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Jane Richlovsky

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Meet Me in Miami

 Posted on November 24, 2020

Art Basel and all of the related Miami Art fairs were cancelled this year for the pandemic. The following essay, which I wrote after participating in the 2008 fair, was published in ArtDish that year.

There are worse things than having too much art. That’s my conclusion after spending four exhausting days looking at art, hawking art, having art hawked at me, talking about art, feeling oppressed by art, and ultimately accepting all of it, the good, the bad, and the pretentious. This year I made my first visit to the phenomenon known only as “Miami” in artistic circles, characteristically timing my introduction to this festival of art-mongering to coincide with a worldwide economic near-collapse, and amid much talk about the recently-booming art market going bust. Making my living as an artist, I’m invested in, ambivalent about, but ultimately fascinated by the symbiotic, historically protean relationship between Art and Commerce. The economic milieu surrounding this year’s fair cracked the bedroom door open a bit and provided me a glimpse into some of the ambiguities of that relationship.

“Miami” usually refers to Art Basel Miami Beach, the large and prestigious international art fair that takes place in the Miami Beach Convention Center each December since 2002, along with the numerous satellite fairs that have since sprung up in its immediate vicinity, as well as in an outlying colony across the bay in Miami’s Winwood district. These fairs range quite a bit in size and flavor from those nearly as tony as Art Basel, to tiny fairs of unaffiliated artists crammed into beachfront hotels. In the vast middle category, many respectable commercial galleries set up shop in hotel rooms, sportingly making the best of the bad draperies and carpet. This year the Miami Herald counted 23 fairs, but some I’d attended were not listed, so the number could be much greater. I was embedded with one of my galleries at Art Now, my own work being exhibited along with other gallery artists in our booth in the lobby of the South Seas Hotel. I came along to help out my dealer with the booth, to do what I could to promote the gallery and myself, and to observe the parade of humanity and its creations on display in this legendary tourist trap.

My first impression of Miami Beach was that it was the kind of tacky old-school beach town I adore, and my second was that it was the perfect setting for hawking wares of any kind on a massive scale. Everywhere I wandered hucksters were huckstering, peddlers peddling. All along the oceanfront street where I was staying, for example, the seating for the restaurants spilled out over the entire sidewalk all the way to the street, forcing all pedestrians to walk through what is essentially the middle of the restaurant, where invariably someone waved menus in their faces and attempted to seat them. After walking through five of these on the first night and at least ten more the next morning, I not only got used to ignoring the menu-wavers, but also began to feel a kinship with them. Really, what else was I, or my dealer, or any of the high-brow art brokers, there to do ourselves? Similarly, at dinner one night, my companions and I, seated at an outdoor table, were approached by a roving illusionist trying to sell us a tableside magic show. He specified he did not work for tips, because he did not trust the public, but instead charged a ten-dollar fee. We laughed, but who could blame him? What artist has not encountered the boorish lout who balks at the cost of a moderately priced piece of art, oblivious to value of the artist’s time and skill invested in it? I could relate, although we did decline on the magic show. Peddling illusions was getting a little close to our turf.

Walking home that night, I noticed that someone had outlined in colored chalk the long, streetlight-cast shadows of lightposts, newspaper boxes, parking meters and the bikes locked to them. The outlines lent substance to the ghostly shadows and had the urban, spontaneous feel of unofficial public art that isn’t commissioned by panels of art-history majors. However, as I walked along, I eventually noticed that the artist’s name had been added in chalk in places, along with the number of the booth in which to find him at the Aqua fair. My spontaneous unofficial public art was yet another sales pitch.

I’m not complaining, exactly. Art has been intimately connected with advertisement of one kind or another for millennia, and quite blatantly so since the Renaissance. Artists have pitched religious views for the Church, or served the secular interests of their patrons, and the art that manages to give us something beyond those sponsored messages is the art we still value after the messages themselves are no longer so pressing. I will venture that a contemporary work of art is first selling the idea of itself as art. A Duchampian readymade or a DeKooning drawing erased by Rauschenberg is practically shouting to you that it’s art, dammit. Many contemporary installations and performances are pitching their case for themselves as art by their very opacity to the average viewer, sometimes by the prestige of their settings or the identity of their sponsors.

