It’s off to the races for the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA).

The museum’s Circle 2445 is encouraging everyone to dress in their best for the running of the 139th Kentucky Derby. The party, Run for the Roses, is scheduled for 4 p.m. May 4 in the Peristyle Theater.

“The main point of the event is to get dressed up and have a fun afternoon at the museum,” said Dustin Hostetler, co-chair of Circle 2445, in an email.

“While I’ve never been to the actual Kentucky Derby, I am certainly a fan of this event. Our first Derby party at the TMA in 2011 was a blast and I can’t wait for this year’s party.”

The event will include Southern-style appetizers, a cash bar featuring mint juleps and live music by Kentucky Chrome. The Derby will be simulcast on a big screen.

Circle 2445, led by Hostetler and Amir Khan, is a group that promotes involvement with the museum by planning programs targeted to appeal to young adults.

The name of the group comes from the museum’s address, 2445 Monroe St., and also reflects the 24-45 age demographic.

“It is of course important for the museum to engage with this demographic because these people will become the next generation of leaders, philanthropists and patrons of the arts in Toledo,” Hostetler said. “We need to support them as they do us.”

Tickets cost $40 in advance or $50 at the door. They can be purchased online at toledomuseum.org/circle2445 or by calling TMA’s information desk at (419) 255-8000, Ext. 7546.

A special promotion offers anyone renewing or buying a membership with the museum, along with joining Circle 2445, a free ticket to the Derby party, said TMA’s Marketing Communications Coordinator Jenny Fogle.

To purchase or renew a membership to the museum, contact the information desk.

Anyone interested in joining Circle 2445 can contact Coordinator Jackie Tussing at (419) 255-8000.

Tags: Circle 2445, Kentucky Derby, Run for the Roses, TMA, Toledo Museum of Art

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 1st, 2013 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Arts and Life, Toledo Museum of Art.
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Let’s try something. Everybody get on your Facebook, or send a mass text message or email. Make a (gasp) phone call. Invite every creative person you know to Toledo.

Make actual arrangements. Offer to pick them up from airports, train and bus stations and to help them find places to stay. Offer your couch. Say the word “Welcome” when they arrive. Find out ahead of time, if you don’t already know, what they’re into.

Make plans to take them to something like that while they’re here. Try really hard not to take them to the mall. Use your imagination. Choose local businesses. When you take them for coffee, show them Black Kite at the corner of W. Delaware Ave. and Collingwood Boulevard. Point out how beautiful Scott High School is looking. Drive them down some tree-lined streets. Obviously, take them to the Toledo Museum of Art, but on the way, be sure to drive past two new works of public art on Monroe Street. Drive down Adams Street. Stop at the new Art Corner Toledo (ACT) mural at 13th Street. Get out and walk up to the wall. Take your friends’ picture in front of it. Show them the wheatpaste Smoking Cats on the front of the building.

Walk them to a nearby Yarnbomb. Suggest that they hug the Yarnbomb. Trust me. Make conversation with people walking by the wall who live or work in the neighborhood. Introduce and include your friend from out of town.

Next, take a walk around UpTown and ask them if they can feel that? Show them the artist-designed bike racks. When they comment about the empty buildings, suggest studio space and walls perfect for murals. Speak only in terms of potential. That’s artists’ favorite language anyway. Ask them again when you get to Manos Garden on Jackson Street and you’re surrounded by growth and color and community investment. Ask them how they feel. Casually throw the word “joy” around.

Continue down Adams Street in the car toward the river and head over to the Original Sub Shop & Deli for lunch. Over soup, ask your friends if the artists in their city have taken over the same way we have here. If they say yes, ask them for examples and exchange ideas. Actively acknowledge the national renaissance. Get excited about it! If they say no, start the push to convince them to move here. Encourage the Brain Gain. Tell them they will have the opportunity to be creative and to have an appreciative audience and instant community.

Get back in the car and drive down Broadway Street, where the murals are so colorful and vibrant you can’t take your eyes off them. Point out community gardens and how unbelievably tall the sunflowers are. You see what I’m getting at here.

Spark their awareness to how all of this makes them feel. Then, send them back to their respective cities where they can either see opportunities to invest themselves or start figuring out a way to move here and stoke whatever each of them may have burning.

I met a new friend last night who has just returned home to Toledo after a few months in Chicago, where he just wasn’t feelin’ the love, so to speak. I didn’t get his full story but what I did hear him say was that he felt a very definite pull to come back and that he could sense the creative revolution happening here.

