Art for Community Expression, Enduring in Columbus

Art for Community Expression has mounted over 200 art shows in Columbus since it was founded in 1979 to assist African American artists develop and show their work, and to raise funds for trips to Africa. ACE's membership places self-taught and naive artists shoulder-by-shoulder with those trained in art schools and universities. The non-profit is an exemplary community cultural institution and a model of mutuality. It provides professional mentoring as well as social inspiration and support. 

April Sunami, Pensive One, detail. Mixed media, 10 x 8."

Pepper Johnson curated the current show, just opened at the ROY G BIV Gallery. Works by Kojo Kamau and Queen Brooks, two of the founding members, are included. So are pieces by Vivian Pittman and her mother, Barbara Thomas, two who have also been long prominent in the ACE community. Among the names of Columbus legends, though, are plenty of artists who have come to ACE at different points throughout its thirty-four year course.

April Sunami's tiny mixed media painting, Pensive One, seems a fitting emblem for the whole show. Against a background of gray tones, and outfitted in the same foggy shades, an alert young woman's head explodes with masses of color and texture. This is more than an afro hair style. It's blooming imagination, ideas, and promise—what takes one away from gray space. The  girl won't be pensive for long. She can maintain her stillness only so long before the tempest will propel her to a colorful place. She's the spirit of this show, the symbol of the need to express oneself through art. To turn oneself inside out to do it.

Karl Francis, Untitled #1. Black and white photograph, 14 x 11." Image
courtesy of the artist.

I liked Karl Francis's untitled photograph both for itself and for the contrast it made with Sunami's pensive girl, dreaming her actions. Francis's break dancing boy has  entirely exerted himself in body and passion.  He has created a situation virtually the opposite of the girl's. In his world, he is fully alive in his motions in the middle of a dance floor, while, all around him, people stare into the distance, check their telephones and appear too lazy even to maintain themselves standing erect. It's a great image of caring, engagement, and indomitability.

Bruce Robinson also models commitment and consequences in his wall-mounted wood cut- out, Pressure Points. Sawed from pressed plywood, Robinson's industrial material and the graphic boldness the design of his colors heat up the classical pose: A man bears his wounded brother to likely death. Under one foot of the rocker on which he balances is the word "Nature;" "Nurture" is under the other. The tattoo on his arm reads "NO MAS." A handgun fills the red "O."

Bruce Robinson, Pressure Points, oil and plywood,
52 x 35 x 1."

I love Robinson's blending of the urban and classical in this piece. The figures are placed in the pieta configuration, which reinforces the individuality and humanity of those shot and killed in the city. The artist has made a protest piece all the more potent because of its great heart and spirituality. Furthermore, he has made a work that is aesthetically fine. As composition, this is a satisfying study in line and color, in tension and relaxation as he ties, knots, and untangles limbs, lines, and colors from one another.

While April Sunami's mental dreamscape sets the stage for this show's thread about thought and action, it also suggests the strong motif of the lyrical that is so refreshing here. While there is plenty of work to remind us of racial and social issues, there is much that reminds us why hearts sing too.

Barbara Thomas, Eagle in the City, watercolor on canvas, 36 x 30."

 Barbara Thomas's Eagle in the City suggests that urban strength, order, and justice can prevail. The mighty eagle, poised before the flag that occupies a huge amount of literal and symbolic space,  reassures us. It's an avenging protector: a mighty angel with a sword of wrath; a righteous hero with super powers. 

Thomas paints in watercolors, not often seen on canvas this size. There is a washy appearance to the painting that is strangely complementary to the image of the mighty bird. The world protected strikes me as a city of pastel tranquility, to be kept that way. Its relationship to a city where Robinson's tragedy can occur feels almost impossible. Perhaps the eagle here is more to a guardian who prevents the marauders from coming to despoil a peaceful urban neighborhood in the first place.

Florstine Yancy-Jones, The Flower Garden, acrylic on canvas.

In a folkloric vein, Florstine Yancy-Jones presents an irresistible Flower Garden in which every flower bed blooms in happy simultaneity, all beneath a sky that reflects the floral palette below. This painting offers all the joy of work so literal that it cannot begin to represent what it takes such pains to imitate. What the artist gives us though, is so much better than reality: colors more saturated, details focused beyond the capability of the human eye to pick out, and a compositional perfection that fades when we awaken from the sweetest of dreams. 

Heath Allen Woodruff, Birds on the Mountain, mixed media, 24 x 20."

At every show I go to, though, I always ask myself—or a companion, to start a good discussion—which piece I would take home if I could. In this year's ACE show, I'd take the most colorful and ebullient of all, a painted wooden wall hanging by Heath Allen Woodruff, an artist until this moment unknown to me. 

The work is glossy, bright, and child-like. It is based on the sort of literalness that is endearing yet reassuring: The grass grows underneath the mountains that rise into the sky; the trees grow from the mountains and the birds sit on their boughs. It represents a known world in which everything is both literally and symbolically ordered. There is no imaginable way to go wrong. God is in His heaven and all is right with the world.

In this work, the natural order is expressive of human moods. The mountains are as happy as people with flower arms; with as many arms as it takes to express riotous joy over perhaps the color itself in life. 

Even to accept the mountains as mountains is to cheat ourselves of all the life contained in this piece. The extensive decoration of the forms could be read as fancy textiles with embroidered circles—fantastical burqas.  The "mountains" could be cities, or far-out apartment buildings in an ebullient society in a peaceful world.

