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Author Archives: Stephen Charles Benine
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Piano Drop
The Great Piano Drop of 1968
Sunday, February 1, 2009
How a $25 Steinway made history, blew hippie minds and almost squashed them flat.
Folks around Duvall still talk about the Great Piano Drop of April 28, 1968, when the hippies decided they wanted to hear what such an instrument sounded like dropped from a great height. It happened at a pioneering rock concert in a small ravine off Cherry Valley Road.
“On one side was Larry Van Over’s unfinished barn-sized mansion, which, still without a roof, resembled an Elizabethan theatre,” recalls Paul Dorpat — now an award-winning historian, then the publisher of the alternative newspaper Helix and emcee of big local hippie events.
“On the other side a stage was improvised for Country Joe and the Fish. In between was a postage-stamp wetland with a woodpile. The spectators formed a narrow horseshoe with the pile of logs at the center.”
As arriving concertgoers clogged Duvall’s narrow roads, Country Joe performed his hits “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” (about “their manager Ed Denson’s not very sweet ex-wife”) and “Janis” (about his romance with Janis Joplin). As Country Joe sang, “The only way you’ll ever get her high / Is to let her do her thing and then watch you die,” Dorpat pondered the excellent chance that he was about to watch the hippies die by crowding so close to the woodpile where the piano was supposed to land.
“I began pleading with the crowd to step away from the log pile. The vision of the piano hitting its target and exploding into wooden shrapnel made me acutely nervous.” A helicopter hovered above, the piano swaying beneath it. Dorpat recalls, “It headed up and over the crowd and then hovered above the pile. And it kept hovering. Perhaps to wait for the piano to relax. Later I learned that the pilot was not relaxed.”
While Dorpat pleaded with the hippies, Van Over pleaded with the terrified pilot to drop his perilous payload. “They’ll move,” said Van Over. “Trust me, man, it’ll be like the Red Sea all over again!”
At about 3:30 p.m., the pilot attempted to come to a stop about 150 feet overhead. “But bodies in motion tend to remain in motion, and the five-hundred-pound piano dragged the helicopter forward,” wrote Walt Crowley in his memoir Rites of Passage.
“It started to wobble and the pilot released it,” recalls Country Joe, “probably to avoid a crash as it seemed quite a precarious load.”
“The pilot panicked and hit the harness release,” wrote Crowley, “but nothing happened. He then hit the emergency cable release, and the piano snapped free.”
The $25 St. Vincent de Paul upright was airborne for about five seconds. “It was a long few seconds,” says Dorpat. “I lost my breath, because my heart — or stomach — seemed caught in my throat.” Providentially, the piano missed both its target and the hippies, landing in the soft grass between. “The piano did not seem damaged in any way when it hit the ground,” says Joe. Dorpat remembers: “We were lucky. Like Maenads descending on Orpheus, the crowd broke for the broken piano and carried away the pieces.”
“I was amazed that they could damage an upright piano with their hands,” marvels Joe. “All in all it was quite fun and I thought very creative.”
The ostensible point of the Piano Drop was to determine scientifically what sound the instrument would make upon impact. “Sproinnnng? Charrrownnng? Brrrannnnggg? Kashwonngagaga?” wondered Crowley. In fact, it was something like “Plop.” Dorpat pronounced it a “Piano Flop.”
And yet the event was anything but a flop. Every ticket sold raised a dollar for Helix and extravagantly alternative radio station KRAB. “It was the joyful time that a few hundred (although we claimed thousands) had at the Piano Drop in Duvall that encouraged us at Helix to try a multi-day outdoor festival,” says Dorpat. Later that summer, a year before Country Joe played for half a million at Woodstock, Northwest hippies converged on Betty Nelson’s Strawberry Farm in Sultan for the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter than Air Fair.
And we may not have heard the last from that piano, the pieces of which have dispersed like the Grail. Says Dorpat, “I have a note somewhere which will, it is claimed, lead me to the sounding board.”
Illustration by Andrew Saeger for City Arts
– See more at: http://www.cityartsonline.com/issues/seattle/2009/02/great-piano-drop-1968#sthash.xKAwaDT1.dpuf
http://www.cityartsonline.com/issues/seattle/2009/02/great-piano-drop-1968
Co-curators Michael Goodson, CCAD’s director of exhibitions, and Shannon Benine, associate professor of photography and multimedia, acquired works from 27 photographers with an eye toward the human experience and the multitude of factors that come with it.
Shannon Benine Co- curates new gallery opening in Columbus Ohio.
Wolf had just published a book of photographs of riders on “the pathologically packed morning trains in Tokyo,” Goodson said.
The journalist had been in the Japanese city covering the sarin gas attacks on the train system and began snapping photos of the early-morning commuters, using the subway-train windows as frames.
