Pulling Museum Mile Uptown

SHE was sometimes by his side when William C. Thompson Jr. worked the rubber-chicken circuit last year, a poised, attractive woman in no rush to pose for the cameras, confident that her husband, the New York City comptroller, could make his own case for why he deserved to be mayor.

Elsie McCabe Thompson was perhaps an underused asset in her husband’s narrowly unsuccessful campaign against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Smart, articulate and charming, she emerged infrequently from the shadows to talk to reporters. When she did, she often also spoke of something else dear to her heart: the Museum for African Art.

Now after more than a decade pursuing what some saw as an impossible quest Mrs. Thompson is preparing to open the museum’s new $95 million home on upper Fifth Avenue next spring.
“Maybe I’m just contrary,” she said during an interview this month, “but the more people tell me it can’t be done, the more I want to prove that it can.”

Even as her husband steps back (temporarily, he says) from public life, Mrs. Thompson has emerged as the increasingly visible president of the 26-year-old museum as it completes an unlikely journey from a temporary office in Queens to Manhattan’s cultural center stage.

On Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th Streets, the museum will occupy the lower floors of a 19-story condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern and will extend New York’s Museum Mile uptown into Harlem. The limestone-colored building, with window mullions that lyrically evoke the weave of African baskets, will become a high-profile showplace for one of the only two major American museums devoted solely to African art. (The other is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington.)

The hoopla associated with its arrival will be a coming-out party of sorts for Mrs. Thompson, who, if her husband has his way, would one day become the city’s first lady.

Mrs. Thompson, 51, had singular qualifications to shepherd the museum project when officials tapped her to lead the institution in 1997. Though not an art historian, she was a Harvard-trained lawyer (and Eliot Spitzer’s moot court partner in law school) who had once held a high post in city government, clearly understood its mechanics and had established her own viable ties to the Harlem political leadership.



And as the project moved forward, it did not hurt that she was the close friend and later spouse of Mr. Thompson, who held one of the city’s most powerful offices and remains today one of the front-runners for the 2013 Democratic mayoral nomination.

So far of the $71 million raised in construction funds for the museum, some $32 million has come from public funds, though Mr. Thompson said he has had only the most limited of roles in securing them.

The road ahead for the museum looks unremittingly steep however. It does not have an endowment. It is projecting an operating budget of as much as $8 million a year, or almost triple its current expenses, and it is doing so at a time when the aftermath of the recession has made both public and private donors cautious about taking on any new financial commitments.

“Long before the recession these new buildings were struggling to pay operating costs,” said Gail Lord, the co-president of Lord Cultural Resources, an advisory firm with cultural clients around the world. “The recession only made it worse.”

Small, specialized museums have the hardest time because they cannot realize economies of scale, Ms. Lord said, though she was impressed that the Museum for African Art had done enough planning actually to know what its budget would be.

Museum board members say they will be able to tap additional resources, perhaps by selling the naming rights to the building, as long as the person is a good fit for the museum. (They estimate that they could get as much as $50 million for this.)

And it is not as if Mrs. Thompson and her board have not overcome numerous other hurdles. The museum’s original development partner pulled out. Then there was a lengthy and at times contentious public approval process, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, known as Ulurp. Before construction the engineers had to adjust the foundation plan to account for unstable sediment. Mrs. Thompson said the remaining obstacles were “nothing more onerous than what we’ve already had to deal with.”


Mrs. Thompson is the mother of twins, and with her wide smile and a slightly husky voice, she exudes a kind of matriarchal warmth, even toward the museum. She hugs. She describes the museum as “my baby,” and she will interrupt a conversation to dab at a stain on a female colleague’s shirt.

“I wanted my kids, my little African-American kids, to be proud of being African-American,” she said recently to explain her passion for the museum. A native New Yorker, she worked for the law firm Shearman & Sterling before joining the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins.

Afterward, when she was turned down for jobs because she did not have experience running a big nonprofit, she founded one, devoted to bringing computer technology and training to poor urban neighborhoods.

She makes no apologies for knowing little about African art when she took the museum job. “I sought to learn a lot, and I did,” she said.

After opening in 1984 in an Upper East Side town house, the museum developed a reputation for innovative exhibitions, but its fund-raising was low. For many years it was located in SoHo, but the space was rented, making it hard to plan.

