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2004 HEADLINES Click for full story "The History of Art, in Baggy Jeans and Bomber Jackets" "The Fine Art of Car Bombings" Photos from Papo Vazquez's June 5th performance "Vazquez Powerful, Playful at Real Art
Ways" None of the Above Review "'Papo' Vazquez: Charting Future Of Afro-Puerto
Rican Music" "Home Improvement" The Rowland Years: Arts "Going Beyond Identity" "For Three Young Artists, A Search for the Spiritual" |
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Painter Kehinde Wiley whose show "Passing/Posing" recently opened at the Brooklyn Museum was featured in a NY Times Article on December 19, 2004. Mr. Wiley's first solo exhibition took place at Real Art Ways in November of 2002. "ON a recent Wednesday afternoon, the studio on West 23rd Street where Kehinde Wiley lives and works was a maelstrom of activity. Near the door, three art handlers were packing five of his large canvases for shipment, hammering supports and loudly tearing through fat rolls of cellophane tape." .: Read the full story @ nytimes.com - top - |
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Walid Raad and his new exhibition "The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere" at MassMoCA in North Adams, Mass., was featured in The New York Times on Sunday, June 20. Raad, who produces projects under the auspices of The Atlas Group, was featured in Real Art Ways' 2002 exhibition This is Then. "Walid Raadwas 15 in 1983 when his family shipped him out of Beirut to Boston, just ahead of the militias that were targeting teenage men for enlistment during one of the most violent periods of the Lebanese wars. Now, in his art, he explores the inner life of hostages, the aftereffects of car bombings and the disconnect between official promises and how secure people feel." .: Read the full story @ nytimes.com - top - |
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Check out these photos from the Papo Vazquez Pirates Troubadors performance at Real Art Ways on Saturday, June 5.
Funded in part by a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts and Meet the Composer, Inc., with additional support from ASCAP, The Virgil Thomson Fund, and with additional support from the six New England state arts agencies and the National Endowment for the Arts. - top - |
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MUSIC REVIEW June 6, 2004 Papo Vazquez and Pirates Troubadours played propulsive and swashbuckling music at Hartford's Real Art Ways that had the Saturday night crowd roaring its approval. A trombone player and composer, Vazquez led the seven-man band through two high-energy sets with music rooted in the rhythms of West Africa that flowered in the Puerto Rican countryside (bomba) and later in the cities (plena). The concert began with "Pirate Theme," a song whose hard-driving
rhythms surged through the audience. By the time the ensemble tore into an intense and cacophonous "Who's Sane," a Vazquez original he dedicated to the American troops in Iraq, the overflow crowd had begun to match the players' rumble and roar with squeals and whoops. The band followed the fire of "Who's Sane" with "Snow Angel," a gentle mist of a song, where Vazquez on trombone and Sherman Irby on saxophone intertwined their instruments like lovers whispering in the rain. Following the intermission, the band began the second set with "Carnival in San Juan," the title track of Vazquez's latest album. Pianist Hector Martignon, sensational all night, highlighted the band's growing playfulness. As the ensemble quoted Duke Ellington's "Caravan," Vazquez switched from the trombone to the cowbell. He stood between Irby and John Benitez, who played a pounding bass and prodded the percussionists, especially drummer Henry Cole, who was playing his first gig with the band. The concert ended with percussionist Roberto Cepeda dancing on stage, his bomba a multi-rhythmic tai chi that summarized the craft, grace, playfulness and joy of the evening. The concert served as an aural companion to "None of the Above, Contemporary Work By Puerto Rican Artists," an exhibit that will be up at RAW (56 Arbor St.) until Oct. 3. - top - |
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ART IN REVIEW 'None of the Above' Definitions of identity and politics in identity politics have hanged since the 1990's, growing subtler or softer, depending on your point of view. Several exhibitions have explored this shift as it applies to Latino art. The most recent is "None of the Above: Contemporary Work by Puerto Rican Artists" at Real Art Ways, a feisty and enterprising alternative space in Hartford. The change in thinking is implicit in the show's title, which avoids mention of a unitary "Puerto Rican art" (or, for that matter, Latino art) and refers instead to 16 artists who identify themselves as being, in some sense, Puerto Rican. Not all of them were born on the island. And among those who were, several now live and work in the continental United States or Europe. Generally speaking, the diaspora phenomenon has become the basis for a new kind of identity politics. The art it produces is internationalist in style, embracing photography, video and installation, and tends to hold what might be called indigenous culture at a wry arm's length, in some cases bypassing it.
