The Argentinian artist’s first public sculpture in New York will coincide with a survey at the Jewish Museum
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Ikebana Connects Creative Traditions in ‘Common Ground,’ a Ceramic Project Tying People Together Through Earthen Materials
“Massachusetts.” Photo by Joshua White. All images courtesy of Inventory Press, shared with permission
“Before there was America the country, or the individual states and the ensuing territorial identities and resulting politics, there was the land that America occupies,” writes artist Adam Silverman about Common Ground. Born in 2019, the ongoing project is ambitious and optimistic, seeking to connect people separated by ideology, geography, and culture through the shared land we occupy.
While its goal is lofty, the premise of Common Ground is simple: Silverman harvests clay, water, and wood ash from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the five occupied U.S. territories—Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands—and then blends the materials together so that the substances and their origins are indistinguishable. That mixture is the basis of the artist’s ceramic vessels, which encompass two series of tableware and ceremonial pots. He explains about the latter: “The forms are not subtle, and although they stand on strong feet or foundations, they are battered, scarred, leaning over, showing the processes that got them here. The tops are open, symbolically ready to receive.”
A new book published by Inventory Press celebrates Silverman’s ceremonial pots, which are paired with sweeping arrangements made by ikebana students and teachers. Common Ground: With Sogetsu Ikebana Los Angeles documents the artist’s process and explores the impulse behind the project, particularly as it bridges American and Japanese making traditions. Spreads are full of diagrams explaining differences in materials, images of Silverman collecting and preparing his substances, and photos of the completed collaborative works that show myriad Ikebana creations emerging from the vessels.
Common Ground: With Sogetsu Ikebana Los Angeles is currently available from Bookshop, and you can explore more of the project on its site.
“Maryland.” Photo by Joshua White
“Pennsylvania.” Photo by Joshua White
“Louisianna.” Photo by Joshua White
“West Virginia.” Photo by Joshua White
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 Ikebana Connects Creative Traditions in ‘Common Ground,’ a Ceramic Project Tying People Together Through Earthen Materials appeared first on Colossal.
Lee Miller comes into focus, at last
Ten years ago I visited Farleys House in East Sussex, the home of the artist and curator Roland Penrose and his wife Lee Miller (and their various lovers) for over 28 years.
I met their son, Antony Penrose, who still lives in the house. At that time, I must say, there was far less interest in Miller. Like so many women, her achievements were partly overshadowed by the men in her life—and there were quite a few—despite her career as a model and photographer.
There was Roland Penrose himself, a frankly rather mediocre painter but one of the few British Surrealists, noted more today as a curator and biographer of Picasso and Miró. Then there was Picasso, who painted her six times, but of course he always gets the limelight. She was also supposedly a “muse” to her lover Man Ray, who “invented” the solarisation process in 1929 while she was his assistant. The story goes that she flipped on the light briefly when a mouse ran over her foot, so creating these images, part positive, part negative, as if lit from behind. Man Ray and Miller worked so closely together that apparently some works she created are still credited to him.
Miller was among the first women photographers to unsparingly document the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps
But among Miller’s most searing work was when Vogue commissioned her as a photojournalist during the Second World War—partnered with a male co-photographer, David Scherman. She was among the first women photographers to unsparingly document the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. With Scherman they visited Hitler’s home in Munich, where he took the famous image of Miller bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, the bathmat muddied with the dirt of Dachau from her boots. On the very same day, 30 April 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun died by suicide in their Berlin bunker.
Love letters and ephemera
I returned to Farleys House this year, to find that it’s now all about Miller. The guided tour concentrates on her legacy, while Antony Penrose has been working on a massive archive: 60,000 negatives, photographs, love letters and ephemera discovered in trunks in the attic. And certainly interest has been ramped up by the film, Lee, which has just come out, starring Kate Winslet and inspired by Antony’s book, The Lives of Lee Miller (1985).
Miller is now receiving both institutional and commercial accolades. In November the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Australia is presenting a major survey of her work (4 November-25 February 2024), curated by Antony Penrose. And in New York, Gagosian is showing Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends (11 November-22 December). It will feature photographs by Miller and Roland Penrose, and works on paper by the bevy of artists they knew, lived with and loved: Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Valentine Penrose and Picasso.
