It's the American Idol ideal—if only someone would open the door, you, too, could stride through fame's threshold. (Funny no one's dreamed up a summer series: So You Think You're Picasso?) But, of course, the fame American Idol dangles before its hopefuls eventually resolves into American Idols Live at the Illinois State Fair (Kelly Clarkson notwithstanding). There's a reason why no one discovered those Idols. There's art and there's Art.
Still, the Idol analogy only carries so far. You can be a competent and engaging local artist just as surely as you can be a talented local rock singer or church organist or lounge pianist. Take, for instance, Susanne Forestieri or Roberta Baskin Shefrin, both gifted artists represented in LVAM's Round-Up. Forestieri's loosely impressionistic paintings and Shefrin's elegant sculptures are familiar to followers of the local art scene, and their works have been shown at LVAM before. Three years ago, during a director interregnum, consulting director and local gallerist Joe Palermo brought a Henderson Art Association show of works by the two women to LVAM. At the time he said the show neatly filled a gap in the schedule, but it also raised an age-old question about the relations between art museums and local artists.
Many American art museums, like LVAM, started as local artists' guilds. LVAM held its first round-up at its Lorenzi Park home in 1951. At some point, however, all art museums have to decide whether they are instruments for promoting local artists or venues for presenting the best national and international art to the public. For years, even as it presented nonlocal art, LVAM seemed to cling to a revanchist love of beauty, realism and sentiment, those treasured motives of the Sunday painter. Under new consulting executive director Libby Lumpkin, LVAM appears to be moving away from that notion.
Let's be clear—some fine local artists, such as Shefrin or Forestieri, have national careers, too. And some who never breach the local frontier make questing or idiosyncratic artworks. The Round-Up offers plenty of evidence, from Chad Brown's "Visit," a large oil painting of a layered desert landscape, which won the Wally Goodman and Patrick Duffy Award for Best in Show; to Samuel Davis's "Untitled (Escape Pod)," a fanciful swept-wing vehicle in glistening auto paint, which took third place for sculpture. (Long Beach-based curator Jeffrey Ryan served as juror.)
But most of the work here, while technically adept and even imaginative, is just that. Alfred Schreiner's digital photograph, "40 to Flagstaff," centers a tractor-trailer in a side-view mirror, with clouds spread over the car window in a gold-ocher landscape. Patricia L. Caspary won a first-place award with a watercolor, "Snow in Las Vegas, NV," that makes skilled use of negative space—blank white paper representing the snow on palm fronds. These are splendid works of art. But take it from one who has spent years making pleasant photographs of buildings and trees and mountains, something else, another step, is needed to make Art. Something yet unseen, something that seizes the mind or grips the gut.
An argument can be made that the capital "A" has been awarded to much that is merely trendy or provocative, and that some of the fervor that animates most local artists is sorely needed at the higher elevations of the art world. Duly noted. That's why it's a good thing that LVAM continues the round-up tradition. It's more than a pacifier for those who feel their homegrown locals gallery has been sacrificed on the Altar of Highfalutin' Ideas. It reminds the organization of its roots, to be sure, and it reminds the gallery-going public that museum-quality Art derives from the sort of zeal that moves local artists who may never see, who might not even want, that capital "A."
And what of the argument that a local museum should show what the local public wants? Doesn't the public get to vote for American Idol winners? Well, yes, but only after the "experts" winnow away the chaff. That's why shows like this have jurors. Perhaps instead of awards, however, the museum could, à la Idol, give the top winners a show in the museum's main gallery, instead of the cattle-call arrangement spread through three adjunct spaces. It could be a chance for the local artist to be an Artist.