Five-Minute Museum

You know, the invention of photography really changed the course of the history of art. The amazing thing is that these early photographers were working with very rudimentary equipment; these were very simple box cameras that were big and unwieldy , and homemade-seeming recipes and solutions that they made in their kitchens or in a workroom. They had to follow those recipes painstakingly to have any kind of result; they had to estimate the exposure time dependent on the amount of sunlight that day. On top of it all, when they were using the cameras, they would look at their image in the viewer — what we call the ground glass — and they would see it upside down and laterally reversed. So they had to reverse it in their heads.

Was the process these photographers used similar in any way at all to the process used by photographers today?

One of the great reasons why photographers make pictures is to see how [something looks] as a photograph. A photograph is a two-dimensional rendering of the three-dimensional world; it flattens what you see. We contemporary people, having known modernism, often see planes of tone in these early photographs that we’re not 100 percent sure the early photographers saw. But they must have been aware of them, because they seem to be so much part of many of the greatest early photographs — planes of tone, of light and dark; the creation of an image that’s not just about detail, but about tone, light and shadow.

Photography was invented at about the same time in France and England, where it was announced by two different people: Louis Daguerre (in Paris) and William Henry Fox Talbot. Daguerre was the first one to announce his discovery, in early January of 1839 — and then Talbot, having heard that Daguerre had invented something rather similar-sounding to what he himself had done, rushed to make his own announcement. The photographs in our show were mostly made with Talbot’s paper negative process; there’s only one daguerreotype. [Paper] was ultimately the one that succeeded more, in part because you could create multiple prints, so it had more usefulness — whereas daguerreotype was unique. With paper negatives, the prints were larger, so I’m sure that was also appealing. The daguerreotype basically became antiquated at some point, and the uses for paper photography multiplied. Our exhibition celebrates what people often call the golden age of early photography, which is the use of paper materials from the 1840s to the mid-1870s.

Were these photographers mainly wealthy people? Or people from all different levels of society?

Well, a lot of them were wealthy people who had the time and the resources to do things. The one daguerreotype we’re showing is by someone called Girault de Prangey. He was a wealthy architectural historian who heard about the daguerreotype process and almost immediately went to learn it — got himself taught the process, had a couple of cameras built, and took off for the Mediterranean to make some of the earliest pictures of the sites in that area. He made images that were surprising, because he framed them interestingly. He used the “close-up,” which was actually an unusual idea at the time. He would photograph only part of a building; our picture is sort of the top section of a church in Athens.

With industrialization came great advances in transportation — particularly train travel — and so a number of other well-to-do photographers started to travel to distant places and bring back images of the exotic sites in places like Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria. We have one picture by a photographer who got to Mexico.

Gradually, glass negatives started to replace paper negatives, because they offered even more detail, and allowed you to shorten your exposure time. But if they were going to go with glass, these traveling photographers had to carry sheets of glass that were the same size as their prints. Which is amazing — these are prints that are often 15 inches by 12 inches. They would bring sheets of glass that they had prepared; they would bring bottles of chemicals, too, because they had to treat the negatives before exposure, and then treat them again right after to secure the image. They had to bring a sort of makeshift darkroom — it’s incredible. We have one picture that was taken near the top of Mont Blanc, in the mid-1860s, by one of the Bisson frères — an image that he had to make while dealing with the elements, the cold and snow. He made two unsuccessful trips before he actually succeeded in getting images. The diligence itself is just remarkable; the passion of these people is amazing.

How many of these works were conceived, at the time of their creation, as “art”? How many were done more commercially — as portraits, for instance, or with the goal of simply depicting realistic scenes (i.e., photojournalism)?

Some of the greatest and most important photographers were artists, and brought an artistic vision to their work, so they were thinking of this as a tool for making expressive art. But the purposes for photography developed over time, portraiture being one of the most obvious (and we have a number of wonderful portraits in the exhibition). Then travel photography, like I was just mentioning, and the beginnings of photojournalism. There were also applications in the industrial context; for instance, we have a group of pictures made at the Sèvres porcelain manufactory [slide 11], because there were a group of artists involved in the making of the porcelain who were fascinated with photography. They realized they could make wonderful images that would promote the porcelains.

The exhibition focuses on work from England and France. What was going on in American photography at the time?

In America, the daguerreotype lasted for a longer period. It starts in America in the early 1840s, and there were several important daguerreotype studios. There was one very important one here in Boston, Southworth & Hawes, and we have an extensive collection of their work. Because Americans moved and traveled so much, and because the Civil War happened, there was a great need for portraits. So daguerreotypes and tintypes and ambrotypes — there was a big business in that, all the way until the 1860s. It just went in a slightly different direction, and then paper photography also started to take over here in the U.S. We’re focusing in this show just on the European photography, because it’s so cohesive as a body of material.

