Mollyblog

The Evolution of an Artist

(published in Ventana Magazine September 2006)

Elisse Pogofsky-Harris’ paintings reflect the inner workings and education of a lifelong creative spirit

Looking at Elisse Pogofsky-Harris’ paintings is almost like cracking open her mind and gazing into her dreams. There are paintings about her mother’s death, her former husband Paul Suttmann, her dog. Her personal spirit guide shows up. She retells stories from her Jewish heritage and depicts scenes of great loneliness and isolation that can only be personal. Her emotions and passions and fears and beliefs spill onto the canvas without restraint. They are so vulnerable and open that looking at them can bring you to tears involuntarily.

And yet the woman behind these works is almost exactly the opposite of what you’d expect. Pogofsky-Harris is neither flamboyant nor chatty. She doesn’t reveal much about what she’s thinking or feeling. She’s reserved, soft-spoken, quiet and elegant. Her friends describe her as private and complex. It seems one reason her emotions live so vividly on the canvas is that they hardly seep out of her personality at all. And the energy and vivaciousness required to ingest and process these ideas and emotions so thoroughl and beautifully? That seems better characterized by her tiny, long-haired dog Bravo, who jumps and runs and wags and pants with excitement in direct proportion to Pogofsky-Harris’ stillness and containment.

The day I visit her at her modest-but-nice Ojai home, she waits for me outside her studio. She wears a brown linen long-sleeved shirt, matching pants and brown leather shoes that loop around her toe. She holds her hand out almost timidly and leads me inside the large, utilitarian space. There’s a stick wedged between her foot and the sandal, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her skin is very smooth and her eyes are unblinking, almost hidden by a fringe of thick brown bangs streaked with silver. She seems very serious, even when she’s joking, and is almost impossible to read.

Inside her studio, however, her work speaks volumes. Leaning against one wall are stacks of aquatint prints depicting shadowy figures standing in doorways or sitting in chairs, waiting for something. Hanging across the room is a large painting of a lone figure in a dark boat stranded in an even darker ocean. Next to that are two paintings of cloudscapes, the skies bright blue and the clouds soft, cottony and seemingly in lazy motion. On her easel is one of her newest series: four terra cotta squares with skies, suns and oceans only hinted at by large, sweeping brushstrokes and lots of empty space.

Though these different series of paintings initially seem so unique they could almost be painted by four separate people, they all have one thing in common: a strong, visceral emotional quality as personal and evocative as reading someone’s private journal. As such, they tell the story not only of Pogofsky-Harris’ past (one haunting painting contains figures of people and pets she’s lost, all waiting for a boat, while another shows her mother’s spirit leaving her kimono-clad body), but of her education and evolution as an artist.

In the beginning

Pogofsky-Harris’ art career started with illness. At age 10, she spent an entire month debilitated by mononucleosis. To help pass the time, a friend gave her a paint-by-numbers set. It wasn’t long before Pogofsky-Harris was turning the pages over, preferring to create her own pictures rather than color in someone else’s. She took art classes in junior high school and high school, including a special tutorial at a local museum. She hated the class itself — where she sat in a large auditorium and sketched a model far, far away — but loved her afternoons at the museum, where she admired the empty spaces in Cezanne’s work and was especially struck by Piet Mondrian. She didn’t know why, exactly, she liked Mondrian, she just knew that it appealed to her. “It made me feel something,” she said.

Knowing she wanted to pursue art but not having much guidance about how to do it, she took a friend’s advice and attended University of Michigan. She wasn’t impressed by the art program, but she was by several of her teachers, including award-winning painter Frede Vidar and experimental artist Milton Cohen, who introduced her to John Cage and Alan Capro. “I learned a lot about the art world from [Cohen],” she said.

Pogofsky-Harris’ real education began, though, when she moved to Italy to attend the American Academy in Rome. It was there that she blossomed. Not only was she constantly surrounded by some of the world’s greatest historical artworks, but she was immersed in a culture of serious, well-trained artists who taught her what it means to be a creative professional. She counted pop artist Red Grooms, abstract expressionist Willem DeKooning, and magic realist painter Gregory Gillespie as friends. She met and married (and modeled for) great American sculptor Peter Suttmann. Pogosky-Harris was in one of the world’s most artistically rich cities, and at the center of the most interesting, innovative and technically virtuosic art scene at the time.

The result of this remarkable education is that Pogofsky-Harris managed to learn art history, perfect artistic technique, understand the lifestyle of the artist, and value the importance of having her own artistic voice, all at the same time — a feat that few artists ever master. All are apparent in her works. Her pieces always reference art history — from Renaissance and baroque Christian paintings to elements of French painters like Eugene Delacroix. Her attention to detail, whether in etchings or oil paintings, betrays her years of classical training. The depth and breadth of each series comes from the seriousness and commitment she learned from other artists in Italy. And her strong, personal, unique identity comes from an innate confidence that was nurtured and encouraged by her community of artist friends.

