Described by William Wilson Corcoran as the “lady with a pen”, 19th century Irish-American artist Eliza Pratt Greatorex is known to have traveled extensively with her inkhorn, producing drawings of old New York, Colorado, Algiers, Italy, Bavaria and France.
The “penner” or “inkhorn” was a device in use from the Middle Ages to the development of industrially manufactured fountain pens in the mid to late 19th century. Typically made of cows’ horn these clever objects provided a carrying case for ink, pen, and ashes or blotting powder. Short quill nibs were carried in the upper chamber, with an ink bottle below it. Its cork stopper provided a soft surface for nibs to rest upon that would not dull their points. Beneath there ink bottle is a container for ashes with a perforated cover for shaking the blotting-powder onto the page.
This particular example is a replica of an penner made ca. 1760, made by master horner Arthur deCamp, President of the Kentucky Rifle Association and a Master member of the Honorable Company of Horners guild. One of his inkhorns received the “Best in Show” award at the 2010 conference of the Honorable Company of Horners.

Art’s website: http://www.artspowderhorns.com/index.html

Letters from the Field: August 1-2, 2014
New York to Cusco
James L. McElhinney © 2014

Several months ago my wife Kathie Manthorne received word that funding had been approved for a grant she submitted to the Getty Foundation on behalf of the Laguna Museum of Art, for an exhibition exploring the subject of landscape in the art of Mexico and California. The exhibition will be part LA/LA (Los Angles/Latin America), the second installment of the Getty’s new Pacific Standard Time initiative. When Kathie was invited to deliver a paper at the Universidad Católica de Lima on historic artworks depicting Franciscan missions in California, we decided to arrive in Peru five days early to visit Cusco and Machu Picchu, and then explore Lima and its environs at the back end of the trip.
Driving from Washington Heights to Newark Liberty International Airport on a Friday afternoon might have presented a few challenges, but the moment we chose to depart provided us with no delays. Kathie noted the high water level in the salt meadows flanking the Jersey Turnpike, and I was reminded of John McPhee’s In Suspect Terrain, in which he traverses the United States via I-80, across the Hackensack River to the north, far behind us.
Passing the Meadowlands Sports Complex on our right, the turnpike traverses vast wetlands via an elevated causeway before being borne aloft on a ribbon of elevated roadways. Rising up out of the marshes to the east, the dark, rocky face of Snake Hill is adorned by a polychrome tapestry of aerosol graffiti. A lone yellow brick smokestack is the solitary relic of a tuberculosis sanatorium and lunatic asylum that once stood on the volcanic promontory.
Exiting the turnpike, depositing the car in the B section of the long-term parking lot, we caught the bus, checked in and suffered the routine vexations of airport security before embarking on a non-stop flight to Lima, where we arrived about nine hours later.
No direct flights exist between any of the New York airports and Cusco. Because the most frequent connections are through Lima, it would be our first destination. Arriving late in the evening, the second leg of our journey had to wait until morning.
Passing the night at the enchanting Hotel Costa del Sol, literally twenty meters from the arrivals terminal at Jorge Chavez International Airport. Leaving the terminal we hewed a path through a predatory swarm of taxi and limo drivers vying for fares. Our driver in Cusco explained that in Peru the difference between a private automobile and a taxi is whether or not the owner had purchased a dome light and displayed it on the roof of his car. Street hails in Lima are risky affairs because unprincipled taxi-drivers have been know to deliver fares into the hands of ruffians and thieves who then force their victims to withdraw cash from ATMs. We heard one tale of an American who took the wrong taxi and lost everything but his underpants.
We checked into the hotel. One of the two small elevators bore a sign reading “Fuera de Servicio” because as we discovered in the morning, it was reserved for the use of construction crews who were adding two floors to the existing structure.
Following ubiquitous Latin American construction practices, many buildings in Lima are constructed in stages. Reinforcing bars are left protruding from the structural elements at or above roof level of a building so that more floors might be added in the future.
We skipped the customary Peruvian welcome of Pisco Sour cocktails and went directly to our room, barren as any bunker, noteworthy for its opulent sterility and surprisingly comfortable mattresses. Bone-white concrete walls were decorated with three small, square abstract paintings that seemed to be inspired by macro vision views of river stones or aquarium pebbles. Both pictures were secured to the wall by mysterious means as a deterrent to thievery. Our room was on the far side of the building that faced the city, away from the runways. Spared a night of screaming jets, we awoke around seven in the morning and found the restaurant hotel offering a typical Norteamericano breakfast bar featuring breakfast links the size of Vienna Sausages, Yanqui-style belly-bacon sliced prosciutto-thin and fried to a crisp, along with pain-perdu and maple syrup. Quiche Lorraine was prepared as a frittata cut into brownie-sized chunks. The rest of the menu was spread out in a row of steam trays and tables. Apart from hot dishes were assorted sweet rolls and marmalades, washed down with strong percolated coffee. The Peruvians seem to be fond of caffeinated drinks and we saw at least one Starbucks in central Lima, and most restaurants were equipped with espresso machines. They also use a lot of powdered Nescafe, as well as a kind of syrup/concentrate to which boiling water or heated milk is added to prepare a cup of coffee.
We soon learned the value of being well fortified, as back in the terminal we had to stand our ground against queue-jumping senior citizens. The typical Peruvian is a bit shorter of stature than most North Americans. Those of indigenous blood are slightly shorter than mestizos, but being no larger than European children failed to hinder dogged abuelitos from cutting ahead of anyone who lowered their guard for a split-second.
The terminal was an orgy of confusion. Luggage chariots pushed across serpentine passenger queues crisscrossing one another in a gigantic human granny knot. Guarding the entrance to the cordoned rat-maze dividing the public areas from the check-in counter was a kid of about nineteen, who kept nervously looking over his shoulder, waiting for his cue. Uniformed employees wandered back and forth, indifferent to his perplexity.
A stocky middle aged Peruana called out “Mas rapido!” followed by a chorus of similar exhortations up and down the line in a Babelic host of tongues.
Kathie had been swept a distance of two or three positions ahead of me, but when an airline employee pulled her out of line. I joined her. Examining our papers, the kid at the security podium waved us through to priority check-in, where our bags were tagged and boarding passes printed. Going through yet another security screening, Kathie once again found herself ahead of me in line. She called out for me to join her, but in defiance of local custom I demurred from jumping ahead.
As Kathie’s queue inched forward, I was suddenly pulled out of my line and directed to a security checkpoint at the far end of the barrier, where I passed through an expedited screening process a few minutes ahead of Kathie. Despite the reign of chaos, our plane pushed away from the gate five minutes ahead of schedule with every passenger buckled into his or her seat. During our brief travels in Peru, we came to appreciate that disorder by Anglo standards manages a surprising level of efficiency. We soon became airborne, passing over the Puerto de Callao jutting into the Pacific, leaving behind the Costa Verde and crossing La Ciudad Gris a few miles inland. An hour later, we landed in Cusco. Passengers raced to the baggage claim, but we all had plenty of time to gather our thoughts as the ground crew took its time to locate our luggage.