I think people will be particularly interested in the Lewis Carroll photograph [slide 1]. What’s the story behind it?

Well, first of all, that’s our newest acquisition, so we’re very proud of it. Lewis Carroll’s work has a market beyond the photography world, so these images are expensive.

Carroll was interested in photography, just like he was interested in his writing, and he made a number of photographs of little girls, including the real Alice. This particular picture shows the young girl who was really his favorite model; he photographed her the most. Her name was Alexandra Kitchin; her nickname was Xie [pronounced "Ex-ee"]. She apparently took an interest in his photo-making, and was patient; she would sit for these long exposures, and enjoyed the whole process. He used to say, “If you want to make a great photograph, you just have to put Xie in front of the camera.” She looks so sweet in this picture, reclining on that beautiful sofa with a book at her feet. It’s really quite beautiful.

Are there any other photos you’d like to single out as particularly special?

Yes. Another photo from the same section of the exhibition is the Nadar portrait of Jean Journet [slide 7]. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon Nadar was the best-known portrait photographer in France at that time. Whereas other photographers who had very active businesses in making portraits for customers might work with teams of assistants, Nadar would take hours for a single portrait. It wasn’t a quick one-off; he did it with great care. He photographed a lot of the most important people in arts and letters, and some friends. This particular picture is kind of unusual, because it’s of a very bohemian friend, Jean Journet, who was a street preacher. He had been painted by people like Courbet, and was beloved in the circle of artists at the time. Nadar’s picture makes him look like he’s in the garb of a Spanish baroque painting — and he’s looking up, like he’s receiving spiritual insight. It’s rather special.

We also have an early Hill & Adamson. [Octavius] Hill and [Robert] Adamson were a team of British photographers who learned Talbot’s process in the early 1840s, and made photographs of the fisher folk of Newhaven, and also of people around Edinburgh, where they lived. With their photos, there’s less emphasis on detail, and much more light and shadow; you can really tell that there was a painter involved — someone who was really thinking about the balance of light and shadow and the composition.

Actually, the Bisson Mont Blanc picture has a wonderful balance of light and shadow. It’s almost divided into quadrants of light and dark. Some of these pictures have a formalism — an abstract or formalist quality that seems almost modern to our eye.

The Gustave Le Gray seascape [slide 4] is special, too. Le Gray is one of the best known of these early photographers; this seascape in particular harks back to painting of the period. These early photographers had great difficulty recording the sky, because the sky was light and the clouds were moving and they had long exposure, so it would come out light in tone, or blotchy. They often painted out the sky so that it would appear just white in the background. But what Le Gray did was to sort of ingeniously piece in another negative of clouds, in a way that almost seemed deceptive. And this was a large print for his time — these pictures caused quite a stir, because they were so evocative and magisterial and amazing.

“Silver, Salt, and Sunlight: Early Photography in Britain and France” will be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from Feb. 7 through Aug. 19, 2012.

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Had you considered doing a swimming-pool themed photography exhibition before “Pacific Standard Time”?

I’d been thinking for a long time, actually — ever since graduate school — about trying to do an exhibition that investigated a theoretical concept: the notion that a place is both a real, topographic entity and an ideological construct … It’s just an idea I’ve been wanting to explore. When the opportunity came to apply for a grant to do an exhibition as part of this larger project looking at art in Southern California, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to begin to explore that idea.

When I started thinking about it … I realized that in many ways, in the post-war period, Southern California was the ideal of what the American dream was going to look like. At the center of that was the swimming pool, and suburban expansion, and the concept of everybody living in this place that didn’t have the danger of nature, but had all the benefits of the natural landscape. A place that was away from the city, but at the same time felt domesticated. I started thinking about the pool as the central icon of that both real and imaginary place. And it grew from there.

What do swimming pools say about Southern California in particular (that they don’t say, for instance, abut other parts of the country, such as the Midwest or New England)?

Well, in the immediate postwar period of the ’40s, ’50s and even ’60s, there weren’t that many swimming pools elsewhere. Maybe in Florida, which had a similar kind of expansion at that time. But Southern California was growing very rapidly in terms of suburbia in that period, and that expansion included houses that incorporated swimming pools. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in Seattle, and I envied Southern California — because in Seattle, in the summer, we would drag out our above-ground swimming pools and set them up and pretend that we lived the same kind of life that I imagined people in Southern California lived all the time. Thinking about kids my age in the ’70s growing up with swimming pools in their backyard and having this kind of experience as the norm for their life — that was a very seductive sensibility. I don’t think that that was unusual, when you look at how much Hollywood promoted itself and Southern California as an ideal for the country. You pretty much see it everywhere.

