Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace, Speaker 2 (00:02): I always loved drawing because I felt like that's where the artist is most naked. You can add lots of other stuff and then you don't know really what's going on in the mark. The drawing is the most naked. Speaker 1 (00:25): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Gary Gaffney, professor Emeritus at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. This episode was recorded live in our galleries with a small group of visitors, so you might hear more background noise than normal. We started the conversation by looking at Gary's life-sized drawing of a female figure titled Woman Resurrected. This piece was originally created in 1986, but after a leak in his studio stained parts of the drawing, he reworked it in 2009. So tell folks a little bit about how you sort of came to the art academy. Speaker 2 (01:17): Well, I didn't have a traditional growing up in an art school. I was training to be research mathematician and working on my PhD when I decided that that wasn't the creative route for me. So I went back to graduate school, university art, and then came to Cincinnati to get my M F A and then took a job right at the art academy because at that time the Art Academy only offered a certificate Speaker 2 (01:47): And they were beginning a B F A program and they were a small school and they needed someone who could teach both art and academic subjects. And so it turned out that this was a wonderful thing for me because over 33 years of teaching, I taught 42 different classes in studio and liberal studies, and many of my created myself. And what I found out was that if I taught a new class in something I didn't really know, then that went into myself and into my art. So in this particular pair, you only see the female, but in this particular pair I was thinking that so many images we see in contemporary art of figures, it's really how they're dressed or the nude figure or the skin out really. And in our culture, we have so many new ways of seeing the human being through x-rays, through all kinds of medical devices, and yet we have a history. So we ground from that up into ourselves growing from all parts of nature into all aspects of what a woman could be. And it was interesting to me because this is maybe the second or third series, and I discovered that instinctively the men were all the philosophers and the mathematicians and the women's were all the feeling people. And so I had to go back and rethink the whole drawing to include a more complex and wider vision of who a woman was. But that's what I see. I mean, this is woman, this is, Speaker 1 (03:33): So your own viewpoints changed from the beginning of making this piece to the later resurrection of it? Well, Speaker 2 (03:42): I started as a mathematician and a chemistry minor, and that stuff is in there, but there's more and more and more piled on as I thought about it more and more. And that same thing happened in my teaching at the Art Academy. I started out teaching drawing and history and philosophy of science class Speaker 1 (04:00): And Speaker 2 (04:01): Then went on from there to teach all kind of interesting stuff. Speaker 1 (04:04): Yeah. So how do you think that, I mean, I know, and you just mentioned teaching things that were literally based in kind of like you taught some things that were mathematics based and stuff. But how do you think that background in math and science informed how you looked at art and how you talked about it with students? Or do you think it did? I guess Speaker 2 (04:26): Actually it did in a kind of consequential way because in contemporary education, every subject is its own complex and intricate subject and it builds walls around itself. And so you don't think that an artist should be a scientist or a scientist should be a poet or any of those other kinds of things. In fact, in the real life of people were all kinds of things. And so what I tried most to do in my teaching was break down the boundary between mathematics and science and art to show that the creativity that goes back and forth between those, because there really weren't none of those boundaries until fairly recently. And so I mean, that boundary didn't exist in me. And so why should it exist in the way I looked at the world and taught students to look at the world? Speaker 1 (05:22): So Gary, so everyone knows kind of my personal story. Gary was actually my first teacher at the academy. I think I had you at least day one when I started. You would've been probably the first person I met. And really one of the lessons I think, or the thing I remember you being so interested in was things that sort of defeated boundaries, right? Yes. That was a very big point for you. So it's interesting now thinking about that in terms of the way that even on a sort of human level of having a personal boundary of being a scientist or an artist and those things being defeated, but for you, it was often about things sort of defeating the frame of an artwork or sort of going beyond the places we think something could go. And I think that was a big part of pushing, especially for early students, of trying to get them to think literally outside the box in a lot of ways. Speaker 2 (06:20): Well, I think that you hear a lot about thinking outside of the box, but I think people don't take the time first to see what box they're actually in because no matter how much you think outside of the box, you're