WALKING THE WALK: PART TWO
FRANK AND HELEN HYDER TALKING WITH JAMES MCELHINNEY
James L. McElhinney © 2014

Helen Hyder: Real estate doesn’t keep just going up. You know how many times I’m working with a new artist and they give me their work and they tell me their prices—if they can tell me their prices, many of them have no clue, and I ask them,
“What are you basing your price on?”
A typical response might be, “Well…it took me a really long time to make it.”
My response is, “That’s your decision. You can’t base it on a by-hour rate.”

James McElhinney: Well this is one of the things about artistic quality that a lot of people have said, the age of industry, collective bargaining, and the whole idea of the hourly wage has made some kind of abstract equation between the value of something and the amount of time it takes to make it. So you could spend a lifetime making something completely worthless or you could make something magical in a minute. So it’s actually what you’re dealing is what you’re dealing.

Frank Hyder: And I have a warehouse filled with work that I’ve made over 35 years that is powerful, perfectly good, high quality work that didn’t make the market. I did sell lots of work during that time, but there is that storage.

JM: That’s what they call “research”.

FH: Right. And so, you can’t look at making a single work of art if you are a real artist because you have to think in terms of a seminal body of work or a complete life of work. When we started doing art fairs, there are galleries that do one or two fairs a year; but then there are galleries that do many fairs in a year

HH: 18, 20,24

FH: Yeah, we know dealers from Spain and Mexico and from other places, London, that do 18 fairs a year. What they do now, instead of looking at the numbers from a given fair and say, “Oh we’re losing money here.” What they do is put it all into one box for the whole year, and they dollar-cost average the whole year out, and they look at how the business is. Like I said earlier, we did a fair this year where we lost almost everything we invested. We’ve had other fairs where we did that as well, but we came from that fair really quite behind. But while we were there, we met an artist who we had never worked with before. We started a dialogue, and the next time we did a fair, two months later, we showed this artist. We sold enough of this artist’s work at the next fair to cover the complete loss. So when we look at that we say neither fair was a failure. They were both a success. Because sometimes you walk away from one fair with a new client or a new artist, or you walk away with a possible sale that doesn’t happen for two years

JM: Well you used the term a while back; you spoke about taking a loss leader. This is a basic concept that you offer a product at below value to get people to come to you, and a lot of dealers in this town do this too. They’ll actually get the artist’s inventory in the gallery and they’ll give a piece to a museum if the museum will take it, or they’ll give a piece to prominent collector–

HH: Well that’s building a resume, yeah sure.

JM: Building a resume but also marketing, because if you give a piece to a museum, they hang it on a wall, people see it. You give the piece to a top collector. They’re having cocktails. People see it. Nobody’s going to be rude enough to ask,
“How much did you pay for it?”

FH: We live in a new time; everything’s different. When you and I first started making paintings, you made a painting then you made a slide, you had to get it developed, you had to send it to somebody.

JM: Technology.

FH: So technology has changed. But also, other technologies have changed. For example, when we opened, it was one of my feelings that we had to have a state-of-the-art website. It had to be absolutely the tool. And we have a counter on our website that can show us where people that are visiting our website are coming from. So we’re sitting the gallery in Miami or Philadelphia, we can see on the website that we have somebody in Toronto, Canada looking at certain pages on the website and how long they’re doing that. When we’re about to go to a new site for a fair, we will have an increase of hits on the fair, and we’ll see what they’re looking at and that can aid us in picking out the work to bring to the fair so we’re prepared for what’s going to happen. These technologies, not every gallery takes advantage of these, but the ones that are succeeding and surviving are employing every one of these strategies that you can find. At the same time, it’s not necessarily about making money, because there are a lot of galleries making lots more money all around us. Our strategy is that we’re surviving and we’re showing the things we care about. That matters, too. Just making money is not what it’s about. The commodity issue—that’s something that, after 35-40 years in the business, gets a little tiresome.

JM: If success has a dollar value, as they say in Hollywood: there’ll always be a smarter agent, there’ll always be a bigger part, and there’ll always be a prettier girl. And you have so many people in the world who have so much money, it’s gotta be also about doing what you want to do.

FH: And there are new forms, too. For example, we did a fair and this man came up and talked to me at length and it turns out he’s the CEO of a cruise line who has a particular interest in art. He has several ships, and on these ships he has a number of works by Picasso, Miro, Mendive, Wilfredo Lam. The collection is immense, and it’s spread across luxury cruise lines. As he said to me,
“The top two percent of the nation are riding on my ships. I’m going to give them a visual diet that is equivalent to their status and their economics.”
So he approached me about making some paintings in my mixed media that would be weatherproof, and we started with a small block of commissioned paintings. I just finished my 32nd commissioned painting for this line. He also built two ships that incorporated a 1,000 square foot art studio on the ship, and he puts together artists residencies. So he puts an artist on the ship for a month or for two weeks, and he gives them a working room and supplies. He allows people to come into the space and see art. He just took what they do with the cooking classes and all these different models and applied them to art. I’ve been told that people like Dale Chihuly have done these things. The playing field is different. We are leaving on the fourth of April for Tahiti, where we will get on a ship in Papeete, and we will sail from Tahiti to Chile.

HH: Peru.(Callao, Lima)

FH: Peru. We’re stopping in Easter Island, Bora Bora, many of these other sights. And I will be working as the artist for that month on the ship, making my work, interacting with people, dining with guests on the ship, and talking about the other art that’s on the ship, which includes Picasso, Miro, etc.

