Links to stories and places of interest
Urbancode was born in April of 2007 as a pdf-based DC arts magazine. It has since morphed into an interview centered magazine focusing on the best and brightest artists in the DC area and beyond. Urbancode has quickly become one of DC’s favorite arts publications and its design has distinguished itself in the design community.
Published eight times a year, Urbancode interviews the art personalities that make the DC art scene lively, provocative, and visually stimulating.
Urban Code
Dan Keegan is heading home
By Mark de la Viña
Mercury News
Article Launched: 01/02/2008 06:13:23 PM PST
The executive director of the San Jose Museum of Art announced on
Wednesday that he will step down at the end of February to return to
his home state of Wisconsin and run the Milwaukee Art Museum. Keegan
is scheduled to start his new job as director on March 1.
Keegan, a Green Bay native, will lead one of the Midwest’s premier
visual arts centers, a museum that operates on an $11 million annual
budget. San Jose Museum of Art has a $5.3 million budget for 2007-08.
Though the opportunity to run such an acclaimed institution was
tempting, Keegan, 58, says he ultimately accepted the job for more
personal reasons: His daughter is in nearby Chicago and mother lives
about 100 miles away in Green Bay.
“That was the tipping point for me,” Keegan said. “The opportunity to
work in one of the great art museums in the Midwest and also to go
home is way too compelling to say ‘no’ to.”
With an aim of attracting “venture culturalists” - museum visitors
willing take a risk and experience art that connects to the human
experience - Keegan spearheaded a drive to attract patrons by
offering free admission at the museum from 2001-06. The campaign
increased museum attendance increased by 115 percent, to nearly
200,000 visitors a year. This was at the same time when many arts
organizations were reeling from the one-two economic punch of the end
of dot-com heyday and fallout from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
After Keegan arrived in November 2001, the art museum’s budget dipped
from $6.9 million to a low of $4.2 million in 2003. Under his
leadership, it grew to $5.3 million. Since 2004, the museum added 341
new works to its collection.
Keegan also played a vital role in promoting South Bay culture. In
2001, he was a founding member of ZeroOne Festival executive board,
which paved the way for last year’s ZeroOne San Jose: A Global
Festival of Art on the Edge.
Keegan was a chairman of the San Jose Arts and Culture Roundtable, a
board comprised of representatives of nine of San Jose’s major arts
institutions that commissioned research on the economic impact of the
arts. Keegan also served as the co-chairman of the downtown vision
task force of 1stACT Silicon Valley, a collaborative group of arts
organization representatives that encourages the cross-pollenization
of art and technology.
Connie Martinez, managing director of 1stACT, says that Keegan’s
vision and leadership benefited the museum and Silicon Valley.
“To be in an organization and leave it stronger than when you arrived
is a huge accomplishment,” Martinez said. “And he did this while also
contributing to the greater good of the downtown and the region.”
Hal Rammel: Invention’s Perspective on Improvisation
Check out the link to a story about Hal Rammel’s innovative musical instruments. Rammel performed at the Crossman Gallery some years ago.
Hal Rammel is featured on a number of Crouton projects, including his solo work and with the group Raccoons. The following is an essay he wrote regarding some of the instruments he’s built over the years and how they fit within his work.
Notes on Art Basel in Miami Beach
Check out this story about the big art fair; Milwaukee artist Roy Staab was interviewed by former Wisconsin gallerist Janice Paine.
Green Piece: Connecting Art and the Environment
A walk along the Raven Nature Trail in Minocqua provided view after view of northwoods beauty: smooth and shiny leaves rustling softly in the breeze; the chirping of birds echoing through the trunks and branches of the forest; the combined scent of fresh earth, plants and grass.
Every twist and bend of the trail revealed more of Wisconsin’s natural splendor. Turning one corner, however, the scene was anything but expected. Large, looming chainsaws hung suspended from tree branches. Below them, more machinery sat heavily on randomly placed wooden posts. A small bird perched on one of them, picking at its rough surface—perfectly embodying the contrast between human and nature, foreign and native.
But this clash between nature and industry wasn’t the result of man’s destruction—quite the contrary. The chainsaws—actually wooden casts covered with coats of suet birdseed—were artfully created, deriving their beauty and meaning alongside and with nature, as a part of the Forest Art Wisconsin project, a unique “gallery” created in summer 2007 under Ute Ritschel, a German professor-in-residence at UW-Madison. (connect with the link and read on…)
Justseeds/Visual Resistance Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized community of artists who have banded together to both sell their work online in a central location and to collaborate with and support each other and social movements. Check it out.
Susceptible to Images
This web site features articles and reviews from Milwaukee area writers, artists and collectors.
New posts to Susceptible to Images are up, including:
One String After Another: Labor and Lace in Contemporary Art; a review of Laced with History at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, by Regan Golden McNerney
METALS! 07 @ UWM, reviewed by Graeme Reid
Astounding! Stupendous! Sensational! A review of Circus Acts: Suspending Disbelief at the H. F. Johnson Gallery of Art (Carthage College), by Judith Ann Moriarty
Reflections on Collecting, an essay by artist/collector Gary Gresl
Recap: Art Chicago in Review
Plus, new readers’ responses and EyeSpy picks for the week: another big weekend with the IN:SITE 1st anniversary, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and the Waukesha Art Crawl. Also, the Wisconsin Triennial: A Statewide Survey of Contemporary Art opens; and One From Wisconsin: Linda Wervey Vitamvas on view at the Wisconsin Museum of Art.
Arts Wisconsin
Link to the homepage of Arts Wisconsin
Follow this link to the home page of Arts Wisconsin, a good source of regional art information. Arts Wisconsin advocates for the arts in Wisconsin so that everyone in Wisconsin can experience the arts.
New Exhibition at the Kohler Art Center
Artist-Environment Builders in the Collection of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Since the 1970s, the Arts Center has been involved in the preservation, study, and exhibition of work by vernacular artists, and has worked closely with Kohler Foundation, Inc. (KFI) to preserve the objects and environments they have made. Artist-environment builders transform their homes, yards, or other aspects of their personal surroundings into multifaceted works of art that, in vernacular ways, embody and express the locale—time, era, place—in which each of them lived and worked. The artists’ locales, histories, ways of learning, and reasons for art-making are widely varied, though they share in having a powerful connection to home-as-art-environment; each expresses the ineffable qualities of place according to nativist understandings and insights.
Click here for more information:
Kohler Ars Center