The ACE show will remain at ROY G BIV through July 27. It's very rare to find a show like this because there are so few institutions like Art for Community Expression, which hold their arms wide open to anyone who defines him/herself as one who needs or wants to be an artist. Artists are people who  feel compelled to make art.

To anyone for whom art-making is a motive, goal, or aid, the rest of us can only offer applause. Criticism in the sense of aesthetic judgment is rarely of any value to any artist happy in and conscientious about her or his job. 

This is something I admire vastly about ACE as an organization. Making art is always a good thing, and ACE always pitches in to encourage anyone who wants to do it. So, in this democratic-minded organization, whose work gets in the juried show? The work with something to say that says it clearly and with conviction. At least, you see a lot of that in this show.

In the Muranese Fashion: New Glass from Mattia and Marco Salvadore

Current work by Mattia and Marco Salvardore of
 StudioSalvadore, at the Sherrie Gallerie
 in Columbus, through July 31, 2013.

In March of 2012, I was introduced to the astonishing work of Muranese master glass artist Davide Salvadore at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus. This summer, Sherrie Hawk is showing work from his sons, Mattia and Marco, who work cooperatively at their Studio Salvadore in Murano. Murano is the traditional island site of Venetian glass works, where today's techniques have continuously developed since the 16th century.

The Salvadore brothers' sculptures capture color and light, transferring to them the molten look their medium once had, when it emerged super-heated from the kiln. The artists concentrate on a few forms—simple, graceful elliptical shapes ideal for framing the layered currents of color that swim through their depths.

Those colors are, in fact, one of the first things that caught my eye as I looked through the room toward the large front window, the natural source of illumination for all the work. The palettes are fresh and, above all, struck me as young. Young: as in springlike (leaf green, sky blue, buttercup yellow), but also as in hip. 

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 13. 
Blown and carved glass.

A signature of Studio Salvadore is swathes of color encased in transparent glass with large murrine applied on the surface. Murrine are the slices from canes the glassmaker forms for this purpose. Disks cut from the canes will make beautiful, circular decorations, all alike—like filled cookies cut from a roll. The Salvadores apply murrine at the end of the glassblowing process, so they sit boldly on the surface of the vessel. The small variations in size have to do with distortions consequent on working with high temperature materials.

Detail of murrine on Opera 13

The application of murrine is not the last step of decoration. Once the piece is entirely cool, then its surface is carved. This step is yet another opportunity for the worker to make the slip that would destroy so labor- and technique-intensive a work of art. These pieces are highly vulnerable to error and serendipity at every step of the process. They requires the artist's confident and unerring hand at all stages, from super-heated fluid to rock-like solid. I wonder how many pieces like the ones in this show are attempted for each one realized?

I'll return to my perception of the youthful air about Studio Salvadore's work. Fashionable is the word that actually describes the feeling I have about this body of work. The fact that nearly all of the work is similar in size, shape, and distinctive motif brings to mind an up-to-the-minute, fresh fashion collection presented on the elegant curves of uniform models. The colors and their satiny flourishes within the vessels give the air of draped or folded fabrics. This effect is spectacularly enhanced by the details of carving. In Opera 13, the horizontal surface waves atop the lime green give the effect of a pleated, silken sash. 

Opera 5 is the most translucent piece in the Sherrie show. Its swirling, interlocked patterns of

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 5. 
Blown and carved glass.

carved surface designs respond to the movement and shapes of the color designs. On top of the simpler areas of pale violet, though, the carving gives the feeling that quilting stitches do on fabric. The effect is not that we necessarily focus on the troughs left where glass has been excised. Rather, their edges define soft spaces in the way that quilting stitches define and gently gather tiny pouches of fabric. I see that this is similar to the effect of stitchery on fine, sheer fabric. Not only does the extra surface detail add the beauty of subtle design, but it piques with the illusion of transparency. Perhaps we could see through this were it not for those marks? There is a seductive element created by the intersection of translucence and the fine shadowy marking of the carved or stitched lines. 

Opera 5 is high fashion in its sensuous, seductive use of color and pattern; design elements subtle and bold; and materials the hand can barely resist caressing. It has the sex appeal that makes you want to get closer, and the attitude of couture that enforces distance as part of its allure.

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 8. 
Blown and carved glass.

Gazing at this beautiful show, then, from the back of the room, is like enjoying the pages of Italian Vogue, or enjoying a Fashion Week party in Milan, Paris, or New York. It is fresh, beautiful, new, and exciting. A wonderful show of exquisite glass!

I mention a vantage point from the back of the room not only for the view into the dazzling grouping of Studio Salvadore glass, but also because there sit on display three pieces remaining from the elder Salvadore's spring 2012  Sherrie Gallerie show.

At the time, I was disconcerted by Davide Salvadore's show because very little of his work looked like glass. His works tend to have matte surfaces which, while minutely and brilliantly decorated, nevertheless appear to be made of inlaid wood or leather. His forms, too, are unconventional, having the appearances of imagined musical instruments or dreamed "ancient" vessels. If the sons' sculptures are sleek,  young, and stylish, the father's seem almost curmudgeonly in their astonishingly wrought singularity.

Davide Salvadore, detail.
Blown and carved glass.

Mattia and Marco learned their art in their father's studio, Campanol e Salvadore, when they were boys. Both have worked with other masters since, both in Murano and at the famous Pilchuck School in Washington state. It is still clear that their father's influence is deep, being on the surface of the work shown here.

