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New York Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Painter Famed for Recreating What She Lost, in the Spotlight
'Welcome to the laboratory!' That's how the artist Ann Craven, 58, greeted me when we met in the stairwell of her archive in Harlem. The space looked like a mausoleum: rows and rows of shelves lined with meticulously labeled boxes. She took out a box and lifted the lid to reveal 14 paintings individually wrapped in plastic, each the size of a vinyl record and with the same subject: the moon. Considering the volume of art assembled here, it is hard to imagine that Craven lost nearly everything she had ever made 26 years ago in an electrical fire at her former studio in New York. Like the many artists in Los Angeles now reeling from the Eaton and Palisades fires in January, Craven — who was 32 at the time of the studio fire — had to start over from scratch. The lone survivor (other than the works that she had previously sold) was a small painting of a deer that was out on loan. Today, she keeps it close, like a talisman, in her TriBeCa studio. 'I had lost everything,' Craven recalled. 'So I just started to think about repainting everything I could remember.' The practice of remaking her earlier paintings, which Craven calls 'revisitation,' has come to define her career. Today, she is one of America's most poignant — and misunderstood — artists meditating on memory, time and mortality. If a viewer encounters one or two of her paintings in isolation at a museum or an art fair, it is impossible to grasp what she is really up to. The serial nature of Craven's work is the subject of three museum shows opening next month in Maine, where she has spent nearly every summer since 1986. The curator Jamie DeSimone, who spearheaded the effort, acknowledges that Craven's paintings are sometimes dismissed as kitschy or sentimental because they are nice to look at and capture conventionally feminine motifs like flowers and birds. 'This happens all the time — an artist in midcareer getting dismissed for all the wrong reasons,' DeSimone said. DeSimone is chief curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, where she has organized a 30-painting survey, 'Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020–2024),' which traces the artist's variations on key subjects over a five-year period. It opens on May 3 and runs through Jan. 4, 2026. A companion show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, 'Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory),' from May 22 through Aug. 17, presents a year's worth of moon paintings from Craven's laboratory. Students and prominent figures in the Maine art community will be invited to organize rotating displays. The Portland Museum of Art will round out the celebration, with a small show of Craven's moon and flower paintings, 'Spotlight: Ann Craven,' from May 14 to Sept. 14. It was Craven's idea to have multiple exhibitions at once. She has done it before: In 2006, she presented 400 paintings of the moon at the New York gallery Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, now shuttered, and 400 hand-painted copies of those works at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The twin exhibitions responded to a show from 1995 that featured 101 moon paintings, most of which burned in the 1999 studio fire. (The handful that had sold out of that show survived.) DeSimone was skeptical that she and Craven could convince museums to sign on for this summer, since most plan their schedules years in advance. But they were surprisingly receptive. 'Almost all of the museums in Maine have an Ann in their collection,' DeSimone said. The number of concurrent shows references the holy trinity — significant for Craven, who was raised Catholic — and the number of times she typically allows herself to repaint the same image. Some of these paintings, which could be thought of as siblings, will be shown across two or three of the Maine venues. Craven likened the journey between shows to her own process of repainting. 'The time in between going from one venue to the next is the same as in between a stroke — looking at an older painting and looking at a new painting,' she said. (In a 2023 catalog essay, the artist and writer Richard Kalina described Craven's 'revisitations,' which vary in style and scale, as 'fraternal rather than identical twins.') Maine has long been a haven for artists seeking respite from urban life. On a visit to the region in her late 20s, Craven met Alex Katz, a seasonal Maine resident and a prominent American artist known for his stylish portraits of friends and family. Katz complimented her work, Craven recalled, and wrote her a recommendation for graduate school. (She later worked as his assistant for seven years.) Katz 'gave me the courage to paint whatever I wanted,' Craven said. In 2000, Craven bought a home in Lincolnville, Maine; 16 years later, she bought a vacant church in nearby Thomaston and turned it into a venue for art shows. This summer, she will receive the 2025 Maine in America award from the Farnsworth Art Museum, which honors an individual or organization that has made a meaningful contribution to the state's arts and culture. Craven may have painted the moon thousands of times, but she still relishes setting up a row of easels in her Maine backyard as the sun sets, working on as many as five canvases at once while her Boston terriers, Magic and Moonlight, sniff around in the grass. Rather than waiting for the surface to dry, she uses a technique known as wet-on-wet, which allows colors to blur into one another, creating a luscious, almost dreamy effect. 