Women architects, designers of Las Vegas showcase talent in downtown gallery

There are no talented women designers in Las Vegas.

That’s what Amy Finchem was told by her male peers in the architecture and design field when they heard she was planning an exhibit showcasing the work of local female designers.

She proved them wrong Thursday night with the opening of “Women in Design,” a blind juried exhibition featuring work by such women in the fields of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture. Six designers were ultimately selected from a total of 15 submissions.

“I was pleased with the overall quality of the submissions that we got, especially for the first time out. It was really, really difficult to pick just six,” she says.

The exhibit is the latest effort by COLAB, the local design nonprofit and gallery at Art Square that Finchem founded and directs, to further community dialogue about Las Vegas’ architectural landscape. Finchem, along with judges Alex Epstein of El Cortez, Quentin Abramo of Faciliteq Architectural Interiors and Art Square developer Brett Sperry, provide well-rounded looks at both built and unbuilt work that showcase designers’ overall capability and aesthetics, rather than the details of a single project.

“Women in Design” is not the first time Finchem’s efforts have been met with raised eyebrows: She faced similar skepticism when she founded COLAB earlier this spring.

“People said, well we hire outside of the city [for architecture and design work] because we don’t have any local talented designers,” she says, a sentiment COLAB disproved with “Young Guns,” a curated exhibit of work by UNLV School of Architecture graduates who were subsequently hired by the city of Las Vegas to design Project Neon’s gateway to downtown. COLAB’s Downtown Backyard Project, an effort to design and construct parks and gardens in downtown’s Arts District, is also gaining attention and momentum among locals.

“For this show I think it’s the same as ‘Young Guns,’ where there’s a perception that we don’t have local talent here, period, and certainly not women designers. So this has really given the platform to show that we have really great, talented women in this city,” Finchem, 35, says.

While visibility and local employment opportunities are issues faced by Las Vegas’ design community at large, the struggle is particularly challenging for women, who often must juggle the fast-paced fieldwork and round-the-clock schedule that architecture demands with raising a family. While working at a large firm, where meetings often ran late at the end of the day,  Finchem began noticing that women were the only ones who got up to leave when time went over.

“They had to go pick up their kids,” says Finchem, a single mother of three. “It truly does impact the perception of those women in their ability to fulfill their jobs — that they’re distracted, or they’re not reliable. Those are misconceptions because any woman that I’ve worked with in this field works harder and is more persistent, constantly trying to prove themselves to live up to the standards. They don’t automatically get that respect when they walk in the door — you know you’re going to be doubted from the get-go, so you have to be on your game all the time.”

Finchem hopes that exhibits like “Women in Design,” which is open through February, will help shed light on those challenges and catalyze more open discussion about them in both the workplace and the community. In the coming months, she plans to incorporate events such as a film screening about women in design, guest lectures and panel discussions with women in related fields including construction and engineering.

“What it looks like to be an employee for somebody doesn’t have to look the same [from person to person],” she says. “We really want to get in the habit of these exhibit launches being a start to dialogue about whatever the topic is.”

Women in design features the work of local designers Lindzay Green, landscape architecture; Gina Grillo, architecture; Renee Smith, architecture; Alice O’Keefe, interior design; Kim Daoust, interior design; Briana Tiberti, interior design.

COLAB Las Vegas is open Mondays through Fridays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and also available by appointment.

source: lasvegassun.com

Louis Vuitton Paris Bag Exhibit

PARIS (AP) –``Fashions fade, style is eternal,'' Yves Saint Laurent once said.

An immutable fashion list must include the Ls Vuitton bag, on display demurely but proudly in Paris' Decorative Arts Museum like the historical artifact it should be.

The bag pattern was first patented in 1877 but it can still be seen, almost unchanged; on the Parisian boulevards more than 130 years later. This is thanks to house founder Louis Vuitton, and since 1997, creative director Marc Jacobs.

Both their stories are woven together in a colorful exhibit that spans over a century of fashion history.

The exhibit takes the visitor from the founder's humble beginnings as a case-packer to the fantastical runway shows that transformed the house into one of the world's biggest names, with a revenue last year of (euro) 2.5 billion. Though both men are from different centuries, the exhibition asks whether they have more in common than meets the eye.

There's a small clue in the first room: portraits of the two men hang side by side, both sporting mustaches in the style of their age.

``They're both visionaries, though they would be the last to admit it,'' said museum curator Pamela Golbin, ``and they both lived an exact same story at a decisive moment in fashion.''

Louis Vuitton faced industrialization of the 19th century and new train travel while Marc Jacobs was confronted with 1990s' changing demands for marketing ``making fashion truly globalized for the first time,'' Golbin said.

The story began for Louis Vuitton as a trunk-packer for rich Parisians, a job in which he was able to hone a mastery of every bolt, lock and corner of travel cases from across the French capital. He built on his knowledge, finally opening his own house in 1854.

The Orient Express was new and fashionable, and the meteoric rise of haute couture under Charles Frederic Worth meant better-dressed women went on trips with more and more clothes, that needed cases to fit them in.

Such was the demand that the norm in the late-19th century norm, as one display shows, was for a traveling lady to take a staggering 30 large cases on each trip.

From this a thousand trunks were born, all perfectly preserved with their original wax coatings and all viewable at the exhibit: hat trunks, toiletries trunks, trunks that pulled out as a chest of drawers, metal trunks for humid countries. For the trendy yet tired, there was a trunk that folded out into a bed.

As it still does under Jacobs, the house had a sense for the avant-garde as early as 1890: one gargantuan case boasts the title the ``Never Full Bag.''

Then there was the radical facelift of the 1990s. Glossy fashion magazines landed and globalized demands meant that labels had to up their game and expand, or sink. Creative talent was no longer the only criteria sought by the industry: instead ``marketing'' became the buzz word.

Enter Marc Jacobs, already a big name in the fashion industry, to design the Louis Vuitton house's first ready-to-wear collection, 143 bag-filled years later.

Using his corporate knowledge and irreverent humor he revamped the bags and shoes; the company's financial lifeline.

A vivid display of mannequins kneeling captures the transformation from past to present perfectly: each model has a classic Louis Vuitton bag placed on her back, covered in graffiti.

The exhibit shows other irreverent sources of musings for the designer, including a 2003 manga film by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami that is used to revamp the traditional LV monogram.

The continued growth of the house comes down to his versatility.

Marc Jacobs fall-winter runway show featured models in Edwardian hats exiting a reconstructed train that might have been the turn-of-the-century Orient Express. So there we have it, the full circle.

But, the designer mused backstage, ``What ever you try, clothes never really can live in the past. They are worn now so they are modern, with a modern take. I'm not nostalgic.''

The exhibit ``Louis Vuitton-Marc Jacobs'' runs March 9-Sept. 16.

source: mb.com.ph