Exquisite glass carving is clearly a shared characteristic. Because the sons are more interested in allowing light to travel through their glass, they use carving almost as another color element, or as an enhancement to the directional flow of color. Because Davide's presentations are nearly always opaque, carving is exterior enhancement. He uses it more architecturally than his sons do.

Both generations apply murrine to the exteriors of their works rather than incorporating it into the hot glass. What different expressions result from the same technique though. The detail from Davide's fantastical instrument shows tightly focused murrine placed in double pairs for an almost classical look. This couldn't be more different from the sons' large, loose, urban tribal tattoos.

Davide Salvadore. Blown and carved
glass.

Sherrie's show of Mattia and Marco Salvadore glass provides a heavenly hour for any person with eyes to see. It is a trip to Paradise. That such pure sensual gratification is generated by so technique-heavy, physically demanding an art form is breathtaking, even as a concept. For the Salvadore brothers to bring us such light and elegant work is most artful indeed.

But their show is enriched for all of us by the three pieces of their father's that remain in the wings. Davide Salvadore's work seems to come from a different planet—the planet perhaps farthest away from youth: Age. The complex uncompromisingness of the elder's work; its depth of concept and design; the visionary quality to his use of materials: All this hearkens to experience with glass and with life too. The strange formality of his work lends a darkness to them that appeals to me. They are not only wonders of process and aesthetics, but repositories of experiences I don't have to know to connect to.

Not that this isn't true for the work from Studio Salvadore. But I am older now. I love beauty, color, youth and fashion. I love especially what I know will continue to sustain me, and I turn to art for this. I embrace especially work that I have to think about before I fall in love with it—the odd or rough, the characteristic, troubling, or off-kilter. Often I find that works with these qualities keep me coming back because they always have more to offer. I may not always "like" them, but I always have a conversation with them about something important. Those conversations may change from month to month, but they don't stop. It doesn't hurt if the works are beautiful, but they don't have to be. They have to keep talking and challenging, though. And they have to bear the deep, indelible mark of their individual maker.

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All photography by the author, with thanks to the Sherrie Gallerie.

"Photography's Back to the Future"

Garie Waltzer, Tokyo: Hanayaski Amusement Park, 2008.
Printed with archival pigmented carbon inks on Hanemuhle photo rag paper.

Catherine Evans, the William and Sara Soter Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art, has curated a breathtaking show for the Ohio Arts Council at their Riffe Gallery in Columbus. Photography's Back to the Future presents bodies of work by ten exceptional artists who use their cameras to transport us past documentation of reality. In the images these ten bring us, microcosms and galaxies hitherto beyond our focus or dreams lie before us. It's a show that made me catch my breath over and over in surprise and wonder as I reacted to the beauty, mystery, and acuity of ten distinguished visions.

Every photographer in the show dazzles with striking image, unusual  technique, or stunning point of view, so let me name them all: Amanda Hope Cook and Dennison W. Griffith, both of Columbus; Lori Kella of Cleveland; Tracy Longley-Cook, Francis Schanberger, Janelle Young, and Christine Zuercher of Dayton; Rachel Girard Reisert and Jordan Tate of Cincinnati; and Garie Waltzer of Cleveland Heights.

Garie Waltzer, Eiffel Tower Plaza, 2005. Printed with archival
pigmented carbon inks on Hanemuhle photo rag paper.

Four of my favorites demonstrate that however I wish that I understood the many different technical forms of photography, I am at least not blind to the beauties of the work that results from them. As in print-making and multi-media art, my experience would probably be enhanced by understanding each artist's techniques and innovations. Yet these ultimately matter to the extent that they serve the ends of the work and its essential communication about the human issues—which bring me to art in the first place.

I led this review with one of Garie Waltzer's entirely absorbing, deeply layered images from her Living Cities series. In each of the huge, black and white, perfectly-focused photographs, taken in cities around the world, Waltzer shoots from a position so neutral and narrative—all-seeing and inescapable—that we feel the satisfaction we find in a nineteenth-century novel. The camera is situated at a spot of high, distant authority that permits us to roam with freedom through the  minutely documented world. Seeing the world through her image is unquestionably better than being part of it, where we would be reduced to insignificant participation with an insignificant consciousness.

Garie Waltzer, Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha, 2010. Printed with archival pigmented carbon inks on Hanemuhle photo rag paper.

Waltzer captures the essence of the city's interlocking series of macro- and microcosms. Her lens composes and frames a whole world, even though the background mountains, the shadow, or the park fences tell us that it is merely a slice of a city's life. Yet within this microcosm, we see the defining architecture and infrastructure and we can watch the movement and the expressions of the people moving through it. The depth and clarity of focus is uncanny. In Rio, we can see all the way back to the houses against the mountainside; in Tokyo, we admire the planning that fashions from a tiny piece of ground a sufficient "Disneyland" for hundreds of pleasure-seekers. No individual's delight is left ambiguous: All the facts are laid bare in Waltzer's living cities, where all the scenes, so beautifully composed, are just as her camera finds them.

Janelle Young, from Atlas series, 2012. Silver gelatin print.