When Mrs. Thompson saw the Fifth Avenue site, she said, she fell in love. The location, at the juncture of Harlem and Museum Mile, was symbolic, and it was close to audiences the museum wanted to reach. The first development plan called for a partnership with Edison Schools, the for-profit manager of public schools. Edison would help pay for the purchase of the land, some of which was city owned, and would build offices and a flagship school, whose students could use the museum. But Edison backed out in 2002, after it ran into financial difficulties.

This current project is being undertaken with new development partners, Brickman and Sidney Fetner Associates, who are building luxury condominiums. The developers paid most of the cost of the land and built the core and shell of the museum. At a news conference for the project in 2007 Mayor Bloomberg praised the museum as an important addition to Museum Mile. The ceremonial groundbreaking that year was attended by a raft of public officials, including Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, Representative Charles B. Rangel and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

By this time Mrs. Thompson had been dating the comptroller, a longtime friend, for more than a year. Her husband, Eugene L. McCabe, the president of North General Hospital in Harlem, had died in 1998, and Mr. Thompson had filed for divorce in 2005.

Mr. Thompson said in an interview that his future wife had called him over the years, as she did many people, seeking support for the museum. But he said he had not provided any assistance beyond a call to a deputy mayor when the museum was seeking to secure the land from the city and a 2005 conversation about funds with the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller. The conversation with Mr. Miller took place in April 2005, according to Mr. Miller’s appointment diaries, about a month after Mr. Thompson had recused himself from all museum matters because of the personal relationship. Mr. Miller, as reported this year in The Village Voice, ended up committing $750,000 in city capital funds to the project that year.

But Mr. Thompson said it had been Mr. Miller who had contacted him about the museum, not the other way around. Mr. Miller said he could not recall the conversation or who had initiated it. Mr. Thompson said that it was his wife who had persuaded government officials to support the project. “They all know Elsie on her own, not because of me,” he said.

The museum has set an ambitious slate of loan exhibitions for its first few months, including the first-ever career retrospective of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui; a show comparing African baskets with those made in the American South; and an exhibition of ancient sculptures from Nigeria, organized by the museum and the Fundación Marcelino Botín in Spain. (The museum’s own permanent collection is small, with around 400 works.)

Mrs. Thompson said she expects to draw more than the approximately 225,000 yearly visitors who go to the Museum of the City of New York, several blocks south on Fifth Avenue. She also expects substantial revenue from a restaurant; the sale of African jewelry, textiles and other items; and from leasing an event space.

In part to bolster its donor contributions, the museum has expanded its board to 22 members (with a goal of 25); those added recently include the artist Martin Puryear and Mannie Jackson, the Harlem Globetrotters’ chairman. To save money the museum may open only certain sections next April. Adjusting expectations has been essential to keep the project on track, and Mrs. Thompson said that her own expectations have been challenged as she has confronted the works of art she now spends her days with.

She had initially found a wooden spirit figure from Congo alien and frightening with its surface covered by nails. But she came to learn that each of the nails represented an oath or prayer — for example, a ritual prayer for the harvest or the resolution of a dispute between neighbors. “It represents the hopes and dreams, the fears, the prayers, the aspirations of a single community of people for generations,” she said of the sculpture. “For me that’s what resonated.”

She hopes that the museum will bring Africa, long misunderstood as a “dark, distant place,” out of the shadows, she said. Its debut will certainly usher Mrs. Thompson further into the spotlight, a place she may one day inhabit even more prominently depending upon the political future.

Source: The NY Times
BY: Kate Taylor

Smithsonian Leads Recovery of Haiti's Art and Culture

Haiti's recovery from the devastating earthquake in January requires more than rebuilding structures, but also repairing tattered paintings and cultural objects still buried in the rubble, the Caribbean nation's first lady Elisabeth Preval said Thursday.

She visited the Smithsonian Institution to open an exhibit of children's artwork created after the earthquake, calling it a reminder that Haiti still needs help. The paintings and drawings will be on view through the summer. She also discussed the importance of an effort by the U.S. museum complex to lead a cultural recovery effort in Port-au-Prince, where there are few, if any, professionally trained art conservators.

"This is fundamental for our nation," Preval told The Associated Press during her Washington visit. "This is our cultural heritage. This is us."

The Smithsonian leased a building in Haiti's capital that once housed the United Nations Development Programme to create a conservation center where experts from U.S. museums can repair artworks and train Haitians to perform the intricate restoration work.

