People + Art + Wildlife
Why Teach Kids in Museums
Posted Friday the 13th of August, 2010 My father-in-law, Ed, a sometime chess partner and a long-time public school math teacher, was always involved with numbers and organizing things. He would sit watching a football game on TV and graph the play-by-play progress of each team on a chart showing yard lines on a field. When asked if he enjoyed teaching math, his response was "I don't teach math; I teach kids." One way of not teaching math was running chess games with his junior-high school students. These games could go on for weeks alongside the official curriculum, and winning a game or tournament could somehow produce an understanding of round numbers or square roots. His statement about the purpose of his work, teaching kids, provokes me to think that we are often confused about the value of museums and their collections. Museums have devoted two hundred years to the proper ways of collecting, classifying, preserving and occasionally presenting objects. I say occasionally because 90% of museum collections usually remain in storage, out of sight of the public--a point that museum detractors frequently repeat. But we often overlook the point of collecting and the reasons for doing so in the first place. Why did any of our predecessors gather these wonderful paintings, sculptures, and objects in the first place? Because they had the expectation, the hope, the compulsion to believe that other people would benefit from the gathering, and that future generations would continue to have the opportunity to wonder, enjoy, and learn from the objects. The people and their education were the ultimate goal. The risks of recovering the objects, the costs of preserving them, and their display were means to that end. How many early collectors, informed that their gatherings would be sequestered forever from human view and never seen, would have continued their pursuits? The creative process may sustain artists when no one notices--the art never purchased, the dance never observed, the novel never published and read. And perhaps some collectors are mere hoarders who will save anything because they save everything. But museums have formed and flowered as public institutions because they bring art and history and science to people. My thoughts received a bit of validation from Max Anderson, Director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who recently suggested to the Association of Art Museum Directors that the traditional mission of museums to "collect, preserve, and interpret" might be better conceived these days as "gather, steward, and converse." This leaves in place the fundamental activities of museums, but leans them in the direction of people more than objects. Kids, not math. People, not objects. Think about the results the next time you visit a museum. |
Wild Imagination
Posted Thursday the 27th of May, 2010 If you've never seen an animal, what does it look like? Renowned children's book illustrator and author Maurice Sendak has something in common with 19th-century Swiss artist Karl Bodmer: their work portrays animals many people had never seen before. New exhibits at the National Museum of Wildlife Art feature Sendak's Animal Kingdom and Bodmer's North American Wildlife. Bodmer brings artistic flair to natural history. Many of his animals are literal still-lifes--studies of animals that have been killed. The ones in the liveliest poses are those most easily captured or observed--turtles, salamanders, frogs, toads. But he also manages a majestic watercolor of "Buffalo and Elk on the Upper Missouri" featuring a bull elk on a promontory above herds approaching the water's edge - a vision much in the tradition of portrayals of heroic European stags. Sendak's creatures are variously lifelike, animated, anthropomorphous, and imaginary, a welter of visions to suit the storyteller's needs. The final drawings for many of his books speak to multiple attempts to rightly characterize the mood, the instant, the expression of the moment in the narrative, to leave the viewer with a satisfied comprehension of the creatures depicted. What might these images mean to their viewers? Bodmer's images, made first to satisfy the demands of his employer, the Prince Maximilian zu Wied, are first of all anatomically precise, skillfully drawn and colored. When Europeans saw these images in 1843, they might have heard about the animals, but never seen them. The creatures were exotic, rare, and distant from their experience - almost imaginary.  Karl Bodmer (Switzerland, 1809-1893), Bison Wounded in a Hunt, 1832 - 1834. Watercolor on Paper. 5 7/8 x 8 5/8 inches. Collection of Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Gift of Enron Art Foundation, 1986. Sendak creates creatures that look civilized, but act wild; or vice versa. Dragons read books, toads converse; bears play musical instruments, then try to eat people. Generations of children first encountered animals both real and imaginary through Sendak's drawings. They speak to the nature of "wildness," and the fine line between the tame and wild tendencies in all living things.  Final drawing for Where the Wild Things Are. Pen and ink, watercolor. © 1963, 1991 by Maurice Sendak Some people have regarded Sendak's portrayals of wildness as "too scary." Think for a moment, however, about the impressions of 19th-century Europeans seeing their first accurate portrayals of bison, pronghorn, and lynx, compared to a child's first encounter with Sendak's wild things. Is the imagination the work of the artist or the viewer? Labels: American West , Bison , Children's Books , Dragons , Joslyn Art Museum , Karl Bodmer , Maurice Sendak , National Museum Of Wildlife Art , Rosenbach Museum , Wildlife , Arts News |