Janelle Young documents in her 2012 Atlas series living worlds as ambiguous as Waltzer's are defined. Her camera may be focused on views of Earth from Mars, or on dew drops through microscopes. The reality content of her work is merely the stage upon which the viewer's dreams emerge and play what roles they will. The allure of her work for me is that I find myself sometimes the principal inhabitant of her odd landscapes and at other times a distant surveyor of far-away, misty and mystical scenes—the sorts of places that suggest the challenges that determine destiny. A remarkable thing about the pictures, then, is that the images are so plastic in terms of interpretation, while being formally so stable.

Janelle Young, from Atlas series, 2012. Silver gelatin print.

In the photograph to the left, one can even compare the camera angle to those Waltzer chooses in her cityscapes. We feel that we are high above a world laid out below us. Is it a city whose airport we approach? Or the the foothills that will lead us from our mountaintop to the moors? Perhaps it is the dream of Death's distant horizon, with its edges curving in to embrace us; or the setting moon that leads us to from this vague life to a glowing final place? 

The image to the right can lead all sorts of sensibilities into meaningful narratives and reflections. Interpret this through, time, space, delight, fear, Nature, spirit, religion, philosophy, the creative urge: The potential narratives are, in Young's suggestive visual definition, as great in number as Waltzer's in their clarity. Yet, like Waltzer, Young's mastery of her medium is at the highest level. In neither of these images is there a moment out of place. Allowing one's eye to shuttle slowly across every area of the surface, we find nothing even close to being "out of focus." Young has carefully chosen the degree of edge for every episode of the print: This is tour de force work.

Lori Kella, Majestic Effort.

Landscape is also the territory of Lori Kella, who handcrafts vistas to photograph. Her constructions are in the vein of traditional museum dioramas, in which scenes are set as background on which model humans or wildlife display their habits or dramas. Her work disconcerts viewers new to it. Its colors are vivid and the effects she creates do not at first glance appear to be modeled by hand: Of course they are photographs of real places and events! It is only after puzzled scrutiny that we discover the artifice. We experience her work in waves, each bringing a new swell of delight and surprise.

What finally clues the viewer in to the artificiality of Kella's work is its literal shallowness. Compared to the vistas we've seen in the literal and metaphorical landscapes of Waltzer and Young, Kella gives us horizons cut off by clouds, creating narrow, cosseted worlds for us to experience and examine. Though she often generates snowy and aerial scenes, even these are warm because the implied grand scale is closed off by cloudy skyline, looming mountains, or by trees. 

Lori Kella, White Paper Mountains, 2011.

In White Paper Mountains, the mountains rise abruptly from an even plain; a few small, cumulus clouds are suspended from a faintly glittering "invisible" wire. The helicopter in Majestic Effort is crudely painted, and its blades are seen individually, not as the blur that would appear if they were rotating.

The notes to Kella's work in the show remind us that her work, though whimsical, is serious, having to do with preservation of landscape, and being artistically related to the work of Ansel Adams and other great American landscape artists. No doubt all of this is true, but it is definitely the whimsical that most affects me in her work, for it removes me to an age when the world could be literally modeled for train sets and doll houses, and when our youthful minds inhabited them fully. As my brothers' O-gauge train chugged down its track between its minor scenery of water tower, general store and a few flaky trees, it shoved every other possible reality from mind. 

Kella's photography proves that the imaginary can be as discernibly real as reality. Photography is traditionally the documentary medium. It witnesses, defines, and proves. In Kella's work, personal worlds, the worlds we dream about—or the secret, fantasy ones in which we in fact mentally operate daily—are validated and proven real by the fact-finding camera.  

Rachel Girard Reisert, Tropism #8, Toned cyanotype prints on Arches Platine paper, 55 3/4” x 21 1/4.”

Rachel Girard Reisert's handsome series, Tropism, is another highlight of this wonderful show. Each triptych features one or more trees in three parts, which the viewer cannot fail to associate. I find them impossible not to understand as gestural, every springing branch (even the severed one in Tropism #8) an invitation to and anticipation of life beyond.


A tropism, for those of us who have forgotten, is an organism's tendency to orient itself by growth on some external stimulus. Phototropism is the apparent tendency of plants to grow toward light (though the light actually damages the side closest to it, allowing the farther side to grow faster, thus bending the plant "toward" the light. Stay tuned.)

Reisert works close-up, giving us studies not only in gesture, but in surface as well. These tree are portraits in the manner of figure studies, such care Reisert takes lovingly to detail the particularity of each. In Tropism #8, I feel myself granted a privileged, intimate view of an ancient elder, whose folded, mottled, and stringy skin is the displayed history of his long life. The point of view, up the trunk, pays homage to the subject, whose complexity is expressed through three views that suggest his roundness of character and vision, on top of his longevity. Is the outward gesture the tropism? Is the gesture promoting or crippling the aging tree?

Rachel Girard Reisert, Tropism #9, Toned cyanotype prints on Arches Platine paper, 55 3/4” x 21 1/4.”

As we look up into the triptych of Tropism #9, we see the branches of the central, dead figure gesture on the right directly into blooming spring branches (perhaps photographed with infrared film? I'm not certain). On the left, an abundant vine graciously entwines with dead twigs. The clean spareness of these images, along with the lilting composition reaffirms the hopeful messages of dignity and renewal that Reisert finds in nature's life cycles and seasonal cycles both. 

Reisert's focus on age in nature is particularly interesting throughout this series of work, as longevity's values of durability, texture, grace, and generosity seem to be in general cultural disfavor at the moment. Reisert's exploration of time through these studies is not only visually beautiful, but excellent for the quiet pace her triptych technique imposes. She invites our not only our inspection, but our reflection as well.

