Month: March 2016

ROBERT T. KNIGHT

Posted on by Taylor Norman

ROBERT T. KNIGHT MIGHT JUST BE CHANGING THE FUTURE OF HOW WE THINK.

That’s not hyperbole—the neuroscientist, neurologist and UC Berkeley psych professor is working on projects that center on the brain’s frontal lobe, an area that’s at the core of understanding human beings and our diseases, neurological disorders and psychiatric issues. “We’ve been working with a group in Germany where we stimulated the reward area of the brain,” he says. “We studied five intractable alcoholics, and with that stimulation, they stop drinking. I’m also involved in a project where we’re trying to alter mood behavior by stimulation.” So someone whose depression hasn’t been treatable with medication could have their mood changed in a period of months—effectively altering their brain’s physiology. “I know it sounds crazy,” he acknowledges.

Knight is fascinated by how the brain functions and the way it misfires. For example, there’s been plenty of debate lately regarding head trauma in professional athletes. “I’ve been working on a new helmet,” he explains. “It diminishes the amount of force that gets to the skull and the brain when you’re hit.”

Another of his projects focuses on the brain’s response to marketing. Around seven years ago, he and two other scientists developed a way to measure people’s cerebral responses to advertising, working with an outfit called NeuroFocus. Nielsen (as in the ratings) was, of course, interested in the technology and bought the company. His ongoing partnership with Nielsen has allowed him to develop yet another monitoring system. “It’s a wireless EEG system, like a swimming cap, that records your brain’s electrical activity.” While a conventional EEG costs about $50,000, he’s optimistic about getting the cap’s cost down to $200. “Roughly 75 percent of the world doesn’t have access to an EEG,” he says. “So if a kid falls down, you don’t know if it was a heart event or a brain event. If we could get this into sub-Saharan Africa and rural China, you could measure anyone’s brain waves, transmit that information to an iPhone and transmit it to a neurologist so they could take a look.”

Given his impressive set of skills, you might be surprised by Knight’s upbringing, which wasn’t packed with Montessori schools or Baby Einstein DVDs. Raised in rural New Jersey near a Superfund site, Knight grew up in a 480-square-foot house, where he shared a tiny room with his brother. “My dad was an eighth-grade dropout—his father died and he had to work,” he explains. “His educational plan for us didn’t include tutors. It was basically, ‘Keep going to school till you can’t stand it anymore.’ As soon as we finished eating, my mom would say, ‘Get out of the house and don’t come back until the next meal. And wear clean underwear in case you break a leg.’ ” At night, he and his sibling would “blow things up and do all sorts of crazy stuff in our room.” That brother? He’s now a botanist who has discovered several new species. Knight says that at a family party years ago, someone asked his mother why her boys had turned out so well. She cracked, “I think there was something wrong with the water.”

There were more happy accidents along the way. “My plan was to become an architect, and the first day of college, they said you had to take mechanical drawing, and I said, ‘Forget it. What major doesn’t have that?’ They said physics,” he recalls. “So I became a physics major. I was basically functionally illiterate. Really. They let me substitute COBOL [an early computer-programming language] for my language requirement.” Then, one professor changed the course of his career. “I saw all these guys and gals who’d done Ph.D.s and postdocs in physics who weren’t finding jobs. So I asked my professor what to do. And she said, ‘You’re a smart guy—why don’t you go to med school?’ ” In his junior year, he applied to med school but realized that biology, which he’d never taken, would be on the test. “I got a biology book, read it, took the admission test and got in. You can’t make this crap up,” he laughs. “It’s serendipity.”

Since becoming a full-fledged scientist, Knight’s taken a special interest in epilepsy, which is sometimes difficult to medicate. “There’s about 3 to 3.5 million people in the United States with epilepsy,” Knight explains. “And of those, about 15 percent aren’t controlled with seizure medications.” To treat them, Knight and his lab team place electrodes deep in their patients’ brains. They’re taken off their meds and monitored in the hospital. “Once we’ve got three seizures that all come from some specific point,” he explains, “they go to surgery.” The onset spot is then removed from the patients’ brains. “It’s really a remarkable procedure.”

His current research is so complex and fantastical, it almost seems like sci-fi. But Knight is uniquely well equipped to explain his work in terms even a kid could understand. “I started a journal two years ago called Frontiers for Young Minds. We ask scientists to submit a paper targeted at 9-to-15-year-olds. Then kids  review the paper, and the scientists have to make any changes they want. It’s really designed to empower kids, but I think it’s going to be a resource for anyone to get information in an understandable manner.”