And we are as overloaded with art as we are with its redheaded stepsister advertising, as we are with the products that the stepsister peddles. Even as economists worry that we are not buying our usual glut of those products and doing our part to maintain the unsustainable model of more, more, more, we apparently haven’t gotten enough of either buying stuff or looking at art. In past years Miami’s been described as a veritable feeding frenzy of collectors fighting with each other to buy, buy, buy, the newest, the latest, the hottest. This year, in a depressed economy, there were still plenty of people from around the world, and some were buying, but it was more of a viewing frenzy, in which a wide cross-section of people took part. In the few hours a day I wasn’t tending our booth, I joined groups of brightly-clad retired New-York ladies, shiny Europeans with fashionable eyeglasses, local Cuban families with small kids, in looking at art, taking in eight fairs in all myself.

I hit Art Basel first, determined to see the entire exhibit, and I stayed for three hours, knowing full well that my ability to make sense of visual phenomena would give out after an hour or so. The huge convention hall was divided up into a labyrinth of interconnected exhibition spaces, occupied by 250 galleries in all. Here the aproned restaurant barkers were replaced with tiny blond underpaid MFA grads in pointy heels and black dresses, but the idea was the same. They enticed you by ignoring your presence, and their menus had no printed prices because if you had to ask . . . well, you know the rest.

Playing it safe, many of the galleries had opted for pulling out secondary-market stuff by known artists, so there were a lot of Chuck Closes, Cindy Shermans, Barbara Kruegers — it sounds like a who’s who of the ’80’s — and of course an abundance of Rauschenbergs since he died this year. But I gravitated toward anything that might hold promise in the way of painting, and I remember, in no particular order, Barack Obama (one of several) in a Grant Wood style, and plenty of those Neo-Rauch-influenced German Figurists with their clashing primary colors out of the tube and thin, loose brushwork. I also paused to look at an installation consisting of twenty plaster people wearing 3D glasses and watching a movie of geometric shapes engaged in loud sex with a miserable- looking Slavic woman in attendance.

As I pressed on through the aesthetic smorgasbord, I was haunted by a creeping sense of futility. We’ve known about the image glut for decades, yet we, and I implicate myself here, keep adding to it. Onward through a blur of resin-coated paintings, pointless installations, more Rauschenbergs, and the giant C-prints that seem to be everywhere these days, I started to resent photography in particular, with its capacity for high image emissions, for being the equivalent of an SUV in the rapidly warming visual environment.

Just outside the nearly-last booth of the last aisle of Art Basel, and well past that day’s saturation point, I had an epiphany of sorts. In the cubicle of a Tokyo gallery, a man and woman were seated atop a wooden structure. Whatever constituted the artwork they were peddling was apparently behind and under them, and they were wearing puffy moon booties over their shoes to protect it. In spite of my indifference to most installation art and my mental and spiritual fatigue, I gamely entered the passageway encircling their platform. It was unremarkable even as far as installations go — you enter the plain hall made of untreated 2×4’s and plywood, squat down to look in a round window, and see yourself on the other side. (How’s my lipstick holding up.) Keep walking and there’s a small picture of a forest hanging on the wall. (Whatever.) Keep walking and look through a window opposite the one you looked in earlier. (Oh look, another window). Garden-variety installation art, one of hundreds of artworks I’d looked at in the past three hours, and thousands I’d loved, hated, or been annoyed with in my lifetime. But I look anyway. I’d walked through the damn thing even though I was nearly certain it would provide no enriching aesthetic experience.

People I know who’ve gotten tattoos, piercings or other forms of voluntary self- inflicted pain talk about getting past the agony of having their skin poked full of holes to the ecstasy of the endorphin rush. I was having mine now, in that dumb plywood hallway. I had hit the metaphorical plywood wall at the intersection of Too Much and What’s the Point, and pushed through to the other side. Bad art, good art, lame or pretentious art, I couldn’t help but admire our human beings’ persistence. Shiny things! Piles of household objects! Another Obama! Japanese people in booties on raw plywood! Bring it on! Go, Art!

Suddenly I wasn’t depressed anymore about the overabundance of art, nor existentially angst-ridden about continuing to contribute to it myself. The planet is melting, people around the world are killing each other over old tribal grudges, the world economy is on the brink of collapse . . . there is no rational reason why we should be stuffing ourselves with attempts at beauty and meaning, but there never has been. The fact that we are, even badly, could make a person think twice about writing off the species.