Photography's Back to the Future will be open at the Riffe Center Gallery through July 7. I'm able to cover only a few of the wonders in it. I am embarrassed to use the term "must-see," so I'll just say that I wouldn't want to miss this show and hope my local readers will not.
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Photographs courtesy of the Riffe Gallery, Rachel Girard Reisert, and Garie Waltzer. 

Ohio Designer Craftsmen, "The Best of 2013"

Sharona Muir, Perrysburg, Ohio, Storm's Eye Ring. 
Wire, tool-dip, glass polychrome

The Ohio Craft Museum in Columbus is hosting the annual membership awards show of Ohio Designer Craftsmen through June 23. In viewer's terms, the show has something for everyone, though that's how crafts shows tend to be. While jurors—Michael W. Monroe, Director Emeritus of the Bellevue Arts Museum in Washington State in this case—can focus on materials, mastery, and innovation, viewers indulge themselves in the decorative, droll, or too often, the cute.

This show is full of admirable works from a broad range of goals and tastes; I'm reminded why crafts are often presented in fairs. Quilts and crystal; clay in forms from humble earthenware to shimmering raku; and pearls set in gold neighboring felted footstools are herein gathered in a small space. The crowded displays inevitably create odd backgrounds for anything one stops to admire, despite the obvious care that has been taken by the installer for rational presentations.

Mary L. Alexander, Hubbard, OH. Until 
Justice Rolls Down Like Waters II.
 Cotton, hand-dyed (shibori).

Craft has long been presented as the little sister of Art; crafts workers don't get the respect, they may believe, that fine artists do. I think that the art-vs-craft dichotomy lies in emotional limitations. In general, I find crafts less expressive of the deeper thoughts and preoccupations of human experience. Often crafts bring me simple pleasures, but not the sort that stimulate my deeper thoughts or that induce reflection. But that's fine too.

Mary Alexander of Hubbard, Ohio shows two beautiful quilts. Both are formally composed of long rectangles; their composition creates a monumental effect that is softened by the use of light-dappled batik fabrics. They are hand- quilted in narrow, vertical bands. Like all the quilts in the show, they are art quilts—hangings that in her case, would fill a space serenely.

As much as I like the quilt pictured, I cringe at its title, Until Justice Rolls Down Like Waters. The image of falling waters is clear, but it is difficult for me to derive from the quilt's medium, colors, construction, or pattern what only its title points to: that it in some way embodies the mighty, inevitable movement of justice. The artifact is light, lovely, and pleases the eye in ways that carry no such weight of concept.

This certain aspirational misfit is a crafts tendency represented by a number of works in this show: Either the artists has chosen the wrong medium for a powerful concept; or (s)he has attempted to add pomp to a piece unable to communicate in the haughty vernacular its weighty name suggests it should.

One of the quilts, with the simple name of Mickey was unusual in every way, though: Fine quilting and fabric enhance what would be an intriguing image in paint, mixed media, or as a print. Mary Ann Tipple's seems to have found the perfect medium, though, in fabric and needlework. 

Mary Ann Tipple, Elyria, OH. Mickey. Fabric, thread.

Star- or future-gazing, Mickey, portrayed as two related, psychically communicating selves, is ethereal and moon-lit against the rich, deep night of the blue background. The red quilted blocks suggest a scientific grid against which some meaning system can be charted, while the black and silver blocks, the red and white stripes suggest antic and partial occurrences contrary to implied plan. Inspired, bearded, rakishly capped Mickey seems tuned in to a universe of un-phased planets that never set. Tipples scene is mysterious, open, evocative, and fun. That it is a quilt adds plenty to the work. The patterns of stitchery in the two Mickeys distinguish them from one another, especially in the definition of the faces, one of which is more curved and free in pattern than the other. The texture produced by the careful quilting is  down-to-earth, tactile and very relatable. There is indeed a "homespun" feel that grounds this otherworldly image, suggesting how real and human it is to release the imagination and the to explore through science and fantasy the farthest reaches of the unknown. Here is the prospect of the far-out, speculative future, presented as a natural extension of the creative urge that moves even women gathered to ply ancient, traditional needle crafts.

Katie Schutte, Akron, OH. Sabedilla Motif Collar. Wire, powder coat.

The category of work in The Best of 2013 that struck as most consistently excellent in presentation and informed by interesting concepts was the jewelry. One tends to think of jewelry as existing to reflect the wearer's beauty; to add visual or literal value to the wearer; to enhance femininity (in most cases). Here were several excellent items that were not only exquisite in craftsmanship, but which question or subverted one's assumptions for the purposes of jewelry in the first place. 

Katie Schutte's Sabedilla Motif Collar is a large, spiky thing one would settle about one's throat with particular care. We can only assume that the powder coat is permanently affixed and is not in fact powder of the sabadilla plant, a South American lilly widely used as a botanical insecticide. It is as toxic to humans as to weevils. Everything about this ornament looks uncomfortable: the individual wire loops at the end of each "bulb" would have to be irritating to bare skin. Think about positioning the collar for a balance that allowed the wearer to carry the chin and shoulders naturally, or that allowed unencumbered movement of the head from side to side. It would be a continuous challenge that might make the wearer perceive time to pass slowly. 

Shawn Lopez, Bowling Green, Ohio, Honey Locust.
White bronz, copper, leather.

