Notes from the Nemenator

St Augustine may have been around for a while—try 1535—but it got a new life in 1888 when Henry Morrison Flagler decided to build the Ponce de Leon hotel there. Two young architects (combined age=25) from McKim, Mead, and White came down to build the Moorish-Beaux Arts mashup of a building. The opulent wintering hotel is now home to Flager College. A few choice pics follow.

The original dining room is still the dining room, but more cafeteria than gourmet these days. Those windows are by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

more Tiffany windows, and murals by George Maynard.

The largest piece of onyx in America:

By the way, the young architects did pretty alright after the Ponce. As Carrere & Hastings, the pair brought us the New York Public Library.

Yesterday we learned all about the modern architecture on Florida’s west coast. Actually, the four of us mostly just looked at some of Sarasota’s mid-century highlights from the interior of a very compact Mercedes Benz, but there’s a bunch of knowledge on the interweb, and I’ll try to link the pics up accordingly.

We followed the advice of Jessica, who wrote about some of the town’s highlights for the Orlando Weekly a little ways back. First stop was Lido Shores, which boasted two beauts. The Hiss Studio:

And the Rudolph Umbrella House, sans umbrella.

Once I claimed the navigator seat proper (directing from the back middle wasn’t going so well), we went back to the mainland for the Paul Rudolph addition to Sarasota High School. Rudolph, who has since made a national name for himself, did much of his early work in Sarasota. This work, from 1958, was slated to be torn down, but hope is brewing.

Just across Bahia Vista is the Victor Lundy Church complex. There were three buildings of with these same parabolic roofs: two with glass walls like this, and one made of some serious ce-ment.

Then, back to the peninsula for the best part: Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchell’s Revere House on Siesta Key. Instead of adding onto the building (which was a wee pip of a glass thing), the architect Guy Peterson built the gorgeous addition next to it. Also skinny, but placed almost perpendicular, so the two really engaged in an exciting way. The low part to the right of the red wall is the Rudolph original:

it’s see thru!

a bedroom window

Here are the glamor shots of the new building:

To top it all off, there was public art along Tatami Trail. Here’s Frances in the middle of an assemblage by Dustin Shuler.

A giant tooth with plastic people.

We came back the park off Tatami to check out the sunset.

t-minus four weeks for art basel, one of miami’s—and the art world’s—main events. i went south for a rendezvous with friends, and we deliberately opted for beaches over museums (the little guy on my right shoulder’s PO’ed). but even without the benefit of the city’s art museums, we saw a bit of the city’s latent art. which is to say, Mr. Britto.

just down the road from britto HQ, we happened upon miami beach’s sleepless night, an all-night event sponsored by the city’s cultural arts council. i saw, and liked, this piece by mitch markel.

we tried, rather unsuccessfully to see some of the area’s other venues. once we’d tracked down a map (harder than it sounded), my companions had lost some of the spirit of said adventure. we knew italians were doing a performance piece with mattresses on ocean drive at 4 am, but we lost steam well earlier than even the old 4. and while they meant well for the 13 hour thing, some people have a real hard time keeping the whole spring forward/fall back straight in an hour-by-hour schematic program guide.

A bright light on the strip was the art center/ south florida . they’ve got subsidized studios for 3-6 month residency, a nice room open to curatorial proposals, and art classes. some of the art seemed a bit tempered to the clientele (the two front studios featured gummi bears and martinis), but no bother. check it.

sunday was vizcaya day. the estate, right on the water, south of the downtown, was built in the teens in the sytle of a certain italian renaissance four centuries prior. the place was lovely. we learned a lot about porcelain and saw the chairs where reagan and the pope had a nice convo. also, i enjoyed the (elder) calder featured on the sea barrier.

While I’ve seen a number of tours, this week I saw my first local music, which was a good learning experience. The band, here known only as Tom’s band (he plays the flute, there is sunshine somewhere in their name), was playing at Taste’s fourth birthday party. They did some very nice (and very loud) things with found footage:

The mouths were right up my alley. The bad part, which is implied by deeming it a “learning experience” is that a girl really should not be left alone in this town. Apparently “no” means “I’ll call you next week.”