Two themes that seem immediately apparent in many of these images are architecture — that is, the houses or buildings we often see beside the pools — and sex.

The exhibition is divided into thematic groups. It does start with California architecture and design, because swimming pools were at the center of the way that mid-century architects here in Southern California were thinking about modern architecture. The pool created a very porous experience between indoor living and outdoor entertaining. These were houses literally built for entertaining, and the movement from the inside to the outside was part of how Southern California architecture was developed … The pool really allowed for fluid movement between those spaces. So architecture and design is certainly at the beginning of the way that you would want to think about pools, in the period from 1945 to 1982 in general, in Southern California.

In addition, this is a period in which … culture was creating an image for the Hollywood celebrity that was built around the pool. You see all of these images of Hollywood celebrities — supposedly just casual, unscripted moments. [But] none of those photographs are meant to do anything except promote the persona of the celebrity. They give you this impression that what you’re seeing is the “real” celebrity, when in fact you’re seeing the carefully narrated Hollywood persona that that celebrity is based on.

[Another section of the show focuses on] suburbia, and how much the private, backyard pool (as opposed to the public pool) was at the center of suburban life. There were some public pools in suburbia, but the ideal was a private, protected space; especially in the ’50s, it had very much to do with this notion that we Americans had a private experience — as opposed to the communal experience of the Soviet countries. When you look at what people circulated in terms of photographs, and even what they said about their own experience, it almost always revolved around things that they were doing in the backyard. If they were lucky enough, it revolved around a pool in the backyard. And as you say, because of the very nature of the fact that, when you’re around a pool, you’re wearing a swimsuit, it becomes an opportunity for the body to be on display.

[The final section of the exhibition is a conceptual one.] I wanted this show to be not just about these social topics, but also about what was happening in photography during the period. 1945 is a high modernist moment in photography, and the earliest photograph in the show is by Ruth Bernhard, who emigrated from Germany to escape the Nazis. She went first to New York and then to Southern California, and her images represent all of the things that you would expect in a high modernist photograph: … even though it’s representative, there’s a very abstract organization of the forms and the shapes in the image, because it’s done through high contrasts of light and dark.

As you move through the period, you get photography really blurring the boundary between popular culture and high culture, because photographs circulate in commercial advertising; they circulate in journalistic reporting; they exist in lifestyle magazines as well as in professional trade journals … all of those things in addition to showing up as fine art in museums.

Then, in the 1980s — that’s when photography goes big; that’s when Cindy Sherman’s photographs go up on the wall large, and Barbara Kruger’s imagery goes up big, and David Hockney first takes his smaller Polaroid images and montages them together into something large enough that it can go up on the wall and challenge painting as the dominant mode in contemporary art practice. You see this shift from a very high modernist fine art practice to color photography that we recognize as a part of postmodern contemporary art. That really literally happens from 1945 to 1982, so it spans the dates of this show. The conceptual section really shows you how photography used the pool, not as a subject, but as an opportunity to explore all kinds of developments in photography as an aesthetic mode itself.

The exhibition features several works by David Hockney — and several that were inspired by him (or even actually incorporate him [slide 10]). Can you talk a little about his art and influence?

[The Hockney photo in your slide show,] “John St. Clair Swimming,” [slide 9] is actually very small. It’s typical of a series of images he took; he used photography in the way that other artists might use a sketch or a prefatory painting: as a way to think about his compositions. That image of John St. Clair swimming became source material for a later famous painting by Hockney that is actually set in Italy. But that particular image [was taken in California].

When I decided to do this exhibition, I knew it had to have Hockney, because if you say “the swimming pool in Southern California,” the first thing that comes to almost everybody’s mind is Hockney. It’s ironic, though — I don’t think most people know that he only painted 15 paintings of swimming pools. They loom so large, because they circulated so widely through reproductions and in the popular imagination that people think he must have painted dozens of them. But he only did 15.

“Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945-1982″ is on display at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, Calif., through May 27, 2012.

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Over the phone, curator Dr. Graham Boettcher outlined the history and uses of these petite, jewel-like paintings. The accompanying slide show highlights some particularly splendid examples from an altogether remarkable collection.

Can you give us a brief history of these so-called “lover’s eyes”?