The first paintings were taken to the center last week. Experts carefully began vacuuming destructive dust from the paintings, repairing tears and "inpainting" damaged areas so it appears nothing happened, Smithsonian conservator Hugh Shockey wrote on his blog.

As many as 10,000 paintings and sculptures by Haitian masters were buried when the Musee d'Art Nader collapsed in the earthquake, said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art and culture. Thousands of other objects are buried elsewhere, tracing Haiti's struggle for independence, its abolition of slavery and other cultural milestones.

"Imagine in the United States ... if every Smithsonian museum collapsed, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the White House, the U.S. Congress all collapsed," Kurin said. "At some point we'd probably say it's worth pulling out the Star-Spangled Banner, the Declaration of Independence."

The oldest objects to be recovered date back to Haiti's indigenous people from before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Some artifacts have been recovered by hand. Others will require sophisticated engineering and heavy equipment.

Murals painted on the walls of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral that depict scenes from the Bible have been a central focus. They date to prominent artists from the 1950s and are cherished as part of Haiti's cultural heritage. Some crumbled with the church but at least four remain mostly intact and can be saved, Kurin said. Experts are still trying to determine how.

The effort has been primarily funded with private dollars. The Broadway League trade association made the largest gift of $276,000, while the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences contributed $30,000 each. Smithsonian officials are working to raise more money to sustain the effort, Kurin said.

The involvement of U.S. cultural agencies also is a response to the looting of Iraqi treasures in 2003. Broadway producer Margo Lion, who co-chairs the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, said cultural recovery is a priority after Americans were accused of neglecting cultural preservation during the invasion of Iraq.

Conservators plan to turn over most of the work to Haitian professionals by November 2011.

During her visit to Washington, Preval helped open an exhibit of 100 paintings and drawings by Haitian children after the earthquake with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. They will be on view through October.

Art has provided healing for children as a way for them to express their emotions, Preval said.

"My dream and my hope is to make sure the world does not forget Haiti," Preval said of the exhibit. She hopes it can help draw more support to overhaul Haiti's schools, beginning with early childhood education, she said.

The display includes paintings by U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, from their April visit to Port-au-Prince. At the direction of a 5-year-old boy, Obama painted a colorful fish and Biden painted a house.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival beginning June 24 on the National Mall also will feature artists from Haiti. Some of their work will be sold to benefit Haiti's cultural revival.

Source: Google

Sotheby's Oceanic and African Art Sale Earns $8.4 Million

Sotheby’s concluded its June sales of Oceanic and African art in Paris on Wednesday, achieving a total of $8,448,741.

Of the 82 lots on offer, 12 works from the collection of Marsha and John Friede spurred a fierce bidding competition, with many pieces exceeding their estimates. The highest-earning work in the sale was an early-19th-century Hembigurea ancestor figure from the Congo, which fetched $1,042,109 above the high estimate of $619,150. This June marks the 50th anniversary of the Congo's independence.

Other top lots included a 42-inch carved female figure by a craftsman of the Inyai-Ewa People, which earned $685,133; the work had previously been in the collection of Douglas Newton, a former curator, who built The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another crouching female figure that had been included in the first show of Oceanic art in the U.S., at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1934, was sold for $476,897, a price that more than doubled the high estimate.

Oceanic art has inspired numerous modern masters such as Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso. The sales in New York last month and Paris on Wednesday showed a continued global interest in collecting this category as they achieved strong prices far exceeding the estimates.

Source: artinfo.com
By: Louise Chen

South Africa's Booming Art Market

In recent years, African artists have seen their work increase in value as they attract global investors.

South Africa, in particular, has seen a significant rise in prices paid out for major works, according to Strauss and Co, a Johannesburg auction house selling 20th Century art.
Prices for major South African art are estimated to have increased by over 500 percent in the past five to 10 years, according to the auction house.

In recent years a new world record was set for a still-life by a South African artist when a stunning piece by Irma Stern sold for more than one million dollars.

Only halfway through the year, Strauss and Co. says it has already earned more from sales this year than in the whole of 2009.

Among the beneficiaries is Johannesburg-based William Kentridge, who is perhaps the closest the African art world has to a rock star.

He is one of Africa's most commercially successful artists and his work is in demand around the globe.

But he acknowledged that the market for contemporary art is small. "A lot of work gets sold to institutions and wealthy patronizing collectors -- patrons of the art," Kentridge told CNN.

"The number of people that actually seriously collect, and are interested, and travel to exhibitions, and are knowledgeable about it is tiny. But they form the bulk of the collectors of contemporary art."

