MFA Programs

Hunter College:

• School is located in New York City (midtown).
• It is much less expensive, because it is a state college.
• Easy access many contemporary art galleries and museums.
• For me, being a part-time student is an advantage.
• After graduating, there are greater opportunities to teach at the undergraduate level in Hunter College or Columbia University.

Mason Gross School of Art:

• School is located in New Brunswick, NJ, which close to home (I have a family of my own).
• I speaking with a past post-graduate student, he chose Mason Gross School of Art for its teaching style. He did not need to specialize, so there was greater exposure to various departments.
• The tuition is low, since it is a state college.
• Working as a Teacher's Assistant, was a valuable experience and it greatly reduced his costs. This experience helped him to get a job teaching more easily.
• One concern is the college depends on state support, so state budget cuts could heavily effect the art programs.

California Institute of the Arts:

• The program develops a strong conceptual foundation in the arts.
• It is very difficult to be accepted, since they accept only 4 students per year.
• The school has a personality of its own, very "Californian," and the teaching style is also different than most east coast schools.
• Once establishing an area of concentration, you are discouraged to change areas of concentration.
• Noted for it art theory classes and instruction. The school is known for music and performance arts.

Yale University:

• It is still difficult to get in, even though 12 to 15 graduate students are accepted each year.
• Each art depatment has its own building, so there is a feeling of isolation to each field of concentration.
• The critques are known to be brutal, there is a great amount of pressure on the students. It leaves the students emotionally drained, but they are stronger.
• Even in the graduate studies, the atomosphere is very competitive.
  

University of the Arts:

• The school is located in Philadelpia, PA. I am familiar with the school, since I was a part-time student there for a few years.
• Philadelphia has many of the advantages as New York is for the art student. There are a number of other art schools, in addition to the galleries and museums.
• The University of the Arts has a renowned glassblowing studio (one of my interests). Additionaly, there is a good sculpture and ceramics studio.

Oct. 17, 2009 Visit to Montclair Art Museum

Cezanne and American Modernism

A recent exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum tried to make connections of Cezanne's art and the American modern art movement. I was fortunate enough to be able to see last Winter, another exhibit about Cezanne at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It had a similar goal of showing Cezanne's influence on modern and contemporary art in general.

The French painter, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) transitioned from the late nineteenth century impressionism to the twentieth century modern art. Paul Cezanne was friends with several French impressionists, but he mostly worked on his own. Most close to his inspiration was the land in southern France, particularly around Aix-en-Provence.

The painting, "Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry, 1897" was of particular interest to me. The composition of natural forms and the emotional qualities of color was immediately striking to me. "In the early 1880's Cezanne began his exploration of Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix with a series of studies and oils that depicted the mountain rising above the immense valley of the Arc River....complex rock formations dominate the foreground, while the distinctive silhouette of the mountain looms large in the distance. The painting appears to have been produced in intense summer light, when the deep orange of the sandstone cliffs contrast greatly with the dark green of the trees and the purple-blue sky. Mont Sainte-Victoire continued to motivate Cezanne until the end of his career, inspiring more than two-hundred compositions by 1906.

by Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the

Bibemus Quarry, 1897

Marsden Hartley, the American painter-critic, probably never met Paul Cezanne. He may have been first introduced to the works of Cezanne at the Stein's salon in Paris. For Hartley, "who wished to be liberated from the restrictions of their outmoded, academic educations, Cezanne was a challenging beacon of modernity and unhampered self-expression....Cezanne was also a significant model for the synthesis of dualities of form and color, the objective and the subjective, matter and spirit, and abstraction and representation, as he had fused intuition and intellect to achieve the logic of organized sensations."

