Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

Yayoi Kasama and John Grade

Two years ago, our son bought us tickets to the Seattle Art Museum's blockbuster Yayoi Kusama show.  I admit it took some convincing for me to agree to make the long drive north.  But I was newly retired and no longer had time restraints.  I knew nothing of Kusama going into the show. While her early work was monochromatic, her later work is an explosion of color. Museum shows tend to inspire whispers and reverence but Kusama's show was abuzz with chatter, sharing and smiles.  Photographs were encouraged and you could go in and out of the mirrored rooms as many times as you were willing to wait in line.  
Seattle is filled with great art, good food and wonderful vistas. But my favorite unexpected treat was seeing John Grade's Middle Fork sculpture suspended the full length of the Seattle Art Museum's multi-storied lobby.  It is stunning. Many volunteer hours were spent creating it. Best of all, it is still there, though his intention is to eventually return it to the forest to degrade naturally into the forest floor.  If you are in Seattle it is a must see, and can be seen for free by just visiting SAM's lobby.  Here is a link to learn more:http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibitions/middlefork

Russell Childers Show

 

Russell Childers: Oregon Outsider is currently on display at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem, Oregon.  Jonathan Bucci will be giving a free lecture on Russell Childers September 25, 2016 at 3 p.m., at the Roger Hull Lecture Hall, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. The show will close October 23, it is worth making time to see. There is also and exhibition catalog of the show available for $17.95.  

I cannot express how much knowing Childers' story and his work has meant to me over the years. Childers died in 1998 and I have longed to know where life took him and see the work he created after the 1977 show. The current show is terrific.  But there are still missing pieces. Jonathan Bucci (and I) are excited that the show is bringing attention to this forgotten artist and more people are contacting him with information and recollections.  Go see the show and if you have a missing piece of Russell Childers' story, please share it so he will never forgotten again. 

The Power of a Book

This summer there was a local retrospective for Carol Vernon, a long time Southwestern Oregon Community College art teacher.  During the preparations, I was shown the picture they were planning to use for publicity - a young Carol was resolutely looking directly at the camera, clutching, embracing her copy of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Georgia O’Keeffe. Someone commented that it was odd she was photographed with a book, not one of her pieces.  But I knew why. One look at the picture and I was immediately transported back to 1976.

I was finishing my first year of graduate school. It had been a challenging year.  In the 30's, early in her career, Louise Nevelson was told she had “to have balls to be a sculptor.” That sentiment was alive and well in 1976. That spring, I impulsively cut a slab of walnut into the silhouette of a plump swimming suit and mounted it on mahogany legs fitted with maple high heels. I rubbed white paint into the grain of the mahogany. By the end of the week, the finished piece was squirreled away in the corner of my work area where it could not be readily seen from the common area of our shared grad studio. The next Monday, the head of the department visited. Clearly word was out. He circled my new piece, paused, and pronounced he had nothing to say, “There was no art history precedent for it.” And he left. I was stunned. Less blunt but the same message given to Nevelson - I was not making, nor was I equipped to make sculpture. A paper doll past was irrelevant, useless for a sculptor.

I sat staring at the piece for the longest time. As I gathered my things to leave, one of the other grad students poked his head around the corner and quietly said, “I don’t get it either.  But he is wrong.... it is art”. Jan Zach, the chair of my graduate committee, stopped by a couple of days later. In his usual effusive half-Czech, half-English way, he urged me to make more, bigger and bigger. He was convinced that the piece was the start of my thesis work. But nothing of substance grew from the tiny balsa wood studies that followed.

In desperation for a context from which to build my graduate thesis, I surveyed the University of Oregon Architecture and Allied Arts Library for information on women artists.  I found one picture and two magazine articles. But by the fall, some of the fruits of the feminist movement were reaching Oregon. Black and white paperbacks on Nevelson and Kathe Kollowitz had been published.  Judy Chicago spoke at the U. of O. and Miriam Shapiro lectured at O. S. U. 

