Akron Museum Visit & Install Day

Last Thursday the SPACES team plus our new artists Lauren Herzak-Bauman (Cleveland) and Migiwa Orimo (Yellow Springs, OH) went on an outing to the Akron Art Museum. We got a tour of the new shows from Arnie Tunstall, collections manager, and Liz Carney, curatorial assistant. We spent an especially long time with the new piece by Diana Al-Hadid, Nolli's Orders, a stunning sculpture that takes up the entire space of the front gallery room. Made out of steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, wood, foam and paint, the piece looked so delicate it felt like a piece could fall off any second if someone breathed too hard--but it was remarkable in its stability. Each drip from the figures and the pedestals stayed perfectly in place, and the combination of materials created a beautiful textural effect that was equally hard to take your eyes off of. There were also a few really nice drawings of Al-Hadid's on the walls, as well as a panel that fooled some of us--it looked like a 2D piece from afar but on closer look we realized it was actually 3D, with spaces in the piece where the white wall showed through.. very cool effect.

We also got a tour of the show Multiplicity, which came from the Smithsonian, featuring prints from a diverse range of artists such as Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, John Cage, and Kiki Smith. An interesting aspect of this show is that all of these artists worked with professional printers in some respect. One of my favorite pieces was Kiki Smith's Banshee Pearls, twelve chaotic black and white prints arranged in a grid.

We warmed up with some lunch afterwards and then hauled on back to Cleveland. It was a wonderful chance to hang out with Lauren and Migiwa, and see what our friends in Akron are up to. Some photos from Thursday are below.

In other exciting news, last Saturday the whole team was busy-- we packed up the old shows, and Lauren started installing her piece Field, with the help of her friend Mallorie and SPACES interns. Three of us spent many hours cutting pieces of fishing line and tying loops on each end. Lauren's piece is looking beautiful, porcelain chains hung from the ceiling in rows creating intricate patterns from different viewpoints. It was really fun being part of the process and getting a view into the immense amount of time and effort it takes to put an installation like this together--it's really interesting how art-making can involve a lot of mechanical tasks like this.

Take a look at the photos from install day!

It's going to be exciting when we can share these new exhibitions with the public on our opening on January 31st! Hope to see you all there.

[Information on Al-Hadid's work and the Multiplicity exhibition from akronartmuseum.org]