Here are Academy Film Curator Gina Caruso and director Nathan Apffel having a pre-festival pow wow in Pavilion Cafe. Just 25, Nathan Apffel made Lost Prophets: Search for the Collective—the opening film for the Third Annual Surf Film Festival tonight (tickets for tonight are SOLD OUT. But you can buy ahead for any other film—get them while you can.)

When asked what inspired the California native to make the film, Apffel said that as a director for the Fuel television series Fins, he saw that most of what is publicized about the surfing world is the glamour stuff. “And it’s the opposite of that.” He wanted to capture the surfers who are in it for the connection to the ocean. “These guys are relatively unknown, yet surf companies use them as icons.”

The film is also screening in France today. But Nathan is here. And he is excited that he was able to invite his friend Duke Boyd to the opening tonight. Thanks for being part of the festival Nathan—you embody the current of aloha that runs through surfing (but is not always apparent).

Read Mike Gordon’s great story on the festival in the Star Advertiser.

PS: Happy birthday Gina!

The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan is on the final stop of its global journey—on July 4 the landmark exhibition organized by the Honolulu Academy of Arts opened at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich, Switzerland, as Bhutan: Heilige Kunst aus dem Himalaya. Chairman of the Academy Board of Trustees and Interim Director Lynne Johnson attended the opening. The exhibition will be on view in the Werner Abegg Gallery in this complex of elegant villas.

See a video of the exhibition.

The one time a year surfers come to the Doris Duke Theatre is almost here. And this time film curator Gina Caruso and her trusty advisors Eric and Jackie Walden of Chinatown Boardroom have chosen a lineup with a lot to offer people who aren’t into watching epic wave after epic ride. I’ve been watching surf films since Kapahulu Theatre still existed. I’m not trying to brag about how ancient I am, but just saying—kind of got “tubular swells” fatigue. There will be lots of epic surf, fer sure, in films such as the WORLD PREMIERE of The Oxbow Watermen Experience but there are also excellent documentaries that I can’t wait to see, like Out of Place, about surfing in…Ohio. Check the shot of a guy walking in the snow carrying his board in the trailer. (And the filmmaker has a blog—his latest post is about surfing in New Jersey.) And the trailer for Gum for My Boat is captivating, while the trailer for Somewhere Near Tapachula made me cry. The trailer!
read more from "Surf Film Festival is back better than ever. + FREE beer at opening nite"

As an Assistant Manager and Buyer for the Academy Shop, my job entails traveling in search of cool, new things, and in April I attended the Museum Store Association conference in Austin, TX. Many shop issues were discussed at the conference, but the hot topic was e-marketing. I learned how Twitter and Facebook are increasingly being used as advertising tools for and how successful they can be.
read more from "Inside The Academy Shop: A buyer’s eye view of Austin"

Now on view through June 26 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City is the exhibition Monet. The survey of the artist’s late work has gotten rave reviews and it includes a painting from the Pacific—our “Water Lilies” by Claude Monet. The work normally hangs in Gallery 10 (it’s temporarily replaced by three Mary Cassatt works). If you happen to be in Manhattan, pop in to see it in a new setting. In exchange for the loan, the gallery is funding the glazing of the painting, an important protective measure.
Read the New York Times review. (Aw Holland Cotter, why didn’t you mention us?)
Read the New York Magazine review.
Photo: Robert McKeever/Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Michael Rooks, the Academy’s former curator of European and American art, is now the Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum in Atlanta, and he’s headed to Venice this summer. He is one of two curators of the High Museum’s “Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice,” which was selected by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to be the U.S. representative to the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, which will take place August 29 to November 21. Co-curator is Jonathan D. Solomon, architect and founding editor of the architectural publication series 306090 Books.

“Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice” features a series of projects that demonstrate in different ways the evolving role of designers and their relationship to other specialized professionals and clients in realizing architectural ideas. The exhibition focuses on collaborative projects, rather than individual architectural practices. The exhibition will highlight such projects as Peachtree Center by Atlanta-based architect John Portman; On the Water, Rising Tides and Palisades Bay by New York–based architect Guy Nordenson; New York City (Steady) State by the New York–based firm Michael Sorkin Studio; and Flip Strip by the Los Angeles–based think tank cityLAB.

Last year, when Curator of European and American Art Theresa Papanikolas was working on “From Whistler to Warhol: Modernism on Paper,” she realized there was one glaring gap in our extraordinarily comprehensive collection of modernist works on paper. That gap was Marcel Duchamp. Anyone who’s taken an Art History 101 class knows him from his Nude Descending a Staircase. But Duchamp is so much more than that seminal painting. He is his own survey of modern art. He did it all, and he did it first. Go into the Marcel Duchamp room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and half the stuff in there could be in the next triennial at the New Museum. It just kind of makes your head explode. Anyway, as Theresa was thinking about that gap, she received a call from the Zabriskie Gallery in New York. They wanted to let her know that they had one of Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte Series G” works for a museum-friendly price.

As you probably know, the Academy, like museums across the country, is reeling financially from the current economic doldrums, and that means no money for acquisitions. Theresa sadly told Zabriskie Gallery of the situation. But she had a brilliant idea: Would the gallery be willing to loan the work to the Academy to make her exhibition complete? Zabriskie generously agreed.
read more from "Our first Duchamp. Very exciting."

The 21st Rainbow Film Festival kicked off last night with actor Mindy Cohn in attendance. (Here she is with Whole Foods‘ Natalie Aczon—who was previously our associate director of development for corporate relations.) Cohn was the star of last night’s hilarious (and poignant, of course) film “Violet Tendencies.” The lineup is stellar, with New York Times Critics’ Picks (“Eyes Wide Open“), hard-hitting documentaries (“8: The Mormon Proposition“) and homegrown films (“Ajumma! Are You Crazy???“—Hawaii’s self-proclaimed “first kim-chee comedy”). And it’s all packed into one long weekend. Time for film immersion!

Maika`i Tubbs, talented artist and the Academy’s Bank of Hawaii Family Sunday Program Coordinator, has been hard at work the past few days tracing a mural of men in lace that will be a part of the “Men In Lace” exhibition opening tomorrow, May 20, in the Textile Gallery 22. “Men in Lace” will showcase selections from the Academy’s exquisite lace collection, and reveal how the textile, now associated with clothing for women, was once the ultimate status symbol of men in Europe, used in men’s collars, cuffs, ruffs, bibs, cravats, fichus, flounces, shoe roses, bootlaces and garters.

Theresa Papanikolas, Honolulu Academy of Arts Curator of European and American Art, continues to burnish the museum’s scholarly reputation. Last year saw the publication of her book “Doctrinal Nourishment: Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor.” Now just about to come off the presses is “Anarchism and the Advent of Paris Dada: Art and Criticism, 1914-1924″ (Ashgate Publishing). The new book, based on Papanikolas’s dissertation which she updated and revised for the book, looks at the intersection between art and politics in post-WWI France. It also, um, rewrites art history. The art historical trope on Paris Dada is that they were just a bunch of crazies doing whatever the hell. Papanikolas argues that the Paris Dada was in fact a focused movement that drove all the cultural milieus of the era.

Papanikolas did her post-graduate work at the University of Delaware where she studied with professor Patricia Leighten, known for her work on Modernism and politics in early 20th-century Europe.

“We became good friends,” says Papanikolas, “and would meet for coffee. And every time we did, we’d be caffeine-fueled and say ‘I can’t believe no one’s written about this!’ This was in the late-80s and early 90s—I was very young and I thought of myself as a radical and related to these people and it evolved into a disseration. It took me a while to find my way into it.”
read more from "Paris Dada: Not so crazy"