Strange Art

 

[It seems I’ve been focusing on visual art on Rick On Theater over the past few weeks.  I started July off with a tribute to Sam Gilliam (posted on 2 July) and two weeks ago, I launched two-part profile of the pre-teen artist Andres Valencia (17 and 20 July).

[Over the years since I started the blog, I’ve raided my archive of pre-ROT reports on both theater and art.  Now I’ve reached back to the 2000s and put together a collection of vintage reports on art exhibits that focused on unusual, even peculiar art or artists.  For lack of a better descriptor, I’ve called the assemblage “Strange Art”—although, of course, strangeness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.]

DECEPTIONS AND ILLUSIONS: FIVE CENTURIES OF TROMPE L’OEIL PAINTING
National Gallery of Art, East Building
Washington, D.C.
9 & 12 January 2003 

Here’s my report on one of the art exhibits I saw while in Washington, D.C., over the year-end holidays of 2003.  On an art trip downtown, my mother and I went to the National Gallery of Art’s East Building to see two shows.  One was a Willem de Kooning (Dutch-born American, 1904-97), an exhibit on which I’m not going to comment here.  The other was unusual, but quite curious with respect to its theme.

After Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (29 September 2002-5 January 2003), which, as the title specifies, focused on the artist’s “figurative” drawings, we went upstairs to Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting (13 October 2002-2 March 2003).  Escaping Criticism (1874) by Pere Borrell del Caso (Spanish, 1835-1910), a painting of a boy climbing out of the frame of the painting, had been prominently featured in the New York Times as part of a review of this show (Holland Cotter, “Playing Tricks With Reality and Realism,” 11 October 2002). 

Actually, from my perspective (an unintended pun, as it turns out), that was the most interesting thing in the show.  It had an element of whimsy that seemed to be missing in all the other pieces (and this was a big show: 116 paintings, sculptures, books, prints, drawings, decorative arts, and one mosaic.) 

The concept behind the exhibit is that it presents examples from Roman times (several frescoes from Pompeii) through the 19th century of art intended to fool the viewers into thinking they’re looking at real objects, not paintings.  Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, director at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, was the guest curator and Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American and British paintings at NGA, was coordinating curator

Some were remarkable as phenomena (not necessarily as art, you understand) because they were painted long before perspective was discovered; others used forced perspective—a favorite gimmick of the 18th century, as witness the stage settings of that era (that’s my insertion; it’s not in the exhibit—though there are some paintings that were for all intents and purposes little stage sets)—to fool the eye.  (That’s where my lame pun comes in, by the way.) 

The problem with the exhibit, for me at least, is that it’s repetitive and presents works as examples of an idea, not of good art.  The show’s divided into themes—fruit, insects, flowers, coming out of the frame (that’s where Escaping Criticism is), and so on—but the technique exemplified in each section is the same.  After a couple of themes, the idea was well established and everything became a repeat of what went before. 

Except for Escaping Criticism, none of the paintings themselves were particularly interesting, so after seeing the technique exemplified a couple dozen times, it was boring to me.  We rushed through the last several rooms of the show. 

(We were also pretty “arted out” from the de Kooning’s 65 works and the 20th-century exhibits we’d seen just before at An Artist’s Artist: Jacob Kainen’s Collection in the West Building [22 September 2002-9 February 2003; 77 prints and 2 drawings].  Unlike some culture-vultures, we go through an exhibit slowly, so it takes some time on our feet; one or two shows at a time is often all we can handle.)

[After I got home to New York, I loaded Escaping Criticism into my PC as the wallpaper for the desktop.  When properly sized, it looked as if the boy is climbing out of the monitor.  It gave me a chuckle every time I booted the computer up.  (My current wallpaper is Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, which I think is one of the most beautiful paintings ever created.)]

*  *  *  *
WHEN WE WERE YOUNG: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ART OF THE CHILD
Phillips Collection
Washington, D.C.
21-25 August 2006 

[The art in this small exhibit isn’t really so strange—but the point of it seemed . . . well, odd.  It’s meant to examine drawings by children, looking at the issues of present and future giftedness.  “Do childhood works by artists reveal traces of their future genius?” asked Leslie Camhi in the New York Times.  “What can the drawings of gifted children teach the viewer about the relationship between art and society?”

[The exhibit catalog included reproductions of childhood work by other now-famous artists, such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and the 8-year-old Joan Miró (1893-1983).  It also includes 17th-century drawings by the very young Louis, Dauphin of France (1601-43), the future King Louis XIII (reigned: 1610-43).]

On Thursday, 17 August 2006, Mother and I took a bus to the Phillips Collection near D.C.’s Dupont Circle to see Klee and America.  As an adjunct to the Paul Klee (Swiss-born German, 1879-1940) exhibit, in a gallery next door is a display called When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child (17 June-10 September 2006), one of the first museum exhibits, according to the New York Times, to look at children’s art from an aesthetic point of view. 

One of the curatorial points of Klee’s works is that he maintained a sort of childlike innocence in his pictures—not unlike Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910; see “Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris” in “Short Takes: Some Art Shows,” 17 June 2018), though the source and result are quite different—and the nearby exhibit of Washington children’s artworks is an extension of this notion. 

When We Were Young juxtaposes three childhood drawings by Klee and one by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) with a work by the mature artist and with work by children from the private collections of Rudolf Arnheim and Victor Lowenfeld, the best-known writers on the subject of 20th-century American children's drawings, and Melody Klein, a well-known psychoanalyst of children.

The exhibit catalogue, edited by modern and contemporary art scholar Jonathan Fineberg, who curated the exhibition, addresses the psychological implications of the children’s art, as did a lot of the press coverage.  (The New York Times ran a heavily illustrated, two-page article on the exhibit in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday edition, “If a Little Genius Lives in the House, What's on the Fridge?” by Leslie Camhi, 18 June 2006.)

I’m not competent to comment on that, or even really to understand it, and I don’t feel comfortable commenting on the artistic content of the works on display.  [Sixteen years later, I seem to have shifted my position some when I wrote my profile of 10-year-old painter Valencia, but he was entering the professional field and selling his art for tens of thousands of dollars.  He was also appearing on television and sitting for published interviews.]

I’ll say here only that, aside from the three Klees and the Picasso, the children’s artworks shown in When We Were Young were by youngsters ranging in age from 3 to 5 and revealed various levels of skill and manual dexterity—as one might expect.  The level of perception concerning the works around them was universally astonishing.  [I felt the same way about Valencia’s work, but he was 10, which is quite different from 3-5, I think.]

The interesting thing in this exhibit, for me, is the presence of the several childhood drawings by the future greats.  One of the Klees, Woman With Parasol (1883-5), was one he did at around age five or so; the Picasso, Bullfight and Pigeons (1890), was from when he was about nine.  It astonishes me that these drawings still exist and that someone had them on hand to display!  It’s like someone knew they were going to grow up to be famous artists, so they kept these early pieces.

