Artfully Presented: The New Neiman Marcus

Artwork, much of it from Bay Area artists, will be integral to the experience of the new Neiman Marcus — much more than an "accent," says Julie Kronick.

Kronick, the corporate art curator for Neiman Marcus nationally, has been working the better part of a year, sampling Bay Area galleries and dealers and meeting the artists as the high-end retailer opens its 42nd store, and first in the East Bay.

"There's a lot of work that I feel is of a certain level that you don't get in certain places," said Kronick. "The challenge here was: Could I afford everything I wanted? … The work in the Bay Area is just fabulous."

Neiman Marcus officials say the store, opening March 9 after a March 8 gala, has 163 works of art, some quite small in secondary areas and larger pieces in architectural focal points. Some 133 of those are by regional artists, Neiman Marcus estimates.

Much of the work is quality abstract, non-representational work that could go with different store departments, said Kronick. "We do not buy anything that we feel is controversial," she said. "Of course, art is very subjective. We lean to a lot of different mediums and styles within abstraction."

Kronick worked with the architects of the Neimas Marcus store to produce spaces to show off art. "Some of the artists come in and install their work personally and look over the space," she said.

The list below, with paragraphs of text about some individual artists, came from Neiman Marcus:

ART FOR WALNUT CREEK STORE
As we have done in previous stores, we are concentrating on local and regional artists for the Walnut Creek store.  Included in the collection will be paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and limited edition prints.  Most of the works will be commissioned and we have already begun connecting with various artists, galleries and dealers.  We are excited by all the Bay Area talent.  There is a wealth of fine artists in the area, creating unique, significant works which would compliment our store environments as well as add to the existing strength of our permanent collection. 

While we are still in the selection process for interior artwork, we have chosen an artist for the exterior of the building, which will be the public art piece for our store.  Ned Kahn, Bay Area resident, is the chosen artist.

NED KAHN
For over 20 years, Kahn has been engaged in the creation of large scale public artworks that increase people’s awareness of natural phenomena.  Using materials such a s water, wind, fog, and light, he has worked to create contemplative oases in forces of nature.  He is fascinated by blurring of the boundaries between art, science, architecture and nature.

Kahn’s concept for the Walnut Creek store exterior is to animate the vertical fins in the center of the building.  He has experimented with hinged elements that sway in the wind that could be integrated into the vertical outer edge of the fins.  These wind-animated elements would create a subtle flow suggestive of the movements from wind.  Kahn’s intent is to create an artwork that will change/move from moment to moment.  Ned Kahn is known and revered both in the area and internationally for his large scale artworks.

Walnut Creek approximate count:

# of works of art to be in the store:  163 (please note that some of these pieces are quite small, to be installed in secondary areas, and others are larger, for more focal areas)
# of works by regional area (primarily Bay area) artists:   133
# of Bay Area artists included in Walnut Creek:  Approx. 30


REGIONAL  ARTISTS INCLUDED IN THE WALNUT CREEK STORE  AS PART OF THE NEIMAN MARCUS CORPORATE COLLECTION

30 Different area artists included, some will have multiple pieces in the store

Ned Kahn:  sculpture on exterior of the building

Brian Caraway:  painting and prints

Jamie Brunson:  painting and prints

Seiko Tachibana:  prints

Robin Kandel:  painting

Shawn Weeden:  mixed media on paper

Kim Squaglia:  painting (Sacramento)

Steuart Pittman:  painting

Esther Traugot:  sculpture and fiber art

Albert Dicruttalo:  Sculpture

Marc Ellen Hamel:  painting and prints

Rupert Deese:  prints

Maya Kabat:  painting

Howard Hersh:  prints

Mitch Jones:  painting

John Belingheri:  painting

Amy Trachtenberg:  wall sculpture

Rex Ray:  painting

Judith Foosaner:  painting

Freddy Chandra:  painting/sculpture

Linda Fleming:  wall sculpture

Patrick Dintino:  painting

Deborah Salomon:  mixed media on paper

Deneane Niebergall:  painting

Catherine Dudley:  mixed media on paper

Jenn Shifflet:  painting

Carol Lefkowitz:  painting

Lisa Espenmiller:  painting and prints

Penny Olson:  prints on acrylic


Some of the artists from the above list have pieces that are more prominent and focal.  To accompany these artists’ names and store locations below, I  have included a paragraph, giving insight into their works.