I asked him what he does and he said, “I’m working at Savers.” “No, no,” I said, “What do you do?” “I’m a writer,” he said.

Of course he’s a writer.

Scan your internal “friends list.” How many of them are creative types who live in Toledo? How many of them are creative types who have moved away from Toledo? How many of them are creative types who are frustrated in a city that may not support their urge? Do they feel out of place in some suburb somewhere? Or are they in a town that is too big to have a real chance at opportunities? Think of that guy you went to high school with who was always writing or sketching. What’s he doing now? How many people do you know whose lives are begging for a change of scenery right about now? Think of one of those people and reach out to them and welcome them for a little trip to Toledo. Sell them the feeling. And welcome them home.

Tags: ACT, Black Kite, Manos Garden, Original Sub Shop & Deli, Rachel Richardson, TMA, Toledo Museum of Art

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 12:16 pm and is filed under ACT, Star.
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Toledo is now known as the birthplace of the studio glass movement, but participants at a glass workshop 50 years ago had trouble even forming a bubble.

“Nobody knew anything. Literally no one knew how to make a bubble. There was no one there to ask,” recalled 89-year-old Toledo artist Edith Franklin, one of the fewer than 10 people who attended the first of two 1962 glass workshops at Toledo Museum of Art.

“The turning point for me, for all of us, was close to the last day of the class, this old man came dressed in a suit and tie and someone started to talk to him. He had worked as a glassblower for Libbey. They said, ‘Would you like to try?’ He took off his coat and his vest, sat down, put his thumb over the hole at the top and there came the bubble. Magic! Here we had been huffing and puffing for a week and then there it was. Simple. With the touch of a thumb.”

The man was Harvey Leafgreen, a glassblower who had worked for the Libbey Glass division at Owens-Illinois for years. Afterward, he worked one-on-one with the workshop participants.

‘Color Ignited’

“Color Ignited: Glass 1962–2012,”  a new exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA), will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the historic workshops led by Harvey Littleton. The free show, which focuses on the evolution of the use of color in glass, will debut June 14 during the Glass Art Society Conference and run through Sept. 9.

On display will be more than 80 objects from private collections, galleries and other museums as well as TMA’s collection, including work by Littleton, Dominick Labino, Marvin Lipofsky, Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Laura de Santillana, Heinz Mack, Klaus Moje, Yoichi Ohira, Ginny Ruffner and Judith Schaechter.

The exhibit will be the first in the new $3 million Frederic and Mary Wolfe Gallery of Contemporary Art. The space was home to TMA’s glass collection before the Glass Pavilion opened in 2006.

Jutta-Annette Page, TMA’s curator of glass and decorative arts and vice president of the Glass Art Society, called the exhibition “visually enthralling” and said she hopes visitors leave with a better appreciation of Toledo’s role in the evolution of studio glass.

“I very much hope this exhibition will make it clear this very important movement started here in Toledo and also help people realize this is an international movement that is here to stay,” Page said.

Visitors can also view the exhibit from the gallery’s mezzanine level.

“It allows people to look at the works on the ground floor from a different vantage point, which some of the artists are intending on in their works,” Page said.

Several of Franklin’s pieces from the original studio glass workshop will be on display.

“I had them at home for years and nobody looked at them and now they’ve become famous,” Franklin said.

Such early pieces are rare, Page said.

“It’s a very, very small group of surviving objects and the reason for that is they had not really figured out the technological issues that came with this experimentation,” Page said. “Most of the pieces broke.”

The first workshop used glass from melted-down fiberglass marbles made at the Johns Manville plant in Waterville. Learning to add color was part of the experimentation process.

“If you look at these very earliest pieces they were all greenish, transparent glass because the color was entirely determined by the glass batch,” Page said. “Very early on the palette was limited to the prefabricated glass the artists were using, but they very quickly experimented with color.”

Right place, right time

Franklin, a lifelong Toledo resident, was taking a ceramics class at TMA when she heard about the 1962 glass workshop. She was told it was open to university ceramics professors only, but a week before the workshop, she was invited to attend.

“They couldn’t fill the class. There were not enough people signed up from across the country to fill the class,” Franklin said. “I’m a firm believer in luck. Right place, right time and you’re lucky you were the one that happened to be there.”

Franklin never worked with glass again, but has fond memories of that first workshop.

