Jasmine Williams moved from Mississippi to Austin, Texas on a whim. She had just lost her job in housing, which provided her a home. While some of her friends were visiting, they brought up the idea of her moving to Austin. With no job prospects that she could find at the time in her field of marketing and corporate relations, she took the chance and left the Magnolia State in 2018.

She was happy in Austin, where she learned she could make a living from creativity and entrepreneurship. She began delving more into her family lineage as well as Mississippian culture and history. Eventually, she ended up creating ’SippTalk, an online forum that highlights Mississippi creatives and culture through various multimedia forms.

“I found myself gravitating to the same work of creating community safe spaces, documentation, and I wanted to do it in a community that was closer to home,” Williams told the Mississippi Free Press.

Staying in Austin began to make less sense, so at the end of 2019, she moved to Jackson, Miss., a city with a large creative community and a place where many of her connections were based.

“I wanted to learn more about oral history and archives and really tell the stories of the people that are here because there’s so much I didn’t know,” Williams said.

A few weeks following her return to Mississippi, Williams met artist Nick Cave. After telling him how much she enjoyed his work, he hired her to organize a call-and-response to his “Beyond the Cave” exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art in downtown Jackson.

The event brought together more than 42 local creators from Jackson and across the state who created responses to Cave’s work through visual art, music, photography, dance and other forms of creative expression. Williams curated the event with friends Meredith Williams, Miranda Hicks and Charity Hicks, also known as rapper Vitamin Cea.

“We didn’t really know the journey that we were embarking on or like what we were really building, but we trusted the people that were around us,” Williams said. “To see the reactions from kids to elders who felt seen, felt special and were excited, that really did it for me. I knew that I wanted to continue to create safe spaces for Black folks to feel seen, regardless of what that looks like.”

This event helped her build a relationship with the art museum and ultimately acquire a position as associate curator of public programs and community engagement. In this role, she has organized events such as “Art and Voice as Healing,” Museum After Hours with The Mashup, the Food Truck Festival with Magnolia Market, and Art Night.

“I never saw myself working in a museum because I love the grassroots aspect; I love being able to create something that’s fresh and new,” Williams said. “I felt like it had to happen outside the walls of an institution, and I felt like I would have to sacrifice my creativity in order to fit into an institution. I think building that relationship did help them to think more about what community and including people really looks like.”

The associate curator said that transitioning into having an institutional mindset has been a challenge but that her experience has come with its own set of advantages like stability, resources and a set location and space that is always present for people to connect to.

The Columbus, Miss., native said she loves that people can see reflections of themselves and can affirm that they belong through the programs and events she organizes. The more opportunities she finds to provide people with a sense of community, the more she feels inspired to keep creating.

“There’s a narrative about Jackson not being safe … so having these programs and they happen safely, people are enjoying themselves, (and) we get to a real representation of what Jackson looks like,” the curator said.

Williams also serves as an artist-in-residence for the Mississippi Museum of Art. On Saturday, June 3, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., she and Sarah Jené will be on-site to premiere their outdoor installation “How We Get Over: We Grow On” in the Art Garden. The project, which will be open to the public during the museum’s hours of operation until Sept. 3, 2023, is an exploration of Black grief and Black southern traditions around grief.

Jené curated an opening ceremony that pays homage to the Black church and the tradition of testifying.

“We both lost family members to COVID, and it was just bringing up a lot of emotions that were bigger than just losing someone,” Williams said. “We were trying to create a space that just holds space for folks to deal with the plethora of what grief is, expanding on what we think about grief, and even talking more about what perpetual grief looks like and why Black folks experience grief differently.”

In the future, Williams wants to organize an arts and music festival and find opportunities for creatives to learn more about what it means to sustain oneself through art. Jackson’s creative ecosystem has always been there with artists doing the work to keep it going, the curator explained, emphasizing that the main thing that is still largely missing in her view are the eyes and resources to take it to the next level.

“Everybody is creating their own universe and doing things to push themselves forward,” she said. “We are going to look up (one day), and we are going to be at the place that we dreamed about because we’ve just been doing the work and people feel motivated.”

“How We Get Over: We Grow On” premieres outside the Mississippi Museum of Art (380 S. Lamar St., Jackson) on Saturday, June 3, 2023, with a launch event from the participating artists taking place from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The installation will remain on display until Sept. 3, 2023. For more information on the art museum, visit msmuseumart.org. 

If renowned modernist painter Gordon Smith hadn’t lived to 101 years of age, it’s highly probable that his Arthur Erickson designed house — probably the most famous Erickson residence in the country — wouldn’t have survived.

The small house, built in 1964, with extensive glazing and cantilevered beams, sits nestled within a forest setting near the ocean in West Vancouver, on a lot worth millions. Considering the land value, a lot of buyers would have knocked the house down, cleared the trees and built a mansion. But Smith, who commissioned Erickson to build the house for him and his artist wife Marion, who died in 2009, lived in the house until his death in 2020. The couple didn’t have children, and Smith wisely left the house in the hands of Equinox Galleries owner Andy Sylvester and curator Daina Augaitis, who’ve spent the last two years restoring it.