Pressed, stressed faces on the condensation-covered windows made for powerfully unsettling images.
The series, “Tokyo Compression,” is one of many jaw-dropping sets of contemporary photos in “ Sitter” at the Columbus College of Art & Design.
“What drives the show, in part, is that the idea of the portrait has been adopted by photography, in various ways, more than any other medium, although using many different methods, ideas and strategies,” said Goodson, who organized the exhibit with Shannon Benine, assistant professor of photography and graduate studies at CCAD.
Goodson and Benine’s curatorial skills are just as important to the show as the images.
They sought a range of artists, from newer voices to the internationally established — such as street-art icon JR and beloved social documentarian Catherine Opie, whose portraits include deliciously composed images of actress Elizabeth Taylor’s clothing.
Art history in the making is on view. The portrait of Erno Nussenzweig from Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s “Heads” “stands out as a photographic icon in regards to the legality of street photography,” Benine said.
DiCorcia captured painterly portraits of ordinary people walking New York sidewalks at midday and showed them in galleries without their consent — for which he was sued in 2005 for violation of privacy.
The show is also marked by a range of processes.
Kelli Connell, for example, uses modern digital techniques to create photos of one woman in scenes with herself, implying the duplicity of a life and what a singular portrait of a person can often fail to capture.
Most moving, though, is the wealth of subjects, particularly regarding those of marginal communities — acquired through extensive research and storytelling.
Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project portraits present adults who are the age that the children killed by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1963 church bombings would have been had they lived — juxtaposed with photos of children the same age as the victims.
Celia Shapiro wrote to prisons asking for a list of what Death Row inmates had requested for last meals.
On view are her colorful representations of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream (requested by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) and hot dogs (murderer John William Rook). The re-creations are attractive at first, then chilling.
Go see the show, bound to be one of the best of the year, but don’t take the kids. The images not suitable for children are among the ones you’ll spend the most time contemplating.
Shannon Benine
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https://www.columbusmuseum.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/
GCAC2014Exhibition
Support/Volunteer
The Columbus Museum of Art presents The 2014 Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) Visual Arts Exhibition. Highlighting the outstanding talent and ability of Columbus artists, the exhibition includes work by the recipients of the 2013 GCAC Individual Artist Fellowship Awards : Shannon Benine, Clara Crockett, Evan Dawson and Shane Mecklenberger Two others, Andrea Myers and Laura Alexander, were awarded GCAC residencies in Dresden, Germany this year.
These artists represent a diverse range of practices fostered within Columbus’s artistic community. Clara Crockett’s pencil drawings of human and canine figures are both sensitive and surreal, while Shannon Benine will show her compelling, somewhat mysterious photographs of Molokai, Hawaii. In his video works, Shane Mecklenberger creates weightless fields of computer-generated diamonds, while Evan Dawson’s sculptural gestures begin with the material circumstances of daily life. Laura Alexander cuts intricate patterns into layered sheets of paper, and Kaveri Raina’s vivid abstractions are painted with materials like turmeric, chili powder and cinnamon. Each with their own niche, together these artists demonstrate the region’s vibrant artistic ecology.
Shannon Benine
Exhibition Date: Saturday, May 17, 2014 – Saturday, July 5, 2014
Reception
Saturday| May 17 | 5 to 7pm
The artists featured in Fragments of an Unknowable Whole complicate our everyday encounter with images and expand the boundaries of the photographic medium.
Their generative and transformative practices are situated within and around a diverse field of spaces – the screen, the picture plane, and the physical object. They activate these spaces through conceptually bold and visually compelling inquiries, and disrupt the conventional notion of the photographic image as inherently fixed or depictive.
Ranging from Heidi Norton’s material analogies of photo processes and plant life cycles, to B. Ingrid Olson’s circuitous photographic assemblages of the body, to Jeremy Bolen’s experimental attempts to document unseen natural and man-made phenomena, the artists in this exhibition reveal new contexts for looking and embrace a multiplicity of possibilities for our engagement with images.
Curated by Timothy Smith
Exhibiting Artists:
Shannon Benine Promoted to Associate Professor
Shannon Benine is promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
The Promotion Committee noted Shannon Benine’s dossier was extremely
organized and comprehensive, providing ample evidence of her
outstanding national and regional achievements in teaching, service,
and creative research. The leadership roles she has taken, combined
with grants, and professional connections she’s made have placed her
in the national photographic arts discourse, bringing that attention
to the programs at CCAD.
Link
Shannon Benine receives Arts Fellowship Award
THE GREATER COLUMBUS ARTS COUNCIL AND THE COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART ANNOUNCE 2013 VISUAL ARTS FELLOWSHIP AWARDS
Columbus, Ohio – The Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) and the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) are pleased to announce the recipie…nts of the 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship awards.
