Residencies and professional development opportunities for emerging artists, while not always the easiest to secure, are happily still a reliable presence in the cultural fabric of New York City—from “Swing Space” at the Lower Manhattan Community Council, to the Artist in Residence program at The Studio Museum in Harlem, to Artists in the Marketplace at the Bronx Museum. But rarely do those who make these opportunities possible, the arts administrators at the core of these institutions, get the chance to showcase their own work as visual artists. Enter the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts (EFA) Studio Residency for New York City Arts Workers—a two-week residency intensive from August 14-29, which admitted eight diverse and accomplished arts professionals (administrators, registrars, curators, writers, etc.) who maintain an active artistic practice in addition to their day jobs. The participants, who were nominated for the residency, included Tova Carlin, Sean Carroll, Paul Clay, Chantel Foretich, Felicity Hogan, Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Beatrice Wolert, all of whom work in New York arts organizations as varied as the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), CUE Art Foundation, Artists Alliance and Cuchifritos, and the New York City Opera. After years of realizing the visions of other artists, this residency gave participants the time, space, nurturing community and critical dialogue that allowed for serious, concentrated productivity. More than just the two weeks of being present in the studio space, the residency will span the next year, with monthly follow-up meetings and shared planning sessions.

The artists’ practices, as well as their approaches to the program, varied widely, encompassing painting, drawing, photography, video, installation and sculpture. Some took time off from work, while others came to the space in the evenings after working at their jobs during the day. As arts professionals who know full well how to navigate institutional resources, budgets and schedules, they were effective in mobilizing and publicizing events such as their studio viewing and reception. Many chose to continue work on pre-existing projects, taking advantage of the time and space allotted by the residency. CUE Foundation Program Director Beatrice Wolert continued to build on her practice of using cake-decorating bags and metal cake tips to explore notions of decoration, domesticity and masquerade. Arts educator Amber Hawk Swanson worked on durational endurance videos and performances based on “Crossfit,” a fitness program that emphasizes strength and conditioning through a comprehensive philosophy and methodology.  NYFA Program Officer and Artists Alliance Inc. Executive Director Felicity Hogan created an entirely new series of acrylics on paper and canvas, brightly colored abstractions that, according to Hogan, “are in conversation with each other as a whole (and myself), whether broken or seamless.”

The very existence of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Residency Program for New York City Arts Workers asks what it means to shift abruptly from cultural laborer to cultural producer. Aside from the fact that both are often underappreciated and underpaid, these two aspects of the art world’s social and professional infrastructures are generally seen as very separate. In fact, artists and institutions are more interchangeable and fluid than the mythology of the art world would make it seem. Recently, a number of galleries and cultural organizations around New York have turned a curatorial eye towards the people bridging these gaps, much of the time their own employees. Curator Dan Cameron put together the tongue-in-cheek group exhibition “Employee of the Month” at Marianne Boesky Gallery this summer. Organized in conjunction with the Art Handlers’ Olympics, it paid homage to the art handlers and gallery workers who help assemble exhibitions, and gave them exposure as artists in their own right. A month later, the small Chrystie Street gallery Art Since the Summer of ’69 hosted an exhibition called “The Intern Show,” which showed the artwork of arts interns/artists around the city, and acknowledged their diligent, often unpaid assistance.

Asked about this resurging interest in the work of those “behind the scenes,” Beatrice Wolert, of the EFA residency, replied that it seemed symptomatic of a desire for community-building and a do-it-yourself attitude that has emerged, largely in response to the economic climate. This seems like an apt point, and important to note in a wider art community that can be a struggle to negotiate for both artists and arts workers even in a booming market. As such, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Residency Program for New York City Arts Workers is vital in providing the strong community and resources for those artists who straddle both art making and arts professionalism, proving that these do and always will deeply inform one another. The residency seems to aim at narrowing the perceived gap between pedagogical, pragmatic approaches to art and the creative process of art making. Even further, it formulates the participants’ work in non-profits or institutions as artistic practices unto themselves.

