July 2006 Page 3

> Long-time Frisco colleague, Jeremy Stone, alerted VAA to the following explanation given by a Curator who resigned from University Art Museum (Berkeley) on grounds which he will explain for himself (with which I strongly disagree, BTW.) The story is a useful object lesson, for curators and for artists. This is an excerpt. For the entire thing see www.stretcher.org

CHRIS GILBERT RESIGNS
By Chris Gilbert

"Editor's note - Curator Chris Gilbert joined the Berkeley Art Museum as Matrix Curator in September 2005, following a two-year stint as curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. He resigned his Matrix position late last month. Stretcher has received Gilbert's resignation statement which is here posted in its entirety as a contribution to the ongoing dialog about the cultural impact of contemporary art. Readers wish to respond to the statement may use the "Add a comment" button at the end of the page.

I made the decision to resign as Matrix Curator on April 28, but my struggles with the BAM/PFA over the content and approach of the projects in the exhibition cycle "Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process" go back quite a few months. In particular the museum administrators—meaning the deputy directors and senior curator collaborating, of course, with the public relations and audience development staff—have for some time been insisting that I take the idea of solidarity, revolutionary solidarity, out of the cycle. For some months, they have said they wanted "neutrality" and "balance" whereas I have always said that instead my approach is about commitment, support, and alignment—in brief, taking sides with and promoting revolution.

I have always successfully resisted the museum's attempts to interfere with the projects (and you will see that the ideas of alignment, support, and revolutionary solidarity are written all over the "Now-Time" projects part 1 and part 2—they are present in all the texts I have generated and as a consequence in almost all of the reviews). In the museum's most recent attempt to alter things, the one that precipitated my resignation, they proposed to remove the offending concept from the Now-Time Part 2 introductory text panel (a panel which had already gone to the printer). Their plan was to replace the phrase "in solidarity" with revolutionary Venezuela with a phrase like "concerning" revolutionary Venezuela—or another phrase describing a relation that would not be explicitly one of solidarity.

I threatened to resign and terminate the exhibition, since, first of all, revolutionary solidarity is what I believe in—the essential concept in the "Now-Time" project cycle—but secondly it is obviously unfair to invite participants such as Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler or groups such as Catia TVe to a project that has one character (revolutionary solidarity) and then change the rules of the game on them a few weeks before the show opens (so that they become mere objects of examination or investigation). At first, my threat to resign and terminate the show availed nothing. Then on April 28, I wrote a letter stating that I was in fact resigning and my last day of work would be two weeks from that day, which was May 12, two days before the "Now-Time Part 2: Revolutionary Television in Catia" opening. I assured them that the show could not go forward without me. In response to this decisive action—and surely out of fear that the show which had already been published in the members magazine would not happen—the institution restored my text panel to the way I had written it. Having won that battle, though at the price of losing my position, I decided to go forward with the show, my last one..."

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

Volume 6 Number 1 July 2006

> Visual Art Access suspended operations in December 2003 while based in Tulsa so that I could accept an appointment as Curator of Collections and Exhibitions with the Saginaw Art Museum in Michigan. Then becoming employed in the non-profit art world again meant potential conflicts of interest or self-dealing when accepting private work such as appraisals and the like. Now, with high gratitude to graphic designer Keith Price (keith@pixelassassin.com) of NYC, VAA and ARTHROBS are able to work again through a VAA website (www.visualartaccess.com) and this blog http://arthrobs.blogspot.com/

> Because of the abundance nowadays of art career advice (as compared with 1987) the focus of VAA has shifted away from being primarily an artist's career self-management company, into the areas of:

~ contemporary art appraisals (especially living artists)

~ expert witness testimony

~ estate issues related to well-established/experienced artists.

~ Some career guidance remains available, especially for previous clients of VAA who have successfully completed at least one full year program.

> My tenure with the Saginaw Art Museum ended abruptly and unexpectedly (in a certain sense) at 1230 hrs on this past April 20th, in the offices of the museum's Board President and in the presence of their newish Executive Director. The latter official allowed what turned out to be roughly 30 minutes to clear out my office of personal belongings, turn in my keys and leave the premises. The Director's effort to cut my hours by half in December 2005 resulted in an instantaneous spit storm of protest from the many friends and colleagues Carol and I enjoyed in Saginaw, and an almost unheard of virtually immediate reversal of a personnel decision made by any museum Director in my 35+ years in the art industry. Needless to say, I was not sanguine about our future prospects under his "leadership" thereafter... having done everything possible to alert the trustees and patrons of his atrocious mis-management style once it became clear that it was justifiably of that character in August 2005 (two months after his taking of office.) The messenger was shot, but not killed. At the moment, the question of that museum's longevity and health remains very much undecided... sitreps from Saginaw through back channels are far from promising... except for a gradual and determined counter-force mustering at very high levels of their community and staff. Carol decamped for Tulsa in mid-January. I did similarly in late May packing only what would fit in our Tercel, having shipped her domestic materiel along, and then went to visit my brother George in Louisville... to be among the thoroughbreds.

