The exhibition opened Saturday and runs through January 18, 2010 in the IMA’s Star Studio. I spent my Tuesday lunch in the exhibition. The students’ video works and the film documenting the process with Dash drew me in. I was also tempted to add my own daydream to an IMA Flickr set shown in the exhibition as a slideshow. But my stomach was growling so I’ll have to go back.

I was delighted to sit down with Julie for a quick chat earlier this year.

Interview with artist Julie Dash

Was there a recent experience that led to the title for the exhibition, Smuggling Daydreams into Reality?
That’s something that as an artist I’ve been doing all my life and career. It’s not always easy being a visual artist. Creative ideas can be fragile and sometimes you have to protect those ideas at the same time you are developing them. We’re born creative beings. As you get older people demand that you be less creative, less imaginative and more pragmatic so you learn to protect and nurture your imagination. I’ve learned to smuggle my dreams into reality.

What do you hope visitors to the exhibition will take away from their experience?
First, it’s a way of giving a public voice to my students. Second, it’s a way for visitors to see and hear and interact with the students. And for me, it’s a great experiment with teaching and nurturing creativity. This is the first time I’ve worked with students in this way. I was presented with the opportunity and said “I can’t turn this down.” For the students, myself and the community, I hope we will continue this experience on some level.

The exhibition title also serves as a theme for this year’s Museum Apprentice Program. How do you hope the students in the program will be impacted?
I hope they will have fun smuggling their creative ideas, and at the same time they will unmask themselves. Everyone walks around with some mask on. This is the perfect venue to talk about unveiling because you have access to art and experts in one place. The students went into the galleries and looked at African and Asian masks and then video blogged about their experiences.

As a filmmaker, your daydreams would seem to be wonderful breeding ground to explore new stories, plots and characters. How have your daydreams found their way into your craft?
You’ll always see some of my daydreams in my films. If given an assignment or a script, I have to dream it from beginning to end before I make it. Dreaming comes in handy. It’s really just a more romantic way of saying “visualize.”

Are there ways you might recommend people to access and record their banished fantasies or deferred hopes?
Video blogging – it’s private and easily done with a flip camera and tripod. You can sit with yourself and talk about experiences.

Tell me something about yourself you think readers would like to know.
Before a filmmaker, I’m a mother. My daughter just graduated from college. So you could say, first I’m a mommy.

Note: this interview was also published in the fall issue of Previews membership magazine.

Isabel Bishop’s Tidying Up

One of the great things about working in an art museum is the opportunity to really get to know a collection. It is a sad reality of museum work that sometimes, although we are literally surrounded by a wonderful and varied collection of art, the practicalities of making the institution do the things it does overwhelm museum employees, causing us to spend more time in Outlook than actually looking around. It has been my experience that walking the galleries almost always yields some surprise, or reacquaints me with a painting I’ve admired but lost touch with, or is just somehow the right painting for the right day. A stroll through the American galleries earlier this week included some time spent with Tidying Up by Isabel Bishop, a painting that I’ve seen many times,. I’ve always liked the painting, but this time the painting really seemed special, and I’ve been thinking about why.

I’ll foreground my discussion of the painting with an admission: I think my interest in any painting, or the degree to which a painting affects me, is nearly always dependent on the way the painting connects with or disputes some ongoing development in my own art making process. I suppose I am a selfish viewer, but I think that it is also about the value of placing yourself within a lineage of artists, and finding commonalities in practice across eras and locations. I think that is one part of what museums provide for most artists, a place to construct a framework for your own practice, a building that serves as some kind of physical demonstration of the value of making art as a collective human endeavor. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about drawing and observation, and about the way that keeping a sketchbook full of drawings done on the spot and in the moment formalizes the process of looking around, and helps remind one to be always at the ready for visual inspiration. Bishop’s painting speaks to that impulse to see and interpret, and in keeping with the nostalgic air of the beginning of this post, reminds of me of days spent on trains and in public spaces sketching unsuspecting strangers. I have become a frequent visitor to the Urban Sketchers site which is a collection of artists in cities all around the world who post scans of their sketchbooks, including some drawings of commuters that rhyme nicely with the un-posed and informal look of Tidying Up.