Manuel Acevedo, for example, who was born in New Jersey and lives in New York City, makes no direct reference to Puerto Rico itself. Instead, through hand-altered photographs, he fills an empty lot in an ethnically mixed Hartford neighborhood with architecturally scaled sculptures. In Javier Cambre's tabletop sculpture based on a building at the university of Puerto Rico in San Juan, European modernism seems to be his subject as much as a Caribbean setting. And fanciful architectural forms by Cari González-Casanova exist in a transcultural Space Age rather than in the real world. Even specific references are made abstract. The Puerto Rican resort hotels in paintings by Enoc Pérez look as distanced and generic as Warhol soup cans. The landscapes and cityscapes in a video piece by Nayda Collazo-Llórens might have been shot almost anywhere. An abstract mural-size painting shimmering with glass beads by the artist called Dzine (Carlos Rolón) brings Japanese screens to mind, while Chemi Rosado Seijo neatly sends up abstraction's claims to transcendence by encasing Malevich's utopian geometric forms in decorative soft-sculpture frames. Absurdity is the show's strong suit, and artists use it purposefully. Arnaldo Morales's huge, mechanized crossbow reads like a muscular joke on technological power. An installation by Charles Juhász-Alvarado, a star of this show as he has been of others, complicates history. He has created a wooden replica of a Wells Fargo van attacked by a Puerto Rican pro-independence group in West Hartford in 1983, but he has turned it into an ice cream truck, sweetening — for better or worse — what was a bitter political gesture. In a similarly light-touch way, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla address an aspect of Puerto Rico's political self-image in their short film "Returning a Sound." It follows a young man's motorbike journey over the island of Vieques, until recently the site of a United States Navy base and vociferous protests over bombing exercises, which were ended last year. As if to celebrate the departure of the military, the motorbike's exhaust pipe has been fitted with a trumpet, which burbles away, like the voice of a town crier, throughout the ride. Organized by Silvia Karman Cubiñá, Deborah Cullen and
Steven Holmes, "None of the Above" travels to Museo de Arte
de Puerto Rico in San Juan in January. But Real Art Ways, a space New
Yorkers would do well to keep their eyes on, gets credit for presenting
it first, and well. - top - |
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'Papo' Vazquez: Charting Future Of Afro-Puerto Rican Music June 4, 2004 Storyteller and teacher, jester and historian, Angel "Papo" Vazquez says he plays his life on stage and in the recording studio.
Perhaps people will dance when he and his band play Hartford's Real Art Ways Saturday at 8 p.m. Vazquez likes it when people dance. That's why he keeps songs such as his "Like a Child" accessible. When the people dance, it's as if he's found a way to put the stories of a beautiful Caribbean island and its tough and tender people in the audience's bones. Sometimes, Vazquez says, his music makes people cry, so vivid are the memories engendered by the bomba and plena rhythms. After all, he says, it's not just his life that's in his music. The lives of others, their triumphs and pain, are there, too. A beautiful Caribbean island and islands of urban despair are in the New Yorker and former Philadelphian's music. So is hope and happiness, Vazquez says. That's why he loves to play for as many people as possible, so that more and more people can hear and feel a history that hasn't been captured in any book. "I try not to make it too complicated," Vazquez says. "If what we play doesn't get to everybody, we're not doing our jobs." Vazquez's history is rich and varied. Born in 1958, he began playing a $5 trombone as a child in Philadelphia, where black jazz musicians introduced him to still more rhythms and stories. They also helped spark his interest in musicians such as John Coltrane and trombone player J.J. Johnson. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York before beginning a career that has seen him play on movie soundtracks such as "Mo' Better Blues" and with the royalty of Latin jazz, including Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and Reuben Blades. He's also played with Ray Charles and Dizzy Gillespie. The elders, Vazquez says, taught him to practice until he got tired. They also taught the sci-fi buff and "Trekkie" to "go to the beach" and live life, otherwise "you'd have nothing to play." And trombone player Slide Hampton, Vazquez says, "really set me straight. He taught me how to blow into the instrument." Although Vazquez doesn't blow his own horn, his recordings (including "Carnival in San Juan") and live performances have caused some critics