Jim Newman (born 1933 in Omaha, Nebraska) is a film and television producer, contemporary art curator, gallerist and musician.
Jim Newman (born 1933 in Omaha, Nebraska) is a film and television producer, contemporary art curator, gallerist and musician.
Discovering bebop as a teenager and trained as a saxophonist, Newman attended Stanford University and Oberlin College, where he received his bachelor's degree in music in 1955. While at Oberlin he started a jazz club and was also a founding member, with Walter Hopps and Craig Kauffman, of Concerthall Workshop. In addition to his activities as a musician, Newman has had extensive experience as a jazz presenter, having staged numerous concerts at Oberlin and in Los Angeles, presenting such artists as Dave Brubeck, Teddy Charles, Count Basie, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, Terry Gibbs, and Gerry Mulligan.
In 1978 Newman resumed active music making, studying flute performance. From 1982 to 2013 he held the baritone saxophone chair with the Junius Courtney big band in the San Francisco area. With filmmaker William Farley he produced a video documentary, In Between the Notes, on the life and career of master Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, working closely with Pran Nath's disciples Terry Riley, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
In 1992, along with Charles Amirkhanian, Newman co-founded the new music festival organization Other Minds, based in San Francisco. He designed its website from 1995 until 2005 as well as its concert programs and CDs. He served as President of Other Minds (formerly the California College of Performing Arts) from 1992 to 2004. He resigned from the Other Minds Board in 2016. He currently curates a film series for the Upper Ashbury Cinema Club (UACC), a private, by invitation, group of film lovers.
Jim Newman co-founded Syndell Studio in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles in 1955, with Ben and Betty Bartosh, Walter Hopps and Craig Kauffman. [1] In that same year they presented "Action I," the first major survey of California abstract expressionist painting, at the Santa Monica Pier merry-go-round. [2]
In 1956 he moved to San Francisco where he co-founded the Dilexi Gallery with Robert Alexander in 1958 and directed its operations until it closed in 1969. [3] Exhibitors at the gallery included: Alan Lynch, Jeremy Anderson, Hassel Smith, Alvin Light, Leslie Kerr, Craig Kauffman, Irving Petlin, Deborah Remington, Jay DeFeo, Roy De Forest, Ed Moses, H.C. Westermann, Jess (1958), Sidney Gordin, Gary Molitor, Ron Nagle, Richard Shaw (artist), Robert Morris (artist), Joe Goode (1962) and Charles Ross.
In 1993 Newman began a collaboration with conceptual artist Lowell Darling on a project called Hollywood Archaeology. They began making Cibachrome prints of discarded movie film found by Darling in the streets and dumpsters of Hollywood in the early '70s. More recently the project has expanded and found a home on the World Wide Web, under the sponsorship of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In his capacity as a film and television producer, Newman worked with KQED-TV on production of the Dilexi Series, featuring twelve original TV programs by artists including Terry Riley, Arlo Acton, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Nelson, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, The Living Theater, Philip Makanna, Robert Frank, Edwin Schlossberg, Walter De Maria, and Ken Dewey. [4] From 1971 to 1974 he produced two feature films, Phil Makanna's Shoot the Whale and Space Is the Place , featuring jazz bandleader Sun Ra. In 1976 he produced a video documentary on Philippine psychic surgery, Miracles and Metaphors.
In 2017 Newman began collaborating with curator and art historian Laura Whitcomb in a series of projects documenting his career in the arts. In November 2021 Whitcomb authored and published a book titled DILEXI: a Gallery & Beyond. [5] It covers the entire history of Dilexi Gallery and other projects, including the Dilexi TV series of artist commissions, films Newman produced, including Shoot the Whale and Space is the Place , his documentary In Between the Notes on the Indian classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, and the new music festival Other Minds, which Newman co-founded with Charles Amirkhanian.
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, and delay systems. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music. Subsequent works such as Shri Camel (1980) explored just intonation.
La Monte Thornton Young is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best known for his exploration of sustained tones, beginning with his 1958 composition Trio for Strings. His compositions have called into question the nature and definition of music, most prominently in the text scores of his Compositions 1960. While few of his recordings remain in print, his work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including avant-garde, rock, and ambient music.