“She has a very unique approach that’s non-indigenous in the United States,” said Donna Granata, founder of the Ventura-based arts foundation, Focus on the Masters, and also Pogofsky-Harris’s friend. “She’s an anomaly.”

A personal perspective

Pogofsky Harris’ works now are in private collections from Beverly Hills to London, including those of Jack Lemmon and Lynn Redgrave, and in public collections from the Carnegie Museum in Oxnard to Rice University in Texas. Her pieces have been shown in galleries across the country, as well as in Italy, Israel, Nairobi, Australia and Nepal. She’s won several awards and is well-respected in the art community.

But like many serious artists, her daily life seems far away from fame and acclaim. She lives at the end of a series of winding streets in Ojai with her husband, actor Robert Brown (of Star Trek and All in the Family fame). The house is full of antiques and art both she and Brown have collected over the years. She drinks coffee from a delicate china cup while sitting on a velvet cushioned bench, looking out the window toward the lawn and a small but gleaming swimming pool.

This is where she started her series of seascapes, after studying and trying to depict the drowning death of 19th century feminist Margaret Fuller. It’s where she moved on to cloudscapes, having spent so much time on the clouds and skies in the seascape paintings. After doing nearly 40 cloudscapes, she noticed “they just started coming apart.” That’s when she started her newest series — the vivacious, almost abstract suns and seas and horizons against a bold terra cotta background — while working nights in her studio.

This is where she opens her soul onto her canvas. And as a diary of Pogofsky-Harris’ inner life, these new paintings, with their celebratory colors and free, loose strokes, seem to suggest that the artist has recently found new happiness and joy. When asked about it, she seemed slightly bewildered though not disbelieving. “I don’t feel any different,” she said. But she doesn’t deny that her paintings are anything other than personal. “It always comes out of my feelings and who I am,” she said.
And that, said Granata, is what makes Pogofsky-Harris’ work so powerful and so unique.

“Elisse is so genuine … having courage to put this kind of soul searching in the public eye,” said Granata. “We need more people like that in the art world.”

Burning Man's Mandala Maker

(published SB Indie 8/23/06)

Gerard Minakawa And His Starry Bamboo Mandala

When most people refer to Burning Man art projects, they usually mean a kick-ass pair of handmade boot covers or an old beater bicycle spackled with red glitter. Some of the truly dedicated may be referring to more ambitious ideas: art-cars tricked out with fire cannons, dance domes decorated with papier-mâché fish, or an Airstream trailer lined with fuzzy purple fur. But almost no one undertakes the kind of art piece that 32-year-old Gerard Minakawa — founder of Ukao, a Santa Barbara-based bamboo furniture company — plans to execute this year: the Starry Bamboo Mandala.

This 55-foot structure represents the nexus of Minakawa’s interests and talents: ecologically friendly materials, radical and complex construction, and design that actually means something. Constructed completely out of organic materials — 21 tons of bamboo poles shipped from Colombia, 5,000 feet of manila rope, and more than 500 dowels — the structure expresses Minakawa’s dedication to sustainable building practices (as does his plan to donate leftover materials to Habitat for Humanity, rather than burn them). And Minakawa, with his small crew that includes S.B. lighting designer Jeffrey Boynton, are erecting the piece in these two weeks before Burning Man starts, withstanding 100-degree-plus temperatures, dust storms, and potential rainfall.

Not content to simply create something beautiful, Minakawa’s innovative design draws on his research into the spiritual significance of different star shapes throughout history — the result will be a piece that looks like a supernova of bamboo poles from afar and a Star of David embedded within a Star of Lakshmi (from Hinduism) from inside. Those interested in the natural magic of mathematics will also be pleased to know that the structure draws on the Fibonnaci sequence.

“It’s a gift of sacred space,” said Minakawa, who was given a coveted Burning Man organization arts grant to complete the piece at this year’s festival, which runs August 28 through September 4. He expects the light, strong, flexible structure to be a performance space for Burning Man artists, as well as a climb-able vantage point from which to view the desert landscape.

But it’s also a gift of remarkable vision, excellent design, and plain-old elbow grease, all things Minakawa doles out in bucketloads. The New York native (born to a Japanese-Bolivian father and Italian-Argentine mother) started Ukao at age 26, after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design and moving to Carpinteria to work with Forms+Surfaces. His furniture was so innovative, he’s been recognized by publications such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Metropolis, Boston Globe, and I.D., where he was listed as one of the magazine’s 40 designers to watch in 2006. He also won first place in the 2002 International Design Resource Awards.