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“Color Your World!” proclaims the headline of the February 2010 Connecticut Cottages and Gardens, typed over a detail of Nina Bovasso’s limited-edition, vivacious floral carpet. Though I am neither a resident of Connecticut, nor possess a home or bank account suitable for the purchase of such a rug, I am seduced by its exuberant Pop sensibility and relentlessly bold, cheery hues. Inside the magazine, in an article cheekily titled “Art Under Foot,” it shares a page with other kaleidoscopically bright, geometric rugs, but it is likely that this is the only rug commissioned by a commercial art gallery that also represents such artists as Mequitta Ahuja, Thomas Nozkowski, and Amparo Sard.

In just under a year, John Lee and Meredith Rosenberg of BravinLee Programs, a Chelsea gallery, have commissioned artists Peter Halley, James Siena and James Welling, as well as Bovasso, to create lush designs for rugs made of hand-knotted, tightly woven wool or silk. “Each rug is one of a kind and has been crafted by weavers in the Kathmandu area, whose skills have been passed down through many generations,” says the website, and each rug displays “rich texture and subtle color variation.” Lee and Rosenberg selected the weavers, based in Nepal, for their high-quality production and laws against child labor, after several test runs with rugs made in India, Morocco and Mexico. They made it a priority to join GoodWeave, a certifiably child-labor-free program that donates part of its profits to educating children in Kathmandu. Each rug is artist-signed, and bears an individually numbered GoodWeave label as a symbol of ethical business.

The process of creating the rugs always begins with the artist’s design, which can be either drafted completely anew or adapted from a previous work—most often a painting, drawing, or photograph. The design is then sent to Nepal, where yarn color samples are chosen and shipped back to BravinLee for approval by the artist. While the original design concept belongs to the artist, it is up to the weavers to interpret the designs, resulting in a process that is ultimately collaborative and dependent on the stellar, by-hand craftwork of the weavers. The weaving process itself takes about three months—with each rug measuring around 6 x 9 feet, this seems no small endeavor—and rugs are usually produced in editions of fifteen with two artist’s proofs. In this way the process is not unlike printmaking, in its scrupulous repetition and production of editions, and in fact Meredith Rosenberg describes it as “the alternative to an editioned print.” Right now, she says, the rugs range from $4,000—$12,000, in an attempt to keep them at a competitive price with other high-quality rugs in the design market. So far the clientele has mostly included the collectors with whom the gallery is already familiar, but interior designers and decorators have been showing interest as well. The ultimate hope is, of course, that even those who have no previous interaction with art galleries will be interested in purchasing the rugs, and interested in the BravinLee Editions project.

Rosenberg, who has a Masters Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, says she is fully committed to opening up the often esoteric and insular (not to mention expensive) world of contemporary art to a larger audience, as well as further breaking down the boundaries between fine art and design. She discovered the project through Lee, her thesis advisor at FIT, and it coincided with her particular field of study at the time: “I was doing my thesis on marketing conceptual art,” Rosenberg explains, “and how to take something conceptual and make it into a commodity.”  The partnership that became BravinLee Editions was formed not long after, and the “commodity” point of departure shifted from conceptual art to work that is, perhaps, more easily marketable. The website for BravinLee Editions echoes Rosenberg, in that the mission is very much to “explore and experiment with other ways in which fine art and fine art imagery can be utilized as the basis for a design platform.” In exploring the rugs, their strong graphic sensibilities and vibrant colors, I was faintly reminded of a certain strand of modernism that embraced the world of industrial design, that strove to emphasize the purity of materials and craft. The legacy of the Bauhaus seemed nigh—or perhaps it was just the lingering ghost of the recent MoMA exhibiton—but especially that of Anni Albers, whose vivid, austere, and texturally complex formal influence can be found in the bold grids of James Siena’s rugs and the stark, black and white abstract rug by James Welling.