to hail him as the future of Latin jazz. If that's true, Vazquez says, it will be a future rooted in Afro-Puerto Rican music and not the more widely known and played Afro-Cuban music. "Cuba," Vazquez says, "has nothing to do with what we're playing." While he looks to his roots as a source of his music, Vazquez also seeks to stretch its boundaries. He's been commissioned to produce a symphony for a Bronx ensemble. Another mission is to spread the joy of his music and culture to young people. "What I know can't be taught in any school," says Vazquez, who describes himself as a "street musician." Still, he laments that public-school budget cuts resulted in too many of today's young people not getting a good music education. "So you got rap," Vazquez says, and young people who are "illiterates in the music." Vazquez wishes he had the resources to boost the musical understanding of young people, who he believes suffer in their ignorance. "What we have now is a lot of people with an identity crisis," he says. Vazquez hopes to change that through music. "We [musicians] have to give. "I'm a giver. I want to be a service to the community. As Wynton Marsalis said, we provide a service to people they don't know they need." Papo Vazquez's group features Sherman Irby on alto sax and flute, Hector Martignon on piano, John Benitez on bass, Roberto Cepeda on percussion and vocals, Juan Gutierrez on percussion and Henry Cole on drums and percussion. Tickets for Vazquez's concert Saturday, June 5 at 8 p.m. are $21 at the door, $16 for members. Real Arts Ways is at 56 Arbor St. in Hartford. Call 860-232-1006, Ext 222. - top - |
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Home Improvement by Patricia Rosoff - May 27, 2004 The cool thing -- the really cool thing -- about None of the Above, Real Art Way's current exhibition of contemporary work by Puerto Rican artists, is a matter of impact. Each object, each image dishes up some combination of cheek, smarts and cross-reference, upending genres with gleeful irreverence and satisfying the eye with often astonishing visual props.
It's impossible not to grin, for instance, when you meet up with "I-Scream: (resist!)," Charles Juhász-Alvarado's double-entendre construction -- an homage to the ubiquitous Good Humor truck which just happens to bears an uncanny resemblance to an armored truck. Part toy, part Trojan horse, part tongue-in-cheek reference to Hartford's 1983 Wells Fargo bank-truck heist, this near-full-scale wooden construction is parked right in the doorway. Leaning companionably against the wall, as if in conversation, is an immense mixed-media fudgecicle. Directly opposite in the same room, like an immense letter-box-formatted projection, Dzine (Carlos Rolón)'s bejeweled wall mural ("Beautiful Otherness") unwinds across the view. This bold, abstract, graphic work, 6 feet high and 38 feet long, is constructed entirely of tiny acrylic and glass beads. As you move closer, this shimmering, '60s retro-mod-patterned surface is as changeable as a mirage, or a sequined dress stretched across a taut behind -- bold from a distance, slippery and more slippery as you get closer. What's fun here -- what leaps out at you -- are the artists who go for broke, who press inanity to a ridiculous degree. Like Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, whose video "Returning a Sound" beckons the viewer (with the puttering blare of a trumpet) from the main gallery to a smaller video projection space. On screen you can watch a young man on a motor bike (the trumpet is affixed to the muffler pipe) who, literally, tootles his way up and down the vacant hills and landscape of Vieques, Puerto Rico. No overt commentary, certainly, on the political issues surrounding this former site of U.S. Marine target practice. Just the simple, gorgeous, ludicrous fact. Or, too, in a grimmer, "what-the-hell-is-this?" category is Arnaldo Morales "Vainilla Power No. 4," which beckons you into still another of the four gallery spaces, this time to view a huge gun-like construction, one that pivots on its tower as if on a turret. "Powered" (it does not actually fire, except audibly) by a two-tank air compressor, this bristlingly-lethal industrial "toy," measuring some 6 feet tall and stretching 10 feet from butt to nozzle, is the materialization of the adolescent boy's violent pipedream -- paintball gone Home Depot. It is also, of course, in its invitation to climb up into the driver's seat of a weapon of artillery destruction, a monumental parody of all those join-the-U.S.