New Acquisitions: Bret Price's Hublot May 29, 2012

Bret Prices's Hublot

How many of you, as youngsters, wanted to be a superhero when you grew up? I wonder if sculptor Bret Price had any such aspirations. He may not be able to leap over tall buildings, nor outrace a speeding bullet, but he does share one quality with Superman. He is able to bend steel. Okay, Price requires help from forklifts and jigs. He's only human after all. Nevertheless, his finished pieces are super in beauty and often heroic in scale, ranging in size from that of a coffee mug to over 34 feet tall!

Last year, American Art acquired such a sculpture by Price called Hublot. Hublot is one of Price's less monumental works, standing at just over two feet tall. The title means "porthole" in French, and sure enough, the circular shape of this sculpture and bronze coloring call to mind the round, watertight windows of a ship. After graduating from the California Institute of the Arts with a Masters degree in Fine Arts, Price began teaching at Chapman University, before eventually becoming the chair of the school's art department. Price created large ceramic pieces at this point in his career, having studied the work and methods of Peter Voulkos and Paul Soldner. He struggled, however, to create clay pieces the size he wanted, frequently stalled by the logistical limitations of the medium. It was actually during a staff meeting that Price came up with the idea to work with giant pieces of metal. He decided to try heating up metal, much like he heated up clay, to manipulate it into looking soft and whimsical.

Price created his first steel sculpture in the parking lot of Chapman University's science center in 1979. With the help of two others, he bent a 40-foot metal beam using heat redirected from the kiln building. Years of experimentation have led Price to refine his methods. He now heats steel using a variation of a technique used by NASA to protect the underside of space shuttles and has replaced manpower with machinery.

About 20 years after making his first sculpture in that parking lot, Price met fellow artist Jim Dicke II at an event in Washington, D.C. The two men soon became friends and Dicke offered Price the use of his farm and equipment to bend the steel after Price had difficulties locating a suitable place to do so in his native Southern California. Dicke's Ohio farm afforded Price an additional benefit: he finds minimal distractions in the surrounding cornfields, which allows him to focus solely on his work.

Jim Dicke, a longtime patron of our museum, gave Hublot to American Art. We were thrilled to be able to find a home for it in the Luce Center's third-floor sculpture gallery where it sits between Robert Hudson's sculpture After Wood and Jesús Moroles's Georgia Stele. The sculpture can be seen on American Art's space within the recently-launched Google Art Project! Either way, come see this sculpture by a true Man of Steel. The cape-wearing, villain-fighting little kid in you will love it.

Behind the Scenes: Preparing an Artwork for Exhibition May 24, 2012

Left: Löis Mailou Jones's Moon Masque, Center: Paintings Conservator Amber Kerr-Allison cleans the painting using a wet technique, Right: Cleaning the painting using a dry technique.

Conservators must use a variety of techniques when treating mixed media artworks, each suited to a particular material in that piece. Read on to learn about the different treatments that Paintings Conservator Amber Kerr-Allison used to prepare Löis Mailou Jones's mixed media painting Moon Masque for display in our exhibition African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Era, and Beyond, now on display through September 3.

Jones's artistic career spanned almost the entire 20th century. She studied painting in the United States and France and traveled extensively throughout Africa and Haiti. Heavily influenced by traditional African art forms, her works highlight the connections between modernism, abstraction, and African motifs. In Moon Masque, she has framed a Zairian-inspired mask with abstracted silhouettes and patterned bands of color reminiscent of Ethiopian textiles. It's difficult to tell until you are close to the painting, but the mask is actually a three-dimensional work that Jones created out of papier-mache and placed on the flat, painted canvas. The mask is painted in acrylics and overlaid with strips of gold leaf.

After examining Moon Masque, Amber noted that the weight of the mask was placing stress on the canvas, causing it to sag and stretch and creating tiny cracks in the painted surface. Since conservators not only strive to keep artworks in top condition but to protect them against future damage, Amber placed a padded backing board behind the painting in order to reduce the stress on the painted layers created by the weight of the mask. The padding fills the space between the canvas and the back board, supporting the canvas and curtailing the possibility of further damage to the paint layers. Additionally, the padding will reduce vibration of the canvas any time the painting is handled and transported.

Amber then cleaned the work using both wet and dry techniques. A low pH, water-based solution was applied to the painted surface of the canvas using small cotton swabs. The low pH level ensured that the acrylic paint would not swell during cleaning. Gentle but highly effective, the solution removed environmental surface grime without affecting the molecular structure of the paint. Next, she removed dust and accumulated dirt from the crevices in the mask via a dry-treatment system using a specialized sponge. You may not think of a sponge as a high-tech, but this one is specially designed to lift and sweep away embedded surface grime in much the same way that a pencil eraser lifts graphite from the surface of a sheet of paper.

After cleaning the painting, Amber began a consolidation treatment on the surface of the work to secure loose material and to fill in cracks. She reattached the strips of gold leaf that had begun to curl away from the surface of the mask using a conservation-grade adhesive and then applied a special reversible paint to hide the cracks that had formed in the paint layers on the canvas. Amber chose this reversible paint because future conservators must be able to distinguish between her treatment and Jones's original work, and to undo Amber's treatment if necessary.