'I was called a lunatic by my grandfather, my uncle,' Craven said proudly (the 'lunar' pun was very much intended). 'But then they said, 'Keep going, girl.'' In New York, Craven's laboratory — which she moved to a new site in Long Island City after this story was reported — houses not only hundreds of moons, but also nearly every palette she has ever used to make a painting. With the leftover paint on each palette, she creates a corresponding striped canvas, also stored on site. This elaborate system enables her to see how the colors dry and relate to one another so she can more effectively revisit the works later. Craven's oeuvre is part of a lineage of contemporary art that makes tangible the passage of time. There is Andy Warhol's eight-hour slow motion film of the Empire State Building, titled 'Empire'; On Kawara's 'Date Paintings,' which consist of nothing but that day's date; and Nicholas Nixon's 'The Brown Sisters,' a series of photographs the artist took of his wife and her sisters every year for more than three decades. But unlike many of these artists, Craven has remained steadfastly committed to painting as her chosen medium. 'Being a painter and being a conceptual artist was not an easy thing,' she said. 'I'm still defending it.' Art about time is also, invariably, art about death. For Craven, painting, mortality and nature have always been interlinked. Growing up in Boston with a big family, she felt like she was constantly going to funerals. She was drawn to painting flowers in part because she recalled her mother regularly swiping fresh bouquets from the graveyard to bring back home. 'A lot of these revisitations have the memory of a brushstroke from before — that is the same as thinking about the twinkle in my mother's eye,' Craven said. 'I'm still here and I can revisit a painting, but they are never the same.' In remaking her old work, Craven is not only recording her own existence, but also trying to stretch and bend time — even, perhaps, make herself immortal. 'The laboratory is a mausoleum,' Craven said. 'If you don't believe me now, you'll believe me when I'm dead, because it's really there — one long line of what I did.'
New York Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Francine Tint Is Finally ‘Having Her Time'
A visitor to Francine Tint's Greenwich Village studio could be forgiven for wondering if the woman before them is about to embark on a passage through turbulent seas. In her yellow wet suit, rubber clogs and shower cap, Tint resembles a cross between the Gorton's Fisherman and a hazmat suit-wearing Karen Silkwood. But as the pigments splashed all over her 'painting garb,' as Tint calls her attire, attest, the journey is here, in this workshop, before canvases the size of standard school buses and colors so luscious you want to ingest them. This work — her work — is 'my travel, my marriage and my children,' Tint said. And now, at 82, some 50 years after launching a career as an Abstract Expressionist painter in New York City, Tint is finally receiving the recognition she craved as a youngster growing up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, longing for an artist's life on the other side of the river. She's had successes — her paintings, which range in size from 10 inches to 20 feet, have been exhibited in more than 30 solo shows in the United States and Europe, and housed in permanent collections including the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Ill., and the Clement Greenberg Collection at the Portland Museum of Art. She received a Pollock-Krasner award in 2004, 2017 and 2023, along with a $25,000 grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in 2003. Still, her dance card has never been as full as it is now. To wit: A solo show in November at the Upsilon Gallery in Manhattan, which featured eight of her pieces along with works from Helen Frankenthaler, one of Tint's inspirations. Not long after, Snap Collective published a monograph of her work from 1975 to the present. 'The book provides valuable context for her role as a key figure in the third generation of American postwar abstract colorist painters,' said Beatrice Caprioli, the book's editor and Tint's studio manager. In February, Upsilon's London outpost held a show of Tint's work; a forthcoming short film about her, 'Panoramic View,' by the filmmaker Pola Rapaport, will be released later this spring. Then there is her show at 68 Prince Street, a new gallery in Kingston, N.Y., from April 26 to June 26. 'I was looking for an artist that really was going to make a statement for our inaugural show,' said the gallery's curator, Alan Goolman. Tint came to mind. 'This woman is having her time right this very minute.' Tint is not sure why her time did not come sooner, though she suspects it might have something to do with being a woman in a male-dominated field. 'It was very, very sexist,' she said of the 1960s art scene and beyond. 'I can toot my horn now, 52 years later: I was better than most of them. If I was ever in a group show, my work would shine. But I was kept down. There was jealousy.' Tint came to Manhattan at 16, crashing with a friend in the Village. In the early 1960s, she married a painter, and she moved into his enormous Soho loft for which they paid $90 a month. The relationship was tumultuous; they competed, literally, for space. 'Men couldn't deal with women's talent; there was only room for theirs,' she said. 'A friend told me to 'Take his work down and put yours up instead.'' So she did. The marriage failed, but her confidence flourished. She did freelance work as a stylist and costume designer for the likes of David Bowie, Andy Warhol and Ridley Scott, and for 'Saturday Night Live.' 