#lsfa

The Lagos State Football Association (LSFA) is implementing measures to enhance professionalism in football media management through a training session for Media Officers from the participating clubs. This initiative is designed to provide officers with the necessary skills to effectively promote their clubs and the LSFA. In partnership with Cloud Sports Limited, the training will feature…

…reaffirms support for youth football development All is now set for the kickoff State Championship of the second edition of the fast-growing Spires 5Aside football tournament. Thursday at the CIBN building, Victoria Island, Lagos, the organisers held a well-attended draws and unveiling of jerseys for the 16 teams that qualified from the five divisions in Lagos State. Lagos State Football…

Monday Mood Board: MARC CHAGALL

"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art." - Marc Chagall

Clockwise, from top left: Mounting the Ebony Horse…, 1948, lithograph; L'Age d'or, 1968, lithograph; Daphnis et Chloe au Bord de la Fontaine, from Daphnis et Chloe, 1961, lithograph; Self Portrait with a Laughing Expression, 1924-25, etching and drypoint.  

Above: Ed Ruscha, 1970. Photograph by Jerry McMillan. Courtesy the artist and the Craig Krull Gallery (source).       

"As an artist, I gotta stand up to my own work." - Ed Ruscha

Monday Mood Board: GAIL CATLIN

Above: Fragmentation of Man II, circa 1983, mixed media, 46 5/8 x 36 3/8 inches; Untitled, mixed media on mylar, 21 x 20 3/4 inches; Untitled, 1998, oil on paper, 7 x 8 1/2 inches; Untitled, mixed media and oil on paper and plastic film, 33 1/2 x 18 inches; Untitled, oil and mixed media on plexi torso, 56 x 35 1/2 inches; Untitled, 1982, 13 1/4 x 11 inches; Fragmentation of Man, 1981, mixed media, 38 1/2 x 41 inches. 

About the Artist

Gail Catlin was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in March 1948. She has recently started working with bronze, but made a name for herself in the South African art world with her liquid crystal paintings.

It is no exaggeration to say that Gail Catlin is the first, and possibly also the only, artist to use liquid crystal as the principal medium in her art. The question that begs an answer is: why would she choose to use such a difficult and elusive medium?

While Catlin lived at Arniston, she became fascinated, but also frustrated, by the nacreous quality of sea shells and mother-of-pearl, and was convinced that a new color spectrum needed to be developed to capture the subtle and ever-changing shades of Nature. She also realized that she was more fascinated by the color spectrum of the moon than of the sun.

She experimented with clays and resins and fiberglass, which played nicely with light, but only when used in sculptural form. She wanted to paint with materials that played with light. Her aim was no less than to capture the most elusive of nuances, the most intangible subtleties of n nature, but she was frustrated by the inadequacies of the traditional media of oil paint, acrylics and watercolor.

While at the Royal College of Art in London, she visited the Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine, and asked the boffins there how she could capture the pearly color of sea shells. They advised her to use a mirror to split white light into the color spectrum, as al-Haytham and Isaac Newton had done many years before.

But Catlin wasn't satisfied with this explanation. She made contact with a Dr. Cyril Hilsum at General Electric, who had co-invented the hologram, and was a world expert on liquid crystal; it was he who first introduced her to liquid crystal. Together, as student and mentor, they set off on a symbiotic journey of discovery, the results of which we see in Catlin’s work today.

Liquid crystal is something that, like Catlin’s art, hovers between two states, it exists somewhere between liquid and solid. Liquid crystal exist somewhere between a liquid and a solid, in the form of crystals in a watery medium. This effect was discovered over 150 years ago when Victorian scientists found that water containing myelin, a fatty substance that insulates nerve fibers, produces spectacular colors under some lighting conditions.

In 1888, an Austrian botanist Friedrich Reisnitzer, was examining the melting behaviour of a substance related to cholesterol, and identified a new kind of matter, which he called 'liquid crystal'. He found that, because the molecular forces producing these states are very weak, the alignment of the molecules can easily be altered by mechanical stress or by temperature changes. As the material becomes more or less crystalline, it reflects light in different ways.