For his first Burning Man in 2003, Minakawa helped build a bamboo bridge. Then in 2004, he designed the 20-foot Bamboo Trapezium, which caused Burning Man’s art curators to encourage his application for this year’s grant.
With energy left to burn, Minakawa sold or packed up everything he owned and moved to Bolivia, where he set up a bamboo workshop and a retail store, consults with nonprofit Aid to Artisans, and is collaborating with an indigenous Aymaran family on pieces that will be exhibited in New York City in spring 2007.

Clearly, Minakawa has come a long way from his first bamboo piece: a pergola for the entrance to Livingreen’s retail store on Helena Avenue. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows him, since he’s always on the move, traveling the world in pursuit of inspiration and innovation. So it’s fitting that his Burning Man project is called a “mandala” — defined as “container of essence” — for this project, in all its ambition and beauty, truly reflects the essence of its illustrious creator.

4•1•1
For more info visit minikawa.com, ukao.com, aidtoartisans.org, and burningman.com

It Really Is

(published in SB Indie 8/23/06)

Brian Doherty’s This Is Burning Man

People who go to Burning Man are a notoriously possessive bunch, profoundly skeptical of the event getting any kind of mainstream media attention. As a veteran burner, I’m not necessarily any different, so I approached Brian Doherty’s book This Is Burning Man with more than my share of doubt.

Would this be some newbie’s love letter to the party that convinced him to leave his girlfriend and join a men’s group? Would it be some journalist’s watered-down, narrow-minded version of an event he’d never experienced? Would it be a propagandist vehicle for the version of the festival that organizers are always trying to portray?

It must be, I figured, because it couldn’t possibly express the diversity of experiences and interpretations of this strange phenomenon. It couldn’t capture the varying views of the thousands of people who flock to Nevada every year, and their thousands of varying reasons for doing so. It couldn’t explain both the controversy and the deep passion that Burning Man always seems to be surrounded by.

But much to my delight, it could and did. Thanks to mystical powers of dedication, observation, and patience — and thanks to a rare ability to both participate in and objectively consider something at the same time — Doherty has accomplished a nearly impossible feat: A Burning Man book that informs and challenges burners while also giving those who’ve never heard of the festival a clear and complete explanation of what the hell this phenomenon is.

The primary reason this book works so well is that Doherty seemed to leave no stone unturned, tracking down everyone from founder Larry Harvey to Burning Man celebrity (and S.B. local) Dr. Megavolt, from Bureau of Land Management reps to the guy whose 50 stacked pianos started a trend of large-scale absurdist art. There wasn’t a single rumor or story or important moment in Burning Man history that he seemed to miss.

But he also weaved it all together in a remarkably engaging, honest way. He presents his own experience, but never at the expense of the larger story. When accounts are contradictory, he lays out both versions (and often, why the contradictions may exist). As he walks the reader through Burning Man’s chronological history, he also unravels a narrative about what the festival means on personal, political, and spiritual levels.

It’s the most comprehensive account of the festival yet, a must-read for anyone for whom Burning Man means anything. And that’s saying a lot coming from me, a fellow burner who was prepared to 
hate it.

4•1•1
For more on Brian Doherty’s This Is Burning Man, visit thisisburningman.com

Top 6 Reasons You're Bummed You Missed L.I.B.

(published SBIndie 7/27/06)

With three stages, an idyllic forest location at the Live Oak Campground, nearly 1,000 enthusiastic and creatively clad revelers from up and down the West Coast, and all the accelerated bonding that happens between people who sleep, eat, and consume massive amounts of alcohol together, July 14-16’s Lightning in a Bottle was every bit the “magical forest adventure” its organizers claimed it would be. Here are six reasons you should be sorry you missed it.

1. The Yard Dogs Road Show: This freakshow puts every other burlesque and vaudeville act to shame. Their performance – complete with sword-swallowing, a jailhouse striptease, bellydancing, topnotch lounge-singing, and a David Bowie look-alike, proved the San Francisco troupe is only getting better, funnier, and more professional.

2. DJ Naise: This Australian beatboxer, who moonlights as the guitarist for a band that plays the Warped Tour, managed to work the word “mayonnaise” into his freestyle rap when most of us couldn’t say anything other than “I’m hot” or “I’m drunk.”

3. The Tree House Dome: In this forest-themed dance space that debuted at Coachella, DJs with good sense resisted the temptation to play loud, monotonous oom-pah-oom-pah music all day, instead bowing to the superior god of variety. Michelle Bass, Ooah, Cheb I Sabbah, and others delivered downbeat electronica in the morning, danceable hip-hop in the afternoon, ethereal worldbeat at dusk, and a smattering of butt-rock metal throughout the day that had even the hippiest of the hippies headbanging in their campsites.