The wearer's movement isn't the only issue with such an ornament though: The wearer is thinking of its impact on the people who interact with her. How do people react to a person ornamented thus? Such jewelry creates a zone that both protects the wearer and will be taken as aggressive by others—concepts forever paired.

Honey locust thorns, 6" long

Those ideas of protection and aggression accrue equally to some other outstanding jewelry, in particular to Shawn Lopez's Honey Locust  and Emily Fruth's We Are the Church. Lopez's alarming collar cries out, "Punk!" and sets the gentle quilt- or plate-collector's pulse racing with the threat implied in this sensibility. It's title, though, leads, ironically, to the perception that the form copies nature, not weaponry either science fictional or medieval.

Mary Fruth's We Are the Church has its shock of irony as well, but it comes not from a reconsideration of punk, but of piety.
The aggressive defense of her equally exquisite collar derives from the soft, golden glow of protruding flying buttresses that bolster tall, pierced and pointed walls of a gothic church. The buttresses jut out from the wearer's throat, securing the house of God that surrounds the wearer's head. The same architecture, though, allows no one to get close to the wearer. Is she too holy to

Emily Fruth, Napolen, Ohio, We Are the Church. Brass

approach? Is this church only for the elect? Is the admirer too poor to purchase her way into it? The beauty, luxury, and exclusivity of this phenomenally crafted piece put it, along with Lopez's collar, into a very special zone of wearability married with complex concept: Both are pithy, sharp, and humorous.

Fruth, who won the show's Jane H. Zimmerman Award for Excellence in a Body of Work, also showed a show-stopping Chatelaine. In earlier generations, through the nineteenth century, European and American women carried chatelaines, in which they carried daily essentials, like scissors and keys. These were attached small chains that dangled in a bunch from the waist.

A chatelain

Fruth's elegant, traditionally formal interpretation of the chatelaine, is made for the contemporary woman. It does not pin to the dress, but has a broad hook on the back, so it can be hung over a belt or the waistband of trousers or blue jeans. She describes it as a "carrier for personal items such as cell phone, pepper spray, and kubaton," the latter being a small, pointed self-defense devise. It it beautifully crafted into an updated shape with only two chains, the formal emphasis being on two ovary-like curls that lead into the splendid uterus whence can nestle one's treasure, the cell phone.

Emily Fruth, Napoleon, Ohio, Chatelaine. Copper, enamel.

So, I was glad I went to the see the Ohio Designer Craftsmen's "The Best of 2013." There are inherent limitations on membership shows: They draw on a limited pool, and are therefore capped by the numbers and the ingenuity of the people in the group who decide to participate. This show, overall, demonstrates that drawback for the viewing public. Some of the work exemplifies high achievement of technique without demonstrating much imagination. But where it shines, it's a forum for some artists worth watching, whom I trust are showing much farther afield than here.

Ai Weiwei's Challenges and Questions

According to What? is a retrospective that covers twenty years of work in many media by the Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei. Organized by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, it is the first North American tour of his work, now showing in Indianapolis through July 21. 

Poster in the parking lot at the IMA. A larger one
faces the major intersection near the Museum gates.

Of Ai, more may be known about his story than his work: how he was surveilled by the Chinese police, attacked in the night and beaten to the point of a brain bleed as retribution for his efforts to document the names of the thousands of children killed in the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The government has never acknowledged that the schools that yielded immediately to the shocks were shoddily constructed death-traps for the children. Ai was later detained for several months on fabricated tax evasion charges. He became an international symbol for resistance against the Chinese government's attacks on human rights and freedom of expression. He is now the global symbol and spokesman for freedom of individual and artistic expression. 

Ai's personage was very familiar to me, although his work was not, so I went to this show with great anticipation of the work of the internationally recognized, influential, contemporary artist.

Had I really been looking for the work of "the most controversial artist in the world," I would have been sorely disappointed. As it was, I was deflated. The final work in the show is a documentary film, "So Sorry," made from footage shot by the artist's colleagues and friends, which chronicles Ai's conflicts with Chinese authorities: We witness the political controversies that have made him a key figure in the cause of free expression. There is controversy, yes.

Elsewhere, however, his challenges to authority, mores, and history are almost stunningly jejune. As a viewer, I find myself empathizing with the high school art teacher who sighs over the work of yet another class of freedom-loving adolescents whose lifted fingers, voiced "fucks," or engaged spray cans make them strut with imagined revolutionary inventiveness. How many times has the teacher had to suffer this rite of passage?

Something like that is what I thought when I encountered, early in the show two photographs from Ai's Studies of Perspective series. Alluding in the title to the sketcher's use of an uplifted index finger for gauging spatial relationships, he substitutes the irreverent middle

Ai Weiwei, Study of Perspective, Tiananmen and Study of Perspective, White House, Inkjet prints, both 1995-2003. Courtesy of
Ai Weiwei Studio. Photograph by the author.

finger in a contemptuous and vulgar gesture toward these seats of government. Apparently these photographs are from a series of studies that include the Eiffel Tower and the Reichstag. Were the reductive, inarticulate gesture used in a rich context, there would be no reason for disappointment. But I find nothing beyond the obvious to raise these works beyond the status of one-off. What would incline me to look at them again? What would grow on me? I can't answer that question.

