"In Pittsburgh, about 30 buyers arrived on a recent sunny summer evening at Space gallery, a nonprofit that inhabits what was once a downtown video pornography store, to find their shares waiting for them on large tables, in nice brown paper bags with the question “Do You Know Where Your Art Comes From?” printed on the side. (One of the pieces from an earlier share pickup, by the artist Lenka Clayton, took the concept of local to a new level: framed swatches of a plum-colored shirt once owned by Andy Warhol, native son.)"
The Andy Warhol Bridge in downtown Pittsburgh will be decorated with knitted, crocheted and woven blankets through September 6, as part of a public art project called Knit the Bridge.
A bridge needs a blanket like a fox needs a jacket. But adorning one of Pittsburgh’s best-known bridges with 580 knitted and crocheted blankets wasn’t about keeping the 1061-ft. long Andy Warhol Bridge warm. “It is about connecting and bridging communities,” says Amanda Gross, a local fiber artist who headed up the record-breaking public art installation on the 87-year-old, steel suspension bridge spanning the Allegheny River.
"Over the course of four days, she and a team of crochet-efficient assistants took over a massive locomotive in Lodz, Poland, turning the drab train into a psychedelic street-side attraction."
Art New England
Regional Reviews 1984
By Roger Baldwin
John Slade Ely House/New Haven
Points of View:
Kari Nordstrom, Wes Goforth, and Blair Cook
Buy and Sell: Beverly Richey, Paul Rutkovsky, and Jack Harriett
These two shows are quite different in there content and goals-the first a collection of graphics and constructions executed by architects, and the second a wry assemblage of simulated advertising literature, photographs, and installations.
Kari Nordstrom works primarily with wood creating unlikely chairs that seem to hover between utility and sculpture. They are composed of wood slats which exaggerate length or height, and suggest a delicate balancing act of their parts to achieve stability. Blair Cook exhibits low, massive tables composed of thick glass and concrete.
The three-dimensional vision of the architect is reduced to two in Wes Goforth's prints, executed in various techniques. Some feature single lonely buildings, rendered in thick blacks, their elements reduced to a minimum and abruptly geometric. Many of his works are in small series, one motif reworked with different with different colorations, different emphases of structure, mass, and light. As a whole the show lacked a central theme or thrust. Since its participants are practicing architects, comparison of this work to their architectural work could have provided considerable into both, had such a comparison pointed been made.
The thematic looseness here was opposed by the unequivocally singular point of the show in the upstairs galleries. Buy and Sell was an indictment of consumer culture, and more important, the political and economic bases for its rise in contemporary American society. The tenor of the exhibition was sometimes propagandistic, sometimes caustic.
The installations, first of all, defied the notion of "fine art" (itself a captive of that culture). The work was there for its message-verbal more than graphic. The logic of the show was carried through to the hilt; a promotional flyer noted the "Grand Opening," and, continuing the parody "Free Admission with This Coupon." A calendar of events (this show evolved as a continued activity) boasted "Double Coupons Today," "10% OFF everything," and the like, just like the grocery store adds in a Sunday paper. Since the show was to a large degree about media promotion, these cheap Xerox flyers were fully part of it, not accessories.
Beverly Richey's Army Man Series typifies the concept. Tiny plastic packets contained plastic toy soldiers and other tawdry items kids get for a quarter from the vending machines in discount store entrance ways, each object (plastic American flags, for instance) a symbol ready to be read in terms of political economic relationships. These pseudotoys could be bought (another handout) was an ironic, mocking order form) and we were guaranteed that each was "Hand Collected and Hand Packaged."
Richey's humor might seem light and innocent, if she did not force the viewer to make the connection between the tokens of promotion and the sinister and devastating forces that lie behind them. The room was lined with Xerox posters: "Army: Be All You Can Be," They read again and again, with images of tanks destroying a wooden shack. With these, myriad identical images of a soldier, fallen, with a tank beyond. One was strongly brought to realize that especially in light of events in the last few months, consumer capitalism is tied to military aggression, both supported by the state, each feeding the other. Thus the parody of blaring broadsides deepened to an ethical revelation of genuine seriousness, so that Buy and Sell could be seen as life and death.