Pandit Pran Nath was an Indian classical singer and master of the Kirana gharana singing style. Promoting traditional raga principles, Nath exerted an influence on notable American minimalist and jazz musicians, including La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Don Cherry. He began performing in the United States in the 1970s, and established the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in 1972; he subsequently taught in various universities across the US and Europe.
Charles Benjamin Amirkhanian is an American composer. He is a percussionist, sound poet, and radio producer of Armenian origin. He is mostly known for his electroacoustic and text-sound music. Performance artist Laurie Anderson praises his work: "The art of audio collage has been reinvented here... A brilliant sense of imaginary space."
Wallace "Wally" Berman was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art.
Other Minds is an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. It was founded In 1992 by Charles Amirkhanian and Jim Newman. According to their mission statement, the organization is dedicated to the "encouragement and propagation of contemporary music."
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, formerly known as the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA), is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, California, United States. As an independent and non-collecting art museum, it exhibits the work of local, national, and international contemporary artists. Until May 2015, the museum was based at the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. In May 2016, the museum announced an official name change to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and its relocation to Los Angeles's Downtown Arts District. The museum reopened to the public in September 2017.
Marian Zazeela is an American light artist, designer, calligrapher, painter and musician based in New York City. She was a member of the 1960s experimental music collective Theatre of Eternal Music, and is known for her collaborative work with her husband, the minimalist composer La Monte Young.
Larry Bell is an American contemporary artist and sculptor. He is best known for his glass boxes and large-scaled illusionistic sculptures. He is a grant recipient from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his artworks are found in the collections of many major cultural institutions. He lives and works in Taos, New Mexico, and maintains a studio in Venice, California.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s, and later went on to redefine practices of curatorial installation internationally. He is known for contributing decisively to “the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.”
Joe Goode is an American artist who attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1959–1961. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles through his cloud imagery and milk bottle paintings which were associated with the Pop Art movement. The artist is also closely associated with Light and Space, a West coast movement of the early 1960s. He currently creates and resides in Los Angeles, California.
The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery which operated from 1957 to 1966. In 1957, the gallery was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. In 1958, it was relocated across the street to 723 North La Cienega Boulevard where it remained until its closing in 1966.
Craig Kauffman was an artist who has exhibited since 1951. Kauffman's primarily abstract paintings and wall relief sculptures are included in over 20 museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Irving Petlin was an American artist and painter renowned for his mastery of the pastel medium and collaborations with other artists and for his work in the "series form" in which he employed the raw materials of pastel, oil paint and unprimed linen, and found inspiration in the work of writers and poets including Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, Michael Palmer and Edmond Jabès.
The Cool School is a 2008 American documentary film about the rise of the Los Angeles contemporary art scene. It was directed by Morgan Neville and narrated by Jeff Bridges. The documentary premièred at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
Syndell Studio was an art gallery located in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, between 1954 and 1956.
The Just Alap Raga Ensemble is a Hindustani classical music ensemble, based in New York City, formed in 2002 by La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Jung Hee Choi. The ensemble performs music in the tradition of the Kirana Gharana, a style inherited through Young and Zazeela's long discipleship under master Indian vocalist, Pandit Pran Nath. The music features extended alap sections and sustained vocal drones in just intonation over tamburas.
Hassel Smith was an American painter.
Jung Hee Choi is a South Korean-born artist and musician, based in New York City, working in video, performance, sound and multi-media installation. Since 1999, Choi has been a disciple of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in the study of music and art. Choi, with Young and Zazeela, is a founding member of The Just Alap Raga Ensemble, and has performed as vocalist with the ensemble since 2002. Choi's work has been presented in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including FRAC Franche-Comté, France; Berliner Festspiele, Germany; Dia Art Foundation, Guggenheim Museum and MELA Foundation Dream Houses, NYC; FRESH Festival, Bangkok; and the Korea Experimental Arts Festival, Korea. The New York Times listed Choi’s Tonecycle for Blues performed by her Sundara All Star Band as one of The Best Classical Music Performances of 2017.
Shirley Neilsen Blum, also known as Shirley Hopps is an American art historian, author, gallerist, and professor emeritus at the State University of New York, Purchase (1970–1989). She specializes in Northern Renaissance art, early Netherlandish art, and modern art. In the 1950s through the 1960s, she was active in the Los Angeles gallery scene, and she co-founded and co-ran Ferus Gallery.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)