That evening, at the Art Now opening, the day’s revelation made me feel a bit more solid about my own role as huckster. As I repeated my schpiel about my own work to fairgoer after fairgoer, I could recognize the glaze in their eyes from overindulgence in art. Yet I continued to serve the intoxicated, because that is my job, and I’m beginning to embrace it.

The next day I continued to overindulge, trudging through booths covered in newspapers, graffiti, and duct tape, all the tribal markings of “alternative” at the more indy-flavored New Art Dealers’ Association (NADA) fair. In a booth covered in video screens, a young blond Italian woman texted ferociously next to a white pedestal that was tipped at a rakish angle by a roll of caution tape. There were the obligatory eviscerated mattresses, piles of household junk, manga-like cartoon characters on ragged paper taped to the walls, boxes of ammo, more duct tape, a guy on a lawn chair in a khaki suit, bunnies, big-eyed girls, piles of dirt, more graffiti.

I was still feeling oversaturated despite making my peace with oversaturation, and a little jaded, when I spotted two bearded men on folding chairs crocheting a soft pink undulating object and gravitated toward them. They were Dutes and Stan, a married couple / performance team from Chicago, and they had been working on their big pink tube since 2003, working out from the middle in opposite directions. They estimate it to be about 50 feet long and consider it a kind of metaphor for relationships, particularly their own. According to the artists, “when it was shorter it had a more phallic quality, and as it’s gotten longer it’s become more of an umbilical cord.” While more fiber connects them today than when they started, one could also say they’ve crocheted their way apart. But they were sitting close, the tube heaped in piles around their chairs, and the overall effect was rather cozy. Most of their work, it turns out, is done in public spaces for the non-art crowd. I found their amiability a refreshing antidote to the audience- alienating, interiority-fetishizing vibe of much highbrow Performance Art, and to the stridently avant-garde art quality of much of the art surrounding it at the fair.

If it had seemed a little weird for mainstream commercial galleries to be setting up in hotel rooms, as they were at most of the Miami Beach fairs, soliciting the business of moneyed collectors, then the idea of individual artists in various states of desperation displaying their wares in lower-rent hotel rooms, beckoning to passers-by, gave me a slightly unwholesome feeling, and perhaps hit a little close to home. So naturally I wasn’t going to miss the Artist’s Fair, nestled in the dilapidated grandeur of the Sagamore hotel, its spacious marble lobby smelling of stale cigarette smoke, hanging in the air like bad performance art since the 1970’s when the place was apparently last redecorated. Up an almost-grand marble staircase, the artists were crammed into the myriad corners of what looked like a succession of small party rooms, jammed together in a maze that I gave up on navigating about halfway through. Much of the mediocre painting went in one eye and out the other, like most everything else I’d viewed that day. But again, I had to admire the enterprising spirit of people going to great personal expense and risking humiliation just to give it a shot. Some were probably hoping to be discovered and attain commercial success, others, armed with dense, wordy manifesti, just wanted the world to hear their message. I paused at the booth of an “artist and open-heart surgery nurse”, a tiny space stuffed with 33 numbered gold-spray-painted suitcases, long enough to pick up the intriguing press release/ manifesto she proffered. In it she described the suitcases, which contain her patent application, as simultaneously an art installation, invention application, business plan, marketing ploy, spiritual quest, and self-portrait.

That pretty much sums up Miami.

art fair booth in miami with the author
Tending the Heineman-Myers booth at the ArtNow Miami fair. 2008 Photo: Zoe Myers

Top: Zoe Myers, owner of Heineman-Myers Contemporary Art, with a sculpture by Jonathan Stein.

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Square Deal: 50 Artists for a Fair Vote

 Posted on July 23, 2020

Earlier this year, I was thinking to myself that I really wanted to do something meaningful to help swing the 2020 election in the direction of good and away from the direction of dictatorship. Because of our goofy electoral college system, my “blue state” vote alone isn’t worth much, and neither is knocking on doors, as far as the presidential election is concerned. I had heard about an organization, Movement Voter Project, that raises funds in states like mine and gives the money to grassroots groups in swing states who fight voter suppression and get out the vote. I convinced my co-curator, Dara Solliday, to add a benefit for MVP to our annual “100 under $100” show, scheduled to happen in June.