As I said, neither of these shows made all that much of an impression on me with respect to the art on display.  You can tell this is so because there are no paintings I wanted to come back for on a midnight shopping trip.  (I’m running out of wall space anyway.)

[This exhibit, though I saw it almost 16 years ago, came to mind recently while I was writing my profile of 10-year-old artist Andres Valencia.  I kept wondering, as I was reading and writing about the young painter, if there was any real correlation between the kind of attention he’s been drawing this summer and future success as an adult artist.  As the New York Times’ Leslie Camhi pondered, does the talent of a child artist predict future achievement?

[I also wondered if any of the baby geniuses of the past, such as Klee and Picasso spotlighted here, received the kind of excitement Valencia has been getting.  I suspect they might have if they had the kind of media—TV, Internet videos, and social media postings—that we have today, but since they didn’t, it took looking back at their youthful output after they reached the high level of acclaim as adults to see the nascent talent exhibited when they were children.]

*  *  *  *
DARK METROPOLIS: IRVING NORMAN’S SOCIAL SURREALISM
American University Museum, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
Washington, D.C.
29 November 2007 

I spent ten days in Washington, D.C., through the Thanksgiving weekend of 2007 because there were several art exhibits and some shows that seemed worth visiting.  (And we’ve just come out of a stagehands’ strike in New York that shut down most of Broadway since earlier this month.)

I took my usual bus (the “Kosher bus”) down on Friday morning/afternoon, 16 November, and on Saturday, my mother and I drove to the nearby American University Museum in the Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center on Ward Circle, right near Mom’s apartment.

We went to see Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (6 November-30 December 2007; see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 26 November 2017), an exhibit of 79 paintings and drawings by the Colombian artist (b. 1932) of the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, but Dark Metropolis: Irving Norman’s Social Surrealism (14 works on paper and 25 large canvases; 9 April-29 July 2006) was in the gallery below the Botero show in the AU museum, so we had a look. 

Norman (American, 1906-1989), a West Coast artist, used his art to inspire social reforms.  Born Isaac Noachowitz in Vilnius, Lithuania, the artist drew on his experience fighting fascism in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) to create highly detailed, monumental works that critique the inhumanity of war, the inequity of capitalism, and the tyranny of the elite. 

What he painted were depictions of a dystopia where capitalists essentially consume not only the products of the workers’ labor, but the workers themselves.  His canvases are like story boards for Tim Burton on acid.  George Romero with a social conscience. 

While Botero never intended to sell his Abu Ghraib works, collectors have bought—and, I assume, displayed—Norman’s dark, demented works; I don’t know how anyone could live with one of them on his walls.  (Reports are, unsurprisingly, that Norman didn’t sell well—but he did sell!)  They’re fascinating, however, and engrossing—the way a horrible auto accident is: you can’t stop looking at them, and searching for the minute details of societal disintegration in them. 

In a statement, Norman said, ”I try to go beyond illusion to tell the truth.”  Well, it’s his vision of the truth—the man had a horrific view of the world.  (“He scares people,” wrote a San Francisco critic.  That’s an understatement!) 

In his Washington Post review, Michael O’Sullivan, who encountered Norman’s work in 2001, wrote: “Life [in Norman’s art] is a nasty, brutish and short business from cradle to grave, interrupted only by bouts of unhealthy eating, joyless copulating and slavishly serving our corrupt masters.”  

On his blog, Lines and Colors, Charley Parker, an artist and illustrator (not the jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker), asserts that Norman’s art was “suppressed” by the “modernist art establishment” for a number of reasons, among them: “because it intentionally makes us uncomfortable” and “because his horrifically elegant tableaux of the landscape of suffering humanity, that expose how those with power dominate, manipulate, control and use those without, make those same powerful individuals uncomfortable and angry.”

In Meeting of the Elders (1977), bar charts hang like tapestries in a great hall where a cigar-smoking council emerges from stacks of gold coins atop human-skin rugs.  Norman’s Air Raid Shelter (1958-1977) resembles a nuclear reactor, with the people inside twisted into Guernica-like agony.  Even a topic as simple as rush hour is intensified to the point of anguish: dozens of cars become jail cells to the weary commuters of The Bridge (1946). 

Norman borrowed from religious imagery for his grand triptych, Human Condition (1980), and the towering (27' high) Crucifixion (1961-62), and from neoclassicism for his epic battle scenes, which look as though they could have taken place on the set of the movie Metropolis (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1927). 

Perhaps the bleakest and most hard-hitting of Norman’s predictions is our era of cause célèbre in To Have and Have Not (Charity Gala) (1979), where futuristic models and socialites mingle and dance on a runway surrounded by the pockmarked and skeletal.  As one San Francisco critic wrote in 1970, “You may not like what he reveals.  You probably didn’t like what you read on the front page this morning.”  No newspaper story is as terrifying as Norman’s world, however.

*  *  *  *
JOHN DREYFUSS: INVENTIONS
The Sylvia Berlin Katzen Sculpture Garden, The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center
American University, Washington, D.C.
13 October 2009 

On Saturday, 26 September 2009, Mom and I drove over to the Katzen Arts Center at American University to have a look at John Dreyfuss: Inventions (8 September 2009-17 January 2010), an exhibit of six sculptures by this Washington artist.  (Mother had been an acquaintance of Dreyfuss’s parents and grandparents, though I didn’t know any of them; Dreyfuss [American, b. 1949] isn’t an artist I’d encountered before.) 

The outdoor exhibit in the Katzen’s sculpture garden (there’s another show of works for sale at Hemphill Fine Arts downtown) is of large-scale pieces evoking bones (one piece in front of the AU building housing the Art Center is a giant Vertebra) and “early tool shapes” in a study the Center’s brochure characterized as “examining the relationship between form, strength of materials and the harnessing of power.” 

For my dough—and thank God I didn’t have to expend any—this is close to Quatsch.  I was underwhelmed, to put it succinctly.  Of curiosity value, the manufacture of the sculptures was by a firm in Minneapolis, Alliant Techsystems, that calls itself “America’s largest supplier of commercial and military ammunition, a top manufacturer of satellite components and missile-defense systems” whose best customer is the army.  (The Hemphill exhibit includes a group of three “abstracted, truncated models of submarines,” collectively called Enigma [2009]—named for the World War II German encoding/decoding machine.)

ATK, as it calls itself, made the monumental sculptures from “composite materials,” presumably some of the same stuff out of which it makes post-modern weapons.  “Not the typical offerings at your local art store,” quipped Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post (“Sleek, Silent and Powerful,” 23 September 2009).  I’m not going to go into any more detail than this because, frankly, despite the oddity of their fabrication, I was unmoved.

[I posted an examination of the ideas of aesthetics philosopher Susanne Langer on art, beauty, and theater on 4 and 8 January 2010.  She had a few things to say about some of the kinds of art and artists on which I reported in the collection above.  For instance, Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions.  Where, then, does beauty enter the equation?

