Augusta has link to Japanese pop culture

Augusta has link to Japanese pop culture
Takashi Murakami, whose cartoonish pop art creations incorporate anime and manga influences with traditional Japanese techniques, and who is frequently called the Andy Warhol of Japan, created a stir this spring with the opening of his retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
While the show was being installed , Augusta artist Tatiana Klacsmann was working behind the scenes on other Murakami projects at the Long Island City studio/office of his Kaikai Kiki production company .
For Ms. Klacsmann, the job meant long hours of intense, precision-driven work. She was one of a team of 17 studio assistants who worked in shifts round the clock.
Working for a Japanese pop culture icon and one-man global industry might seem a strange tangent for Ms. Klacsmann, who is a Yale graduate with honors in art and classical Greek. She said she wanted to work for Mr. Murakami because she knew “it would be a very active and exciting time to be there with the opening of the Brooklyn show and the coming of Art Basel.”
What did the experience bring to her art?
“In terms of my own working methods, my medium and subject matter differ from Murakami’s, but I was influenced by the high level of organization in the studio,” she said.
There’s more information about Mr. Murakami’s Brooklyn show at www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/murakami, where you’ll find images and a slide show of the installation of the massive exhibition. The exhibit and the online slide show will close July 13.
Ms. Klacsmann is happy to have one of her own works from her “Chimera” series on exhibit in the Spring Show at the Pen and Brush Building in New York. Pen and Brush Inc. is a 113-year-old international organization for women in the visual, literary and performing arts, based in a historic townhouse in Greenwich Village. That show closes June 22.
Next, she will head off for her second summer at the Vermont Studio School, where she will be preparing an entry for a national portrait competition. She will end the summer with another artist’s retreat at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia before going to Christie’s in London in the fall.
Sculptor to participate in sculpting competition
Augusta artist Casey Cohoon is in the spotlight this month as a finalist in the National Competition for Figurative Sculpture, sponsored by the National Sculpture Society in New York. The society , founded in 1893, is the oldest organization of professional sculptors in the United States.
The competition will take place Monday through June 20 at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Conn . This year , there are 13 finalists. The actual competition begins when the finalists enter a large studio contaiing a live model. Until that moment, they will not know who the model will be or whether the person will be young, old, male or female.
F or five days, six hours a day, they will work to create realistic sculptures (no more than 3 feet high) of that model. At the end of the competition, a panel of judges will critique the works and select the winners.
Mr. Cohoon was also a finalist in 2006. He knows from experience that the judges will be looking for anatomical accuracy and continuity of line, for work fully realized right down to the toes. In the past two years, he says, he has been doing a lot of sculpting, giving him broader experience, and he makes sketches almost constantly. H e believes he is ready for the challenge.
He began sculpting in his freshman year at Westside High School and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2007. He had work included in the B.F.A. Regional Exhibition at Boston University in 2006 and was selected for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Sculpture Competition that year. Last summer, he had a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, where in a classic “small world” encounter, he met Tatiana Klacsmann.
“Finding one’s character through clay, and pushing it to expose an innermost being, is for me the most rewarding aspect of sculpting,” he said. “I am intrigued by how much information a simple piece of clay can reveal.”
An example of his work can be seen at Zimmerman Gallery on Broad Street.

Louise Keith Claussen is Morris Communications Co.’s corporate art manager, former arts editor, former art museum director and advocate of Augusta’s cultural arts community.