True to form, Larry Gagosian is staying schtum on prices, so I don’t know how much he is asking for her work. But her prices elsewhere are still nowhere near those of contemporaries. Christie’s is offering a gelatin silver print, her portrait of Man Ray, dating from 1931. It is estimated at $6,000-$8,000. But in the same sale, Man Ray’s silver gelatin portrait of Miller, dating from around 1930 and almost the same size, has a heftier estimate: $20,000-$30,000.
Nevertheless, today a modern edition of Miller’s Women Firewatchers (1941) showing masked wardens in London, is priced at around £20,000. In 2007, a print of the same subject sold at Christie’s for just £1,500—which would be £2,400 today. Your time has come, Lee!
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Hoek’s FLEX Is the Swiss Army Knife of Furniture
Modular furniture has been popular since the late 70s and early 80s, but it’s experienced a resurgence in the last few years that doesn’t include orange velour. No longer is its inherent versatility relegated to sofas. Designers and brands are thinking outside the box to create compelling work while also disrupting the furniture industry. The latest introduction to this revolution is Hoek’s newest product – FLEX. Launching today on Kickstarter, the unique modular piece of furniture can fit many of your needs: coffee table, shoe rack, lap desk, side table, pull-up sofa table, and more. The only limitations are those that you impose.
Conor Coghlan, Co-Founder and CEO of Hoek Home, shared the backstory: “The idea for FLEX began as a gift for a friend of ours who was pregnant. We wanted to create a simple and elegant piece of furniture that she would love, but also wanted it to be as useful around the house as possible.”
Innovative and minimal, FLEX is deceptively simple, designed using two interlocking U-shaped pieces that are proportioned for a variety of uses. It’s the Hoek product that most fully embodies the business’s mission, to create “the best, for the most, for the least,” as pioneered by Charles and Ray Eames.
The more FLEXs you have, the more modular they become. Join two to create a media console for your record collection or a display for your plants. Connect even more for a modular shelving system with timeless curved wood details. Sold as individual units or in bundles of two, three, or four, FLEX does not require any tools or hardware and can be easily set up or changed with zero experience.
To learn more about FLEX, visit the Kickstarter fund at kickstarter.com/projects/hoek/flex-furniture.
Porcelain sculptures of gods: Inspired by India, made in Spain
In its 70th year, Spain-born Lladró, known for its handcrafted porcelain sculptures, opens its second-largest store in India and launches two sculptures — Radha Krishna on a swing and the Ram Darbar — inspired by Hindu mythology
The Story Behind 2023’s Most Iconic Street Style Photograph
After 16 years, Tommy Ton finally landed a portrait of elusive Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo.
This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the spring and fall fashion weeks. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Over the past 16 years, eminent street style photographer Tommy Ton has taken millions of frames outside fashion shows around the world. But it wasn’t until last week that he finally got the shot he’d been pursuing for his entire career: a quiet and beautiful portrait of Rei Kawakubo, the elusive and mysterious creative force behind Comme des Garçons.
It was, Ton tells me the day after returning from Paris, “just this magical moment.” A moment that instantly went industry-viral when Ton posted it on Instagram.
It was the Saturday of Paris Fashion Week, a holiday in all of Comme-dom, the traditional date when the Japanese brand and its sub-labels (like Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya) unveil their collections. Ton was outside the Junya Watanabe venue, usually the earliest-morning show of the entire week, much to the chagrin of bleary-eyed buyers. Ton got there ahead of schedule. “It’s the day that I look forward to the most,” he says.
The Style.com and Vogue veteran, 39, was a fashion fan before he was a photographer. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of every Marc Jacobs collection ever and an archive of rare and important Dries Van Noten. Photographically, Ton’s eye is drawn to detailed sartorial flexes and authentic style moments. So for Ton, Comme day, when Kawakubo devotees hit the streets decked in their freakiest through-the-looking-glass CdG gowns and suits, is like shooting fish in a barrel.
“It’s a day where people can wave their freak flag,” Ton says. “It’s a celebration of fashion on the highest level, a day when fashion is so welcomed to the point where there’s no judgment. It’s so much fun.” You might recall Ton’s famous street style flick of Virgil Abloh and Kanye “Ye” West’s crew at Paris Fashion Week in 2009. That was outside Comme des Garçons Homme Plus.