JAMIE BRUNSON
Location in store:  1st floor/elevator

"For me, the success of these paintings relies on their capacity to evoke analogous sensations of expansion and connection in the people who see them.”   
        - Jamie Brunson

San Francisco artist Jamie Brunson works with a mix of oil paint, alkyd medium and refined beeswax to build up layered, shimmering surfaces that extend beyond the canvas. The process of manipulating the paint demands a level of consciousness and presence that mirrors the meditation practice. She employs the physical qualities of paint to mimic the kind of perceptual sensory phenomena that arise in meditation.  Brunson received her BFA from the California College of the Arts and her MFA from Mills College.


ROBIN KANDEL
Location in store:  1st floor/Between Cosmetics and Ladies Shoes

“Our tendency is to depict memory as black and white or sepia toned or faded and hazy…But I'm thinking about when we remember something and describe it as, for instance, "The brightest moon. The bluest sky. The hottest day." I'm thinking about when memory is bigger and (perhaps) better than reality. Maybe we call that romanticized.  I'm calling it amplified.” 
        -Robin Kandel

Robin Kandel’s paintings focus on her childhood memories.  The paintings begin with her memories of growing up near the five Great Lakes in Michigan; memories of “shady banks, frozen lakes, canoes, paddle boats, a black rubber inner tube, the smell of a wooden dock, the wooziness on land after a day on a lake.”  Her palette consists of bright, saturated bands of blues, greens, and browns as she draws from memories that are perhaps bigger and better than reality. 

Robin Kandel is a San Francisco Bay Area artist.


KIM SQUAGLIA
Location in store:  Men’s

Kim Squaglia’s paintings consist of multiple layers of intricately rendered biomorphic patterns layered between coats of resin.  Although the imagery references the biological and botanical, they remain a whimsical imagining of sacred niches where colors ebb and flow, and space swells and implodes without cause.  The images are transportive and somehow comforting; intriguing and coy.  The work invites the viewer to explore and interpret.  This large scale piece is one of several in the Neiman Marcus collection.


ESTHER TRAUGOT
Location in store:  1st Floor/Men’s Shoes

“I cover objects of nature with crocheted threads in an attempt to ‘prop up’ or ‘put back’ what has been abandoned, broken. … Although futile in its attempt at archiving and preservation, it suggests optimism.” Esther Traugot is a Bay Area artist who received her BFA in painting at UC Berkeley in 2005 and her MFA in Studio Art at Mills College in 2009. She has exhibited internationally, as well as throughout Northern CA including at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland, di Rosa in Napa, and the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in Sonoma.


ALBERT DICRUTTALO
Location in store:  Men’s Shoes

Array, a steel, bronze, and stainless steel sculpture explores the use of repetitive forms to create a geometric composition. Each element is composed of four distinct parts, which become interdependent when arranged in a spherical orientation along three axes.  The result is a three dimensional array of eighteen identical components combining organic forms within geometric forms. Dicruttalo has a BFA from Ithaca College.   Albert Dicruttalo is a San Francisco Bay Area artist.


MAYA KABAT
Location in the store:  1st floor/Men’s Club Room

Maya Kabat received her BFA in 1993 from Oberlin College, and her MFA in 2000 from the University of California, Davis.  Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and may be found in a variety of public and private collections throughout Northern California. Kabat uses drywall and other tools to create thick surfaces with stripes, gouges and slabs applying and taking away paint. “I paint the spaces between chaos and order, structure and formlessness.”


MITCH JONES
Location in store:  Men’s Clothing

“I have always felt that for me, painting is a way of actively scratching the surface to get at what is deeper.”                                                    - Mitch Jones

Bay area artist Mitch Jones incorporates antique books, documents, and visual encyclopedias into his paintings, often layering bands of paint and printed materials.  He challenges the viewer to look beyond the surface and read his works as one would read a document. Painting for Jones is a “personal excavation,” visual proof of his journey through life.


JOHN BELINGHERI
Location in store:  Men’s

“My paintings are essentially experiential in nature, a combination of wandering and a construction of half-steps and corrections.”

John Belingheri’s paintings are an enquiry. They act as an interaction of thought with material; fat ellipse, and cluster of colors skip across the surface.  Tension builds and there is a temporary drive for harmony-- the endless deferral of that which cannot be signified-- an awareness of absence. Belingheri likes the texture and feel of paint. Color and pattern are central to the paintings meaning. He encourages the accidental scars of reworking an effort for reaching something that is beyond reach.  Belingheri received his BFA and MFA from Brigham Young University.


John Belingheri is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, and Neiman Marcus is honored to have his work in our permanent collection.