Gallery Lion, Wild Art
Posted Saturday the 13th of March, 2010 Have you ever seen a lion in a museum? In startling footage of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, a live male African lion pads through the galleries. He wanders calmly past paintings and sculptures, nosing through carpeted galleries, stopping once to roar. Not the outdoors, not a cage, not an open vista--nothing to eat. This strange juxtaposition of captive wildlife and artworks can be seen on a video, Wild at HeART, produced by SavaFilm. It raises a number of questions about people, art, and wildlife. How do we see animals, and how do they see us? What determines the ways that we portray animals in art? Is there something fundamental about the human habit of portraying animals? James Northcote's 1816 portrayal of two children peering into a tiger's cage is another starting point for exploration of these questions. The painting is more complex than it appears to be at first glance. Behind the tiger in the foreground of the cage stands another, more threatening in visage.  In the rage for authenticity, many people favor direct experience with wildlife--but it is almost impossible to break the cultural frames that we create for that experience. It is one thing to view lions, polar bears, and sharks in paintings or films, quite another to get up close and personal. The recent and unfortunate death of a Sea World trainer is only one in a continuing number of human encounters with animals where expectations about animal behavior fail, even within a defined context. People continue to express severe misgivings about holding animals in confined spaces under any circumstance. Painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers stretch beyond most of us to create images of the animals they portray. Artist's stories about the experience of getting the image expand the action--the narrow escape from a charging elephant, the unexpected closeness of a mountain lion, the intensity of a wolf's gaze. At the same time, we wonder about what the world will be like without animals. "It's a beetle," says the father, in a singularly hopeful scene from The Road, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Father and son regard the small creature picked up by the son, whereupon the beetle buzzes off into the blasted branches of a tree. In the apocalyptic world of The Road, all animals are declared dead, but they remain present despite the destruction: a mounted deer head on the office wall of a destroyed bank, the buzzing beetle, and a puzzled-looking dog--the final member of the family where the boy ends up. The mounted deer head is a grim reminder that we have often valued things more after they are dead and gone than we did when they were alive. But for all the framing and predictions and opinionating, artists and wildlife persist. Carl Akeley, James Lippitt Clark, and other artists who pioneered the use of dioramas in museums over a hundred years ago worked in the expectation that many of the animals they portrayed would one day be extinct. I like to think that due to their labors some wildlife has survived. I also hope, as I survey the enormous number of animal and wildlife photographs and videos on the Internet, that more people will recognize the sketchers, painters, sculptors, and other artists who portrayed animals in the wild when zoos and cameras were not available to them. Labels: Carl Akeley , Gallery , James Lippitt Clark , Lion , Museum ,National Museum of Wildlife Art , Savafilm , The Road , Wild At Heart , Wildlife , Green News |
Maps, Moose, and Museums
Posted Sunday the 14th of February, 2010 In these days of Google Earth, GPS tracking, and instant cell phone connections to every nearby restaurant, mapping technologies inspire new visions. It’s great to know about restaurants. What do you know about, say, moose? Or museums? One recent evening at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, about two hundred people gathered for a potluck dinner with Bert Raynes, a much-beloved writer and observer of nature, particularly birds, in the valley of Jackson Hole, and a long advocate of wildlife. Bert founded the Meg and Bert Raynes Wildlife Fund after the death of his wife, Meg, to identify and support wildlife and habitat preservation in Jackson Hole and Wyoming. One project of the Fund is “Nature Mapping” (modeled on similar projects in Washington State and Oregon) that organizes people to document the presence, location, and condition of particular wildlife species across