“It wasn’t for me. I did it because I was curious, but I’m too little to lift that heavy pipe with the gather on the end. My God, I couldn’t lift the damn thing. But it was a wonderful experience,” Franklin said. “It’s been exciting these past couple of years. It’s nice it’s getting the recognition it should. Too bad some of the people aren’t alive who would have been enjoying this.”

Admission to the museum, located at 2445 Monroe St., is free. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. The museum is closed Mondays and major holidays.

For more information, visit www.toledomuseum.org.

Tags: color ignited, Dale Chihuly, Edith Franklin, glass, glass art society, Glass Art Society Conference, Harvey Littleton, libbey glass, Sarah Ottney, TMA, Toledo Museum of Art

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2012 at 9:12 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Featured, Star, Toledo Museum of Art.
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The quaint wooden house that sits atop the grand steps at Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) might be tiny, but it stands for something much bigger.

These little homes on wheels are making appearances across the country in increasing numbers, from the depths of mountainside forests to the backyards of residential lots. The idea is to decrease one’s carbon footprint, avoid lengthy mortgage payments and embrace mobility.

“It does speak rather universally to the time we are living in, where we are living in the middle of an economic downturn that came on the heels of a huge housing bubble, that saw a huge growth out of proportion of what people needed,” said Amy Gilman, curator of the “Small Worlds” exhibit and TMA’s associate director. “There is a movement in the other direction.”

The museum’s tiny house — to be auctioned on eBay starting March 8 — is 65 square feet. It stands 12 feet, 6 inches tall and is 6 feet, 4 inches wide. Two space heaters are all it takes to warm the interior to a cozy climate. A futon sits against one wall below a window, facing a counter with a desk chair and rows of storage racks.

Step a couple of inches forward and you’ll see the kitchen counter, inlayed with a sink and sitting above a small refrigerator while tiny frying pans dangle from the ceiling. If you turn around, you’ll see the bathroom: a miniature toilet facing a showerhead. A ladder leads to a loft where a queen-sized air mattress rests.

Collapse provoked growth

Jay Shafer, who owns Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, said the housing market collapse helped his business grow, as hundreds of new clients disenchanted with the traditional housing industry flocked to buy his floor plans.

He started out in the late ’90s, when he built one for himself. During his first year he sold two or three plans but now he is selling at least 100 a year. He will speak at the museum’s Peristyle, at 7 p.m. March 8.

But he and other designers, homeowners and prospective tiny house dwellers are running up against a wall of regulations. Just where would you park one of these things? And just how legal is it?

When Shafer first moved into a tiny house, he bought a small home, rented the house out and parked his 89-square-foot home in the backyard. He lived there for five years.

This, however, would be illegal in Toledo, according to building codes and zoning laws. Regulations forbid someone from living in one of these tiny houses on the lawn of a property, even if the property belongs to the tiny house owner, said David Golis, chief building official for the city.

One could theoretically move a tiny house into a mobile home park. Most of these places require that mobile homes on-site are Housing and Urban Development approved, which would mean that tiny house owners would likely have to ensure that their homes comply, said Tom Lemon, administrator of planning.

The tiny house living conundrum has not presented itself to many mobile home communities in Toledo. Blog sites about tiny houses contain a few posts from individuals looking for tiny houses in Northwest Ohio, but the posters have not responded for request to comment.

Ella Jenkins, a 23-year-old living in Southern California, worries about where she’ll park her tiny house when she finishes building it. She has been working on it in her parents’ backyard for months. Her little wooden home has a 10-foot high ceiling and is 6 feet wide. The wheels were the answer to another regulatory roadblock, Shafer said. Housing codes in many areas forbid people from living in something so small.

According to Ohio residential codes, legal dwellings must have at least one room no smaller than 120 square feet and no room can have any dimension shorter than 7 feet. Golis said the size regulations are to control odors, moisture and disease transmission.

Moving off the grid

Roadblocks aside, these little dwellings are becoming popular among young couples, singles, retirees and environmentalists. A wealth of tiny house forums span the Internet, with commenters writing about simply “moving off the grid” in tiny houses.

Think Walden Pond, only imagine Henry David Thoreau retreating back to a little wooden cabin with a tin roof, furnished with a propane-fueled stove and a shower inside.

Tiny Green Cabins, a Minnesota-based company that started in 2008, posts photos of cozy cabins nestled beside streams and snow-capped mountains. “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify” — one of Thoreau’s popular quotes — is Founder and CEO Jim Wilkins’ mantra.