Jack Harriett's suite of photographs, technically superb large-format studies of furniture for sale in shop windows, roadside antique stalls, and such. approached the consumer theme more subtly, and with a far less overtly political stance. These weary, gross, and often ugly objects the photographer singled out seemed as tired, directionless, and adrift in the world as those people one imagines might buy and use them.
The conceptual direction in which these two artists are working may have been brought into focus by Paul Rutkovsky, the founder of New Haven's Papier-Mache Institute, with which Harriett and Richey are allied. Rutkovsky's contribution to this show was a series of highly colored shaped pieces, each incorporating a commercially loaded word ("Tax," "Get"). For all its exuberance and art-world iconoclasm, Buy and Sell was a dead-serious exhibition. Rarely has the network of forces so devastating to peace, human dignity and simple sanity been so forcefully excoriated.
Shoppers' war is focus of city art exhibit
Journal Courier
January 20, 1984
By Kathleen Mary Katella
SPECIAL OFFER Collect all six of these little plastic green combat men and receive a special bonus package-FREE! Just tape the purchase seals on this card and mail it in. Allow six to eight weeks for delivery.
You can check out this series of combat men in an art exhibit called "Buy and Sell" at the John Slade Ely House thru Jan. 29.
The show, produced by Beverly Richey and two other members of the papier mache institute, focuses on consumerism-which Ms Richey approached in a military fashion. It also features Jack R. Harriet's photographs of "Furniture for Sale" (a flee market, an almost empty furniture store window), and Paul Rutkovsky's painted geometric shapes. (titles include 45 cents,) "Buy," "Get" and "Tax.")
"It's about commodities. It's about war. The reality for us is the social meaning," said Ms Richey, who stopped by the gallery this week to speak for her part of the show.
She said she carefully packaged each of her combat men to simulate the way manufacturers use packaging as a sales tool. She sells them for $1 at the exhibit from behind a glass case. She's also had a grand opening, double coupons, triple coupons, a free Band Aid with a coupon and a 25% off sale.
Ms Richey went shopping for her combat man packages. She picked up cheap little toys to go with them-a tiny plastic bible, a tiny plastic ballerina, a rifle, Bazooka bubble gum, Trident sugarless gum, sugar packets, toy pistol caps.
Ms Richey said she chose a military theme after noticing certain ironies- store rhymes with war; supermarkets speak of "price wars"; There are products with names like Bazooka bubble gum; consumers feel they have to fight prices with coupons.
"It seems to me the basis of our economy is war. It's the consumer thats the soldier out there," she said.
The show has gotten me so involved in consumer issues. A coupon for me is a political issue. It is the saddest way for consumers to save money and the best way for advertisers to promote. When food prices drop, we are bombarded with coupons," she said.
Ms Richey got some of her background in consumerism from consulting friends on Wall Street. She also delved back into personal experiences such as being short changed in the grocery store, or paying more for a product she thought was on sale because the display confused her.
Consumers today have a hard time knowing what they are paying because of confusing displays and because they can't see what the electronic cash registers are ringing up, Ms Richey said. Coupons are equally misleading; retailers give out coupons to avoid bringing down prices, she said.
Some of her packages include instant coupons, which Ms Richey thinks is "a little saner" than the cumbersome coupons manufacturers sometimes give out. Anyone who buys all six of her combat men can send away for a seventh. She said promoters always make consumers feel they have to complete a series.
Visitors to the show have had mixed reactions to the work. Ms Richey stuck paper to the walls for people's comments, and got reactions ranging from "Great Concept" too "GARBAGE."
She said the show's goal involved a little more than aesthetics, however.
"Art for me is to deal with, address and change something. I'm not just doing it to hang in someone's living room. I'd really like this to make a change out there, " she said
'Buy and Sell'
New York Times
Connecticut Weekly Section
Sunday January 8, 1984
By Eleanor Charles
Taking consumerism over the coals is the theme of "Buy and Sell," A new exhibition opening today at the John Slade Ely House in New Haven. Paul Rutkovsky and Jack Harriett usually show their work in the Papier-Mache Video Institute, which they founded a few years ago as "a haven for artists to do transient, experimental, commodity-oriented art," according to Ms Richey, who is the institutes current director. This will be the first time that they have mounted and exibition [sic] in a traditional, conservative setting.
