Eero Saarinen, Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1955-1957
This building does not show well, as they say, but is gorgeous in person. The hillside galleries are beautifully proportioned.
Buttons, 1990–1992
Three small buttons for visitors created by the Walker Art Center design department to coincide with special exhibitions
Left to right: John Baldessari (1991), featuring his famous dictate, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”; Claes Oldenburg: In the Studio (1992); and Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism 1924–1932 (1990)
Andrew Blauvelt
Chief of Communications and Audience Engagement,
Curator of Architecture and Design
Walker Art Center
http://www.walkerart.org/
Teeny tiny artworks, all week long.
In 1952, Alvin Lustig designed the interior of an Upper East Side apartment—including most of the furniture—for William Segal, the brilliant, polymathic, self-taught artist and publisher of Gentry, Men’s Reporter, and American Fabrics magazines. Lustig had previously designed Segal’s offices and served as art director of at least one of his publications, and the two men were close.
Segal moved out several years later and eventually passed away. But today the apartment remains largely intact a few blocks east of its original address, thanks to his second wife, the French artist Marielle Bancou-Segal, 92, who hasn’t changed a thing. The light fixtures, the sofas, the storage units, the shelves, the desk, the headboard, even the rugs—all of them are one-of-a-kind Lustig designs.
Preserved in amber—not as a museum, but as a home.
“It’s interesting,” she told me. “[This place] is neither modern nor old. It is something very pleasant to live with. My husband was an artist. I am an artist. You can’t but keep something like this.”
It was a honor to visit with Ms. Bancou-Segal this morning. More to come…
Eva Hild (Swedish, born in 1966)
Sinuous
2010
Hand-coiled clay, silicate color
31 ½ x 15 ½ x 15 ½ inches
Edwin E. Jack Fund, 2011.2Artist Eva Hild hand shaped this ceramic piece, deliberately creating a form that seems to have a continuous flow between inside and outside. There is no beginning or end to its structure, allowing the eye to weave in and out along the wave-like form. The fluidity of the piece is emphasized further by Hild’s conscious use of negative space and monochrome palate.
Emily Zilber
Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
http://www.mfa.org/
Sculpture, or building?
Brooks Stevens (American, 1911–1995)
Designed for William Woods Plankinton, Jr.
Model for the “Zephyr Land‑Yacht”, 1936
Painted wood, aluminum, stainless steel, and wire with original mount; 7 1/2 x 9 3/8 x 37 1/2 in.
Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of the Brooks Stevens Family and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design
M1997.232
Photo by Larry SandersThe stream-lined shape of this glamorous mobile home evokes the movement of water, the shape of a falling rain drop. Industrial Designer Brooks Stevens meant it that way. Milwaukee’s Brooks Stevens was a founding member of the Society of Industrial Designers in 1944, and he widely promoted the profession as a “business man, engineer, and stylist, in that direct order.” Stevens designed cars and trains, toys and bicycles, packages and appliances—even the wide-mouth peanut butter jar and the Oscar Mayer “Wienermobile”. Millionaire playboy William Woods Plankinton, Jr., commissioned the Zephyr Land-Yacht, shown here in model.
Mel Buchanan
Mae E. Demmer Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design
Milwaukee Art Museum
http://mam.org/
Who wouldn’t want to drive a land-yacht?
Dear LEGO - Take the Street Harassment Out of Your Stickers
My son is just getting into Legos, so I thought he’d love these stickers. Then I took a closer look and saw that one of the construction workers (the only one wearing “cool” sunglasses) was labeled “Hey Babe!”
I was stunned. Maybe it’s the fact that I just saw the team at Hollaback speak this month, or maybe it is that this is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, or maybe it is just that street harassment sucks. But chances are it was all three of these things that made me so mad to see a brand I love pushing this sort of thing.
The Hollaback website notes that street harassment is the most prevalent form of sexual violence for both men and women in the United States. Internationally, they point out, “studies show that between 70-99% of women experience street harassment at some point during their lives.”
Lego hasn’t really been on a roll recently when it comes to gender and its toys. See for example this post over at Ms. Magazine that picks apart the images of beauty in Lego’s new line of toys for girls (and check out the great ad from 1981 to see how far they have fallen).
Needless to say, I didn’t buy the stickers.
I can’t even.
Milwaukee Art Museum, 20th-century Design gallery, May 2009 to 2011. Photo by John R. Glembin.
What happens when a Museum abandons classification systems and chronology and just arranges based on color? At the Milwaukee Art Museum, we experimented with this idea in our 20th-century Design gallery. Platforms presented the vases, chairs, toothbrushes, and lamps in our collection on platforms divided by the colors of the rainbow. We found that arranging the objects in this gallery by color (instead of by time period, style, or materials), highlighted the individuality of each design. We saw shapes and details. We saw that any given chair, radio, or teapot usually sprang from several overlapping classification ideas at once. We enjoyed our experiment and saw twentieth-century design in full color.
Mel Buchanan
Mae E. Demmer Assistant Curator of 20th-century Design
Milwaukee Art Museum
http://mam.org/
If we can arrange our bookshelves by color, why not our exhibitions?
Commentary on the visual world by Alexandra Lange. Can include design, architecture, parks, movies, TV, books, kids.