I made it two galleries into Downtown’s Third Thursday gallery night before I got distracted by sushi. I saw some wierd biblical lightbox art:

before heading to the Gallery at Avalon Island (the name, yes?), which was having a puppet show as part of the Orlando Puppet Festival. Jim Hensen’s daughter was there, along with a whole load of puppets. We discussed puppets vs. clowns at length, enjoyed the finger puppets, and met Wavy Davy, the show’s curator. You may know WD from his day job at Nickelodeon. He made slime and designed stick stickley. I spent a while blubbering about how much slime meant to me, and went into something about how it (and by extension wavy davy) had entered the cultural canon —or was it the “contemporary vernacular”?—when my friends based a whole music video on the premise of getting slimed at a new jersey kegger. He seemed pleased.

I went out last night, rode Tony’s old-new bike across town to Beta Boutique. It sure went fast down Livingston. Anyway, the show/party was full of young people. And art. And Red Bull. And vodka. But really, folks, the art, that’s why we’re doing what we do. “Small Talk” was good—all square foot pieces, laid out in a shoe store.
Andrew Spear (colored pencil!) was especially great:

I met the curator, Dustin Orlando. Like so:

and of course, there were shoes to match.

Also of note, after meeting Dustin and a couple of the artists, and Lisa of the skateboarding circuit, I’ve moved onto using the fingers of my second hand to count the number of young people I know in O-town. It’s nice, knowing folks. Miss you, too.

Today’s adventure was the Orlando Art Museum, in the Loch Haven Park complex off Mills Avenue. After working at the Metropolitan, whose collection may be the closest thing to encyclopedic in the western hemisphere, if not the world (only the Hermitage, and the Louvre are larger, the former’s collection reflects generations of idiosyncratic rulers and their tastes, while the Louvre’s holdings end in the mid-nineteenth century), I have a particular way of approaching regional art museums. They will not have a comparable collection to New York, so it is a questions of what they do with what they have. You’ve gotta shake what your momma gave you, as they say. Go on and flaunt it.

Past a blue and green Chihuly, which served as the central atrium, was a show of Puerto Rican Art. The 2-D show of over 50 works only included a few pieces from the past decade, and many of them were well executed but fairly generic. That being said, it was bilingual and the pallate of the artists—supersaturated colors and a whole lot of black—gave you the idea that they came out of a shared of cultural aesthetic.

There was a room of Latin American Art, one of Native American, a hall of prints (the Richard Tuttle was wonderful!), and, well, an assemblege of assembleges. Here is a turtle of sorts:

Okay. Take a deep breath, past Chihuly again and through a few rooms of American art, standard portraits and landscapes. A small and lovely O’Keefe:

Nice little gallery on the end, with a nice Chamberlain and an Ursula von Rydingsvard (she had a show at Madison Park in 2006 for those of you who visit the Shake Shack). One of my favorite things about UVR’s work is the smell of the wood, they are very piney, which gives it an affect along the lines of the large scale and choppy texture. This one was from the early 90s and didn’t smell much any more.

There was a good room of juxtapositions from the collection, ie a still life with Roxy Paine salami, one of Rauschenberg’s Florida prints (he lives in Captiva) with a more tradition Floridian landscape.

The museum ended on a high note, a room of contemporary art making statements about society. It was a little like Art21 in a 30′ square room: Fred Wilson, Dennis Oppenheim, Ellen Gallagher, etc.

Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, has one the largest collection of Frank LLoyd Wright buildings in the country. He started designing them a campus in the late 1930s, and construction continued into the 1950s. He was in it for the opportunity to build a unified group of structures, and he did… the campus is this web of low-slung stone walkways, all geometric and sensible in Florida’s daily rain, connecting these buildings that felt a lot like high school meets trapezoids. Interesting thing is that the place is in total disrepair. It’s true, FLW doesn’t make buildings that are easy to maintain… they tend to disintegrate, but in a place like Taliesan, they are trying their damnedest to keep things up. There was a huge amount of work going on in Lakeland when I visited–they have just been identified by the World Monument Fund’s watch list, but it looked like nothing had been done for a long, long time. A few shots:

walkways

the chapel, notice the blue tarp covering a lot of it

inside the chapel, with glass-block stained glass

criminology with nice windows