4. The Vendors: One of the nice things about a Burning Man-style festival that isn’t Burning Man is you can actually buy stuff you forgot. The down side? The multiple tents selling insta-burner playawear speed the process of even “alternative” dressers looking alike. The plus side? Delicious all-raw sandwiches that completely destroyed the suspicion that “raw food” means subsisting solely on salad.

5. The Artist Formerly Known as Christian the Blacksmith: This L.A.-based artist, now working with clay instead of metal, was responsible for a number of the weekend’s delights. Not only did he provide a space for making clay beer cozies and sculpture inspired by the children’s book Everybody Poops, but he ran around all weekend in his striped man-shorts and a child-sized Budweiser bib.

6. Billie, the Camp Quality Inspector: This mulletted performance artist in jean shorts and an American flag-themed halter top informed us that our camp wasn’t decorated enough. Furthermore, our tents and chairs had too much of an “autumn color” theme. She promised to return with paper and pastel markers so we could add some elements from the “spring palette.” She never did return, but she did leave a red, white, and blue air freshener that did wonders for warding off the scent of patchouli.

Musical Vision

(published in Ventana Monthly Magazine in June 2006)

The Ojai Music Festival turns 60 and celebrates with a dizzyingly diverse program

There’s no place like Ojai: the idyllic landscape, the eclectic culture, the urban sensibility combined with rural lifestyle, and the spectrum of residents from low-income farm workers to millionaire filmmakers.

Which is why it makes sense that the city’s namesake music festival is also one of a kind. For 60 years, it’s been known in music circles as one of the most innovative, creative festivals around, thanks to multi-dimensional programming that encompasses composers from Bach to Boulez, genres from Baroque to Balinese gamelan, and guest artists from Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky to Peter Sellars (who staged Stravinksy’s Histoire du soldat with a cast of inner-city actors in 1992).

In fact, the history of the festival’s offerings reads like a Who’s Who and What’s What of contemporary music: quite a reputation for this year’s 60th anniversary festival to live up to when it returns June 8 through June 11.

(Music director Robert Spano brings the Atlantic. Photo by Andrew Eccles.)

But artistic director Tom Morris and music director Robert Spano aren’t balking at the challenge. In fact, they’ve relished it as an opportunity to experiment with programming. And the result is a line-up that’s dizzying in its depth, breadth and bravery, covering ground from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus doing Bach’s Dona Nobis Pacem from B Minor Mass, to one of Brazil’s leading singers presenting folk tunes with a solo guitarist.

The daring nature of the schedule is due in large part to the vision of both Morris, who was the executive director at the Cleveland orchestra before taking over at the Ojai Music Festival in 2004, and Spano, who Morris chose as this year’s musical director.

“He has wide and eclectic taste. He’s got energy,” said Morris, who has known Spano for years. “I thought that this would be somebody perfect for Ojai.”

Morris also knew Spano could handle the challenge of taking on such a feat. Not only has Spano been musical director for the Grammy award-winning Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for five years, but he also directed the prestigious Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood in 2003 and 2004, with great results.

“He has a real natural brain for what a festival is,” said Morris. “He thinks about the entity of the festival … he has some sense of organic cohesion.”

Of course, Spano would bring the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Chorus with him. And Osvaldo Golijov, the innovative Argentinian artist Musical America named 2006 Composer of the Year and whose work Spano has long supported, seemed an obvious choice for the festival’s focus.

“He’s a very versatile composer in terms of musical language,” said Spano, pointing out that Golijov’s work engages world, folk and indigenous music from Spanish, Latin American and Jewish traditions, among others — a fact due in no small part to Golijov’s eclectic heritage as the Argentinian son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. “There’s African drumming, there’s Cuban drumming, there’s klezmer in his world.”

Spano wanted to include Golijov’s one-act opera Ainadamar, to be performed on Friday, June 9, which meant inviting worldclass soprano Dawn Upshaw, who sang the role of Margarita Xirgu when the show opened in 2003. And of course, it made sense to have Dawn sing Golijov’s Grammy-nominated song cycle Ayre, to be performed on Sunday, June 11. It only seemed natural, then, to invite eighth blackbird, the sextet known as one of the premier music groups in the world , “because of their capacity to do the Ayre series better than anyone else,” said Spano.

The festival’s programming continued to unfold in this organic, but untraditional way. With eighth blackbird already in Ojai, Spano figured he’d have them perform in the Opera in Concert performance on Friday too. And once he’d decided to present Golijov’s cantata Oceana and bring star Brazilian singer Luciana Souza to do it, it seemed natural to have Souza, known as a jazz singer but renowned for her flexibility, perform Brazilian folk songs with guitarist Romero Lubabmbo on Saturday and, on Sunday, El Amor Brujo in a flamenco style that’s unusual for the traditionally operatic piece.

