November 2021 - Page 2 of 26 - Art of Landscaping

November 29, 2021

Locals react to Rockford native, fashion designer Virgil Abloh death

ROCKFORD — Local residents took to social media Sunday to remember Virgil Abloh, a Rockford native who went on to become one of the most influential and creative figures in modern art, fashion and design.

Abloh died Sunday at the age of 41. According to his verified Instagram account, he was privately battling a rare form of cancer for the past two years.

As news of Abloh’s death spread across the globe Sunday, Abloh’s alma mater, Boylan Catholic High School in Rockford, released the following statement:

“The Boylan Catholic High School community is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of our 1998 alumnus, Virgil Abloh, a 2019 Alumni Excellence Awardee. Virgil Abloh was an amazing force in all he did and made an incredible impact on the world.

“He was a groundbreaking artist on a global stage, daring collaborator and an inspiration and advocate for new artists. Our prayers are with his wife, children, parents and sister. Rest in peace. Once a Titan always a Titan.”

The Rockford Area Convention & Visitor’s Bureau posted the following message on Facebook:

“Here in his hometown, we join the global community to share our deepest condolences to Virgil Abloh’s family and loved ones after hearing of his passing today.

He was a courageous visionary, and his legacy will continue to be a bright light inspiring others to break barriers with creativity and valor. Please take a moment with us to remember this Rockford native and honor him today and always.”

Abloh was the artistic director of the Louis Vuitton menswear collection. He was also CEO and founder of the Milan-based label Off-White. He was included in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2018.

That same year, Abloh and sportswear giant Nike collaborated on Nike x Off-White c/o Virgil Abloh’s collection soccer jerseys. Abloh sent the very first set of jerseys along with a bag of Nike gear to Boylan soccer players with the message “Once a Titan, always a Titan.”

In 2019, Abloh’s parents Nee and Eunice Abloh and his sister Edwina Abloh were special guests at Boylan’s 11th annual Alumni Recognition Awards to accept the Alumni Excellence Award on his behalf.

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Condolences on Abloh’s passing flooded social media Sunday from international fashion houses to celebrities spanning art, sports, music and people back home in Rockford.

Our City, Our Story, a website dedicated to sharing the stories of Rockford’s most precious people and places, posted:

“Upon hearing the passing of Virgil Abloh, we would like to take a moment to share our condolences to the family, close friends and frankly the world that he inspired.

Born and raised in Rockford, Virgil was an intense creator. We all are at a loss for words upon hearing of this tragic news. His illness was private, but let’s not have our appreciation be silent.”

On Facebook, Emma Walker of Rockford wrote:

“Absolutely no words for this loss. Virgil was one of the greatest creatives of this generation, being the creative director for Louis Vuitton and CEO of Off White brand, among others.

“He touched the lives of so many around the globe, from Hollywood’s top elites, to children of poverty with similar dreams of becoming creatives, to entire foreign cultures, all the way back to here at home in Rockford, IL.”

The city of Rockford acknowledged Abloh’s passing as well.

“REST IN PEACE: We’re sad to learn of the loss of this incredibly talented Rockford native,” the city shared on social media.

“While I didn’t know Virgil personally, I followed his career as a trailblazer in the design and art fields,” wrote Alderman Bill Rose. “As a Rockford native and Boylan graduate, I wish him Godspeed.”

Abloh was married to his high school sweetheart, Shannon (Sundberg) Abloh. The couple has two children.

November 29, 2021

Council awards $731K in contracts to landscaping business | Local News

The City Council recently voted to sign off on awarding a trio of three-year public grounds maintenance contracts totaling $731,226 to a local landscaping and lawn care business.

Precision Cut is now authorized to maintain the grounds of 11 facilities or locations for $496,785, the Battleboro and Northeastern cemeteries for $131,589 and four low-lying areas or areas with boat ramps or water for $102,852.

The vote occurred during the Oct. 25 City Council regular meeting.