The Georgia O’Keeffe book showed up in the college book store just before Thanksgiving.  It was a full colored, oversized monograph on a woman artist, with an unprecedented $75 price tag. For comparison, I had bought the Nevelson book, Dawns and Dusks, for $7.95 and Kathe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist for $5.50. I spent Christmas Day curled around my very own copy, reading it from cover to cover. The book sold out in record time, shocking the publishing world and providing impetus for rushing long-neglected manuscripts on other women artists to market.

For me, Carol Vernon and countless other women artists coming of age in those chauvinistic times, the book was instantly our most prized possession. Carol’s copy was at her retrospective, looking worn and well loved, just like my copy.  We all still had to struggle to find our own paths, but the O’Keefe book was proof we could hold in our hands that a woman artist had found her way, had found a place in the art world. 

I will forever be grateful to O’Keeffe for not allowing her work, her life be relegated to a black and white paperback.  Instead she continued to work and patiently waited for the publishing world to meet her terms.  She was 89 when the book was published, but when her story was told, it was with her own words, in a blaze of color, and bigger than life.  The size of the first edition was wonderful to look at, but difficult to shelve, later editions were downsized to a more conventional coffee table book size.

For Christmas I treated myself to two new books on the sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy.  Then I saw Manufactured Landscapes a  documentary on the photographs of Edward Burtynsky.  Much of Goldsworthy's sculpture is fleeting, made with natural materials which melt, decay or are washed away with the incoming tides.  But one of my new books, The Andy Goldsworthy Project, is on his permanent work.  Through out his career Goldsworthy has been a meticulous photographer, carefully documenting the purposeful interactions of one man (and his team of workers) with and on nature.  He records the evolution over time - the impact his pieces have on the land or the impact nature has on his pieces. Images of his work are in the Other Artist album.

Edward Burtynsky's  photographs record the collective impact of humankind on the environment as we extract and use natures resources to manufacture the consumer goods of a modern society.  Burtynsky's photographs reminds me that even degradation  and pollution seen through an artist's eye can be incredibly beautiful.  But his work also stuns me by revealing  the shear magnitude of the scale and change we are having on the world.  One of Burtnysky's pictorial studies is on the multi-decade, Three Gorges Dam project in China.  For some of the workers   it was simply a job, but others glowed with pride for being part of something so monumental, bringing  progress in the form of power generation, transportation and floodcontrol.  A good website to see Burtnysky's work is  http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/. But I have added a few pictures to whet your appetite.

As a community college dean,  I am privileged to be part of making a long dreamed for small  branch campus a reality.  I was there when local tribal members gathered Sitka Spruce roots for baskets, before the trees were felled and the land cleared.  I  watched as trucks haul away a ridge of rock slowly but surely, day after day.  The structural beams of the building are finally peeking over the hill.  Half of the ten acre site will be untouched but the other half will be forever altered, in spite of the solar panels on the roof and the carefully engineered system of bioswales and filtering ponds designed to manage runoff before returning it to the neighboring wetlands. 

Like the Chinese workers I swell with pride and excitement every time I am on site, because  I knows how needed the new facility is for our isolated, rural county.  Like Goldsworthy, I have enjoyed the design process and seeing the project evolve.   But Burtynsky reminds me that like most people, I have a hand in the steady transformation of our planet. 

Construction workers tease me about my "magic tree", the one remaining Sitka Spruce circled by barricade netting, to remind everyone to keep it safe.  When I look at it, I remember the beautiful spring day when we gathered roots for basket making, how the land looked and smelled before we began carving it up to build a college.  Sometimes I find myself making the Spruce a promise - that once we are done building we will re-plant with natives so it won't be solitary forever. I promise it that we will use the surrounding wetlands wisely to teach watershed management.  And I share my dream that by setting the college at the edge of town, in the midst of a forest with a distant view of the ocean, our students will reconnect to the land, learn, and be inspired.