I love the way that finding oneself unexpectedly entranced by a painting can act as a catalyst that links and crystallizes thoughts. In an unexpected way, I find myself connecting both the work posted on the sketchblog and Bishop’s painting to the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Before researching and installing the current Star Studio exhibition, More than Four Legs: A Closer Look at Chairs (through January 19), I was familiar with the work of Charles and Ray Eames as designers, but knew very little about their photography. The show contains a label written by Charles Eames’s granddaughter, Carla Hartman that details the amazing volume of photographs that Charles and Ray Eames produced (hundreds of thousands of still images). Many of the photos record apparently simple, common household tableaus (dishes in a sink, a bouquet of flowers). I love the idea of a cumulative record of the visual events encountered in daily life that prompted the desire to artfully record the moment, to produce a personal library of framed views of the world. Perhaps today Charles and Ray would have a massive Flickr account or would keep a really great photoblog.
Combining Bishop’s painting (and the long history of reportage-style drawing that is implied by it ) with the examples of lifetimes of close looking found in the work of Charles and Ray Eames creates a model for really seeing and understanding the world through constant, disciplined application and exertion of the “view-finding” eye. The message I get is shoot photos, make drawings, watch the space around you for art, both purposeful and unplanned. Look more intently at the world around you.

I don’t want to overstate this, but I feel like Isabel Bishop’s modestly scaled painting is acting as my own stand-in for Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo, and reminding me of the unique, and really kind of unreasonable, impact that an object in a museum can have on one’s thinking. The last line of Rilke’s poem is “You must change your life.” There is an echo of that message to be found in museums everywhere, and it is likely to be triggered by an object far less obviously imbued with the weight of historic significance than an ancient Greek statue.

So, for me 2009 is going to be a year of looking around more intently, drawing more, and a year of allowing myself frequent opportunities to be surprised and affected by the works in the museum’s collections. Maybe I will also start writing more concise blog posts. Happy New Year.

These chairs are being created by artists of all ages using a simple template as a starting point.  Feeling inspired to try your hand at creating the next innovation in seating design?  Drop by Star Studio and get to work.  As always, the activity is free and available all hours that the museum is open.  Can’t make it to Star before the show closes?  You can still make a chair!

Download a printable template adapted from the die-cut that Carla Hartman designed for use in Star Studio.

Download Chair Template

I quit “trying so hard.” I wrote like I was writing to my best friend. I added facts. It’s just not right.

I’ve made things in Star Studio. I go to Art Openings. I work at every exhibition opening event and spend time in the galleries. So why can’t I pick up a brush, pen, piece of chalk, prick my finger and write in blood, whatever – and spill my brilliance into a sketchbook or an electronic diary? Throughout my life I’ve owned countless notebooks and sketch pads that I’ve bought only to sit in a corner and get dusty. Packs of markers of every width and color that I draw the same ol’ Ninja Turtle(usually Donatello – but only because I have a fondness for purple).

Some of my work is on the wall at Zest – the great restaurant on 54th St., where they have placemats you can draw on and a glass of crayons. But it’s no Picasso. I think I even asked the my dining guests at the table “What should I draw?” It was winter. I made a snowman. It’s hanging next to – you guessed it – a little kids drawing of a Ninja Turtle.

Lately I’ve gotten it into my head that I want to illustrate children’s books. As long as someone were to write the story, I could draw the pictures that go along with it. And I have recently discovered that a knack I do have is for scrap-booking. But I want to be a blogger – a GOOD blogger. So I guess I’m asking this – what inspires you? I could join the Army to Be All I Can Be, but how do you get over a creative block? My inner Martha Stewart is trapped. Please, set her free…

In the years since Star Studio opened, countless visitors have declined the invitation to make something in the drop-in studio by saying “Oh no, I’m not creative.” Huh. I’ve never had a child say that, though. Something happens between childhood and adulthood that prompts many of us to draw a line between who we are and who we think we aren’t. Maybe children are just braver, less worried about making a mistake. In the end, kids are just more open to the concept that making art is fun. I think many adults (and I’m including many adults who identify themselves as artists, myself included) sometimes forget that simple idea: it is fun to make things. It is satisfying to create, even if the thing you are creating is seemingly trivial, or unaccomplished, or ugly, or merely pretty.