There is, needless to say, a long modernist precedent of artwork that complicates the distinction between visual art, architecture and design, from the Bauhaus, to De Stijl, to Russian Constructivism. If the overarching aim of the BravinLee Editions rug project seems to be to create a utilitarian object that channels the blue-chip aesthetics of artists like Halley and Welling into a completely different medium, this begs the question of why textiles at all? Why not chairs, tables, light fixtures, kitchen appliances? How do the selected artists’ practices, which range from painting to photography, translate into the textile medium? Does this reveal more to us about the depth of their artistic practices; does it actually challenge or inspire the artists to adjust how they view their own work?

Within the last five or ten years, New York in particular has seen the growth of a certain textile zeitgeist and a resurging interest in the “tapestry fetish object,” as Rosenberg put it, in addition to interest in the rich history of the medium. This all was perhaps ushered in with the magnificent tapestries shown in the 2002 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence,” so popular it spurred the 2007-08 sequel “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor.” There was the moment early in 2010 when James Cohan Gallery mounted “Demons, Yarns & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists,” just across the street from the BravinLee gallery which, at the same time, was showing the rugs created by Bovasso, Siena and Welling. Such exhibitions have revealed the relative lack of textile work by contemporary artists, the end product of which, in its labor-intensive and detailed process from the wool-dying to the loom, can be quite stunning. It is often the warmth of textiles—of woven materials, carpets, throws—the tactile, tangible sense of presence and handmade craft, of home, that makes this medium come alive. Perhaps these qualities are what make the prospect of owning a unique, artist-designed rug so compelling.

Most of the artists selected by Lee and Rosenberg work in the two-dimensional mediums of painting, drawing and photography, making their work easier to translate into the carpet format. Rosenberg says, “We’re really interested in [taking] the painting off the wall and living with it on the floor.” This gives the notion of living with artwork on a day-to-day basis a slightly different meaning, when it is a work on which one must constantly worry about spilling crumbs or red wine. Bovasso’s Flowers on a Walk (2009), which runs at a cool $8,000, seems to have garnered the most press attention, with the Connecticut Cottages and Gardens cover, and brief features on the Apartment Therapy and Better Living Through Design websites. The rug does not stray far from Bovasso’s paintings and drawings, which are filled with rich colors and swirling with spastic, orgiastic patterns. The rugs of James Siena—Global Key (2009) and Nine Constant Windows (2009)—also echo and eagerly transcribe his complex, rigidly formal geometric paintings and drawings, which visualize mathematical formulas and sequences. James Wellings’s New Abstraction #1A (2009) seems to channel Franz Kline; based on an abstract photograph, its beautiful, graphic swaths of black seem ready-made for a room composed of clean lines and modern architecture. The vital strength of each rug chosen by BravinLee is the utter translatability, the enhancement of each deceptively simple design in this flexible, heavily-textured medium. The rugs are incurably modern, but this is their strength too, knowing full well that, in the end, each rug must easily match the color scheme of the rest of the parlor or living room they will eventually inhabit.

In the preface to her book On Weaving, Anni Albers wrote: “Though I am dealing in this book with long-established facts and processes, still in exploring them, I feel on new ground. And just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships”. Albers was able to constantly comprehend and learn anew as she pushed her textile practice to the limits, even when it fell out of fashion. One could argue that the artists and weavers who produce rugs for BravinLee Editions are doing the same but with different stakes, producing an object that is tricky to define, skimming the line between fabulous decorative art object and pragmatic design piece.

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Concurrent shows at Cheim & Read of photographs by William Eggleston and Diane Arbus presented new and rarely-seen work, respectively, by two critical pioneers of the medium. Created roughly in the first decade of this millennium, Eggleston’s photographs continue to invigorate the banal and the unseen by way of meticulous attention to detail, form, and vibrant surges of color. The selection of photographs by Arbus, on the other hand, retain the artist’s fascination with the out-of-the-ordinary, the freakish, except here applied to vacant landscapes which are as quietly unsettling as her portraits.