The Color of Sadness

I was recently asked what color sad was.  I floundered about, mentally picturing color after color trying to find a fit, finally deciding sad did not have a color.  Sad is emptiness, it is what is left after mad, after grief, after all the other emotions have flamed out.  It is a stuck place where there is no forward or backward movement.   It is texture-less, colorless.  It is a void. 

 

Then I realized, that I while I could not settle on a color for sad, but I did envision an image  - The Invisible Object, Hands Holding the Void, by Alberto Giacometti.  

 

His later pieces, the ones he is most known for, do resonate with isolation and sadness, but I was surprised when the word sad triggered Hands Holding the Void.  I have always loved this piece, because she appears to be just on the verge of being able to tell me something important, something life changing. She does have a certain helplessness, a quiet desperateness, but she also seems so earnest, engaged, even hopeful - in spite of the curious rectangular slab pressing against the front of her lower legs.

 

It is hard to find good pictures of this sculpture.  Most are full frontal images, where it is hard to grasp that she is actually represented sitting on a chair and in some versions there is even a bird sitting beside her.  Everything is skewed, but logical except for the slab pinning her legs together, preventing the independent movement necessary to stand and move on, trapping her in place. 

 

Giacometti wrote that he "could have destroyed it. But I made this statue for just the opposite reason - to renew myself. Perhaps this is what makes it worthwhile." It was one of his last surrealist pieces. He would later struggle to finish work.  His brother Diego sometimes arbitrarily emptied his studio to force him to begin new pieces. Was Hands Holding the Void his last heroic effort to get a grasp on the sadness and isolation that was about to descend, an attempt to capture and hold it so he could set it aside and move on?  Was in the end he left with emptiness, resigned to letting it settle into his life without further fight? 

 

Maybe Hands Holding the Void is my image of sadness because it was the last piece by Giacometti that engaged the viewer, that grappled with emptiness, that tried to communicate emptiness.  Every figure afterward stares back at the viewer dispassionately, in the world but not part of the world, seen but not heard.   

Daniel Minter

While I was in Seattle last month I went to the Northwest African American Museum to see the Jacob Lawrence and James W. Washington, Jr. exhibit.  It was a treat to finally see Jacob Lawrence's work in person and be introduced to the sculpture of James W. Washington, Jr. , but the biggest surprise of the day was to see the work of Daniel Minter. 

 

Minter had been an artist in residence at Washington's House and Studio and the paintings he had completed were hanging in the museum's hallway and cafeteria.  They were breathtaking and haunting.  Minter also sculpts and illustrates children's books.  His website is www.danielminter.com.  I am posting a few pictures from the website to help lure you into checking it out for yourselves.

In Seach of Marisol

I decided to write a post on Marsisol Escobar months ago and have been totally frustrated trying to get information to get a clearer perspective on her career as a whole. I was surprised to discover there is not a comprehensive retrospective book and instead found myself following crumb trails across the internet.

First I came across a 1976 book by Robert Creeley, his words, her sculpture. Then I found the recently produced Marisol Works 1960 - 2007, from the Neuhoff Edelman Gallery. And finally Marisol, from the Neuberger Museum of Art arrived this week, after three months of emails and morning calls. It is by far the most comprehensive and I recommend it. Eleanor Heartney’s essay is insightful and the color photographs chronicle work from every decade of Marisol's long career.  The small black and whites give us a glimpse of her life at the center of the New York art scene. But if you decide to purchase it, take into account time zone differences and call only when the gift store is open.

The Creeley book has grainy black and white photographs of sculpture I found nowhere else: of A Portrait of Sidney Janis Selling a Portrait of Sidney Janis by Marisol by Marisol, of her lyrical 1970's fish series, and of the Father Damien maquette which I like better than the bronze. The catalog from the Neuhoff Edelman Gallery shows some early work and more of her later work.

And I still hope some day there will be a comprehensive retrospective book on Marisol.