-Army-and-see-the-world (from-behind-the-barrel-of-a-gun) recruitment commercials. Closer to (the viewer's) home, is a series of works called "Altered Sites (Hartford Revisions Plan: Park and Main I, II, and III)." In these gently low-key sketches over photographs, Manuel Acevedo interjects the linear framework of potential buildings into what are actually vacant lots in the Park Street area. Like a student doodles in his class notes, Acevedo projects building activity into the gaping lethargy that is so much a fact in Hartford's "cityscape" -- playing a wry Brunelleschi (the early Renaissance inventor of linear perspective) in the face of our local municipal/economic doldrums. Interestingly, a number of artists take the tack of projection. Take Chemi Rosado Seijo, for instance, whose "Renaissance of the Flat Cube," arranges dozens of "framed" pictures tightly together on the wall -- like devotional pictures crammed together on a cathedral choir screen, only built out of soft materials (fabric and foam, a product of quilting and rubber molds, collage and mixed media). Nearby, Ivelisse Jiménez decks out a corner of the gallery like a magical Christmas tree, pasting elements of brightly-colored acrylic onto the walls and ceiling, dangling others within the space created. This work does hang on the walls so much as it inhabits the corner. Joyfully, it is part kaleidoscope, part visual wind-chime (suggesting all kinds of tinkling visual "noise"). The most complexly orchestrated of all the works in the show is a gorgeous dual projection (two video images, side by side) by Nayda Collazo-Llórens, which lays out a binocular experience of landscape intercut with text. Phrases flash by in narrative sequence ("... she sat down beside me ... I couldn't help but notice ... ") as the video stands us, first on the platform at a subway station as the subway car passes by, then in the moving car itself, as the view out the windows dissolves into a blur with the movement. Throughout the five minutes loop, we never stand still -- things move past us laterally, then we dive into the viewpoint. We are submerged into a blue-watery world, surface, and then move into a high vantage point over a city -- the ocean dominates the distance, pinned to the sky. A message blinks on screen ("enter password"), taking us out of our reverie; then another ("increase speed"). A coda to Allora and Calzadilla's trumpet/muffler video at the other end of the gallery space, this silent vision (full of talk, but without sound) brackets the entire business of this terrific, engaging show. Ultimately, what is most fascinating about the exhibit as a whole, and these artists as a group, is the way in which they have moved in to the space, sprucing things up with every kind of ticky-tacky, brilliantly colored, glistening, largely industrially produced sort of material. Despite the intelligence with which these artists play off artistic convention, there is no sense of nostalgic looking back. The ingenuity alone is astonishing, but the sheer élan with which this crews slaps every conventional notion of art-making into an embrace of wall, space and environment is so cheeky you can't help but be taken with it. .: Read Here @ hartfordadvocate.com - top - |
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The Rowland Years: Arts From a May 12th report WNPR.com... "Governor John Rowland has often touted his commitment to the arts. In his first year in office, Rowland made good on a campaign promise and doubled the budget for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts from 1 million to 2 million dollars a year - its now about 3.5 million. That boost helped vault Connecticut from number 44 to number 2 in the nation in per capita funding for the arts. But some critics wonder who state support for the arts is really benefiting. As part of our series about Rowland's tenure in office, WNPR's Amy Jeffries reports." This story features an interview with Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. .: Listen Here on WNPR.com (Real Audio Required) - top - |
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Going Beyond Identity May 1, 2004 Art has frequently been about contradiction and variety. And never more so than in a new exhibit by Puerto Rican artists that opens today at Hartford's Real Art Ways. "None of the Above" features paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs and installations by 16 artists. The exhibit surveys a new generation's art being made on and off the island. And according to Steven Holmes, exhibit co-curator with Silvia Karman Cubiña and Deborah Cullen, there's a lot about it different from the generation before. "It's not about identity politics necessarily," he says. "There seems a less urgent need to claim or assert Puerto Rican issues. Identity seems a resolved issue; there's a greater confidence and ease." While there's a pride in its ethnicity, the art has universal appeal. That's confirmed in a tour of the exhibit. Two of the artists, Chemi Rosado Seijo and Javier Cambre, had works on view at New York's Whitney Biennial in 2002. Another, Dzine, recently had his painting "Beautiful Otherness" on show at