William Eggleston’s photography stems from the snapshot, the idea that what we see is transient and evershifting. Yet, as has always been the case with Eggleston, such an attitude is at odds with the artist’s acute vision and observation evidenced in purposeful compositions that convey both intimacy and fragmentation. While he is largely known for his pictures of middle class families of the American rural South, this new body of work expands Eggleston’s practice to an international context. Works such as Untitled (Water on Dirt Road, Las Pozas, Mexico) (2005) “document” the most mundane details of the world around us with few, if any, signifiers that place us in a particular locale.  With their jolting, unique perspectives and brilliant color, however, they become small moments of revelation. Typically with Eggleston’s oeuvre, something dark and macabre lurks behind his lush color saturation. Untitled (Lamplighter Kitchen, Memphis) (2000) frames a small, squalid kitchen crowded with white bread, mustard, and utensils, electrical wires and metal boxes circling the walls, the colors muted but garish in the washed-out light. The straightforward, controlled honesty with which Eggleston renders this and other pictures, stripping the subjects of every conceit, barely hides the threat of evil looming beneath the surface. We are left to our own conclusions about who or what these photographs indirectly portray, based on the implications of the details. These new works are even more fragmented and isolated than vintage Eggleston.  Refreshingly, they are less concerned with representing the symbols of a cultural landscape, and slightly more focused on the beauty and possibilities of form.

Eggleston and Arbus were introduced to one another by John Szarkowski, legendary former director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who showed both artists along with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in the 1967 exhibiton, New Document.  The artists occupied a critical moment in photography, rebelling against the tradition and conventions of the gelatin silver print to embrace the “documentary style” of the new generation, as a way to further close the gap between art and life. They promoted the shared view that no subject is uninteresting when captured a compelling way.

According to Susan Sontag, “In the world colonized by Arbus, subjects are always revealing themselves. There is no decisive moment. Arbus’s view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence.” (On Photography, 1977). Along these lines, the photographs shown at Cheim & Read slowly unravelled their subjects, begging a second look, and then a third. Arbus applied the same idiosyncratic interest she found in her human subjects, seeking out sites that project a disturbingly private kind of loneliness—even humor—through their eccentricities and kitsch. It’s the Arbus freakshow as applied to landscape, an approach that, for the artist, has always bordered on exoticism.

Christ in a lobby, NYC (1966) shows a large close-up of Christ’s face against a marble wall, and another, similar but smaller image just off to the left that seems to float, transparently. This juxtaposition, like many of the other locales in the show, is both surprising and off-putting, injecting a semblance of mysticism into an otherwise ordinary room. Other works, like An empty movie theater, NYC (1971) and Rocks on wheels, Disneyland, CA (1962) also convey an eerily ephemeral, surreal quality, yet still feel intimate despite the lack of people. Subsequently, much like Eggleston, a compelling poignancy come from their humanity—while there are no people portrayed, their presence can be felt, their traces are in fact visible.

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The year 1969, subject of a current exhibition spanning the entire second floor at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, provides a compelling starting point for examining artistic production and contemplation, then versus now. With every work dating from the year in question, minus a few select contemporary works by younger, emerging artists, the show serves as a kind of thermometer for the vast range of avant-garde thought and practice emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nearly every work comes straight from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, of which P.S.1 is an affiliate, revealing patterns of acquisition that mark an institution both ahead of its time and flawed.  The show was organized by Neville Wakefield, P.S.1 Senior Curatorial Advisor; Michelle Elligott, MoMA Archivist; and Eva Respini, MoMA Associate Curator of Photography

1969 counters the surface, buoyant stance on artistic practice exemplified in the Whitney’s 2008 ‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.’ The tone of 1969 is of a darker, more restrained hue, reflecting not just the instability and turmoil of that year, but the marked change in what was considered avant-garde—absence of color, de-materialization of the art object, an ever-closer merging of art and life. Throughout the show we are taken on a journey through the predominant narrative of 1960s art history, as told by the institution that has dictated modern art as we know it. As a result, it is unsurprising that female and black artists are under-represented—particularly absent are Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, and the late Nancy Spero.

