Friday Fish Wrap for September 18-19th.

Sword Guard from Art of the Samurai, Asian Art Museum

Friday Fish Wrap: Sept 19-20

There’s a wide variety of events at our local museums – from East to West, traditional arts, cartoon arts, photography from the Middle East and avanteguard work at the Berkeley Art Museum.

The Art of the Samurai at the Asian will be closing on September 20th. The exhibit “inspired” a parody website with a particular political ax to grind. While nastily clever, the parody website igored the realities of museum funding, much less relationships with donors and a host of related issues in favor of promoting their point of view. The Asian was open minded enough to raise the issue on their blog which inspired a wide variety of responses. Kudos to the Asian for allowing this kind of open, uncensored discussion on their website! What I found most amusing is that a number of the comments decrying the military ethic of the samurai and Japanese militarism in the earler part of the 20th century were made by the same bloggers who were most fascinated by the swords and armor.

http://www.asianart.org/blog/index.php/2009/08/27/invitation-to-a-discussion/

Some further thoughtful comments from a museum curator, including one, which I think, is absolutely crucial –

“My impression, and please disabuse me if I am incorrect, is that when one is dealing with a single family and a single lender (Hosokawa and the Eisei Bunko) the exhibition narrative can be seriously impinged upon by the priorities of the lender. For one thing, to receive the cooperation of someone as esteemed as Mr. Hosokawa, one may not feel particularly free to bandy about concepts like whacking noses and kidnapping potters.”
http://asiansart.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/a-museum-curators-response/#more-248

More commentary from a blog that deals with Asian art and politics:

“The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has been targeted by an anonymous artistic and political intervention that parodies the current Lords of the Samurai exhibition with a well designed website and a series of pamphlets distributed in San Francisco. …”

Many in the museum world will feel that the parody is entirely unfair. The museum is a non-profit organization dedicated to education, and museum staff include many of Asian heritage as well as many respected scholars who have advanced degrees in Asian art history. In addition, some recent exhibitions at the museum have attempted to deal (not always very explicitly) with the history of Orientalism, such as the recent one on photographs of Asia, particularly South Asia.
http://www.froginawell.net/japan/2009/08/samurai-exhibit-pwned/

The Sendack show opened at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Respect for children's experiences of the world emerges as the undeclared theme of "There's a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak," which just opened at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Organized by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, the show presents a portrait of our era's most famous author and illustrator of books for children, Maurice Sendak. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/12/DDDS19K98M.DTL&type=art#ixzz0ROBktIRu

Wee Pals exhibit at SF Main Library:
“Cartoonist Morrie Turner came up with the phrase "rainbow power" to express the inclusive vision of Wee Pals, his racially integrated comic strip that broke barriers when it first appeared in American newspapers in 1965. Forty-four years later, the revered Berkeley cartoonist - the first African American artist to have a nationally syndicated strip - still draws the daily panel where Nipper, Ralph and the other kids in their multicultural gang riff on the world around them…”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/11/PKIB19H7KS.DTL&type=art#ixzz0ROBVJ6UF

Bade Museum: Hope and Reflection: Images of Kurdish Culture from Turkey and Iraq. May 14 - December 17, 2009. Hope and Reflection: Images of Kurdish Culture from Turkey and Iraq features hopeful images of daily life in a troubled region and intimate portraits of the Kurdish people. The exhibit presents a selection of photographs taken during four visits to Diyarbakir Province, Turkey in the summers between 2005 and 2008 and one month spent in Northern Iraq in 2008. Photographer Jon Vidar developed close relationships with residents of cities and villages throughout the region, capturing a Kurdish culture that is largely unknown by Western observers.
http://bade.psr.edu/content/current-exhibits

Berkeley Art Museum
Upcoming: Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series
Currently of interest:
Deborah Grant: Bacon, Egg, Toast in Lard / MATRIX 228

“Deborah Grant’s paintings are dense—quite literally loaded with obsessive code-like mark-making, collaged and drawn symbolic representations, and flat silhouettes, and with myriad personal, cultural, and art-historical references.”
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/228

And a notice about a movie that I hope plays here about the Barnes collection.
I plan to travel to the east coast next year and visiting this collection will be one of the highlights of my trip.

By Steven Rea, Inquirer Movie Critic

TORONTO - One of the unlikeliest stars of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival, under way this week, has been dead for more than half a century.

Albert C. Barnes, the famously eccentric Philadelphian whose eponymous institution in Lower Merion houses a jaw-dropping collection of post-Impressionist art, has been wowing festival-goers thanks to The Art of the Steal - a documentary about the Barnes Foundation and the storm of controversy surrounding its move to a site along Philadelphia's Museum Row.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20090917_Bringing_back_Barnes__on_film.html

E-mail Nancy Ewart at namastenancy@hotmail.com