Marisol, Rediscovered

Last December I came across a picture I had saved of Stephanie’s Family by Marisol Escobar. Marisol was the only woman in the new Pop Art movement that burst on the scene in New York in the early 60's. I had always assumed that her stature had continued to climb with that of her male Pop compatriots. Somehow I had missed that she had been stripped of membership in Pop Art by the art critic Lawrence Alloway who declared in his 1974 book on Pop Art that she was "a sophisticated, naive sculptor, whose figures possess a folkloric decoration and fantasy that is quite unlike Pop." That pronouncement didn’t seem to slow down Marisol. She is still making sculpture, her work is in the collections of major museums and a 2007 retrospective of her work was at the Neuhoff Edelman Gallery in New York.

In 1975, I had the unlikely opportunity to visit the private home of a major collector of American Pop Art. There was a grouping of multiple Warhol portraits of the collector's wife gracing the dining area. The gallery room featured Jasper John’s paintings and number prints, one through nine. An Oldenburg vinyl drum set, a Stella, a Lichtenstein and other pop art masterpieces were on display throughout the house. I was mesmerized by the Jasper Johns prints. It was the only time I have ever seen that much work of Johns close up. Their layers, complexity, and variation were beyond the capabilities of a camera to capture. It is true, Marisol’s work was no where to be found and probably would have been out of place in that sleek contemporary home and life style where the human element had been reduced to a design element. It was a wonderful afternoon, but I left looking for my heroes elsewhere.

Like the other Pop artists, Marisol looked to popular American culture for subject matter. But she focused on the people and the social conventions of the time, not the products they consumed. She created at times poignant and other times searingly satirical portraits of the unknown and the famous. Warhol treated a Campbell soup can and Marilyn Monroe the same, but Marisol’s subjects never lost their humanity. The famous often looked foolish (John Wayne on a hobby horse or The Generals) or over-whelmed (Desmond Tutu reduced to a small head atop a massive red rectangle and a staff). But the unknown always seemed to maintain their dignity and pride.

In a 2004 interview with Whitney Eskew, Marisol was asked if there was a dominant mood or theme in current artwork. She stated that there wasn’t and went on to say - "Art used to be a group effort. Artists worked in movements like Abstract Expressionism. Now everyone is on his or her own, working in a more individualistic style. Working together our efforts were more fruitful." When asked by Whitney where her work belonged, Marisol said, " My work is Pop, but not in the strictest sense because it doesn’t use found objects exclusively. My work has a surrealistic quality as well."

I find myself wondering. How would it feel to be part of a movement, to know where you belong even when the experts declared otherwise? What would I have thought of her work had I seen it that long ago afternoon I spent immersed in Pop Art, when I was still in search of a place to belong? Would I have followed her work more closely? Who else did I dismiss too early, who persisted, who now have a lifetime of art to discover and glean?

Andy Goldsworthy, Stone River

I was in Colorado a couple of weeks ago for two family weddings, followed by a few days on the banks of the Frying Pan River to regroup before my final push for the Hult Center Show.  The aspen were just beginning to turn, the air was crisp.  I was purposely not thinking of art, or work, relishing in having the time to catch up with family and friends, play Swedish Rummy and read the stack of books I had brought.  But I couldn't resist the temptation to make a trip into Aspen to see Andy Goldsworthy's new Stone River. 

From an inauspicious beginning from underneath a parking lot, Goldsworthy's river of red sandstone flows "downstream" through a small meadow, under a walkway and through a reflecting pool.  Then the very tip of the sandstone wall curves into the building at the base of a wall of windows.  The thin line of red sandstone meanders in broad snaking curves through a large conference room back outside, across a cement deck where it disappears over the edge, curving in perfect alignment to join up with Roaring Fork River flowing far below.

Unlike the majority of Andy Goldsworthy's work, Stone River required a team of skilled stone masons to construct. It is a major installation piece, but like a river, it only rises to ground level; and like a river born from individual rivulets and streams from multiple and diverse watersheds joining and flowing as one, Stone River combines the beautiful red Colorado sandstone of my childhood with red sandstone imported from England, China, India, and Jordan. 