Mr Rutkovsky a professor of art at Florida State University, has exhibited at Real Art Ways in Hartford and at the Kitchen gallery in New York City. Mr Harriett is a printer by trade and Ms Richey's talents are sometimes turned to baking socially significant cakes that are displayed and then eaten.
A large paper mache sculpture of a man sitting in his house watching television is the center piece of the show.
Hours are 1-4 P.M. Tuesday-Friday, 2-5 P.M. weekends. The address is 51 Trumbull Street and there is no admission charge.
Buy and Sell Art Review....
New Haven Register
by Shirley Gonzales
January 1984
The John Slade Ely House on Trumbull Street shows fun and funk in its two current shows. Downstairs, "Points of View" is based on architectural prints by Wes Goforth and furniture designed by Karl Nordstrom and Bair Cook. The latter are innovative, if impractical, and even good looking. In Cook's case the materials are concrete and glass, in Nordstrom's they are slatted wood and concrete. Her Rock-In-Chair looks like an old fashioned wheel chair with its base set in concrete. A round table has a curving split across the middle of the top, split again into curving slits held apart by chocks. Cook's glass suggests more formal and frail compositions.
"Buy and Sell" in the upstairs gallery was organized by Beverly Richey, Paul Rutkovsky and Jack Harriot. It also blends tradition tradition, in the form of Harriot's photographs of shops that sell furniture with what is what is close to a sixties happening rather than an exhibition. Unlike what is seen belowstairs, there is a lack of craftsmanship in evidence, which is probably appropriate considering that most of the show seems to be a condemnation of America as a television-advertising scam and a purveyor of war as a game. Even the refreshments were cakes topped by toy soldiers, American flags and white doves. The materials and techniques are appropriate for the concept.
Under new leadership New Haven's Arts Council attempts to define and fulfill the needs of the city's cultural community
New Haven Advocate Vol.X No 4
September 5, 1984
By Mary Beth Bruno
Since there's no universal definition of what Arts Councils are supposed to do, or be, most of us have only vague notions that they exist to help artists by providing something more than tan, bejeweled arms to pour chilled white wine at opening receptions. What that something more is varies from city to city and state to state. In Columbus, Ohio the Arts Council runs the artists-in-the-schools programs and advises city officials on how to spend money for public art. The Arts Council of San Antonio, Texas provides many services but is most proud of it's weekly showcase on cable TV. The Rockland County New York, Arts Council's annual festival draws thousands of people to see-and-buy the work of local artists. The main stated function of these three councils, and of most arts councils in large cities, is to distribute state and local funds as grants to artists and arts organizations in their area.
In a small state such as Connecticut, such decentralization hasn't seemed necessary. All state arts grants come out of the main office of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts in Hartford. According to Commission spokesperson Tony Norris, only one of the state's 60 regional and municipal arts councils make raising and distributing funds its primary reason for being. That, of course, is Hartford. You don't have to know much about that super-corporate city to realize how large and plentiful philanthropic donations can get before tax time each year. Good thing there's a strong organization up there harvesting money full time for the arts.
So what about New Haven? What are the unique needs of artists and arts organizations in this city? What are their unique opportunities for growth? How can one low-budget not-for-profit organization located in the basement of an old foundry help to answer these questions?
This is exactly what Frances T. Clark - Bitsie to everyone who's ever met her - began thinking about when she took over as executive director of Arts Council of Greater New Haven in the fall of 1983. She assumed leadership of an organization that had, among its definite strengths and problems something of an identity crisis in this lively but bitterly fragmented cultural community. An active board of directors and president were on hand to provide continuity, but it was clear that with so much going on in New Haven, it was time for an active new direction.
The Arts Council had been established in the 60's to work with the city in the development of the Audubon Street Arts Complex-a project that has been brought out and reshelved countless times since. As major development efforts shifted to other areas of the city over the next two decades, the Arts Council began to change and broaden its focus. Audubon Street development ceased to be the only concern of the Council - providing technical assistance and coordinating activities of existing arts organizations and individuals suddenly seemed more important.
