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100/150: WPA Library Manual, compiled by Ida M. Day, no date. A guide for librarians on providing excellent service to their customers.
Live personal soundtrack at the permanent collection at the Hammer Museum, 11.11.2010.
Machine Project / Hammer A.I.R.
Photo by Marianne Williams.
Live personal soundtrack at the permanent collection at the Hammer Museum, 11.11.2010.
Machine Project / Hammer A.I.R.
Photo by Marianne Williams.
La Vida - 1988
Artist: Martin Wong (American, 1946–1999)
Martin Wong’s La Vida is a large, celebratory depiction of the poor, vibrant, largely black and Puerto Rican neighborhood that was the Lower East Side—or Loisaida— in the 1980s. Evoking the portrait drawings the artist made and sold for a living early in his career, La Vida is populated with the faces of local residents, artists, musicians, and poets —as well as popular figures such as film star Mr. T (visible on the lower right). These characters fill the tenement windows, which Wong renders brick by brick in a fashion characteristic of his oeuvre. Many are clearly identifiable as members of the artist’s social and artistic community, including graffiti artists DAZE, Sharp, LA2, as well as poet and writer Amiri Baraka. Perhaps most importantly, Wong’s lover, collaborator, and supporter, poet and playwright Miguel Piñero, appears in the painting three times. Made only a few months after Piñero’s death, La Vida is not only a powerful and playful depiction of a neighborhood, but is also a joyful commemoration of the poet and local figurehead who insisted in his A Lower Eastside Poem: ". . . let all eyes be dry when they scatter my ashes thru the Lower Eastside."
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"I close with four more favorites from my day at Yale. La Vida, by the American artist Martin Wong, is, of all things, a painting made in New York in 1988. I say of all things because New York art has never interested me much. I don’t think I could explain what’s significant about Dan Flavin’s work in neon if my life depended on it. Or for that matter Keith Haring’s graffiti paintings—aren’t they just boring? Basquiat I guess I could talk about, because I saw the movie, and fine, I will admit to loving Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen. In general, though, downtown art is not my thing, so I was surprised when I started looking at this painting, and kept looking, and looking and looking. Maybe the difference is that it’s not just a painting made downtown, by an artist associated with one scene or another, but a painting of downtown.
From 1982 to 1994 Wong lived and worked in a top floor apartment in the tenement building at 141 Ridge Street, in the heart of the Puerto Rican Lower East Side. Through his kitchen window he could see another tenement across the street, and it was this building that he used as the stage set for La Vida. It’s a large painting, seventy-six square feet, with countless red bricks, sixty windows, three fire escapes, and over a hundred figures. Friends, lovers, neighborhood characters, celebrities, boxers, cops with mustaches. A man in his underwear talks on the phone; another fans out some cash; a third, in sunglasses, stands on a fire escape with a boom box. On the fifth floor a child pulls a white t-shirt over his face to play ghost. A few windows over, in the leftmost dwelling, firemen have gathered, faceless silhouettes, the yellow stripes of their uniforms almost glowing. Is there a fire? But there’s red inside everywhere, not just here. Down on the street level the windows are bricked up. A seven-piece salsa band has set up out front, while off to the side a child jumps into the spray of a fire hydrant. There’s so much here; I only scratch the surface.
Wong was no stranger to urban life when he moved to New York in 1978. Though born in Oregon in 1946, he had grown up in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In the mid-nineties he returned there to live with his parents, who took care of him until he died from AIDS-related complications in 1999. A documentary shot during his last years reveals him to have been a kind, soft-spoken man with wry humor and a winning laugh. Rest in peace.
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The early years of the 20th century were characterized in the visual arts by a radical international reassessment of the relationship between vision and representation, as well as of the social and political role of artists in society at large. The extraordinary modern collection at the Yale University Art Gallery spans these years of dramatic change and features rich holdings in abstract painting by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as in paintings and sculptures associated with German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, Dada, and Surrealism. Many of these works came to Yale in the form of gifts and bequests from important American collections, including those of Molly and Walter Bareiss, B.S. 1940s; Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903; Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, B.A. 1929; Katharine Ordway; and John Hay Whitney.