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has awarded Knight (twice) for his work, and in 2013, he was given the Distinguished Career Contributions Award by the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. But he clearly doesn’t take himself too seriously. I ask about an odd-looking profile photo he’d posted online, on a medical journal’s website. “That’s my grandson eating chocolate out of the garbage can,” he laughs. “It’s funny you should bring that up. A week ago, the editors of the journal asked if I could replace it with another profile picture, so I sent them a shot of me wearing an Elmo shirt. So we’ll see how that goes. I’m not rolling easy—I’m from Jersey, man.”
 

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OFR

Posted on by Taylor Norman

The website for Ofr (pronounced like the individual letters, O-F-R), the Paris-based minichain of bookstores, is rarely updated; the last event listed was back in 2013. The home page reads, “No more time for this website and no more time for phone.” But considering how much Ofr, and its co-founder, Alexandre Thumerelle, are up to, it’s easy to forgive this slightly underdeveloped web presence. The 19-year-old entity (which has three permanent shops in Paris and one in Tokyo) hosts events weekly, including live music, book parties and art openings. And, of course, the shops offer plenty of tangible objects, ranging from small souvenirs to serious indulgences. “We have postcards that are 1 Euro, and expensive photography books that cost, like, €5,000,” says Thumerelle.

Ofr is less like a traditional bookstore and more like a collective with a few different clubhouses, united by a passion for art and community. And Thumerelle’s affection for live music ensures the shops are always generating some kind of beautiful noise. “Last year we organized an event with Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth. Two weeks ago, we did a show for Herman Düne.” But Ofr’s influence goes beyond one-off events. “If people have an idea, we can transform it into a book,” he explains. “Or if they have a book, we can sell and promote it. Ofr stands for Open, Free and Ready. And that’s what we try to be: super available, and capable of transforming an idea into a reality. So we’re open every day of the year, and we have live events two or three times a week, all year long.” If that wasn’t enough, Ofr also has a weekly live radio show, recorded right in the store. “We do a lot of music and interview people around us, sometimes even people in the shop at that moment.”

Thumerelle started Ofr in August 1996 with the help of his sister Marie, who’s three years his junior. “It was sort of my idea—I needed someone I could trust.” But they’ve collaborated in some form since they were teenagers. The siblings produced the first Daft Punk concert in the early ’90s, and they’re close with the band Phoenix, who created music for Thumerelle’s first film, En Route. “Whenever I’d say, ‘I need you,’ she’d be there,” he says. “I’ll be 44 this year and we’ve worked together since I was 16. That’s a lot of years.” Their partnership even extends to real estate: They recently bought a house together in the south of France, which will serve as an artists’ residence. “So if artists in Paris need some air or space, we give them keys and they can stay a week or a month,” he says. “It’s a big house by a river. It’s not trendy at all, but it’s a nice place to produce a show or a book.”

Given how fractured familial relationships can be, it’s a wonder the two have happily worked side by side for so long. “Sometimes there’s huge drama and we think it’s the end of Ofr—it’s happened a few times,” he says. “But we’ve made it through. We’ve been through lots of catastrophes and we’re still super close.” So close, in fact, that he takes care of her baby weekly. “I’m not just an uncle on the phone, or an uncle from time to time. I try to really be important to him.” Thumerelle’s a family man as well—he has three children with his American wife. (“Even with this I don’t speak good English,” he jokes self-deprecatingly.) “I like taking care of kids,” he says. “My two older kids are teenagers now, and we really listen to each other, and it’s wonderful. That’s my biggest success, being close with the kids. It’s not easy, but it’s real.”

While Ofr is a tidy acronym, there’s a deeper meaning to being “open, free and ready,” says Thumerelle. “It’s about being free to build the life you want. Being open, free and ready are the three qualities that make you a happy person, because you’re not just a dreamer,” he explains. “You’re someone who can fight back, and you’re not afraid. You believe in yourself.”
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HIRO IKUTA

Posted on by Taylor Norman

In the past month alone, Hiroruki “Hiro” Ikuta has put over 1,000 miles on his car. That doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary for an average Angeleno, but it’s practically a milestone for Hiro, who clocked in less than that during the two years he owned a car in Japan. But now, as a newly minted Redondo Beach resident, a car is not only essential to his daily commute to Downtown Los Angeles; it’s symbolic of his new life in America.