still in another box and you'll never get outside the box. It's just a bigger and bigger and bigger, more interesting box. Speaker 1 (06:41): Yeah, it seems like the complicated nature of who you are affected even what was being taught at the academy in that way and that we were teaching these things like courses on science and religion simultaneously, and I think you taught a course on that, right? And you did have a pretty big interest in religion as well, right? Yes, Speaker 2 (07:01): I did. It's in these works too, because to me, another thing you almost never find in contemporary art is a real engagement with spirituality. So I was interested in that and I continue to be interested in that. Speaker 1 (07:19): Yeah, I mean obviously the biblical subject matter is a pretty direct connection, but then I think you're always interested in these ways of, are these star charts or things down here and sort of ways of representing the universe and almost even the way that this figure dissolves into the structure in some, on one hand it seems very kind, scientific that it's bone, but the very idea of a body sort of dissolving and sort of disappearing, it feels very spiritual too. This sort of body left and just sort of this structure underneath. Speaker 2 (07:58): But this is woman, but that's woman, but that's woman. But that's woman, but that's woman and that's woman. Speaker 1 (08:08): What do you mean by that? Which Speaker 2 (08:11): They're all manifestations of woman. If you're in a culture, then you see a woman as a certain person in a certain form, in a certain symbolic representation. But when you throw 'em all together, then that completes what woman is or can be or man is or can be. Speaker 1 (08:28): Right, right. Well, thank you for talking about this piece. I thought this would be a great way to get us started. So what I want to do now is we're going to move around a little bit. I just want to hop over really quick to talk about this piece right there where this poor unsuspecting person just wanted to look. Yeah, just walking in a gallery, just minding your own business, didn't think anything of it. So I wanted to talk a little bit about this piece called Dust Ball by Mark Fox. Did you know Mark pretty well? Speaker 2 (09:02): Yes, I did. So Speaker 1 (09:03): Mark went to, did he go to the academy at all or did he just teach there? No, he Speaker 2 (09:07): Taught there. Speaker 1 (09:08): Yeah, I had him as a teacher, so that's how I knew. Yeah, it says here he taught from 2000 3, 2 5. So Mark, if you don't know, Mark Fox has actually a piece on view right now downstairs that is the video that was made around the same time as this piece when he had a show here at the museum and he had this video. He has this video piece downstairs of Mr. Peanut destroying the museum, which if you haven't seen it, is certainly enjoyable. We watched it with our, we do summer camp here last year we had the kids watch it and they were losing their minds. They loved it so much, screaming every time he crushed something. But yeah, he was an interesting guy. He was very quiet, but making this kind of crazy work that was ultimately all about destruction basically. Do you have any other thoughts about Mark or any memories of Mark? Speaker 2 (10:02): Yeah, I'll try to put it in a different context if I can. Sure. One of the most important things to me about the history of the Art Academy is that it really emphasized solid discipline drawing as the basis for everything. Speaker 1 (10:18): Yeah, that's true. Speaker 2 (10:19): And you'll see this in a lot of the images, and for a long time that solid discipline drawing really was the anchor for everything, but it was also something that corralled so much of the other work. So art was about certain kinds of things and certain kinds of landscape figures, that sort of thing. But over time, artists broke away and images like this you would see because they were expressive, because they were a different facet of who the artist was. And I always loved drawing because I felt like that's where the artist is most naked. You can add lots of other stuff and you don't know really what's going on in the mark. The drawing is the most naked. And I think here you can see Mark in that. And his piece at the art museum that he created was out of dust. He had collected from around the museum. And for somebody like Mark, I think a lot of his purpose was anything is art. There's beauty in anything, even a dust ball, and I can show you. Speaker 1 (11:27): Yeah. Speaker 2 (11:28): Also the idea that play is important, play is essential. A lot of art earlier seemed to be so much about talent and discipline, whereas in the contemporary time it's more about creativity and play and Mark with the puppets and the video that we talked about earlier, that's the creative play that's so important. That's what I would say about Mark. Speaker 1 (11:57): Yeah, and I think it's a really smart, the idea of collecting dust around a museum and thinking about almost dust is this sort of residue of humanity and that connection with art too. And by putting it under this little protective jar and everything, it's presenting this thing that's like, we were here, we were alive, and that's kind of what art is. So I think it's a really smart way of looking at the whole history of art. I think he was very conscious of obviously this piece about making works literally about the museum. He's very much thinking about the whole