Liquid crystal thus functions like a perfectly cut, faceted diamond, breaking white light up into the full spectrum of colors, and reflecting these colors with unrivalled brilliance and clarity. The beauty of liquid crystals, from an artist's point of view, is that they are infinitely flexible and fluid, and can be painted onto an artwork, It's like painting with liquid diamonds.

Later, in 1970, it was found that an electric current could also change the orientation of the crystals, and could make them either opaque or clear, which gave rise to the invention of LCD lights, which are commonly used in calculators, watches, laptops, etc.

Many other uses have also been found for liquid crystals, including the early detection of breast tumours, and the measurement of the temperatures of babies too young to use a mercury thermometer.

Through painstaking experimentation over many enormously frustrating years, both in England and South Africa, Catlin gradually began to master the fugitive alchemy of liquid crystals. She learned how to capture iridescence and lustre, as well as the changing diel and seasonal moods of landscapes and objects.

She began to paint with liquid crystals in such a way that she could anticipate their responses, to light, to temperature and to each other. A magical relationship developed between the artist and her medium, lying midway between predictable science and fickle art, but the process of discovery and understanding was still ongoing.

For many years Catlin produced mainly dark, nocturnal colors from the medium, and struggled to create the kind of lighter palette she needed to evoke her chosen terrain, the sun-baked African plain. She eventually resolved this problem, partly by accident (as all great discoveries are made), by painting on tippled, white paper. She sent a sample to Dr. Hilsum, who noted that the crystals rested at a slight angle towards each other and found that, the more you angle the crystals, the more you enhance their ability to reflect light in different directions. This produces a greater degree of optical shimmer and color contrast, with each crystal acting like a miniature prism.

The use of a white background also released a whole new spectrum of softer, lighter colors.

What Catlin has now achieved is quite extraordinary. As Fabbrizzio von Grebner has rightly stated, Catin's personal contribution to world art is that her works have achieved a kind of metastasis — the ability of the artwork to escape fixity and to constantly transform itself like a kaleidoscope. She has achieved this by simultaneously being an alchemist, scientist, magician and artist.

She has also, on an unprecedented scale, worked closely with some of the best scientists and technologists in the world in the field of liquid crystals in order to obtain a full understanding of her magical medium. She is probably also one of the first artists to venture into the realm of nanotechnology, the study and manipulation of materials at the molecular level.

Catlin has produced a unique body of work, not only in terms of her abstract imagery or dramatic chromatic effects, but also because of the lively responsiveness of her artworks to the viewer. 

Gail Catlin has possibly come closer than anyone to capturing the infinitely varied iridescence and color spectrum, not only of the pearl, but also of the African landscape. She has short-circuited millions of years of evolution and solved one of the secrets of Nature. 

Public Collections: South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Pretoria Art Museum; Durban Art Gallery; Pietersburg Art Gallery; Stellenbosch University Collection; South African Reserve Bank Collection; South African Department of Education and Training, Pretoria; South African Reserve Bank, Pretoria; Public Library Collection, Cape Town; Good Hope Bank of South Africa, Cape Town; Royal College of Art, London; Pulitzer Collection, America; Standard Bank Collection, Johannesburg; Constitutional Court, Pretoria

National / International Collections

1979: Cape Town Biennial - South African National Gallery; 1981: South African Republic Day Festival - Durban; 1981: First Cape Town Triennial - South African National Gallery; 1985: 'Women Artist of South Africa' - South African National Gallery; 1989: South African Women Paper Exhibition; 1990: Standard Bank National Drawing Competition; 1991: Grand Prix International Des arts Plastiques - Nice (France)

Award winner for landscape category:

1993: Momentum Art - Biennial - South Africa; 1994: Grand Prix International Des arts Plastiques - Nice (France)

Award winner:

Above: José Clemente Orozco's mural at Pomona College will be paired with socially engaged art from Mexico in Pomona College Museum of Art's PST show

Museums in Los Angeles find expert partners across South America

Pacific Standard Time's second edition is a catalyst for ambitious international collaboration

By Jori Finkel, theartnewspaper.com 

Of all the Southern California curators organising shows for the second iteration of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time (PST: LA/LA) of 2017, which focuses on Latin American art, Dan Cameron knows the territory better than most. In the early 1990s, he travelled widely in South America. Soon after, as a senior curator at the New Museum in New York, he organised exhibitions on Cildo Meireles, Eugenio Dittborn, Doris Salcedo and Rivane Neuenschwander.