Similarly with a series of photographs that form one face of According to What? and, I believe, is thought to represent a controversial act. In the sequence, Ai drops a Han Dynasty urn, roughly 2,000 years old. Clearly, he doesn't even flinch as he performs as act we are
presumed to witness aghast. ("The steely terrorist!" or, "The toddler in tantrum!" You choose.)

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995/2009. Image courtesy of the artist. Each photo, 75-3/8 x 70-7/8." Courtesy of the
Indianapolis Art Museum.

These photographs fill up a wall, so the images of Ai loom over the viewer. He is a menacing presence; the series has the feel of stills from a movie in which the assassin reveals to his next victim through visual metaphor, just how easily he can annihilate him or her. I feel no anxiety over the fate of the vase, because the images give us no information that suggests that it is remarkable. That it is ancient comes from a gallery note that gives the title and tells us when the Han period was. Whether an American's assumption that its age indicates high monetary value is not discussed: I just don't know. But I do know that visually, the vase is of secondary interest to the power of this large, fierce man. 

These photos are still, from the film of a performance. The point of the performance was, according to the catalogue (page 89), to be "a work of conceptual art that captures the moment when tradition is transformed and challenged by new values." The performance may well have achieved that.

But there is a chilly violence to this embodiment of the idea that new generations need to transform or challenge traditional values. Wasn't the Cultural Revolution about destroying them? I find this work disturbing. Either one can agree with notes that say it means what they assert it does; or one can look and see a threatening bully smashing a pot with no  appearance of concern for the significance of the vessel, the action, or the spectrum of interpretations.

Ai Weiwei, Colored Vases, 2007-2010. Han Dynasty vases
(206 BCE- 220 CE) and industrial paint. Photo by the author.

Ai uses more Han period vases in Colored Vases, an installation of just that, vases painted in colors of industrial paint so opaque and brilliant that they look like a display in the patio shop at Home Depot or Pier1. My eye makes little more of this aggregation than that: a collection of jolly pots useful for a casual, graphic sort of interior design.

Once more, it is only through external information that we learn that these have been transformed; that Ai painted them with industrial paint so that, if the note has any authority, "the vases challenge the viewer to consider questions about authenticity and the value and meaning of original artwork." If this is indeed so, why would he have to alter more than one to make the point?

Ai Weiwei, Colored Vases, 2007-2010. Image courtesy of the artist
 and courtesy of the Indianapolis Art Museum.

Without the gallery note, I would have no reason at all for the questions it suggests, since nothing about this installation leads me to think that I am dealing with an original artwork of any period, let alone any of historical note. The histories of the vases are entirely effaced. The altered vessels are simply mundane, which is deplorable as a message about challenging cultural values of the past. Again, I feel like Ai plays the naughty boy who has not thought very deeply about his simplistic actions. 

Ai's conceptual work seems to me either simplistic or so engaged with the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and with the Minimalist artists of the 1960s as to be of no unusual significance. There is certainly no controversial content, for he covers ground well-covered for decades.

His best work, though, is when he brings something that feels heart-felt to his conceptual and Minimalist—his very cerebral—forms. This may, in fact, account for my overall disappointment with his work. 

Politically, Ai is testy, aggressive, and histrionic. His modes of art-making, however, are hyper-rational, controlled and cool. While his work is all about culture, history, and to a lesser extent, politics, the personal doesn't so often appear. It is difficult to make personal connection with much of the work. 

Ai Weiwei, China Log, 2005. Tieli wood
(ironwood) from dismantled temples of the
Qing Dynasty (1644-1911.) Photo by the
author.

The art with warmth is work in which materials matter, not to be effaced, but to be revered and admired. Where Ai uses ancient ceramics only to destroy or deface them, he salvages and preserves antique and rare woods. Many works in the show were fabricated by master woodworkers out of ancient or rare woods, using historical joinery techniques.

China Log joins five ironwood beams from dismantled historical temples and joins them into a log, the cross-cut ends of which form gaps that describe the map of China. If there's a commentary about the relevance of the past, it seems to be that the history and culture define and secure the country's definition. The ancient wood is in color and texture well-named: It appears to be an unassailable material. The log, which one is urged not to touch, in fact is so sturdy and beautiful, that it appeared to me as beautiful place to rest and let one's hands enjoy the satiny finish of the wood.

As a commentary on China, I felt this a positive, even nostalgic work, about duration and durability; about its indelible presence in the mind of the artist. An amusing impression from my American childhood that further endeared this to me: Any holes we dug when we were little would eventually "lead to China" on the other side of the Earth. Here, at last, was the perfect fulfillment of the conviction I'd secretly cherished for so many years. I found a bit of myself in this as I was feeling something warm and contemplative coming from Ai.

Ai Weiwei, Kippe, 2006. Tieli wood (ironwood) from dismantled temples of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) and iron parallel bars. Photo by the author.

Ai's Kippe, too, was another work that stands out for its warmth, beauty, and personal qualities. Appearing to be an enormous pile of wood stacked for the fireplace or oven, it is packed perfectly tightly to form a flawless block. It incorporates architectural ornaments, mere splinters, and slices from cross-cuts of the beautiful ironwood trees. It forms a wall almost like  an oven glowing a steady heat. Who would need anything the woodpile itself does not give?

The notes connect the work to Ai's memories not only of the family's woodpile, but of the village basketball hoop (the uprights) and parallel bars, which are easily read into the structure. Is the success of this piece—its accessibility to the sensoriums and imaginations of others—a result of its genesis in Ai's lived experience?

