By LEE LAWRENCE

Gainesville, Fla.

With the opening of the 26,000-square-foot David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing, the University of Florida’s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art is adding a conservation laboratory for Asian art and devoting almost 7,000 square feet—about one-sixth of its total exhibition space—to works from China, Japan, Korea and South and Southeast Asia. Designed by Kha Le-Huu & Partners of Orlando, the wing retains the Harn’s characteristic openness, including floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto a new rock-and-water garden. But the new galleries feel different. Here, mahogany floors, ceilings and columns impart a warmth well-suited to the works on display.

These include selections that came to the Harn at its founding in 1990—most notably Korean paintings and ceramics from Gen. James Van Fleet (who commanded the U.S. Eighth Army and United Nations forces from 1951 to 1953) and a variety of Indian paintings and sculpture collected by Roy C. Craven (whose 1975 “Concise History of Indian Art” still features regularly on many Asian-art syllabi).

Asia was thus a primary focus from the start, a commitment the Harn has now deepened at a cost of $20 million. Original funders and consistent contributors to the museum, David A. and Mary Ann Harn Cofrin gave $10 million that the state of Florida was to match under its Major Gift Challenge Grant Program. When budgetary constraints forced Florida legislators to suspend the program, the university forged ahead anyway, taking out loans it hopes the state will eventually reimburse. “The goal is to make students citizens of the world,” museum director Rebecca Nagy explains, “and the arts are central to that mission.” Given Asia’s prominence, she adds, “the better students understand it, the better prepared they will be.”

With nearly 2,000 Asian works in its permanent collection, the museum can now display some 680—almost four times as many as before. For its inaugural installation, curator Jason Steuber stops mid-20th century (more recent works are included in the contemporary-art wing). Most visitors, he discovered, associate Asia with ceramics, which is one of the Harn’s strengths. So, starting in a gallery of the main building renovated to match the new wing, he surrounds us with bowls, ewers, vases, dishes and the occasional figurines, tiles and plaques, arranged by country and displayed in tall mahogany units.

A wall text alerts us to the role trade routes played in disseminating materials and designs. Thus primed, we notice, for example, that blue pigments achieved with cobalt pop up in Syria, China, Vietnam and Japan; that the green and orange glaze of 15th- and 16th-century Chinese Ming figurines echoes that of a 12th- to 13th-century platter from Afghanistan; that ancient Chinese forms recur at different points in China’s history when ruling dynasties looked to the past.

From here we move seamlessly into the new wing, where there is enough space for us to absorb, undistracted, the Buddha figures and undulating pagoda rooflines carved on a sandstone pillar from 11th- to 12th-century China; the dynamic gestures and multiple symbols in a 10th-century relief of the Hindu goddess Durga as she simultaneously spears a buffalo and strangles the demon emerging from its mouth; or the elaborate headdress on a late sixth-century Bodhisattva’s head from China.

“The Harn Museum has deepened its commitment to Asian works at a cost of $20 million.”

What makes the installation work so beautifully is that it alternates from this kind of sparse configuration to dense clusterings. Surrounding the airy central space, intimate alcoves showcase masks and Tibetan Buddhist objects while display cases variously teem with carved Chinese jades or a smorgasbord of Indian reliefs, statuary and ritual objects from the third to the 20th centuries. This open-storage format proves highly effective. With more objects on view, we see connections and shifts in technique and design, and movable shelves create cubbyholes perfect for small bronzes and reliefs.

Overall, wall texts frame rather than explain displays, occasional didactic materials help decipher a sculpture’s gestures or symbols, and information on the labels is kept to a minimum. This has the advantage of keeping our attention on the objects, but at times the information is frustratingly sparse. Finding the right balance is tricky, and success will depend on how plans proceed to develop the means to allow visitors to access supplemental information through tablets or other media.

