New Creativity in New Media


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June 3rd 2011
Published: February 28th 2012
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Butler Institute of American Art





Today I visited only one site, but it is an important one: The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio.

This museum is the premier institutional collector of new media artwork in the country.

In addition to the new media work, the museum also has a through collection of American Art from 1900 and later.

This museum is what I like small art museums to be, deep and specialized.




The traditional painting is organized by theme.

Many of them rotate.

When I was there, they had a show on marine painting over time.

It starts with traditional seascapes, ending up with work so abstract it’s hard to recognize as a picture of waves.

Another show was on geometric abstraction.

It combined color field painting from the early 1950s, hard-edged abstraction from the early 1960s, and op art pieces.

Most of the latter were done by Cleveland artists, who all studied together at the Cleveland Art Institute.

Why can’t the Cleveland Art Museum have a show on them?

The star painting of this section was Bisected Red Violet by Cleveland native Richard Anuszkiewicz.




There was a show on sports as subject.

The paintings were mostly realistic pictures of athletes in games, but there were also more abstract works that tried to picture the energy of a sports event.

Finally, there was a show on new realism, pictures of real things done by artists since 1970.

Photorealism shows up, along with the psychological portraits that were so popular in the 1980s.

The highlight of this show was Stairway to the Sea by Will Barnet, a picture of the artist sitting on a California lifeguard stand at sunset.

The entire picture is done in only four colors; one each for sea, sand, sky, and shadow.

It’s a highly realistic picture that also borders on abstraction.


New Media Artwork





The new media work was even better.

New media in this context means work done with nontraditional materials, often electronics or computers.

This work is still considered highly radical, even though it has been around for at least thirty years.

One consequence is that the work is still mostly appreciated by a sophisticated group of practitioners and connoisseurs, who make quite an effort to analyze and collect it.

Part of the goals of this museum is to bridge the gap between this group and the broader art community.




The works here are also organized into thematic shows.

The first was on light as medium.

It featured artists who manipulate light through colored glass, special plastic, and other means to create an impression on the viewer.

Much of the resulting work is highly ethereal in nature and has spiritual overtones.

One artist used sheets of transparent Mylar folded in various ways to create patterns of diffuse light along the walls.

The text describes it as a meditative space.

Yet another artist created squares of wavy polished ceramic.

At first, they appear to have nothing to do with a light show.

Get close, and patterns of reflections appear on the surface, distorted by the curves.

Fun house mirrors have done this for years, of course, but none are aesthetically pleasing as these pieces.

Finally, artist Stephen Knapp used colored glass to create multi-colored shafts of lights on the wall, intersecting and merging at various angles.

The final result looked like an abstract expressionist action painting turned into glowing light.

For me, this was one of the most amazing pieces in the entire museum.




Another show on display was holographic works.

They have been made since the 1970s, and the museum has a wide range of them.

One unique aspect of holograms over sculpture is that the artist controls the detail level and viewing angle, and can use this to enhance the effect of the work.

The show highlighted this.

The best piece for me was a detailed hologram of tree branches, which required incredible skill to get the sharp details.




The center also has some unusual sculpture.

Most visitors at this point are familiar with kinetic sculptures where little balls roll through a maze like track, triggering things as they go.

The museum has one of the earliest examples of this type, by artist George Rhoads.

It has a piece of steel covered with tiny mirrors.

The viewer's perception of the work changes as they move around it.

The museum also has a cylindrical sculpture that viewers are requested to spin very fast.

When they do so, a figure of a walking robot appears through slots in the cylinder.

In the 1890s, these types of cylinders were found worldwide with drawings inside them, the zoetrope; they were the first animated films.

The twist behind this one is that the robot figures are actual sculptures within the cylinder.

The drawn version has been replace by a three dimensional one.




I really enjoyed my time at the Butler.

It does exactly what a small museum should do, a deep focus on areas that other museums have overlooked.

Thanks to its commitment to new media, it is one of the most important art museums in the state of Ohio.

I spent quite a bit of time here.

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28th February 2012

Free admission at Butler art museum in Youngstown
Thanks for your visit! We are glad you liked the museum--please let others know that admission and parking are free daily. Come back soon! Kathy (Butler director of PR-full disclosure!)

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