And at the center of the sartorial drama is the sphinxlike Kawakubo, who has long insisted that the best way to know her is to look at her clothes. Ton calls her a unicorn. Images of Kawakubo exist—anonymity is not central to her creativity, as it was for the reclusive Martin Margiela. But she avoids interviews and cameras, quickly slipping in and out of her shows surrounded by a retinue of aides. “It’s kind of like an unspoken rule,” Ton says. “You never take photos of Rei.”
Which hasn’t stopped Ton from trying, driven more by a deep sense of admiration than anything resembling an Ahab-like madness. “She represents this greatness,” he says. “So even if she’s just in passing, you gasp when you see her. So in the past, any opportunity I had to take a picture of her, if she’s running into her car or being whisked away, I would try to do the best I could.” Ton never got the moment he wanted. Most recent photographs of Kawakubo are of a slight woman, her black bob streaked with gray, walking purposefully away from the photographer.
On Saturday, outside Junya Watanabe, Ton finally got his chance. And just as quickly, he almost squandered it.
“I was photographing all the staff members, which they were kind enough to let me do, because they’re all very notoriously shy. And then I look through the crowd and I see Rei just standing there.” Kawakubo had materialized on the sidewalk, talking to her husband, Comme and Dover Street Market CEO Adrian Joffe, and members of their team. Ton started taking photos of her through the crowd. “And then I thought, oh, how harmless would it be if I just went around and got a bit closer?” He approached, closer but not too close. “And then, as I was about to take a photo, that’s when she turned. And then that’s how you get the photo of her kind of smiling.”
That’s also when Joffe saw what Ton was doing. The Australian executive—an amicable guy if you get to know him!—firmly shooed Ton away. “I felt extremely embarrassed at that point,” Ton recalls. Ton did the only thing he could think of and hid behind a nearby Metro sign. As any fashion week regular knows, Ton is one of the most respectful photographers plying the streets. His style is to hang on the margins of the crowd, about as far from the celebrity paps as possible, patiently waiting for the moments other lensmen might not see. He is beloved in the industry. But Ton had gotten nabbed breaking the unspoken rule. “I just felt like, How could I do something so stupid?” he says.
At risk of slight overstatement, what happened next was basically a fashion week miracle. Ton, still hiding behind the sign, poked his head and lens out. Kawakubo had walked in his direction, and was standing on the curb. She looked over at Ton. “And then she took another step, and that’s when she just stood there and she faced my direction, and I just lifted my camera up and I took one or two shots. She didn’t budge, and I just thought, Let’s go.”
For a few seconds, Ton recalled, everything around Kawakubo went still. Joffe and her staff, the crowd behind her, “totally just shifted.” “Somehow, it was just this magical moment that happened where she was blessing me with this opportunity to take a portrait of her. And there was not a single person in the background.” As soon as Ton had gotten his shot, Kawakubo turned and walked into the show.
The image, Kawakubo poised in her crisp black blazer, is special, the result of Ton’s diligence and grace built up 16 years. “She knows what you mean,” the fashion critic Tim Blanks commented on Instagram. Ton, of course, is modest as ever. “I think it was a very kind gesture she gave to me,” he said. “Maybe she felt bad that I got shooed away, and then when she saw me again she felt like, What’s the harm? Let him have a photo.”
Ton is currently working on a career-spanning street style anthology. “Rei will have some nice coverage” in it, he promises.
The pursuit of street style glory, however, is never over. “I definitely felt like I achieved something I’ve been wanting to achieve for a long time,” Ton says. “But that didn’t stop me from trying to take another photo of her two days later.”
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A Rediscovered Rembrandt Masterpiece Will Head to Auction at Sotheby’s With an $18M Estimate
Rembrandt’s painting reappeared at auction in 2021 attributed to the painter’s circle but infrared imaging reveals the Old Master’s hand.
Lincoln photographer seeking to wrap up documentary of ‘Sixties Survivors’ before they’re gone
LINCOLN — Bill Ganzel survived the 1960s.
He researched how long it would take Russian missiles to rain down on his family’s home in Waverly, grieved the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and joined demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Now, the 74-year-old photographer and former executive producer with Nebraska Public Television is seeking to wrap up a nearly two-decade-long project to document how other “survivors” of the ’60s fared.