'I decided to make my own money in fashion and costume so I would not be dependent on the men, or any man,' she said. At night, she took classes at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pratt Institute. She painted nonstop. She hung out at Max's Kansas City, the famed night spot on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, where she befriended artists like Larry Poons, Brice Marden and Dan Christensen. The critic Clement Greenberg became a pal. For the next 13 years, the two spent hours in her studio analyzing her work, which also included figurative sculpture. Around the same time, she began experimenting more with color, which 'should be a delicious shock to the eye,' she said. 'I wanted colors to layer, melt and dissolve into each other, to do unpredictable things.' 'Her sense of color is very, very strong,' said Robert S. Mattison, an art historian and professor emeritus of art history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. 'It's based on her sense of light, and that's really one of the characteristics and spatial qualities of the work. 'They suggest a kind of infinite space, which is quite interesting. In my view, she's making some of the best paintings of her career.' Tint typically works on four or five canvases of various sizes at a time, wrapping them across her studio's walls and ceiling or plopping them on the floor for a bird's-eye view. Brushes are not her only tool of choice: She stains, sponges, splashes, smears, streaks, drips, drizzles and glops paint onto the canvas, often adding sand, mesh or gel for texture. It's a messy business (hence, the hazmat suit). She has no idea why certain colors or textures speak to her; she lets her intuition guide her. The ultimate goal is for the viewer to interpret the work through their own lens. David Ebony, a curator and former managing editor of Art in America, got to know Tint's work through Poons, a mutual friend. Ebony considers her work a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, which entails throwing diluted paint onto an unprimed canvas. 'Chance is a very important essential theme for the Color Field painters,' he said. 'She'll throw paint on a canvas, and that's the moment of chance. But then she manipulates that chance and creates forms and unites colors without those chance moments.' The accolades Tint has received are welcome, but she has been taking it in stride — or in as much stride as she can. 'Artists are pretty crazy, and I am,' Tint said. She meditates daily, has been in a healthy relationship for the last decade and takes great solace in her work. Getting older isn't fun. 'It's hard opening the cans of paint,' she said. 'But I do it. I'm OK. I'm happy. I'm a product of doing what I want to do in life.'
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Redesign of Portland's Congress Square Park may resume this summer
Mar. 24—"Dearest Portland," the post read. "It's gonna be a weird year." Friends of Congress Square Park announced via Instagram on Wednesday morning that construction on a yearslong renovation to the downtown park is likely to resume this summer. As a result, the group is planning to scale back its programming to accommodate the work. But city spokesperson Jessica Grondin wrote in an email last week that it's too soon to say when construction will restart. The city cut ties with the contractor that completed the first portion of the project in 2023, so it needs to hire a new company to complete the work. Grondin said the city put out a request for bids for the job Friday. She said work may start up again this summer, as the organization said on Instagram, but that there's no definitive start date. The $7.2 million redesign has been in the works for years and was planned to unfold in two phases. It was originally slated to be completed in 2024 but has been plagued by delays. The first phase, budgeted at $2.6 million, included improvements to traffic flow and sidewalks at the intersection of High and Congress streets, work that was originally expected to be largely completed by fall 2022, with final paving and landscaping to occur the next spring. While the original contractor, Gordon Contracting, completed a portion of that work, there are still significant updates to the intersection to be done, according to the bid published by the city Friday. Phase two calls for upgrades to Congress Square Park itself, including the installation of new artwork and improvements to the plaza outside the Portland Museum of Art. The first phase took far longer than expected because of the discovery of an electrical vault under the street and resulted in partial closures of High and Free streets for months, frustrating nearby businesses and residents. Meanwhile, the city and the contractor were at odds over who was responsible for the delays and how to respond to them, and the two eventually ended their agreement. CJ Opperthauser, executive director of Friends of Congress Square Park, said that while the group hopes to put on as much of its usual programming as possible, some events likely will be paused or relocated. He said the group may move some events to Longfellow Square or Monument Square if construction makes hosting at the park impossible. "At the end of the day, we won't have too many fewer events than in a normal season," he said. Opperthauser said he is excited about the project and believes it will make the area more pedestrian-friendly and make it easier to host events. The plans also call for improvements to accessibility for people with disabilities and for planting more trees in the park. He joked that he's thinking of making a T-shirt that reads "The Jackhammer tour," referring to the roving events schedule, if construction is in full swing this summer. "That's the spirit we're trying to have," he said. Opperthauser added, that although the project is spearheaded by the city, his organization has been involved since the beginning and is glad to be included. "We're really like cheerleaders for the project," he said. Copy the Story Link