JM: There was, a few years ago, maybe 5-6 years ago or more, someone was running an art fair on a boat. FH: Oh they would be the Lesters. We know them very well. We’ve done that fair five times.

JM: Is it still a going concern?

FH: It still exists. The ship is mostly docked in Miami. They do occasional ventures. The quality of the ship is extraordinary, and the experience is interesting.

JM: They were going to places like Charleston, Savannah. HH: Now they just stay in Miami. FH: We know them very well. We’re aware of a whole bunch of things in the art world—

JM: What’s the name of the ship?

HH: The SeaFair.

FH: SeaFair is the name of the ship, and their organization is called International Fine Art Expo. They founded…they were the founders initially of Art Miami back when there was only Chicago and Art Miami, the two art fairs in the United States. They founded Art Palm Beach. Here in New York, there are a couple of guys we met a few years ago in Miami and they started doing a hotel fair, and they’re called the Select Fair. They came to me, because they knew my work, at some venue they had seen me, and they came to my studio to talk to me to try to convince me to do something in their fair. When they saw some work I was making, they offered me the opportunity to install these transparent pieces in the windows in the glass stairwell in the space. So, I ended up creating a new piece of work that worked in that installation. I wouldn’t have made it had they not come to me. In the process of them coming to me, our interactions, I gave them a lot of observations that we had made from doing 50 fairs previously. They took that information and heeded many of our suggestions and now in May we’re going to do a fair with them here in New York. They’re doing their first booth fair. They’ve gravitated from hotel fairs and they’ll be doing tent fairs in Miami this year. They’re living off the art fair.

JM: So, in other words, what we were saying earlier, Helen and I were talking, I shared that I had conducted almost fifty interviews with some of the top dealers here in New York and a couple other towns like Chicago and LA and that it seemed to me that the reality of it was that there was no gallery system such as the schools wanted everyone to believe. The art schools were preparing students for a gallery system. There’s no system. There were a bunch of individuals who ran galleries with as much differences as retailers in any line of work.

FH: Let me clarify: there’s not an art gallery in the country that cares whether you went to school or not. The only thing they want to see is the work, and whether they think they can sell it, and whether their audience wants to see it.

JM: I interviewed many of New York’s top art dealers and recall asking each and every one of them,
“How many of your artists have MFAs?”
Most of them say they don’t know, and don’t care. Like you said, it’s about the work, not the degree. That only carries weight if you’re looking for a day job. It has almost nothing to do with why a dealer wants to represent an artist.

FH: What’s a requirement is the ability to create work that people want to buy. An art gallery doesn’t exist just to sell art. It’s a place where people who are interested in art come to look at it. It’s a place where artists come to look at it. It’s a place where writers come to look at it. It’s a place where clients come to look at it.

JM: Say, the reason why a writer needs to get a book published is so they can read it, so they can experience their own work. The reason why an artist benefits from exhibitions is like getting a baby out of the womb, or wine out of a bottle and into someone’s belly. An artist takes the work away from the safety of the studio and hangs it naked on a strange wall. It is the first time one can actually see it one’s own work with honest eyes. Frank, I want to ask Helen a few things.
Helen, because for many years you were a long-suffering artist’s wife, watching Frank— who is always extremely enterprising and very industrious—watching him deal with a parade of rascals and thieves, along with a few nice people too. You worked in the business world, working in a completely different environment informed by a whole different set of standards. When you and Frank decided to form the gallery, what was your level of confidence in terms of choosing artists to represent, what was guiding you? To what extent were you relying on Frank?

HH: In the very beginning it was just I, relying on him totally. I came to discover by accident that I actually had an eye. I don’t know anything about art. I have no education in that area.

JM: Except that you’ve been living around it for thirty years.

HH: I’ve been living around him (Frank Hyder). You and I have been friends for a long time, I’d walk into your studio, or maybe Doug Wirls’s studio, all these other artist’s studios, and I’d say, “Oh, I like that. That’s interesting.” But I had no historical reference. I had no idea what I was looking at. I went through a period of time where I would put on these group shows of graduating students from all the universities in Philadelphia. I would go to every senior thesis show. I would go to many studios, and from that I would pull together a show based on “fresh”, fresh ideas. And they were pretty damn good shows, and I picked them by myself. It was then that I realized that I could actually see what they were trying to say and create a language. I still rely on him, but it’s kind of funny. We’ll walk into a show and I’ll pick the things I like, and I’ll bring him around and we pretty much pick the same thing. Maybe its because we’ve been together for 45 years, I don’t know; but I think it’s because there’s a synergy between us as well. There have been artists I’ve pulled and I want to work with this artist, and he’ll go, “No, I don’t think so.” And I’ll be persistent and he’ll finally acquiesce and I was right. So I think he’s learned to let me have an eye, because his level of what he wants to show may be a little higher than mine. He often says I have an eye for the Craft, but I think he’s learned to trust that I have an eye for what the industry wants as well.

JM: Well, I think that what you’ve both been saying is that Frank, as an artist, has an aesthetic agenda and a different sense of the nature or the character of the body of work he’s trying to produce. Whereas you, as someone who has interacted with artworks without a specific purpose in mind, now that there’s a purpose, that purpose has let you organize your ideas about it in a way that has shown you that you can make choices with confidence and actually be right a lot of the time.

HH: Well the other thing, Jim, in any gallery, with any of the dealers, you’re going to see the same thing. Out of a hundred artists, twenty percent of them support the operating function of the gallery by sales. The other eighty percent you just like, like to show their work. They may not financially support what you’re trying to do.

JM: But they help you to deliver an esthetic message. It’s like what you’re saying about the two shows. One of them was a bust in terms of sales but the other one was a huge critical success, so it all averaged out in the end.

HH: But there are galleries where if you don’t meet a (sales) quota, you’re out the door.

JM: People will come into the gallery to have a look at particular artwork because it attracts them, and then they might leave with something else.

FH: That’s right, and art fairs have a particular character. The glitz, the things with bling are very attractive. People are drawn to those things. We’ve had a conversation with a dealer from London, from Quantum Gallery in London. He’s been in the business for 30 years, and I asked him for his observation in the way we do our shows. He said, “Well, it’s very clear that you understand that you have to create a visually interesting space, and you have to invite people in to see what’s right over there in that corner, and that reveals that you’re paying attention and you have experience in doing this.” And at the same time, what we know is that if you want to succeed, you show up every day and you tune, readjust, move, change, try different strategies, because every time you hang things on a wall, it’s a strategy to get people’s attention to look at the thing.

