News

Tribal Show: Herbert (Skip) Cole, Professor Emeritus

Friends of Ethnic Art Lecture

A VISUAL MEMOIR

50 years in African Art
50 Months of Fieldwork
50 Slides in
50 Minutes—(p.s. It can’t be done…)

Sunday, February 12th,
Fort Mason, Fleet Room (across the street from Festival Pavillion entrance) 10 AM, Free

 Coffee will be served

Well-known writer and teacher of African art, Dr. Herbert Cole was among the first art historians to write primarily from his own fieldwork.   Although his first love has been the arts of West Africa, he has increasingly been able to take a “big picture” view of multiple cultures, describing how art objects and rituals — especially masquerades — make belief systems visible and help order human society.

Cole’s talk features highlights of his fieldwork and exhibitions plus some of his pet peeves and crazy experiences — and stunning photographs: objects, art and architecture in African life and ceremony in NIgeria, Ghana, Mali, Cote d’Ivoie and Kenya.

Curator of twelve exhibitions of African art and author, co-author, or editor of nine books, Cole was the recipient of a Leadership Award, for lifetime achievement, by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in 2001.

As an emeritus professor, lecturing and consulting a bit and sometimes advising museums such as the de Young, “Skip” Cole founded a “friends of Africa” group in Santa Barbara to raise money for varied NGOs headquartered there. Among his favorite pastimes, as Kofi Cole, is whittling exquisite miniatures of classic African masks and figures, with amazing detail and accuracy. These will be on view after his talk (and for sale, benefitting a fellowship set up to honor his son, killed in Uganda two years ago). For a preview of Skip’s carvings, visit koficoleart.com on the web.

In Memoriam

MERLE GREENE ROBERTSON, who merged her loves of art and history into a groundbreaking career in archaeology, died April 22 at her home in San Francisco. She was 97.

A long-time Friends of Ethnic Art member, Mrs. Robertson was a leading researcher of ancient Mayan civilization and a passionate teacher who led hundreds of local students on adventures amid the ruins of Central America and Mexico.

Mrs. Robertson pioneered a type of archaeological rubbing, using rice paper and Japanese ink, that elevated the standard technique for recording images of artifacts to an art form, managing to preserve details that have since deteriorated and were often missed in photography.  More than 2,000 of her rubbings are preserved at Tulane University in New Orleans.

I Did Not Die

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there.

I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the mountain goat on snow.

I am the sunlight on Maya grain.

I am the gentle jungle rain.

When you awake in the morning hush,

    I am the soft uplifting rush

    of quetzal birds in a highland flight.

I am the Venus star at night.

I visit now Hunahpu and Xbalanque,

    in the forever ever land of God K.

I am the Mother Goddess

    of Palenque’s past.

Do not stand at my grave and cry.

I am not there.

I did not die.

     Merle

http://www.mesoweb.com/reports/merle.html

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VIRGINIA FIELDS dies at 58; scholar of early Mesoamerican art, archaeology at LACMA  In her 22 years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Virginia Fields helped make the museum a vital center of Latin American culture.

Book Release Event

. The Friends of Ethnic Art enjoyed a private collection tour and book release event in a spectacular northern California home,  The author, April Dammann,  presented and discussed her book and her experiences in writing it. A press release for the book follows:

Press Release: (LOS ANGELES, February, 2011) – The revealing title says it all: Exhibitionist, Art Dealer as Impresario.

This is a new biography by April Dammann, which chronicles the story of Earl Stendahl, who exposed Los Angeles to a wealth of art and artifacts, and whose Stendahl Galleries continues to thrive as the oldest continuously operating art gallery in the City of Angels.

In 1911 Stendahl, a young candy-maker from Wisconsin, had a vision unlike any other art
dealer in provincial Los Angeles: develop local talent into famous, sought-after painters and
bring the finest works of art from all over the world to Southern California. Henri Matisse, Pablo
Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, David Siqueiros, Marc Chagall, Edgar Payne, Guy Rose, William
Wendt and Lorser Feitelson were among hundreds of artists represented by Earl Stendahl,
who moved among them like the ringmaster of a magnificent circus.

Published as Stendahl Galleries celebrates its centennial, this dazzling illustrated biography
describes Stendahl’s move to Los Angeles in 1909 and his subsequent entry into the fine arts
community. With the zeal of a showman and an extraordinary eye, Stendahl went on to create
one of the most influential art galleries in the world. Exhibitionist includes a cast of characters
that could be taken from a 20th Century Who’s Who. High -profile clients such as William
Randolph Hearst, Edward G. Robinson, and Vincent Price make their appearances, as do
countless other public figures and the famed artists whose careers were nurtured by Stendahl.