In September 1926, Hartley, following in the footsteps of Cezanne, moved to the same chateau that Cezanne had lived in when he studied Mont Sainte-Victoire in the late 1880's. He drew and painted the mountain over and over again . Basing his series on Cezanne's depiction of the mountain seen from the Bibemus Quarry, Hartley felt and understood the sense of peace that Cezanne must have experienced. Hartley created a more condensed, highly contrasted image out of rougher, more vibrantly colored brushstrokes, which suggested the impact of more recent modern art developments such as the works of Henri Matisse or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

by Marsen Hartley, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1927

When I look at Hartley's paintings the colors are exciting and vibrant, a little different from the colors used by Cezanne. The yellows were accented by adding other colors on top of it. This made it more dramatic and contrasting in style. He painted the strong Mediterrean light and the sculptural massing of landscape forms. I like what he says, " I belong naturally to the Emerson-Thoreau tradition and I know that too well. It is my native substance." This was Hartley's first and enduring source of inspiration. "Emerson championed direct encounters with verdant nature as the optimal source for spiritual revelation and artistic stimulation. Cezanne also advocated developing oneself and one's art through sustained contact with nature."

by Marsden Hartley, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1927

"Cezanne was lauded as an iconoclast loner, an artist who focused on a self-defined achievement rather than public acclaim. Cezanne proved to be a very potent source of artistic sustenance for this American modern artist."

Memorable quotes by Cezanne:

"Perhaps I came too soon. I was a painter of your generation more than my own... You are young, you have vitality, you will imbue your art with a force that only those with true feelings can manage. As for me, I'm old. I won't have time to express myself....The reading of a model and its realization are sometimes very slow in coming." I feel that Cezanne is talking directly to me!

"We must again become classicists by way of nature, that is to say, by sensation....I am old, and it is possible I shall die without having attained that great end." I am afraid of this ending, too.

"My age and my health will never allow me to realize the artistic dream I have pursued throughout my entire life. However, I shall always be grateful to the group of intelligent art lovers who have... sensed what I was trying to do to renew my art... one does not replace the past, one only adds a further link to it."

Chapter 3 in the Seven Days in the Art World

The Fair


Each June the most important contemporary art fair opens in Basel, Switzerland. I was fortunate enough to go the the 2009 Armory Show in New York. This is the only reference I can compare with Art Basel, when reading the chapter: The Fair. The Armory Show was at Pier 94, exhibiting new art by living artists, and Pier 92, exhibiting modern and contemporary art.


The exhibition hall for Art Basel is described as a black glass box on the outside, with a clear-glass circular courtyard on the inside. Three hundred gallery stands are split between two floors, each arranged in two concentric squares. The ceilings are high, and the walls are sturdy enough to support the heaviest works. Most importantly, the artificial lighting is clean and white.


At the Armory Show, the ceilings were very high, and the walls were only high enough the display the art works and to isolate each gallery space. As described for Art Basel, the lighting was bright, but not distracting or glaring, and it was white. Most of the time, I had spent at Pier 94 (with approximately 185 galleries), since the first time at the Armory Show, I wanted to see the "marque" artists. The time I spent at Pier 92 (with approximately 85 galleries) was still inspiring. So, this year (March 2010) I hope to spend more time seeing the exhibits of new art by living artists. There were a fair number of galleries from outside countries.

I did not realize from the Armory Show, but it seems clear in the "The Fair" that it is important for galleries to be represented at Art Basel. From the admission committee "The fair is significant from a prestige point of view. If a gallery is not admitted, people might think that it is not as important as another gallery that is." From the New York Times article (October 17, 2009), the Frieze Art Fair in London, England was well attended. Because of the economy, 28 dealers dropped out of this year's fair. But, there was no trouble replacing them. In fact, this year they had more exhibitors (164 exhibitors compared with 151 in the previous year).

For galleries and dealers, they view their primary role as choosing, mentoring, and curating their artists. Collectors may come and go, but a strong stable of artists with developing careers is essential to a gallery's success. Artists tend to view art fairs with a mixture of horror, alienation, and amusement. They feel uneasy when all the hard work of the studio is reduced to supplying the voracious demand, and they wince at the sight of so much art accompanied by so little substantive conversation. As explained by John Baldessari, "At fairs, gallerists are reduced to merchants, a role in which they'd rather not be seen by their artists."

But, Paul Schimmel comments on Takashi Murakami in the chapter, "The Studio Visit", "To experience Takashi, you have to experience the commercial elements in his work." "Takashi understands that art has to be remembered and memory is tied to what you can take home." I wonder if Takashi Murakami goes to the art fairs and whether he enjoys it?

