Reynolds Art Donation Has Good, Bad Points

Source from:  Winston-Salem Journal 08/31/2011

The Arts Council's announcement that it will sell 3,000 artworks recently donated by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. amounts to a mixed blessing for the city's visual-arts community. In announcing the donation late last month, the company valued the works at about $700,000. Milton Rhodes, the council's president and chief executive, said the council intends to make at least that amount from selling them. Thirty-seven of the works are up for auction through Sept. 9 and on exhibit through Sept. 24 in the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts' Womble Carlyle Gallery. Presumably, these include many, if not most, of the more highly valued pieces because the reserve amounts on their auction prices add up to more than $114,000, about one-sixth of the entire donation's estimated value. These works can also be viewed at www.WinstonSalemArtAuction.com, where bids for them can be placed until 5 p.m. Sept. 9. Donated works not included in the exhibition or not sold after the auction will be offered by the Arts Council in a public sale Feb. 10-12. Obviously, this is good for the Arts Council. So, why is it a mixed blessing? Because money that collectors spend on any of the donated art might otherwise be used to buy works from local galleries and studios. It's no secret the sustained economic downturn has hurt the local market for visual art. This has led to the closing of one of the city's best art galleries, 5ive & 40rty. Although the faltering economy appears to have caused local gallery prices for art to decline, in some cases to dirt-cheap levels, sales don't appear to be picking up. In other words, this big corporate art donation effectively floods an already tight market. Because the Arts Council stands to gain so much from it, is there anything the council might do to mitigate negative effects on the visual-arts scene? Sure! Milton Rhodes has said the council's board members will decide by mid-September how to spend the proceeds from sales of the donated works. Here's a suggestion: Add it to the amount the council has budgeted for grants to local artists in the next year or two. While the council deliberates on how to spend its windfall, the show in the Womble Carlyle Gallery provides an intriguing glimpse of the art Reynolds has been collecting in the past several decades. Even if you lack the disposable income to bid on these works, you're likely to find something of aesthetic interest in this stylistically diverse show. Historically, it ranges from a 19th-century Romantic landscape painting by Consalvo Carelli to representational and abstract works made since 1970. The tobacco industry is visually represented in a few works, including George Harrington's "View of Hindale Smith's Tobacco Farm," painted in 1884, and Dennis Zaborowski's more recent photorealist still life, "Orange Ashtray." Admirers of meticulously rendered, nostalgic landscape imagery will gravitate toward works by William Mangum, Mac Powell and Joe Seme. More stylistically distinctive takes on representational imagery include Kenneth Ness' expressionistic painting of three "Kite Flyers" and works by two well-known North Carolina painters, the late Maud Gatewood ("Barn in Snow") and the late Claude Howell ("Fish Market"). Among the show's striking abstract works are large-scale geometric paintings by Richard Kinnaird and Jacques Menache. Local artist Anne Kesler Shields is represented by a minimalist take on geometric abstraction in her group of four untitled prints consisting entirely of vertical lines. Highlights among the selection's works in craft mediums include an augmented table by Bob Trotman, a nonfunctional toaster by Lawrence "Cliff" Norris and Catherine Ryan's oversized wooden chessboard with porcelain pieces based on characters from Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" books. Also noteworthy are works in various styles and mediums by Elaine Dowdell, Wolf Kahn, Setsuya Kotani, Billy McClain, Marc Peiser, Elsie Popkin and Richard Stenhouse. Enditem