The Stendahl story is at its heart a Los Angeles story, peopled with celebrities, rocked by
scandal, full of failure and triumph. The book is also personal. Stendahl was author April
Damman’s grandfather-in-law. She knew him—the “exhibitionist,” who prevailed against all
odds and inspired a family business that has lasted one hundred years.

While first specializing in the Western landscape and plein-air artists of the turn of the last
century, Stendahl later awakened Los Angeles collectors to the world of abstract modernist
painters. Stendahl Galleries was the only place on the West Coast ever to exhibit Picasso’s
monumental Guernica.

Stendahl also made his name as one of the premier dealers in Pre-Columbian art and artifacts,
a nascent discipline at the time.

As Dammann portrays him, Earl Stendahl is a modestly educated man who nevertheless had
impeccable taste in art and artists, and whose loyalty to them was always unstinting. Without
false modesty, Dammann observes, Stendahl preferred to call himself an “art peddler,” and to
those who called him a “pioneer,” Stendahl would amend the accolade to “buccaneer.”

If fine art can be termed “candy for the eye,” readers will learn that Stendahl, originally a
confectioner, continued to craft fine chocolates at the same time he represented some of the
world’s finest painters and sculptors.

Stendahl’s story is an emphatically visual one, and the book includes more than 200 never-
before-published photographs of the man, his family, his galleries, his painters and patrons,
and some of the many outstanding artworks he represented.

Finally, Exhibitionist emphasizes that Earl Stendahl’s legacy is alive today, not only in the
gallery that continues to bear his name, but in the many institutions – both in Los Angeles and
worldwide – whose collections boast Stendahl acquisitions and are thereby indebted to the
man’s keen eye and impeccable taste.

About the Author

April Anson Dammann has been a writer for radio, television, motion pictures and theatre,
and has recently been a producer for the Los Angeles stage. She holds degrees in French
Literature from UCLA, the University of Rochester, and La Sorbonne. She and her husband,
Ron Dammann, live in the same house where Earl Stendahl lived and which continues to
serve as the Stendhal Galleries.

2118 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD  SUITE 880  SANTA MONICA  CALIFORNIA 90403
PHONE 310.395.9982  FAX 310.395.3353  WWW.ANGELCITYPRESS.COM

LAND Lecture: Oct. 22

The 2011 Elizabeth and Lewis K. Land Memorial Lecture

THE MURALS OF SAN BARTOLO AND THE MYTHIC ORIGINS OF

ANCIENT MAYA GODS AND KINGS

By Karl A. Taube, University of
California, Riverside

Saturday, October 22, 2011 ~ 10 AM

Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

                                                                 (Free admission)

 Discovered in 2001, the buried mural chamber at San Bartolo, Guatemala, constitutes one of the richest bodies of information concerning ancient Maya creation mythology. Not only of exceptional
beauty, the murals are also extremely ancient, and are hundreds of years before such Classic Maya sites as Tikal, Copan and Palenque. Dating to the first century B.C., the San Bartolo murals form an important link between the religious beliefs and practices of the still earlier Olmec and the later Classic Maya. In this presentation, Professor Taube will discuss the discovery and excavation of
these murals and their symbolic significance, including such themes as the creation of mankind, the world directions and the mythic origins of Maya kingship. In addition, the presentation will include some of the most recent findings at San Bartolo, including still finer murals from another structure
and the earliest writing and mural painting known for the ancient Maya.

Karl Taube is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Much of his recent research and publications center upon the writing and religious systems of ancient Mesoamerica. Selected publications: (with W.A. Saturno, D. Stuart and H. Hurst) The Murals of San Bartolo, El Peten, Guatemala, Part 2: The West Wall (2010) and Part 1: The West Wall
(Boundary End Archaeology Research Center 2005), Olmec Art at Dumbarton Oaks
(2004), “Lightning Celts and Corn Fetishes: The Formative Olmec and the Development of Maize Symbolism in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest” (in OlmecArt and Archaeology, editors J. Clark and M. Pye, 2000), The WritingSystem of Ancient Teotihuacan (Center for Ancient American Studies, 2000), “The Turquoise Hearth: Fire, Self Sacrifice, and the Central Mexican Cult of War” (in Mesoamerica’s Classic Heritage, editors D. Carrasco, L. Jones,S. Sessions 2000), “The Olmec Maize God: The Face of Corn in Formative Mesoamerica” (RES, 1996).