ArtsBeat
Syracuse creates a collaboration masterpiece
By now, practically every arts organization in the United States has grown weary of the word “collaboration.”
The term has long been bandied about by foundations, consultants, politicians and community members as a solution to for the financial and institutional woes that afflict thousands of arts groups across the country.
But any group that has tried to mount a wide-ranging collaboration knows the concept sometimes creates more problems than it solves. In some cases, the up-front investment of time and resources to launch a major collaborative project far outweighs the increased exposure and revenue it produces.
Done right, however, collaboration can be a sorely needed shot in the arm to arts groups striving to cast a wider net to snag bigger and more diverse audiences.
In Syracuse, a promising city-wide cultural collaboration –grander in scope than any we have seen recently in Buffalo –is in full swing.
At the center of the initiative is “Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces From the Davies Collection,” a small but potent touring exhibition at Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art featuring important pieces by Monet, Turner, van Gogh, Renoir and other significant turn-of-the-century painters. The show, comprised of 58 wisely chosen works that tell the story of Impressionism through the lens of two Welsh collectors, is impressive in itself.
The Everson could have done well for itself simply by promoting the show to art-savvy audiences in Central and Western New York and leaving it at that. But, under the direction of director Steven Kern, the museum managed to recruit a laundry list of Syracuse’s cultural heavyweights to mount programming that plays off the exhibition’s theme. The result is an entire city saturated and infatuated with one expansive theme, the once-glum Salt City transformed into an Impressionist playground.
Last weekend, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra presented a concert of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” featuring an hour-long multimedia presentation reflecting on the fascinating
space between art and music. On Nov. 20 and 21, the orchestra will present “Impressionist Masters,” with work by Debussy, Ravel and Faure.
Syracuse Stage, the city’s regional theater company, has joined the fray with two related plays. The first, Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” (through Nov. 1) is a mad-cap one-act that muses on the artistic and scientific mind-set at the dawn of the 20th century. The second, an original piece called “The Woman in the Blue Dress,” is based on a famous Renoir painting in the “Turner to Cezanne” exhibition and runs in the Everson auditorium through Nov. 8.
Today, the Syracuse Opera performs Puccini’s “La Boheme” with costumes based on work from the exhibition and plans a series of performances to be presented at the Everson itself.
And the list goes on, with additional tie-ins with Onondaga County’s Historical Society and Public Library and Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery and Vocal Ensemble through the end of the year.
In this way, the entire Syracuse community, from Syracuse University Hill to the outlying suburbs, has an opportunity to explore Impressionism from several distinct perspectives, all bound loosely together with a sort of Impressionist paste. This type of full-on cultural assault may not be for every taste. But there is an indelible benefit—not to mention an invigorating sense of city-wide excitement and engagement –that comes from focusing huge amounts of cultural energy on one big idea.
However you look at it, the current zeitgeist of Syracuse’s culturals is worth exploring even by Buffalo’s arts groups, no strangers to successful large and small-scale arts collaborations.
Given its size, Syracuse can’t hope to compete with Buffalo in terms of diversity, audience base and sheer profusion of artistic offerings. But when it comes to focusing the eyes, ears and minds of its community on a single compelling theme, the city’s affair with Impressionism offers a promising route to cultural success.
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