In South Africa the pool of people buying serious art is even smaller. Most are white businesspeople. The country's emerging black middle class and wealthy have not yet started buying South African contemporary art in the same way the newly monied classes snapped up art in China and India.

Ross Douglas organizes the Johannesburg Art Fair. He told CNN, "What we saw in China and India was that they suddenly got very rich and they started buying contemporary art at the same time the international art market started buying it. And one supported the other.

"In Africa there is very little local buying of contemporary art and that's why artists go abroad. But that will change, slowly."

There are signs that change is already happening. Young South African artists like Lawrence Lemaoana and Mary Sibanda earn a living from their art, which didn't happen five years ago.

"As an artist you have to work extra hard," said Sibanda. "You have to keep reinventing yourself because you can't keep showing the same thing over and over again."

They rely on galleries and the Johannesburg Art Fair -- the only major art fair in Africa -- to introduce their work to South Africans.

Lemaoana told CNN, "It is a great platform for introducing the normal public into walking into a gallery. Because one of the things we struggle with in South Africa is the idea of culture, and how culture is limited to a few people.

"I think it's an interesting way of inviting Joe Soap to walk in and maybe buy an artwork."
Before the economic meltdown, South African corporations such as big banks or mobile phone companies were the main investors in local art.

But gallery owners say those companies have cut back in the past two years, reasoning it might be difficult to explain to shareholders why they were buying art in the middle of the global credit crunch.

Those sentiments have been echoed in global art capitals such as New York and London.

"There was a huge bubble of extraordinary prices being paid for contemporary work, and that took a knock," said Kentridge.

"It was astonishing how short that was. I think what happens when you have the crash in the art market the way you had in the late 1980s.

"There was a period in which it was very easy for galleries to survive and make money and do well; it's much harder now."

But at the top end of the market at least, things seem to be picking up. Which could be good news for those who were early investors in mid-20th century South African art.

Source: CNN
By: Robyn Curnow

Art museum calls in tribal expert for work on tepee

One hundred twenty-five years ago, Standing Bear created the painted canvas tepee that has been the centerpiece of the Denver Art Museum's American Indian exhibit for the past two decades.

On Wednesday, under the direction of two tribal elders, the tepee was taken down for the renovation of the third floor of the north building.

"The renovation gives us a chance to rotate out artifacts," said museum spokeswoman Kristy Bassuener. "People can get to know new favorites."

Kiowa Nation elder John Emhoolah directed the disassembly, which required more than 10 people.

Emhoolah has disassembled thousands of tepees, Native Arts collection curator Nancy Blomberg said.

The museum needed his help because John Emhoolah, center, who is a member of the Kiowa nation, pulls a string out so it can be unwound from the top of a historic teepee as it is disassembled for cleaning.

"It is not a sacred object," she said. "We had elders come because there's a specific sequence in which you take it down."

Before the canvas cover could be rolled back, starting at each end along the angled wood poles, short wood pegs on the floor and the door latches had to be removed.

Then, together with the rolled-up canvas, the first of about 15 poles was taken off.

The structural heart of the tepee is a tripod of three poles tied together at the top. The other poles are interlaced outside of those with a separate rope. The rope was unwound by passing it around the tepee while people held onto the poles. They removed one pole at a time until they reached the final three, which were taken away still tied together.

The beige canvas is covered with detailed paintings of horses and tribal members. The tepee will be vacuumed and its surface will be cleaned. Next February, when the exhibit reopens, the tepee will return, Bassuener said.

About 50 of the current pieces will be brought out again, along with about 500 other objects from the museum's collection. There are around 18,000 artifacts in the Native Arts collection, Bassuener said.

"This is an opportunity to highlight the collection," Blomberg said. "And also to be able to show people the depth of the collection."

Source: The Denver Post
By: Sarah Horn

The Tribal Rug Market Takes Flight

A leaf-patterned blue rug from the courtly heyday of 17th-century Iran (above) sold at Christie's this spring for $9.6 million, 20 times its asking price—and the highest price ever paid for a rug. Several months earlier, Sotheby's sold a rug from the late 1500s for $4.3 million, the going rate for a top sculpture by Alexander Calder.

Oriental rugs, once the obsession of Ottoman sultans, European nobles and American robber barons, rarely topped $2 million a decade ago. Now, these centuries-old carpets from Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus are commanding sums more often reserved for masterpiece paintings than floor coverings.