history of art. Speaker 2 (12:33): I would also say that there's a kind of common statement that says a piece of art gets about six seconds when you visit a museum. But if you just look at the difference between my piece and his piece, the way you approach it, what the questions you ask, the kind of answers you get, what the artist is after, those are so different. And that's the work of a museum. Being in a museum really is you have to carry something inquisitive to every piece knowing there's different expectations and different messages. Speaker 1 (13:08): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were talking a little bit before everyone got here and sitting down and I was talking about some of the things that I took away, important lessons from the Art Academy. And for me, I remember when I started here, I sat down and they gave me like, oh, you should read this book. It's all about teaching in the museum. And I was reading this book and I was like, okay, this is fine. And a certain point, it dawned on me that this sort of technique they're talking about was just basically a critique. It was like, oh, this is just being in a studio critique. I've done that. I've done this for hours and hours, and it's one of the things I really loved about art school is being in a critique. I know some people hate it, but for me it was always so thrilling. I could sit in critiques for hours. And so it's a natural extension for me to come here where I get to basically sit and talk about art all day. It's my favorite thing. Speaker 2 (14:01): And as a viewer, you're not just looking at art, you're critiquing it, you're having a conversation with it if you spend some time with it. Speaker 1 (14:09): Yeah, definitely. So we've got kind of a lot of works around us that I was really excited about. The first one right here is this piece by Tom Shaw called Self-Portrait Redemptive Justice. And I didn't know Tom too well. I know he went to the academy probably a little bit before you started, I think right Speaker 2 (14:30): Before Speaker 1 (14:30): You started there. But actually I worked in the library while I was a student here at the museum, and he was a regular visitor to the library always in. So he was just a person who I knew was so interested in art history. He would come in to look at images, and I think that shows up here where you have this very example of the four horsemen of the apocalypse appearing in this woodblock print that he's made. And I think it's such a fascinating image. One of the things I love about the way he uses these almost scribble marks in the piece is because I loved knowing that it looks really inconsequential. Somebody just went, but when you realize it's a woodblock print and somebody had to carefully carve out the scribbles that they're not, you can't just scribble that on there. In fact, you can. All the marks you're making are the negative space, all the white space. And once you start to pick 'em apart and think about how they were made, it's really, really fascinating to me. Do you have any thoughts about this piece, Gary? Speaker 2 (15:38): Yes. Speaker 2 (15:41): Tom went from the art academy to be a designer for Bell, Cincinnati Bell for many years, and there's another one of his pieces. And those pieces were very marketable. He had a gallery in Atlanta, they were beautiful. They were abstract, actually not objective color, black and white really. And at one point in his life, he had some medical problems and a kind of personal crisis, and he gave all of that up for this. And he did a whole series about his own black culture, very powerful images about guns, violence. If you can see them in books on him, they're really powerful. And this is one of those. And he died not too many years ago. He had a lot of heart problems, but he was a wonderful person, very generous, Speaker 1 (16:43): Very Speaker 2 (16:43): Giving, very talented. And I think to see someone go from one way of making art as a designer to another way of making art as a fine artist and really attacking powerful contemporary issues and culture was really astounding and he'll very much be missed. Speaker 1 (17:07): I didn't really know that about his past. And when I came up here to look at the show, I saw that work on the balcony and it looks so different. I had no idea he was, this was the work I knew of his. When I started becoming familiar with him, he was already onto this phase of his career. So seeing that older abstract work, I was really surprised by it. Speaker 2 (17:27): And if you met him as kind of the kind quiet person he was, and then he's doing these take no prisoners pictures. It was really an interesting contrast. Speaker 1 (17:37): Yeah, there is a sort of, yeah, I mean, the works are so powerful and so dynamic, and he was such a kind of quiet person, at least my dealings with him. He was very soft spoken, but he was so nice Speaker 2 (17:53): To me. I like artists who won't let me off the hook. Speaker 1 (18:00): In what way does this not let you off the hook? Speaker 2 (18:02): I have Speaker 1 (18:02): To look Speaker 2 (18:03): At it. I have to think about the history. I have to look, think about why it's a portrait. I have to think about why that tower's broken and who that ghost is over there. Those little squiggles are very much his early history and why that's there. And the graphic power really, it's so sharp that you can't be comfortable in front of it. Speaker 1 (18:28): Yeah, yeah, there's a