“In Japan, I took the train every morning and night. You just stand and listen to music. There’s not even room to read a book, or space to make a move. You just stand there,” he says. “Even though we have traffic here, the car is your own private space. You can think without pressure from everyone else. That’s a good thing.”

Add it to the ever-expanding list of things Ikuta is enjoying since moving to the West Coast to take on the role of Citizens of Humanity’s general manager of international production and fabric sourcing. “California is a place of dreams for everybody,” says Ikuta, who was born and raised in the Japanese port city of Yokohama, as the younger of two children. His formative years were spent at a private boys’ school, where soccer was his passion, though occasionally fashion did come into play. Weekends meant trips to Tokyo, where the latest European and American designs were regularly on display, thanks to both a strong foreign military presence in Japan and the country’s booming economy. “At that time, we could only wear a school uniform, and that stuff was so expensive for high school students, so we got a lot of things secondhand,” says Ikuta, who during school days was resigned to wearing a sailor-like uniform, which now makes him chuckle.

Ikuta graduated and went on to study economics at Yokohama University, and, inspired by a friend who had matriculated ahead of him, applied for a job at a major national trading company that handled both imports and exports across a variety of fields, from textiles to energy. Ikuta, then 22 years old, was selected to join the fashion sector, where, in typical Japanese style, he immersed himself in everything from logistics to accounting, working 16 hours a day or longer—sometimes even sleeping at the office.

Three years later, Ikuta was offered a position in domestic textile sales, where he began to study the intricacies of Japanese denim. “I learned a lot about quality control issues, and what makes a fabric good,” he says. He brought his knowledge to the European market for the next seven years, working with clients ranging from Diesel to Replay, and began developing his own fabrics for his company. “Denim has a long history, but it keeps changing. It’s a simple indigo-dyed fabric, but it can still be improved,” he says about what draws him to his work.

In 2008, he was sent to Hong Kong to manage the company’s business in China in addition to his European clients. It was during this time he first crossed paths with the Citizens of Humanity team. It took three years before Ikuta finally came on board with the brand, fulfilling not only his dream to move to the United States but also to work for a company that made its own product. “The name, Citizens of Humanity—it sounds good to me,” says Ikuta. “It’s representative of my lifestyle. I like people. I like to be honest with everybody. It’s one of the reasons I joined this company.” This spring, he packed up his life (including 80 pairs of his 150-strong collection of denim) and headed for the Golden State.

In addition to his new role, Ikuta is also learning his way around the culture of the American workplace—a far cry from the rigid structure of a Japanese corporate environment. “Here, everybody has their own freedom, and that comes in the form of responsibility. Everyone has to be mature. In Japan, responsibility only comes with age,” he explains.

Even the finer points of life in America, like food, have taken some getting used to. “When I was younger and first came [to California] for sales meetings, I was quite fanatic about real American hamburgers,” he says with a laugh. “I used to try a lot of that kind of stuff.” These days, however, it’s all about the abundance and affordability of fresh, organic vegetables, which are expensive to come by in Japan.

But for all the differences between Ikuta’s life in Japan and California, there are similarities, too—most notably his love of water sports, including sailing and more recently surfing. “My hometown is near the beach,” he says of his decision to settle on the ocean in Los Angeles, too, where he is now committed to surfing as often as possible.

“Surfing is like driving,” he says of his two passions. “When you ride your board or play in the waves you don’t feel pressure and you can think.”

Spoken like a true Californian.
 

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Danny Trejo

Posted on by Taylor Norman

The film Machete was a joke from the start. It began as a trailer with no movie to go with it, made as part of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s double-feature Grindhouse, a movie about bad movies. Then, when Rodriguez decided to make his farce into a real film, a comedy about border issues centered on a Mexican-American super killer, he chose as his star a guy who’d stumbled into movies accidentally.

Danny Trejo, a born-and-raised Angeleno with long dark hair, a gravelly voice and a distinctive weathered face, would be “Machete.” And he would be quite good at it: He’d take low-riders on spins, use knives to fight off gun-toting villains and get the girl despite the odds. At 66, he would go from supporting actor to leading man.

“My mom was calling me Machete before she passed,” remembers Trejo. He’s sitting in his backyard in the San Fernando Valley, a few yards away from his prized avocado tree. He’s wearing boots and black pants, but he’s just taken off his shirt for a photo shoot—the photographer wanted to see the tattoo on his chest, of a woman wearing a sombrero. Nearby, there’s an oblong swimming pool with a machete tiled into the bottom of it. He laughs about that.

