Lawyers spend too much time using the left-side of their brain and hardly tap into their creative right-side. With this in mind, I’ve decided to create a drawing class strictly for lawyers. Whether you’re a novice or experienced draftsperson, I encourage you to put down that summary judgment brief and pick up a drawing pad and pencil and let that artist out.

No CLE credit, no statutes (although perhaps a statue or two), and no partners breathing down your back. Just you and a group of like-minded attorneys interested in expressing themselves through drawing and two artists hanging out with you teaching you how to “see” and draw. This will be an ongoing series, and depending on interest and energy we may meet in different locations around the city, both indoors and outdoors.

This class will be led by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento and Luis Nieto Dickens.

When:  Saturday, May 14, 2011
Where:  Paley Park (next to 1 East 53rd Street. Look for the waterfall)
Time:  11am – 2pm (but you can leave when you want)
Fee:  Free

To sign-up for this free class, please rsvp to sergio_sarmiento@clancco.com. Please include name, law firm affiliation, e-mail address, and years in professional practice. This class is limited to 15 attorneys, so please notify me if you will not be able to attend.

For more information, or if you have questions, please contact Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento at sergio_sarmiento@clancco.com.

Required Materials:

1. 11 x 14 drawing pad, 50 sheets, 70 lb. paper (approx $7)
2. 1 Eraser, Staedtler (approx $1)
3. 2- 2B pencil (what you have in law firm conference rooms) (free)
4. 2-Black ink pen (Pilot, Uni-Ball) (approx $1)

All of these materials can be purchased at any art store, such as Pearl Art & Craft; Blick Art Materials; and Ultrecht Art Supply.

This free class is part of Clancco.com’s Art School for Lawyers™ series, and is co-sponsored by Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

Greetings from Miami. We’ve finally found some time for a quick post on the NADA Art Fair opening. Just opened over an hour ago, and people are trailing in. I even bought my first piece, a signed Thurston Moore print. The champagne and coffee is flowing, and the sun is shining!

Here are some pics below of the fair, our booth, and a few other booths we captured on image during a quick preview. Stay tuned on our Twitter feed and here for more posts on the NADA fair.

Karla Ostolaza and Sharmyn Cruz of The Fractal just dropped by, as did art lawyer Peter Stern, The Art Street Journal’s Elisa Carmichael, and Clancco Rose Bowl Biennale artist Jason Brinkerhoff. Stay tuned; lots more to come!

Some NADA press here, and here. We’ve sold six drawings by John Lee, so good start so far. Also, check out Jordan Nassar and Elisa Freudenreich over at Pool Gallery: great photos!

NADA Art Fair 2010

Check-in booth

Clancco NADA Art Fair Booth 2010

The Clancco table with goods

Artist Gallery Consignment Notice (postcard)

Kate Werble Gallery booth

Jack Hanley

Leo Konig booth

Eleven Rivington

Signed Thurston Moore print

NADA's Frederick Janka

Berlin's Pool Gallery

Clancco will be at this year’s NADA Art Fair Miami Beach at the Deauville Beach Resort. Look for us in the Publications section, Booth L-2, exhibiting drawings by John Lee. Drop by and say ‘hi,’ grab some Clancco stuff, and share a beer or cup of coffee. We hope you can join us there, but if you can’t make it out, we’ll be tweeting live, so follow us on Twitter and get the latest from the Miami party!

Tree Trunk. John Chi-Yun Lee, ink on paper, 2010. © 2010 John Chi-Yun Lee.

DATES & TIMES

December 2-5, 2010
The Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Avenue
Miami Beach, FL 33141

Opening Preview by Invitation:

Thursday, Dec 2; 10am to 2pm

Open to the Public

Thursday, Dec 2; 2pm to 8pm
Friday, Dec 3; 11am to 8pm
Saturday, Dec 4; 11am to 8pm
Sunday, Dec 5; 11am to 6pm

Admission is free and open to the public.

Please visit newartdealers.org for additional information.

Artist Bio:

John Chi-Yun Lee is a Brooklyn based artist.  Born in Taiwan, Lee moved to the United States some time after birth.  After (barely) getting his B.A. in Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno, he attended and graduated (also a close call) from Parsons The New School for Design with an MFA in Fine Arts.  He enjoys sitting and thinking about sitting and thinking, often at the same time.  He has exhibited all over his world.  Where exactly?  You wouldn’t know.  Through black and white images, stick figures, and text, I, I mean he, hopes to create a photo realistic visual world in two dimensions.