A patchwork of global collectors and institutions are fueling the rise. New museums across the Middle East and Europe are driving up prices as they build collections of Islamic art. Contemporary-art buyers from Singapore to the Silicon Valley are rolling out antique rugs to complement the abstract, geometric art works that hang on their walls. And everyone is on the lookout for the next little-noticed niche of the market that could see a spike in value.
As the global art market recovers, collectors are once again scouring the marketplace for new areas to exploit. Pastoral landscapes and gilded table clocks—antiques that once would have been too stuffy for high-spending art collectors—have emerged as some of the market's newest favorites. Buyers who bid up trendy contemporary art works during the boom only to see them plummet in value during the recession are seeking out more obscure pieces whose values could rise with an overall market upswing.

Rugs are typically classified by the circumstances in which they were made—hand-woven by tribal nomads, crafted in a village or city, or woven on looms in a royal workshop—and prices tend to rise along the same lines, according to Jon Thompson, a British rug scholar. Those woven by tribes or in villages are on the lower end of the scale, commanding prices anywhere from $2,500 to $300,000. Persian court rugs made in royal workshops during the 15th and 16th centuries and featuring pastel, botanical designs, are particularly popular with collectors of Impressionist art, and their prices have been soaring into the millions.

The wealthy have collected Oriental rugs for centuries. Henry VIII owned several hundred Turkish rugs. Hans Holbein, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Sigmund Freud, who kept a rug draped over the couch where he conducted his psychoanalytic sessions, were Persian-rug aficionados.
These days, top antique rugs are sold more like works of art than pieces of décor. Some high-end rug dealers even eschew the retail system of pricing by the square foot, because their collectors will pay higher prices for small prayer rugs and rare rug fragments than for palatial floor coverings. In recent months, sales have been slower for pieces that are frayed or of mediocre quality, but values have climbed sharply for the best surviving examples, according to appraisers and auction records.

Many buyers of modern art like television producer Douglas Cramer, a founder of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, are turning to tribal rugs speckled with jewel-toned, geometric shapes. Chicago real-estate developer Ron Benach, who owns pieces by Willem de Kooning and Gerhard Richter, is also a rug collector.

Jon Schreiber, a 56-year-old medical-equipment investor from Oakland, Calif., is on a quest to amass the world's best collection of antique tribal rugs. For the past three decades, he's been tracking down rugs woven two centuries ago by the 85 nomadic groups listed in a 1981 landmark study of weavers from the Caucasus, a craggy region between the Black and Caspian seas. So far, Mr. Schreiber has paid up to $225,000 apiece for 84 museum-quality varieties that represent each of the region's tribes or rug styles. His hunt for the lone holdout—a rug representing the 85th style called the Pinwheel Kazak—is intensifying.

Curators at Washington's Textile Museum say few rug collectors have ever come close to achieving Mr. Schreiber's goal of finding a top example representing every Caucasian rug in the canon, so to speak. The museum's founder, George Hewitt Myers, spent much of the early 1900s collecting Caucasian rugs and found fewer than 85 types, says curator Sumru Belger Krody. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has gathered 48 varieties from the region, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has around 20 Caucasian rugs.

Word of Mr. Schreiber's quest has already spread to a few of the country's rug cognoscenti. Mark Hopkins, a collector in Lincoln, Mass., praises Mr. Schreiber for focusing on a worthy niche but criticizes his comprehensive focus as "stamp collecting"—an approach that's based on numerical obsession as much as artistic appreciation. Kurt Munkacsi, past president of New York's Hajji Baba Club, says he tried to amass a similar set of Turkmen tribal rugs years ago before deciding the task was "impossible."

"In this world, there are lumpers and splitters—people who are fine with finding important overall pieces and people who try to identify every subgroup imaginable, like they're botanists looking for new plant species," Mr. Munkacsi said. "I'm a lumper. This guy's a splitter."
Mr. Schreiber, in turn, says some collectors give up too soon, but he's "willing to compete for what I want."

A lanky man with shaggy gray hair, Mr. Schreiber pays little attention to the volatile swings of the contemporary art market. Instead, he has learned to navigate an eclectic subculture where brand names are valued less than silky wool or rare natural dyes. Rug collectors often meet in groups like the Hajji Baba Club in New York, but Mr. Schreiber has mostly shopped solo, relying on a network of global dealers to scour and trade for pieces on his wish list. So far, he's spent at least $2 million on his pursuit.