AMY TRACHTENBERG
Location in store:  1st floor/Between Men’s and Accessories
Color, tone and texture meet structure and space in this wall relief. I think about the object, material and spatial qualities in conversation and motion together. The curvilinear staves of Sleeping Beauty Situation are meticulously milled and polished from century old salvaged timbers juxtaposed with unruly, repurposed materials from the everyday. The syncopated patterns and stillness find coexistence in their combinations.


REX RAY
Location in store:  Accessories/Precious Jewelry

For Rex Ray, the joy of making and viewing art is his continuing motivation. Drawing inspiration from his acknowledged influences—the Arts and Crafts Movement, Abstract Expressionism, organic and hard-edged abstraction, pattern and textile design, and Op Art—Ray playfully combines these formalist concepts with decorators’ tips gleaned from lowbrow publications and sources of popular culture in his pursuit to create beautiful things. Gracefully bridging the gap between fine and applied art, he distinguishes himself in each realm.  Ray’s work exudes beauty with a subversive edge.  Rex Ray lives and works in San Francisco, and Neiman Marcus is proud to have his work in our permanent collection.


JUDITH FOOSANER
Location in the store:  2nd floor/Contemporary/Designer

Judith Foosaner received her Master of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968.  She has participated in over 47 solo and over 75 group exhibitions in her career. After teaching at the California College of Arts in Oakland, CA for 34 years, she moved to Sacramento, CA, where she continues to paint. “So I paint out and then I add in, over and over, until I get a pulse. With pulse comes pace and I start searching out the rhythms.  When the piece becomes electric and unstoppable, then I know I'm there.”


FREDDY CHANDRA
Location in store:  2nd floor/Designer
Chandra’s work is rooted in the language of abstract painting and in the temporal nature of the moving image.   In applying acrylic and urethane paints on transparent cast acrylic panels, he repeats, pairs, overlaps, reverses, and re-sequences ensembles of chromatic areas and seamless shifts of lines and values. These works are rhythmic compositions of discrete frames in which the relationship between parts inherently informs the logic of a continuous whole. These wall-based installations -- from the modestly scaled to the panoramic -- use the structure of filmic space to link the concrete and the atmospheric through a sequence of encounters. Through investigations of specific color relationships, value shifts, dimensional modulations of transparency, and compositional structures, he seeks rhythms that are fleetingly present in such elusive moments as when overhearing a fragment of music only as it fades away, essentially catching hold of bits in a stream of information before it disappears.  In his work, he tries to make more tangible the act of recognition, recollection and anticipation driven by a desire to understand the present moment in the space between attentive perceiving and the peripheral subconscious.

LINDA FLEMING
Location in Store:  Designer

Fleming’s wall sculpture, entitled Ice hovers on the edge of the tangible and the intangible, the seen and the unseen.  The geometry is triggered by the polygons formed as ice cracks in puddles on the desert floor or in the depression left by a wild horse’s hoof. The mirror surface reflects the world back to the viewer in the form of a trace of memory that transforms constantly as the viewer moves around the work and the lines of light and shadow unfold into evolving meaning.  Linda Fleming is well regarded for her sculpture, large and small and is in numerous collections around the country.


DENEANE NIEBERGALL
Location in store:  2nd floor/Between Childrens and Galleria

Deneane Niebergall’s sensory paintings archive moments in time via accumulation of stains, imprints, traces and other remnants. For Walnut Creek she is creating 112 small individual jewel-like paintings that cohesively bring elegance and excitement to her work.  Niebergall received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. Along with exhibiting in numerous exhibitions in the Bay Area, where she resides, she was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA.


JENN SHIFFLET
Location in store:  Café

Jenn Shifflet’s paintings envision an internal refuge that reflects the wonder of the natural world.  At once ethereal and organic, her dreamlike images connote spacious light-imbued atmospheres, mysterious under-water realms or surfaces dappled with illuminated droplets.  A delight in nature, attentiveness to her surroundings and depiction of constant flux echo Shifflet’s Buddhist perspective that “the ineffable beauty of life is held within a profound fragility of impermanence.”  After earning her BA at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA in 1995, Shifflet moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she received her MFA at John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley in 2004.

PENNY OLSON
Location in store:  Store Manager’s Office

Penny Olson’s images on plexiglas are breathtaking.  Olson creates elegance and beauty by photographing flowers, sky and the ocean as raw material from which she extrudes digital pixels to create grid-like color fields. Chance is a factor in Olson’s work--she sets mathematical instructions that create abstract images from the original. She cannot fully predict the results and does not manipulate the images afterward. Penny received her BFA from California College of the Arts in 1975 and her MFA from UCLA in 1986. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.