Tam - Fels Exhibition Plan Ddd

Exhibition Plan Primary Information Exhibition Title: What Is a Trade? Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India Exhibition Dates: January 18, 2009

September 13, 2008 –

Coordinating Curator:

Rock Hushka

Originating Institution:

Tacoma Art Museum

Additional Information Gallery location at Tacoma Art Museum:

Annie’s Gallery

Approximately how many objects and what medium? 16 large-scale paintings; oil enamel on aluminum Rough range of dates for the artwork?

All paintings created in 2005

Brief Description: Northwest artist Donald Fels has been creating work around the connections between trade and culture for over a decade. For this project, Fels took as his conceptual starting point the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama’s voyages to India as a spice trader. Fels commissioned sign painters in India to collaborate with him to create 16 large enamel-on-metal panels that examine the legacy of trade in India and how trade impacts cultures and populations beyond the simple exchange of goods. Exhibition publication citation:

Tour Schedule: Culture, Spokane

Bell, Greg, Donald Fels, and Samuel K. Parker. What Is a Trade? Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Northwest Museum of Arts and May 2 – June 29, 2008 Hoffman Gallery, Lewis and Clark

College, Portland January 21 – March 18, 2010 (tentative) 5/29/2009

Questions What are the key ingredients of this exhibition that make it right for Tacoma Art Museum?  Don Fels is a Northwest artist.  This exhibition is part of the Northwest Perspective Series, which provides scholarly insight into the work of established regional artists. Don Fels has been creating artwork in the Northwest since 1974. He had an exhibition at Tacoma Art Museum in 1994. Called Trading Stories, the exhibition was an early investigation into trade. Fels is particularly well known for his public artwork.  What Is a Trade? forms an imaginative pairing with Oasis: Western Dreams of the Ottoman Empire from the Dahesh Museum of Art, which will be on view simultaneously. Both exhibitions address Western perspectives on and representations of the East. Both raise questions about how these views affected and continue to affect relationships and cultural exchange between the West and the East.  The exhibition considers the process of collaboration and as continues a theme in recent exhibitions (Chuck Close, the Saint John’s Bible, the work of Dale Chihuly). What is the value of this exhibition to the Tacoma Art Museum visitor and community?  Visitors will learn about a Northwest artist and see how his work is situated in a global context.  The exhibition investigates trade, which affects everyone, but may be of particular interest to this region since Tacoma and Seattle both have major international ports that serve as gateways to Asia.  The exhibition provides an opportunity to examine our notions of history. This project uses historical events as a means for investigating contemporary issues of trade and cultural exchange. It questions our received versions of history and challenges us to ask questions about whose history, whose point of view, and whose agenda is represented in a particular historical narrative.  The exhibition examines and challenges ideas of collaboration and art-making. What essential understandings do we want a person to take from this exhibition?  Art can be employed as a means of cultural critique. This project is not about self-expression, or formal considerations. The paintings themselves are just one aspect of the project. Just as ideas generated by the paintings and the process of making them are as important to the artist as the end results. This is one of the reasons Don chose to work in a medium that is associated with commercial art rather than fine art.  Art may be made collaboratively and by people other than the artist. This example of collaboration highlights the value of equal exchange and cooperation. 5/29/2009

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Tacoma and the Northwest are part of a larger world of global interactions that affect each of us. As individuals, what we buy and consume has an impact on others. The histories we are taught are constructed from a particular point of view and often have a cultural, national, or personal agenda. A more complex story usually comes to light when these histories are questioned and explored further or from other perspectives.

How will museum visitors reach the desired “essential understandings” of the exhibition?  Most of the paintings are quite narrative; many employ a combination of graphic narrative and text to illustrate a story.  Wall and label text will be essential to help tell the complete story of this project and provide context, especially regarding the collaborative process, the story of Vasco da Gama, and the tradition of billboard painting in India.  The catalogue should be available for use in the gallery. It offers multiple perspectives on this project, including Don Fels’s own writing about the project.  Other possible ideas include: a reading area in the gallery; photos of the painters working as part of the exhibition layout.

5/29/2009