The 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship recipients, chosen from 198 applicants, are: Evan Dawson (3-D), Shane Mecklenburger (3-D), Clara L. Crockett (2-D), and Shannon Benine (Photography). Awards were based on the artistic merit of works submitted in the disciplines of Craft, 2- and 3-D Visual Arts and Photography. Each Fellowship recipient will receive $5,000 and be featured in an exhibition hosted by the Columbus Museum of Art in the spring of 2014.
The 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship recipient bios:
Evan Dawson Evan Dawson teaches sculpture at The Ohio State University. He is the grandson of immigrant Holocaust survivors, and the child of global missionary parents. In his work all relationships are at stake: religion, heritage, narration of history, economic development, circulation of the material world, our posture towards the environment, and bare survival. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus, Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati and the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies. He received his MFA from OSU in 2012.
Shane Mecklenburger Shane Mecklenburger is an intermedia artist whose projects collaborate with systems of value, simulation and science. His work has been exhibited at the Hoxton Art Gallery in London, The El Paso Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Studio for Electro- Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, and in Chicago the New Capital Gallery and the Antena Gallery . He received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and is Assistant Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.
Clara L. Crockett Clara Crockett is a performance and visual artist in Columbus. She has received multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990. She has participated in residency fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and the Yellow Springs Institute for Contemporary Studies and the Arts 1988. Her work has been presented at Ohio Arts Council’s The Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts Spaces, Cleveland, Pittsburg Center for the Arts, Cleveland Center of Contemporary Art, among many others.
Shannon Benine Shannon Benine is an internationally exhibited, interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video and installation art. Benine’s work has been widely exhibited and included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia. Benine works as an Assistant Professor of Photography & Multi Media at Columbus College of Art & Design. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA in Photography and BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts from the University of Washington in Seattle.
GCAC’s Arts Fellowships program, established in 1986, recognizes outstanding Franklin County artists. Since the inception of the program, more than 150 artists have received awards in a variety of disciplines, including visual arts, crafts, film and video, creative writing, music composition and choreography/movement arts. GCAC’s program is one of the few local fellowship programs in the country.
GCAC would also like to congratulate the finalists for the 2013 Visual Artist Fellowship awards:
3D: Tyler Bohm; Ken Rinaldo 2D: Shawn Mcbride; Alan B. Crockett; Morris Jackson; Mark Bush; Kaveri Raina; Becca Lynn Photography: Jenny Fine; Jessica Phelps; Mike Olenick; Tariq Mohamed; Elizabeth Fergus-Jean Crafts: Joanna Manousis; Mikelle Hickman-Romine; Michael B. Hays; Lisa Belsky
The awards, recommended in an anonymous review process by panelists, assist recipients in any manner they choose to support the creation of new works and/or the advancement of their careers. All 2013 recipients and finalists will be invited to apply for GCAC’s Artist Exchange program in Dresden, Germany. Artists who have participated previously in any GCAC exchange program are not eligible to apply.
Members of the 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship panel who reviewed all applications and recommended fellowships were Gregory Burke, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada and the future Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan; Mercedes Vicente, Darcy Lange Curator-at-Large and formerly Curator of Contemporary Art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand (2005-2012); and Jennifer Yum, Vice President, Head of Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s auction house.
This year, one of the four fellowships is made possible through the generosity of Annie’s Fund, a foundation created in honor of surgeon, artist and arts patron Anne Miller. Until her untimely death in 1998, Miller was an established member of the medical community and a dedicated artist specializing in the hand-crafted arts—those created by people with little or no formal training and without regard to the mainstream art world’s recognition or marketplace. This special award celebrates Miller’s commitment to this art form’s visionary quality and the recipient’s work is meant to embody this bold concept. Shannon Benine received the Annie’s Fund award.
A reception in honor of the 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship recipients will be held in conjunction with the exhibition hosted by the Columbus Museum of Art in the spring of 2014.
For more information contact Ruby Harper, Grants & Services Director at rharper@gcac.org.
About the Greater Columbus Arts Council: Through vision and leadership, advocacy and collaboration, the Greater Columbus Arts Council supports art and advances the culture of the region. A catalyst for excellence and innovation, we fund exemplary artists and arts organizations and provide programs, events and services of public value that educate and engage all audiences in our community. GCAC thanks the City of Columbus, Franklin County, the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for their continued support.
About the Columbus Museum of Art: The Columbus Museum of Art creates great experiences with great art for everyone. The Columbus Foundation, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council provide ongoing support. CMA and the Museum Store are open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM, and until 8:30 PM every Thursday. The Palette Express is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. For additional information, call (614) 221-4848 or visit www.columbusmuseum.org.See More
Columbus, Ohio – The Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC) and the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) are pleased to announce the recipie…nts of the 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship awards.