According to lore, the story of lover’s eyes goes back to the end of the 18th century, when the prince of Wales — who later became George IV — became smitten with a twice-widowed Catholic woman named Maria Fitzherbert. He courted Maria Fitzherbert rather unsuccessfully at first; he kept trying to win her affection and profess his undying love to her, and she wasn’t really going to have any of that. Finally, he staged a kind of half-hearted suicide attempt (I think it was more of a cry for help than an earnest effort to take his own life) — and then she reluctantly agreed to marry him. But shortly thereafter — I think really the next day — she came to her senses and realized what exactly she had done by consenting to marry the prince of Wales, which of course was totally illegal according to the laws (first of all, the king had to consent to the marriage of the heir to the throne, and second, he would never have consented for the prince to marry a Catholic, let alone a twice-widowed Catholic six years his senior).

So Fitzherbert fled to the Continent, trying to escape George’s attention, but he didn’t give up. On Nov. 3, 1785, the prince wrote to Mrs. Fitzherbert with a second proposal of marriage. Instead of sending an engagement ring, as we might expect today, he sent her a picture of his own eye, set in a locket, painted by the miniaturist Richard Cosway, one of the celebrated artists of the day. At the time, they referred to these pieces as “eye miniatures”; today we call them “lover’s eyes,” but that wasn’t a period term — that’s a term coined by the New York-based jeweler Edith Weber, who’s handled a lot of these over the years.

Anyway, George sent a note with this eye miniature, and it said: “P.S. I send you a parcel, and I send you at the same time an eye. If you have not totally forgotten the whole countenance, I think the likeness will strike you.” It’s not known whether it was the letter or the eye that changed Mrs. Fitzherbert’s feelings precisely, but shortly after that, she returned to England and married the prince in a secret ceremony on Dec. 15, 1785. Soon, the fad for these eye miniatures began to catch on — so this episode is, according to legend, the genesis of the eye miniature.

There is some evidence to suggest that these had appeared in France a few years earlier, and that the Brits were only adopting a French invention; I think the jury’s still out. In any event, the love affair between the prince of Wales and Maria Fitzherbert popularized these objects and spawned a fad that lasted well into the 1830s — and even later, past Queen Victoria, who was known to have commissioned a number of these objects during her reign. There are even artists to this very day who are painting lover’s eyes. One is the great-great-grandson of the famous Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully; he’s sent me a picture of a miniature he’s working on. Rather than paint on elephant ivory, which of course wouldn’t be legal nowadays, he paints on mastodon ivory. He also points out that he usually has them commissioned by faithful spouses, not lovers or mistresses.

The original idea was that, by only showing an eye, these miniatures would effectively conceal the identity of the person who was shown, right? This way, the miniatures could be worn or exhibited publicly?

Exactly. Only someone with really intimate acquaintance — a lover, a spouse, a close family member — would recognize an individual’s eye, so they could be worn in a more open way. They didn’t have to be encased inside of a locket. There are rare instances in which we do know the identity of the subject, because of an iron-clad provenance or documentation, but typically we can only tell if there’s an inscription.

Some of the eyes in the Skier Collection have inscriptions that reveal the identity of the sitter, but still, oftentimes these will be fairly generic; it’ll just say the name of the individual — and if it’s a memorial piece, it might give the date they died and how old they were. Through genealogical research, we’ve been able to discover the identity of certain people, but some of the names are a little too generic; we’re only able to establish certain identity in a handful of cases — and I think that’s by design. That was really the intent of these things, to keep the identities secret.

How did the Skiers start collecting these objects?

Nan and David Skier started collecting “lover’s eyes” about 20 years ago — and I think you’ll love this detail: David Skier is a prominent opthamologist here in Birmingham. So he’s someone who deals with eyes all day long. They came across their first lover’s eye at an antique show in Boston, and were just utterly captivated by it. (The first eye that they saw was a really exquisitely rendered one: quite early, from 1790, with a blue enamel surrounding — often associated with eyes that were commissioned by and for the nobility. It’s also encrusted with diamonds and pearls.)

For 20 years, the Skiers have quietly built what is really thought by all who have been asked — all who would know — to be the largest collection of these materials in the world. Larger than any institutional collection, certainly. Larger than the collection of the Queen herself.

When the “Antiques Roadshow” came to Birmingham, one of the appraisers on the show, Barry Weber (to whom the catalog is dedicated — he passed away recently) approached the Skiers about doing an educational segment on lover’s eyes, and of course they were happy to share their collection; that was the first time the collection received any sort of notoriety.

And this is the first time this collection has been exhibited in a museum?

That’s correct. This is the largest exhibition of its kind. There are certainly a few museums here and in Britain that have small collections of lover’s eyes but display them with their permanent collection; I think Philadelphia has about 30 or so eyes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a few in their collection, as do the Royal Collection and the Victoria & Albert in London. But this collection is three times larger than any institutional collection.

