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| Welcome to SKETCHES, Michael Gerrish's WhyART.com newsletter. I offer thoughts to stretch your mind and spur your actions to produce positives for you and those you touch. Author Daniel Pinkwater said, "I believe it is impossible to make sense of life in this world except through art." Artist Francis Bacon said, "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." This "talking head" sees truth in both statements; let's start making sense by exploring and expanding the mysteries which surround us! |
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and Community: From Mesas to Gates to Galleries.... "I represent under-known artists, not unknown ones." Anita Shapolsky "Our work is a scream of freedom.” Christo Last month I did a little traveling. I began by going to Albuquerque, NM, then spent a day each in Buffalo and New York City. I visited the Pueblo Cultural Center in New Mexico, and saw an exhibit of Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexico art at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo. While in New York, I walked through Christo's Gates and checked out the Armory Show on Park Avenue, where I saw an extraordinary painting by my favorite artist, Arshile Gorky. I ended my travels with a trip to the Opalka Gallery, which featured a show of New York Abstraction and a panel discussion...one of the panelists was Anita Shapolsky. So? There was a connection winding through it all. I had wanted to visit the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe; it was closed. But, I saw Georgia O'Keeffe's work at The Albright-Knox in Buffalo...where I expected to see Arshile Gorky's masterwork, The Liver is The Cock's Comb. For the first time I can recall, Gorky's painting was not on display. Yet, when I went to New York to see The Gates, I saw a number of works by Gorky on display at the Armory Exhibit. And, when I couldn't find a midtown gallery show of New York School Abstraction, I ended up seeing a number of the same artists' works in Albany at Opalka's exhibit entitled, "The New York School, Another Look". I could look on this as a series of broad coincidences and forget it; but, I can't. I was on a journey with some expectations attached. I didn't think about the expectations until they were unrealized, and then fulfilled in a series of unexpected ways. Each part of the journey was completed on the next leg, in the end knitting the disparate parts into a whole community of experiences. Fascinating. Part Two... I really do have to say something about Christo's Gates! The
installation stirred up quite a bit of conversation on
line and among our neighbors here in Troy. My neighbor Dana thought it
wasn't art at all. He saw it as Christo continuing self promotion
rather than creating true art. He's not alone in his opinion. I disagree; although ephemeral
(what art isn't?) the Gates transformed the public space, and the
experience of those who took a walk in the park to see
it. You listen to artists fighting with each other, competing to the death like gladiators, in order to see who is going to get into a show, who is going to make it, who isn’t: who is going to get a full-page ad and who is going to get a half-page. Then I think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go off somewhere and just do your work?" Howardena Pindell |
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Sketches
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Michael Gerrish • 159 1st Street • Troy, NY 12180 •
(518)266-0304 • mrg@whyart.com |