I have the good fortune to see children making art often – in Star Studio, in the studio classes offered here at the museum, and at home, where my own children put markers, crayons, and Play-Doh to nearly daily use. Looking up from a work in progress, my son, who is not quite four years old, will say to me “Y’know, Dad, sometimes you’ve got to just check the theory at the door to the studio and just let the paint fly. Let someone else decide if that mark is genuinely felt or merely a self-conscious echo of a mythologized time and place you never knew. It’s just paint, man. Lose the paralyzing introspection and just make the work. Now grab me a chocolate milk.” I’m summarizing, but you get the idea. The point I’m trying to make is that we were all creative as kids, and we all still are…it’s a basic element of being human. Making art is one way to affirm that. We made stuff when we were kids because it was fun to do, and it still is, if we let it be. So, grab your Play-Doh, your sippy cup, and get to work.

Don’t get me wrong, the majority of artwork that visitors make goes home with them, but a percentage always gets donated. Often visitors will make more than one piece, so that they have one to take home and one to add to the collection. We didn’t start out asking people to leave their work, but it always happened. Now, we build it into the consideration of the activities that will be offered in the space. It isn’t really like the formal artist-displaying-work model that is in evidence throughout the museum…the work is typically anonymous and individual pieces aren’t highlighted.

When you walk into the space during the last month or so of an exhibition you experience the visitor-created artwork as a single, room-sized installation first, and only later do you focus on individual pieces. I think it is closer in some ways to the urge behind street art…the sort of private joy to be had from making something great and then leaving it behind for others to discover. I sometimes see visitors coming back to find something that they left behind a month or two before, not to reclaim it, just to see where it is now. The current show, Squares-Folds-Life: Contemporary Origami by Robert J. Lang opened in mid-February, and it will close on July 20th. We’ve been making paper ducks and sparrows with visitors since the show opened. I don’t know how many ducks we have in our flock currently, but I know that we’ve used somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 sheets of origami paper so far during the show. A colleague recently described walking into the drop-in studio by saying that it was like standing in a bag of jellybeans. Sometimes it makes me think of a really cheery version of The Birds…

After the show closes, we’ll shoot some photos of the space, and save a small number of the ducks and other paper sculptures that were made during the show, and eventually the rest of them will be recycled. The drop-in space will be cleaned and painted…a blank slate for the next collaborative installation.

In the gallery, the finished work is shown alongside an 8’ x 4’ graphic panel that depicts the 113 steps developed by Lang to transform a square of paper into a realistic lobster with articulated legs and spindly antennae without making any cuts to the paper. I included the large print of the folding instructions in the design of the exhibition with the idea that it would help visitors understand how Lang coaxes such forms from the paper while adhering to the “rules” of origami. The step-by-step instructions are the same as those that would appear in any of the multiple books that Lang has published, and the implication is that if you possessed sufficient origami folding experience and skill you could follow them and make a lobster of your own. I am sure that a skilled origami artist would respond to the instructions in that way, but for most of our visitors, the effect is altogether different. Seeing exactly how the lobster was made does not demystify the process. Looking at each step makes the final piece seem more astounding and improbable, not less.

One of the great things about working in a museum with a large and varied collection is the way that dialogues between works of art sometimes appear unexpectedly. If you are standing in Star Studio, near the instructions for the lobster, and you look directly across the main hall you can see Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing No. 652. Thinking about the impact of displaying the instructions for the production of a work of art along with the finished piece while LeWitt’s mural is in your peripheral vision, some conceptual links between the two artist’s practices begin to emerge. Lang composes and diagrams the origami sculptures that he creates, and gives them titles that include an opus number, like a musical composition would. On his website, Lang describes the folding diagrams for each of these compositions as “…serving the same purpose that a musical score does: it provides a guide to the performer (in origami, the folder) while allowing the performer to express his or her own personality through interpretation and variation”. There is a parallel here with LeWitt’s practice of providing instructions for the production of his wall drawings and accepting the idiosyncrasies of the execution of those instructions by different hands. I’m not arguing that we should think of Robert J. Lang as a conceptual artist, but it is worth considering the ways in which some of Lang’s instructions, like those pictured here wouldn’t seem out of place in LeWitt’s body of work.