Because these things are tiny, I think a natural impulse on the part of exhibition designers would be to put them all in one case — but then you can take them all in in an instant, which doesn’t really do justice to the artistry that went into making these. Each one is so carefully rendered, and they all tell very different stories.

“Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection” will be on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Ala., from Feb. 7 through June 10, 2012.

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First, can you tell me a little about the Hill collection? How and why did the Hills start collecting walking sticks?

The Hills have been collecting folk art in this area for almost 40 years. They also have an art gallery. Their business is two-pronged; their specialties are modern and contemporary art, and then — equally and oppositely — American folk art. They were really a part of the whole late-’60s, early-’70s rediscovery of American folk art, and early on — by the mid-’70s — they had discovered the idiom of the carved walking stick. At that time, this was not a well-known category of folk art production, but they kept finding these rather remarkable and unique things, and so they started collecting them.

[It started as an informal] collection of curiosities, but they’ve been collecting seriously for about 35 years. They see this material not just as whimsical folk art, but as a form of fairly serious folk sculpture — something that has a message in terms of understanding modern and contemporary sculpture. This is the first time that they’ve exhibited these walking sticks in public. We’re showing about 105 works … When you get that many of these things in a large gallery, properly lit and presented, they’re really quite impressive.

The Hills are unique collectors in that they have an interest in folk art, but a grounding in modern art. They see this material as a kind of crossover form of folk art — something that’s been theirs to explore, theirs to think about and theirs to really define over the time that they’ve been involved in collecting.

You’re presenting these pieces as sculptures. Were any of them ever actually used as walking sticks?

That’s an interesting question, and it was my first question to the Hills: Are these things purely decorative, or were they made for people with impairments? It turns out that they are honorific, fashioned for personal adornment — these are not, by and large, things that were made for people with difficulty walking. They’re more spectacular than that, they’re more personal than that, and in many instances, they’re also more cultural than that. I found in putting the material together that there was a strain of walking stick that was highly personal; the themes were very individualized and the stories were narratives that were coded into the forms of the stick — we can’t really ever know completely what the authors had in mind.

There’s an equal and opposite strain that serves a social purpose — for example, there are sticks carved with all of the symbols of various fraternal organizations, telling you immediately that the carrier of this or that particular stick is a member of the local Masonic lodge or the local Odd Fellows lodge. Some address religious subjects; some deal with political sentiments — a lot of them are very nationalistic and patriotic in their symbols — and many commemorate military service. What I guess I’m saying is that these things were social and very public — they were more or less paraded, rather than used for physical support.

Many of the artists whose work is featured in this exhibition are anonymous. What do we know about when, where and by whom these sticks were made?

My own sense is that, in the true folk-art tradition, this was work made by individuals in a given folk community, or within a given locale, for consumption in that same given locale. I’d say most of the time the artists are anonymous. There’s not a lot of history — we don’t have names of specific makers. But the Hills were able to gather works by at least five or six known makers — known in the sense that the hand can be recognized, or the works have been very audaciously signed. There’s a whole section of the exhibition given over to multiple examples from the same maker, to suggest that these artists — like other trained artists — worked in series, produced more than one work addressed to the same subject, and in a sense attempted to better their best or improve on their ideas. I think this is very interesting, because a lot of people seem to think that folk art is a one-off thing — you know, somebody gets an impulse in the morning and says, “Gee, I’ll carve something today,” then puts it aside or gives it to their kid and that’s the end of it. Not so. These are real tours de force of knife-work, painting and image-organizing (which is to say, the whole composition of the cane itself) — and what’s interesting is that it’s a very restricted format. Think about trying to make an unusual and unique work of sculpture out of a 34-inch stick. You’re starting with something that’s pretty limited to begin with. What I like about the sticks in this collection is that the best artists were able to make something quite transcendent — something that went way beyond what would seem to be the inherent and absolute limits built into the medium.

This exhibition is really about the issue of sculpture. And it talks about sculpture as being somewhat different from what we traditionally think of as art — when we’re thinking about paintings, for instance. A simple example: A painter in a studio looking at a white canvas is starting with emptiness and filling it up with an idea or an image. We get that, and we understand that as kind of miraculous, and we respect the creativity in it. But the carver — particularly the carver of a walking stick — begins with something that’s already there. Perhaps they found a gnarled root along the path walking through the woods … It suggests a form, it suggests an idea; they reach down, and in the act of standing it up or picking it up or taking it home, they have already determined to transform it. This exhibition talks about sculpture as an art not of pure creation, but of transformation — and that’s very interesting when we start to think about the whole history of sculpture: Michelangelo’s transforming a block of marble into David, Rodin’s transforming a lump of clay into the Thinker, and then these folk artists transforming found objects, cast-off sticks and roots, into all kinds of things.