Of course, the big group shows we loved to create, our hall crowded with people vying for affordable art—obviously couldn’t happen. (Neither could knocking on doors.) In May I reconvened my dream team (via Zoom) of artists with multiple skill-sets in marketing, art installation, press relations, etc. and we decided to make the benefit happen anyway. After all, with a disastrously mishandled killer pandemic, racist tweets, federal troops invading the next town to beat up protesters, voter rights under even more vicious attack—you get the idea—our motivation to make a change was all the more urgent.

So we organized the thing as an online gallery and auction. We collected the physical art from the 50 artists, hung it in the upstairs gallery, and posted it online, along with a donation link to Movement Voter Project dedicated to our event. Donors of $100 or more can pick out a piece of art (while supplies last!) and pick it up* in September, when we may be able to open the gallery to the public to see the whole show before the work goes to its new homes.

The artist who created each piece will remain anonymous until the work is selected, so I can’t post mine yet. However, a complete list of the illustrious names of the artists I persuaded to donate is on the ’57 Biscayne website.

GO TO THE SQUARE DEAL SITE & GET SOME DEMOCRACY & ART.

*I’ll ship!

Update: I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again

 Posted on July 15, 2020

The Food Art Collection is now open by appointment!

You can view my new show of 24 tiny round food paintings, I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again, in the lovely apartment gallery, with masks and at a safe distance, through August. Contact Jeremy to make an appointment. All the work is also viewable in their online gallery.

I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again

 Posted on May 21, 2020

I have been painting twisted vintage Americana, much of it food-related, on found fabrics for over twenty years. A couple of years ago, I found myself with an overabundance of tiny (4″) plywood “doughnut holes” left over from building larger round panels. The tiny circles were so appealing, I had to make them into painting supports. I used them for studies of the food that was piled on a table in a commissioned piece I was working on at the time. I was trying to mix the weird colors found in 1950’s cookbook illustrations of processed food, mimicking the color printing process by using only four colors of paint (CMYK) plus white.

painting of a radish
Radish Rose

The project later evolved into a way to trick myself into painting more loosely. The tiny paintings were from scraps, and such a low investment—if one wasn’t working, I’d just paint over it. 

I would get hungry every time I worked on them, even when the food was kind of gross.

In my work I’ve often depicted highly decorative culinary concoctions that channeled an inordinate amount of female creativity into bizarre and ephemeral projects. For example: start by gutting a simple potato, loaf of bread, or hard-boiled egg; mix the innards with other ingredients, primarily mayonnaise; then stuff them back into their original container to create a similacrum of the original—now there’s a productive use of time! Working alone in a room painting detailed, labor-intensive food pictures makes me feel a sort of kinship with my homebound foremothers who labored over the actual food. Their creations were devoured (or not), the evidence of their labor and ingenuity vanished. Art is arguably undervalued in our culture, but at least there do exist people willing to shell out money for it and hang it on their wall. So I’ve got that going for me anyway.

I was finishing this series just as the pandemic was starting to drive many of us into the cocoons of our homes. Home-cooked food has suddenly taken center stage as a source of comfort and symbol of togetherness. There has also been a resurgence of food-as-craft-project, a reincarnation of the fifties mom sculpting strange concoctions out of humble, edible materials. We’re mourning our former social, public, busy lives, and appreciating anew things we took for granted, including sharing food with friends. When we finally re-gather and rebuild and sit down to a nice dinner together, we’ll be starting from scratch, as it were, in a new world. We’ll never have that recipe again.

Sweet Green Icing

Appropriately, this series of twenty-four food paintings will be shown for the first time in a home. The Food Art Collection has existed as a gallery in curator Jeremy Buben’s apartment since 2017. We had already planned to show this work there this year, just before everybody went home and did everything, including showing art, online. Opening in June, all the paintings in I’ll Never Have that Recipe Again will be hung together on a real wall in a physical gallery. They will also displayed on the gallery’s website (and online store), and video tours and talks will be scheduled in the coming weeks. The paintings will remain on display in the physical space through the summer. We anticipate possibly moving into “phase 2” in Washington next month, which means the gallery will likely be open for in-person viewing by appointment in the coming months. A reception seems less likely, but stay tuned.

Yet another panel discussion – but this time with food!