When Bitsie Clark's predecessor, Baker Salsbury, resigned in 1983, he a mandate for his successor: to find "a unified voice and commonality of purpose in the New Haven arts community, and to represent them every time the city embarked on a major economic-slash-cultural development project in which the cultural benefits were in danger of getting slashed right out of the plans." Drawing on her years of experience managing Girl Scouts and School Volunteers, Bitsie Clark threw herself into bringing forth that unified voice.
The first sign of progress to emerge was the Art Service Consortium, a committee which brought together representatives from the main arts service organizations in the greater New Haven area. The goal was to eliminate overlap and competition, and to work on complementing each other's efforts. Begun in February this year, the Consortium includes Ruth Resnick of City Spirit Artists a union that works to match artists with paying jobs; Christine Spiesel of Artspace, a relatively new group that plans to turn a piece of downtown real estate into a community gallery and performance space. Debbie Weiner of the Office of Cultural Affairs, the branch of city government responsible for promoting the arts; Lou Auld of the Shoreline Alliance of the Arts, an established and exemplary Arts Council on the shore; and Bitsie Clark. The Consortium is staffed by Robin Golden of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, thereby providing one single contact person for outside groups who want to communicate quickly with all arts service organizations in this area.
Benefits of the inter-organizational cooperation have already been proven by a successful workshop of grant-writing that the Consortium sponsored a few months ago. The potential of this super-arts council - or "megagroup," as Spiesel calls it-seems unlimited. Possible future plans include joint membership fees and joint grant applications for operating funds - possibly even to the NEA. If all goes as planned, New Haven artists will soon begin to know and take advantage of every possible service that Consortium member organizations can offer. "We really want to get the message out on where to go for what," Spiesel explains.
"There's a lot of networking happening this year," adds Ruth Resnick. "Bitsie has opened doors and people feel it. They're making an effort to work together.... There's a healthy atmosphere in the arts in New Haven."
Other results of the Art Council's commitment to maximizing assistance to artists are the establishment of Arts Assist and Business Volunteers for the Arts. Both programs are directed by Robin Golden. The first makes the expertise of Arts Council employees available to members who need help setting up boards of directors, researching grants, or organizing publicity campaigns. The second program, Business Volunteers for the Arts, will make the legal, financial, and promotional expertise of many members of the business community accessible to artists for little or no money. That resource program, which has been hugely successful in other cities, will get underway this fall. Golden says, "The more services we off, the more reason there'll be to join the Arts Council," says Golden. "We'd like all artists to join."
That would be more than a symbolic coup-it would mean a substantial increase in income. Currently, individual and organizational membership dues account for one-third of the Arts Council's annual $200,000 income for operating expenses. Another third comes from grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the New Haven Foundation, and various corporations. The Arts Council raises the remaining third through its programs.
"We'd like to steadily decrease the amount we receive from the New Haven Foundation and increase the amount we earn," Golden says. That would go half way toward pleasing critics in the community who believe not only should the Council not be competing with arts organizations for foundation grants, but it should be earning enough off real estate and other projects to actually grant funds to artists, as arts councils in larger but perhaps less wealthy states do.
Golden believes there are other solutions to the problem of limited funds for the arts in the New Haven area. Members of the business tell here that there are many corporations willing to donate money, but they just haven't been asked.
Doing that asking is one of the tasks the Arts Council has ahead of it. And it's not the only one. Membership data and renewal procedures have to be updated; currently the Council has no accurate tally of how many paid-up members it has. The computer system has to be effectively installed and utilized. Staff turnover has to be stabilized. "We're trying to prioritize," Clark says. "This organization tends to think big-there are many things to be done at once."
Meanwhile, plans for large open forums for artists, smaller closed ones for specialized groups (such as all large performing arts producers), and various other new projects continue to roll through the halls and glass doors of the newly remodeled Arts Council Office. Bitsie Clark eternal troop leader, manages to keep a clear head. She's aware of the passionate, but often conflicting, needs and opinions of the various members of this richly diverse arts community. "We're not interested in the Arts Council being all things to all people," Bitsie says. "We're interested in hooking people up.... If we're doing our job, we'll pull it all together."