One of the canes in our slide show features a crucifixion scene [slide 2]. Is Christianity a common theme in the collection?

Well, these canes did come from folk communities, and in many instances out of local traditions that were pretty conservative — and yes, the conservative beliefs and the conservative mores of a community are often coded into these things. The Hills have one cane with the entire Lord’s Prayer developed around the stick as a kind of spiral of information, with all the text in raised letters and then little figures that illustrate different aspects of the prayer; there’s another one that recounts part of the book of Genesis in text and figuration. There’s also one that has a saint’s head at the top — clearly, that’s a piece from the West and comes out of that Hispanic Southwestern tradition of Catholicism. I should think that crucifixion piece, on the other hand, is probably from the southern U.S. and represents a fundamentalist interpretation of the New Testament. We do find that imagery on walking sticks; other examples are known.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I see the exhibition as having two thrusts. The first we discussed a little bit — the business of the whole thing as a meditation on sculpture and the uniqueness of sculpture as an art form. The other has to do with the exhibition being a kind of a survey of what it is that energizes folk art — what it is that comprises folk art that is compelling. I think this exhibition tells us that folk art is often very personal, but always very local and regional. And that the shared values, the shared mores, the shared stories that are passed around within a given folk community, tend to come full circle and inform the imagery on a lot of these walking sticks. So on the one hand, we’re talking about a sculpture process that’s kind of universal — and on the other, we’re talking about a content narrative that is often extremely local and regional and personal. It’s the local knowledge that goes into many of these pieces that I think drives the imagery and makes them endlessly arresting. A number of people have walked into the exhibition and said, “Oh, my granddad used to whittle. I think we have something like this at home!” This is not unusual; folk art is kind of everywhere, though I wouldn’t want to suggest that it’s common. How many people out of a hundred actually would take the time to transform a gnarled root into a crucifixion in the form of a walking staff?

“Carved and Whittled Sculpture: American Folk Art Walking Sticks from the Hill Collection” is on display at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, through April 1.

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Over the phone, organizers Michael Carriere and David Schalliol explained why they think Milwaukee in particular is at the “cutting edge” of the 21st-century renewal; check out the following slide show for some of Schalliol’s evocative images of life and work in the Wisconsin city’s evolving urban landscape.

First of all, can you explain the basic premise of your project? How did the two of you start working together?

MC: It started around two and a half years ago. I’m an urban historian by training, but I had really gotten attached to the topic of how the financial crisis was impacting the built environment of American cities. I teach in Milwaukee, so the story is all around my office.

From a historical perspective, I was interested in trying to start at the moment of urban renewal in cities like Milwaukee, and then push it forward to try to create a narrative for the latter half of the 20th century — to historicize the idea of urban crisis. But just looking at what cities like Milwaukee were doing, I found it really inspiring. I found myself drawn to people who were interacting with the urban environment in ways that I didn’t expect — turning what one person would see as an abandoned building into, say, a working urban farm. It complicated the narrative [of urban abandonment] in ways that I found incredibly exciting, and even exhilarating. I wanted to document what I found in ways beyond the written word — and that’s when I reached out to David, whose photography I had admired for quite some time.

DS: I’m a Ph.D. student in sociology, and I also teach in Chicago. Michael and I are interested in similar issues, but I go about [my work] in a different way. Some of the straight sociological work that I’ve been doing has really focused on the built environment, how individuals pursue the built environment, and what kinds of actions are being taken, given a particular understanding of that environment. One component of that work is photographic: For the last several years, I’ve been spending a lot of time, particularly on the South Side and West Side of Chicago, looking at what’s been happening in the neighborhoods that have been most affected by industrialization, racial change and so on.

In the course of this work, I was bumping into some of the same kinds of things that Michael was finding and engaging. For example, I was finding these places where people had discovered abandoned buildings, figured out how to get hold of them, and then tried to use them for something really unusual or different. I was already engaged and beginning to do a little bit of documentation of that work when Michael got in touch with me, and we started talking about how to take these [local] ideas and think about them in a national framework.

At the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee, we’re pulling this national idea back into a specific locality — examining all of the social factors that are at work, as well as the actions of people on the ground, and seeing how it’s all coming together in one particular place.

Which other cities will you be featuring in your work? Where else might you try to mount an exhibition?