HH: You have five seconds.

FH: Yeah, you have to get someone’s attention right away. And you’re competing with an immense number of things. So if you happen to have artist who gets mentioned in an art article about a fair or a blog article about a fair or photography of their work appears, and we’ve had them show up on national news, national news in Canada, we’ve had them in the major papers, we’ve interviewed in Chicago and in Houston. And we’re a little gallery. We don’t have resources. We have a small agenda, but we have a program, and that’s the way a really good gallery that does shows at fairs looks at it: you have a program. You have a point of view you’re trying to present and you have a group of artists that you believe supports that point of view. Some of them are going to bring people in the door, some of them are going make you money, but they work synergistically off one another.

JM: So in other words, creating a gallery is a form of installation art.

FH: It is a form of installation art, absolutely. And the arrogance and the pomposity of some galleries is visible immediately from the way they install their work and their generosity and openness by the way other galleries install their work.

JM: I don’t need to ask on which side of the fence you guys fall.

END PART TWO

I first met Frank and Helen Hyder in 1973 when Frank and I shared a road trip from the Philadelphia suburbs to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Over the years we maintained a close and collegial friendship. The following conversation is one of the few oral history ventures I have undertaken pro-se, and it should be illuminating to artists and others who find themselves dazed and confused by the growing complexity of today’s rapidly evolving art scene.

FRANK AND HELEN HYDER: PART ONE
James Lancel McElhinney © 2014*

On March 19, 2014 I sat down with Frank and Helen Hyder to talk about the origins of Projects Gallery, moving from Philadelphia to Miami and the challenges of balancing a serious studio practice with the delivery end of the art business. We met in the library of the Art Students League of New York

James McElhinney: I am speaking with Frank and Helen Hyder on Wednesday the 19th of March 2014 in the library of the Art Students League of New York 215 West 57th Street. So, welcome. We’ve been talking a lot already. I’m curious. I’m assembling information for maybe a book, maybe some articles, maybe some other things; and you are two people whom I have know longer than almost anyone else in the world. And, also you are two people who have sort of taken an unusual path which is Frank as an artist, who toiled for years in higher Ed and tried to balance a career as a painter against the demands of teaching in a small, gender-specific art school, and Helen, you were the personal secretary assistant to the present of Hunt Manufacturing. Is that correct?

Helen Hyder: Well, not to the president. I had other administrative duties but not to the president. But you got it close.

JM: You were in the executive suite of the administrative doers.

HH: Yes.

JM: And so the upshot is that you are working together. Frank as an artist, you’re in the studio every day. But you took a kind of a prescient move, which is that you opened a gallery. What inspired you to open a gallery?

HH: A couple things. My company was bought and I was invited to follow them to Ohio and I declined. And we had just renovated our building and were going to rent it out and we had talked about something retail; but in the backs of our minds was the idea that for years I had watched him get screwed over, for better use of the word, by dealers in terms of not being honest with artists. As we’d been talking about, taking in inventory selling it and not paying and then suddenly we don’t know where it is, and artists aren’t good at record keeping, so one doesn’t know who has what. So there was that sense of doing something that wasn’t so much based on greed and retail but more so presenting work honestly and ethically and paying the artists first before anything else. And that’s really what the premise was and I started it in August of 2004, put on a show of our friends and had no idea what the heck I was doing. And he said to me, “Where’s your press release?”, and I said “What the heck is a press release?” We put on our first show and sold some work and that’s how we got started. And I can say in the ten years we’ve been doing this that I have been able to follow that initial creed of paying the artist first before anything else.

JM: What year did you actually hang out your shingle?

HH: 2004

JM: And what month? Do you remember?

Frank Hyder and HH: August

FH: And so I knew something about how a commercial gallery worked and, having been affiliated with an education institution for a number of years, I knew something about how university galleries worked. And I knew something about how museums worked and then I had just come back from doing a senior Fulbright research, a year in South America, where I’d done a lot of interacting with museums that were working in community-based operations and things like that. So, we created a kind of a hybrid gallery that was not purely a commercial gallery. We reached out and established liaisons with arts-based institutions, the first one being Mural Arts of Philadelphia. We then reached out to Taller Puertorriqueno; we reached out to the Brandywine Press, which is the oldest black printing press in the United States. So by reaching out and creating a network and bringing them in and then discussing a kind of a show that we could put together and put on in our space, it created a dynamic. We existed in our space sometimes commercial, sometimes public; but it enabled us to really form-shift frequently and create venues and opportunities that brought an immense cross-section of groups through our door. We would also allow our space to be rented by corporations and businesses for special receptions that would bring new people in just to see what we had on the walls. And we even became the host for two years for a minority business entrepreneur that would come and set up little mini business fairs one night a month in the gallery to kind of create a dynamic and introduce the business model to people who pretty much had never had any exposure to it. So what we were trying to do was build a number of–if you imagine an aerial view of a lake you can see where a deer comes to the lake and other animals leave paths in the grass. Our idea what to see that as many different paths as possible would lead to that lake. Not with the goal of making a lot of money but basically creating a site where work that was not in the public domain, was not being seen as frequently, got the same level of respect. So, there were times when we put on mini seminars, and we had writers from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the architecture critic; we had a sociologist that wrote books; and we did a show that was based on the dynamics of urban renovation in concert with how artists change neighborhoods and then developers drive artists out of the neighborhood. So, anyway, over the ten years we built a press book of an immense amount of reactions to what we were doing and got a pretty good rep for doing it. We would let artists come in. We had a space we built in the basement. We would let artists come in and build an installation that could be up for months, and it would take weeks to put it together and we would let it stay. These were all models that exist, but they didn’t really exist on a commercial network. At the same time, we found the only way we could really fundamentally create enough money to survive was by going and doing art fairs. So within six months of our first business operation—

JM: How did you discover that?

FH: Well, somebody suggested that since we had a real gallery, we could actually maybe go to an art fair. So we took a loss lead and we tried it. What I did was I went around and I got a number of artists and I invited them to be part of what we were doing; and they would all pay a small amount toward the collective whole cost, with a guarantee that they’d have an equal amount of space and equal promotion, and they’d get their money back as soon as we sold anything. So it was again a novel concept because it was very cooperative. We put together our first show, which was Art Miami, in 2004.