lot there. Yeah, even I kind of wondered about, you were pointing out his work, taking a focus more on race relations as well, and even the sort of black and white that's sort of not only the part of the work, but then in that pattern, the checkerboard pattern of the floor felt very intentional to me, whenever I see a checkerboard pattern like that, it makes me think of, okay, we have two opposites being put next to each other for a very intentional reason. While we're looking at this wall, I kind of want to hop one over to Stuart Goldman, who was just a staple of the academy for many, many years. And I'm assuming you taught with Stewart for quite a while, right? A Speaker 2 (19:17): Long time, Speaker 1 (19:18): Yes. Yes, sure. Does it say, can you read there what years he taught? Speaker 2 (19:22): I know he retired in about maybe 2008 or something. Oh, Speaker 1 (19:27): He was before that. Yeah. Speaker 2 (19:29): Yeah, he was there when I started at 1978. So it was probably in the early seventies. Speaker 1 (19:33): Yeah. Yeah, it says 2000. So he retired in 2000, but Stewart was just sort of felt like one of those people who was just a pillar of the academy. He was just a part of it, and you just had to, he felt like he came with the architecture or something. And I never actually had Stuart as a teacher. He only taught for two years, I think, while I was there. I think he retired while I was in my sophomore year. But I also remember being a little bit afraid of him. I was always actually a little bit afraid of him, and now I'm less afraid of him because he's on our board and I talk to him actually quite a lot. So I still have to see Stewart. So I've maybe conquered my fear of him, but he just had this demeanor that was, I think the self-portrait kind of captures a little bit of, there's something very serious feeling about Stewart, and there's something kind of gruff about Speaker 2 (20:33): Him. But then Speaker 1 (20:33): It's really fascinating. A lot of his work is, you were talking about kind of a playfulness. He is a person who is definitely unafraid to experiment and take his work into really unexpected places, I think. Speaker 2 (20:46): But I think part of it is that he was the figure of the quintessential Speaker 1 (20:52): Painter, a Speaker 2 (20:53): Painter's painter, and he carried that with him. And I think that was kind of awe inspiring. But I think also when I look at this portrait, Stewarts and this one, we think of the portrait as a picture of the individual, but it's also a picture of the artist looking at the individual. And so do you want to represent the mood of the person? Do you want to represent the actual physical features of the person or how do you want to dig into that person? And here, Stuart is really physically digging into himself. It's not quiet, it's not soft. It's not about light. It's about some kind of psychological or some kind of really digging aspect. Speaker 1 (21:44): So Speaker 2 (21:44): That's important to think about how different the portraits are based on how different the artist are. Speaker 1 (21:50): Yeah, that's true. That's a good transition to maybe talk about what's behind us because this piece could not be more different than Stewarts to look at these two artists and how they handle materials are like polar opposites at Stewart's, very physical, aggressive mark making. And then we come to this piece by Connie McClure, which is just, I mean, I came around the corner and it kind of took my breath away. I'd seen the piece before, but it still was like it's so full of light and it feels so, I don't know. I don't know how else to describe it. What do you think? Speaker 2 (22:29): Well, I'll tell you a little bit about Connie. She's been around Cincinnati for a very long time, and there's probably very few individuals in the country who are masters of traditional renaissance techniques. So she knows Fresco, she knows caustic, which is wax painting. She knows egg tempra, and this is metal point, Speaker 1 (22:56): And Speaker 2 (22:56): You take a nib with a little bit of metal. It can be gold, it can be silver or whatever. And you draw on top of a ground, which is a white substance that will take that metal and hold it. And then over time the metal will corrode a little bit and change color. But this whole drawing is constructed from marks. This metal point is a very intimate kind of thing, and it's usually done on small surfaces and it's done for things. You want to look carefully at an object or something like that. So for her to tackle this family photograph in a technique that she built up and from light to dark mark after mark after Mark after Mark after Mark, mark is really incredible. Speaker 1 (23:50): From the side I'm standing on, I can just see this woman's dress and you can just see how many little marks make up that dress. And it makes a lot of sense when you talk about that as being something designed for a much smaller scale. Scale is such an important part of this work too, because it's this thing that we are used to seeing at a smaller scale, probably the scale you would probably more traditionally draw in Silver Point, but thinking of the scale of a three by five family photo. And then when you blow it up to this scale, it's taking this thing that feels sort of almost insignificant or just like a family snapshot, and it gives it so much more power by just taking that and giving it this totally unexpected scale. Speaker 2 (24:33): And