The rest of the line-up is just as dizzying: The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus will sing an a cappella program on Saturday. On Friday night, sound sculptor and MacArthur “Genius” award-winner Trimpin will play a Nancarrow piano piece on an instrument he invented. There is a symposium about the search for distinction in music festivals and another about Golijov’s music.

Meanwhile, the Ojai Valley Museum will host a concurrent art exhibit featuring artifacts of festivals past and more of Trimpin’s work, and the Ojai Playhouse will screen a documentary about Betty Freeman, one of the most influential patrons of contemporary music.

The final line-up is largely the result of a meeting Spano and Morris had two years ago. Though Spano knew of the festival’s reputation and had already agreed to direct the 2006 season, he’d never set foot in Ventura County’s Shangri-La. When he finally visited, he was so blown away that the city itself became a major inspiration for the programming.

“I was flipped out, it’s so beautiful … It’s a very magical place,” said Spano, who sat down with Morris almost immediately to start planning. Though they’ve made changes in the program as recently as six months ago, about 80 percent of the final schedule was decided during that meeting. “When we got seated in Ojai and were drinking in the air … ideas started going crazy because of the location,” he said.

Morris is especially pleased with the results, saying the festival adheres to Ojai’s fundamental belief in “a sense of adventure, a sense of journey, and a sense of wide contrasts,” perfectly exemplified in the contrast on Saturday night between the nightclub feel of Souza and Lubambo’s folk songs with the following “unbelievable harpsichord concerto.”

“It’s going to be a very exciting ride,” said Morris.


(The music of Ozvaldo Golijov
will be the focus of the 2006 festival. Photo by Sara Evans.)

Of course, this may all sound like gibberish to classical music’s newcomers. Some might even wonder if a festival like this has anything to offer someone who’s never heard of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, which Spano led to critical acclaim, or the Seattle Opera, where Spano conducted three cycles of Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen last year.

Spano’s answer is a resounding “absolutely.” Though the festival program will surely get the hearts of classical music veterans racing, Spano says newcomers shouldn’t be intimidated to show up too.

“I think often people get an idea in their heads that they need to know something, some piece of information, [to enjoy or understand music], and I just don’t believe that,” he said. Sure, knowing a lot about a particular piece of music or a particular conductor may enhance your experience of the festival. But not knowing doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it. All you have to do, he said, is “be open, interested and unafraid.”

Which, again, is nothing new for progressive, experimental Ojai. It’s part of what makes the city — and this festival — so great, said Morris and Spano.

“I was very proud of Tanglewood … but you wouldn’t find this range of music there,” said Spano. “I have not seen any other festival like this. Ever.”

The 60th Annual Ojai Music Festival runs June 8 through June 11. For more information call 646-2094 or visit www.ojaifestival.org.
06-01-2006

Art Complicates Life

(Published in SBIndie May 11, 2006)

An Ex-Ode To The Corporeal Conversation: A Salon For The Suit—A Boutique For The Conversation
At the Contemporary Arts Forum.

The first time I saw the new exhibit in the Contemporary Arts Forum Norton Gallery, I felt as though I’d stumbled into someone’s living room or studio—circa 1762. Hand-sewn clothing samples were draped over antique furniture while a woman in cropped pants, a billowy blouse, and a fitted vest sat in an upholstered chair drinking wine from a cut-glass tumbler. Except for the laptop computer on the desk, the large-screen television on the table, the iSight camera projecting a square onto the opposite wall, and a gallery employee wearing a dress made of bubble wrap, it could have been the 18th century.

So, what is going on right now at CAF? The first in a series of salon-themed shows, An Ex-Ode to the Corporeal Conversation: A Salon for the Suit—A Boutique for the Conversation is actually an art installation that deals with some very contemporary themes, including interactivity, the eroding distinction between art maker and buyer, labor rights, consumerism, capitalism, the textile industry, technology, the culture of the mall, masculinity, and all the places where these ideas intersect.

The exhibit was created by J. Morgan Puett and Iain Kerr, a duo of East Coast artists who collaborate under the cumbersome title, That Word Which Means Smuggling Across Borders, Incorporated. The “word” they refer to is “coyote,” but Puett and Kerr didn’t want to reference the desert animal directly, or the people who traffic Mexican immigrants to the United States. Those references would be too simple. And Puett and Kerr don’t do simple.

Instead, the name refers to the concept of crossing, denying, and disrespecting borders. It’s an aesthetic philosophy organized around blurring the lines between physical places and conceptual camps, and around crossing the imaginary boundaries that separate artists from their subjects.
Ex-Ode is thus a multifaceted, interactive experiment, rather than a straightforward exhibit. The idea is to create a retail store appropriate to a re-imagined mall, and to sell pieces there for a re-imagined suit of clothes. Customers are meant to enter the store, look at the clothing samples (which don’t resemble any clothes you’ve ever seen), and lounge about on furniture upholstered in baroque fabrics, all while helping themselves to wine or whiskey. In order to be fitted for the odd clothing, visitors must interact with the artists, who are projected live via digital videoconferencing onto the gallery walls.
Of course, “clothing” is a loose term for these strange strips of fabric. Although based on that ubiquitous male status marker, the three-piece suit, the pieces aren’t just isolated suit components. Instead, the artists have used the “language of the suit” and the “vocabulary of the tailor” to create something entirely new.

