In Search of Lucas Samaras
Topic: Art
This evening I was visiting at the studio of Clarity, a couple of collaborative artists who teach and make art in the Lincoln Street Center for Arts and Education where I have a small classroom/studio. We were discussing art and teaching and something about our talk reminded me of the work of Lucas Samaras - yes, they had just started making jars of memories, like a book in a jar or a ship in a bottle. I said Samaras had made a wonderful series of boxes made of pins and colors. The Museum of Modern Art had had a show of these years ago, and a former drawing teacher from art school, Kim Levin, had written a book on him, his art... Clarity would check out Samaras.

I've since googled Samaras for my own curiosity and could find only a few images similar to the boxes I'd seen. I followed most all the links that Artcylopedia offered. It took quite a few tries before finding these pieces at the Tate Gallery, London. I did find a box made of pins at the National Gallery of Australia.

But before I found the good stuff on Samaras, I googled Levin. (I hadn't yet found the right search words for Samaras so I thought Levin would yield something.) Turns out she has been an art critic for the Village Voice in NYC for the past twenty years (I don't keep up on the art world) and has an installation? at the Feldman Gallery,NYC, Notes and Itineraries. Every week she has made the rounds of countless NYC galleries to compile her compact review listings and kept notes and itineraries of these visits on the gallery cards mailed to her. This ephemera of her travels around the NYC art scene is mounted on the walls of the gallery where one can trace her paths through the last twenty years of art's story in NYC galleries.