The action also came in the context of extensive discussion having occurred during the Oct. 11 council work session about wanting the Parks and Recreation Department to be able to do more in terms of maintaining the public grounds in the future.

City Manager Small-Toney during the Oct. 11 council work session made clear that, as far as increasing the skillset of Parks and Recreation employees, she believed the first step would be to come back to the council in January with what a higher level of service, managed internally, is going to cost.

Still, Small-Toney made clear her plan in the meantime was going to be to ask the council to approve the three-year contracts with Precision Cut to continue to help with maintaining the public grounds.

And Small-Toney made clear the contracts would include wording giving the ability to the municipal government to make changes, including to reduce Precision Cut’s service level.

Precision Cut had been continuing to work amid a month-to-month contract extension based on a previous contract.

During the Oct. 25 City Council regular meeting, Councilman Andre Knight was quick to note the discussion of Oct. 11 having been intense and there being a lot of concerns about the contracts and the Parks and Recreation employees and to note the municipal management saying they are going to bring back a plan in January.

Knight wanted to know whether, as the council waits for what is going to come from the municipal management, it would be wise to instead set the lengths of the contracts at one or two years.

Mayor Sandy Roberson, who chairs council regular meetings, said he would let Small-Toney answer that question, but Roberson said his recollection was that, regardless of the terms, the contracts could be broken within a 30-day notice.

Small-Toney said that would be correct because the requests for bids were issued with specific requirements and expectations.

“And so as I said, we could amend the contract once it’s awarded,” Small-Toney said. “But I think to go back now and change the requirements for the contract would negate it, in essence.”

“That answered my question, thank you,” Knight said, adding he has no problem.

Councilman Lige Daughtridge made the motion, seconded by Councilman Richard Joyner, for awarding the contracts to Precision Cut.

In a roll call vote, Knight and Councilmen Reuben Blackwell, W.B. Bullock and T.J. Walker voted yes.

Councilwoman Chris Miller was participating in the Oct. 25 council regular meeting via teleconferencing.

City Clerk Pamela Casey twice called Miller’s name, but an immediate response from Miller could not be heard.

After Roberson said the motion carried, Miller said, “I abstain.”

“Well, that’s a yes vote,” Roberson said.

“I made the point I think,” Miller said.

“Yes, you did,” Roberson said.

City Attorney Jep Rose said abstaining is an affirmative vote unless Miller had a recognized reason for declining to vote yes or no.

“Philosophical differences,” Miller said in response.

“OK, very well,” Roberson said. “The vote is in the affirmative. The motion carries.”

Precision Cut is a woman-owned business and the City of Rocky Mount strives to involve minority- and women-owned businesses in seeking contracts.

The contract with Precision Cut calls for maintaining the grounds at the following facilities or locations:

The Douglas Block.
City Hall.
The Rocky Mount Senior Center.
The Imperial Centre for the Arts & Sciences.
The Rocky Mount Business Services Center.
The Rocky Mount Event Center.
The two Main Streets alongside the rail line.
The Rocky Mount Judicial Center.
The Helen P. Gay Rocky Mount Historic Train Station.
The bus station.
Station Square.

The contract with Precision Cut for maintaining low-lying areas or areas with boat ramps or water specifically lists the following locations:

Holly Street Park.
City Lake Park.
The Tar River Reservoir boat ramp.
The Sapony Creek boat ramp.

During the Oct. 11 council work session, Parks and Recreation Director Joel Dunn said his department did not have the people power to tend all of the municipal grounds in a timely manner and started looking at contracting out some of the work.

During the Oct. 11 council work session, Blackwell said he was not questioning either the intention or the work being done by Precision Cut.

Blackwell said, however, he was concerned the skill level of the contractor seemed to exceed, at least in Dunn’s confidence, the Parks and Recreation staff concerning key properties being contracted out.

During the Oct. 11 council work session, Knight said he believed it to be really sad when the municipality has to hire somebody from the outside to come in and beautify Rocky Mount.