[Well, in a way, it doesn’t.  It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art.  “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criterion Langer applies to art when she considers beauty.  It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant.  In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

[“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition.  In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty.

[The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work.

[I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings over 60 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive.

[When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it.  Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism.  We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in.  Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

[Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging.]

BroadwayCon

 

In olden days, before the dawn of the internet, Broadway lovers who lived out of town often starved.  They had to wait for the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure section to arrive on the following Wednesday, and wait for the vinyl of the latest musical to be available at the mall, and wait for the annual Tony Awards broadcast to try to sate their appetite.  Today, of course, theater geeks feast upon a buffet of instantaneous bliss, following their favorite shows and stars on social media, downloading scores and video clips before a show even opens, and building online communities to share in the spoils. 

That’s how Stan Friedman of New York Theatre Guide, a theater vet of many hats, introduced his “Impressions of BroadwayCon 2016 in New York City.”  Finally, to answer this crying (among theater freaks and Broadway superfans) need, came BroadwayCon, an annual three-day get-together of fans, producers and creators, artists, and musical theater devotees of all kinds and ages from all across the U.S.  So far, it’s withstood a blizzard and two years of a pandemic—but it’s survived and flourished.

BroadwayCon returned to in-person programming this summer after the 2021 edition took place virtually.  The theater enthusiasts’ expo was held from Friday, 8, to Sunday, 10 July 2022 at the Manhattan Center and the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan’s Clinton neighborhood (what used to be called Hell’s Kitchen). 

The musical-theater convention was postponed this year from its usual January dates because of the surge of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in New York City.  The 2022 edition of BroadwayCon was the first in-person gathering in two years; the 2020 BroadwayCon in January of that year was the last live gathering.

Launched in 2016, BroadwayCon has normally been held in January.  The first event was staged at the New York Hilton Midtown from 22 to 24 January 2016.  Louis Peitzman, New York-based deputy entertainment editor for BuzzFeed News, dubbed BroadwayCon 2016 “basically musical theater nerd heaven.”

The convention, which consists of performances from current shows, a preview of the upcoming season, panels and workshops, merchandise sales, keynotes, autograph and photo opportunities, and cosplay (which I discussed in a post on Rick On Theater last 22 June), was conceived and is run by Melissa Anelli and Stephanie Dornhelm and their company, Mischief Management, with the help of actor Anthony Rapp (original cast of Rent as well as the film adaptation; currently a regular on the streaming series Star Trek: Discovery on Paramount+).

Rapp recounts that the origin of BroadwayCon dates back to the first year Rent played on Broadway (29 April 1996-7 September 2008; previously Off-Broadway, 26 January-31 March 1996) when he met BroadwayCon co-creator Anelli, a big fan of the Jonathan Larson musical, at the stage door.

“I met Melissa when she was 16 [i.e., 1996], outside the Nederlander Theatre after Rent,” said the actor in Playbill.  

I started communicating with her and a bunch of other people, who were also active on AOL Rent chat boards.  [Remember the online service provider America Online?]  This was before ‘stage dooring’ became this hectic crazy thing.  Sometimes there were just a couple people outside the theatre.  Not hundreds like it is today.  I was 24 at the time, and I would talk to them and get to know them.

Rapp and Anelli formed a friendship and through Mischief Management, Anelli organized the annual Harry Potter conference LeakyCon (launched in 2009), which has now become GeekyCon (rebranded in 2014; on hiatus since 2016).  Rapp attended GeekyCon and performed a parody song about all the different fandoms, then Anelli and Dornhelm broached the idea of creating a convention aimed at the Broadway community modeled on the popular ComicCon.

(For those like me who’d never heard of GeekyCon, it was a convention for fans of sci-fi and fantasy films, television shows, and books.  Among these are such works as Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, Supernatural, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, as well as the Harry Potter books and movies.)

After the first BroadwayCon, the national theater magazine, Playbill, came on board to spread the word about the fandom confab.

The concept at the outset was not to make BroadwayCon an event directed by the theater industry, but a way for the fans to interact directly with the people who make theater.  Rapp explained:

It’s a chance for us to interact and share and contribute and give back.  When there’s a community that organizes around something that they’re passionate about, then it becomes special.  As a theatre artist, when we’re on stage, of course the applause is nice, but to directly interact and share with these people is very rewarding.  Rent was extraordinary and so was the community of fans who gathered around it, and I’d love other theatre artists to experience just a taste of that.

The actor also asserted that “part of the mission is to be charitable.”  Toward that end, a percentage of the ticket sales benefits Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, a theater community nonprofit organization that raises funds for AIDS-related causes across the United States.

I’m sure Rapp is speaking the truth from his point of view, and that of many of the performers and other artists attend BroadwayCons for that reason, but let’s be honest: it’s a marketing dodge.  As the New York Times reported at the first BroadwayCon:

Broadway has always relied on word of mouth to sell tickets, but the industry—like film and television before it—has come to see special opportunity in loyal fans who come early (and, in some cases, often), share their enthusiasm on social media and ultimately persuade friends and family to shell out big dollars for seats.

Broadway producer, blogger, and writer Ken Davenport (Broadway revival of Godspell, 2011-12; the Tony Award-winning Best Musical Kinky Boots, 2013-19; and Deaf West Theatre’s Spring Awakening revival, 2015-16.) blogged about his observations on that first BroadwayCon:

Sure there was a blizzard.  And sure some of the panels were over-packed.

But overall, I’d give the very first BroadwayCon a [New York Times chief theater reviewer] Ben Brantley-sized rave.  [Brantley retired in October 2020.]

And here are five things I loved about it.

1.  If You Hold It, They Will Come.

My first appearance at The Con was on the first day, Friday, in the early afternoon.  And honestly, since I figured most of the attendees would be in their teens and early twenties, I didn’t expect a huge turnout.  #Wrong.  Fans (of all ages) were everywhere, and a Hamilton [Richard Rodgers Theatre, 6 August 2015-Present] karaoke party was already underway.  “Ok, ok,” I thought.  “So there are a lot of people here.  But surely there won’t be a ton at my session.  It’s about producing.  It’s not like we have Sutton Foster or a Newsie on the panel.”  #WrongAgain.  The Producing 101 Panel [Saturday, 23 January] was SRO, with people S-ing [sic] out in the lobby trying to hear how shows like Fun Home [Circle in the Square Theatre, 19 Apr 2015-10 September 2016; previously Off-Broadway], Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson [Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 13 October 2010-2 January 2011; previously Off-Broadway], and more came to be.  So not only did people come, but they came to celebrate every aspect of Broadway.