HH: 2005

FH: Yeah, 2005, January; and we realized instantly that we could generate enough money in these types of events to keep the gallery running for months at a time. So we followed up with others; and now at this point, we’ve done more than 60 different art fairs over the ten years of business. In as diverse places as London; Toronto; Caracas, Venezuela; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Miami; New York, etc. And, that has given us other things, which is exposure to a pretty good level of galleries. We’re not a top-tier gallery. We’re interacting with all of the upper level, second-tier galleries, good quality; we have many friends here in New York. And for me as an artist, the dynamic suddenly changed. I walk into a gallery and the dealer is happy to see me. And we earned our stripes or our respect on the field of that arena. And we learned—it was also like a mini seminar every time we would do an art fair. We’d have down time where we could learn from other dealers, how you deal with this situation.

JM: I can imagine everybody’s learning from each other because the scene is evolving all the time and changing so rapidly, and so you can’t just come up with your branded paradigm and it may not work. It may work one year but not the next

FH: And it’s in the tradition of the great bazaars, as opposed to a great market, because the openness of the art fairs, the clustering of space, and the cross-semination of ideas. Where you’d see something out of the corner of your eye and you’d say, “I you think I know how to do that”, and you try to incorporate it into your next fair. And so it led to a kind of building of a stable of artists that we’d picked up so we had artists from Cuba, artists from Canada, artists from Venezuela, all under one umbrella.

JM: How did they come to you? Did they find you or did you find them?

FH: Generally we would see them at an art fair or she would get a response from them. For example, we did the a fair in Chicago one year. After we had set up, I went on a vision quest of sorts, a sort of dream search; and I went to a couple of the fairs. And I went to one of the fairs and I saw one artist. I came back with his name on a piece of paper, and I said, “This is the best young artist I’ve seen in 150 spaces.”
His name was Caleb Weintraub. We contacted Caleb and said, “How’d you like to do a show?” Well, he was interested, came to Philadelphia, we set him up, we did a show, we got him a bunch of talks and things. But the show we had previewed in our gallery in Philadelphia and then left our gallery and went to Jack the Pelican in Brooklyn afterwards. The result of that, we were actually creating venues and helping artists create images. We co-curated shows where we put Latin American artists together with one another. We did things with Mural Arts. We then were in Mexico City at a mural conference, where I met the daughter of Diego Rivera. After I met her, I spoke to the people at Mural Arts in Philadelphia, I said, “Look what we need to do is bring this woman to Philadelphia, to the art museum, for a purpose.” They arranged it; they brought her. Meanwhile we staged in our gallery a show of Latin American art. She then came from the museum to the gallery and gave a talk and we filled the gallery with people. Those were the kinds of think-fest, lets-make-it-happen ideas that we could get from the diversity of interactions we were having. We were not traveling normal channels. And so, we talked before about this notion of the “gallery system”.

JM: It doesn’t really exist, does it?

FH: But the idea of that you sign with a gallery and that gallery sort of takes care of you and shows your work and represents you, and there’s a sort of commitment.

JM: Like the Castelli model, which was and is very rare. It was rare when he was doing it, and it’s still rare.

FH: But that model, I saw a way to do it differently. So what we did, we didn’t know how it should be done, but it was like kind of on instinct and then as we did it we adjusted ourselves. So her organizational skill and her managerial skill created an excellent cup to hold the fulcrum of ideas that we were throwing in and seeing what we could get. And essentially what began to develop were new forms. And I, for the first ten years, have only had three shows in the gallery.

JM: There are two little housekeeping questions I’ve got. One is, when you decided to open this gallery, what you’re describing to me sounds an awful lot like something that would be a good candidate for a new 501C3. Did you think about making it a not-for-profit and going after donations, or what made you decide then run it as a business?

FH: Well, the problem with this idea of becoming a not-for-profit is that that’s a language unto itself: writing for grants and appealing to the grant cycle—

JM: Meaning wealthy people write you checks?

FH: Yeah but there’s a kind of popularity in what ideas are getting aired, and what we found was something that when you and I went to art school didn’t exist in art school – this notion of “Mixed Media”. Our idea of mixed media was charcoal and white caulk.

JM: You mean like what Bob Rauschenberg and people like that were doing?

FH: They were the beginnings of something that Picasso began at the turn of century with cubism. But what was beginning to emerge was artists that were working materials that were non-traditional and at times mixing them with very traditional mediums and creating forms and methods of communication, media, whatever you want to call them, that really hadn’t existed before. So that became our focus. Every artist we worked with became a master of his or her material. We looked at them. They had to be working in a highly proficient manner with a material in a very personal way. So we weren’t looking for a classical painter. We weren’t looking for a painter who had classical skills but maybe painting with wax or painting with cut paper, something different. So we found an artist who made castings of negative shapes of teddy bears in Toronto. These were brilliant things that looked soft and fluffy but were made of concrete. We found an artist who carved into telephone books and made detailed portraits of popular figures—I mean it’s in the manner of Andy Warhol but it’s also very unique in the way it’s made. We found artists who had approaches to making imagery and making subject matter that sometimes incorporated found objects, cut up credit cards, all sorts of things. And we created an umbrella under which all of those things could be housed and seen.

JM: So you decided to go for the enterprise model. That made more sense to you.

HH: Grant writing doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me.

JM: Well, its not just grant writing. It’s begging wealthy people. People I know who run foundations talk about the caring and feeding of the very rich, and it can be very unpleasant work. So this idea of enterprise is interesting; I hear this more and more. When I interviewed a pair of Chelsea dealers maybe six or seven years ago, I asked them what kind of artists they would like to show and they said they’d like to show artists who can do what they do, or at least get it. They were willing to put up with a couple of prima-donnas, but they actually liked working with artist who actually understood the business of art or how to be a business person or how to be organized or who could, if they dropped dead, could maybe run the gallery for them. I think that if you look at a lot of successful artists, a lot of them are very organized. I did a small project with the Rauschenberg Foundation, and I was blown away. Bob Rauschenberg from his earliest life would take photographs and clippings, and it was part of his artistic practice to, to sort of scavenge images. But he actually put all the records in binders, all of them in loose-leaf binders, all of them in files, so that when the archivists had to come along and organize them all it was pretty much there. He was a very organized guy. According to the people, I never knew Bob Rauschenberg, but according to everybody I interviewed, they said that Albers hated him, thought he had no talent; but he revered Albers because Albers taught him the importance of being organized. So I’m just wondering, one hears a lot of people complaining about how the art world is changing and it’s not like the art world they knew, the galleries are having trouble. But we also hear of a lot more artists going pro. The spectacular example of that being the Damien Hirst auction. The artist sort of running their own business: Jeff Koons, Mark Kostabi (I guess he’s still around), Warhol too.