Puett and Kerr have devised an algorithm based on numbers they assigned to various significant objects, ranging from concepts and shapes in architecture and literature to the blueprints of the first museum in which they showed this piece. They then drew patterns based on the algorithm’s outputs.
“We did not put any of our personal design or prejudice into this garment,” said Puett. “This garment made itself, with our collaboration.”

Each piece was then tailored by hand, and priced according to how much the seamstress would want to be paid to make the same piece again—this as a comment on labor practices and the questionable morality of mass production. The process of being fitted for the garment—a ridiculous one, since the pieces come only in one size and are put together purely according to one’s own imagination—is a commentary on the historical relationship of the tailor to his customer, one built more on illusion and intimacy than any necessity. In addition, being fitted this way via videoconferencing not only blurs the boundaries between Santa Barbara and Pennsylvania, where the artists are located, but also erodes the distinction between the artist and the viewer, in a related riff on reality television and its role in contemporary culture.

That alone is enough to make your head spin. But there’s so much more. No prop in the gallery is without meaning. No action or interaction is used just for its aesthetic value. Take any element of the installation, from the three-page-long title placards to the specific hooks on which the clothing hangs, and Puett and Kerr have a complex, detailed explanation for it.

This is part of the reason why the exhibit works better in theory than in practice. On a surface level, the space is confounding. The decor is unremarkable, and the clothing samples look like random shapes. It’s unclear at first that the large sheets hanging from metal arms are diagrams of the algorithms that determined the clothing shapes. The instructions are so text-heavy that they are daunting to even glance at, much less read. As for the interactivity itself, the technology and the time difference proved more problematic than was expected. On opening night, there was a time delay with the iSight camera and a problem with the microphone, so real-time conversation was impossible. Still, the overall effect works. Ex-Ode is confusing and thought provoking, surprising and a little disconcerting. Everything is vaguely familiar, yet it is hard to know what to do with it in this new context. One can’t tell where life ends and art begins—which the artists say is exactly the point. The piece is a living, breathing, expanding experiment that’s wholly dependent on personal experience.

“It’s a way of imagining everything as collective and collaborative and interactive,” said Kerr. “You’re never the originator … that’s pure patriarchal arrogance.”

Why Ventura County Doesn't Suck

Charity: East by South

(published in Arroyo Monthly Magazine July 2005)

Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum brings Asian culture to Southern California and beyond.

photos by Sarah Alvarado • Brooks institute of Photography

The architecture of the Pacific Asia Museum isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a downtown Pasadena building: a curved green roof, stone lions flanking an imposing, arched red door, a central outdoor courtyard with a koi pond. In short, it’s a Chinese-inspired building right in the heart of Southern California. But that’s what makes the building, and its purpose, so special: There’s nowhere like it—in Pasadena or anywhere else.

The museum, which features a collection of 14,000 works of art from China, Japan, Tibet, Thailand, India, New Guinea and other countries, is one of only four in the country that focuses exclusively on art of Asia and the Pacific, and it’s the only museum of its kind in Southern California. It is also a California Historic Landmark, a Pasadena Cultural Heritage Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

Not only does the Pacific Asia Museum possess and display an impressive array of objects, from Japanese silk paintings to musical instruments from New Guinea, but it also hosts Mah Jongg games and Tai Chi classes, provides outreach programs to 10,000 students in grades K-12, and acts as a gathering place for Asian-Americans and Asian-art enthusiasts near and far.

That’s what gives the Pacific Asia Museum a unique position as an educational institution and a community center, as well as being a repository for historic art. And its presence on the Web, with a site featuring interactive “Web modules,” including an award-winning program on Buddhist Art, only increases its global importance and its impact.

“The Web has leveled the playing field for museums,” said executive director Joan Marshall. “We’re a small institution, but we can have a broader reach.”

Whether visitors experience the museum online, through its in-school “Traveling Trunk” outreach program, or within its beautiful, quaint galleries, what they’re getting is a unique glimpse of the subtle similarities and differences between various Asian cultures—a luxury many of us miss when we visit encyclopedic art museums where pieces from Japan, China and Tibet are displayed together.