Sometimes, though, the balance is just right. Text in the north gallery invites us to explore how artists negotiated the tensions between tradition and modernity. Discrete groupings then focus on women painters in 17th- to 19th-century China, prints made in postwar occupied Japan, and works by Jamini Roy, an artist in newly independent India who is prominently represented in the Harn collection. In the Korean gallery, a 17th-century Bodhisattva showcases not just its own compelling beauty, but the science that reveals some of its story. Across from the seated figure, displayed with scriptures that were once housed in the sculpture’s abdomen, CAT scans and X-rays show that the artist carved the body from a single piece of wood, using a protruding branch for the right arm. A practical choice—but also a spiritually resonant one, since the statue thereby preserves the flow of the tree’s energy. The scans also show that the artist hid more scriptures in the statue’s head.

We will probably never see these—just as the general public will never see the conservation laboratory and other hidden working areas of the new Asia wing. It will, however, benefit from the research, conservation and continuing acquisition programs taking place behind the scenes.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing

Harn Museum of Art

www.harn.ufl.edu/asianartwing

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Asian Expansion in Florida.

By LEE LAWRENCE

Gainesville, Fla.

With the opening of the 26,000-square-foot David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing, the University of Florida’s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art is adding a conservation laboratory for Asian art and devoting almost 7,000 square feet—about one-sixth of its total exhibition space—to works from China, Japan, Korea and South and Southeast Asia. Designed by Kha Le-Huu & Partners of Orlando, the wing retains the Harn’s characteristic openness, including floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto a new rock-and-water garden. But the new galleries feel different. Here, mahogany floors, ceilings and columns impart a warmth well-suited to the works on display.

These include selections that came to the Harn at its founding in 1990—most notably Korean paintings and ceramics from Gen. James Van Fleet (who commanded the U.S. Eighth Army and United Nations forces from 1951 to 1953) and a variety of Indian paintings and sculpture collected by Roy C. Craven (whose 1975 “Concise History of Indian Art” still features regularly on many Asian-art syllabi).

Asia was thus a primary focus from the start, a commitment the Harn has now deepened at a cost of $20 million. Original funders and consistent contributors to the museum, David A. and Mary Ann Harn Cofrin gave $10 million that the state of Florida was to match under its Major Gift Challenge Grant Program. When budgetary constraints forced Florida legislators to suspend the program, the university forged ahead anyway, taking out loans it hopes the state will eventually reimburse. “The goal is to make students citizens of the world,” museum director Rebecca Nagy explains, “and the arts are central to that mission.” Given Asia’s prominence, she adds, “the better students understand it, the better prepared they will be.”

With nearly 2,000 Asian works in its permanent collection, the museum can now display some 680—almost four times as many as before. For its inaugural installation, curator Jason Steuber stops mid-20th century (more recent works are included in the contemporary-art wing). Most visitors, he discovered, associate Asia with ceramics, which is one of the Harn’s strengths. So, starting in a gallery of the main building renovated to match the new wing, he surrounds us with bowls, ewers, vases, dishes and the occasional figurines, tiles and plaques, arranged by country and displayed in tall mahogany units.

A wall text alerts us to the role trade routes played in disseminating materials and designs. Thus primed, we notice, for example, that blue pigments achieved with cobalt pop up in Syria, China, Vietnam and Japan; that the green and orange glaze of 15th- and 16th-century Chinese Ming figurines echoes that of a 12th- to 13th-century platter from Afghanistan; that ancient Chinese forms recur at different points in China’s history when ruling dynasties looked to the past.

From here we move seamlessly into the new wing, where there is enough space for us to absorb, undistracted, the Buddha figures and undulating pagoda rooflines carved on a sandstone pillar from 11th- to 12th-century China; the dynamic gestures and multiple symbols in a 10th-century relief of the Hindu goddess Durga as she simultaneously spears a buffalo and strangles the demon emerging from its mouth; or the elaborate headdress on a late sixth-century Bodhisattva’s head from China.

“The Harn Museum has deepened its commitment to Asian works at a cost of $20 million.”

What makes the installation work so beautifully is that it alternates from this kind of sparse configuration to dense clusterings. Surrounding the airy central space, intimate alcoves showcase masks and Tibetan Buddhist objects while display cases variously teem with carved Chinese jades or a smorgasbord of Indian reliefs, statuary and ritual objects from the third to the 20th centuries. This open-storage format proves highly effective. With more objects on view, we see connections and shifts in technique and design, and movable shelves create cubbyholes perfect for small bronzes and reliefs.