HH: But then most artists couldn’t do that. It’s like the government wants everybody to run their own IRA. Most Americans wouldn’t have enough financial knowledge to do that, and most artists don’t know that either. So that’s one of the ways the galleries and the art centers and all those people help them, because most artist just want to be in their studio making work.

FH: Five hundred years ago every artist had to be some kind of a small businessman, had to understand something. And really probably the first kind of merchant artist would be Rubens, who really created a network of trainees, experts, and a marketplace approach, and a real sense of a global commitment.

JM: He adopted the Venetian model.

FH: But he traveled, he painted, he sold, he advocated something that the Flemish masters had developed which was oil painting and canvas, which were transportable easily, not painting on walls. And in the 19th century, many don’t even realize that Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker for while in his life, and a bookkeeper, and a mariner, and he had these various and sundry experiences. He was tarpaulin salesman in Denmark. He had business behind him. And so, when he finally made his commitment to just being a full-time artist, he had savvy about how business was done and how it could be conducted. And he found himself, while in Tahiti, he was an anti-colonialist; and, in fact, it is one of the reasons it is believed he died because he’d been sentenced to go to jail for speaking against the French in favor of the natives in Tahiti. And he overdosed on morphine. Jeff Koons did time in the business world. Jeff and I went to school at the same time. So I think that model, maybe not every artist can do it, and I don’t think it’s something you can teach in art school. But it is something that is very much doable, and that is that you can have some control in your own destiny. So I, now, ten years after we started a gallery, I have relationships with galleries who show and sell my work. I have art fair experience, sometimes showing with them and sometimes just showing with our own enterprise, and I have more experience than I’ve ever had before, and I have power.

JM: So you would suggest to other artists that they should explore ways to do more for themselves.

FH: Totally, and I think that they should know how the market works. “When your work is ready,” as Joanne Mattera said to me “when the work appears and the edges haven’t been trimmed and its rough and ragged, that’s like going out to a fine evening dinner and your underwear is showing.” You have to get real about all those things, and those are details, but they’re giant details that change the game. The other thing that I’ve learned is my work is market tested. I know it’s going to work at that price in every market because we floated it. We started at a price, and it achieves its own level. Then something has to happen to push it to the next level.

JM: How do you feel about studio purists accusing you of being a shameless self-promoter?

FH: Well, I think that that’s fine. But I think that if you want to be a Trappist monk or if you want to take a vow of silence and if you want to read the bible and pray daily, I have nothing against you. But at the same time, somebody who’s out in the field doing the work that you propose to support and believe in, don’t judge them either. There is the famous story of Saint Francis of Assisi and his accomplice riding up to the wall of a medieval town and his associate says, “What are we going to do when we get there?” and he says, “Well I’m going to talk to them about the goodness of God and God’s mercy and the love and all these things.” The accomplice says, “Boy, I can’t wait.” So they go into the town. The first thing they do is to greet the mayor. He stops and gets off his horse. He pats the mayor on the back says, “It’s a beautiful town you have here.” He goes down the road a little further and sees a man’s cart has a broken wheel. He goes over and helps lift the cart so they man can get the wheel back on. He stops and talks to a lady who’s doing some wash on the street. Next thing you know they’re on the other side of town and his assistant says, “When are you going to give that talk?” Saint Francis says, “I just lived it.” If you want to stand on a podium or in a sermon and make pronouncements about the importance of your purity and piety, that’s one thing; and that’s your right to do it. But at the same time, leave alone those people who are out there in the field trying to live that life and dealing with compromise that real life offers. And hopefully both methods are valid.
I had a conversation with an artist in Baltimore about a month and a half ago, and we were looking at one of his pieces on the wall. I said, “How much does this piece sell for?” and he gave me a price. I said it was a realistic price. He said he wouldn’t take anything less than that. I said, “Well, that same sized piece I get about the same amount of money for it, but I have to sell ten or twenty of those in a year to survive.” So I said, “I know I can sell them and you can afford not to sell it, so there’s a difference there. I wish I had that luxury of the support of an institution.”

JM: I interviewed, among other people, I one famous and successful dealer who still runs a gallery in Soho. I asked him,
“What are you going to do about an artist who you sold work for last year for $50,000, and now no one is going to buy it at that price point?”
He said,
“We lowered the prices. We have to meet the market where it is. It’s just like stocks, real estate, everything else. You can’t invent a price and say ‘This is the price.’ I know a lot of artists believe: Okay, I get out of school, I have my thesis show, and then I paint a couple of practice gallery shows, and then I have a gallery show, and I set my prices with the dealer, and every year we try to build the market.” (Helen Hyder is smiling and shaking her head.) “The expectation is just going to keep going up.”

End Part One

* (This interview is protected by copyright. No part of it may be reproduced without permission of the author, or without proper citation approved by the author)

PENMANSHIP AND NUKES: A LOVE STORY
James Lancel McElhinney © 2014

Recent articles in the New York Times and other news feeds revealed that many K12 school districts are doing away with penmanship in favor of keyboarding. The pet canary in the educational coal mine stopped singing years ago and is now dust and feathers, proving once and for all that very smart people can do extremely stupid things.
This latest stroke of curricular folly is the brainchild of highly educated but visually illiterate decision-makers, whose educational reforms are delivered by compliant teacher-corps of cowering jobholders to willing victims and their clueless parents.
It is pointless to spill more ink trying to argue how unrelated activities can reinforce learning or enhance performance, such as singing the alphabet, or marking cadence with sea-shanties , keeping step with marching songs, or nursery rhymes as aides-de memoire.
Music reinforces math. Poetry and literature inspire eloquence. Dance and sport promote physical health. Drawing develops spatial reasoning,  with penmanship being the most easily teachable form of drawing. As John Gadsby Chapman proclaimed on the title-page of his 1847 American Drawing Book. “Anyone that can learn to write can learn to draw.”
The genesis of computer games lies in the development of weapons-systems-simulations used to train pilots, astronauts and drone navigators.