2.  The Stars Came Out To Con.

Part of the reason the people came, was that the stars came.  I remember thinking when it was announced that BroadwayCon’s success would depend on whether our industry went all in, or whether we kept an arm’s length.  And boy oh boy, did the biz jump in.  Lin-Manuel Miranda [playwright, actor, Hamilton], Sara Bareilles [composer-lyricist, actor, Waitress], Diane Paulus [director, The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, Waitress], Adam Pascal [actor, Something Rotten!], Faith Prince [actor, Annie] . . . and on and on, all showed up . . . and showed up with smiles on their faces.  It was like an opening night party that the fans got a ticket to . . . and there was no long line at the buffet (ok, there wasn’t a buffet but you get it).  Cons like this were created to give the fans access to folks they only see on a stage, and BroadwayCon didn’t disappoint.

3.  The Average Age of the Attendees.

I hope BroadwayCon releases some demographic statistics about where these folks came from, how many shows they see per year, and how old they were.  My eyeball survey says that it’s a young crowd.  And sure, some folks might say, “Ken, they are not the traditional theatergoer, so you know that they’re not keeping your show or any show alive.  Broadway survives on the 44-year-old female who makes $250k a year.”  All that’s true, but I don’t see these conventions as a short term market.  While sure, they do help in the immediate (see #4), today’s twenty-something super fan, is tomorrow’s traditional theatergoer.  And if we can rev up their passion even more, not only will they make sure theater is an integral part of their adult life, but they will *be much more likely to pass that passion on to their children.  And thus, the theater tradition continues.

4.  Shows Sold Tickets.

Get hundreds and hundreds of theatergoers in one room and let them talk theater all day . . . and they want to go see theater.  And they did.  I overheard so many people saying, “I’m going to see the matinee of XXXX,” “I’m going to rush XXXX,” or “I’m seeing five shows this weekend!”  Now, obviously Blizzard Jonas effed up a lot of the theatergoing, but without a doubt BroadwayCon helped moved the ticket needle last weekend (I bet BroadwayCon could survey this year’s guests and find out a rough idea of how many did see shows last weekend).

[Blizzard Jonas was a massive snow storm that hit New York City on Friday, 22 January 2016, and by Saturday, had dumped 26.8 inches of snow on the city, making it the second-biggest snowstorm since 1869.  The city’s public transit system shut down and so did the area’s interstate bus systems.  The mayor and the governor urged people to stay home.]

5.  I Learned Stuff Too.

I was on panels with [producer, performer] Ted Chapin, [producer] Hal Luftig, [producer, theater-owner] Daryl Roth and more.  And I stopped in to other sessions and heard from [director] Bart[lett] Sher, [director, actor] Sam Gold, [actor, singer] Michael Cerveris and so many more.  I could have stayed there all day.  This is not a convention just for “stage door kids,” this is a convention for anyone and everyone who loves Broadway and who wants to learn.  And I’ll be making sure I clear more of my day next year to listen in.

BroadwayCon was a success just by happening.  But it exceeded my expectations in providing such a positive environment for the fans to find each other, and find new theater-loving friends . . . and not just the Facebook kind.  The real, “I meet you in person and don’t judge you by your photos,” friend.

The only thing that pissed me off about BroadwayCon was I kept thinking, “Why didn’t they have this when I was a super fan?”

Davenport is, of course, correct about the demographics of the Broadway audience versus the crowd at BroadwayCon.  The New York Times cites some of statistics of the convention attendees: “Nearly 80 percent of the registrants are female; 75 percent are from outside the state of New York; and 50 percent are 30 or younger.”

In their reports on the first-ever BroadwayCon, National Public Radio (NPR) spotlighted three teen Instagram friends and Broadway fans, two 14-year-olds from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and New York City, and a 13-year-old from Los Angeles, and the Times interviewed a 19-year-old Swedish Broadway devotee.

Damian Bazadona, the president of the digital marketing firm Situation Interactive, asserts,

There is a generational divide in understanding what BroadwayCon is aiming to be.  Some think it is a bunch of theater nerds in a room, but some think this is the future of audience development.

Indeed, some of the participants come to BroadwayCon, just as they do to conventions for other industries, to sell their product and create marketing buzz.  The fans, though, have various other motives.

Some come to meet their favorite actors, directors, composers, or other artists; others are there to collect merchandise and mementoes—although, there’s no reason convention-goers can’t come to do both.  Some fans, who are incipient theater artists and are looking for a Broadway break, are there for career tips, to make friends and network, or to cosplay.

Cosplay has been part of BroadwayCon since the first one.  The Theatre Development Fund (TDF – the non-profit corporation that operates the discount ticket booths in Duffy Square and various other locations and is dedicated to assisting the theater industry in New York City) booth had actual Broadway costumes fans could try on, but many attendees arrived dressed as characters from The Phantom of the Opera (currently the longest running show in Broadway history) and Sweeney Todd, the witches of Wicked, a coupla newsies, Hamilton’s King George, and Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad.

Frank DiLella, the entertainment journalist who’s the host of On Stage on Spectrum News NY1, the New York City cable news channel’s weekly half-hour theater program, characterized the BroadwayCon cosplayers:

Some of the most amazing theatre costumes by fans were certainly present at BroadwayCon.  I will never forget that there were these two twins from out of town dressed as the Side Show [conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton – 1997-98; revived 2014-15] sisters . . . .

In BuzzFeed, Louis Peitzman asserted:

Cosplay is a highlight at any convention, whether you’re participating or merely people-watching. . . . 

Never have I recognized more coslay than I did at BroadwayCon . . . .  It’s hard to describe the sheer delight of coming face-to-face with a Medium Alison from Fun Home.  I know you.  I knoooow you.

Costumed convention-goers (as well as those dressed in audience mufti) could create a Broadway keepsake by posing for a photo in front of a giant mock-up of the Playbill cover.

Among the other events of the first BroadwayCon, some planned and some unscheduled, were an impromptu fan Hamilton sing-along, a class on “Life Lessons in Musical Theatre” by Melissa Errico (My Fair Lady, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas), and a master class by Rebecca Luker (Phantom, The Sound of Music, The Music Man; Luker died of ALS in 2020).

There was a 20-year reunion of the original cast of Rent, attended not just by the cast, but people close to the show, including Jonathan Larson’s sister, Julie Larson, and New York Theatre Workshop artistic director Jim Nicola, the producer of the Off-Broadway début of the play.

Rent, because of the 20th anniversary of its Broadway opening, plus Hamilton, which had opened both Off-Broadway and then on Broadway in the year leading up to BroadwayCon 1, and the Deaf West hearing-deaf hybrid revival of Spring Awakening, which had just opened in 2015 and closed on 24 January 2016, the closing Sunday of the BroadwayCon weekend, were heavily spotlighted during the exposition.

At the Hamilton panel on Friday evening, 22 January, a hugely popular event, the interviewer asked if any of the cast had ever rapped before being cast in the hit Off-Broadway-to-Broadway musical.  Several had, but near the end of the session, creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda improvised an impromptu rap off a typo in the real-time transcription of the session shown on video screens in the room.