“I was in France,” he says. “Max, my assistant, he put that big machete down there.” It was meant to be funny. The oversized machete-shaped decorations on top of his garage are meant to be funny too. “I love it,” Trejo says of the machete joke. Three of his five dogs gallivant around the yard, and the smallest jumps up to rest his paws on Trejo’s lap. “That’s John Wesley Harding,” he says of the dog. “The meanest cowboy in all the world.”

Trejo, who refers to himself as a drug counselor rather than an actor, was born in 1944 and grew up on Temple and Figueroa, near downtown L.A. He had a rough youth. He developed a drug habit early and participated in a string of armed robberies, going in and out of prison several times before landing in San Quentin on drug charges. While there, he fell in with a group of men in on murder charges. For a price, they would protect newcomers from the inevitable dangers of prison life. “Prison is the only place in the world where there’s only two types of people: There’s predator and there’s prey,” says Trejo. He learned to be a predator with a business plan.

In 1968, he and two friends were involved in a prison riot. A sergeant was hurt, as was a civilian. While in solitary confinement, sure he would receive a death sentence, Trejo prayed. “God, if you let me die with dignity,” he remembers saying, “I’ll say your name every day and do whatever I can for my fellow man.” But charges were never pressed. “One thousand guys on the yard and they couldn’t get a single witness,” Trejo chuckles. “I thought it would be a couple of years before I’d be dead. It’s been 46 years now.”

He was released in 1969 and started working as a drug and alcohol counselor a few years later. In the mid-1980s, he went to visit the set of Runaway Train to check up on a kid he was counseling who was working as a PA on that set. While there, he ran into an old prison friend turned screenwriter, Eddie Bunker, and before he knew it, he had a small role in the film.

“And I just kept getting job after job. I found that if you’re pleasant, people tend to gravitate toward you,” he explains. “The first five years of my career, I was just ‘Inmate Number 1,’ ‘Bad Guy 5,’ ‘Tattooed Guy.’ I didn’t know what typecasting even was.”

He remembers being on a particular set and having a director pull him aside. “ ‘Danny,’ the director said, ‘I want you to hold this shotgun and kick in this door. It’s a robbery. You’re going to rob a poker game.’ ” Trejo kicked in the door, taking out a stuntwoman and a “big hillbilly” before the director yelled, “Cut.”

“My god, Danny, where did you study?” the director asked.

“Vons, Safeway,” Trejo answered. It had all come back to him immediately, the adrenaline rush and the performance of being the robber in real life.

By the mid-1990s, Trejo began to receive speaking parts. He appeared as Navajas in Desperado and a thug called Razor Charlie in From Dusk Till Dawn. Still, even after his movie career started taking off, he says he had no aspirations as an actor.

“I still work for Western Pacific Med Corp. That’s my real job. I still work with addicts and alcoholics,” he says. “Let me tell you what that did for me,” he continues, referring to his acting breakthroughs. “My passion is talking to young kids in trouble. Well, the trouble with talking with kids is that first you have to get their attention, which is impossible because they have none. And then you have to keep their attention, which is impossible because of number one: They have none.” Now, he goes to schools and kids listen. “Not Danny Trejo, that’s not who they’re listening to, but the guy from Spy Kids, the guy from Desperado, the guy from any movie they’ve seen.”

All the assistants who live in his house, who have been coming out to feed the dogs and who take care of business when Trejo’s traveling, are former addicts he’s counseled. Today, his 27-year-old son Gilbert is in town and the two are driving down into Hollywood to take a meeting at the American Film Institute about a script Gilbert wrote, a strange spin on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. Trejo’s most recent project was a PSA for the Friends of Animals, for which he wore a full-body dog suit and played “T-Bone.” He’ll sign autographs in Canada later this week.

“I’m blessed,” says Trejo, recalling something Eddie Bunker told him: “The whole world can think you’re a movie star, but you can’t.”

 

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DIBI FLETCHER

Posted on by Taylor Norman

THE FLETCHER FAMILY, OFTEN CALLED “THE FIRST FAMILY OF SURFING,” IS RENOWNED FOR ITS DYNAMIC MEN, BUT AT THEIR HEART IS THE EXTRAORDINARY DIBI FLETCHER.