At a family reunion several years ago, an avuncular family friend railed against the Naval Academy dropping its course in solar-celestial navigation in favor of teaching midshipmen refinements in the use of satellite-based global positioning technology.  Uncle Bob was a graduate of Annapolis. The bulk of his career had been spent working for a certain three-letter agency headquartered in McLean, Virginia. He pointed out that without a senior chief  who knew how to handle a sextant on board, a nuclear submarine would be running blind after its payload wiped out global positioning satellites within the event horizon of the blasts. The only way for the captain to determine where he was on the globe would require reading the stars to discern the right parallel, and reckoning longitude with an analog chronometer.

In 2001, I had been called in to pinch-hit for American Arts Quarterly senior editor Jim Cooper by delivering lectures on art at the U.S. Air Force Academy “National Leadership and Character Development Symposium”. During the midday break in the vast dining hall, I joined other speakers, cadets and senior Air Force officers around a lunch table. The conversation soon drifted from polite chatter about the menu to nuclear weapons deployment tactics.  I was fascinated by the discussion that weighed blast altitudes against megatons, to disable electronics on the surface with an electromagnetic pulse generated by detonating thermonuclear weapons just outside the atmosphere, to minimize physical damage to built infrastructure on the earth’s surface. This conversation occurred a few years before drone technology and GPS devices was marketed for civilian use. Concerns were raised that some of the electronics upon which weapons-delivery aircraft depended would be disabled by nuclear explosions. Any Navy man could have piped up and reminded the table that because a large part of America’s nuclear arsenal is aboard submarines. No fly-boys need apply. Friendly rivalry between armed forces branches of service aside, it seems that one hand knows nothing about what the other one is doing. It is this kind of compartmentalized, task-to-outcomes thinking that now afflicts our educational system today.

Shortly after VJ-Day, a young playwright named Arthur Miller was on a flight to Los Angeles, to deliver a screenplay he had written about the life of KIA war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Seated next to him on the plane was an engineer. Looking out the window at the desert lands below the man declared,
“You know, all that dry land could become a breadbasket. Below the desert lies one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world.”
“But how do you get water to the surface?” Miller inquired.
“Nuclear explosives,” the engineer calmly replied.
“Wouldn’t that contaminate the water?”
“Oh that’s not my department.” The engineer replied.
Whatever skills one can learn in a flight simulator or with a X-Box are provisional, offering no guarantee that proficiency in virtual reality will be entirely applicable in physical environments.
In principle, manning the controls of a biplane or crossing the ocean in an open boat is the same as remote-piloting a drone or skippering a supertanker. Meanwhile, back at Annapolis, new classes of midshipmen are being taught to privilege their tools instead of developing a greater capacity for problem-solving traditional analog crises. In plausible battle scenarios, a nuclear detonation just outside the atmosphere could knock out every satellite within range of the blast, shutting down computers on the surfacet, including those on the sub that launched it. New tools do not render old skills obsolete. GPS, like computer keyboards, CADD and other new tools offer welcome conveniences but they have not relieved us of the necessity for us to be able to think for ourselves.
Dark days  have overtaken the overseers of pre-college and higher education. As unwitting victims of the same faulty learning-systems they now direct, they fail to grasp that they have become part of the problem.

Cults of self-expression that arose during the 19th century threw the baby out with the bathwater. Spinning the history of drawing as indivualistic mark-making justified their existence, while inadvertently hijacking what once had been a widely-taught visual language into something reserved for poetic use.  English is taught to everyone; not just those with literary ambitions. Math is required for all; not only future physicists or engineers. And yet drawing, which Horace Mann called “a moral force”, and “an essential industrial skill” is reserved (under the dubious rubric of “art”) for those professing artistic aspirations, and other seeking after-school “enrichment” programs.

Many artists today are unaware that drawing was a required course at the military academies of Woolich, Mezieres and West Point. Not only were cadets expected to produce mechanical drawings and maps. They were taught to render topographical views with an artistic flair. Mastering the aesthetics of drawing was believed by the high command, to make keener observers of military draftsmen in ways that might serve them as explorers, and on the battlefield. Likewise, civilian education included drawing in its curricular core. Books were published for use in schools and at home, by autodidacts and classroom instruction. Drawing manuals written by Archibald Robertson, John Gadsby Chapman and John Ruskin were best sellers. Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing  remains in print today.  Rembrandt Peale’s 1834 Graphics broke ground by mapping out a curriculum of drawing and penmanship, in the same course of study at Philadelphia’s Boys’ High School. It’s unlikely that today’s STEM-besotted educational system will fully embrace the alternative values of STEAM, for the simple reason that the financial aparatus of performance and reward favors bean-counting outcomes over expert evaluations. For this reason, the benefits of culturally enriched education will drift back into the realm of privileged learning, which in time will only serve to deepen socioeconomic divisions within our society. Should the unthinkable occur, and our civilization is devastated by nuclear warfare, survivors who can read the night sky, use flint and steel to build fires, possess the wherewithal to kill and butcher game, raise crops, and translate ideas into visual form, will fare better than those who cannot.