Overall, wall texts frame rather than explain displays, occasional didactic materials help decipher a sculpture’s gestures or symbols, and information on the labels is kept to a minimum. This has the advantage of keeping our attention on the objects, but at times the information is frustratingly sparse. Finding the right balance is tricky, and success will depend on how plans proceed to develop the means to allow visitors to access supplemental information through tablets or other media.

Sometimes, though, the balance is just right. Text in the north gallery invites us to explore how artists negotiated the tensions between tradition and modernity. Discrete groupings then focus on women painters in 17th- to 19th-century China, prints made in postwar occupied Japan, and works by Jamini Roy, an artist in newly independent India who is prominently represented in the Harn collection. In the Korean gallery, a 17th-century Bodhisattva showcases not just its own compelling beauty, but the science that reveals some of its story. Across from the seated figure, displayed with scriptures that were once housed in the sculpture’s abdomen, CAT scans and X-rays show that the artist carved the body from a single piece of wood, using a protruding branch for the right arm. A practical choice—but also a spiritually resonant one, since the statue thereby preserves the flow of the tree’s energy. The scans also show that the artist hid more scriptures in the statue’s head.

We will probably never see these—just as the general public will never see the conservation laboratory and other hidden working areas of the new Asia wing. It will, however, benefit from the research, conservation and continuing acquisition programs taking place behind the scenes.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing

Harn Museum of Art

www.harn.ufl.edu/asianartwing

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Asian Expansion in Florida.

The Chocolate Chips

A Smokin’ Notion

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Chocolate chips from Autumn Martin’s Hot Cakes

There’s a nuanced flavor running through Autumn Martin’s s’mores cookies. Is that bacon? Not quite. In order to replicate the char of marshmallows roasted over a campfire, the Seattle-based pastry pro smokes chocolate chips with alder wood and adds them to her batter. The former overseer of Theo Chocolate’s kitchen has been mastering this maneuver for the past five years. Now, with her new company, Hot Cakes—purveyor of decadent jarred desserts, over-the-top salted caramels and cookies—she has found other ways to apply the technique. Ms. Martin sells the chips separately so that adventurous sweet-crafters can experiment at will. Suggested applications include incorporating the smoky nibs into a ganache, which can then be blended into a Scotch milkshake, grinding them into savory meat rubs, using them for a mousse or simply melting them into a drizzle-on for buttered toast. $9 for three cookies, $14 per 8-ounce bag of chips, getyourhotcakes.com

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

‘Culinary Intelligence’ by Peter Kaminsky

The Diet Guide

Healthy Appetite

Writer Peter Kaminsky has lived off the fat of the land as a reviewer of untapped New York ethnic eateries, while also journeying through France with Daniel Boulud and researching his tome on the gastronomic majesty of swine. The embarrassment of richness caught up with him, and his doctor advised that he lose some serious poundage. His newest book, “Culinary Intelligence,” proves that a delicious bite can be had at any price point or calorie count. Mr. Kaminsky avoids restricting readers to a collection of recipes (although there are 14 stellar essentials at the book’s closing) or stringent meal plans. Maximizing your FPC (flavors per calorie) is the linchpin, and Mr. Kaminsky has it down to a science. His edifying manifesto allows for both well-being and hedonism to “coexist quite happily.” $25, knopfdoubleday.com

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Santé for persnickety snackers

The Snacks

Nuts, to You

Roasted and seasoned in small batches, serious nut-jobber Santé has enough of a selection of thoughtfully crafted flavors (from cardamom cashews to chipotle almonds) to sate the most persnickety snackers or spruce up just about any dish. Candied pistachios belong in brittle or atop rice pudding, while the aforementioned savory options (as well as garlic almonds) can provide salads with some zing. The California company is careful never to overpower the main ingredient; added spices or accents only enhance the nut. $2 per 1-ounce bag,
santenuts.com

—Charlotte Druckman

A version of this article appeared April 28, 2012, on page D9 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: No Headline Available.