“I’ve always been an achiever, but not in a predictable way. I didn’t like school; I didn’t like the kids in it. I always felt like an outsider. I ran away with Herbie when I was 16. And then you better have pedal to the metal, honey! No education, no skills, and it was just the two of us. And so we ended up doing all this stuff—maybe we were too dumb to know we couldn’t.”

That’s Dibi Fletcher, telling how the Fletcher dynasty came to be. Dibi is a fireball of a conversationalist, blond hair framing her vibrant face, chunk jewelry accentuating her expressive hands, a voice of great empathy yet great force. She punctuates her observations with screeching laughter. She asks big questions, then throws her hands up to the sky. She exudes a sense of absurdity, as if perpetually flabbergasted by the mysteries, ironies and atrocities of life.

We are sitting in Dibi’s office in San Clemente, California, which is decorated with family pictures and Dibi’s paintings and sculptures. The Herbie she refers to is her husband of 47 years, Herbie Fletcher, surf wizard, founder of Astrodeck traction pads, producer of the Wave Warriors video series. They have two sons: Christian, 45, aerial surf icon since the late ’80s, and Nathan, 40, champion surfer/skater/snowboarder/dirt bike rider. And two grandsons: Greyson, 24, son of Christian, is one of the world’s best skateboarders. Laser, son of Nathan, is only 2, but he’s already surfing, skateboarding and occasionally riding around on uncle Christian’s Harley. And that’s not even mentioning Dibi’s sister Joyce, ’65 and ’66 world surf champion; dad Walter Hoffman, big-wave pioneer; and uncle Flippy Hoffman, surf-world rapscallion.

#fletcherdna, as Dibi ends her Instagram posts, is something extraordinary. They are perhaps the most influential family in surfing history. I first met them in the early ’80s when Christian, Nathan and I were on the amateur circuit. I’d see them at contests between San Diego and Santa Cruz. They were eccentric. Dibi had pink hair and wore loud outfits. Herbie was an eternal teenager, pulling crazy tricks on a canary-yellow longboard. Once, Christian invited me up to their truck for a bite to eat. Dibi, clad in bright-colored tights and flashy running shoes, served us an avocado and alfalfa sprouts sandwich on whole wheat bread. Most everyone I knew at that time ate junk food. Dibi was a strict vegetarian. “This is the good stuff,” she explained, and went on about the value of healthy eating. “Okay, I’m out of here,” she said, handing Christian the car keys. Then she trotted off on what I would learn was her daily run—12 to 13 miles in soft sand.

And that’s the Dibi Fletcher I’ve known for over three decades—always deeply immersed in some giant passion. First it was running and vegetarianism, then it was painting and sculpture, then it was ballroom dancing, then real estate, then gemology. Today she runs the family business, Astrodeck, and writes, and cycles 25 miles a day.

“When I get interested in something I just get immersed in it,” she says. “I get every book I can find on it and I get up at 4:30 every morning and read for a couple of hours.”

Astrodeck HQ sits atop an industrial district in San Clemente, the small beach town that’s been home to the Fletchers for as long as I’ve known them. Five years ago, with the economy in a horrible place, Dibi took the helm of the business, which started in 1976, so that Herbie could focus on his art career. “My family is my biggest achievement,” she says. “We’ve done it our way. And my best talent is to see where something is needed in my family and to come in and fulfill that role.”

I ask her what it’s like being surrounded by action men who charge giant waves and ollie over tall buildings. Before I can finish she chimes in: “Why do you think I turned out the way I am? Was I going to be the delegated chief? Fuck you, I’ll fight you for chief!” We share a big laugh.

“I really wanted to keep Astrodeck going,” she says. “Herbie invented it. He did a lot of firsts in the surf industry and certainly didn’t make the money that a lot of the others did. And I thought it was very important to keep this, as part of a legacy. And I’m not afraid to work. I don’t care if it’s not glamorous. My UPS driver did say I’m the best-dressed person on his route! I said, ‘Of course I am, darling!’ ” She giggles. “But anyway, I’m not a quitter. I never give up.”
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Citizens x Gjusta

Posted on by Courtney Ngo

In good taste. In collaboration with our friends at Venice-based restaurant Gjelina, we’ve designed custom jackets for their bakery, Gjusta. The Citizens x Gjusta workman jacket is available exclusively on The Dreslyn. For each jacket sold, The Dreslyn and Citizens will donate 20% of proceeds to Gjelina Volunteer Program. GVP educates public school children in Venice, CA on the importance of connecting food through gardening and cooking, nutrition and environmental sustainability.