Now, the show he is organising under the PST: LA/LA umbrella (PST2) for the Orange County Museum of Art, where he is chief curator, features Latin American kinetic art from the 1960s (which he sees as a tech-inspired predecessor of Southern California’s Light and Space art). He got the idea after seeing a show on a similar theme at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires in 2012. Still, Cameron says he could not imagine organising the show without curators from South America: the Orange County museum has a ten-­person advisory board that includes María José Herrera, who organised the kinetic art show at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. One challenge that has already cropped up: since Argentina defaulted on some of its foreign debts, its national museums have not been sending works abroad for fear that they will be seized. “Someone like María José is keeper of the keys because she knows the municipal museums, provincial museums and private collectors that are still able to lend—it’s so far beyond what I could do on my own,” Cameron says.

Expert advice from throughout South America, including Venezuela and Chile, is vital to ensure the US museum avoids “accidentally bulldozing in another country’s history in our zeal to come to a conclusion or pick an appropriate number of artists for the show”, he says.  Cameron is not alone. PST2 is very different from the first edition, which focused on different aspects of Southern California art from 1945 to 1980, allowing US museums that took part to draw on their in-house expertise and archives. This time they are hiring co-curators, researchers or consultants on the ground in Latin America to help them identify artists, access archives, negotiate loans and the like, collectively creating a diverse network of collaborators. “By nature, the breadth of this topic requires bringing in more people. With PST: LA/LA, we thought we had the unique opportunity to strengthen the connections between research communities in Los Angeles and Latin America,” says Joan Weinstein, the deputy director of the Getty Foundation.  Along with covering travel expenses for two dozen international scholars to join an event last October in Los Angeles, where museums shared briefs on their shows, the Getty has already distributed around $5.1m to some 40 ­California museums and cultural centres for “research and planning”, up from about $3.7m at this stage for the first PST.

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles’ guest curator, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, for example, has been working now for several years with the Argentinian art historian Andrea Giunta on “The Political Body”, a survey of radical women artists from Latin America, 1960 to 1985. After being scrapped by the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach (where Fajardo-Hill was formerly the chief curator), the show was picked up by the Hammer and given $225,000 in Getty funding. Now, the Buenos Aires-based Giunta is focusing on countries including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Peru, while Fajardo-Hill is looking at Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and the Caribbean. (They are both working on radical artists from Brazil and Mexico.) Hugh Davies, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, joined forces early on with the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte de Lima (Mali) in Peru, for a show about underground Latin American conceptual and performance art practices from the 1960s to the 80s. The show, which has co-curators from the three institutions as well as an independent expert from Brazil, has received a Getty grant of $275,000. “Financially we are a heavy partner,” Davies says. “But intellectually we are very much a junior partner in this collaboration, looking for leadership in our Latin American colleagues.” The Fowler Museum at the University of Los Angeles (UCLA) is organising a show (with $170,000 in Getty funding) about the city of Salvador de Bahia as Brazil’s “Black Rome”, a centre for religious and secular arts. Patrick Polk, the Fowler’s curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts, has enlisted as his co-curators Randal Johnson, a UCLA professor, and Sabrina Gledhill, a Bahia-based curator who has a doctorate in ethnic and African studies. Polk has also created a ten-person advisory board and reached out to two Afro-Brazil museums in São Paulo and Salvador as possible partners.  There are logistical challenges to be overcome by the curators, from managing different time zones to language or cultural differences. But several Latin American collaborators say that Skype, Facebook chat and online document-­sharing has helped them to maintain the dialogue between face-to-face visits. “It’s been surprisingly easy and smooth,” says Emiliano Valdés, who is co-curating a show on the origins of contemporary Guatemalan art with Miki Garcia, the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. And the potential reward is considerable: shows that advance scholarship in North and South America. These early collaborations could even help overcome one of the biggest criticisms raised of the first Pacific Standard Time: too few exhibitions travelling beyond California.  Many PST2 curators are lining up additional venues for their shows. The Fowler Museum’s curator Patrick Polk is looking for two US venues, “ideally in New York and Miami”, he says, as well as European and Brazilian stops, for his Bahia art show. The Pomona College Museum of Art’s show that pairs José Clemente Orozco’s on-campus mural,Prometheus, 1930, with socially engaged art is due to travel to Mexico City. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will send its show to Mexico City and Lima. The Getty’s show, “Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas”, will travel to its co-organiser: the Met in New York.