Because the blizzard had closed down the city’s and the region’s transportation systems, many performers scheduled to contribute to the festivities couldn’t get there, last-minute substitutes came in.  Idina Menzel, the original Elphaba in Wicked, agreed to participate as a speakerphone guest on a pop-up event called The Broadway Party Line.  BroadwayCon organizers took the stage with their contact lists and proceeded to phone friends in the biz.  They dialed up A-listers like Betty Buckley, Patti LuPone, Joel Grey, and Audra McDonald who answered questions and chatted.

Rock star Krysta Rodriguez, who was scheduled for a 20-minute gig at the late-night cabaret on Saturday/Sunday, stepped up and gave a two-hour concert when the other scheduled performers couldn’t make it.

(The snowstorm also closed down the Broadway theaters, which canceled performances on Saturday for both the matinee and evening shows.  BroadwayCon offered $20 tickets for anyone who had seats that day for cancelled performances.  BroadwayCon’s 2016 regular entrance fees included a $95 Day Pass for full access to all convention programs and a $50 Explorer Pass, which granted admission only to the BroadwayCon Marketplace—the merch vendors.)

Other events included a game modeled on TV’s Family Feud (with actors and fans) and panels on lighting design and stage management.  On Friday afternoon, an original musical number created for the opening ceremony was presented, establishing a BroadwayCon tradition.  Here’s how that special event was hyped in the official schedule:

Another op’nin’. . . no, actually, it’s our first opening.  [For any of you who don’t recognize that lyric, it’s a ref to one of Broadway’s all-time favorite paeans to show business, “Another Op’nin’ Another Show” from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate, 1948.  The other Broadway anthem is Irving Berlin’s “(There’s No Business Like) Show Business” from Annie Get Your Gun, 1946.]  The first-ever opening for the first-ever BroadwayCon.  We can’t tell you what’s going to happen, because it’s all a big surprise.  You can, however, expect singing, dancing, laughter, cameos from some of your favorite guests, a lot of tomfoolery, and who knows what else. . . .

BuzzFeed’s Peitzman limned the opening event:

You know what makes me happy?  When there is a deep-cut reference to the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee [2005-08] and the auditorium erupts in cheers.  That does not happen at other conventions.  That has likely never happened before, anywhere.  The BroadwayCon opening was a charming performance filled with song parodies and assorted other references that ranged from the obvious (lots of Hamilton) to the more obscure (Honeymoon in Vegas [January-April 2015], anyone?).  This hourlong musical was a sure sign that I was in the right place . . . .

The template established in 2016 has been followed at all BroadwayCons since (with the obvious exception of the 2021 online expo).  This includes last-minute, seat-of-the-pants changes to the announced schedule—even when there was no storm.

Let’s jump ahead to this year’s conference earlier this month and look at BroadwayCon 2022. 

On Thursday, 6 January, Mischief Management announced that the seventh annual BroadwayCon, originally scheduled for 18-20 February, following Broadway’s year-and-a-half shutdown, would be delayed until 8-10 July due to the Omicron variant surge.

Arguably, the most prominent guest to appear this year was former FLOTUS, U.S. Secretary of State, and 2016 Democratic nominee for President of the United State Hillary Rodham Clinton.  A certified Broadway enthusiast, Clinton moderated a panel on Friday afternoon, 8 July, called “Here’s to the Ladies” on legendary women of Broadway.

The panel members were actors Vanessa Williams (Kiss of the Spider Woman, Into the Woods), Julie White (The Little Dog Laughed, Sylvia), LaChanze (Once on This Island, The Color Purple), and Donna Murphy (Passion, The King and I). 

The panel discussed the unique challenges women face in the workplace in general, but specifically dealt with the theater.  Clinton asked the panelists how many women directors they’d worked with, and the answers were unsurprisingly low.  The actors addressed the unique perspective women have in the arts.

Other presenters at BroadwayCon 2022 included Rent stars Rapp and Freddie Walker-Browne, four-time Tony nominee Judy Kuhn (Les Misérables, Chess, She Loves Me, Fun Home), three-time Tony nominee Carolee Carmello (Parade, Lestat, Scandalous), Olivier winner Lesli Margherita (Zorro, West End, 2008-09; U.S. performances in Salt Lake City, 2012, and Atlanta, 2013), Jacqueline B. Arnold (Moulin Rouge!), Andrew Barth Feldman (Dear Evan Hansen), Thayne Jasperson (Hamilton), Erin Quill (Avenue Q), Ryann Redmond (Frozen), Nik Walker (Ain’t Too Proud), iTunes celebrity-interview podcast Little Known Facts host Ilana Levine, author Jennifer Ashley Tepper of The Untold Stories of Broadway (2013-21, series—four volumes to date—of anecdotes by theater pros about Broadway theaters, productions, and personalities).

Attendees heard from casts, crews, and creative artists from shows currently running on The Great White Way.  As in past years, BroadwayCon 2022 featured a line-up of question-and-answer sessions with the stars of Broadway shows, live performances by members of the casts, sing-along sessions for the fans, and more from hit Broadway shows such as A Strange Loop (opened at the Lyceum Theatre, 26 April; Tonys for Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical), POTUS (Shubert Theatre, 27 April-14 August), Disney Princess – The Concert (touring since 2021 to venues across the U.S. and around the world), and Dear Evan Hansen (Music Box Theatre, 4 December 2016-18 September 2022; 2017; Tonys for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score Written for the Theatre).

(For those, like me, who aren’t in the know, Disney Princess – The Concert is a composite revue of songs sung by the heroines from Disney animated features such as Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora [from Sleeping Beauty], Ariel [The Little Mermaid], Belle [Beauty and the Beast], Jasmine [Aladdin], and more.  It began in 2015 as Broadway Princess Party, a small concert at Feinstein’s/54 Below in New York City.  The performers are Broadway stars, many from the stage productions of the Disney shows.

(Despite its New York City origins, there have been no performances in venues in the city, though concerts have been mounted in nearby New Jersey and Upstate New York.  The remainder of the 2022 tour includes stops in Red Bank on the New Jersey shore, and Brookville, New York, on Long Island.)

On Friday afternoon, the 8th, there was the “BroadwayCon First Look” presentation, a showcase of the newest and most talked-about shows of the season.  Many a Broadway performance débuted at BroadwayCon’s sneak peek, in this case, David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s Kimberly Akimbo, due at the Booth Theatre in November.

Also at “First Look” was an introduction of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, coming to the Hudson Theatre in October, presented by actors Wendell Pierce and André Deshields, who will be appearing as Willy Loman and Uncle Ben in the production which looks at the story from the perspective of an African-American family.  (Pierce won an Olivier Award for his performance in the 2019 London run of the production.)