Image: Cafe Eleven, Crystal Bridges Musem of American Art.
Watercolor and Micron pens in Moleskine sketchbook
3.5 x 5.5 inches. April 10, 2014

CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

For years it was whispered that Alice Walton, the daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton had been buying important works of American art from the colonial period to the present. Self appointed eastern elites scoffed at her plans to build a major center for the study of American art in her hometown.
Bentonville, Arkansas sits on a broad plateau west of the Ozarks, just east of the Cherokee Nation, where the western margin of the Mississippi woodlands meets the frontier of the Great Plains.
People started taking Walton seriously when she stunningly negotiated the purchase of Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits from the New York Public Library.
Academics and museum specialists began to realize that the lady from Arkansas was a force with whom to be reckoned. She invited Moshe Safdie to Bentonville where together on a cold damp day they tramped through the wooded ravine where Ms. Walton envisioned her museum.
They hiked along the creek. Safdie lost his footing and fell into the water. As he scrambled out of the creek Ms. Walton asked if he wanted to cut short their tour and change into some dry clothes. Safdie insisted on completing their reconnaissance. Later, knowing that other architects were under consideration, Safdie asked Ms. Walton what process she would use to make a selection.
She smiled and said that her decision had just been made.
Safdie’s building wraps around the base of a curving wooded slope, with “bridges” crossing the pond at the bottom of the ravine. The central “bridge” is a large dining and commons area where meals are served by Café Eleven, the number being significant because the museum opened on November 11, 2011—the eleventh day in the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the new millennium.
To the north another “bridge” crosses the base of the pond, where it drains into a stream flowing northward into city parks. At the opposite end of the curving main structure is the Great Hall, an events center, auditorium and reception hall.
Many of the wall surfaces throughout the building are curved. Supporting the roofs covering the Great Hall and “bridges” are huge, arcing laminated wooden beams like ribs of ancient ships, tied together by an ingenious system of steel rods which also support walls of glass that seal the gap between the floors and the ceilings. These are the “crystal bridges”—spacious and luminous interiors, above which hover turn-turtle carapaces of wood and glass.
Upon entering the building one is greeted by friendly, attractive staffers who ask if this is your first visit to the museum, before directing you to the reception counter. Free admission is underwritten by Wal-Mart, but special exhibitions such as the William S. Paley Collection, presently on loan from MoMA, require a special ticket. School groups bussed in at the museum’s expense fill the galleries and are treated to free lunches.
I was completely ambushed by the collection, especially the American modernists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Max Weber and Joseph Stella. The collection has a stunning Copley, a canonical Revolutionary-war era portrait of Washington by Charles Willson Peale, and a fabulous wall of hummingbirds in South American landscapes by Martin Johnson Heade. First rate works by Hudson River School artists include Durand’s Kindred Spirits and an unusually fine Crospey.
Recently Crystal Bridges paid a princely sum to Fisk University for a fifty percent interest in the Alfred Stieglitz collection, which had long been locked away from public view. Now on exhibit at CBMAA, it is full of surprises.
Also on view was a comprehensive exhibit of American watercolor painting and a contextual exhibit of drawings and studies for Edward Hopper’s Blackwell’s Island, recently acquired at auction by the museum.
Weather-permitting one may trek a series of footpaths and trails along which are strategically positioned sculptures such as a Luis Jimenez Vaquero and a site-specific light installation designed by James Turrell, one of Alice Walton’s favorite artists. Following the trails into the town center one passes through Compton Gardens, a public park extending from the former home of nature conservationist Dr. Neil Compton that winds its way behind private residences along paved walkways inhabited by sculptures from the Crystal Bridges collection, like Paul Manship’s monumental Group of Bears.
A few steps beyond Compton Gardens is 21C Museum Hotel, which one might expect to find in South Beach or Beverly Hills, not a city block from a typical Southern courthouse square with park-benches orbiting a pillar on which a Confederate soldier stands at “parade rest”.
Bordering the square are upscale eateries, banks, and private retailers. Under construction just off the northwest corner of the square is the kind of mixed-use retail-residential building advocated by New Urbanists, staunch opponents of laissez-faire zoning and the automotive strip-mall netherworlds where Wal-Mart reigns supreme.
Challenging regional philanthropists to use culture to transform hometowns into national destinations, Crystal Bridges celebrates art as medium of public salubrity, a way to build community, and a vaccine against mediocrity.
Art makes sense, like everyday low prices.

https://paddle8.com/work/frank-hyder/28805-fish-egg

Most folks who associate auctions only with secondary market sales must not have gotten the memo about Jeff Koons’s new “Popeye” sculpture, or Frank Hyder’s “Fish Egg”. Both are offered for first time sale in a bidding environment. While both pieces are expected to sell for wildly different prices, these two MICA graduates represent a growing number of artists who are bypassing the galleries altogether. Stay tuned

Mud Island Fort, later renamed Fort Mifflin, was built by the British during the French & Indian War. It was later expanded, strengthened and defended by Continental Forces who lost it to the British in 1777 and recovered it the following year. During the Civl War it served as a POW camp, run by artist-soldier Seth Eastman, who later served as commandant of the notorious prison pen at Elmira. In gratitude for his life of military service the House of Representatives gave Eastman a retirement sinecure in the form of a commission to paint America’s historic forts, including Fort Mifflin. The paintings now hang in the hallways outside the House and Senate offices in the US Capitol. Eastman died at his easel working on a view of the North Gate of the Hudson from Land’s End at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where as a young officer Eastman wrote and published the academy’s principal text on topographical drawing. He briefly served as interim head of the drawing academy at West Point, before Robert Weir stepped in to rule the roost for the next four decades. Eastman is also the grandfather of Dr. Charles Eastman, a popular writer and a central character in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a painter friend about issues of style, which I proposed were now obsolete, or at least far less important than perhaps they were once upon a time. I didn’t have a good reason but then after hanging up had a “L’esprit de l’escalier”. Carl Linnaeus. Like so many things in our society modes of classification (including art) derive from science, which provided the model for organizing art into movements and styles. Genetic research has shaken up Linnaean methodology, and while nobody is quite ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the historic paradigm needs a serious upgrade. The common thread between art and science is too obvious to mention without insulting the reader, but it is encouraging to regard sound reasons to abandon weary monikers like “realist”, “abstractionist” and “conceptualist”.

Visiting the Royal Pavilion in Brighton last year we took in an exhibition of Turner’s work in and around the seaside resort. in a vitrine was a small leather object resembling an old-fashioned wallet, which the label identified as Turner’s watercolor field palette–the precursor of Windsor-Newton bijou box. Combining ingenuity and simplicity, this humble fold-up paint caddy was for me a highlight of the show. Pigments ground in gum arabic with a small quantity of glycerin were formed into cakes and pressed into sheets of canvas sewn to a sheet of leather equipped with a tongue and strap closure. Water-activated cakes did not appear until the 1830, which puts the object in Turner’s possession closer to the end of his life. Didactic information supporting the display did not reveal what else Turner may have carried in his pockets; sketchbook, small porcelain or enameled metal mixing surface, water-flask and brush roll-up.