patience isn't a hallmark of a lot of contemporary art. Speaker 1 (24:37): Yeah. I think it gets away with it the sort of making that thing so big because of that sort of carefulness and the gentleness of the mark making that it never becomes this thing that feels sort of overblown unnecessarily. It feels so right at this scale. I wanted to look at this piece over here, which I feel is a little unassuming in the corner here called French Windows by Tony Bachelor, who is another person who was sort of a staple of the academy while I was there. And he actually retired the same year I graduated. So again, I'm looking at our labels and going, that's not right. I think he was retiring in 2003, not 2005. And my experience with Tony was that I had a class with him called I think creative processes. And I remember being this sort of young student who just thought, oh, creative processes. Speaker 1 (25:36): How do you teach somebody to be creative? I just remember being kind of cynical about it at first, and it was actually one of the most helpful classes I ever had. And Tony was really great at breaking things down into very practical lessons. I remember one of the ones he taught us early on was this idea of a river flows faster when you have narrower banks that giving yourself some limits actually helps creativity flow. So sort of having a blank page and everything is possible is actually less helpful than maybe narrowing yourself down a little bit by bringing in giving yourself a few restrictions and then seeing where that takes you. And also he was this very experimental art maker that, I mean, I remember this looks a lot different than the work he was making when I was at school. He had sort of gone on to be really interested in chance processes, was all about making pieces based on dice rolls. Speaker 1 (26:36): And he had these series of works that were sort of these shaped pieces that the very shape of them was determined chance, and then the marks were determined by chance and all of these things. So a lot of things inspired by John Cage. But this is interesting, a little bit earlier work and it looks a little different than I would've expected. I've never seen this, but then I can remember some of the things he was showing us in class, like artists, like Sigmar pokey and stuff that when I see this, I go, oh, that's right. He was really into sigmar pokey. What's your memories of Tony? Speaker 2 (27:10): Well, I'm going to put two people together. Tony Bachelor and April Foster right there. Speaker 1 (27:16): Perfect. Yeah, that's a good match. Speaker 2 (27:19): Those two taught together for probably 25, 30 years at the art academy, and you would not find two more exacting, meticulous printmakers or teachers in either one of their classes. When you came in. You would have an absolute written out list of all the things you had to do to make this successful. And both of them were also very patient and meticulous in their work. Tony in One End Chance and those kinds of processes, April and her interest in the natural world as a, she's one person who began as a biology botany student and wound up in art, but that produced many years of really quality printmakers at the art academy, who really knew how to do etching, lithography and screen printing. And screen printing is very common. I mean, if you look at the cups that refreshments come in at different places or if you look at posters of all kinds, that's screen printing. But to do it in a fine art way with the kinds of inks you had and the kind of processes available to create something like this was really very different. One other good thing about Tony, just to mention a side thing, is that he recognized that the oil-based screen prints were toxic and he got the whole school to turn back over to water-based screen print. But both of those were really fine teachers and good models for the students in printmaking. Speaker 1 (29:01): Yeah, I took a litho, an etching with April, and I remember just after the first lithograph I made, I just thought, why on earth would anyone ever want to do this? I just could never imagine. Speaker 2 (29:16): It is so much work an attitude. It is Speaker 1 (29:18): So much work, and I just thought I could draw these things faster than you can print them. This is so insane. But I'm still glad I know it because now whenever, a lot of times things, when we talk about printmaking in the museum, a lot of people have questions about how the processes work. And I always go, oh, well actually I know this. I did it and I remember how to make a lithograph. Well, I mean I couldn't do it for you, but I understand the principles it and the principles behind etching, and I never took screen printing, but I get the gist of that too. Speaker 2 (29:48): But there is something magical about Prince like Tom Shaw. There's no way you can draw in all those accidental marks and things like that. And that's both Tony and April really enjoyed the nature printmaking for what it was. Speaker 1 (30:04): Yeah, yeah, that's true. That is something that there is a nice, I remember I responded much more to etching. I could see myself doing that just because it's a little more easy to wrap your head around how it works, but it does have those great, the sort of residual ink that stays on the plate and the way that changes, then it gives a sort of richness to the work that is always really exciting. So yeah, those are great comparisons to make and their work could not be more