We love our volunteers!

Managing volunteers at The Blanton is always entertaining, and this past March was particularly fun! On March 4 and 5, volunteers helped with the installation of A Knitted Wonderland - the temporary textile work by Magda Sayeg in the museum's Faulkner Plaza - and also helped us host Explore UT, the university's annual open house. It’s always amazing to see visitors at this event enjoying our exhibitions, but this year we saw a record 8,240 guests, in part because of this special installation that looked like Dr. Seuss had come and dressed our trees!

The idea to commission this artwork originated with Jennifer Garner, the museum's Manager of School and Family Programs. Her desire was to drive more traffic to The Blanton during Explore UT and to reach out to Austinites, middle school visitors, and hosts of out-of-town guests here for SXSW. She also felt the installation would complement the museum's current exhibition, Recovering Beauty, which explores notions of color and playfulness. Jennifer was assisted by graduate student and Blanton intern, Kristen Bellamy, who worked hard to help execute the event.

A Knitted Wonderland would never have come to fruition without help from the scores of volunteers who generously offered their time and talents. The work was created by 175 volunteer knitters from all over Austin and was installed with the assistance of many museum volunteers. On the evening of March 4, our volunteers assisted the knitters as they sewed their custom "sleeves" onto the trees. One of the sweaters had the words “I am a tree” embedded within the knitted stripes. Another was created using the Fibonacci series of numbers by students from The Girls School of Austin. And a Blanton member knitted one particularly perfect sweater that held majestic court at the entrance to the Smith Building! While each sweater was made up of the same colored stripes, each was unique.

Volunteers also assisted with a series of fun activities that The Blanton developed in conjunction with Explore UT. This year, we offered lectures, tours, and a sculpture challenge that was judged by museum director Ned Rifkin, along with Blanton curator Ursula Davila Villa, and docent Ellen Hunt. In preparation for these activities, volunteers from the Liberal Arts Science Academy’s National Honor Society came to set up tables and supplies, and the sculpture challenge was overseen by volunteers from The Blanton's Student Guild, a registered student organization on campus.

Even though we all were exhausted, the day was a great success. A Knitted Wonderland was so well received, we even extended it a week! Congratulations to everyone and a heartfelt thank you to our many volunteers who helped to make it possible.

- Martha Bradshaw, Manager of Visitor and Volunteer Services

Image: Blanton volunteer, Allyson Weber, attaches tree numbers to the 99 trees in A Knitted Wonderland so that knitters could find their tree and sew on the custom sweaters.

For the second installment of the new Blanton Blog, assistant curator Risa Puleo reports on her recent whirlwind trip to NYC for "Art Week," and the sanctuary she found in a new installation by Dario Robleto.

Returning to Austin as it amps up for South by Southwest after a week spent in New York during Art Week, I’ve been thinking of the pros and cons of amassing great amounts of anything—art or music—in an exposition format. For those of you unfamiliar with art fairs, imagine a trade show, but for contemporary art. Art galleries from all over the world set up temporary shop, displaying works from their stable of artists in niche-like spaces in civic spaces and hotels across Manhattan. The Armory show is the largest among them, taking up two piers along the Hudson River. There are also the satellite fairs like Volta, Scope, Pulse, the Independent, the Dependent, and the Art Dealers Association of America. I went to them all. A day at the fair should be an opportunity for getting a pulse on the state of contemporary art production. However, after navigating crowds of people and trying to take in, let alone entrench into one's memory, booth after booth of disparate objects, more so than not, art fairs are the worst kind of ocular overload.

There were standouts, nonetheless. At the Armory, Carrie Moyer at Canada Gallery's booth and Katerina Grosse at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, and at Volta, Elizabeth Subrin's video at Sue Scott Gallery and drawings by George Kuchar—an artist better known for his films—at ADA Gallery, all provided moments of respite among the hubbub. The Dependent, the newest and most edgy of the art fairs focusing on smaller project spaces and artist-run initiatives, was refreshing. Cleopatra, a curatorial collaborative, made over their hotel room with a Polly Apfelbaum duvet and closetful of flowers arranged by artist Alex de Corte. At Recess, which offers residencies for artists to interact with the public, I got a haircut as part of a performance by Brown Bear duo AK Burn and Katie Hubbard.

Outside of the fairs, there were studios, museums and galleries to visit. Lynda Benglis is still my hero, reconfirmed by her retrospective exhibition at the New Museum. The Whitney and The Guggenheim's current focus on collections meant early 20^th-century favorites came out of storage: George Bellows, Paul Cadmus and Charles Demuth playing for American realism and Kandinsky, Delaunay and Kupka on the side of European abstraction.