the ARCO Exhibit in Madrid. Dzine's piece immediately grabs your attention in the Main Gallery. Thirty-eight feet by 6 feet, it is an abstract but lyrical montage of colorful lava lamp-like drops and clouds amid rectangular bands of black, pink, yellow and tan. The work is acrylic paint on canvas, but - in a unique twist - has superimposed on it tiny glass beads, giving the art a glossy sheen. Its creator was at one time a street artist, though there seems more calculation than spontaneity at work in "Beautiful Otherness." Dzine says his ethnic heritage has less bearing on his art than the electronic music he listens to. "I don't like labels," he says. "As a Latino and street artist, it's hard enough to break in to the art world." The Puerto Rican connection is more obvious in the exhibit's other works, including the short, politically fraught film "Returning a Sound" by Allora & Calzadilla. In it, a camera follows a motorcycle with a trumpet as its muffler traveling around the lush green of the island of Vieques, the home of a controversial U.S. military base. The five-minute video is viewed as a loop, with the trumpet playing its own unusual sort of musical commentary. Depending on the acceleration or gear-shifting of the vehicle (and the listener's imagination), it might sound like a variation of "Taps" or a super-slow bluesy jazz solo. In "Channels IV" Nayda Collazo-Llorens presents another film image of Puerto Rico, played alongside another of the mainland United States. As an artist who calls both places home, she offers a bifurcated vision split by language, geographical space and culture, with the net effect of one world starkly contradicting or negating the other. Chemi Rosado Seijo plays with another dichotomy in "Cubo Plano." Using the cube as a subject, he transforms the pure rational geometry of the shape into a warm figure made comfortable in plush pillows arranged side-by-side as a cozy patchwork quilt. Likewise, a transparent glass rectangular prism in Javier Cambre's "Cinema Glass House" is given a soul through a projected film in its interior of a person going through her everyday paces. Alongside "Cinema Glass House" is Arnaldo Morales' large-scale machine sculpture called "Vanilla Power." It might best resemble the laser gun in "Goldfinger." In this interactive work that functions like a harpoon, one is invited to "fire" the trigger (a subway handle) from inside a "protective" barricade. A menacing, noisy weapon designed to intimidate as well as to inspire awe, it also may symbolically represent a weapon as a super-sized, fancy toy. According to the 36-year-old artist, he grew up watching a lot of Hollywood science-fiction and "Mad Max" films. Like others in his generation, he says he is as much a product of globalization as he is of his country. "The exhibit is a global conversation about art," says Holmes. "Some of the art work could be made anywhere, whereas some of the issues relevant to Puerto Rico are broadly identity-based." Holmes went to San Juan with Real Art Ways executive director Will K. Wilkins three years ago and says he was amazed by the breadth and cosmopolitan sophistication of the island's art. The island has opened two new art museums, and Puerto Rico has seen an explosion of public art works. (The show will travel to San Juan later this year.) Says Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, many of his artist colleagues have two homes, one in the United States and another in Puerto Rico or abroad. In light of the recent artistic activity in Puerto Rico, many are also enticed to return to the island. With the sounds of Spanish hip-hop in the background, Juhasz-Alvarado
is completing assembly on one of two of his artworks, a life-size armored
car made of plywood. Or is it an ice cream truck? The artist says the
ambiguity is deliberate, playing with the irony of money and sweets. Juhasz-Alvarado, who studied at Yale and lived in Connecticut for eight years, says he thinks of his art as "an opportunity to think about the idea of resistance, and work with ideas through my craft." He wears a T-shirt with the word "Resist!" on the front and the date and place of the robbery on the back. One of his art's ideas remains Puerto Rican identity, which according to curator Cubiña may be deeper in the mainland U.S. than in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican identity is complicated, she says, by the diffusion of Puerto Ricans across a wide range of places. Though there's no linear unity to the work on display, she notes. "The artists here have negotiated their 'Puerto Rico'-ness and have explored the idea of personal identity a little more." - top - |
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For
Three Young Artists, A Search for the Spiritual Published Sunday, March 28, 2004