the region. In addition to many birds, the nature mappers have devoted particular days to identification and location of mammals. A favorite subject: the grand North American moose. On a single day in 2009, some fifty-seven individuals sighted ninety-five moose. This number represented a decrease in the visible moose population, because warmer-than-usual weather allowed moose to scatter into less prominent areas of the valley. Click here to see the map! The impetus to count things that we deem significant has long been a preoccupation of scientific research, and the technical advances in mapping in recent years have given us sudden visions of the patterns of biological and human interactions that in the not-too-distant past were simply guesswork. Early accounts of wildlife in the American West, for example, frequently noted large mammals—moose, deer, elk, pronghorn—by the hundreds, if not thousands, and we are used to reading estimates of the millions of bison exterminated in the nineteenth century. But the literal pinpointing on a computerized map of individual representatives of a species rewards our curiosity with an image that would have been unthinkable before. In like fashion, the Association of Art Museum Directors is also engaged in a mapping project, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, to identify the many collaborations and resource exchanges that art museums create in their local communities. So far, the data supplied by over forty-five individual art museums has generated maps showing recipients and partners in educational services (schools, senior and community centers, libraries, etc.) and the locations of vendors to the museums (i.e., where the museum spends its money). An example:
Labels: American West, Association of Art Museum Directors, Moose, National Endowment for the Arts, National Museum of Wildlife Art , Nature Mapping, Pika, Raynes Fund, Wildlife Art |
"I See What You Mean"...
Posted Wednesday the 20th of January, 2010 "I See What You Mean" is the name of the forty-foot sculpture of a blue bear by Lawrence Argent that stands outside, staring into the windows of the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. This startling public art work has become a regular photo-op for visitors, bloggers, and art seekers. On a recent trip to Denver, looking down from an adjacent hotel at this marvelous and entertaining creature, I could also easily observe scores of construction workers pouring concrete, floor after floor, for a new high-rise building, going at it twenty-four hours a day in the frigid air. I suspect some of them felt as cold as the bear was blue.  Not far away from "I See What You Mean," a gathering of experts at the Denver Art Museum/Petrie Institute of Western American Art was exploring American sculpture in the 19th century. The assembled experts included Thomas Smith, Andrew J. Walker, Thayer Tolles, Peter H. Hassrick, Sarah E. Boehme, Alice Levi Duncan, and Patricia Limerick, whose discourses actually edged into the 20th century and covered prominent sculptors, including Hermon Atkins McNeil, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, James Earl Frazier, Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and Paul Manship. More than once during the discussions the point was made that many of the public works of these artists, in one way or another, reflected a nostalgia for elements of American life that existed safely in the past (Indians and cowboys), or classical mythological heroes, or animals headed for extinction (lions, bears, elephants). James Earl Frazier's "End of the Trail" sculpture of an Indian slumped on his horse in a defeated pose and Frederic Remington's "Broncho Buster" epitomize this nostalgia. Charles Marion Russell was quite frank about his intentions, pointing to the untrammeled wilderness of the past and the larger-than-life characters who peopled it. Several of his own exhibitions carried the title "The West That Has Passed." Russell and his cohort pose a clear contrast with Lawrence Argent, who explains his approach this way: I am an artist that utilizes assorted mediums and venues to engage the viewer in questioning the assumed and provide a vehicle by which stimulus opens a plethora of responses that defy verbal articulation. Denvergov.org Despite this contrast, the presence of monumental artworks in public spaces is something we have grown to expect, and the message intended by the artists is not necessarily that received by viewers. Argent's blue bear stands near the end of a long procession of monumental sculptures, particularly those of wildlife, that occupy the public (usually urban) landscape. Artists' intentions aside, the telling contrast may be between free animals in the wilderness (a notion with its own nostalgia) and urban parks with wildlife sculptures. Who knows? Art may defy verbal articulation yet again and bring us to a better co-existence with animals and the earth. Labels: Art , Charles M. Russell , Frederick Remington , James Earl Frazier , Landscape , Lawrence Argent , National Museum of Wildlife Art , Parks , Sculpture , Wildlife , Wildlife Art , Green News |