 Posted on November 18, 2019

On Wednesday, November 20 from 6-9 PM, I’ll be a panelist in a discussion about—what else?— “Saving Space for the Arts in Seattle,” which is part of The Evergrey series, Setting the Table. After the usual Q & A lineup, the discussion continues more casually, over a meal prepared by local chef Justin Khanna of Voyager’s Table. The description from Evergrey:

Seattle’s history is rich with creative minds who made an impact — from larger than life icons like Jimi Hendrix, Octavia Butler, and Dale Chihuly to our communities of indigenous artists, scrappy trendsetters, counter-culture envelope pushers and more.

Today, Seattle’s rapid growth often looks better suited to our booming tech industry than to creative cultures that have kept us vibrant, authentic, and oh yes — just the right kind of weird.

At this month’s Setting The Table, our community panel and dinner will dive into the Seattle arts ecosystem to try to understand: What led us to where we are today in our arts scene? And how we can build a more inclusive, supportive future for our local creatives?

Led by moderator Caitlin Moran from The Evergrey, local thought leaders will begin the conversation by answering your questions, and we’ll see where we go from there! Our discussion leaders for this month’s topic are:

  • Priya Frank – Community Programs, Seattle Art Museum
  • Jane Richlovsky – Seattle Painter and Accidental Developer
  • Hallie Kuperman – Owner, Century Ballroom
  • Greg Lundgren – Art Space Curator and Entrepreneur

 

The discussion and feast will take place at Makers Workspaces, 92 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121.

Tickets are available here. The event is $40 including the tasting menu. A limited number of reduced-price tickets are set aside; there is a link to apply for them on the event website.

“Face First” at the Bainbridge Museum of Art

 Posted on September 30, 2019
jane richlovsky contemporary art painting figurative art pattern vintage car

My work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition Face First at the Bainbridge Museum of Art, on lovely Bainbridge Island, Washington. Curated by Greg Robinson and Amy Sawyer,

Face First eyes over thirty Puget Sound area artists whose work includes portraiture, focused especially on the human face. Artists include: Juliette Aristides, Fong Baatz, Romson Bustillo, Terry Furchgott, Bryant Goetz, Naomi Haverland, Aisha Harrison, Julia Harrison, Christopher Paul Jordan, Kathryn Lesh, Paul Marioni, Mark Kang-O’Higgins, Jane Richlovsky, Adair Freeman Rutledge, Jessica Rycheal, and Susan Singleton. This major group exhibition includes painting, photography, sculpture, glass, artist’s books, and mixed media.

The show kicks off with a reception on Saturday October 12 from 2-5 PM, followed by an Artists’ Party from 6-9 PM. It runs through February 23, 2020.

100 under $100 and the Sweet Suite 300

 Posted on June 4, 2019
happy women selling art

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A CLOSING PARTY AND INDUSTRY NIGHT ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 17 FROM 5-7 PM!

For the sixth year in a row, my colleague Dara Solliday and I will be organizing and curating the 100 under $100 show at ’57 Biscayne. I love doing this. We gather art from a whole bunch of artists we know, and usually a few that we don’t, all of it priced under $100 (as the name would imply) and wrestle it into a surprisingly coherent show. The first year we put  it on, it was kind of thrown together at the last minute (we frantically raided a lot of our neighbors studios to get to 100 pieces) but nevertheless went pretty well. There are collectors from that first event who still come back year after year. We’ve got it down to a system now: The work has to be ready to hang; the artists have to drop it off at prescribed times and enter their own information into a form (I spent several evenings sliding down the hall with my laptop on a chair with casters as Dara fished out post-its and tried to match them to artworks); and we’ve gotten really good at herding a big fat mishmash of art into aestheically pleasing groupings that make their own kind of sense. In other words, it’s a real show now. And until the day we hang it (with some help from other Biscaynitos), we really have no idea what it’s going to look like.

One of the many pleasures of this show is giving some newer artists the opportunity to show their work and actually sell it. However, many established artists look forward to it as well because it’s a chance to do something outside of their known style or medium, to play around a little bit.  We can take risks with something brand-new, or conversely, dig up something old. I’ll be doing the latter this year. I found some oil studies for paintings from the turn of the century—studies that were actually done after the works themselves were in progress. The paintings have long since left my life and gone to good homes, and the studies are like memories of them. They’re also fresher and looser and less precious, from a time before I learned to be loose in my “real” work.

Study for “Second Date”, 2001, 6″ x 8″

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