The 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship recipients, chosen from 198 applicants, are: Evan Dawson (3-D), Shane Mecklenburger (3-D), Clara L. Crockett (2-D), and Shannon Benine (Photography). Awards were based on the artistic merit of works submitted in the disciplines of Craft, 2- and 3-D Visual Arts and Photography. Each Fellowship recipient will receive $5,000 and be featured in an exhibition hosted by the Columbus Museum of Art in the spring of 2014.
The 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship recipient bios:
Evan Dawson Evan Dawson teaches sculpture at The Ohio State University. He is the grandson of immigrant Holocaust survivors, and the child of global missionary parents. In his work all relationships are at stake: religion, heritage, narration of history, economic development, circulation of the material world, our posture towards the environment, and bare survival. His work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus, Semantics Gallery in Cincinnati and the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies. He received his MFA from OSU in 2012.
Shane Mecklenburger Shane Mecklenburger is an intermedia artist whose projects collaborate with systems of value, simulation and science. His work has been exhibited at the Hoxton Art Gallery in London, The El Paso Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Studio for Electro- Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, and in Chicago the New Capital Gallery and the Antena Gallery . He received an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and is Assistant Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.
Clara L. Crockett Clara Crockett is a performance and visual artist in Columbus. She has received multiple Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1990. She has participated in residency fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and the Yellow Springs Institute for Contemporary Studies and the Arts 1988. Her work has been presented at Ohio Arts Council’s The Riffe Gallery in Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts Spaces, Cleveland, Pittsburg Center for the Arts, Cleveland Center of Contemporary Art, among many others.
Shannon Benine Shannon Benine is an internationally exhibited, interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video and installation art. Benine’s work has been widely exhibited and included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia. Benine works as an Assistant Professor of Photography & Multi Media at Columbus College of Art & Design. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA in Photography and BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts from the University of Washington in Seattle.
GCAC’s Arts Fellowships program, established in 1986, recognizes outstanding Franklin County artists. Since the inception of the program, more than 150 artists have received awards in a variety of disciplines, including visual arts, crafts, film and video, creative writing, music composition and choreography/movement arts. GCAC’s program is one of the few local fellowship programs in the country.
GCAC would also like to congratulate the finalists for the 2013 Visual Artist Fellowship awards:
3D: Tyler Bohm; Ken Rinaldo 2D: Shawn Mcbride; Alan B. Crockett; Morris Jackson; Mark Bush; Kaveri Raina; Becca Lynn Photography: Jenny Fine; Jessica Phelps; Mike Olenick; Tariq Mohamed; Elizabeth Fergus-Jean Crafts: Joanna Manousis; Mikelle Hickman-Romine; Michael B. Hays; Lisa Belsky
The awards, recommended in an anonymous review process by panelists, assist recipients in any manner they choose to support the creation of new works and/or the advancement of their careers. All 2013 recipients and finalists will be invited to apply for GCAC’s Artist Exchange program in Dresden, Germany. Artists who have participated previously in any GCAC exchange program are not eligible to apply.
Members of the 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship panel who reviewed all applications and recommended fellowships were Gregory Burke, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada and the future Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan; Mercedes Vicente, Darcy Lange Curator-at-Large and formerly Curator of Contemporary Art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand (2005-2012); and Jennifer Yum, Vice President, Head of Sale, Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s auction house.
This year, one of the four fellowships is made possible through the generosity of Annie’s Fund, a foundation created in honor of surgeon, artist and arts patron Anne Miller. Until her untimely death in 1998, Miller was an established member of the medical community and a dedicated artist specializing in the hand-crafted arts—those created by people with little or no formal training and without regard to the mainstream art world’s recognition or marketplace. This special award celebrates Miller’s commitment to this art form’s visionary quality and the recipient’s work is meant to embody this bold concept. Shannon Benine received the Annie’s Fund award.
A reception in honor of the 2013 Visual Arts Fellowship recipients will be held in conjunction with the exhibition hosted by the Columbus Museum of Art in the spring of 2014.
For more information contact Ruby Harper, Grants & Services Director at rharper@gcac.org.
About the Greater Columbus Arts Council: Through vision and leadership, advocacy and collaboration, the Greater Columbus Arts Council supports art and advances the culture of the region. A catalyst for excellence and innovation, we fund exemplary artists and arts organizations and provide programs, events and services of public value that educate and engage all audiences in our community. GCAC thanks the City of Columbus, Franklin County, the Ohio Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for their continued support.
About the Columbus Museum of Art: The Columbus Museum of Art creates great experiences with great art for everyone. The Columbus Foundation, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council provide ongoing support. CMA and the Museum Store are open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM, and until 8:30 PM every Thursday. The Palette Express is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. For additional information, call (614) 221-4848 or visit www.columbusmuseum.org.See More
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Stephen Charles Benine's Space 