For starters, Ms. Emerson makes luridly colored, rhinestone-studded paintings about deer hunting. Sometimes the deer are alive, wandering through wilderness; at other times they are on the ground, shot, with blood trickling from their noses. A particularly disquieting painting shows birds picking over a dead deer carcass. It is pretty gross. The taffy colors feel acutely fashionable, as does the theme. But the mood is oddly detached, even callow. Why? The artist puts us in the shoes of a hunter, waiting patiently behind a clump of trees for the right moment to shoot. Looking at the deer we do not see a living thing, but a trophy, a souvenir of the majestic world of nature. What troubles me about these paintings is their beauty. They are innocent, direct and very aesthetic. Partly, they seem to be about environmental issues, and partly about the simple pleasures of painting and a love of bright color. There is nothing wrong with that, but such a cocktail of ingredients can easily slip into soft-core issue art. Like Ms. Emerson's paintings, Ms. Philbrick's installations occasion a fair amount of head scratching. At base, though, she is interested in the human voice, with most of her installations employing voices distorted or fragmented into puffs and squeaks. Her experiments in these areas are commonly regarded as pioneering. Her best piece here is ''Valise'' (1999-2000/2003), consisting of sound clips from a radio drama separated out, distorted and transmitted through 22 sets of headphones hanging from the ceiling. The sounds are mostly meaningless, admittedly, but so are the individual shapes and lines in Cubist paintings. The work is about the splintering of forms. Just as Picasso and Braque abandoned conventional perspective in painting and sought to present all aspects of the same object simultaneously, so Ms. Philbrick presents simultaneously all aspects of what she hears. The result is a parallel aural reality, rather than a reflected one. Another piece, ''Voix/e (Saints)'' (2003-4), applies the same principle. It consists of two light-box images of a man and a woman, each with a quotation from the Song of Solomon tattooed on their bodies. Emanating from the light-box images are faint, disjointed sounds. Move closer and you will discover that the sounds are in fact a single voice, reading from the Song of Solomon, separated into right and left speakers. The left speaker pronounces the consonants, and the right pronounces the vowels. In the back room, Ms. MacGuffie's installation weaves together ''ideas about nature and culture, impermanence and perspective,'' according to the wall text. Titled ''Authorized Reentrance'' (2004), it is an abstract wall drawing made of thousands of finely cut metal strips stuck to painted magnetic wallpaper. Viewers are invited to change the installation, moving the magnets around the walls to create their own designs. Not being a fan of participatory artwork, I was tempted to give this piece a quick once-over and then head for the cold, fresh air. But this time something held me there, demanding I stay and participate in the artwork. I am glad I did, for over the course of the exhibition large portions of the drawing have been transformed into representational imagery, words and text, some of which makes for stimulating viewing. Most notably, the words ''peace'' and ''love'' are all over the wall, along with a bunch of lovingly forlorn faces. It is a reflection of the times, I guess, or a desire on the part of everyday museum visitors to have their voices heard. That an artwork can provide a platform for those voices tells me that art is important, at least in Hartford, and can make a difference. Perhaps the yen to make art that matters is not so utopian after all. The work of Sarah Emerson, Jane Philbrick and Marci MacGuffie is at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor Street, Hartford, (860)232-1006, through April 4. Images: Photos: Jane Philbrick's installation
''Valise,'' above; Marci MacGuffie's installation
''Authorized
Reentrance,'' left;
and Sarah
Emerson's painting ''Do the Collapse''
are on display at Real Art Ways in Hartford. - top - |
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The History of Art, in Baggy Jeans and Bomber Jackets
Sometimes it's
the trombonist's anger at being abused as a child that erupts from
his horn. Sometimes it's the sorrow of his guitar-playing grandfather's
death. Other times it's the joy of marrying the right woman that prances
forth to a bomba beat, the traditional rhythm of his native Puerto Rico and
the heartbeat
of his soul.
As seasoned art watchers will
know, the contemporary art scene is awash with young artists making
morally earnest, quasi-spiritual work. Today's
young artists, it seems to me, want art to matter again, to have the
power to change the world. Or at very least, they want art to speak
to things
that they do not like and want changed.