> Saginaw's art museum was founded in early 1947, originally housed (until late 2003) in a Charles Adams Platt Georgian-revival mansion given to the city by the owner's two daughters. The Board and Director, Sheila Redman, successfully raised more than $7m for a new education wing and one for changing exhibitions and collection storage/preparatorial. My tenure began with the first show there, organized by the prior Director... Rodin sculpture. They'd been without a curator for about 4 months at the time and the department was a shambles for various reasons. Within four months of taking office, we had moved the entire collection from the 3rd floor down into state-of-the-art storage with nary a dent or a chip lost, and I installed seven galleries in the mansion with their permanent collection for the first time in the museum's history. They have a wonderful large collection of E.I. Couse, several quite substantial 17th-19th century paintings and sculpture (e.g. Inness, Blakelock, Cropsey, Huntington, Van Loo, Corot, Lawrence, Minor, Sully etc.), a fine large grouping of vintage japanese prints, a good start on photography, numerous quality 20th century prints by the big names, and a modest amalgam of asian/etruscan decorative arts. Most promising, for me, was their virtually unknown material representing regional Great Lakes and Michigan art.

Right away I got permission to set up an Archives of Michigan Art which, unbelievably, had not existed as such beforehand. When I left in April, we had collected more than 250 new artist files, and organized the Couse and Roecker holdings well enough to use for research. In addition, an exhibition schedule had been contracted through mid-2009, at the rate of four shows per annum. The museum was fully accredited by the American Association of Museums in the Autumn of 2004.

> While in office we created exhibitions including a Betsy Weis painting survey, Beadwork of Woodland Indian Tribes (21 tribes!), Mexico: Art and Civilization, Vaclav Vaca: Visionary Surrealist retrospective, Arnold Kolb's Art of the Infinite, a small tribute to Henry and Julia Roecker, a commemoration for Saginaw's Japanese Tea House and set a precedent of the annual regional contemporary art show becoming an invitational rather than a competition. Future plans called for a presentation of Michael Rossman's immense collection of Political Posters of the Counter Culture, the beautiful figurative bronzes of Osprey Orielle Lake, a retrospective for Bay-area artist Jessica Dunne, and (naturally) in 2008 a huge exhibition of contemporary American Surrealism had already been pre-selected among others (including a vast Marilyn Monroe extravaganza and the Tibetan sand painting experience.) Hopefully, some or all of those arrangements will be realized.

It was a very positive, albeit exhausting, tenure all in all, and I enjoyed every minute of it as a way to polish off, as it were, a long museum career. I had hoped to retire from that museum in about 2 years, but it was not to be. My time arrived, and I accepted it as graciously as was possible under the circumstances... I learned the meaning of being "put out to pasture." The museum has, with one exception, a talented dedicated staff and coterie of patrons doing incredible amounts with very little in a regional economy that is all but broke at present.

At the very end of my stay, it must be mentioned, I was honored to be asked to re-install and catalogue the art collection of the Saginaw Club which began in 1898. For several weeks I was given free-reign in those hallowed halls, and had a magnificent experience with their staff and institution. Feedback thusfar has been positive.

As customary I remain in touch with friends in Michigan, and hope that the contribution Carol (who assisted with moving/re-cataloguing their collection) and I made to their museum will be regarded favorably in perpetuity.

> What now? It is my hope to devote the remainder of my years to playing a role in heightening my hometown's awareness and appreciation for the visual arts. We have a very nice Spiva Art Center here, and quite a number more artists/collectors than one might imagine for a gateway to The Ozarks. I am not interested in being employed by a non-profit institution again if it can possibly be prevented, but working privately one hopes to contribute something of lasting value. We are extremely happy to, at long last, be in our own home climes... able to travel hither and thither for professional and other reasons, but with a comfortable and comforting base so long sought. Joplin, and the region, definitely needs and wants greater rapport with visual arts. This is a prosperous and essentially contented interface of the rural American South, in my opinion, and there is much promise to come. I hope to bring national experiences and resources as might be desired here, and to eventually help acquaint the rest of our nation with the long and excellent art traditions cultivated by Missourians from earliest times to the present. Carol and I will soon be renting habitation, a small house in a town-central neighborhood where we can again have a dog and cat, near friends and my maternal family lineage who settled this area beginning in the mid-1800s. Carol's children all three (plus one girl grandmonkey) reside within an hour of Joplin.

> Business as usual, then. More later, stay tuned.