Wilkins said some clients use the tiny green cabins for a writing hut or an outdoor office space. But those who actually live in his cabins full time tend to have jobs for which they need to move frequently. He’s even receiving a lot of requests for three to five member families.

“Especially with young people, they don’t want to have debt put into a structure,” he said. “They can buy a tiny house and take it with them so it’s a one-time investment.”

Jenkins can appreciate that. Having just graduated college, she is tired of having to pack up and move from lease to lease every year. When she moved back to California, she started apartment hunting but balked at the prices. Perhaps investing in a tiny house would be cheaper in the long run, she thought.

“I have to keep telling myself that, but it gets a little hard when you spend $1,000 on a water heater,” she said.

She’s put about $13,500 worth of work into the house and has barely finished the inside. Plans from Tumbleweed Tiny Houses can cost anywhere from $99 to more than $850. Add in all of the construction expenses and you’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars.

But here’s the kicker: Utility bills are practically nonexistent. When Wilkins moved into his tiny house, the winter electric bill was $25 a month or less. During the summer, he was charged the minimum fee.

There are other ways to get crafty with appliances. Jenkins will use a stove that operates on denatured alcohol. Shafer used solar panels on his roof. That fact gets to the root of why so many people wish to move out of big homes and into tiny ones.

“Perhaps what you have is a beautifully designed space and it doesn’t need to be 25,000 square feet,” Gilman said. “I think that’s a dialogue people need to have and we encourage our community to have that conversation.”

Struggle to build

Gilman sought to bring a tiny house to TMA’s Small Worlds exhibit to extend the art outdoors, to show how art and design can influence the real world. The museum bought plans from Tumbleweed Tiny House Company and The Lathrop Company constructed the house, while modifying some details. The Andersons donated at least 90 percent of the materials, even down to the eating utensils, said Julie Payeff, community commitment manager for The Andersons.

Construction was a struggle that took six to eight weeks to complete, about four weeks longer than expected. The Lathrop Company had to have every piece of the project custom built, from the trailer that the house sits upon to the couch cushions to the ramp that workers cut to fit the art museum steps. Only one worker could fit inside at once, said Paul Lulfs, general superintendent at Lathrop.

One worker had to lie on his back and drill every ceiling board in its place above the loft, Lulfs said.

But looking back, Lulfs, Sofia Eich, assistant engineer on the project, and Raymond Benjamin, manager of special projects, laugh about the amusing challenge that the task became.

The trio said they’d probably do it again — as a hobby.

“It would be hard to lose something in there,” Lulfs said. “It’s so small you have to go outside to change your mind.”

Benjamin added, “You’d have reduced belongings — you’d become a minimalist immediately.”

Tags: Amy Gilman, Jay Shafer, Small Worlds, Tiny House, TMA, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 4:34 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Exhibits, Housing, Toledo Museum of Art.
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Rich Little, the Man of a Thousand Voices, may use them in his one man show — playing October 29 at the Toledo Museum of Art — but the centerpiece is his title character, the legendary Jimmy Stewart. In this interview, the world’s most famous impressionist talks about the show, how he develops the voices he performs, and why it’s hard to impersonate modern actors.

Toledo Free Press: You’re looking back at a near 50-year career in show business. What do you think is the secret to your longevity?

Rich Little: “Keep working! (laughing) As George Burns said at 95, ‘Gotta have a reason to get out of bed,’ you know? Other than go to the bathroom.”

“It’s getting an incredible reaction — better than I ever anticipated — so it looks like I’m gonna be doing it for a long time. If everything goes well, I wanna take it to Broadway, but that’s down the line. At the moment, I just want to do the show as much as possible.  It’s Jimmy Stewart’s life, but it involves a lot of other impressions in the show. And it’s a comedy, first of all. It’s not a drama. And it has 24 different characters in the show, and they intertwine in Jimmy’s life…

“It is a one-man show, but it ends up being a tour-de-force for me, because I end up getting to do so many other people. It’s kind of ‘The Best of Rich Little.’ You’ll get to see Richard Nixon and Johnny Carson and all these other people, hopefully making sense in Jimmy’s story without taking too many liberties.”

TFP: What do you think has made Stewart such a legend?