As a fundraising drive for the Arthur Erickson Foundation, they are showing off the results with group tours on June 24. It is the first public viewing of the famous modernist house, which includes a new display of contemporary art on the walls (Smith donated much of his own stellar collection when he was alive). The $500 ticket also includes an optional tour of artist-writer Douglas Coupland’s house nearby, hosted by Coupland himself. (Coupland was a dear friend of Smith’s). 

And tickets are being snapped up — which tells you something about the level of interest in Erickson’s work. It tells you something else, too, says heritage expert and consultant Don Luxton. 

“It tells you something about marketing,” he says. “The Smith House is the greatest house that Erickson did, arguably, and the fact it’s preserved is a triumph. You never keep everything, but it shows that it’s possible to find the right owners for these buildings. And that that house had an audience.”

Not all midcentury modern houses are so lucky. Back in the 1950s and 1960s architects who favoured modern designs had free rein on Vancouver’s North Shore, particularly in West Vancouver, with its ocean views and rugged forested slopes. Land was relatively cheap and the geography a welcome challenge to the new generation of designers who were keen on integrating the lush surroundings. They built a lot of modern houses with a particular West Coast style. 

But with land now at a premium, and real estate investment a key market driver, it’s difficult to justify a small house on a large lot, says Luxton. That makes marketing of the houses key to their survival — especially without crucial government policies in place to save them, including incentives, such as tax breaks for those owners that do preserve them, he says.

“Nobody is trying to help these [home owners], so the fact that any of these buildings survive is remarkable,” he says. “The hope for them is you’ve got to increase the value of the building in terms of how you market them, and you have to make it a prestige thing. That works in other jurisdictions, in Palm Springs especially. People are mad to buy these midcentury modern houses, especially if a star lived there. But it’s a different market in Palm Springs.

“So there is a lot that’s working against the buildings in Vancouver, and mainly it’s just sheer land value.”

The latest Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver statistics show that despite interest rates doubling, home prices have increased about 5% year to date. Near record-low inventory has created a competitive price environment despite the increased cost of borrowing, according to the board. Buyers are looking, which puts pressure on vulnerable West Coast Modern homes that are relatively small in relation to their lot size. 

That’s the problem for the house designed and lived in by architect Robert Hassell, at 5791 Telegraph Trail, in West Vancouver, which is listed for $1.99M. The tall cedar-clad structure called Hassell House is being marketed as a teardown with no regard for its provenance. On the other hand, there is also the Bowker House, a Fred Hollingsworth and Barry Downs collaboration that is on the market for the first time in more than 50 years that is being marketed for its midcentury prestige and splendor, with 20-foot-high cathedral ceilings, exposed wood expanse and considerable glazing and views of Howe Sound. The 2,794-sq.-ft house, built on a large lot at 6850 Hycroft Rd. in West Vancouver, is listed for $3.198M.

Luxton says it’s difficult to tell what percentage of the houses have been lost and how many have been saved because so many are undocumented. 

West Vancouver has identified 124 houses built between 1945 and 1975 as having architectural importance. Only six are municipally designated heritage buildings from that time period. But their preservation depends on the property owners who appreciate them, and little else. 

Maintenance of the homes is up to the owner, and if a house falls into disrepair there’s little that can protect it, says Luxton. 

 “It’s hard to say what percentage are disappearing but certainly there is an erosion of the building stock, and except for some prominent buildings, not everything is going to be saved. 

“At least [realtor] Trent Rodney and some others are trying to market these things. At least there is more awareness.”

Rodney made a splash last summer when his firm sold a 2,434-sq.-ft Erickson house on Eagleridge Drive, known by architects as Catton House and re-named Starship House by Rodney because of its angular shape. That house sold for $4.3M and made it clear that West Coast Modern houses have an audience that is willing to shell out. Critics complained about the re-naming of significant homes for marketing purposes, but Luxton says the names don’t matter as much as the fact that the houses are surviving.

Rodney is currently marketing another Erickson house, this one in the seven-acre Monteverdi Estates that Erickson designed beginning in 1979. The community consists of 20 homes, most of them on a hillside, with landscaping by legendary landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander. But house No. 8 is on a flat lot, and it’s the first time it’s been on the market in a decade, according to Rodney.  

“A lot of people think it is a strata community because of the extra community space, but it’s not,” says Rodney. 

Not one house in Montiverdi Estates has been torn down. And Rodney — who has carved out a successful niche selling the general West Coast Modern style — says he hasn’t sold a house that got demolished yet. Instead, he has buyers, mostly creative types, patiently waiting for exceptional examples of midcentury or West Coast Modern houses to come up for sale. His strategy is that he prices the houses for their value, not just the cost of the land. 

“The reason we haven’t had one demolition is we charge a premium for the architecture as a work of art. So when we market a piece of architecture, people understand there is a premium attached to the building and the architectural significance there.”