LMCC has just released a two-sided poster I designed for their LentSpace Late Edition project, What is Pan-Americanism? Here’s a description of the Late Edition project:

Punning “late editions,” when newspapers used to release evening editions of breaking news, with “late addition,” as in an afterthought or correction, this print-media series aims to put the current exhibition and its subject up for review by artists. Instead of following the conventions of newspaper publishing, these responses take the form of a new artwork “edition” that will serve as a compliment, retort, or possibly, as a humorous non-sequitur.

Once formatted, these prints are nested into LentSpace’s own program guide as inserts and distributed on-site in newspaper distribution boxes for free, while supplies last. By appropriating the newspaper distribution boxes in LentSpace as a gallery in-itself, each edition will become both part of the larger exhibition, yet will also serve as a take-home gift — often found by surprise — for any visitor.

Keeping in mind that these works will be publicly circulated, hoarding or other “appropriations” beyond the typically intended reception of the art object, such as using these papers as material for packing glass, are to be expected and also encouraged. In order to center this current set on the same themes of the Avenue of the Americas exhibition and to create a small volume of thematically joined works, each of the participating artists were posed a simple yet provocative charge, namely: What is Pan-Americanism?

The LentSpace program was curated by Adam Kleinman and Deborah Sprzeuzkouski, and included three other Late Editions by Wilfredo Prieto, Sebastian Errazuriz, and Erick Beltran. You can get your copy at Lent Space in Manhattan. If you can’t make it and would like one, e-mail me your name and address at sergio_sarmiento@clancco.com and I will get one out to you.

"Good Law is the Best Art"

Clancco has printed 50 limited-edition posters, Good Law is the Best Art, based on Andy Warhol’s now-famous quote, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

These limited-edition posters are for sale, with all profits after shipping costs going to UNICEF. UNICEF Promises that 100% of donated money will go to saving children’s lives in Haiti. Although the earthquake happened on January 12th, there is still much need for donations of all kinds to help Haiti rebuild. The AP reports:

The world still can’t get enough food and water to the hungry and thirsty one week after an earthquake shattered Haiti’s capital. The airport remains a bottleneck, the port is a shambles. The Haitian government is invisible, nobody has taken firm charge, and the police have largely given up.

We’re putting up the artwork; you help children in Haiti get food, water, medicine and clothing while getting a limited-edition Clancco poster.

Each poster is $20.00 (USD), and measure 19″ x 25″ on 110lb white paper. Clancco is also donating the cost of mailing tubes. If you’d like to buy a poster, please send a check to:

Sergio Munoz Sarmiento
1 East 53rd Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10022

Please include the following information:

1. Name / City / Country
2. Mailing address
3. Number of posters requested
4. If you would like your name included in our donation letter to UNICEF. With consent, all donor names will also be listed on Clancco.com. Those not wishing to have their names listed will be listed as “Anonymous.” These posters make great gifts, so you may also buy a poster in behalf of someone else. If so, please indicate name of recipient and mailing address.

If you’d like me to reserve one for you, e-mail me at sergio_sarmiento@clancco.com

Please feel free to forward to friends and colleagues, post on Twitter and Facebook.

Having commissioned Clancco to install an exhibition in its space, Shotgun Space, Los Angeles reconfigured its space and expanded it to five times its original size in order to present previous structures installed by Clancco across the United States. These re-installations–originally installed on public and private property without consent–allowed viewers to experience for the first time in Los Angeles one of the multiple facets of Clancco’s oeuvre and life.

In each of the eight steps of this exhibition, the tour revealed eight sculptures installed by CLANCCO between the years 2000 and 2007. Together with eight drawings, they formed structural remains which denied the thrust of historical force, depriving events of both their form and meaning in such a context.

This exhibition was accompanied by a handout brochure (PDF version available here) expanding on this project as well as highlighting key moments in Clancco’s history.

In this ongoing project, Structures, CLANCCO seeks to explore the current restrictions on the exhibition and experiencing of contemporary sculpture. This investigation takes place in private and public property through the use of property laws governing fixtures, trespass, and the acquisition of private property (adverse possession).

Through these artistic structures, CLANCCO also seeks to challenge the historical discourse of property ownership through the more recent and nascent intellectual property law discourses.

The procedure is as follows: CLANCCO finds private and public property locations across the United States and installs sculptural-architectural structures on these same sites, some with permission, some without. The sculptural-architectural structures shown below were installed between 2000 and 2007, in cities and towns across the United States (from Northridge, CA, Ithaca, NY, and El Paso, TX, to Cambridge, MA, New York City and Williamsburg, Brooklyn).

The last point to note is that none of these structures have been sold, stored, or destroyed by CLANCCO. These structures were left in place in order to allow for a more organic and natural placement or displacement. The whereabouts and fate of these structures remains unknown.