Art from 1920 to 1940 is strongly represented at the Gallery by the group of objects collected by the Société Anonyme, an artists’ organization founded by Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp with Man Ray. This remarkable collection, which was transferred to Yale in 1941, comprises a rich array of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by major 20th-century artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, El Lissitzky, and Piet Mondrian, as well as lesser-known artists who made important contributions to the modernist movement.
The Gallery is also widely known for its outstanding collection of American painting from after World War II. Highlights include Jackson Pollock’s Number 13A: Arabesque (1948) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Blam (1962), part of a larger gift of important postwar works donated to the Gallery by Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. Recent gifts from Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, and Thurston Twigg-Smith, B.E. 1942, have dramatically expanded the Collection with works by artists such as James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud.
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Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest college art museum in America. The Gallery’s encyclopedic holdings of more than 250,000 objects range from ancient times to the present day and represent civilizations from around the globe. Spanning a block and a half of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, the Gallery comprises three architecturally distinct buildings, including a masterpiece of modern architecture from 1953 designed by Louis Kahn through which visitors enter. The museum is free and open to the public.
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Yale University’s School of Architecture was in the midst of pedagogical upheaval when Louis Kahn joined the faculty in 1947. With skyscraper architect George Howe as dean and modernists like Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Josef Albers as lecturers, the post-war years at Yale trended away from the school’s Beaux-Arts lineage towards the avant-garde. And so, when the consolidation of the university’s art, architecture, and art history departments in 1950 demanded a new building, a modernist structure was the natural choice to concretize an instructional and stylistic departure from historicism. Completed in 1953, Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery building would provide flexible gallery, classroom, and office space for the changing school; at the same time, Kahn’s first significant commission signaled a breakthrough in his own architectural career—a career now among the most celebrated of the second half of the twentieth century.
The university clearly articulated a program for the new gallery and design center (as it was then called): Kahn was to create open lofts that could convert easily from classroom to gallery space and vice versa. Kahn’s early plans responded to the university’s wishes by centralizing a core service area—home to the stairwell, bathrooms, and utility shafts—in order to open up uninterrupted space on either side of the core. Critics have interpreted this scheme as a means of differentiating “service” and “served” space, a dichotomy that Kahn would express often later in his career. As Alexander Purves, Yale School of Architecture alumnus and faculty member, writes of the gallery, “This kind of plan clearly distinguishes between those spaces that ... house the building's major functions and those that are subordinated to the major spaces but are necessary to support them.” As such, the spaces of the gallery dedicated to art exhibition and instruction are placed atop a functional hierarchy, above the building’s utilitarian realms; still, in refusing to hide—and indeed, centralizing—the less glamorous functions of the building, Kahn acknowledged all levels of the hierarchy as necessary to his building’s vitality.
Within the open spaces enabled by the central core, Kahn played with the concept of a space frame. He and longtime collaborator Anne Tyng had been inspired by the geometric forms of Buckminster Fuller, whom Tyng studied under at the University of Pennsylvania and with whom Kahn had corresponded while teaching at Yale. It was with Fuller’s iconic geometric structures in mind that Kahn and Tyng created the most innovative element of the Yale Art Gallery: the concrete tetrahedral slab ceiling. Henry A. Pfisterer, the building’s structural engineer, explains the arrangement: "a continuous plane element was fastened to the apices of open-base, hollow, equilateral tetrahedrons, joined at the vertices of the triangles in the lower plane.” In practice, the system of three-dimensional tetrahedrons was strong enough to support open studio space—unencumbered by columns—while the multi-angular forms invited installation of gallery panels in times of conversion.