New Haven Advocate Vol.X No.4
September 5, 1984
By Mary Beth Bruno
It has to be a good sign when an arts council actually gives an artist a job. When the new employee is an observer and manipulator of popular culture like experimental artist Beverly Richey, and the job is Arts Council public relations director, you know unusual things are going to start happening fast.
Richey stepped into the full time job-her first outside the home in several years-in the middle of the summer. The first time I saw her acting in an official capacity was on the sidewalk next to Whitney Avenue one humid day in July. She was out in the hot sun to hand out leaflets (original design) about a noon-time concert at the near by Audubon Street Park of the Arts. She wore an oversized T-shirt made by friends and silkscreen artists Phillip and Roberta Chambers that said "Enforced Leisure" in day-glow letters. It was five minutes before noon. "Look" Richey said pointing to a tiny gathering crowd. "There's hardly anyone there. And it's a free concert."
Frustration and amazement filled her voice. She hated seeing everyone pass up a chance to see something that could be good. "I believe art should be returned to people, not kept closed in galleries," she told me later. When there's no practicing, showing, interacting, art stagnates, she believes. While growing up in a uniquely New Haven neighborhood at the end of Prospect Street (Between the black and the Blue)," is how she describes it" she made some important observations about class, art and life that are still prevalent in her work. A recent color xerox [sic] "Touch the Blue," is about this community, she thinks-"about the need for one culture to wake up another," as well as share its privileges.
Two years ago, after having run an experimental art group called Papier Mache Video Institute for half of her adult life Richey decided she wanted to enter the mainstream for a while. She got appointed to the Arts Council board of directors so she could learn how to run an organization. She served on four committees discussed and argued issues, and became genuinely interested in the Council's potential. Bitsie Clark impressed her as an "outrageously wonderful person, someone who really wants to build and arts community." When the public relations position opened up last summer Richey applied and was hired. She immediately resigned from the board and set to work.
It hasn't all been easy. Richey quickly found out that producing the monthly newsletter, monthly calendar, and assorted publicity pieces could be quite tedious and taxing. But she knows she's bringing creative energy into the office. "Bitsie stops me when I go too far," she says. And from her experience with experimental art, she's learned not to be afraid of failure. It just means growth. "I love when people correct me,"she says. "Especially my daughter."
During the years she worked at home her kitchen became her studio. She worked in cakes and edibles because that was what was around her. She marveled at the power of packaging in the grocery store turning wedding cakes in anti-materialistic manifestos and made all sorts of simultaneously subversive with and about food.
Now that she's in an office, she's fascinated with the passing of papers over her desk, the accumulation and disposal of trash, the alchemical powers of office machines. Her office has become her studio. A recent work, "Waste" consisted of the packaged scrap paper and refuse she produces at her desk. "We're all offended by waste," she observes "We like to think we don't make it." But everyone does and Beverly Richie [sic] makes it art.
As for the job, she really thinks it's great. "It's perfect for me. I'm learning to do things I needed to know... I've been through the alternative system, gone so far in that direction, now I want to combine." She throws out a stream of ideas. "Maybe I'm not a real artist... maybe promoting artists can be an art." It's a lot of questions but Richey can handle it.
"My art is about questions, confusion, not understanding, and how to go about exploring it."
New Haven Advocate Vol. X No.15 November 23, 1983 By Mary Beth Bruno
Face it. In the next year we are going to be barraged by articles, segments on TV magazine shows, lectures and discussions about how the real 1984 measures up, or down, to what George Orwell described 34 years ago in his novel 1984. Before you get sick of it all, take a look at the 1984 Big Brother calendar. Now on Sale at Atticus, Foundry, and other local bookstores. It's a serious look at "240 not-so-great moments in American history marking government intrusion into our lives," or so the package says.
It's not, however, as dreary as it could be. As journalist Nat Hentoff points out in his introduction to the calendar, the very fact that such a calendar exists proves that we still live in a relatively free society.
1984 began early in New Haven when 700 people waited in the cold to weeks ago to see a multi-media art show based on the themes of Orwell's novel. Sponsored by the Papier Mache Video Institute, the show was held in a large industrial loft off Hamilton Street. By most accounts, it was a smashing success. It certainly wasn't just another white wine and cheese affair...
