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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > February > 04
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Blanton gala nets $2.325 million in donations, tickets sales
Saturday night’s gala at the Blanton Museum of Art welcomed more than 450 guests who fashionably partied in honor of museum namesake and donor Jack S. Blanton.
Beyond the impressive $600,000 in ticket sales, the gala and celebration of Blanton was also cause for announcing some $1,025,000 in gifts to the museum’s $40 million endowment.
The children of Jack Blanton — Eddy and Kelli Blanton, Jack Jr. and Leslie Blanton, Elizabeth Blanton Wareing and Peter Wareing — donated $1 million in their father’s honor, with the monies going to the Blanton’s endowment campaign. The LBJ Family Foundation donated $25,000.
The Blanton also raised $275,000 in in-kind support from corporate sponsors for the event.
Making the biggest visual splash of the evening were the two arts works unveiled. Donated by contemporary collectors and Blanton supporters Jeanne and Michael Klein, a massive site-specific installation by Macarthur “genius grant” award-winner Teresita Fernandez and an untitled wall sculpture by Ghanan artist El Anatsui. The two piece together are valued at $700,000.
El Anatsui, Untitled, 2007, Copper, aluminum, 144 x 195 inches, Promised gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein.
Always visionary in their taste in art, the Kleins took the forward step of commissioning Fernandez to create something that could aesthetically defuse the Blanton’s massive white atrium. Fernandez succeeded brilliantly. “Stacked Water” makes an invigorating yet sublime statement as visitors enter the museum. It encourages thoughtful looking — exactly the mindset needed for a satisfying museum experience.
Teresita Fernandez, “Stacked Waters.” 2009. Gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein.
Teresita Fernandez, “Stacked Waters.” 2009. Gift of Jeanne and Michael Klein.
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Viewpoint lectures announced
Chatter, chatter, chatter
The Department of Art and Art History at the University presents the 18th annual Viewpoint series of visits by leading curators, critics and scholars. The year’s series runs through April with public lectures and seminars by Los Angeles Times visual arts writer and author Leah Ollman, and artist, writer and curatorial adviser Phong Bui.
Admission to the lectures and seminars is free and open to the public.
When:
Public lectures will be held at 4 p.m. on Thursdays: Feb. 5, March 26 and April 16.
Seminars will be held from 2-4 p.m. on Fridays: Feb. 6, March 27 and April 17.
Where:
Art Building,23rd and San Jacinto streets
For lectures, room 1.102
For seminars, room 3.206
Ollman has been writing criticism and features on the visual arts for the Los Angeles Times for more than 20 years. She is a corresponding editor for Art in America and the author of numerous catalogue essays. Her publications include: “Strangely Familiar” (2008), “The Photography of John Brill” (2002) and “William Kentridge: Weighing…and Wanting” (2001). She lives in San Diego and is working on a project exploring the affinities between poetry and photography.
Bui is an artist, writer and curatorial adviser at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Modern Art affiliate. His numerous installations over the last two years have earned the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Eric Isenbeurger Annual Prize for Installation from the National Academy Museum. He is the editor and publisher of the monthly journal The Brooklyn Rail, a critical perspective on arts, politics and culture in New York City and beyond.
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Council, mayoral candidates to meet with arts groups
Pencil it in: Candidates for the Austin City Council and Mayor will meet with Austin arts supporters as part of an open forum on April 1.
No April foolin’ either.
A roster of major arts organizations — Arthouse, Austin Lyric Opera, AustinMuseum of Art, Austin Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Austin, AustinTheatreAlliance, Conspirare, KMFA, The Long Center, Paramount & State Theatre Company and Zach Theatre — have come together to ask the candidates to speak about arts issues.
Up for election May 9 are council places 2, 5 and 6 and the mayor’s slot.
The forum will be moderated by the Honorable Betty Dunkerley
7 p.m. April 1
Paramount Theatre, 713 Congress Ave.
