Cindy's Here: Art & Music

A few years ago, my longest known Cindy started a tradition of coming to Tahoe for a Summer Vacation. After gathering her at Sacramento International Airport, we headed for art ogling before returning to our little cabin in the pines.

Our quest for a quality art experience found us at the Crocker Art Museum... a place I have admired for years. Its history started with the activities of the Sacramento philanthropists Edwin Bryant Crocker and his wife Margaret in the mid 1800s. Their interest in art led to a European trip, in 1869–1871, where they collected 701 paintings and 1,344 Master Drawings to display in their art gallery. They also commissioned a large number of paintings from artists working in California.

Although this was a private collection—the largest in the United States at the time—the Crockers enriched their growing community by providing citizens with opportunities to view the works of art that they had acquired. The Art Gallery, as it was then known, came to be prized by Sacramentans, and in response, Margaret Crocker generously donated the gallery building and its collection to the City of Sacramento in 1885, forming the first public art museum west of the Mississippi.

Today, the Museum consists of the historic house and gallery structures, as well as the contemporary Teel Family Pavilion, which more than tripled the Museum's size in 2010. Here we were invited to "Experience innovative interactions with art. With three floors and 15 unique gallery spaces to explore, discover a diverse collection of art that spans centuries, continents, and cultures. There is always something surprising to find at the Crocker.

Helen Victoria Crocker Potter Russell was the daughter of William H. Crocker, E. B. Crocker's nephew and founder of the Crocker Bank. She sat for this portrait in Paris where she and her sister Ethel Mary were sent there after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The artist, Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931), along with John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, dominated society portraiture. Boldini studied in Florence at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where he met artists in a group known as the Macchiaiuoli. Their loose brushwork and attention to color were influential on Boldini's own distinctive style. We were asked to "LOOK FOR: Petals fallen from her bouquet. Helen later founded the Arboretum in Golden Gate Park."

There was something about Boldini's (1875) A Lute Player and a Listener that I really liked. The attention to detail impressed.

California-based glass artist Marvin Lipofsky (1938–2016) helped reinvent the challenging material of glass through experiments in scale, color, and technique. Presenting approximately 40 artworks, Marvin Lipofsky Blows Glass includes the Crocker Art Museum’s collection of Lipofsky’s works, featuring 1960s sculptures from his California Loop Series and groupings of his signature open forms from later in the century and beyond that recall curves, shapes, and colors found in nature.

Art museums allow us to really exam a work and appreciate it that much more. Upon first glance, Warming Up In the Plaza (2022) looks like a painting but Erick Medel did not use oils to make this beautiful piece, he used polyester thread on denim. Yes, it is sewn!

Close observation allowed me to look at his labor-intensive practice "which is meant to pay tribute to the hard work of immigrant laborers". Wow.

Federico Uribe's Pinch also surprised when closely studied.

His art is described as unpredictable and frequently repetitive in an almost compulsive way. He collects and combines objects of daily use into whimsical constructions of form, texture, and color. This amazing piece is made of colored pencils.

Bombed Mosque (2010) by Al Farrow, was something one had to really study and absorb. "The artist uses guns and ammunition to create miniature cathedrals, mausoleums, mosques, reliquaries and synagogues. Colorful copper, brass and steel bullets line entrances to sacred spaces, shape domes and create buttresses and minarets in a beautiful but disturbing way. Farrow is a social commentator, and through these pieces, he expresses what he sees as the hypocrisy and dissolution of true religion."

I have admired this massive painting before. It is difficult for me to explain the complexity of Stephen J. Kaltenbach's Portrait of My Father. The artist labored for seven years, in a California barn, to create this testament to life, love, and the loss confronting us all. It is light, color and intertwining arabesques. It is beauty

And then you find pure whimsy! Big Girl (Yellow). The artist, Richard Jackson is a local Sacramento boy. What fun.

Both of these pieces made Cindy and I remember the toys of our youth. How disappointed we were when our plastic toys didn't come out of the molds just right. Yoram Wolberger is making a commentary on "the ways in which stereotypes deny historical circumstances and have ignored the diversity of Native America people". For me, however, the beauty of art is the affect it has on the beholder.

These two sculptures made me nostalgic and I like that.

I've done a deep dive on Viola Frey before. Ms. Frey is known worldwide for her monumental sculptures that exploded traditional limitations on ceramic sculpture and placed her among the top of the male-dominated ceramics culture in California in the 1960s.

The genre I was most enamored with, on this visit, was Ceramics.

The Crocker holds one of the country’s largest collections of ceramics.

The Museum’s ceramics collection, with more than 5,000 examples, encompasses many cultures, time periods, and idioms. The collection records major movements that have shaped the history of ceramics. Work ranges from vessels and figurative funerary ware from Asia and the ancient Americas to 18th-century Meissen porcelain tableware, 19th-century American art pottery to internationally acknowledged Funk sculpture. The Crocker holds a large collection of Native American pottery both historic and contemporary, particularly Pueblo pottery from the Southwest.

I was incredibly impressed by Marilyn Anne Levine, an artist known for realistic rendering of leather objects in clay. She was a master of trompe-l’oeil and considered no detail too small to be given close attention. In 1969 she created a process that added chopped nylon fiber to a stoneware body that gave the ceramic pieces she created an authentic leathery look.