A real intimacy with a work of art is almost impossible to have at the art fairs because of the ways in which the displays are constructed. But there was one moment amongst all the cab-hopping, cheek-kissing, and generally running around, that will stay with me for a very long time. On the way to the Independent art fair I stopped into a few Chelsea galleries. At D’Amelio Terras, I was fortunate to run into Dario Robleto, an artist whose work is in The Blanton’s collection and whose show The Minor Chords are Ours had just opened at the gallery. Here, the gallery was refuge from the hoards of people outside, and Dario walked me through his exhibition.

It’s been a while since a work of art has made me cry. But standing in front of two works –I Wish The Ocean Sounded More Like Dusty and I Wish The Ocean Sounded More Like Muddy Waters, I did. Full on. Crying in public. During Art Week no less! For the work, Robleto amassed a collection of apple blossom seashell halves, each with a pale pink blush. He then went about the arduous task of pairing disconnected seashells together, lovingly reconnecting the other’s missing side while serenading them with a soundtrack of Dusty Springfield and Muddy Water’s music. Once reconnected he separated the shells again, returning one half back to the ocean and using the others to write out the names “Dusty” and “Muddy” on paper to create the works.

This experience was a gentle reminder to me when I left the gallery to fight the crowds again—one that I hope I can recall while battling traffic during South by Southwest this week—that ultimately, across any medium, whether art or music, these are products made by people trying to communicate. When we are part of an audience we are putting ourselves in a position to receive, and in doing so are able to forge a connection that exists beyond ourselves, the work, and the artist into a new space in between.

So I encourage you to look for those moments of connection among the masses at South by Southwest, when it seems that we are inundated with so much music that we can no longer hear. If you are in search of quiet connections, come to The Blanton and sit vigil with Josefina Guilisasti’s La Vigilia, one of my favorite works of art in the museum right now.

http://ny.voltashow.com/index.php

http://www.scope-art.com/index.php/new_york

http://www.pulse-art.com/newyork/

http://www.independentnewyork.com/thedependentartfair.info

http://www.artdealers.org/

http://hyperallergic.com/20133/the-dependent-art-fair-2011

Image: Dario Robleto, The Minor Chords Are Ours (detail) 2010 , 60 x 23 x 23 inches, mixed media

Welcome to the new Blanton Blog

Welcome to the new Blanton Blog! Formerly known as "Inside the Box," our blog has been revamped to provide you with richer and more varied content, and a deeper understanding of what it is we do. Issues pertinent to the art world and to our community right here in Austin will be explored, and we encourage you to weigh in with your thoughts by responding to our posts. We also invite you to follow us, to "like us" on Facebook, and to "re-tweet" our content!

For our inaugural post, Blanton Museum director Ned Rifkin examines the continuing relevance and importance of museums in today's fast-paced world. Enjoy...

I have often wondered why people support art museums, and how these institutions continue to play important roles within our ever-changing, fast-paced culture. My conclusion, after reflecting on this for many years, is that within the elements of human nature, there is a hunger for creativity. The creative impulse within each of us is what truly distinguishes us as people with dimension, and indeed, many of our successes in life are the result of exercising our imaginations and drawing from the wealth of innovative ideas that we generate virtually every day.

Where, then, might one fully engage his or her creative impulse? Throughout history, museums (stemming from the Greek word “muse” -- the mythological embodiment of the spirits that engender music, art, poetry, etc) have served as gathering places where we may commune with these muses and be lifted out of our ordinary selves. Through the examination of works of art, our typical way of acting, feeling and thinking may shift, and our perspective may change.

In museums, we encounter works created by artists from the past, from far away places, and those from the present -- all that embody notions of individual differences as well as universal connections. How can a portrait of a man from Italy in the 1500s be relevant to a portrait completed in the 1980s and done in a country that was non-existent 400 years before? The works are of course very different given the contrasting worlds they emerged from, but they maintain a similarity of human intimacy. Beyond the historical and social contexts that we can apply, what can we see in each that connects one to the other? And how can we constructively compare and contrast these two objects? It is questions like these that spark our best thinking and most creative faculties, and museums offer limitless possibilities for these types of “musings.”

Art is engaging not only because of the ideas that attend it, but also because it is visually evident, meaning that if you learn to examine it slowly and with intensity, you may actually see more than you might have initially imagined. Spending time with a work of art is sometimes challenging. Because one feels in a museum the urge to “see it all,” he or she too often ends up looking at many things without really “seeing” anything. The value of art ultimately lies in its second and third layers of examination and perception, in things that can only be discovered during sustained looking and reflecting. It’s truly less important if you “like” or “dislike” a work of art, and better to consider why or how a particular work affects you and how it makes you think and feel as you do.

We invite you to discover The Blanton anew. Enjoy the beauty, delve into the meanings, and bring your most active and inquisitive mind with you to visit “the muses.”