When his local dealer, Jan David Winitz, stopped by for a visit earlier this month, the two men padded around Mr. Schreiber's unassuming three-bedroom home in stocking feet because nearly every inch of every room was covered in rugs made before the Civil War. A rug estimated at $18,000 lay on the bedroom floor of Mr. Schreiber's 13-year-old son. Others hung on the walls like tapestry, their colorful patterns depicting everything from peacocks to pixel-like symbols reminiscent of hieroglyphics and Atari video games.

Mr. Winitz joked about the paucity of furniture in the living room, but Mr. Schreiber just shrugged: "I like to roll out different pieces all the time, and furniture gets in the way."
Like Scottish tartans or Navajo blankets, antique rugs offer clues about the lives and folklore of ancient peoples. Archaeologists in 1949 discovered a carpet in a frozen Siberian tomb that dated to the 4th or 5th centuries B.C. A culture of weavers eventually stretched from Indonesia to Istanbul. Most weavers were women who could spend months or years creating a single piece for their families or the marketplace. Ottoman rulers built elaborate rug workshops as well, with workers who created purple and pink dyes by pulverizing sea snails and cochineal insects, respectively.

Aristocratic collectors have long acquired the rugs created in Persian-rug workshops, but Caucasian rugs made by tribal groups have steadily gained favor with collectors since the 1960s, particularly in America, Italy and Germany. The most coveted Caucasian rugs were hand-woven during the 18th and 19th centuries by the dozens of nomadic shepherd families who once dominated the steppes and mountains of modern-day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Their signature dye colors are geranium red and indigo blue, and their designs are peppered with good-luck symbols and playful images of chickens, carnations, and diagonal stripes. Some imagery is sacred, including a fan-like whirling orb that stands for the wheel of life.

In July 2007, an anonymous collector paid Philadelphia auction house Freeman's $341,625 for a 5-foot-wide Caucasian rug called an Eagle Kazak. It was only priced to sell for up to $25,000.
Collectors often shy from Caucasian rugs woven after 1900 because assimilation and the Soviet conquest of the region took a toll on the quality of nomadic life and their rugs' craftsmanship, said William Robinson, head of Christie's rug department.

Growing up in New York, Mr. Schreiber was enthralled by the images and colors that popped from the six Caucasian rugs his grandmother brought with her from the family's homeland in Germany. While studying medicine in college in Jerusalem, he befriended a curator at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art and became equally smitten with Persian and Turkish rug motifs. By the time he settled outside the hills of San Francisco in 1977, a bohemian aesthetic was popular and he began to buy antique rugs of all styles and designations, from Bidjar to Laver.
He didn't hit upon the idea of acquiring a complete Caucasian roster until the early 1990s, when he realized he already had 25 varieties of Kazaks, Kubas, and Shirvan Bakus. Mr. Winitz, his nearby dealer, offered to draw up a checklist and offer him any "blanks" he came across over time.

Mr. Winitz initially considered the idea an intellectual (and commercial) lark, but the hunting got harder eight years ago once Mr. Schreiber crossed the 60-number mark, he said. Some Caucasian groups like the Karabaghs near the southern border of modern-day Iran sold rugs to outsiders by the dozen, but only one town in the Shirvan district ever made rugs featuring fan-tailed birds, called Akstafas, by which their rarer rugs are now known.
Mr. Winitz turned to a network of buyers in Milan, Munich and Istanbul. After three years of diplomatic cajoling, he got a Chicago collector to trade a 17th-century Turkish fragment for No. 82, a rug known as the Cloudband Kazak.

No. 83, a creamy Marasali Shirvan, dotted with shapes that look like seed pods, came from Mr. Winitz's own collection, and No. 84, a Star Kazak, arrived three years ago when a South African collector decided to trade it for a Turkish rug fragment, Mr. Schreiber said. Since then, no hits.
Mr. Schreiber still needs the Pinwheel Kazak, a rug distinguished by a central swirling four-pointed star shape. The Kazaks who once lived near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi popularized the Pinwheel style in the 1800s, according to Ian Bennett's book "Oriental Rugs," the 1981 study that's served as Mr. Schreiber's collecting framework.

Mr. Schreiber says he knows of only six "great ones" in private hands—two in Germany, two in Italy, and two in America. He says the two American owners won't budge—his dealers have asked—so he's brainstorming ways to win over the Europeans. It's futile to trek into the mountain regions and scour for it directly, he says, because the Kazaks who are still there sold off their best antiques right after the Cold War and no longer do much weaving.