Immediately upon entering the exhibition space-after the fire marshal finally deemed enough bodies had left to make room for more- a muddle of noises, colors and motions bombarded the sense. In one corner, two dancers shrouded in blue gauze were swaying to melodious cords inside a blue gauze cage. The cage was like a giant baby's playpen, and in their institutional blue swaddle cloth, the dancers represented innocence in a trance-moving but unable to live within their confined world.
In another corner, a lighted fountain gurgled atop Beverly Rithie's [sic] military wedding cake. The two story confection was iced with green-on-chocolate camouflage frosting and decorating with fallen plastic soldiers, silver candy bullets and mine fields.
Grouped together in another wing of the loft were several of the shows most successful installations, including Andrea Rossi's grouping of stuffed, white corpse-like figures, captioned "They used to be us." Near by was Phillip Chamber's small but stunning sculpture of tiny figures walking en masse. At first glance, they looked like something along the lines of a medieval beggars' procession. But after closer examination, trappings of times present, and future become apparent, and the pieces' connection to the shows theme become clear.
Almost directly above the tiny figures, three Walkman sets of earphones hung at head level from the ceiling. Passers-by were invited to stop and listen to Tyranny in the Scrapyard: 1984 in Music, Words, and Noise. The sounds were created by Roberta Chambers; the installation by John Trainor.
Perhaps the most popular work in the show was Haircut'84, a performance piece by Boston-based artist Tim Conant and R.J. Doughtey. It consisted of two New Waved Costumed figures singing their way through a haircut. The cutter snipped and primped, while the customer hammered out a comical, but a philosophical rap tune, repeatedly returning to the refrain:
Haircut '84
Everybody hit the floor
Dance, dance, dance, dance in your pants
Take a chance.
Slapped onto walls all around the room, tying the various works together were big brother's favorite slogans: "Ignorance is strength," "Freedom is slavery," "War is peace," Art in the shadow of double speak: it worked.
Now that the show is over, the Papier Mache Institute is working on it's next project: finishing their incorporation papers so they can gain non-profit status. A lot of time is also being spent dealing with calls from people who now want to know how they can become involved with PMVI "New Haven didn't know were were around before," Co-director Ritchie [sic] muses, and now even the Arts Council wants to see what they can do to help.
“Art Exhibit Studies Roots of Feminism” New Haven Journal Courier, May 12, 1983 by Kathleen Mary Katella staff reporter Women get out your dust rags. "Spring cleaning" is the title of the feminist art exhibit opening today at 817 Chapel Street. On Sunday, a two-foot-high cake that looks like a big Comet can, baked by Hamden artist Beverly Richey, will be among the highlights at a reception from 2-5p.m. (Yes, you can eat it.) Susan Orange of New Haven will use a scrub brush and lemon-scented cleaner to wash down her old canvases, virtually throwing away artwork she produced when she was a younger artist. This is the first exhibit in New Haven sponsored by the new local chapter of the Women's Caucus for the Arts, a national organization for women, according to member Betsy Haynes. It will run Thursday through Saturday from 1-5 p.m. until May 28th, in a second-floor room owned by the feminist Theater Light and Shadow. The show will include local contributions to an art genre Ms. Haynes said achieved popularity in the 1960s. "Feminist art is basically art done by women," she said, adding that women artists have never achieved as much notoriety as men for their work. She said the genre includes everything from women's paintings to the way women decorate their houses. "Just about anything, I say a woman makes is a woman's type of art." This exhibit's title signifies the need for women to get back to the basic reasons for the feminist movement, Ms. Haynes said. "The women's movement needs to get back to its roots," with a basic concern for "maximum personal freedom as people. Art has been a way of expression," she said. Artists at this exhibit pursue spring cleaning on an intellectual level. Ms. Haynes, a 33-year-old photographer, is including in the exhibit a collage of photo [sic] of women from around the world. Ann Langdon, who organized the artists in the exhibit complimented her pieces with this definition of spring cleaning: "Discarding what is no longer useful or relevant... Readjusting clutter so that it fits into containers... Getting rid of a functional superstructure in order to see and appreciate an introspective structure...) Simply, getting in touch with what she considers personally vital for women.