DS: We’ve been involved in research in about 30 cities, at this point — from Albuquerque, N.M., to Providence, R.I. [In terms of mounting similar shows outside Milwaukee,] we’ve reached out to people in New Orleans, and we’ve also been talking to people in Chicago — both institutions and individuals. But one of the things that’s really exciting to us is the idea of actually working with the organizations [we've studied in each particular city]; that’s something that may take a little bit longer than doing a typical installation.

Michael told me in an email that he thinks Milwaukee is at the “cutting edge of a potential redefinition of [work and labor] in the 21st century.” Why do you think that is? Other cities — like Detroit — tend to get a lot of media play; is Milwaukee under-recognized in this sense, do you think?

MC: I think it is. That’s not to say that what’s happening in Detroit isn’t exciting, or shouldn’t be covered. But I think Milwaukee is particularly interesting when it comes to one of the topics often addressed in stories about Detroit and other cities: urban agriculture. Here in Milwaukee, we’ve had Growing Power since 1993; on the heels of the recession of the early ’90s, you have a man called Will Allen taking over a derelict property, and turning it into a viable urban farm that’s now been in existence for close to 20 years. You also have people like James Godsil at Sweet Water Organics, who have brought what Will Allen was doing to the next level in terms of technology (Sweet Water uses “aquaponics,” a system wherein plants and fish are raised symbiotically).

I think Sweet Water’s example is particularly useful for two reasons. It represents not only the reclamation of a building itself — they’re in an old Harneschfeger factory building on the south side of the city, and they definitely see the [cultural] value of keeping the building around — but also the idea of bringing productive work back to that building.

In the neighborhood around Sweet Water, there are a lot of old factory buildings — a lot of old tanneries being converted into lofts and living spaces. That’s OK, but what we really like about Sweet Water, and what they’re very adamant about, is that they want to make these spaces productive again. They see themselves as part of a narrative of production in the city of Milwaukee. They see themselves as being in touch with the [industrial past], but working in a way that speaks to the needs of the 21st century. For me, Sweet Water is a really nice symbol of why Milwaukee matters. It doesn’t cover over our history of industrialization, but it’s able to take what is positive from that era — a beautiful, functional building — and turn it into something new.

DS: I think one of the other things that’s really important about Milwaukee — and you can see it again in the Sweet Water example — is that the city itself has reached out and become engaged in thinking about how it can support many of these initiatives. This is something that we’re seeing other cities come around to, but I think Milwaukee is really in a position where it’s been more flexible — it’s been more outwardly supportive (financially and otherwise) to these institutions than other cities have been.

Do you think the revitalization of industrial space — the creation of workspaces, and therefore also work — is especially relevant in America today?

DS: I think there are a variety of ways in which these projects are important to people who aren’t directly involved in them. The first part has to do with the way that work has been transformed in the last 30 or 40 years, as more and more jobs have moved out to the suburbs, adding ring-like areas around cities. That’s really changed the way work patterns have played out in central cities. One of the main problems on the south and west sides of Chicago, and of course in many central cities in the U.S., is that the jobs that brought so many people to the cities just aren’t there anymore. And by taking these former industrial sites and transforming them into something else, these same focal points for productive work activity can help fill roles that have been increasingly absent.

MC: Right. To me it comes back to this idea of “reclamation,” which I think speaks directly to the current climate. Indeed, I can see the roots of the Occupy movement in some of the things we’ve been seeing around the country for the past two and a half years. The idea of reclaiming ideas of work, or spaces of work … In Miami, you have groups like Take Back the Land reclaiming housing — and they were doing this years before the Occupy movement started to consider occupying public space or foreclosed homes. We see art projects in cities across the country that are using foreclosed homes as their canvases, so to speak. For me, this is a potentially transformative moment. And what we hear people talk about who are doing this is the idea of returning urban space back to the people that it was meant to serve. For someone who studies the history of urban renewal, that’s incredibly exciting. So I’ve come to see a lot of this as a kind of corrective for many of the ways that policy impacted cities throughout the 20th century.

One thing we constantly heard from people [revitalizing urban spaces] around the country was, “I wish I knew of other people doing this,” or “I feel like I’m really alone in this.” So one of the things that excites me about this project is the idea of allowing these people first to know about each other, and then also to find some way of working with each other. [There are so many] Occupy people who know that something is wrong, but don’t know what to do with their energy; [we'd like to show them that] there are things already happening that would be a perfect fit for them.