He says he's imagined the euphoria he will feel upon completing his Caucasian set. He might exhibit them; he might not. His children enjoy his collection, but he's not sure they'll keep the set intact over the long term.

In the meantime, he's adopted a coping mechanism that all hard-core collectors seem to share: a distraction collection. "Runners," he said, pointing the swelling pile of narrow rugs splayed down his hallway. "I'm collecting them like mad right now."

Source: The Wall Street Journal
By: Kelly Crow

“Pattern, Costume and Ornament” Explores the Meanings of Decoration in Contemporary African and African-American Art

“Pattern, Costume and Ornament” opened at the Birmingham Museum of Art on June 6 in the Bohourfoush Gallery. The works gathered in the exhibition were created by African and African-American artists and drawn from the Museum's permanent collection and from local private collections.

Ron Platt, The Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, organized the exhibition. “These works are united by a visual presentation that emphasizes eye-catching arrangements, attention to detail and embellishment, and often both,” says Platt.

Functional objects, including a quilt and a Haitian vodou flag, mingle with contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. Each work invites the viewer to consider the diverse cultural influences on personal identity, reaching out to ancestry, tradition, and community for iconography and understanding.

Aside from the complex meanings they evoke, these works also can be valued simply for the visual pleasure they impart. Eye-catching arrangements, attention to details, and interesting use of common materials draw the viewer into the pieces.

The exhibition “Pattern, Costume and Ornament” includes the following works, as well as others:

Imminence (1976)

Founded in the 1960s by the artist, Jeff Donaldson, and a small group of other African-American artists, the AFRICOBRA movement was intended to herald a new black aesthetic that drew on African traditions, political awareness, and community engagement. This portrait of Donaldson and his own family is suffused with the symmetrical patterns and improvisatory nature of West African visual culture. In doing so, he pays homage to Africa and his ancestral lineage. The work’s title may well refer to the forthcoming birth of his second child. Imminence is a 2009 addition to the Museum’s collection, acquired with funds from the Museum's Sankofa Society: Friends of African-American and African Art.

Old Salem: A Family of Stranger, Series Two (1995)

Fred Wilson's photographs of 19th-century cloth dolls, lovingly costumed and personalized by African African-American artisans in Old Salem, North Carolina, provide a vital historical counterbalance to the overwhelmingly negative portrayals of black Americans from that time. The arrangement of photographs on a long wall in the Bohourfoush Gallery evokes a family tree.

I Looked and Looked and Failed to See What So Terrified You (2003)

These photographic self-portraits by Carrie Mae Weems show the artist costumed in a dress that directly refers to the rich Southern African-American quilt-making tradition. The photos are from The Louisiana Project, Weems’s ambitious multi-part work that explores New Orleans’s history of social and racial hierarchies and codes. Weems’s dress—patterned on a Log Cabin design—expresses her identification with the region’s rich African-American heritage. She also intends her garment, an object stitched together from numerous pieces of cloth, to signify the city’s unique racial mixture.

Sound Suit (2009)

For his body of work entitled Sound Suits, Nick Cave draws on numerous sources such as carnival and Mardi Gras, traditional West African sculpture and ceremony, performance art, feminism, craft, and modern dance. Cave creates his wearable sculptures from such materials as buttons, twigs, leaves, handmade fabrics, sequins, and hair. The artist aims for his works to seem alive, to “recall the African positing of spiritual powers in objects.” He considers his work a catalyst for change and hopes that “the people who see it will be fueled by their experience with it.” The Sound Suit in this exhibition is embellished with materials such as crochet doilies and colorful buttons.

The exhibition “Pattern, Costume and Ornament” will remain in the Bohourfoush Gallery of the Birmingham Museum of Art through Septmember 12. Find information for visiting the Museum, including directions and hours, at www.artsbma.org.

About the Birmingham Museum of Art: Founded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art has one of the finest collections in the Southeast. More than 24,000 objects displayed and housed within the Museum represent a rich panorama of cultures, including Asian, European, American, African, Pre-Columbian, and Native American. Highlights include the Museum’s collection of Asian art, Vietnamese ceramics, the Kress collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the late 13th century to the 1750s, and the Museum’s world-renowned collection of Wedgwood, the largest outside of England.

Source: artfixdaily.com