 

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 SHOP HERE

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LISA HENSON

Posted on by Taylor Norman

“When we were children my friends heard that my father was a puppeteer and they just felt sorry for us,” says Lisa Henson, daughter of the late Jim Henson and CEO of his namesake the Jim Henson Company. “They thought he was like a birthday party puppeteer or something,” she adds with a laugh.

It wasn’t until 1969, when Lisa was 9 years old, that her father’s name entered the pop-culture psyche with the debut of the affable, puppet-driven PBS children’s television show Sesame Street, home to the likes of Big Bird, Ernie and Kermit the Frog. Almost a half-century later, Jim’s legacy lives on, not only in his world-famous cast of Muppets and otherworldly characters but also in the company’s pioneering, award-winning work in the fields of puppetry and animation.

“It was a very informal household, with art projects and all of us making things in our free time,” says Lisa, the eldest of five children Jim shared with his wife, Jane. The pair met as students at a puppetry class at the University of Maryland, College Park, and went on to work together on Henson’s first TV show, Sam and Friends, in 1955. After marrying Jim, Jane eventually hung up her puppeteering hat to become a stay-at-home mom but nurtured her artistic side, serving as both a mentor for up-and-coming puppeteers and as a volunteer art teacher at her children’s school.

 

“I think we all embraced the fun of having an art studio or a woodworking shop in the garage, or a playroom where you could get all the art supplies out,” says Lisa of a childhood spent in Greenwich, Connecticut, and later in Westchester County, New York. And despite Jim’s ever-expanding ragtag cast of Muppets (which grew to include Muppet Babies and Fraggle Rock), her father’s creations rarely made an appearance in their daily home life. Instead, Jim’s imaginative streak manifested itself in other forms. “He carved spectacularly ornate Halloween pumpkins and made special handmade Christmas ornaments every year and added them to the collection,” recalls Lisa. “Some of that creativity that he was always overflowing with was seen in the projects that all families do—but they were done a little more wildly and creatively in our house.”

While puppeteering came second nature to her youngest sister, Heather, Lisa—a self-described “shy, anxiety-filled youth”—was more drawn to the behind-the-scenes creative process. Armed with a degree in folklore and mythology from Harvard University (where she also served as the first female president of the Harvard Lampoon), Lisa received a job offer upon graduation as a junior executive at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles, where she worked her way up the ranks for the next 10 years to the position of executive vice president of production, lending her name to blockbuster films including Lethal Weapon (1987), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).

“I feel like my work at the studio was actually too exciting at that time to give it up. I was also enjoying being independent from the family business,” explains Lisa, now a mother to two teenagers, who also went on to serve as president of Columbia Pictures. “I felt that, if I ever did go back to work in the family company, I would like to bring as much knowledge and experience that you can pick up on the outside and bring that in.”

And in 1999, she did just that joining the leadership ranks as an official staff member of the Jim Henson Company, nine years after her father’s untimely death in 1990. “My father asked me to come work at the company every year until he died, which is a little sad for me that I never did make that decision while he was alive,” says Lisa.

Continuing her father’s legacy in children’s programming, Lisa’s proudest career moment to date is Sid the Science Kid, an Emmy-nominated preschool show that started airing in 2008 and broke new technology ground with its merging of digital animation with hand puppetry. “It was very exciting to start making a program for PBS when it’s been so many years since Sesame Street first aired,” she says. (The Jim Henson Creature Shop still creates the characters for the show, which is now owned by Sesame Workshop, which just signed a five-year partnership with HBO.)

And while children’s television programming remains at the heart of the Jim Henson Company (Dinosaur Train, Pajanimals and Hi, Opie! to name a few), the company has a history of bringing state-of-the-art puppetry and animation to the big screen, too, from classics such as Labyrinth (1986) and MirrorMask (2005) to an upcoming sequel to 1982’s The Dark Crystal. Meanwhile, the company’s Henson Alternative brand is geared toward an adult audience, with projects including the staged improv show Puppet Up!—Uncensored.