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Dispute over Portland Museum of Art expansion now in judge's hands
Mar. 5—Nearly a year has passed since the Portland City Council decided to clear the way for the demolition of a 19th-century building on Free Street. A judge will decide soon whether that vote — or the building — will stand. The Portland Museum of Art wants to build a sweeping glass-and-timber expansion at 142 Free St. as part of a $100 million capital campaign. The existing building dates to 1830 and most recently housed the Children's Museum and Theatre of Maine. In June, Greater Portland Landmarks sued the city in an effort to save the building and named the Portland Museum of Art as a party-in-interest in the lawsuit. On Wednesday, the parties argued their positions in a Zoom hearing in Cumberland County Superior Court. Attorney Beth Boepple, who represents Greater Portland Landmarks, said the Portland City Council misinterpreted the land use code when it decided to remove a historic classification that protected the building from demolition. "The council does not have complete discretion to disregard those standards," Boepple said. "They must also understand what the standards are, and in this instance, they failed to do that." Attorney Mary Costigan, who represents the museum, said the City Council was allowed to break with P0rtland's planning and historic preservation boards, which both recommended that the building retain that historic classification. "This is a decision of the council," she said. "They are not bound by recommendations. They are not bound by prior councils. They can analyze this on their own as a council." Greater Portland Landmarks has also said that the vote could jeopardize historic tax credits needed by other property owners in the city. Chris Rhoades, an owner of the Time & Temperature Building, said last year that he is worried that the demolition would sink a plan to build 250 affordable apartments in the downtown high-rise. Rhoades said in an email Wednesday that he is working with a potential buyer for that building but did not have additional information to share. "There is some speculative concern about tax benefits and other conjectures about the potential for property values to be harmed," Amy McNally, associate corporation counsel for Portland, said at the hearing. "Again, pure conjecture here, not certain or cognizable." Superior Court Justice Deborah Cashman also asked about changes to the building in recent years and whether Greater Portland Landmarks has standing to bring the lawsuit at all. She did not say when she would issue a decision. Kate Lemos McHale, executive director of Greater Portland Landmarks, said in a written statement that the nonprofit filed the lawsuit to uphold the city's historic preservation ordinance and avoid a precedent that could hurt other historic buildings. "In ignoring the recommendations of both the historic preservation board and the planning board to retain the classification of 142 Free Street as a contributing building within the Congress Street Historic District, we believe the City Council's vote was an abuse of discretion and misinterpretation of clear preservation standards in the law," she said. Lemos McHale also said that Greater Portland Landmarks has had "constructive conversations" with the Portland Museum of Art about their expansion. Erik Hayward, president of the museum's board of trustees, said in a written statement that he is confident that the public process leading up to the Portland City Council vote was done correctly. "We are hoping for a quick resolution of this case so that we can move forward with our goals of fostering greater access to art, culture and education for our community," Hayward said. "The expansion of the Portland Museum of Art creates an incredible opportunity for our community. It will not only provide the room we need for a rapidly growing collection, it will also help to anchor and revitalize a thriving arts district." The building at 142 Free St. was considered a "contributing" structure to the surrounding Congress Street Historic District, which means it could not be razed. Built in 1830 and later renovated by architect John Calvin Stevens, it has been home to a theater, a church, the Chamber of Commerce and the Children's Museum and Theatre of Maine. The Portland Museum of Art bought the neighboring property in 2019 with an eye toward growth, and the children's museum vacated in 2021 for a new home on Thompson's Point. The museum applied to change the classification to "non-contributing," which would allow for the building's demolition. The Portland City Council ultimately voted 6-3 to reclassify the building on the basis of "significant alterations since it was originally constructed." It found that the building lacks integrity of design, materials and workmanship. Marcie P. Griswold, a spokesperson for the Portland Museum of Art, said the building at 142 Free St. has not been used since last year. The expansion plans are "unchanged," she said, and the museum has raised $48.5 million out of its $100 million goal in its capital campaign. Copy the Story Link