November 28, 2021

New art exhibit installed in First United Methodist Church gallery | News

November 28, 2021

Art critic Dave Hickey, known for book ‘Air Guitar’, dies

Dave Hickey, a prominent American art critic whose essays covered topics ranging from Siegfried & Roy to Norman Rockwell, has died.

His books, including “The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty” (1993) and “Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy” (1997), won him legions of fans beyond the art world experts.

His stylish prose, brash criticism of taste-making institutions like museums and universities and equal embrace of works considered both high- and low-brow left a lasting influence on a generation of artists and critics.

“There is no one like him. He belongs in the canon of American nonfiction prose,” his biographer Daniel Oppenheimer wrote in “Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art,” published last June.

He died Nov. 12 at home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after years of heart disease, said Libby Lumpkin, an art historian who was married to him. He was 82.

David Hickey was born in 1938 in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up moving around Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and California. After hopscotching through graduate school programs, he dropped out and opened a contemporary art gallery in Austin, Texas. He moved to New York in 1971, where he ran more galleries, edited the publication Art in America and wrote for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone magazine. His work and interests immersed him in an artistic community that included Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper and David Bowie.

Dave Hickey speaks at Art Los Angeles Contemporary: Vanity Projects and A Talk with Dave Hickey on February 1, 2014 in Santa Monica, California. — Art critic Dave Hickey often defended the gambling culture and lifestyle of Las Vegas.

Hickey later moved to Las Vegas to teach at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada. In the essays published in “Air Guitar” about how art should fit into broader culture, he championed Las Vegas as the most American of American cities for its detachment from traditional social hierarchies.

America “is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility,” he wrote.

Hickey challenged the idea that the Strip’s neon lights were somehow inauthentic, pushed back against notions that Las Vegas entertainment was culturally irrelevant and “especially enjoyed a good smoke and gambling spree at Eureka Casino on East Sahara Avenue, where he was often spotted with a cigarette while jabbing at slot machine buttons,” according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal obituary.

This May 2008 photo provided by Libby Lumpkin shows Dave Hickey, left with Peter Schjeldahl. — Dave Hickey (left) with fellow art critic Peter Schjeldahl in May 2008.

In “The Invisible Dragon” and later works, Hickey’s endorsement of “beauty” as the ultimate arbiter of artistic value ignited a clash with his contemporaries focused on 20th century conceptual art’s theory and meaning, who preferred to deconstruct the reasons why people find things to be beautiful.

“He chooses to overlook the view that beauty may be merely what the ruling economic and social elites say it is. In the process, his adversaries argue, he substitutes his own bad-boy outsider judgments for those of narrow-minded art professionals,” The New York Times wrote in a 1999 profile of Hickey.

Lumpkin said her husband never intended to champion traditionalism as his critics claimed.

“A lot of Dave’s work was misinterpreted. The assumption was made that the beauty he was talking about was something very old fashioned, but he was a supporter of very conceptual artists from the beginning,” she said.

Grace Slick and Dave Hickey (with her portrait of Hunter S. Thompson) — Dave Hickey (right) spent his remaining years being a professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

His tastes were indeed eclectic. He sang the praises of artists and figures in popular culture ranging from Norman Rockwell to Robert Mapplethorpe to Ellsworth Kelly. His essays covered basketball player Julius Erving, reruns of the television series “Perry Mason,” and outlaw country music.

In 2001, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a “genius” grant for his body of work. He was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 2003 and won a Peabody Award for a 2006 documentary about Andy Warhol.

Hickey and Lumpkin decamped to Santa Fe in 2010 and accepted positions at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Lumpkin said Hickey considered teaching among his most important work and legacy.

“He was a real intellectual without being a snob and he trusted his students to be able to think theoretically. When you put your trust in students like that, they get it and they make good art,” Lumpkin said.

November 28, 2021

Check Out This Artbook On Game Landscapes By A Garden Designer

The forthcoming artbook by award-winning garden designer Rob Dwiar, Genius Loci: A Grand Tour of Video Game Landscapes and Gardens, will be fully funded with only a few more backers. Genius Loci was accepted for publication in April, 2021. The artbook is just about ready for print.