So what makes her father’s work live on? “He clearly created a cast of characters that lived on beyond him,” says Lisa (her own favorite being Rowlf the Dog, not only for his piano-playing skills but also for his all-American sensibility and folksy nature). “I always love the diversity of the characters, and I think people respond to the way that they are a mixed-up troop. He didn’t try to design a perfect cast of ideal individuals. They would be forgettable if they were just perfect princesses and superheroes.”
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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Posted on by Taylor Norman

A successful artist’s work nearly always survives beyond the artist’s death—but how do you actively preserve, and perpetuate, their ideas? Take pioneering rule breaker Robert Rauschenberg, whose artworks from the 1950s through to the early 2000s questioned the very meaning of art. Like the blank canvases he called his White Paintings (which were said to have inspired fellow Black Mountain College alumnus and close friend John Cage’s silent musical score, 4’33”), his collages made from Moroccan trash (the ones he didn’t sell he threw into a river), his stuffed goat or his blank piece of paper with the self-explanatory title Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), an artwork said to have taken him one month and 40 erasers to complete. When Rauschenberg died in 2008, leaving behind him a legacy that existed not just in museums but in people’s inspiration, the question was, how do you caretake a vision once the visionary is gone? How do you ensure that ideas live, breathe and continue to evolve?

The task was entrusted to a woman named Christy MacLear, who, as head of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, is dedicated to keeping not just the work but the ideals of Robert Rauschenberg alive. “What we do is defined singularly by the values that we have defined, and those values were defined by the people who were closest to Bob,” says MacLear. “So it’s not just that we give grants, it’s that we give grants to things that are fearless, that are creative problem-solving, that are global-minded and interested in peacekeeping across borders. We will fund projects that may fail because we are funding risk-seeking or catalytic types of moments in an artist’s career.”

The foundation provides a sanctuary where artists can push the boundaries of their own vision, à la Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s former home and studio on Captiva Island off the coast of Fort Myers, Florida, is now a 20-acre compound accepting 10 new artists every five weeks from varying geographies and disciplines. And the rest is up to them. “They get to come in, they get a house, they get a studio or a dance studio or a sound studio and they get to work on their artistic practice,” says MacLear. “We don’t expect anything to come out of it and we don’t ask them to give us anything in return. What we find is that most artists come in and with that degree of liberty, they actually expand their artistic disciplines. We find that with that open space for their creative practice, they interact and try something entirely new.”

Performance artist Laurie Anderson is an alumnus—as are many emerging artists. Some go on to become well known for their art, some don’t. While on Captiva, they are all rewarded equally, though. Rewarded for being risk takers and fulfilling the foundation’s goal of seeding new generations of rule breakers—artists after Rauschenberg’s own heart.

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most influential artists of the last half century. He also happens to be one of the most missed. Instead of trying to explain this, we sought out those who knew him best to share insight into what made him the father, friend, and artist he was.

 

Los Angeles, 1969. Sidney B. Felsen

 

“I think Bob is one of the greatest artists that ever lived, but it was his intelligence, his sense of humor, his concern for everyone else, his practice of philanthropy, his willingness to give and give and give that made him the GREAT MAN he was.”

Sidney Felsen

New York, 1958. Jasper Johns

 

I’m at my dad’s house in Captiva. He has chosen to come home from the hospital and has spent the last few days of his life in his studio. I have read the excellent obituary of my father by Michael Kimmelman in the online NY Times, but then Bob’s secretary, Bradley Jeffries, tells me to go back and read it again. I ask why and he tells me to look at the comments. There are over a hundred comments and virtually all of them say either I never met Bob Rauschenberg but he changed my life or I met Bob Rauschenberg and he changed my life. Of course, as Bob’s son, people have been telling me all my life how much my father’s work meant to them, but when he has just died and I’m wrestling with the idea that he is gone, it has a whole new meaning to have over a hundred people step forward and say that he’s not gone. To have over a hundred people come forward and say that they have incorporated his spirit, his work, his generosity and way of looking at the world into their own spirit, their own work, their own generosity and way of looking at the world–at that moment that is a magically wonderful thing for me.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is, for me, all about this idea that Bob is not gone. It gives us a chance to keep organizing shows of his work to keep blowing people’s minds; it gives us a chance to fill his studios with 70 artists per year who are pouring out great work made with great excitement; it lets us keep his philanthropy flowing. It lets us keep creating people who can say I never met Bob Rauschenberg but he changed my life.

Christopher Rauschenberg

A dealer owed Bob quite a sum of money. Desperate, Bob was able to obtain a court order and was finally paid. “What then?” I said. And Bob’s response was, “I gave him another show!”

Irving Blum

Knowing Bob had a big impact on my life. He was a true artist. He had a huge gravitational pull and held himself to a higher standard than anyone I’ve ever met. Bob defined integrity. If the rest of us could exist at his level the world would be perfect.