Finally, [what I like about David's photography] is that, while there are pictures of derelict or abandoned properties, it doesn’t (for me) fall into the realm of “abandonment porn.” You don’t feel like a voyeur when you look at David’s pictures; you feel  empathetic — you feel like you want to connect with that landscape in a way that simply isn’t gawking at a damaged environment. And starting from that point, when David starts to bring in human subjects, it really does show how and why these faces matter.

“Working Legacies: The Death and (After) Life of Post-Industrial Milwaukee” is on display at the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Grohmann Museum, in Milwaukee, Wis., through Feb. 6. Versions of the show may then travel on to other cities.

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Over the phone, curator Michelle Finamore explained the history behind America’s cocktail romance — and described some of the more distinctive objects in the exhibition. Take a peek at cocktail culture’s historical accouterments in the slide show that follows.

What was the inspiration for this exhibition?

Well, the real inspiration came from an exhibition that was done at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. They did a version of this last year, and it was supposed to travel to the Norton. Something fell through, so what they decided to do at the Norton was basically to re-create the exhibition from scratch. They hired me to do that. I’m a fashion historian, and I’m very interested in food history as well, so this was just the perfect fusion of everything I love. And the timing is so perfect for an exhibition like this; there’s such a big revival of interest in classic cocktail culture.

How is cocktail culture regarded by historians and art historians? There does seem to be revived interest in cocktails in pop culture — but is there a lot of scholarship devoted to this subject?

[The study of cocktail culture] is kind of a new thing, I think, in many ways. One thing I tried to do with the exhibit was touch upon all sorts of different media. I think that is what’s unique about our concept; it hasn’t been done from this perspective. We have everything from clothes and film clips and photography and fashion illustration to … a little sketch by a contemporary surrealist painter. What I tried to do was to break down the boundaries between all of those things. That’s what made it appealing: the chance to think about it much more broadly. And then the more you dig, and the more you look, the more you realize that there’s a huge diversity you can’t incorporate.

One of the challenges I had with this exhibit was that I only had about a six-month time frame to pull it all together, which is unusual; usually, for museum exhibitions, you’re planning two or three years out. If I had had a little more time, I might have started it slightly earlier. As it was, I started in the 1920s, because when I think about how clothing reflects the social position of women, it really does start in the ’20s — that’s when they start actively participating in cocktail culture. There were things called “tango teas” in the 1910s, where women would actually go out pre-dinner-hour and dance the tango and drink tea, and sometimes alcohol was served. But by the ’20s, for instance, you have the prototypical flapper. They’ve gained the right to vote, they’re very independent; it’s very much a youth-culture-oriented era, and they’re out there drinking, they’re dancing, they’re smoking, they’re starting to get into cars. I think that’s a good starting point for the show, especially in terms of the history of the cocktail dress.

What’s the newest item in the show?

Let’s see. We actually have a whole platform of contemporary dresses; I would say the most modern thing is a Miu Miu dress from this season.

The Alexander McQueen show at the Met earlier this year was so popular — did that inspire you to incorporate a lot of clothing in this show?

Originally, as it was conceived at RISD, this really was a fashion exhibition that encompassed other things. I’ve been working in [fashion history] for a long time now, and I really think [fashion] reflects so much of what is happening culturally and socially and aesthetically. [Still,] you cannot deny the fact that that Alexander McQueen show helps the field immensely. It helps fashion exhibitions immensely. That was a phenomenal success … And it will affect what happens in the future with museum exhibitions and fashion, certainly.

What would you say is the most unusual or distinctive piece in the exhibition?

That’s a tough call. There’s a little sterling silver Tiffany vermouth dropper, which looks like an oil can. It’s really kind of a sweet little thing; it’s one of these objects that I wouldn’t have known too much about if I hadn’t pulled this show together. We have a lot of material from the Tiffany archive; this vermouth dropper actually happened to come from a private lender. It’s a wonderful bar accessory that’s also a beautiful object. That’s probably from the ’50s or ’60s.

Then we have some really wonderful cocktail shakers from the ’30s. Around that time, you see a virtual explosion of all these different fun yet functional forms of cocktail shakers. We have one that’s a monoplane, with two flasks that are the wings — and inside are little cups and spoons that sit under the wheels. It’s a very compact, streamlined, wonderful — and functional! — thing.

We also have the cocktail shaker signed by Charlie Lindbergh that was used when he did a reconnaissance mission in Central America. It was signed by him and Anne Morrow, as well as the two archaeologists who were also present on the mission.

Finally, I have a little cocktail napkin from the Prohibition era that says “More beer, less taxes.” (Income tax is directly related to Prohibition [since during Prohibition no revenue could be drawn from alcohol tax].)

“Cocktail Culture” is on display at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., through March 11, 2012.

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