The term “genius loci” translates from Latin to “the spirit of a place.” This was a reference to the various gods and goddesses that were believed to inhabit particular groves and springs. The term is mostly used these days by architects and designers to describe the overall character of a location. This would be what Dwiar seeks to capture when it comes to video game landscapes.

“From rigorously designed palace gardens to expansive natural lands and from alien planets with weird and wonderful plants to terrains imbued with meaning and symbolism, an expansive range of landscapes can be explored, traversed, and enjoyed in games,” Dwiar says. In the tradition of eighteenth century tourism, he proposes to “guide readers on a journey across video game histories, geographies, and stories” while offering “detailed appreciation and analysis along the way.”

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Dwiar promises to “shed light on the background, history, typology, horticulture and botany, and landscape and garden design features,” revealing what “real-world traits and approaches can be found in each place to give a thorough journey across a multitude of games and places.”

Genius Loci will be a deep dive into environment art and level design. The point is to bridge the gap between what players are able to see in games and what they can see in the world around them.

“The landscapes, gardens, and horticulture found within video games have come on such leaps and bounds in the past few decades that there is much to talk about, look at, and get lost in. Real-life garden design features and approaches now feature in game design, accurate portrayal, use, and combination of plants finish landscapes to a beautiful degree of detail, environment design has deeper levels of meaning and narrative importance than ever, and even the most prominent and high-profile games can see players engage in horticulture. Genius Loci will see all of this and more explored through dozens of places and games.”

The artbook will showcase more than 40 gardens and landscapes from Dishonored and Dishonored 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, BioShock and BioShock Infinite, Mass Effect, The Witcher 3, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Valhalla, Horizon Zero Dawn, The Last of Us, Oblivion and Skyrim, Fallout 4, Death Stranding, Red Dead Redemption 2, Ghost of Tsushima, and several other games.

Genius Loci will be a full-colour, high-quality hardback with over 40,000 words across more than 200 pages. The artbook will feature upwards of 100 game photographs taken by Dwiar.

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I’m Sorry But Brock Would Totally Be Cancelled In 2021

Your drying pan won’t protect you from the wrath of societal cancellation, Brock.

Harbor Hideaway / The Up Studio

Text description provided by the architects. Located in the centuries-old whaling village of Sag Harbor, NY, Harbor Hideaway is a single-family two-story residence. The property is situated in the center of a small peninsula and is one of the only lots in the neighborhood without direct water views. Although the instinct would be to design a new house to face the street, The Up Studio flipped the traditional orientation of the home to face the rear corner of the yard. This design decision created privacy from the street corner, immersed the family in greenery, and reclaimed previously obstructed water views, Heal Me Healthy.

The home was nearing completion in 2020 as New York experienced a major shift towards remote work, which made many seasonal neighborhoods like these more desirable for full-time residents seeking relief from congested city life. Although the homeowners initially hired The Up Studio to design a custom home specifically for their family, the increase in demand from homebuyers in the area led them to list the house prior to moving in.

The home was quickly sold just after completion and both the new owners and the original family have continued to work with The Up Studio. The entire home utilizes a simple material palette of blackened steel, light hardwood, and neutral colors. These material and fixture selections provide a subtle sophistication and allow the property’s surrounding natural elements to organically provide a pop of color. At entry, the custom wood stair design connects the three interior levels of the home with a single gesture and provides a sense of openness that makes the home’s modest footprint feel much larger.

The home’s rhythmic, black cedar facade wraps the entire home to naturally shade the south-facing bedrooms from the high summer sun and becomes a visual connection between the home and the carport, creating a covered entry in its path. The first-floor facade was designed to act as a subtle privacy screen from the street, while the rear of the home is fully glazed on both levels with custom Marvin Modern windows to create a strong connection between the home’s interiors, the property’s natural landscape, and the spectacular views of the nearby harbors.

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