Much of the work grapples with the then still-dominant narrative of minimal art—a Carl Andre floor piece and a Judd brass and plexiglas box are among the logical choices that open the exhibition. Richard Serra’s “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure” illustrates the increasing significance of process, spreading the artist’s signature mediums of lead, wood, stone, and steel in raw form out on the floor. The late 1960s also witnessed the radical realization that art can be something quite apart from object, utilizing everything from the body to the earth as site. Performance, photography, and video emerged and increased in prominence, rapidly becoming the preeminent form of avant-garde expression. Several seminal video works by Bruce Nauman are represented, such as the inverted film Pacing Upside Down (all works 1969), in which the artist paces rapidly around the perimeter of a room with a square drawn in the center of the floor. Other video works, including Walter De Maria’s stunning Hardcore, shot in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, attest to the experimental and enthusiastic approach to video by artists who were primarily painters or sculptors.

1969 examines MoMA’s collecting history at a critical moment in the museum’s own history, a period fraught with the tension between institutional responsibility and the revolutionary, leftist politics embraced by many of the artists it engaged with. The curators have included seminal works like the Art Workers Coalition poster “Q: And Babies? A: And Babies,” which exemplifies the controversial and revealing fact that museums like MoMA are indeed ideological spaces, hardly removed from political, social, or economic issues. Archival documentation from the Guerilla Art Action Group, which removed Malevich’s “White on White” from MoMA’s walls and replaced it with a revolutionary manifesto, is included in a glass case nearby, as if to strangely pacify and domesticate the radical iconoclasm represented in these sheets of paper. Such actions show the engagement of artists such as Jon Hendricks (now, ironically, working closely with MoMA on the recent acquisition of Fluxus material) with institutional critique and the breaking down of barriers between art and politics. Additionally, the curators provide archival images and original exhibition catalogues from various groundbreaking exhibitions of the time, proving that 1969 was a historical moment for many other institutions of art worldwide—Harald Szeeman’s “When Attitudes Become Form: Live in Your Head” at the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Whitney’s “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” are among those catalogues displayed.

Mel Bochner’s thought-provoking “Theory of Painting,” in its debut at P.S.1/MoMA, is an installation of wall text, spray paint, and newspaper that conflates past and present, painting and installation. It both negates and depends on material specificity, while employing the “instructional” text often found in Conceptual art. Directly opposite to this train of thought are the environmental and spatially-motivated SoCal artists like Bob Irwin, who are represented in the gallery-within-a-gallery installation “Five Recent Acquisitions” with original text by MoMA curator Kynaston McShine. Besides getting a refreshing idea for what the museum was actually collecting in 1969, we are treated to these artists’ sensuous, luminous play with color and illusion.

The work of black and white photographers like Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz represent one of the most visually compelling and culturally resonant sections of the show. The selected photographs apply a sober, coolly removed perspective and an exquisite formal sensibility to a pivotal moment of cultural change in this country. Their influence was not just on subsequent photographers, but, on painters and Conceptual artists who would see American terrain and portraiture in a new light, from Ruscha and the Bechers, to Richter and Gursky.

1969 provides us with important reminders of how things evolved to the present moment. So many of the artists represented here have become textbook figures, to the point that we often forget how radical they were in their historic context. It was productive that P.S.1 commissioned several contemporary artists to interpret and engage with this context, although the results are mixed. Hank Willis Thomas’s boldly-colored window screens provide one of the sole references to African American culture and civil rights, yet they fade into the background in the presence of important 1960s work. The brilliant, if chaotic, collective Bruce High Quality Foundation offers “portable museums” placed intermittently around the galleries, commenting on the agendas hidden behind museum walls that have persisted since far before 1969. The exhibition succeeds in jumpstarting a renewed reverence for the 1960s avant-garde, but there needs to be more at stake here. 2009, and now 2010, are different years, in a different century, and no less fraught in many ways. Some sense of urgency seems nonetheless to leak from this exhibition, whether intended by the curators or not, and the contemporary art world should take note.

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