An Introduction to Dr Jordana Pomeroy of the Frost Art Museum

Dr. Jordana Pomeroy

My interest in the Frost Art Museum in Miami was triggered by an announcement I saw last summer regarding an exhibition featuring Hong Kong-born artist Simon Ma. Ever since it seemed that every time I read a notice about an upcoming opening the caliber of work peaked my interest in seeing what would happen next.

On Valentine's Day the Frost hosted what looked to me to be another exciting opening for award-winning Chilean artist Mónica Bengoa titled Exercises de Style / Exercises in Style. As if that is not enough to give you a rush, this coming Saturday will be the opening reception for Xu Bing's Writing Between Heaven and Earth.

Because I've been following events at the Frost, it caught my eye when the Art Daily eNewsletter recently carried a news item that Dr. Jordana Pomeroy had been named the new director of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU. Previously she served as executive director at Louisiana State University’s Museum of Art in Baton Rouge. She is the author of numerous books on women and the arts.

EN: What is it that attracted you to the Frost?

Jordana Pomeroy: The possibility of leading an academic art museum in Miami immediately attracted my attention. While I have particular memories of vacationing with my grandmother in Miami, where she felt comfortable traveling to the beach resorts, now I associate Miami with explosive change and breathless anticipation. Miami has become a trendsetter and a place where anything is possible. To lead a museum at such a moment of explosion, and at an expanding university that reflects the city’s dynamism, was too compelling to resist.

EN: When did you first take an interest in a career in the arts?

Monica Bengoa

JP: Probably from the day I was born! My mother was a professor at Hunter College where she taught classics and history. My father continues to be a practicing architect. Travel for our family meant exploring museums, archaeological ruins, and making pilgramages to see architectural monuments and masterpieces. I specifically chose to attend Bryn Mawr College because of its academic strengths in art and archaeology.

EN: The Frost seems to have brought to the U.S. an impressive array of international artists these past few years. What, in the mission of the Frost, has led the museum in this direction?

JP: What museum doesn’t try to include international art and artists in its programming? It’s almost an expectation at this point in our globalized world that we not only look beyond our geographic boundaries but that we think as directors and curators about multicultural influence in the art world. The challenge is to create exhibitions that link history, geography, and chronology to create narratives for our audiences to appreciate. That is my interpretation of the Frost’s educational mission.

EN: What excites you most about the Xu Bing exhibition?

JP: Xu Bing’s art defines the original use of the term “awesome.” His installations are breathtaking in their ambition and conception. Then when you study the meaning behind the works of art, you can relate the artist’s ideas, for example, about rhetoric to political environments around the world where rhetoric substitutes for substance. Additionally, Xu Bing is a world-class artist whose works have graced the galleries of some of world’s best known museums. The Frost is a much more modest museum but we are capable of attracting top caliber artists to work in our galleries, which are quite special. Indeed the installation is nearly complete and I wouldn’t know if I were in London, New York, or at FIU in Florida. The works complement the galleries and vice-versa.

EN: In addition to a background in European art, you have developed a measure of expertise in women’s art history. What are the biggest challenges to finding the role women have played in art history in earlier times?

JP: The challenges presented are those that most historians face. Where are the voices of others who lived and worked at the same time as those who have already been adopted into the canon of art history? The history of women in the arts is still young and evolving, but it is a rich area of the arts to mine continually. Each exhibition and scholarly study contributes to establishing the roles women have played in the arts since ancient times. History evolves and the way we historians tell stories changes because new materials emerge, new scholarship is undertaken, and historians of different generations think differently. Students today expect diversity in their courses. Women’s studies, Queer Studies, Latin American Studies, African-American studies are offerings that simply did not exist 30 years ago but now that we see other histories emerge, we realize how peripheral our vision can be.

EN: What do you most look forward to in the year ahead at the Frost?

JP: Setting the highest standards for professional practice in the arts, expanding the range of exhibitions, increasing our educational impact on underserved communities, and attracting new members and visitors to museum. I want no less than to have members feel ownership of the museum and for the public to identify the Frost as an institution that’s engaged locally but thinks globally.

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The Mission of The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University is to enrich and educate local, national and international audiences through the language of art by collecting, preserving, researching, interpreting and exhibiting art from diverse cultures throughout human history.

Photos: Top right... Dr. Jordana Pomeroy
The bottom three feature Monica Bengoa and her work, courtesy The Frost Art Museum

International Artist Xu Bing Discusses His Iconic "Book from the Sky"

Art Museums are one of the great treasures of our time. In my travels I've had the privilege of visiting wonderful and often surprisingly rich collections. By means of the internet we can now discover many treasures outside the scope of our horizons, one of these being The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami. The Frost's international connections have resulted in a string of exceptional exhibitions by artists from Asia, South America and elsewhere. On February 21 a new show will open titled Xu Bing: Writing Between Heaven and Earth. Included in this exhibition will be Xu Bing's massive "Book from the Sky" installation, which has been rarely displayed in its entirety.