different, but I think you're right about saying how precise they were. I remember that about both of them getting those packets. Now that you say that. That's right. Very rigorous. Okay. The packet on how to produce a lithograph, I swear, was that thick. It was insane. It was like this giant staple thing and you and your litho partner would be reading it and okay, go to the closet and grab some gum, arabic, whatever that is, and you're like squirting stuff on a stone. It was insane. Speaker 2 (30:59): Not for everyone. Speaker 1 (31:00): No, it was much easier to go with you and just do drawing where you just, I'm just going to go downstairs and buy a piece of paper. I can erase it if I don't like it. So I want to kind of go out to the balcony here. Yeah, Speaker 2 (31:17): This is Tom's. Speaker 1 (31:18): Yeah, we can just talk about it really quick since we were talking about it earlier. This was a piece you were talking about that we were looking at Tom Shaw. This is De Jamin number 33. It's so different from what we were just looking at his work. Definitely the color is a much bigger part of this. You said that these pieces were very successful in sort of a commercial way. Speaker 2 (31:40): Yeah, Speaker 1 (31:41): I guess it does feel very eighties too. This is what was selling in the eighties too. Speaker 2 (31:46): Well, I mean, he was in a world of commercial work working for Cincinnati Bell, and so to translate his commercial work into fine art, it looked like this and he did the gallery scene and whatever. But when he jumped into those woodcuts, it was not commercial work at all. And I don't think he sold that many of them, people who museums might've taken some or a few collectors, but he went from selling a lot to selling, not very much because they were really strong pieces hard to live with. Speaker 1 (32:22): And then we've got kind of a few pieces here that are worth looking at too. That's a piece by Kim Flores, isn't it? I can't see it, the label, but I thought that was Kim's. So we have Kim Flora above who actually went to school with me. She was a few just actually a year younger than me, I think, and has been here at the museum forever. She started while she was a student, she started working in design and installation probably as an intern or a work study type deal. And she just kind of never went away, I don't think, and has kind of worked herself up to be the head of that department at this point. So it's interesting to see Kim's work here. I work with Kim all the time here at the museum, and I think it's kind of interesting to see it paired with Kim because I think she's Kim Krause who's pieces below it because she's very much, I think a student of Kim too and making work in that vein of Kim. So again, when we think about, we were talking about Stewart, those painters, painters. I kind of think about Kim as sort of coming out of that same lineage and Speaker 2 (33:32): Really, they're both people who, I think their paintings and their drawings are kind of the same thing. They're almost not a border between the two. Speaker 1 (33:41): That's true Speaker 2 (33:42): Because there's a lot of handwork and a lot of mushing around and a lot of exploring and color work. So that's what I think of them as at least in those pieces as painting and drawing at the same time. Speaker 1 (33:59): For both of them it's a lot about layering and scraping away and leaving those traces of the process. That's a big part of it. And I think that top piece by Kim shows a lot of that kind of feelings of layers underneath and scraping, and she's always been great at building these things that are really dense and full of, you always feel like if you could do a little archeological dig on them there, you would find things buried underneath or something. I was really excited when I walked by here the other day, and I saw this case, so it's full of some art academy catalogs, this catalog right here. The one number eight was actually what made me come to the art academy. So when I see it, I go, it has this really emotional feeling for me because I remember this catalog so thoroughly. I looked through it a lot, and I just remember this sort of duct tape binding that was so clever and just very spoke to me as in high school senior that said like, oh, these people are so cool. Speaker 2 (35:09): The catalog is really an interesting thing because it has to appear to an 18 year old who wants to be an artist, but is clueless about what that really means, and yet has to say what that 18 year old is going to get for their investment of money four years later. And that's really hard to do. Speaker 1 (35:32): Yeah, I mean, that's what I think about when I look at it. I think about how successfully it did that though, that it spoke to me as an 18 year old and it was hitting all the right buttons for me. Speaker 2 (35:46): But I think it did do a Speaker 1 (35:47): Pretty good job also of conveying the silliness of Speaker 2 (35:53): The art academy Speaker 1 (35:54): At times too. And it, it's whimsy as well. So I remember I had pictures of student work and you could see a good mix of people who are doing things that were very academic and very serious traditional art making, but then it was also so playful. So I think it did a good job of saying like, oh, this is a place I want to go. This is a place I would feel at home here. I would say. So that catalog, I don't want to give it all the sole credit because also at the time