Above: A one-third scale model of Alexander Calder's "Jerusalem Stabile" will be installed near the entrance to the Huntington Library in San Marino. (Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society)

Alexander Calder sculpture, tapestries coming to the Huntington

By Jessica Gelt, latimes.com 

Visitors to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens will be greeted with a sculpture by Alexander Calder starting in April, the San Marino museum announced Wednesday.

Titled "Jerusalem Stabile," the 1976 work is brick red and measures 24 feet across. It will be on loan from the Calder Foundation in New York and will be installed in a grassy corridor to the west of the new $68-million Steven S. Koblik Education and Visitor Center, which officially opens to the public April 4.

The first phase of that addition, which includes a new entrance and ticketing area as well as a coffee shop and an expanded museum store, opened Wednesday.

The Huntington announced that it also has acquired Calder's series of six bicentennial tapestries from 1975. These colorful, modern pieces will hang in the lobby of the new Rothenberg Hall.

Other gifts to the museum in anticipation of its new phase of life include a 1964 ceramic mural by L.A. artist Doyle Lane for the courtyard of the new June and Merle Banta Education Center, and a mural dating to 1934 by the Southern California painter and architect Millard Sheets. The mural will be displayed in the new Stewart R. Smith Board Room.

The "Jerusalem Stabile" coming to the Huntington is a one-third maquette, or scale model, that Calder made in advance of a final sculpture that was installed at Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem in 1977, the year after he died. That piece was the last sculpture Calder made. Calder's tapestries are lesser known and are among 200 produced for Calder by a French factory to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution.

Above: A new financial survey of North American museums shows that visitors' spending covers a small fraction of museums' operating costs. Pictured: the Getty Center in Brentwood. (Robbin Goddard/Los Angeles Times)

Report shows art museums rely mainly on kindness, not commerce

By Mike Boehm, latimes.com

A new survey of North American art museums' attendance and financial information confirms once more that if they had to operate like for-profit businesses and rely on a paying public, they almost certainly would be sunk.

To make ends meet, the average art museum counted overwhelmingly on the kindness of donors, government largess and, if it was lucky enough to have an ample one, returns on its endowment, according to responses the Assn. of Art Museum Directors gathered from 220 of its 236 member museums.

The AAMD issued the findings this week in a brief report called "Art Museums by the Numbers 2014," based on responses from 204 museums in the United States and 16 in Canada and Mexico that provided figures for their most recently completed fiscal year.

The average art museum in North America saw 279,351 visitors pass through its doors in a year, with total attendance coming to more than 67 million.

But they weren't able -- or inclined -- to reach deeply into the pockets of all that foot traffic. When it came to earning money by selling admission tickets, parking spaces, refreshments and gift shop merchandise to visitors, or by renting facilities, the survey results suggest that art museums simply are not in step with the capitalist imperative. 

Only 27% of the money that museums took in was earned in those ways. For the rest they depended on private donations, endowment returns and government funding.

Private donors, including corporations, foundations, individual givers and people who took out museum memberships or paid to attend fundraising events, provided a third of the surveyed museums' income. Government appropriations accounted for an additional 18% (although some institutions got nothing), and museums' endowments generated 21% of their money. Endowments are investment funds built primarily on donations that are socked away and kept unspent; the spendable income comes from investment gains from that permanent nest egg.