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Small Business: Treasurer Grossman and Rep. Forry toured the Slate Bar & Grill this week, highlighting a small business in the Financial District funded through a Dorchester bank and owned by neighborhood contractors.State officials kicked off National Small Business Week on Monday morning by putting a spotlight on a former ice cream parlor in the Financial District that has been turned into a bar and grill by the same Dorchester contractors who established Ledge Kitchen & Drinks in Lower Mills.

State Treasurer Steven Grossman and state Rep. Linda Dorcena Forry toured the restaurant, called Slate, which received funds through a small business banking partnership that Grossmans office is pushing.

Meetinghouse Bank, which is located in the Lower Mills neighborhood, gave the owners of Slate an extended $500,000 line of credit for the opening and operation of the new business, which opened earlier this year.

The owners are Brendan and Greg Feeney, brothers who are natives of County Sligo in Ireland and who operate Feeney Brothers Contracting.

The Treasurers office initiative behind the $500,000 line of credit provides state cash deposits to community banks that in turn provide loans to small businesses. Since its inception last year, $231 million has been deposited in 44 Bay State banks, according to Grossmans office, with a resulting leverage of 892 small business loans. The Slate loan helped create 32 jobs, Grossmans office noted.

I looked at these two brothers, and I said these are two guys who I have no doubt any small bank would want to partner with, the treasurer told the Reporter after the tour. Noting the wood paneling and high top tables, Grossman gave the restaurant, which serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a good review. The next few times Im going to have breakfast downtown, Im going to say meet me at Slate, he said.

Brendan and I are continuously encouraged by the level of support we have received as small business owners in Boston, Greg Feeney said in a statement. The hands-on and open-door policy approach by our local political and community leaders has created an environment where opportunities for entrepreneurship and small business ownership are flourishing.

In her own statement, Forry, chair of the House side of the Small Business and Community Development Committee, said she hopes the celebration of small businesses will become an annual tradition and is a wonderful opportunity to highlight and reflect on the many important economic contributions of our states nearly 582,600 entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Grossman, who went on a tour of ice cream parlors during his run for treasurer in 2010, pointed out that the Slate building used to house a Brighams. I cant get away from ice cream, he said.

Excerpt from:
State/Bank loan helps Dot merchants open Hub eatery

A documentary in the works looks to capture the incredible career of an 83-year-old Japanese eccentric.

Yayoi Kusama, known for her innovative soft-sculpture, immersive, polka-dotted experiences, is among Japan's most revered living artists. With art that strides the abstract, cute, and bizarre, this 83-year-, orange-wigged living doll is the consummate avant gardist. She exists in a self-contained bubble of spacy illusions and ephemeral visions, and for the past 38 years has lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital across the street from her painting studio. Frequent exhibitions at MoMA and the Whitney, prestigious gallery shows, mountains of published monographs, and scores of fashion products bearing her imprimatur attest to her surprising popularity. Last February, the Tate Modern in London opened a major retrospective, now in its final month, that testifies to her colossal art-world appeal.

I came to know Kusama in 1968. But to me, then, she was simply a kook. I was the 17-year-old rookie art director of Screw, an underground sex paper that was a part of the late-'60s sexual revolution. That's where I fielded almost daily phone calls from Kusama, who was aggressively hawking photos of the orgiastic happenings she had choreographed. You see, she was a prodigious orchestrator of gaggles of naked hippies, some wearing masks of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, covered in polka dots and scampering in undulating piles of potato-shaped soft sculptures (and on one occasion dangling on the Alice in Wonderland monument in Central Park). Kusama routinely appeared in these photographs as ringmaster, wearing a dot-encrusted leotard.

"I come now, bring photos," Kusama announced in such fast-clipped, heavily accented English that I almost believed that she was speakingand I was understandingJapanese. She'd arrive at the door moments later, as though she had called from just around the corner. Usually, she'd stay for an hour or so, explaining the hidden meaning of every single shot. Listening was torture.

It was a story on a blog in which I mentioned Kusama's hijinx that brought me to the attention of Heather Lenz, a filmmaker making the documentary Kusama Princess of Polka Dots, a seven-minute version of which was cut for the Tate exhibit . I was surprised to learn that this strange blip of memoryKusamahad become such an incredibly renowned artist. If only I saved those photos, I might be rich enough to help Lenz complete her entire film in time for the Tate exhibit.

Lenz was introduced to Kusama's work in the early '90s, when she was earning duel degrees in Art History and Fine Arts, and her textbooks seldom contained any mention of women artists. "Then one day, a sculpture professor showed me a photo of Kusama's sculptures," she told me in a recent interview. "It was love at first sight."

Some years later, Lenz decided to make a film about Kusama. First it was conceived as a biopic, but she decided a documentary was better because "It would be more interesting to have Ms. Kusama tell her story in her own words while she was still alive, and while that was still an option." Lenz is now an expert on Kusama's life in Japan and during the '60s as a struggling artist in New York.

During that period when I met Kusama, "her work had already taken many forms," Lenz explained. Her early material included small paintings made from ink and watercolor on paper. When she moved to New York in 1958, she started making larger paintings on canvas. Then she began crafting sculpture and, later, installations that included sculpture, paintings, and other elements, such as mirrors and macaroni (which in some cases covered gallery floors and required guests to walk over the crunchy pieces of pasta.) Then she moved onto the Happenings she was conceiving when she became our ad hoc photo supplier. "During that era she also made 'orgy clothes,' with strategically cut holes," Lenz said. Then, after moving back to Japan in the '70s, she made collages and wrote semi-autobiographical novels and poems. Since then, she has made paintings, sculptures, installations, and a variety of objects including furniture, purses, puzzles, stickers, and limited-edition phones shaped liked dogs.

"Respect for Ms. Kusama's work has increased dramatically in recent years," Lenz added, and she was the first woman to represent Japan at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1993. "Like many artists who are ahead of their time, she was misunderstood in her hometown for decades, but now there is a museum there with the largest permanent collection of her art."

Lenz posited that part of what makes Kusama so compelling is that she was willing to go to great lengths to pursue her passion to make art. "I think a lot of the art she created in the '60s was really ahead of its time, and that makes it important. Personally though, I'll always have a soft spot for the collages she produced in Japan after returning there."

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Yayoi Kusama: The Polka-Dot-Loving Art Legend I Initially Mistook for Crazy

23-05-2012 14:00 HIT US AT AND FOLLOW @T9DAPRINCE FOR VIDEOGRAPHY

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24-05-2012 02:34 Documentray movie coming soon

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24-05-2012 12:26 Deerfield Academy and Avon Old Farms met for a huge Prep School match-up. There was a lot of great plays and some serious goals! Check it out here.

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