Chuck Arnoldi

All I have to do is sum it up in two words: Brilliance and generosity. I miss him deeply.

Laddie John Dill

About twenty years ago I received an extraordinary birthday gift from my wife Stacey. She had called Robert Rauschenberg and told him what my favorite colors are, my favorite things, and Mr. Rauschenberg made a collage of my life.

That piece of art hangs on our wall and gives me pleasure every day. It is green. It is white. It is fierce, and at the same time, dreamy.

What an honor it is to have Mr. Rauschenberg in our house.

Henry Winkler

I think of Bob often. One thought that regularly comes to mind is we should have put a recording device on him for 90 days; it would have produced material for one of the great philosphy books ever written.

Suzanne Felsen

When I think of Rauschenberg what comes to my mind is the Gluts series (end of ’80s to beginning of 1990s). I believe it’s the most actual works he made in their form and content and that they are very influential to artists working today.

The form of the Gluts wall or free-standing works, the way they are made, is in the tradition of the assembled found objects used directly in a sculpture or painting that was invented in the early 20th century by Duchamp and Picasso. Rauschenberg’s famous Combine paintings were already in that lineage, related to the invention of the collage by Picasso and Braque.

The content, the meaning of the Gluts has a strong resonance today, even if for different reasons than at the time Rauschenberg did the series, when there was a glut in oil, and he used gas station signs, industrial parts in metal …

Almine Rech

I am blessed that I knew him and his work.

Frank Gehry

Bob was the Walt Whitman of 20th Century American art. His name was Bob, by the way, not the professorial Robert.

Dave Hickey

Bob had this international inquisitiveness and enthusiasm, thinking that art was this universal language that could be accessible to everybody, as opposed to a verbal language.

David White

Robert Rauschenberg had a restless mind … an unstoppable imagination. It’s hard not to be envious of someone who wakes up and asks himself, “What shouldn’t I do? I think I’ll do that.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Bob was a generous spirit, always helping others, an upbeat person.

Once I was having dinner with Bob in Baltimore. After dinner we went to MICA [Maryland Institute College of Art]. We went to the artists’ studios at MICA, where three or four students were working, and Bob spent more than an hour critiquing their work.

On another occasion, my wife and I were visiting Bob in Captiva. We were staying in his guest room, where the bed was too soft for us. Bob gave up his room and his bed for us to be more comfortable during our visit.

Another thought: When we visited Bob, he always had the television on while he was working.

Robert E. Meyerhoff

I think of the endless thought provoker from Port Arthur, Texas, who visually continues to invent and rearrange the most extreme thinking with positive expansiveness.

James Rosenquist

I always knew that when I was going to see Bob there would be a lot of laughter. There was this thing he had about connections. Whether they were complex, simple, nonessential, existential or even silly, Bob got a giant laugh about connections. It was an infectious, joyful, “aha!” kind of laugh. When I wasn’t completely clear about a connection, he would bring me along with a laugh that was more than just about the irony or humor of the thing. He could make me see the point.

A long time ago I spent a week on Captiva Island at Bob’s studio, fishing, playing poker and ignoring the clock. Jim Rosenquist was down for the week and the conversations were, in my mind, epic. I was 27 at the time, so everything those guys said was epic to me.

One morning Bob invited me into his painting studio and pointed to a very large canvas he was working on and said, “Why don’t you think about what should happen on the bottom right side where I’ve already started, and I will work up here on the left.” When I got past the initial shock of the invitation, I did work on it. I did because it was clear to me that Bob considered my art-marrow to have a connection with his, just as he considered so many artists as having that connection. I think he thought, “Why not try it out with Guy?”

Years later I asked Bob what happened to that big canvas. He told me it got much smaller; he thought it would work better as a drawing on paper. Nothing about the bottom right, though.

Guy Dill

Robert Rauschenberg was already beset by physical setbacks when I met him, but he was animated by an outsized curiosity and love of being alive. He was interested and engaged in everything that met his eye, and his interaction with the world, his avidity, was inspiring. Knock on wood, I thought, I have all my capacity, my heedless good health, I can still jump and run, but I have HALF his energy, his verve, his eagerness in living. That was a lesson to me, every visit with Bob lit a fire under my complacent butt.

Meryl Streep

 

Los Angeles, 1974. Sidney B. Felsen

 

Los Angeles, 1998. Sidney B. Felsen

 

New York, 1958. Jasper Johns

 

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