Though Kahn’s structural experimentation in the Yale Art Gallery was cutting-edge, his careful attention to light and shadow evidences his ever-present interest in the religious architecture of the past. Working closely with the construction team, Kahn and Pfisterer devised a system to run electrical ducts inside the tetrahedrons, allowing light to diffuse from the hollow forms. The soft, ambient light emitted evokes that of a cathedral; Kahn’s gallery, then, takes subtle inspiration from the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic gallery it adjoins.
Of the triangulated, concrete slab ceiling, Kahn said “it is beautiful and it serves as an electric plug." ] This principle—that a building’s elements can be both sculptural and structural—is carried into other areas of the gallery. The central stairwell, for example, occupies a hollow, unfinished concrete cylinder; in its shape and utilitarianism, the stairwell suggests the similarly functional agricultural silo. On the ceiling of the stairwell, however, an ornamental concrete triangle is surrounded at its circumference by a ring of windows that conjures a more elevated relic of architectural history: the Hagia Sophia. Enclosed within the cylinder, terrazzo stairs form triangles that mimic both the gallery’s ceiling and the triangular form above. In asserting that the stairs “are designed so people will want to use them,” Kahn hoped visitors and students would engage with the building, whose form he often described in anthropomorphic terms: “living” in its adaptability and “breathing” in its complex ventilation system (also encased in the concrete tetrahedrons).
Given the structural and aesthetic triumphs of Kahn’s ceiling and stair, writing on the Yale Art Gallery tends to focus on the building’s elegant interior rather than its facade. But the care with which Kahn treats the gallery space extends outside as well; glass on the west and north faces of the building and meticulously laid, windowless brick on the south allow carefully calculated amounts of light to enter.
Recalling the European practice, Kahn presents a formal facade on York Street—the building’s western frontage—and a garden facade facing neighboring Weir Hall’s courtyard.
His respect for tradition is nevertheless articulated in modernist language.
Despite their visual refinement, the materials used in the gallery’s glass curtain walls proved almost immediately impractical. The windows captured condensation and marred Kahn’s readable facade. A restoration undertaken in 2006 by Ennead Architects (then Polshek Partnership) used modern materials to replace the windows and integrate updated climate control. The project also reversed extensive attempts made in the sixties to cover the windows, walls, and silo staircase with plaster partitions. The precise restoration of the building set a high standard for preservation of American modernism—a young but vital field—while establishing the contentiously modern building on Yale’s revivalist campus as worth saving.
Even with a pristinely restored facade, Kahn’s interior still triumphs. Ultimately, it is a building for its users—those visitors who, today, view art under carefully crafted light and those students who, in the fifties, began their architectural education in Kahn’s space. Purves, who spent countless hours in the fourth-floor drafting room as an undergraduate, maintains that a student working in the space “can see Kahn struggling a bit and can identify with that struggle.” Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who studied at Yale a decade after Kahn’s gallery was completed, offers a similar evaluation of the building—one echoed by many students who frequented the space: “its beauty does not emerge at first glance but comes only after time spent within it.”
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100/150: WPA Library Manual, compiled by Ida M. Day, no date. A guide for librarians on providing excellent service to their customers.
144/150: Robert Ebendorf, Portable Souls, mixed media. The one standing is a gift of the Friends of Art. 2009.5, 2009.47, 2011.2
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103/150: Rolland Ayers sketch: cover, WPA Guide to Kansas/Driving Tours, pencil on paper, 1930s
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109/150: David H. Overmyer, Iago, oil on canvas. Gift of the Topeka Art Guild 79.16.40 Iago is the villain from Shakespeare’s Othello
Live personal soundtrack at the permanent collection at the Hammer Museum, 11.11.2010.
Machine Project / Hammer A.I.R.
Photo by Marianne Williams.
Live personal soundtrack at the permanent collection at the Hammer Museum, 11.11.2010.
Machine Project / Hammer A.I.R.
Photo by Marianne Williams.