RL: “Well, he was voted by the American Film Institute the third greatest movie star of all time. He had such an incredible career and such a wide range of movies that were very popular with the public — mind you, this was a few years ago — but a lot of these movies, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and ‘Harvey’ and ‘Winchester 73’ and that, certain films have lived down through the ages. But he was active until the 70s. I guess if you’re under 30, you might not really know him. Perhaps for ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ But it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the audience if you know his whole career or not. They enjoy all the other impressions.

“[Stewart] was the first impression I ever did, and I became very good friends with him, personally. So, I spent a lot of time with him, and I asked him so many questions about so many stories about his career. So I really almost had a jump on doing this show, because I had taken notes along the way over the years, so I had a lot of material on Jimmy. I told him, not too long before he died, that I was thinking of doing a one man show on his life. And he said,(Stewart impression) ‘Rich, I don’t-I don’t think that would work.’ And I said, why? (Stewart again) ‘Well, uh, g-uh-gee, uh, wi-uh-with the way I talk, your-your show will be f-four hours long!’ (laughs) He always had that great sense of humor, Jimmy did.”

TFP: Can you describe the work that goes into creating an impression, in terms of the research you have to do, and how long you have to work on it and polish it?

RL: “The thing with doing impressions is to study the person, and listen to them over and over again, so that when it comes time to do them, you can visualize them in your head. Some voices come very quickly, like Truman Capote took me about two hours, Dr. Ruth — there were some people that were just naturals. But you really have to watch quite a lot. My Barack Obama isn’t too bad, because I hear him so much on TV, speaking, so it finally dawns on me how to do him.”

TFP: Do you feel pressure nowadays to add new characters, to constantly stay current?

RL: “I’m always anxious to add new people. It takes time to do it, you have to really go after a voice. I’ve added Dr. Phil and Barack Obama. But I don’t like to add too many new voices, because a lot of the current film stars are pretty impossible to imitate. You run into a brick wall when you run into some of the current people making movies, you know?”

TFP: If there’s one thing to be said about the Golden Age of Hollywood, everyone had a very specific personality, a very specific character that they projected. And that kind of gave everyone an individuality. Nowadays, everyone kind of sounds the same.

RL: “Yeah. The old stars were much easier to do, because they were larger than life and identifiable — like Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable and John Wayne. They just were natural. But you get people like Brad Pitt or DiCaprio or some of the stars of today, it’s pretty tough.”

TFP: What do you hope audiences get out of “Jimmy Stewart?”

RL: “I hope they walk away feeling that they got to know the man better, personally, and how much they really did admire him.”

Email Jeff at PopGoesJeff@gmail.com

Tags: Jeff McGinnis, Pop Goes the Culture, Rich Little, TMA

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2010 at 11:16 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Comedy, Pop Goes the Culture.
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Chihuly Toledo! had patrons lining up outside the Toledo Museum of Art’s (TMA) Glass Pavilion.

“At our opening for the exhibit we had people from Florida waiting outside to get in as soon as we opened the doors, as well as a number of other arts patrons from all over the country,” said TMA Curator of Glass, Jutta Page. “The mere mention of Dale Chihuly’s name has been causing a lot of excitement. I first came across his work at the Haystack School of Crafts in Maine in 1993 and was simply struck by the colors in his work. He is one of the most commercially successful artists to ever come out of the studio glass movement.”

A Seattle native, Chihuly was first asked to exhibit his work in a study of contemporary glass art in Toledo in 1970. After an accident in 1976 impaired his vision, Chihuly took on the role of choreographer and director for a team of artists. Chihuly is, perhaps, best known locally for his 9-foot chandelier, “Campiello del Remer #2,” which can be seen at  the entrance to the Glass Pavilion.

“This exhibit includes work from every period and every series in Chihuly’s career. It is composed of every piece from our permanent collection, as well as pieces loaned out by private collectors,” Page said. “It’s interesting to see what pieces kicked off different directions in his work. A lot of people think that Chihuly never really blew glass himself, but one of the things this show does is prove that that is simply not true.”

Chihuly Toledo! marks the first time the TMA’s entire Chihuly collection has been available for public viewing since 1993.

“Dale Chihuly’s work speaks for itself. It’s vibrant, alive with color, light, depth and perspective.” “Just as no two pieces of art are identical, no two people view art in the same way. What’s special about Chihuly Toledo! is that our visitors, from avid collectors to the first-time visitors, will experience, share, appreciate and be fulfilled by a unique form of art that has its roots right here in Toledo.”

The exhibit will remain on display through Nov. 29.

Tags: TMA

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Arts and Life, Exhibits.
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