Behind the scenes, shooting a VMFA TV spot

On Thursday, April 8, a large TV production crew descended on the museum to film two new TV spots. After several weeks of anticipation, we had access to Splotch 22, Sol LeWitt’s famous and colorful sculpture, newly installed in the Atrium. In the afternoon, we shot our second spot with Kaufmann’s “Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures,” in the Vaulted Gallery.

After a rousing crew breakfast at 7:30 a.m. (mostly coffee) we started deploying people and equipment, moving through two elevators, the “secret tunnel,” and several twists and turns. With the greatest of care, and the support of the museum’s registrars, curators, electricians, art handlers, security and many others, we brought in lights, stands, cameras, lots of cable, and carts full of reflectors, filters, and other arcane pieces of filming equipment.

Filming TV spots such as ours are not linear affairs. The director works from a storyboard that depicts the flow of the script, but new shots and ideas reveal themselves during the shoot. The creative process includes the director, advertising agency representative, and client (in this case, me) often seeing something new during the shoot that may get explored. The team on this shoot was impressive. Different versions of lighting, camera angles, script changes, and timing were part of the process of getting the best footage.

Despite the ongoing construction, movement of museum staff and other activities that were critical to the completion of VMFA’s expansion, we ended the day with great footage. The efforts in the edit sessions of the next couple of days resulted in the terrific spots now airing. These spots present a message that will be relevant beyond our opening May 1st.

I hope you enjoy!

- Bob Tarren, VMFA Director of Marketing

Art, or art handler?

I was once duped by a Hanson. A group of students were packed into the foyer of the Lewis house, waiting to get a tour. While wedged, my eyes flittered about wildly, scanning the art-crammed architecture, bouncing from work to work, from face to elated face of fellow students bearing art-shot expressions of awe. I hesitated as the last few students filed out for the tour. Had I missed anything? A solitary figure in the periphery remained motionless. The group partially cleared and I became aware of a worker in uniform, awaiting a package, on the ready with a hand truck. When the foyer emptied completely, (ha!) it was sculpture.

Hanson’s sculptures combine strategies of Greek figurative tradition with Pop concerns from the more recent history of art. There’s also a social realist’s agenda going on in the look on the faces peering out from behind the uniforms. Ancient Greek artisans used tactics of realism like surface coating sculptures with polychrome skins and garnishing them with real clothing. Updated with a postmodern lunchbox of readymade Coke and Lay’s, Hanson’s “Hard Hat Construction Worker” has been an apt mascot for VMFA during its expansion phase website construction, not only for its connection to such sculptural strategies of various eras, but for its popular appeal and the irony of its uniform.

Depicted “on break,” spaced out and wearied by menial labors, the face of the Hard Hat figure, like the faces on the figures of other Hanson works of the same period, is imbued with a pathos of exhaustion to engage viewers on an emotional level. I felt anything but exhaustion, camera in hand, making my way back from a tour of the VMFA’s expansion wing the day this photo was shot. I was exuberant; intoxicated by the thought that all the art I had helped tuck deep into storage would finally be making its way to new and fantastic spaces, to be seen again.

It is a lot of work, putting VMFA back together again.

- Justin Brown has, by virtue of his current employment as an art handler by VMFA, been granted permission to touch. He enjoys each workday for its “hand’s on” opportunity to experience the VMFA’s collection.

(Image: "Hard Hat Construction Worker" is a 20th century sculpture by Duane Hanson. Gift of The Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation.)

Insight into Insights Student Symposium

It’s a strange thing to be a student in an MFA program for creative writing, to be faced by raised eyebrows, prolonged pauses (as if waiting for the punch-line), and genuine disbelief when you confess: yes, part of your graduate curriculum is making one word almost rhyme with another. And it can be an isolating experience, because outside the umbrella of the university, it’s not uncommon to go months without seeing any evidence that the poems and stories you’re spending days, weeks, and months crafting are, in fact, actually being read by someone. It can sometimes feel as though you’re writing into a vacuum. You wonder if perhaps you should have listened to your high school guidance counselor. You consider becoming a reality-TV star.

But you don’t. It only takes one trip to Richmond, one day of artistic affirmation to remind you that those days, weeks, and months of crafting were not for naught. That’s the gift that the VMFA’s Insights Graduate Student Symposium gives, or rather, the gift it gave me and my fellow presenters last spring: an attentive, knowledgeable, and generous audience. The gift of being well-heard, the reminder that Art (that’s right, with a capital ‘a’) can still accomplish what it has since Horace first stated his artistic ideal: Art can still teach, can still delight, thanks to places like the VMFA, and to events like the Insights Symposium.

Last spring, after driving over the Blue Ridge Mountains on my way from Roanoke and my MFA program at Hollins University, not only was I greeted by historic Monument Avenue as I made my way into Richmond, but once I arrived at the museum I encountered a hive of artistic interest. There were poets and fiction writers from other Virginia MFA programs (UVA, George Mason, and VCU), art history scholars and graduate students, museum administrators, and community members; all of them open ears, all of them interested in the ways in which our disciplines intertwined, all of them deeply invested on the art in the air and on the walls.

After the readings, the presentations, the questions and occasional answers, our group moved across the street for a reception. Drinks were poured. Finger-foods were consumed off of very small decorative plates. Winners were named. But even though there was just a single winner in each category, it was clear to everyone there that no individual would leave the museum feeling as though they had lost, for in reality, they hadn’t. Reality TV had lost. Art—and anyone who had ever tilted their head after reading a poem or story, anyone who has stood in front of a painting for half-an-hour without knowing exactly why—had won. I’m honored to have been a part of the first Insights Symposium and hopeful that the event will continue for years to come. It’s a heartening and necessary day, not only because it showcases the wonderful artwork in the VMFA as well as the writing taking place in and around Virginia, but because it celebrates the creation and appreciation of Art as an act of community, as something that should be shared with others. Certainly, that’s worth celebrating, and maybe, just maybe, better than reality TV.

- Luke Johnson earned his MFA from Hollins University. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Greensboro Review, Passages North, and Best New Poets 2008. His manuscript, After the Ark, was recently named a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award. He teaches at Oak Hill Academy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Read his blog at http://proofofblog.blogspot.com/.