Live painting performance by artist Enrico Isamu Ōyama at 2:00 p.m. In Ōyama’s live painting performance he responds in the moment to surrounding people, sounds, atmosphere, and energy. Duration: 30 minutes.
Make your own print in GraficoMovil, a mobile printmaking studio/gallery. Created by artist Artemio Rodríguez.
Action art activities for all ages, EVERYONE’S WELCOME!
Art in Motion, a celebration of art in the museum parking lot.
Concurrent with “Harmony at the ‘Hatt” music festival in Triangle Park, Aggieville district.
I first met Aileen when she visited my project Aeromural at the Clocktower Gallery in 2013 with our friend and his baby.
The curator Aileen June Wang and I first met in New York in 2013 when she came to see my project Aeromural at Clocktower Gallery in New York City’s TriBeCa district. Since then, we have become really good friends. We had many conversations about doing a project together. The first idea she raised was a two-person show with Japanese American visual artist Alex Kukai Shinohara. I was excited. She tried to find a venue for the show but it was not easy.
Then, Aileen was invited by a gallerist to propose a mural for a car wash with a large wall at the corner of West 24th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea, New York City’s gallery district. She and I worked on a proposal with a mock-up of the mural for the owner, but this didn’t happen neither.
The car wash building in the gallery district of New York City, for which we proposed a mural in 2014.
Aileen was invited by the NARS Foundation in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to curate a group show that would have included my works, but soon after, she was offered the job as associate curator at the Beach Museum of Art. I remember the moment when she told me about her new job. We were having lunch together near the Museum of Modern Art. I was excited for her new journey.
Aileen’s farewell party in 2015 at the Brooklyn Museum’s Art Off the Wall event, arranged by Sharon Matt Atkins, Director of Curatorial Affairs (fifth from the left). Other participants from left to right: New York artist Babs Reingold; New York artist Margaret Murphy; Curator Midori Yoshimoto, who introduced Aileen to me; my wife Shihori and I.
From August to October of 2015, I did a residency program at Chelsea College of Arts in London. Right after I returned to New York in November, I got an email from Aileen when I was in Strand Book Store near Union Square to find some nice second-hand books on New York Writing Culture. I noticed right away that this message is about something special. Aileen was talking about a possibility of my solo show at the Beach Museum of Art. Somehow, I had a good feeling that this time it was going to happen. After a while, she confirmed that the show was officially on the museum’s calendar.
Our productive conversation and a few trials of doing a project together over the past few years resulted in something really exciting. I deeply thank Aileen for giving such an amazing opportunity to a young artist like me and everyone at the Beach Museum for their effort and labor to make this exhibition happen.
This post is part two of a two part blog series, “Wondering about Meaning” written by the Director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Linda Duke.
Information overload affects artists, too. Some of the best new work evidences that artists have searched for meaning in the onslaught and employed their skills in sorting through dense information and making sense of complexity and ambiguity. Consider this work of art in the collection of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art: Dendrochronological Data Sequences by Andrzej Zielinski, a sculpture that evokes a computer keyboard and screen in a brightly colored “head comics” sort of style. Careful examination reveals that the “screen” is an actual cross-section slice of a tree or, rather, of three trees that have grown as one, each with a core and concentric annual growth rings. Tree rings are well known to record the effects of climate conditions. It may therefore dawn on the viewer, especially after reading the title the artist has given this work, that two modes of data storage are referenced here: the one recorded and preserved in the natural growth of trees since that botanical life form evolved on Earth, and the one employed by the hard drive of an early 21st c. computer. Andrzej simply presents us with this observation, in a material object constructed with meticulous craftsmanship that may be overlooked because of its playful form. The artist juxtaposes two means of data storage and two assumptions we may make about objects, the latter being that a humorously distorted form carries no serious meaning and that classic material techniques such as bronze casting, marble carving, and gilding would be employed only in a serious-looking sculpture.
In their artworks artists juxtapose the most baffling data points and toss to us, as viewers, intriguing hints and inspiring possibilities instead of burying us in didactics and rationales. They give us experiences and visions to unpack. In doing this, they continue an important and age-old function of art. They help us to understand our lives and the realities we experience. They encourage us to sense who we are. They suggest to us that the answer to “Who am I?” is never final. It grows and changes as we encounter the messy, complex, and confusing world around us. It’s an ongoing calculation of this plus those minus that. It’s worth wondering about.
Dendrochronological Data Sequences 2015 Andrzej Zielinski http://www.andrzejzielinski.net/portfolio/dendrochronological-data-sequences-2015/
About Us
The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art furthers the teaching, research, and service missions of Kansas State University by collecting, studying, caring for, and presenting the visual art of Kansas and the region.