Not only is Moon Masque exhibition-ready, but Amber's work has helped to ensure it will be protected as it travels with African American Art to other museums across the country.

Give American Craft Some Credit: For the Birds Edition May 22, 2012

Laurel Roth, Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Passenger Pigeon (2008) and Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Carolina Parakeet (2009), suits: cotton, silk, bamboo, wool, acrylic blends, mannequins: hand-carved basswood, acrylic paint, gouache, glass eyes, metal legs, walnut stand, Courtesy of the artist; Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco; and Schroeder Romero and Shredder Gallery, New York. Click on image for larger image.

Meet Martha the Passenger Pigeon and Incas the Carolina Parakeet. These two fine aves were lovingly crocheted by artist Laurel Roth for the exhibition 40 under 40: Craft Futures, opening at the museum's Renwick Gallery July 20. Hand-carved of basswood, Martha and Incas are common pigeons in disguise as extinct North American species to allay the artist's concerns about the state of the environment, and to reintroduce biodiversity through their many-colored suits of cotton, silk, bamboo, wool, and acrylic. Martha and Incas are seeking a forever home with the Smithsonian American Art Museum because life on the streets, as Martha puts it, is "for the birds." Curator Nicholas Bell wants the feathery duo to join the museum's collection for a number of reasons, one of which is their illustration of the spirit of the young artists showcased in 40 under 40. "We're so happy Martha and Incas are shooting for the big leagues," says Bell. "I love them because they perfectly sum up the irony that so often defines this generation of craft artist. Their duds are 'tres chick'—they wear their art on their sleeve."

You can help Martha and Incas—as well as "a number of other contenders"—stay at the museum with your donation of $10 or more. That's right, for the price of an exorbitantly-priced beer at one of DC's hipster bars, you can help the museum in its effort to add works by each of the 40 artists to the collection. Here's some more information on how to be a part of craft history! And if that isn't exciting enough, if you donate before July 15 your name will appear in the exhibition itself. Now that is something that is definitely not for the birds.

Comment Sketches from The Art of Video Games May 17, 2012

Visitors's sketches from The Art of Video Games comment books

The Art of Video Games exhibition includes a lot of interactive technology, but one of our favorite components is not hi-tech at all; it's a plain spiral-bound notebook that asks visitors to leave a comment. We include a comment book in every show that we do, and we read all of them. This exhibition has inspired a lot of comments: we've filled 12 books in just 2 months so far!

Gamers are a creative bunch, too, and many of the pages are filled with sketches and doodles of video game characters, from Pac-Man to Commander Shepherd. Next time you visit the show, be sure to leave us a message (written or sketched!).

No Crystal Stair: African American Art May 15, 2012

Robert McNeill's Make a Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York)

In a poem titled, "Mother to Son," Langston Hughes wrote of an African American woman's hardships, as she advises her son to never give up: "Well, son, I'll tell you:/Life for me ain't been no crystal stair..." Far from it. These steps have tacks, splinters and torn up boards. Sometimes the stairs are bare. It is these steps I was reminded of when I visited American Art's new exhibition, African American Art: Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, and Beyond, on view through September 3, 2012.

The exhibition features one hundred works by more than forty artists from American Art's permanent collection, including recent acquisitions that are on view for the first time. The exhibit begins with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and continues through the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, then ends with mid-to-late twentieth century works. The pieces include paintings, prints, photography (many have never been seen in Washington DC before), and sculpture, covering the artistic movements of postmodernism, documentary realism, expressionism and abstraction. It is the record of a journey and all the difficulties and joys that accompany it. It is about people (singular), and a people (plural), and the way we rise and fall and rise again throughout our lives.

"The artists are telling us about the American experience through these sixty or seventy years," says senior curator Virginia Mecklenburg, "Each of the artists included in this exhibition made a compelling contribution to the artistic landscape of 20th century America, and we are delighted to feature their work in the museum's galleries." One striking image at the beginning of the exhibit is the photograph titled Make a Wish (Bronx Slave Market, 170th Street, New York) by Robert McNeill. McNeill, who is also represented in the show by his WPA-commissioned photographs of the black experience in Virginia, was in school in New York when he captured this image in the Bronx. The women pictured here are day laborers waiting to be picked up for domestic labor, gathered in a patch of sun, under a billboard advertising a movie called Make a Wish. The words and the image speak volumes.

Other photographers represented in the exhibition include Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks and James VanDerZee, who documented the rise of the black middle class in his studio portraits of the 1920s. Painters include Benny Andrews, Lois Mailou Jones and Jacob Lawrence. Toward the end of the exhibition are beautiful abstract works by Washington, DC-area painters Alma Thomas, Felrath Hines, and Sam Gilliam, whose 1966 Light Fan comes out of the Washington Color School and shares a quiet elegance with the Veil paintings of Morris Louis.

As Langston Hughes's poem continues, the mother describes the hard work and struggle to climb and reach for something better. "And sometimes goin' in the dark/Where there ain't been no light." That dark and that light radiate equally in this compelling exhibition.

Related:View the African American Art exhibition slide show and Oh Freedom! Teaching African American Civil Rights Through American Art at the Smithsonian