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Kennedy Center sets up crisis line for arts managers
The Kennedy Center is amping up its national role moving beyond being a performing arts center. Beyond hosting performances, sponsoring theater festivals, competitions and otherwise serving as the nation’s theater, the center has initiated a new program to share its management experience with struggling performing arts organizations across the country.
Announced yesterday, “Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative” is an online support service through which arts administrators from non-profit theaters, dance companies and music groups around the country can seek advice from the Kennedy Center’s personnel on issues such fundraising and audience development.
The program’s Web site explains that it will provide information “pertinent to maintaining a vital performing arts organization during a troubled economy.” Assistance — which is free — will be provided mainly through e-mails, telephone calls and Web chats.
“These are times of economic crisis and as the nation’s center for the performing arts, we wish to help,” said Kennedy Center President Michael M. Kaiser in an official statement. “If any arts organization in the United States believes we can assist, the senior staff of the Kennedy Center and I offer our collective skills. We are at your service.”
Kaiser is the author of “The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations.”
The initiative also asks that administrators at successful arts organization get involved as mentors.
“There are many talented arts administrators around the country and we encourage them to lend their expertise,” said Kaiser. “If all of us work together, we can turn a time of crisis into a time of opportunity.”
Kaiser told the Washington Post yesterday, “I’m worried that people are cutting the wrong things first, and that makes it much harder to compete for funding,” he said. “Those who cut the programming first wouldn’t look as attractive to the funders.”
Kaiser also cited the president’s recent call to community service as reason for creating the program. “This is in the spirit of President Obama saying we have to volunteer and get involved,” Kaiser told the Post.
The new program received $500,000 from two individual donors.
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Review: ‘Legally Blonde the Musical’
Make way for chill-bump inducing major chords and overly earnest, but oddly touching love duets.
Broadway’s back.
Tuesday’s performance of the movie-made-musical “Legally Blonde” marked Broadway Across America’s return to UT’s Performing Arts Center. Over the next seven months, musicals take over Bass Concert Hall for at least one week per month. (In August, “Wicked” gets two weeks.) As “Legally Blonde’s” central character, Elle Woods would say, “Oh my God!”
While the bevy of musical theater might be reason for excitement, there’s not much to exclaim about in “Legally Blonde.” The 2001 movie allowed Elle, played by Reese Witherspoon, to have a bit of pluck, even in her earliest, pinkest scenes. The musical’s Elle (Lauren Ashley Zakrin) lacks depth for far too long. When boyfriend Warner chooses Harvard, then a brunette, over Elle, she responds vapidly. Only when Elle’s Harvard law school mentor Emmett Forrest (D.B. Bonds) — an older student with a hard-luck story — forces a study routine on Elle does she exhibit intelligence or tenacity.
The only early onstage evidence of Elle’s intelligence comes in an early showdown with a conniving saleswoman at a dress store. Shopping sets the scene for another key moment in the musical: Elle and Emmett sing their way to tentative love in a department store, belting “Take It Like a Man” as Elle helps Emmett transform from corduroy elbow patches to a Brooks Brothers clone. The musical’s message: love (and shopping) will keep us together.
Jerry Mitchell’s directing and choreography don’t do much to deepen the show — quite literally. Most of the musical uses only the front half of the stage, and the choreography is two-dimensional. Dancing the cast looks militaristic: They face front, then flip to face the wing. The musical’s movement palette, contemporary cheerleading, is constricting, but anyone who’s seen “Bring it On” knows dance for cheerleaders can be more creative.
The set, designed by David Rockwell, also suffers from flatness. The only time the overall stage picture feels expansive comes courtesy of the backdrop of a jail, where Woods visits the second-act celebrity defendant, Brooke Wyndham (Colleen Sexton). Why would jail be the site for a stage space to open up?
“Legally Blonde” eventually proves that Elle has more to her than her valley girl squealing suggests. There is no similar secret buried in the musical.
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