Similarly, Ai's Teahouse thrilled me because I think of connections made through his use of charged materials. The house itself is a brown, Western style, boxy house without windows or doors, placed on a bare, flat yard of brown leaves. Every aspect of this installation is made of tea leaves—of Pu'er tea from Yunnan, fermented and aged. The house is composed of tightly compressed leaves; the floor is of scattered loose ones.

Ai Weiwei, Teahouse, 2011. Compressed and loose tea. Photo by the author.

Visually, this is certainly not representing the location for a traditional ceremony, or for a rite of any sort. It is a reinterpretation of a Minimalist style tableau in a new material, creating a punning title. What makes it special, though—and seems not to be commented on—is the fragrance of the tea. The area of the gallery surrounding the installation is saturated by the sweet, moist scent of tea that warms every aspect of the senses. The entire body responds to this work in a way it would be impossible to 

react to the same shapes made of a scent-neutral material. It's hard to believe that the aroma wasn't part of Ai's plan, that it wasn't his own escape route from the formal rigors of a discipline he's trapped himself in?

Ai Weiwei, Grapes, 2011. 40 antique wooden stools
 from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Photo
by the author.

There are several pieces in which Ai disassembles antique furniture only to reassemble it in non-functional ways intended to call attention to the beauty of traditional joinery and construction techniques, as in Grapes, an assemblage of three-legged stools. Qing woodworkers secured joints without nails or glue. In this piece and others, Ai evidences his respect for high-level craftsmanship. There is even a meter-square Minimalist cube covered in sheets of rosewood carving of great intricacy, which we compare to an exquisite tiny rosewood box once carried by the artist's father. It is touching and inspiring to see this interest in the continuation of traditional values of fine craft despite his crude and shallow gestures elsewhere that assert the need for new cultural values at the expense of fine works of the past. But it leaves this viewer wondering where he draws the line and why; and whether we expect too much philosophy from an artist who may actually be in the formative stages of his thinking about the intersection of cultural legacy and regime in his mercurial country.

Ai Weiwei, Names of Student Earthquake Victims Found by the
Citizens' Investigation, 2008-2011. Inkjet print, exhibition copy.
Photography by the author.

I was uneasily aware, too, that Ai, like many conceptual artists, depends on legions of anonymous experts to fashion the work that comes to us above his name. His Citizens' Investigation project that works still to uncover the names of the students killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai  believes, like Maya Lin, that to name a name is to acknowledge the importance of an individual life. 

This principle is dear in times of tragedy, but not so much when it comes to ascribing artistic credit. On recordings by symphonies, it would be considered churlish to withhold the names of the instrumentalists and give credit only to composer and conductor. In art, there seems to be no issue with crediting Ai as the brains and never naming the master craftsmen who executed his works in wood shops or forges. There are few works (photographs aside) in the show one that one imagines coming from the rough hands of the artist himself.

In the last gallery of According to What? we encounter work surrounding the efforts to name the students lost in the earthquake. On the wall is a reproduction of the spreadsheet kept in Ai's studio, listing the names, birth dates, ages, and sexes of the children discovered so far (over 5,000). On the floor is the installation, Straight, made from straightened rebar rods recovered from the disaster sites. The room also displays Ai's documentary photos of the region 

Ai Weiwei, Straight, 2008-2012. Steel rebar (38 tons). Photo by the author.

and its rubble. Beside those, a video shows the process of straightening and replicating the rods one by one in preparation for Straight. On another wall is the cellphone photo Ai took of himself surrounded by police as he was taken away in an elevator. This is hung next to an X-ray from which his cerebral hemorrhage was diagnosed. 

The single gallery, then,  deeply mixes documentation, dramatization, and what is meant to be artistic response. In this one room, we have the bare list of the names of deceased children; and black and white photos of the crime scene. The memorial rebar installation lies low on the floor. A movie about its making makes noise in the atmosphere. In fact, everything on the walls distracts from its solemnity: It feels rather in the way.

So we come to the end of Ai Weiwei's show with an unfocused gallery and a documentary made by the artist's group about its own efforts. It leaves us wondering whether the show is meant to honor Ai's art itself, or his art as the work of a political dissident whose efforts have placed him on the world stage. Clearly, his art reputation has benefitted from his political action. In So Sorry, we witness his engagement with the cause of the families of missing children; we are given to understand that the title "references the apologies of governments and corporations when their negligence leads to tragedies." 

Yet he films spends very little footage on interviews and testimony from bereft families, devoting quite a lot to producing the hagiography Ai seems intent from the beginning to secure. I found it distasteful, as the focus seems far from the apparent issue of the dignity and safety of the earthquake zone families, and much more on the visibility of Ai and his need to outfox and humiliate the police. While I never question the justice of his cause, I never feel sure that the hero is much better than an adolescent bully either.

So, go see According to What? in Indianapolis or at one of its subsequent stops—the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Miami Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. When I saw it, well into its Indianapolis run, the galleries were very busy. Is Ai the world's most controversial artist? Not by a long shot. His controversy is in other spheres, and it's mistaken to try to transfer his importance as a supporter of rights to his importance as an artist. I suspect that in ten or fifteen years, curators will look back and blush. 

For now, take a look at some interesting, sometimes good work and then think about it. If your pulse remains low, remember that Indianapolis also has fine American decorative arts, and their 100 Acres sculpture garden is open...

Ai Weiwei, China Log, detail.