By PETER PLAGENS

Significant modern sculpture has been generally assumed to be pretty big, made out of metal or some kind of assemblage, uncolored or at least muted, rough-hewn or “tough,” and certainly without utilitarian allusions. Ken Price, who died Feb. 24 in Taos, N.M., at age 77, made relatively small objects out of clay, many of them brightly painted, very smooth and, if not exactly useful around the house, at least wittily referential of that possibility. Price was a ceramist—he studied with the celebrated Peter Voulkos at the Otis Art Institute kilns near downtown Los Angeles, and got a master’s degree from Alfred University’s renowned two-year ceramics program in just one year—who became a sculptor, who became a great, sui generis artist on the order of Francis Bacon or Sidney Nolan.

Part of Price’s uniqueness—especially in today’s logorrheic, theory-besotted art world—was his straightforwardness. At a talk he gave seven years ago at Don Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Price said: “I can’t prove my art’s any good or that it means what I say it means. And nothing I say can improve the way it looks.” The first of his works to be noticed were the circa-1960 football-size “eggs,” intensely painted in color schemes of eye-boggling pinks, greens, oranges and yellows, and augmented with openings inside of which lurk dark, glossy, larvae-looking stuff. Then he went to cups—hilariously impractical vessels with bodies of snail forms or Constructivist geometry (imagine a Gerrit Rietveld chair for your morning coffee)—that are like nobody else’s, before or since.

Price was born on the west side of Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 1935, and raised in comfortable circumstances. (He was privileged enough to take some trumpet lessons from Chet Baker.) His parents designed and built a home close to the beach, so their boy was ready, willing and able to surf practically every day. The sport was a big deal to him (the announcement for one of his shows at the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery contains a photograph of Price standing straight up on a board in a wave, arms triumphantly outstretched), and surfing trips to Baja California, brought him into contact with one of the major influences on his aesthetic, Mexican curio shops. He spent six years in the 1970s, in fact, on a never-completed (but exhibited in parts) project called “Happy’s Curios,” named after his wife. It consists of cabinets of hand-made homages to Mexican commercial pottery, Day of the Dead imagery, satiny cloth and flowers.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Ken Price/Fredrik Nilsen

‘L. Red’ (1963)

A quietly affable fellow, Price could break out of his beloved studio labor (which he thought was the greatest blessing of being an artist) to create the occasional album cover (for his friend Ry Cooder), illustrations for poetry books (by Harvey Mudd and Charles Bukowski) and liquor labels (for a favorite brand of mezcal). He also taught for 10 years (1993-2003) where he first went to college, the University of Southern California, before finally decamping to Taos.

Although it’s almost contrary to the joyful, just-look-at-it spirit of Price’s art, his art-historical importance must be mentioned. When Price, Voulkos, John Mason, Billy Al Bengston and a few others got together at the Otis kiln, the Los Angeles modern-art world was, if it palpably existed at all, provincial and behind the times. The Otis ethos was “Let’s make whatever the hell we feel like making as fast as we can while being so technically proficient it’s scary.” Coupled with Los Angeles’s lack of a brooding avant-garde such as New York’s, and with Los Angeles’s cars-and-plastic visual environment, it formed the basis of the great Southern California art revolution currently being celebrated in the Getty-sponsored plethora of “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions. (Mr. Price had three sculptures in the Getty’s own lead PST show—now closed—and is one of the featured players, along with Voulkos and Mr. Mason, in Scripps College’s current PST exhibition, “Clay’s Tectonic Shift.”) At the time of his death, Price was working with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a 50-year retrospective, a show that will turn up in 2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—where, if it isn’t a gobsmacking revelation of the first water, something’s wrong with New York.

In more academic terms, the art of Ken Price is a lively link between the austerity of Minimalism (he never wasted a curve or a color) and the inclusiveness of postmodernism (his work can remind you of everything from Constantin Brancusi to American Indians to Japanese woodblocks), proving that in art there are no real ruptures, only intriguingly disguised continuities. But in the end with Price it’s the object—not history, not theory, not jockeying for position among cities—that counts. Somebody asked him why there were as many as 70 coats of reworked and pitted acrylic paint on his late, obsessively crafted, bloblike sculptures. “That’s so it looks good rather than bad,” Price replied. Nothing anyone can say about his work can improve upon that.

Mr. Plagens is a New York-based painter and writer. He writes the bi-weekly gallery-review column for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 6, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Words Need Not Apply.