Luxton took the same approach years ago as founding director of Heritage Vancouver. By telling the story behind a house, he says they gave the building cachet. Suddenly people would want to own a home by Samuel Maclure, a West Coast architect from a much earlier period. 

Again, it comes back to the marketing. 

“You have to see them as having a pedigree, like collecting fine old cars,” says Luxton. “It’s a prestige thing. Erickson houses are being bought by people who treasure them. They have real value to people. But those are the exceptions.

“Your average run-of-the-mill midcentury modern building might not hit that level.”

As the market heats up, those houses will just become demo bait. 

In the hands of Eva Jospin, humble cardboard transforms into atmospheric forests, architectural wonders, and mysterious monuments. For more than a decade, the Paris-based artist has explored the possibilities of the corrugated material, layering it to create solid pieces that can be carved to reveal detailed landscapes and interiors. In her solo exhibition Folies at Mariane Ibhrahim, an immersive, site-specific installation challenges notions of scale, while a range of drawings and three-dimensional pieces expand on the possibilities of paper with the addition of bronze and silk tapestries.

At nearly 20 feet long, “Galleria” creates a portal or a gateway with an ornate, coffered ceiling, lined with niches—or perhaps windows—that reveal wooded scenes, woven textiles, and small drawings. The entrance, flanked by trees and textures redolent of rough marble, invites viewers in through a mystical archway. And in “Grotte,” a roughly hewn architectural niche or apse punctuated by trinkets like seashells and string suggests a grotto, a cavern that is often associated with religious devotion and a place to collect sacred items.

“Grotte” (2023), cardboard, brass, and shells, 27 1/2 x 27 1/2 x 19 3/4 inches

Jospin invokes the classical style often associated with historical significance and influence, from ancient ruins to cultural institutions to cathedrals, questioning notions of power and importance. The title, French for “follies,” references the 18th-century European tradition of building extravagant structures purely for decoration, often inspired by crumbling Roman temples or Medieval castles. (Marie Antoinette famously commissioned an entire rural village in the Trianon gardens of Versailles.)

Jospin explores the intersections of nature and the handmade through meticulously carved tree limbs, stone outcrops, and refined surfaces. By using industrial, everyday materials like cardboard, which is often employed temporarily and then discarded, she examines relationships between the quotidian and the sacred, fragility and resilience, and ephemerality and permanence.

Folies continues through September 9 in Mexico City. Find more on Mariane Ibhrahim’s website.

Detail of “Grotte”

“2 Forêts” (2023), cardboard and wood, 37 x 109 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches

“Forêt Noir” (2019), bronze, 30 3/4 x 27 1/8 x 5 7/8 inches

Left: Detail of “2 Forêts.” Right: Detail of “Forêt Noir”

Interior of “Galleria”

Detail of “Galleria”

Left: Ceiling detail of “Galleria.” Right: Texture detail of “Galleria”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Mystical Forests Meet Cavernous Classical Interiors in Eva Jospin’s Cardboard Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

Engel & Völkers Santa Monica is a global luxury service brand. To them, luxury is more than a price point. Luxury is a top-to-bottom service and attention to detail.

“With every property we endeavor to sell, lease or acquire for our clients, we pride ourselves on providing excellence in care,” Broker Sandra Miller said. “From unrivaled global marketing leveraged with a state-of-the-art technology platform to tough real-world negotiations, we are passionate about what we do and strive to exceed your expectations in all aspects of the marketing and sale of your property.”

At Engel & Völkers Santa Monica, their passion is exceeding client expectations, so it’s only natural they align themselves with exceptional real estate professionals to serve clients across the globe. “It’s why we don’t simply have agents, but rather, trusted advisers to guide clients through their home journey with precise knowledge, distinguished care and a bit of fun,” she said. “Our business contributes to the culture and community of Santa Monica by hosting family friendly holiday events at our office. We participate in the Montana Avenue Art Walk, Halloween Hop, and Holiday Hop where families get to take a photo in our office with Santa Claus.”

Engel & Völkers Realtor Sandra Miller has been proudly serving the Santa Monica community for 20 years.

The company was founded in 1977 in Hamburg, Germany. They have divisions in residential and commercial real estate as well as private aviation and yachting. With over 11,000 trusted real estate advisors in over 730 shops around the globe and a presence in over 30 countries on four continents, they are among the most skilled professionals in their field. Their real estate advisors specialize in the highest level of hyper-local knowledge and customer service to help each client find the home and neighborhood of their dreams. “I am truly honored & grateful to be voted Santa Monica’s most loved real estate agent! Engel & Völkers Santa Monica, a global luxury service brand, and I would be honored with the opportunity to serve you,” she said.
“With every property we endeavor to sell, lease or acquire for our clients, we pride ourselves on providing excellence in care. From unrivaled global marketing leveraged with a state-of-the-art technology platform to tough real-world negotiations, we are passionate about what we do and strive to exceed your expectations in all aspects of the marketing and sale of your property.”