July 2006 Page 2

> Although most people should wait a loooooooooooooooong time for me to write a book, I have one in mind finally... on the repeated urging of a dear friend in Saginaw (who always wishes to remain anonymous)to "WRITE SOMETHING!!!".
Working title is: ART MUSEUMS: CURIOSITY, CONFLICT AND CORRUPTION. I have the chapters named thusfar, and will begin bibliographic research in the next few months. Heaven knows there is an abundance of it. It hopes to be a study of how art museums have changed in the past 50 years, why, and what the effects are likely to be for coming generations. Implicit, of course, will also be the inference that the trend can be thwarted... were there only to be the will to do so.

> Thanks to colleague and mentor George W. Neubert, I learned of a Joplin-native artist based in Santa Fe, NM (across the street from El Farol restaurant on Canyon Road... GREAT location!). Ed Larson is his name. He makes paintings and sculpture in what would probably be characterized as an American Folk Art or "Primitive" style... unafraid to take on socio-political issues in good humour. He is at www.edlarsonart.com
Neubert collected one of Larson's patriotic whirligigs recently, for his new Folk Art collection and foundation based in Brownville, Nebraska... about which more later.

> You may not have yet heard about a wonderful art research facility here in Joplin... POST MEMORIAL ART REFERENCE LIBRARY; Leslie Simpson, Director. They have a great collection of art books, and keep the periodicals updated regularly so that's where I go to browse-without-subscribing. The library was constructed inside our modernist local Public Library facility, but was beautifully designed to have an old-world ambience of English architecture and furnishings... making for a VERY peaceful environment in which to read and study... a haven. www.postlibrary.org
Curiously, while on self-imposed sabbatical during the late 1990s-early 2000s... I moonlighted for this library cleaning their floors at night. Not to spill ALL the beans, but I also worked off-and-on back then in similar maintenance capacities for the Joplin Public Library, Joplin Museum Complex (Science and History) and the Spiva Art Center!

> From an e-mail sent to VAA address:

"Novelist Todd Brendan Fahey has purchased what is believed to be the bulwark of The Logbook of the Ship Henry David Thoreau--an obsessive and intimate mixed media project of an expatriate American artist/mystic known pseudonymously as Viktor IV, before his drowning death in Amsterdam in 1987.
Born Walter Karl Gluck, the artist Viktor IV traveled to Amsterdam in the early 1960s and settled there, living on a ship he christened the Henry David Thoreau, after the philosopher who served as his chief inspiration and muse. A burly, rugged figure, Viktor IV was recognizable amongst the quiet Amsterdam populace as the barefoot American hippie artist who dressed in black, sported a great, gray beard, loved cats and women, and worked tirelessly on deeply personal and largely non-commercial projects aboard his canal-bound ship.


A master scuba diver, Viktor IV drowned of a heart attack in June of 1987, while performing underwater repairs to the Henry David Thoreau.

Unconcerned with commerce, Viktor IV created hundreds of captain's "Logbook" paintings-drawings in the original, with no known professional reproductions, from between 1966 and 1976, after which he turned his artistic vision to clockmaking. Individual pages of The Logbook of the Ship Henry David Thoreau are held in the Permanent Collection of the Stedelijk Museum and the Fodor Museum, Amsterdam, where the adopted artist is revered as a free spirit and a national treasure. (Viktor IV visited the United States only a handful of times after emigrating to Amsterdam, and is believed to have held only one American gallery exhibition in his lifetime.)
Professor Fahey hopes to arrange a traveling exhibition of his 38 pages, the largest known single holdings, of The Logbook of the Ship Henry David Thoreau by the late artist Viktor IV. Interested museums, galleries and collectors may contact:


Todd Brendan Fahey
toddbrendanfahey@yahoo.com
http://fargonebooks.com/art.html (Viktor IV's Logbook pages)"

> This is tremendously important... and I hope it is not too late in getting published... from a magnificent quiet artist who worked with VAA for a long while in California, PRENTISS COLE. His art is a highly refined combination of process and materials with an intensely introspective but accessible intellectual/narrative content:

"Prentiss Cole April 12th
www.prentisscole.net
prentisschere@yahoo.com


Dear Friends,

Greetings from Bellingham. I hope this finds you all
well. Lee and I love it here, but we do miss the
friends we left behind.

Soon after our move, I opened a gallery which has
provided some very good experiences, but I’ve decided
that to continue would require more attention than I
want to give it. Now that I’m closing the gallery,
I’m challenged with a task, that for sometime has been
lurking out there--trying to find, in one way or
another, homes for the works I’ve accumulated.
Certainly, like all things, these are impermanent, but
for now they’re literally, as well as figuratively, in
the way of moving toward a simpler life.

I‘d like to start by offering as a gift to those of
you, who have acquired one of my past efforts,
anything you would like to have. They are of no use
stuffed in a storage locker; and I have received all
the benefit anyone could ever ask for--from the
learnings of the process to those rare discoveries to
which I can lay no personal claim. Much of what is
shown at www.prentisscole.net is available. It would
please me greatly if you would accept something. Your
part would be shipping costs only.

If any of these pieces interest you, please let me
know. What happens next the future will reveal. Come
the first of June I’ll go to plan B.

Best regards,

Prentiss"

> The State of Michigan is attempting to enact law which will set guidelines for public school teaching/learning in the arts... quite an ambitious undertaking (though it shouldn't have to be as hard as it is being made). Thanks to Nancy Koepke, Director of the Saginaw Arts and Enrichment Commission, here is an edited summary of the movement and a link to the draft guidelines:

SPECIAL BULLETIN
ArtServe Michigan
GRAAND
GrassRoots Arts Advocacy Network Distribution
Editor: Drew Buchholz
2006 Issue 15

"On April 20, 2006, Governor Jennifer M. Granholm signed into law a rigorous new set of statewide high school graduation requirements called the Michigan Merit Curriculum that are among the best in the nation. (Public Acts 123 & 124)

The Michigan Merit Curriculum will be required for the incoming freshman class of school year 2006-2007.

The curriculum requires 16 credits for graduation, which could be acquired through subject and integrated (mixed subject) classes, as well as, career and technical education programs...

Some of you may not be aware of the current situation regarding the new Visual, Performing and Applied Arts requirement. Some administrators within the Michigan Department of Education are uncomfortable with the guidelines that the committee developed, arguing that the guidelines are too narrowly focused and it would be difficult for an Industrial Arts course to count as an arts credit for high school graduation...

Arts educators and advocates have worked too hard for this one credit to now see it watered down.

In years to come, the students we educate today will be our future artists, audiences, supporters and creative workforce..."

The Visual, Performing and Applied Arts guidelines are now available for review at: http://www.michigan.gov/documents/Art_Guidelines_163780_7.pdf