The full exhibit encompasses 5,000 square feet and features the artist’s iconic installations plus newer artworks that challenge viewers' perceptions of cultural identity and language, including a never-before seen piece that Xu Bing is creating specifically for this exhibition at the Frost. Due to its massive scope and size, only a handful of museums in the world have shown the complete Book from the Sky with all of its hundreds of original components and handmade carvings that took the artist four years to complete. This project of the 1980's was designed to show how the written word can be turned into propaganda and rendered meaningless. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests Xu Bing's work was deemed too controversial thus resulting in his move to the U.S. the following year.

Writing Between Heaven and Earth features many thought-provoking newer works such as Book from the Ground, an interactive staging of two computers running chat software that lures visitors to simultaneously decode universal signs and symbols, or his Suzhou Landscripts which at first glance appear to be traditional Chinese landscape paintings but upon closer inspection reveal Chinese logographic script writing, in which the water is composed of the word for water and the mountains are composed of the word for mountain. Another piece is titled Square Word Calligraphy Classroom which is constructed as a classroom with an instructional video, model books, ink, brushes, brush-stands, and blackboard with the creation of a one-of-a-kind writing system that transforms English into Chinese, but with a twist: these characters also turn out to be comprised of English letters.

Trained in China during the 1970s as a Master Printmaker, Xu Bing was born in Chongqing in 1955 and grew up in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. A core tenet of his work is the preservation of Chinese culture and traditions. Chinese characters and traditional landscapes feature prominently in his work.

EN: In what way does your “Book from the Sky” serve your mission of making “art for the people”?

Xu Bing: In all honesty, when I was creating The Book from the Sky, we were just emerging from the socialist, realist and pragmatic styles of art, so what I wanted at that time was to create a modern and international work of art, and did not really think about this concept of “Art for the people.” At that time, I really wanted to dabble in modern art, but as for what modern art is now, I do not know. Hence, emerging from an old era and entering into a new one, with no specific direction going forward, I created a work that carried myself and my experiences in its entirety. In the transitional phase between the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese economic reform, this work reflected a generation of intellectuals that conveyed this sense of questioning for the unknown, and pursuit of culture and civilization in a vast new world. Because the arts of the past were too practical, or service oriented, this work aspired to explore the more profound aspects, or the essence of ‘things’. As for the concept of “Art for the people,” it was only after I had participated in the western contemporary arts scene, and through contemplation of the relationship between art and the common people did I come up with such an understanding.

EN: Who have been your major influences as an artist?

Xu Bing: Growing up in an ordinary familial environment, for a child, or anybody for that matter, I think the figure that creates the biggest impact on a person’s life in his growing years is his mother. With that, I am very fortunate that I had such a great mother. On another note, it is difficult to pinpoint/list an artist or a figure who has influenced me the most. Honestly, I have quite an open-minded attitude towards the arts. In other words, I have great respect for all the artists that participated in the development of the artistic movement at any point and stage. Moreover, they have also helped me in my understanding and reflection of “what is art.” The exploration and contemplations of such artists from different periods and generations have all contributed to my understanding and attitude towards art. I have been inspired and influenced by different artists at different phases of my life. For example, during my university years, I was very drawn to Jean-François Millet. In addition, I was also greatly influenced by my teacher Gu Yuan. Afterwords, I was greatly inspired by Andy Warhol—not for his artistic style, but more for the ways he conveyed a certain culture in America at that time. These are what I’m most interested in. Another example is Marcel Duchamp and his attitude towards his life and art.

EN: What prompted you to produce a work of this scale?

"Art for the people."

Xu Bing: At that time, I had enough experience and time to devote myself to making large scale works. I also realized such large scale works as “Phoenix” were created after I had returned to China in recent years. I’ve thought about why China has spurred me to create large scale works, and concluded that it must be connected to the atmosphere and environment of China as a country.

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The artist has been invited from Beijing to Miami to present a lecture on February 21st from 4:00-5:00 p.m. with the opening reception running from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public. The lecture will take place at the Florida International University’s Graham Center GC140 (seating is expected to fill quickly, registration in advance is recommended to artinfo@fiu.edu).

For more about The Frost Museum at FIU visit http://thefrost.fiu.edu/

Xu Bing's family roots are in Wenling of Zhejiang province. He was born in Chongqing, China in 1955. In 1977 he entered the printmaking department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) where completed his bachelor’s degree in 1981 and stayed on as an instructor, earning his MFA in 1987. In 1990, on the invitation of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he moved to the United States. Xu served as the Vice President of CAFA from 2008 to 2014 and is now the professor of CAFA, advising PHD students. He currently lives and works in Beijing and New York. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington DC; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Joan Miro Foundation, Spain; National Gallery of Prague and the Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas, amongst other major institutions. Additionally, Xu Bing has shown at the 45th and 51st Venice Biennales; the Biennale of Sydney and the Johannesburg Biennale amongst other international exhibitions.

Xu Bing's remarks here were transcribed and translated by Delissa Putri Handoko. Xu Bing: Writing Between Heaven and Earth is curated by Dr. Lidu Yi, a professor and historian of Chinese art at FIU.