As of now, there’s no official word on BroadwayCon 2023, not even the dates, much less the guests or the schedule.  It looks like the confab will take place in summer again, and at a different location from the New Yorker Hotel/Manhattan Center, but that’s all I’ve been able to suss out for the present.  The best source of information is the website, https://www.broadwaycon.com/, which promises that details about the next BroadwayCon will be coming soon.  Interested theater fans can sign up for news and updates by e-mail.

New York Theatre Guide’s Friedman observed after he wound up his BroadwayCon turn in 2016 that “it is hard, even for a New York theater critic, not to leave BroadwayCon without an overwhelming sense of optimism about the future.”  His conclusion may well apply to all the BroadwayCons that followed:

Broadway, by definition, is a small planet, with a population only as large as the 40 professional [Broadway] theaters in Manhattan can employ.  [There are also 62 Off-Broadway theaters in New York City that employ theater pros.]  But this conference has shown it to be a planet with a million moons: retirees from Iowa, fangirls from Texas, community theater techies, Ivy League scholars, podcasters and future chorus boys.  All of them hungry as Audrey II [the carnivorous plant from Little Shop of Horrors] to taste whatever comes next on the Great White Way.  Here’s hoping that BroadwayCon finds a path to a long run, to keep everybody fed.  

In other words: There’s no business like show business / Like no business I know!

Andres Valencia, 10-Year-Old Artist, Part 2

 

[This is the conclusion of my profile of preteen artist Andres Valencia, the continuation of Part 1, which was posted on 17 July.  (Of you haven’t read the first part of the profile, I strongly recommend that you do so before reading Part 2, below.  It’ll make a lot more sense if you do.)

[In the second part of the post, I continue my look at Valencia’s painting style and his motivation.  Then I discuss the art he exhibits in his first solo gallery show at Chase Contemporary in New York City’s SoHo (which runs through tomorrow).]

Andres Valencia (2nd R), his father Lupe Valencia (L), 

sister Atiana Valencia (2nd L), and mother Elsa Valencia 

at No Rules opening reception on 23 June.

(Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

The young artist’s first solo exhibition opened at Chase Contemporary’s SoHo gallery in New York City (413 W. Broadway; 212-337-3203; info@chasecontemporary.com) on 23 June.  Entitled No Rules, “reflecting the artist’s experimental approach to painting as much as his belief that creativity is unbounded and great art can be produced at any age by any artist,” the show of over 30 paintings created by the artist during the last two years runs until 21 July.  Small canvases begin at $15,000 and larger ones range from $40,000 to $50,000. 

Among the works on display in No Rules is the invented character of Alberto the Clown (2021), which will be Valencia’s second work to be rendered as a print.  Prints of Ms. Cube are on display in the SoHo show as well (all 100 copies are sold out).  (I walked down to SoHo on Sunday afternoon, 3 July, to see Valencia’s art in person.  I’ll comment on the experience later.) 

Valencia is a phenomenon not just because he’s in the fourth grade, however.  His work is stunning, not least because he’s self-taught.  His self-education in art hasn’t failed him, either, it seems—even though he’s said he’d like to get a teacher. 

The neophyte painter explains that he’s developed his skills by copying the same painting over and over again, as he did with the RETNA mentioned earlier.  Asked if his skills had gotten better since he first put brush to canvas, Valencia observed, “Well, I just keep trying till I get it right.”  He’s a pretty good judge of his own skill level!

For now, artists like Basquiat, Picasso, Modigliani, Dalí, Condo, and the others he admires have been his teachers.  He examines something they do in their creative process—from his reading about them, or the videos he watches, or the art he sees in person—and applies it to his own work, makes it his own, and adds it to his palette of techniques. 

“One time I just kept trying to paint something, and it took night[s] and nights until I finally got it,” explained Valencia.  “I just kept practicing.  I didn’t give up.”  Later, he observed, “When I was little, I thought that Picasso did that triangle nose and, I thought I’d try it and, and then I looked him up, and he wouldn’t do that.  So I took it as my own style.”  (See, for example, Valencia’s paintings Van Gogh [in profile], 2020; The Scientist [profile], 2021; Max the Clown, 2022.)

Little by little, his paintings cease to be noticeably Picassoesque, but an amalgam of several styles and influences reminiscent of Basquiat or Condo, and eventually, a uniquely Valencia artwork with echoes of those who went before.  He’s still somewhere between stages two and three now, but each canvas shows movement toward his own . . . well, voice is the only word I can think of to use.  Indeed, Chase Contemporary, the gallery that represents him, proclaims, “Valencia paints in a style . . . which is entirely his own.”

Looking at his paintings, watching him work on videos, hearing him talk about his work, it’s clear Andres Valencia knows what he’s doing.  It’s not haphazard, it’s not accidental—he’s in control of both his ideas and his method, even as he lets inspiration take him.

Valencia’s parents and others, including artist Raphael Mazzucco and Perry J. Cohen Foundation CEO (and wife of Nick Korniloff) Pamela Cohen, have said he’s an “old soul” because so many of the artists who inspire him and the musicians to whom he likes to listen are from the (sometimes distant) past.  If they mean he’s a mature soul, I think there’s also evidence in his art. 

Art Miami director Korniloff is charged with ensuring that “the quality of the works exhibited is high and the artists respected.”  When Chase Contemporary proposed Andres Valencia, the fair’s director didn’t hesitate to accept the fourth-grader as an exhibiting artist.

The artworks in No Rules, the Chase Contemporary show in SoHo, are all from 2021 and 2022.  Though there are differences among the canvases, the same level of skill and execution is evident.  Most of the paintings are Valencia’s figurative pieces, many of them portraits of people he knows, though quite a few are fictional characters he invented.

I was curious to see what his older works looked like, to see if the development of his style was visible.  One of the several websites online that display Valencia’s pictures was by a woman who first encountered the young artist when he was an 8-year-old second-grader.  There are many photos of the incipient artist’s work from 2019 and 2020.

The contrast is quite striking.  It’s still possible to see that they were made by the same artist, but the 8- and 9-year-old’s paintings were less refined, rougher, less detailed that the 10-year-old’s art is.  He became surer of himself and more in control of what he’s putting on the canvas. 

This tells me he’s developing and not just repeating what he did when he was starting his artistic journey.  He’s learning, teaching himself new techniques to make clearer what he wants to say.  In an interview last August, a 9-year-old Andres Valencia was asked if his technique had improved over the preceding year, and he replied confidently, “Every day it gets better and better.”  And older, more experienced heads agree.

Though Valencia’s work is mostly innocent and joyful, he’s clearly not timid about hard subject matter.  In that same 2021 interview, the rising fourth-grader said his favorite painting was Picasso’s 1937 anti-war painting, Guernica.  (I wonder if younger Andres Valencia could have made that statement.  In the earlier Q&A, he said that in his bedroom, he’d like to have Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory [“The Soft Watches”]—still an advanced taste, but a gentler vision.)

