February: A small package full of good things

February went by in a flash, but there was a lot of stuff packed in those 28 days, starting with two “Re-Thinking the Museum” events: a group panel Feb. 1 (see the post “Thinking About Re-Thinking“) and a presentation by Ian Berry Feb. 8 that was as inspiring as it was entertaining.

In case you missed the Feb. 8 event, Berry is associate director for curatorial affairs and curator at The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College (and, the audience learned from him that evening, was Ellsworth Kelly’s studio assistant for almost 4 years). We took a lot away from his talk, especially this:

“When (curators)  lose sight of regional strengths, of local opportunities, of artists that are not in vogue at the moment, we lose out on something big.”

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On the 18th we hosted a season opening reception for four terrific exhibitions, which included a performance by Angela Ellsworth and the “sister wives.” Our tireless volunteer Stu took some photos of the event (in the slideshow at the top of this post), and there are more photos of festive reception-goers online at Mr. FunBooth.

And on Feb. 22 we co-sponsored an appearance at Changing Hands Bookstore by underground comic legend Joyce Farmer, whose recent graphic memoir Special Exits made R. Crumb cry (in a good way — he said it was up there with Art Spiegelman’s Maus). In an informal conversation, Joyce touched on everything from the inadequacies of our elder-care system to hanging with Crumb and Terry Zweigoff back in the 1970s to the difficulties and rewards of writing about your own family members.

Here’s a picture of me, Deborah Sussman, and Joyce at Changing Hands after the presentation. I’ll treasure this one.

And now for March: Among other things, we’re looking forward to the international Resilience Conference , which is being held at ASU this year: On March 15,from 2:00 to 3:30, a panel here at the Museum (in Gregory Sale’s Social Studies Project gallery) will feature our own Gordon Knox, along with Museum Studies’ Richard Toon, The School of Sustainability’s Sander van der Leeuw and Iraqi artist Adel Azzam Alwash, speaking on “Art’s Role in Resilience Science and Other Innovations in Thinking.”