“So much happened in the ’60s,” Ganzel said. “There was so much uproar and upheaval and frankly, violence.”
His project is called “Sixties Survivors,” and so far, Ganzel has tracked down and interviewed more than 50 people across the country, from Seattle to Selma.
Look magazine photos
He identified his subjects after scanning years of editions of L00k magazine, a biweekly publication that emphasized photography in documenting American life from 1937 to 1971.
The list includes the first Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War, an anti-war protester who presented a flower to bayonet-wielding soldiers, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and Native American activist John Trudell.
Before they died, Ganzel interviewed and photographed former Deputy U.S. Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who was fired by President Richard Nixon amid the Watergate scandal, at his office in Seattle. And he sat down with JFK’s speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, who wrote the phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
He has interviewed the famous, like actress Ali McGraw and comedian/activist Dick Gregory, and regular people who became part of history because of the images in the magazine.
Now he’s seeking to add up to 10 more survivors — including a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy — who he has reached on the East Coast during a trip next month.
‘Re-photograph’ project
The journey will allow him to attend the opening of an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art that features one of his images from a previous “rephotography” project, “Dust Bowl Descent,” which focused on subjects of Dorothea Lange’s famous photo collection.
But it will also allow him to reach the final subjects for his “Sixties Survivors” project.
“I have to get to them before they die,” Ganzel said.
Why the ’60s?
He said it was a pivotal decade that has molded American society for decades, just like the Depression era of the 1930s and the war-torn years of the 1940s.
‘Culture wars started 50 years ago’
“The culture wars we’re dealing with today started 50 years ago,” Ganzel said.
President Kennedy was assassinated during the decade, as was his brother, Bobby, and Martin Luther King. Television news provided a front-row seat in front of the Vietnam War. And there were fiery riots on the streets over civil rights and the draft.
Ganzel said it’s no wonder so many young people of his generation decided to “drop out” in a counter-culture revolution of drugs and free spirits.
“They saw it as a brutal society,” he said.
Ganzel, who owns the entire collection of Look magazines, said he scoured the pages of the large-format publication for photos and stories that interested him, then began the sometimes years-long process of trying to reconnect with the subjects of those stories.
A tough one was the civil rights protester who carried the American flag in the famous “Bloody Sunday” march in Alabama from Montgomery to Selma in 1965.
The flag bearer, Lewis Marshall, then 15, was not identified in a photo in Look. But Ganzel said that while he was in Alabama interviewing another subject for his project, he asked about the flag bearer and was given a lead.
Flag bearer discovered sculpture
He said that after he was able to discern that Marshall lived in Montgomery, it took two years of phone calls before Marshall answered a call. Eventually, Ganzel said he had to knock on Marshall’s front door before he got an interview and a photograph.
The story got even better — Ganzel was able to take Marshall to a National Park Service museum near Montgomery where, unbeknownst to Marshall, a sculptor had used his image as inspiration for a bronze statue of a flag bearer.
“This is fantastic … to know it’s me,” a nearly speechless Marshall says when he first views the sculpture in a video shot by Ganzel.
The goal of “Sixties Survivors,” Ganzel said, is to update the history of people who lived through the tumultuous decade.
He said he considered Look the best magazine of its day, and when the publication closed, 3.5 million images were donated to the Library of Congress, creating a rich source of background for his project.
His work is part of the “rephotography” movement, a way to produce “then and now” images of famous places and people.
The “Sixties” project, Ganzel said, seemed like a logical extension of his Dust Bowl project. He said he’s been fortunate to get several grants and donations to finance his latest project, which has required trips across the country, but is soliciting additional donations via GoFundMe.com for this trip east next month.
The photographs, he hopes, will be put into a book. The video interviews he’s done may become a documentary — possibly with his old employer, public television — or a podcast.
All of his work will be donated to the Library of Congress, to add to the texture of its collections about the ’60s.
“I feel a mission to tell all of these people’s stories,” Ganzel said. “They gave me their time, they opened up their lives — about what went on and what’s been going on since.”
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Arts council announces upcoming classes
OLEAN — The Tri County Arts Council, 110 W. State St., is putting together several arts classes. Here is the upcoming class schedule for the rest for October:
anish kapoor weaves ‘untrue’ and ‘unreal’ sculptural works into palazzo strozzi’s architecture