Picasso’s Guernica

Now, Guernica’s a large (11'5½" x 25'5½") and complex painting, but when the interviewer asked Valencia if he thought he’d ever make such a big piece, he responded that he was working on one at that very time, a wall-sized painting.

Starting in March 2022, a month and a day after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Valencia began painting a picture called Invasion of Ukraine, débuting in the Chase Contemporary show.  (His is 4' x 5'.  It’s also highly colored, like all of Valencia’s work; Guernica is black, white, and grey.)  It’s a stunning and powerful evocation of the atrocity that is the Russo-Ukrainian war.  Coming from the mind and brush of a 10-year-old, it’s astonishing.

I don’t think I could live with the painting in my home, but in the gallery, I stood before it—several times, as I kept returning to it—utterly captivated by the horrific imagery as well as the obvious care and concern with which Valencia imbued it.  (Not stylistically, but with respect to its emotional and psychological undertone, Invasion reminds me very palpably of some of David Wojnarowicz’s grittier works.  See my posts “David Wojnarowicz,” 15 March 2011; “David Wojnarowicz (1954-92)” in “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words,” 16 September 2014; and “History Keeps Me Awake At Night,” 19 October 2018)

By the way, the artist understands what he’s wrought.  Forbes reports that after he’d finished a 12-by-9-inch colored sketch of the painting, a study for the final work, Valencia turned to his mother “and asked if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would do ‘something’ to him.”

I said “no, he won’t do anything to you.  Why do you think he would do something to you?” I asked him.  He said, “because when Picasso painted Guernica, [Spanish dictator Generalisimo Francisco] Franco was not happy about it and they wanted to hurt Picasso.”

Invasion of Ukraine (2022) 

The young artist then went to sketch out the large version of the final work on the full-sized canvas.  When he’d finished the outline, he explained the whole painting to his mother, section by section.  Natasha Gural, the Forbes writer, provides this description of Invasion:

A wide eye weeps onto a Ukrainian flag emblazoned with a broken heart and bullet casings, drawing our gaze to the upper left of a monumental canvas.  Symbolism and Surrealism collide as distressed and distorted Cubist figures—one brandishing an enormous assault rifle that commands the center of the boldly colored painting—expose the dread and terror of war.  

Discussing Invasion with the Forbes writer, Valencia, who, alongside his study of art and artists is an avid student of history, asserts, “I think that art tells stories and I am telling the story of the Ukrainian people and what Russia is doing to them.  My painting is telling a story that can not [sic] be forgotten.”

There’s a YouTube video of the artist creating the full-scale edition of the painting (Andres Valencia - Invasion of Ukraine - YouTube).  In it, we don’t see Valencia ever consult a sketch, but the video is a composite of more than one painting session, as the artist is seen in a half dozen changes of clothes over time.

Invasion of Ukraine will be made into a print edition of 500.  All proceeds from the prints, priced at $1,000 each, will be donated directly to the Klitschko Foundation, a charity that supports the children of Ukraine.

Right now, most of Valencia’s works have a similarity to one another, but they aren’t all identical.  Some pieces at the SoHo gallery are more Basquiat than Picasso—he actually has two pieces called Homage to Basquiat (both from 2021).  His reading about art and artists ranges from Renaissance to mid-century modern to current, so I suspect he’ll broaden his base as he gains experience with varied painters.

If he does go with a teacher, either at an art school or privately, I imagine that she or he’ll guide him into a broader palette, more his own than his models’.  That remains to be seen, of course.

His subjects are all his own, though.  Invasion of Ukraine is inspired by Guernica, it’s not a copy of the Picasso—any more than Fernando Botero’s Mona Lisa is a copy of Da Vinci’s.

The first time I heard of Andres Valencia, in that local newscast late last month, and saw the art that was going on exhibit in the gallery show, I saw that this wasn’t what I’d have expected from a preteen.  The first thing that struck me was the colors—bright, bold, vibrant, assertive.

Then, of course, the deconstructed faces and bodies.  They were Picassoesque, as I noted, but not slavishly.  It was an artist’s take on the great painter’s style, but distinctively original.  There was clearly something creative at work; Valencia wasn’t just some juvenile copyist.

The next day, I looked the painter up on the Internet and what I found convinced me that he was a remarkable artist-in-the-making.  His work didn’t reveal just a sophisticated, advanced technique, but a complex creative mentality.  In fact, his paintings were a little daunting, even frightening. 

My response to what I saw reminded me of my first exposure to Botero’s paintings when I was 11.  I thought his work was grotesque (though I don’t think I’d have come up with that word at the time) and disturbing.  Two years later, when my mother bought one of Botero’s paintings as a birthday gift for my father, I wasn’t sure I could live in a house with it on the wall.  (I did, however, for the next five years, and then it happily remained in my parents’ homes for the rest of their lives.)

I knew, too, that I had to see this art in person and made a date with myself to go to SoHo for the Chase Contemporary exhibit.  As I noted earlier, I walked downtown in Sunday, 3 July, and spent about an hour in the gallery.

Valencia’s subjects, “mainly ideas that just come to me,” reveals Valencia, are mostly distorted human figures and clowns, including characters from cartoons (Goofy, 2021), the music industry (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 2022), art (Van Gogh, 2020 [not at Chase Contemporary]), and military types (The Commander, 2022).  There are multiple exceptions, including his collaborations with other artists.

One of the most unusual of Valencia’s character pieces is John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a fairly large piece (5' x 3′).  All of the artist’s other character paintings—with the glaring exception of Invasion—are either single figures or images of two or three separate ones (Tom and Jenny, 2022; Three Punks, 2021—wonderfully evocative).  Lennon and Ono is a painting of one figure representing the couple. 

On a lemon-yellow background is the familiar deconstructed face, but if you examines the image carefully, you can see that the “face” is really two faces, melded side by side.  The right side is Yoko Ono and the left is John Lennon—you can tell because the face on the right has

John Lennon and Yoko Ono on wall at far left

big red lips.  Both Ono’s and Lennon’s hair is long, but the lengths are asymmetrical.  But it’s really only because of the painting’s title can you see that Valencia has painted the couple as joined this way.

What do I glean from this?  It’s very cleaver, first, and a little sneaky, too.  It demonstrates some serious thought about how to portray two people who mean something more than just painting subjects to Valencia—the Beatles (there’s also a portrait of Paul McCartney, but not in the Chase Contemporary show) are at the top of the painter’s hit parade of musical artists.  Either Valencia’s inspiration was working overtime, or he put some serious thought into how to render these special people.

Then he adapted his customary painting style to make his statement—to tell the story he wanted this piece of art to tell.  That may be the most impressive little accomplishment the young artists has revealed so far—flexibility within a consistent style.  (Big accomplishments, I think, are the fact of his painting at all and creating Invasion.)