For example, a tour through the Southeast Asian and Indian Sculpture gallery (which is stunning with its red walls and glass cases with orange silk backdrops) highlights that the Buddha is a central theme in art from Vietnam, Thailand and Southeast Asia. But each culture renders the figure differently. In Southeast Asia, the Buddha is a dragon-like creature; while in Vietnam he is many-armed and fanciful. In Thailand, the Buddha is young, lean and hairless and wears a pointy hat. In none of these cultures is the Buddha the jolly, pot-bellied Chinese version many of us consider “traditional.”

Other galleries highlight the differences between objects within a culture. In the Chinese ceramics galleries, for example, it’s clear that the simplest clay and porcelain bowls, plates and incense burners were reserved for domestic use, while ornate, European-style versions were specific to the export business. In fact, the blue and white china many Western Europeans consider “authentic Chinese” was actually manufactured specifically for export. Similarly, the Japanese Decorative Arts gallery makes clear that the gold-adorned, almost gaudy porcelain figures (known as Satsuma) many of us associate with Japanese décor were also designed particularly for Western tastes—people in Japan preferred their art simpler and less ostentatious.

In fact, nearly every room serves to dispel common misconceptions and increase understanding about some aspect of Asian art or culture. This, said Marshall, is exactly the point.

“Education is the core of what we do,” she said, referring especially to the school outreach programs that bring trunks full of costumes, dolls and toys from Asian cultures to classrooms. The “Traveling Trunks” are accompanied by lesson plans and stories for teachers and are followed by docent-led tours and artist-led workshops at the museum. To make the program even more valuable, Marshall and other museum directors are trying to sync their programs with the California State education curriculum.

And for older students—of either academic institutions or life—a project is under way to photograph and catalog every object in the museum’s collection to post on the Internet. It’s an important project for scholars and the public, said Marshall, since many of the objects are too fragile to be sorted through by hand. And of course, the Web will give access to these valuable resources to more people, providing even more “intercultural understanding through the arts.”

Though 25 percent of the museum’s visitors are Asian, the institution is meant for the education and delight of all cultures. And Marshall, who came to the museum from the Autry Museum of Western Heritage two years ago, hopes to raise the profile of the museum in general. That’s why some brochures are tri-lingual—English, Spanish and Chinese.

In fact, the museum has a multicultural history. Grace Nicholson, a stenographer who moved to Pasadena in 1901 after her parents and grandparents both died, founded it. The young entrepreneur opened a typewriter shop on Raymond Street but became interested in Native American arts through her first two clients. Soon she’d transformed the building into a curio shop, selling Native American baskets and, later, Asian arts.

She documented her travels to remote Native American villages and to Asia and was named the first woman member of the American Anthropological Association in 1904. Though she started out so poor she had to wallpaper her home with burlap bags, by the early 1920s she was successful enough to purchase a two-story craftsman home on Los Robles Avenue. Her clients included John Muir, J.P. Morgan, and members of the Heinz, Kraft and Hearst families. By 1924, she had commissioned the architects responsible for what are now the Mayfield School and the Ambassador Hotel to build her a 32,000 square-foot Imperial Chinese palace with art galleries, living quarters and retail space.

“Her banker was horrified,” said Marshall. “But being conservative was never one of her traits.”

When she died in 1944, she donated the building to the city, and it was leased to the Pasadena Art Museum (a forerunner of the Museum of Contemporary Art). Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp all had exhibitions there before the organization moved to its current location and became the Norton Simon Museum. By the time the building became the Pacific Asia Museum in 1971, it already had a rich history.

And it seems Marshall, museum staff and trustees are continuing the legacy. The museum was the first in the United States to display contemporary art from China after the revolution, to show aboriginal art, and to display an exhibit of Tibetan furniture. A groundbreaking exhibit in the fall of 2006 will feature collaboration between Filipino, Chinese, Japanese and other cultural art alliances interpreting the theme of “food,” while other shows next year will look at the tradition of the geisha and 1,000 years of Thai art.

Marshall said there are also plans to expand and improve the museum. A campaign is under way to re-install half of the permanent collection, renovate the Japanese art gallery (to include interactive computer screens and a temple ceiling), and refurbish some of Nicholson’s living quarters, including a spectacular blue-walled library, a corner sitting room and the former dining room.

One of the ways the museum funds such projects is its annual Festival of the Autumn Moon in October, which, with its 1,000 guests, is the largest black-tie charity event in Pasadena. (This year’s theme will be “Serenade in the South Pacific.”) The event generates about half a million dollars for the museum, which, along with grants and other fundraisers, helps the museum fulfill its purpose.

“We have such a critical role to play in Southern California, one of the fastest growing Asian communities in the West,” said Marshall. “And we’re lucky to live in Pasadena. It’s a very civic-minded community.”

