolor portraits, young people pose in t-shirts with protest messages, transporting me back 40 years to another war, time, and place. 

 The figure in Jihad Jake sports a turban, beard, shades, and a t-shirt emblazoned with an American flag. He stands in a field of what appears to be poppies and an allusion to the drug trade. With this, Michel takes me quickly to the present Middle Eastern conflict.  Here again, the technical choices are powerful.  She has used watercolor washes of sometimes acidic or electric colors on a stark white primed canvas, working on a far more ambitious scale than we usually associate with this delicate medium.

At the same exhibition, I was particularly drawn to a wall of work by Joshua Lefchick.  These paintings are abstract, but somehow convey a sense of human presence.  They could represent distressed stone, the landscape of another planet, or for me, a close-up view of skin aged by life’s trials. These slick surfaces are slit open, right through the canvas, and folded back to reveal layers of paint below—turquoise or bright pink. These layers appear rolled to create a soft edge around dark shapes in swirling patterns that evoke human or animal entrails.  Sometimes the upper layer is pulled and buckled, an artifact of the energy used to make the work. 

As often happens, I wonder: How did the artist make these—and why?  The museum person in me is wishing for long explanatory labels. Fortunately, I spotted MICA Professor Timothy App, who answered all my questions and more.  Joshua was interested in figuration, but in his studies moved toward this abstract work. He uses a technical taboo to achieve this effect, painting that first organ-like layer in oil and adding subsequent layers in latex.

As any of us who have restored an old house know, latex does not fully adhere to an oil base.  Here, the everyday problem becomes an artist’s opportunity, allowing Joshua to penetrate, alter, and exploit the unique material qualities of these layers.  Abstract as these works may be, they speak deeply of people, from outer shells to inner physicality.

MICA’s last thesis exhibition closed May 2, but the best browsing and art-buying opportunities are yet to come:

• Today through Monday, MICA’s 2010 Commencement Exhibition will showcase works by nearly 400 emerging artists from the undergraduate class of 2010.

• And don’t miss the festivities tomorrow when MICA hosts its first annual benefit art sale. There you can buy affordable art works from students in the: 
  • Mount Royal School of Art,
  • Hoffberger School of Painting,
  • Rinehart School of Sculpture,
  • M.F.A. program in Graphic Design,
  • M.F.A. program in Photographic & Electronic Media,
  • And the Post-Baccalaureate Certificate program in Fine Arts.

On a recent visit to MICA, I was surprised but delighted that A Pathway to Awareness: Quilting for Social Justice remained on view after its scheduled conclusion in April.  The exhibition presented the artistic results of teaching and mentoring done by Dr. Joan M. E. Gaither, a documentary quilter who recently completed a quilt that told the story of Barack Obama’s journey to the White House. As she spoke to the creators of textile work like this, she urged them to quilt “the story that needs to be told, one that only you can tell.”

Demonstrating art’s potential to impact society, every piece in A Pathway to Awareness had a story and a message. Perhaps the most arresting work was Sex is a Weapon (American Dream).  The hand-crafted dress composed of individual quilted parts stood on an old-fashioned wire seamstress form.  While its ruffles and medallions could be on any party dress, its quilted squares revealed images of objectified women, each striking a suggestive pose in a skimpy bathing suit. These are photographic images from popular culture, digitized and printed on fabric. The words  “Sex is a Weapon” was emblazoned in fabric letters across the bodice.

From behind the piece you can see it’s not really a dress, but rather an apron that actually leaves the body half naked.  This might be intentional: on the surface, the lives of some women seem to meet the expected normal, but when examined in full, they turn out to be so different from our assumptions.

Sex is a Weapon was made by a group brought together as a part of the Advocate Through Art program at the House of Ruth, an emergency shelter for women who experience domestic violence.  A few of the women are fully identified, but others give only their first names.  Drawing from their own experiences and working with Hannah Brancato, a MICA-trained community arts facilitator who had taken a two-day workshop with Gaither, they ask how violent attitudes in popular culture help perpetuate the abuse of women. 

In an email, Hannah explained the process of making this piece: “Women living in the shelter were asked to consider the ways that they are misrepresented; while working on the pieces and reflecting on the images that participants chose, we discussed what message we wanted viewers to take away; the title was born from that conversation, and is a specific quote from one woman. I collaborated on the piece by assembling the separate ‘quilt squares’ with ruffles and creating the banner with one participant’s quote.”

For me, this is a remarkable example of the confluence of art and social justice—and a very timely one, too.  Only a few weeks ago, I attended a benefit luncheon downtown for the House of Ruth, where one brave mother described the loss of her daughter, who was gunned down by her husband in front of their children. This week the news has been filled with the tragic story of the death of Yeardley Love, a college women’s lacrosse player at the University of Virginia who grew up in Cockeysville.

These poignant stories make me wish fervently that more women who suffer abuse could express themselves creatively—for themselves personally and as a wakeup call to the rest of us, who might take action to spare the next threatened woman.

I have asked Hannah to let us know when this beautiful—and meaningful—quilt will be on view again.