A word of advice for artists designing and executing murals for libraries:
- Don’t misspell names in your mural. I mean, do some research, use some care, ask people to look at stuff over your shoulder — basic business and presentation discipline.
- If you’re going to misspell names, try to keep the error rate under, oh, 5% of the names.
- If you’re going to misspell names, make sure they’re obscure names. Don’t misspell names like, say, Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, or Michelangelo.
- If someone notes that you have in fact made a large number of misspelling, and those of significant, well-known names, don’t make lame excuses and make the library pay to fly you out to fix your frickin’ mistakes.
I’m just saying …
Reached at her Miami studio Wednesday by The Associated Press, Maria Alquilar said she was willing to fix the brightly colored 16-foot-wide circular work, but offered no apologizes for the 11 misspellings among the 175 names. “The importance of this work is that it is supposed to unite people,” Alquilar said. “They are denigrating my work and the purpose of this work.”
Alquilar said it took her quite a bit of her own time and money to create and install the work, and that it sat idle at her Santa Cruz studio for two years until the city cleared the way for its installation. There were plenty of people around during the installation who could and should have seen the missing and misplaced letters, she said.
“Even though I was on my hands and knees laying the installation out, I didn’t see it,” she said.
The mistakes wouldn’t even register with a true artisan, Alquilar said. “The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake’s concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words,” she said. “In their mind the words register correctly.”
Riiiiight. Because in a library, why would anyone be looking at mere words?
Heard this on NPR on the way into work this morning.
I laughed and laughed over it. I mean, it’s not like she couldn’t have gone over and looked up the names in question prior to painting them.
But at the end of the piece I heard what may have been the real reason for the misspellings…Alquilar is being paid $6000.00 to fix them.
That’s the part that frosts my butt. If I were the library, I’d get an estimate from a local artist of the cost to fix the misspellings and then sue Alquilar over it — either to come up and fix them herself within a given time period, or else pay for them to be fixed.
The only possible fly in that ointment is that it sounds like the QC processes of the library in this may have been pretty weak, too.
Then there’s the Reuters version of this story, noteworthy for referring to Livermore as “U.S. nuke city.”
Well…it is.
Just like Los alamos, Savanah River, and Oak Ridge.
Los Alamos, even Oak Ridge, sure. They were cities built directly around the Manhattan Project, and to this day remain focused around (and, esp with Los Alamos, isolated along with) the nuclear labs there.
I don’t know as much about Savannah River (or Hanford, for that matter).
Livermore, though, while the labs there are important, feels a lot more integrated into the rest of the Bay Area.
It just still strikes me as an odd headline. 🙂
I live in Livermore and it really makes me mad that this artist has her feelings hurt. It is the citizens of Livermore such as myself that should be upset that she has given us a piece of artwork that is unacceptable and since we have paid for this I have suggested to the city counsel that we need to recoup our money one way or the other.
Lawrence Livemore National Lab is the best employer in this town and have been great neighbors and help the community out in many ways.
Sorry for any misspellings
I can certainly understand your anger at this. I hope the mural is pretty incredible, because the ‘tude of the artist (not to mention her role in this problem) would be pretty hard for me to swallow if I were a Livermore taxpayer.
What is it with “are-teeests?” A local plaza was designed (poorly, IMHO) by an artist who was supposed to build it. When he didn’t get it finished in time, then a year after time, and the plaza was a big eyesore and people had to walk a quarter-mile around it, the university brought in contractors to finish it using the artist’s design. Que in artist getting all hissy about the university “failing to uphold their end of the bargain in honoring the creative vision” or something like that.
The artist kept the $half-million or whatever it was, though. That part of the artistic vision worked out just fine for him.
My sympathies to the people of Livermore. What a crock.
“Art for art’s sake.”
Too many artists who are doing work ostensibly for the public end up feeling that it’s actually the public doing something (the favor of forking over cash) for them, and that’s the extent of what they feel they need to worry about what their public sponsors think.
Granted, the patronage system over the centuries has led to awful compromises in the artistic endeavors (awful in the view of the artists themselves, if nothing else), but it seems that for every tale that comes to us of the patron taking a “too many notes” approach to art, we get a tale of artists taking a “thanks for the fine judgment you’ve displayed in supporting my creative endeavors, now get the heck out of the way until I tell you it’s time to applaud.”
Both are to be decried. If you hire an expert to do something, let them do it (and make sure your needs are spelled out well ahead of time). And, conversely, if someone is paying you to do something, make sure their needs, not just yours, are being met.