Don and Mera Rubell responded to Sarah Thornton, "We meet the vast majority of artists, because when you're acquiring young work, you can't judge it by the art alone. You have to judge it by the character of the person making it." "Occasionally meeting an artist destroys the art. You almost don't trust it. You think what you're seeing in the work is an accident." "What we're looking for is integrity."

Oct. 11, 2009 Exhibit by Albert Paley

I attended the Albert Paley opening reception at the Grounds for Sculpture on October 10th, 2009 and on October 11th for the lecture by the artist.

Albert Paley is an American modern sculptor, renowned for his monumental metal sculptures. He has worked as a jeweler and a goldsmith. He challenges metals of all types to go beyond the rigid structures, that it usually represents, and to fashion more organic forms. His skills are grounded in working with metals in a super-heated state, where they are more plastic. He is able to manipulate the metals into more natural forms. This is one paradox, which he creates within his sculptures of rigid forms juxtaposed with more organic forms.

Albert Paley is very meticulous about the monumental sculptures and how it relates to the environment. This may be in the natural setting or in the architectural spaces where the sculpture is located. His other important consideration, is how the people viewing the sculpture will interact with it. Will the pedestrians walk around it ,or will they be allowed to walk through it, or will they be only able to view it from across the street?

The recent request from him was to erect a "gate" for a zoo. He was asked to place figurative elements representing animals, trees, and flowers in the massive sculpture. Models were built of the "gate" and each of the figurative elements individually. New skills were developed to form all of these elements.

"Drawing is very intimate. You focus all your energy on seeing something and understanding every element; it's a kind of hyper-realization." Albert Paley started drawing early on in his career, beginning at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He was interested in nature, in particular the forms exhibited in the natural environment. These images would some day work itself into the organic elements in his sculptures.

Most recently, Albert Paley has created large metal sculptures from the discarded materials from his previous work and from what is left-over at his source for iron and steel (from other projects). He may juxtapose steel "I-beams" with left-over steel cylinders and remains of cut-out sheets of steel.

I am a sculptor. I have used recycled steel for my sculptures. Skills were needed to bend steel rods and curved steel sheets. I am familiar with some types of welding, but I could learn a lot about the welding done by Albert Paley. This was an exciting weekend for me at the Grounds for Sculpture.

Quotes by Albert Paley:

"The sculpture is quite different from the actual animals. My intent was not to do a naturalistic rendition. Then you just cast an animal. With this there was an interpretive quality as well. Why should people experience anything? Why do we do what we do? Those questions are important."

"What I was dealing with was complexity and interlacing and interrelationship and - I just perceive things incredibly complex and I have all the skills and disciplines - that was evident in the metal, plus the demands of thinking, the demands of control, the demands of process and material."

"All my other work is abstract, non-literal. This time I was using technology to create a visual, literal vocabulary. You cut a piece of steel and it has an edge, but if you cut it a certain way it can look like fur or feathers. Serpentine forms become a snake weaving through a jungle or fish swimming in the ocean."

Chapter 6 in the Seven Days in the Art World

The Studio Visit

A group consisting of Paul Shimmel, Blum & Poe, and Sarah Thornton visited Takashi Murakami's studio in Japan. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is putting on a solo retrospective of Murakami's work. Paul Shimmel is the curator.

A studio is supposed to be a site of intense contemplation. Murakami does not have a preferred thinking space or somewhere that he feels is the heart of his studio. He is always thinking of his work, whether it is at home, at the studio, or at the airport.

Paul Schimmel says, "Takashi's masterpieces are unimaginably challenging, he has put gazillions of hours and beyond reasonable intelligence into his work. His intent is to make something for all ages, and you can see it."

Murakami wants, "I am thinking a lot about how to connect with people who are under thirty in Japan. I have to communicate with a video game feeling." So, for the retrospective, he is creating "Oval Buddha."

As Sarah Thornton departed at the end of the day, Murakami tells her, "I threw out my general life, so that I can make a concentration for my job. You maybe expecting more romantic story?" I believe this is the choice that artists make, they have to make a compromise for their career.

According to Paul Schimmel, "To experience Takashi you have to experience the commercial elements in his work." "Takashi understands that art has to be remembered and memory is tied to what you can take home."

Question: What is the difference between art and design?