Essay:

In April of 2008, Clancco published an essay expanding on its ongoing project, Structures. This essay is available via PDF format in the recent issue of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. In Structures, Clancco explores alternative exhibition spaces in which to analyze real and intellectual property laws by finding private and public property locations across the United States–unaffiliated with any art institution–and installs structures on these sites, at times with consent of the landowner, at other times without.

In this essay Clancco explores the relationship between the readymade, the corporate entity, and so-called outlaw practices, particularly through the historical practices of urban squatters, Native American contestations of land, Rosa Parks, as well as the art historical art practices of Blinky Palermo, Michael Asher, and Gordon Matta-Clark. The provisional conclusion arrived at in this essay is the beginning of an investigation which must analyze the incremental proprietary element in the owning of aesthetic experiences.

(Installed at intersection of 5th Avenue and 53rd Street, NY, NY)

(Installed in Home Depot, Cambridge, MA)

(Installed on private property, Northridge, CA)

Personal property is a type of property. In the common law systems personal property may also be called chattel. It is distinguished from real property, or real estate. In the civil law systems personal property is often called movable property or movables – any property that can be moved from one location to another. This term is in distinction with immovable property, such as land and buildings.

A fixture is a chattel which by being incorporated or attached to the real estate becomes a permanent part of the realty. For example, a brick is a chattel, but this same brick being incorprated into a wall of a structure of habitation becomes part of the real property, and thus no longer personal property.

A CLANCCO sculpture is also a chattel, which will become a fixture when attached to the real estate, thus becoming part of the realty.

Lore has it that a few years ago a house was sold and one of its main features was a beautiful rose garden. It was sold in the summer when the roses were blooming at their best.

However, the home seller understood the law of fixtures. She had planted the beautiful rose bushes in large pots buried in the ground. The day of the sale closing, the seller’s gardener removed all the beautiful rose bush plants.

Needless to say, the buyer was shocked to find the bare former rose garden with lots of holes in the ground where the pots formerly rested.

Plants and trees growing in the ground are considered to be fixtures, which are included in the sale of real estate because they are attached to the ground by roots.

But the seller was entitled to remove those beautiful rose bushes, although they were quite large, because they were still in their large pots so the roots never legally became attached to the ground.

The proliferation of contemporary art and the mass number of artists being produced have entertained a moment where artists and art students are engaging in multiple and numerous visits and interviews with curators, writers, and other artists and art students. These “visits” are, and have been called, studio visits.

With this in mind, and with the ever-increasing complexity of intellectual property theft, many artists and art students have found themselves in situations where they present their ideas, materialized in any which way and form, to other artists, writers, and art students during studio visits, only to later find that these visitors have taken the artist’s ideas and work product and claimed it as their own, and many times obtaining high acclaim on the sweat of unknown artists and art students.

Thus, CLANCCO has pondered this dilemma and brainstormed a possible method to counter this perplexing and ever-present dilemma. CLANCCO is now making available a NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT FOR STUDIO VISITS, which may provide some level of intellectual property protection to artists, art-students, and other makers under the rubric of trade secrets. These non-disclosure agreements for studio visits are available here in both a short and long version.

The forms provided by CLANCCO may be used as is, but they should be tailored to suit the artist’s individual needs. Always consult with an attorney when entering into any contract or when using any pre-written boiler-plate forms, regardless of use.

Download Short Form

Download Long Form

Microsoft Word necessary to download forms.

The Postcards & Billboard Project: Chinatown, NYC takes the lower Manhattan area as a structural site and context. Taking in mind the perpetual tourist attraction that this area provides, as well as the constant reconstruction and construction projects that abound, CLANCCO decided to relate these two happenings into one project.

The project’s main focus was to make the reconstruction and construction process available to the local and international audience via two traditional touristic mediums: postcards and billboards.

First, CLANCCO obtained photographic images of reconstruction and construction sites from the Chinatown area. These photographic images were then transferred to postcards and made available at local tourist shops.

Secondly, certain images available through postcards were then transferred to a billboard within Chinatown off Canal Street.

One such image made available on postcards as well as the billboard was of a renovation project taking place above The Flea Theater, at 41 White Street.

The billboard image was installed as close as possible in time to the actual renovation taking place at 41 White Street.

(Billboard with original Chinese advertisement, before installation)

(Billboard, after installation, with renovation site image)

In effect, tourists to New York City’s Chinatown District were now able to personally view and send friends and relatives images of structural ghosts, visible to some, invisible to others, yet perpetually present.

Copyright © 1997- 2006 Sergio Muñoz-Sarmiento. All Rights Reserved.