Arts District: Scene's Arts Blog

Just one week after the Cleveland Museum of Art celebrated the Solstice and the opening of its new Rafael Vinoly-designed East Wing, executive director Timothy Rub has announced his resignation. Rub, who took the job in January 2006, and agreed to a pay cut as the museum’s endowment was hit hard (as endowments have been across the board this year) will take over as executive director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in September, according to a press release from the Museum.

In Philadelphia he’ll replace the late Anne d’Harnoncourt, who died of a heart attack last year. He leaves the Cleveland museum at the halfway point of construction in its $350 million expansion. To date, the museum has raised $212 toward that campaign, about $80 million of which was raised during Rub’s brief tenure.

Rub leaves one major architectural project for another: the Philadelphia Museum of Art is in the midst of its own renovation and reorganization, under the architectural guidance of Frank Gehry.

“We are sorry to see Timothy go and wish him well,” said Alfred M. Rankin, Jr., president of the museum’s Board of Trustees in a press release issued by the Museum.

“Following Timothy’s departure in September, the museum will be well served by senior managers who are both experienced and resourceful. With their assistance and the implementation of a transition plan that we are already developing, I am confident that the museum will continue to operate smoothly and that its momentum, including our renovation and expansion project and capital campaign, will continue,” Rankin said.

The search for his successor will begin shortly. — Michael Gill

When the Cleveland Museum of Art and Cleveland Public Art went looking for an outdoor installation that would evoke solstice celebrations around the world, they went to Mark Reigelman, the recent graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art who is now living in New York. If his name sounds at all familiar, that’s likely because he designed the cast concrete planters on the sidewalks along the Euclid corridor—the ones that look like a wrapped roll of paper unfurling a little, slightly uneven at the end.

Reigelman gave CPA and CMA’s party planners four ideas. He says his favorite was to cover the glass cube on the southeast side of the new East Wing with tin foil pom-poms, with light splashed all over them, which would look like a fire.

In the end, though, they settled on an idea to evoke the massive piles of cut wood that villages accumulate in preparation for the gigantic bonfires associated with celebrating the longest day of the year. The plan: to stack sections of fuscia pool noodles like logs, to create the look of an orderly wood pile. This would require a large number of pool noodles: more than any local store would have on hand. 18,720 of them, to be exact.

“The American Pool Noodle Industry gets all its pool noodles from one manufacturer in Canada,” Reigelman has learned. Their factory had been shut down for the season when Reigelman called, but they fired it up to meet the huge order.All told, delivered from Canada, the noodles cost about $7,400.

Reigelman was assembling the pool noodle log piles in 14 foot sections in the basement of the Cleveland Institute of Art last week. He had help from volunteers—anywhere from three to nine people working eight-our days, assembling log piles with construction adhesive.

The sections will be moved outdoors to the lawn outside the museum for the solstice party, where they’ll be assembled into a flowing but pixilated wood pile. They’ll serve a dual purpose, both as sculpture and as a practical barrier to help define the space and make a gateway to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s solstice party, in celebration of the opening of the new East Wing.

Reigelman says the noodles are recyclable, so they won’t end up in a land fill when it’s over, but he’s looking for a way to get more than a single use out of them. So don’t be surprised if the pool noodle log pile is re-incarnated elsewhere around town this summer.

Tania James, a first-time novelist at age 28 with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, notes that she still hasn’t achieved the goal she set for herself when she was 10: to become a Supreme Court Justice. Her novel, Atlas of the Unknowns, is a coming-of-age and coming-apart story about a young Indian girl who wins a scholarship to a prestigious school in America, but she must leave her family and country behind. James mines her own college film studies for a protagonist who makes a documentary about her life. James discusses her book and signs copies at 7 p.m. at Joseph-Beth Booksellers (in Legacy Village, 24519 Cedar Rd., Lyndhurst, 216.691.7000). It’s free. — Michael Gill

When Nina Sarnelle refers to her one-night sculpture show Selvation as an “underground event,” she literally means it. Her gallery, Salon des Refuses, is located in the newly refurbished basement of an apartment building. Sarnelle graduated from Oberlin College two years ago with degrees in creative writing and film studies. Selvation, her first show, includes mostly small sculptures made out of things she found in the apartment, like paper, thread and old McCall’s magazines featuring fashion drawings of impossibly shaped ladies. The work is formed into tiny origami — suspended, contorted and communicating something about how feminist perspectives fit into Christian scripture. The show also includes a couple of animated video installations. Sarnelle slaps a subtitle on the whole thing: “Modest exercises in eternal damnation: a liturgical undressing.” But don’t be frightened by the religious trappings. When she says “blood and body will be served,” she’s talking about refreshments. It happens from 8-midnight, June 19, at the Salon des Refuses (1387 East Blvd., 517.420.6715). Admission is free. — Michael Gill

A week after his Cleveland concert, Goran Bregovic’s raucous and imperfectly tuned gypsy music returns — this time on the big screen, as the Cleveland Museum of Art shows Emir Kusturica’s Time of the Gypsies, Bregovic’s first movie score from 1988. It’s a coming-of-age story about an Eastern European boy. Bregovic followed up with several more Kusturica movies before scoring Borat. Time of the Gypsies screens at 6:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall (11150 East Blvd., 216.421.7350). Tickets: $4-$8. — Michael Gill

When Guiseppe Verdi died, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini led orchestras and choruses from all over Italy for a state-sponsored funeral service, which, 108 years later, is still credited as the country’s largest-ever public gathering. Eight years earlier, when he was 80 years old, Verdi wrote Falstaff, the last of his 26 operas. Based on Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV plays, the story revolves around a drunk dude (played by Gaetan Laperriere, pictured) who schemes rich women and their retaliatory plans to humiliate him. It’s a comedy, so all is forgiven in the end, when couples get married in goofy pairings, and the drunken buffoon Falstaff hands out some famous advice: “He who laughs last, laughs best.” Peter Kazaras, director of UCLA’s opera theatre program, helms Opera Cleveland’s production — which concludes the company’s season with performances at 8 tonight, 2 p.m. Sunday and 8 p.m. on June 27 at the State Theatre (1519 Euclid Ave., 216.241.6000). Tickets: $25-$130. — Michael Gill

Composer and composition teacher Orianna Webb’s music has been performed by orchestras and chamber groups around the country, and she’s taught in some impressive places (including the Yale School of Music). But this weekend she focuses on the kids. Webb is founder and director of the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Young Composers Program, which teaches teens how to write music. The students have been working with CIM faculty all week, and unveil their scores for flute, cello and piano to CIM’s Mixon Hall (11021 East Blvd., 216.795.5000) in performances at 8 tonight and noon tomorrow. Admission is free. — Michael Gill