Upcoming exhibits include: “Brighter than Gold: The Rich Tradition of Satsuma Ware in Japan,” June 18 to August 15, and “From the Fire: Contemporary Korean Ceramics,” a traveling exhibition of over 100 contemporary Korean ceramics featuring the work of over 50 important ceramic artists, July 16 to October 16. Upcoming events include: “Authors on Asia,” featuring Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee with “Eating Korean: From Barbecue to Kimchi, Recipes from My Home” on Friday, July 22, and Ha Roda with “A Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Family Recipes” on Sunday, July 31. The museum is located at 46 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena. For more information, call (626) 449-2742, ext. 20, or visit www.pacificasiamuseum.org.

Cosmic Energy

(published in Arroyo Monthly April 2005)

NaI-Ni Chen’s choreography fuses modern and traditional Asian and Western motifs into big-bang compositions that become oh-so-much-more than the sum of their parts.

Born to expatriate Chinese parents, choreographer and dancer Nai-Ni Chen lived her first 22 years in Taiwan and has spent the last 22 in America—a cultural balance that is inextricably tied in with her work, which is as varied and multi-cultural as her background.

But the pieces Chen creates for the company she founded in 1988 aren’t simply an eclectic mixture of those various traditions. Instead, the influences Chinese, Taiwanese and American cultures have on Chen’s work are as strongly integrated in her choreography as they are in her personality: One dance may deal with Asian-influenced themes but be expressed in Western-style movement. Another may be completely abstract but have elements of ballet, martial arts or modern dance woven through it.

Chen says she never intends to blend the two (or three) cultures into a single “multicultural” style when she creates—instead, she explains, the blending occurs naturally in her body, resulting in this varied and unclassifiable repertoire. Like other choreographers, she finds inspiration from many sources, including art, nature and life experience; her Chinese heritage just happens to be one of them. Similarly, every movement she creates is a product of her training, which is also eclectic, including Peking Opera movement, Chinese folk dance, and martial arts in addition to jazz, modern dance and ballet.

“I don’t think: now this is ‘white’ and this is ‘black,’” said Chen, describing her choreographic process on the phone from the New Jersey home she shares with her husband, also a Chinese immigrant born in Taiwan, and their 9-year-old daughter. “White and black are already a mix and become ‘grey.’”

The result is an impressive company that’s performed at the country’s most prestigious concert halls, received ten awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and was given the Golden Lotus Award by the China Dance Association. And that’s just based on the dance company’s regular performance repertoire.

Of equal importance to Chen’s company are its outreach programs, educational performances for children. In fact, for Chen, who grew up in a society where dance was considered a posture-building exercise and not a career, this part of the work is absolutely vital. She’s spent most of her life feeling that part of her calling was to introduce children to dance. To that end, she regularly schedules special programs in whatever city she’s visiting on tour. (The company will perform A Dragon’s Tale for a group of local schoolchildren at CalTech’s Beckman Auditorium on April 15.) When not on the road, she works with the Harlem School of the Arts and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

“It gives me a sense of mission and obligation,” said Chen, who was accepted to both the dance performance and dance education programs at New York University when she applied to graduate school. She chose the latter, partly because she’d already had years of performance training at what is now the Chinese Cultural University and with the professional dance troupe Cloud Gate Dance Theater, and partly because of her sense of purpose. “It’s very rewarding.”

But the road here hasn’t been easy. Though Chen, whose parents fled communist China and met in Taiwan, started dancing at age 4, she had to quit as a pre-teen because of the rigors of academic study in Taiwan. At 13, her parents discovered a five-year dance program, and soon Chen was a full-time student by day and a professional dancer by night. She got her first glimpse of America when the government selected her to represent Taiwan on a cultural exchange; it was a turning-point moment that changed her life.

“I feel like my eyes were finally open. I knew: I need to come to America,” she said.

But leaving Taiwan was virtually impossible for the young girl. The only way to get out was to apply to graduate school—something Chen couldn’t do until she finished her bachelor’s degree equivalent. During three more years of studying, she whetted her appetite for the New World with another dance tour—during which she turned 20 years old and met her future husband.

Once in New York, though, Chen didn’t get to rest. She danced and studied in the NYU program, performed with various professional companies and even started choreographing her own works. She received such rave reviews for the first show she choreographed that she felt encouraged to start her own company. Despite her teachers’ warnings that the road would be long and hard, Chen did it.

“My teachers were right,” she said. Sixteen years later the company is still going strong, and Chen says it’s been worth it to work with stellar dancers who put her art on stage, to watch audiences react to her work and to reach out to children. “You can feel that somehow your heart and their heart are really together,” she said.

More than anything, Chen knows she’s on the right path—and a path she probably wouldn’t have been able to follow anywhere else. “Dance is my passion,” she said. “It’s my life—my whole life.”

The Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company will perform at CarTech’s Beckman Auditorium on Friday, April 15 at 8:00 p.m. For information on how to buy tickets call (888) 222-5832.