Sarah Kolby was in charge of admissions, and she also did a very good job of convincing me to go to the academy and just charmed me to no end. This Speaker 2 (36:30): Is also the Incliner was a poetry magazine we had for a while, and this is an invitation for something called the Monumental, which is a show where students, faculty, and staff can submit pieces that are two inches in diameter and no more. And there's a small exhibit of that up in the library if you want to look at it. But this is on its 32nd year of the exhibit at the Art Academy. So there are a lot of interesting things that happened within the history of the academy that you don't always see. Speaker 1 (37:07): And you're being a little modest here too. You started Monument Mins, right? Speaker 2 (37:10): Yes. Speaker 1 (37:14): Well, yeah, and unfortunately the library is not open today, but you can come back during the week or they're open on the second Saturday of the month to see. I saw my name on there and I was like, I had to remember what did I, I couldn't remember what I had made. And then I saw, Speaker 2 (37:30): Did you see it? Yeah, I did. Speaker 1 (37:31): It was great. Speaker 2 (37:33): I Speaker 1 (37:33): Had forgotten. I literally forgot I had made it. But yeah, it's a really nice little collection there. And I'm also glad that it was interesting you had Keith Benjamin curate it, which I kind sad there's no Keith in here because Keith is another important professor to me who made a big difference and changed a lot of how I thought about art. And just again, I think that playfulness and a experimentation with really unconventional materials of Keith, and there's a lot of people whose work, I think you can always say like, oh, they're like a Keith follower. Yes, yes. So one of the things here, I was a little surprised by this show. I had no idea that Joseph Albers Speaker 2 (38:20): Taught at the academy. Speaker 1 (38:21): I mean, it looks like one year. So it wasn't long, but Albers was such a big part of my education because his book Interaction of Color became sort a basis of our color theory class when I was a freshman. And it's still one of those things I think about all the time, even when it's like you have to paint your living room or something. I'll think about the effects of like, well, this color looks like this one. It's this big, but when you make it big, that changes it. It's like color is relative, the context changes everything. So I mean, this piece is black and white, so it's not a great example of Albers work. We have one of his paintings in Gallery 2 32 right now. That's a better example of his color work. But was I just wanted to just quickly stop by him because he was a person who did make a big influence on my career, I guess, even though I never met the man. Speaker 2 (39:20): Well, too, with somebody like Albers, there's a lot of things that you think of when you think of art, but with Albers, I always think of art as research. It's not, the images are interesting and they're aesthetic, but he's really figuring out how color works and he's demonstrating it in a kind of exact and precise way. So you're learning from it in a kind of direct way that maybe you don't as much from other kinds of work that aren't after that. Speaker 1 (39:49): Yeah, that's true. Yeah, Speaker 2 (39:51): And I think Speaker 1 (39:52): This kind of to make it bring it full circle to your work, it's also like art as science experiment. Speaker 2 (39:58): Yes. Speaker 1 (39:58): He's doing it in a different way than you're still being informed by science, but he is actually, the making of the stuff is the experiments almost. And it's like, well, I'm going to make this many pieces because I want to test how it works like this, and I want to test it like this. And they can really be looked at as a scientific study almost. And some of them do have sort of that kind of Mr. Wizard G whizz, like cool Speaker 2 (40:25): Effects. I think it's Speaker 1 (40:26): Actually technically the academy's book, but they own an original copy of Interaction of Color that lives in our library here, and it has all the original screen prints that there are plates where you're meant to sort of pull one color along another, and it does these crazy effects where it looks like the colors are moving and changing and you're like, I can't believe this is just a screen print. But it is that kind of magic that opens up your whole sense of like, wow, you can really do a lot with this stuff. And it's just literally flat color. So it was a big part of what I can remember, especially about my early days at school. Well, thank you Gary, for joining me so much today. Speaker 2 (41:09): My pleasure. Speaker 1 (41:10): And thank you guys for hanging out with us. Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have your own conversations about the art general. Admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking special exhibitions on view right now are Art Academy Cincinnati at 150, a celebration in drawings and prints and Georgene lakia, and opening March 1st is Paris 1900. Join us on Sunday, March 10th at 3:00 PM for a free gallery experience with our objects conservator Kelly Recald. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and also join our Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Efron Music by Lau. And always please rate and review us. I'm Russell. And this has been Art Palace, produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.