Max the Clown (2022), one of several clown paintings in the exhibit (another is Alberto the Clown, 2021, the painting that has been made into another print like Ms. Cube) is a lightly-hued rendering of a curly scarlet-haired clown with green cheeks and a red tripartite mouth in a pale yellow costume with blue pom-poms.  Drips run from the red mop and from a pom-pom on his chest.

Among the outliers in the exhibition are the painting of Disney’s Goofy, which is rendered quite realistically, and Yoshi (2022), a portrait of a Japanese soldier, circa World War II, which is essentially Realistic, but with some Expressionistic characteristics.  (I assume this image comes from Valencia’s reading on military history, one of his chosen subjects, and possibly also movies about World War II in the Pacific.) 

El Toro (2021) is a cubistic depiction of a bull in shaded tan against a brick-red background. 

Max the Clown

The shading—which Valencia does with his hands and fingers—gives the image a hint of three-dimensionality.  It’s a small piece, 24½" x 20", and is outlined not in black like almost all Valencia’s other works, but cerulean blue.  It’s a very stunning painting, with the bull’s body in profile but with his head turned toward the viewer.  (The bull has three eyes—two in their usual locations and a third in his forehead.)

The coloring of these different paintings is all much more muted than the more habitual, abstract works of Valencia.  Except for Goofy, they're virtually monochromatic.  They also have the look more of drawings than paintings, making them stand out all the more as out of the ordinary.

A number of people, including both fellow artists and other art-world professionals, have predicted an amazing future for Valencia.  Of course, no one can predict what’s ahead for him: he could lose interest in visual art—maybe music will take its place in his creative soul; he could stagnate and the world’s attention could pass him by for the next striking phenomenon.

There have been any number of creative people who leapt onto the stage with great acclaim and then faded.  Writers who wrote one great book and never equaled the maiden effort; singers and song-writers who became famous one-hit wonders.  The poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.

I think of Orson Welles, who became the enfant terrible of the theater and then Hollywood at 20 and flamed out five years later to become a sort of legendary ghost.  There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.

But if the young painter keeps his focus and energy on target, Andres Valencia sure seems to have all the prerequisites for an astonishing career in art.  He has zeal, talent, drive, concentration, curiosity, and imagination.  He even seems already to have discipline, which many young artists often seem to lack. 

My interest in art is as an amateur; I have no expertise.  But from my point of view, Valencia has all the makings of superb artist.  His work is already arresting, and his approach to art is honest and heartfelt.  Here’s hoping that he keeps on rollin’ and keeps on making art that makes him happy . . . as well as other people.

[A number of pros from the worlds of art and journalism have had something to say about the young artist, Andres Valencia.  In the absence of published reviews of either the Art Miami exhibit or the Chase Contemporary installation, I think it’s worth seeing what these art and press people have said.

[I don’t know why there have been no reviews of Valencia’s work from the public displays.  Though there’s some discussion of his artistic style, with mentions of some specific canvases, maybe no one wants to criticize a 10-year-old in print.  I can certainly understand that.

[In the exhibit catalogue for the Chase Contemporary show, Andres Valencia: No Rules, the gallery collected remarks from several art professionals as “testimonials.”  Of course, I recognize that these people’s words are offered by the gallery as a marketing tactic, just like testimonials in a TV commercial, but since most of these folks have backed their words with acts (and even cash, in some cases), I’d put some credence in them.. 

retna (artist):  Andres and I did a collaboration recently [2021; in catalogue].  It was amazing to see and very, very inspirational.  There is a lot of division that happens in the world, but the arts can unite people.  That is what I look forward to in Andres’ work.  What he has done is amazing and he has so much more to offer.

jessica goldman srebnick (owner/curator, wynwood walls; ceo, goldman global arts; collector of valencia’s work): As someone who finds great joy in discovering artistic talent from around the world, I was completely blown away when I saw the work of Andres Valencia for the first time.  For a 10[-]year[-]old to be so effortless, so passionate, and so inquisitive is just extraordinary.  Andres is a rare natural talent and someone who is certain to make an impact in the art world over his long career . . . [.]  Andres told me once that he wanted to make people happy with his work . . . you do[,] sweet Andres, you do!

raphael mazzucco (photographer and artist): Artists are born and see the world through different lenses.  Andres has these special lenses that create fascinating characters on canvas.  He was only 7 when we worked on an art collaboration together [2019; on Basically Beautiful website, https://basicallybeautiful.com/basically-beautiful-art/andres-valencia-child-artist/].  I knew then that he had special talent.  He’s an old soul.

Andres is never Afraid [sic] to try to push forward and look to see where the unknown lies.

nick korniloff (art world professional; director of art miami): He’s a prodigy, there’s no question about that.  This is a real special child.

The art world for me has always been about access to the mind of an artist.  What the work says to you as you look at it, how you interpret it, how others interpret it and the conversation around it.  And I think Andres is going to be a great conversation for many years to come.

[victor williams (reporter, new york weekly): Andres Valencia gravitated toward a mix of Cubism and contemporary art, using bright and bold colors to create one-of-a-kind visual wonders. . . .  Determined to impress and make a lot of people smile as he presents his new collection in his upcoming exhibit later this year, Andres is pouring his heart and creativity into all his latest artworks.

[tracy risucci (ceo, basically beautiful): While developing an Instagram series on the great George Condo, . . . we discovered two of Andres’ paintings.  Let’s say we were instant fans!  Besides the colors, the lines and the subjects, the work is incredibly original, innocent and joyful. . . .  Andres is only 8 years old and in the 2nd grade [this post dates from May 2020] and is drawn to primary colors and draws and paints without any rules.

[donnalynn patakos (founder and editor-in-chief, portray magazine): Moving beyond his stellar music preferences . . . nine or not [this post dates from August 2021], Andres can paint. . . .  I watched the videos and nearly clapped with excitement. . . .  I recall listening to the legendary motivational speaker Earl Nightingale once defining . . . people . . . who, from a very young age, become naturally drawn to something and through their unwavering dedication to it, become exceptional at whatever that may be. . . .  Andres is one of the best examples I have seen of this, and it’s exciting to watch.

[miick mcstarkey (music and entertainment journalist, far out magazine): Aside from being in fourth grade, it is just how brilliant Valencia’s works are, particularly given he’s self-taught, which has caused such a stir. . . .  It seems he possesses a real tacit understanding of how art works, and surely this will stand him in good stead moving forward. The next few years are sure to be massive for the budding surrealist, and we’re sure the art world will be keeping a keen eye on him, as his works at only ten are truly breathtaking. He has the makings of someone we’ll be talking about in years to come.

[daniel lichterwaldt (vienna-based curator; journalist/interviewer, les nouveaux riches magazine): Andres‘ style and technique have evolved into something very unique over time. His works are never the typical face, (like Bacon) and body of a person – rather, his characters usually have one eye, two or more at times. The characters he creates have facial features spread throughout the face with drips, at times, and beautiful colour combinations. . . .  His color choices, shading and intense detail are captivating.]