This week I watched a huge and pristine art-shipping truck rumble back down my driveway after collecting and crating my piece “That First Peony”, then carrying it off to begin the first leg of its journey to Riga, Latvia.
That First Peony ©2007 Elizabeth Fram
In late March I was contacted by one of the curators from the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies program, asking if I would be willing to loan this piece to the U.S. Embassy in Riga for two years. I was honored and beyond thrilled to say yes! And now the piece is finally on its way.
If you are unfamiliar with Art in Embassies, I encourage you to visit their website. I believe the exhibition in Riga should appear on the site once all the work has been compiled and installed. In a nutshell:
The AIE program was established by the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, and formalized as a part of the Department of State by the Kennedy Administration in 1963. It is one of the United States’ premier public-private partnership arts organizations, with over 20,000 individual and institutional participants, and a presence in some 200 venues in 189 countries worldwide. AIE furthers U.S. diplomacy through the power of the visual arts by expansive, international cultural exchange initiatives.
As then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton affirmed during a recognition luncheon marking AIE’s 50th anniversary, “Advancing U.S. values and interests sometimes requires old-fashioned diplomacy, such as meetings with foreign leaders, or using new technology to reach out to people and ‘give them a voice’. But art is also a tool of diplomacy. It is one that reaches beyond governments, past all of the official conference rooms and the presidential palaces, to connect with people all over the world.”
To be able to participate in such a legacy is an enormous privilege.
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There was an interesting article about Chuck Close in the Times this week in case you didn’t see it: The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close. Tucked in among Wil S. Hylton’s long descriptions of the changes that seem to be enveloping Close, his life, and his art, was the following statement, which I find to be brilliant:
“It seems to me now, with greater reflection, that the value of experiencing another person’s art is not merely the work itself, but the opportunity it presents to connect with the interior impulse of another. The arts occupy a vanishing space in modern life: They offer one of the last lingering places to seek out empathy for its own sake, and to the extent that an artist’s work is frustrating or difficult or awful, you could say this allows greater opportunity to try to meet it. I am not saying there is no room for discriminating taste and judgment, just that there is also, I think, this other portal through which to experience creative work and to access a different kind of beauty, which might be called communion.”