Stone River was designed and built in conjunction with the new Doerr/Hosier Center on the grounds of the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado.  Founded in 1950, the Aspen Institute is an international non-profit dedicated "to fostering enlightened leadership, the appreciation of timeless ideas and values, and open-minded dialog on contemporary issues."  All the components of Stone River's design are purposeful, reflecting the nature of the work being done in the building, especially the bringing together of red sandstone from all parts of the world to mingle together and create a river of ideas that flows from the outside world in through the meeting room and back out into the world. 

At first, two elements of its design seem disconcerting - its abrupt beginning, appearing to emerge from a rectangular opening from underneath a parking lot and its constrictive, tight, snaking curves.  But then I remembered that a couple of years ago the culvert diverting a small stream under the highway and parking lot outside my office had to be dug up and up-sized to correct a chronic high water problem.  That is what happens to streams running inconveniently through cities and ideas outside the box, they remain hidden and contained until they overflow the system meant to control them and are given room to flow.  Flying  home to Oregon, looking down at rivers cutting through the landscape far below, made me realize that Goldsworthy's exaggerated curves do reflect the true nature of rivers.  But it is a perspective we loose when we sit on their banks and can only see as far as the next bend in the river.

Stone River is a hard piece to describe, a hard piece to photograph, but it is definitely well worth going out of your way to see. I did not know the title of the piece before I went, I was expecting a wall and instead discovered a river.  For those on the west coast, since returning home I have discovered that in 2002 Goldsworthy completed a 320 foot long Stone River on the Stanford Universty campus from sandstone salvaged from buildings toppled in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes.  An article on that Stanford Stone River can be found at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2002/january23/goldsworthy-123.html. An article on the Aspen Stone River can be found at http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20060923/ASPENWEEKLY03/109240048.

Andy Goldsworthy

It is spring, the time of year I prowl my yard daily searching for signs of life - a swelling bud, a spike of green poking through the ground. I clear the dead stalks of last year and pull the weeds first in places I know certain plants will soon emerge, because if I don’t they will be choked out by the weeds and grass that already have a head start and are thriving.

Last night on my nightly prowl I came across my crude barren circles in the weed choked flower beds and thought of Andy Goldsworthy. His book Andy Goldsworthy, A Collaboration With Nature was published in 1990. I thumbed through it anytime I saw it in bookstores, but I didn’t buy it until last Christmas. It is remarkable that it stayed in print all these years. I sometimes day dream of coming upon one of Goldsworthy’s pieces in nature, by happenstance, or of sitting mute and still watching him create.

Unlike my want-to-be gardener attempts to bring color and seasonal variety to my yard, Goldsworthy is a master collaborator with nature, in tune with the landscape and weather; pushing the limitations of individual materials, yet maintaining balance within his individual pieces, within nature itself.

I garden to stay connected with nature, to get outside and be reminded that life is cyclical and fleeting. I make sculpture to ponder and capture life's lessons, hopefully with sufficient complexity that they will continue to intrigue and give insight long after they are finished.  I want my sculpture to be able to stand the test of time.  I want my garden to grow and renew itself year after year.

But much of Goldsworthy’s work is as fleeting as life itself.  He uses plant materials that decay, ice that melts, stones that the tides will tumble to create a moment of balance and beauty that from the moment it is finished continues to evolve and decay in a natural life-cycle. I have always been in awe of his ability to create such exquisite moments of perfection knowing that for the most part they would only be seen and experienced through the photos he took to record their life cycles.  Only in his later stone work, can we experience his work for ourselves. 

But most of the art I treasure I hold onto, return to through books and pictures. It really doesn't matter whether a piece still exists or has long since decayed or collapsed from the forces of gravity, wind or rain. Most of Goldsworthy’s pieces were never expected to survive past the turn of the tide or rising sun, but through pictures, they will continue to delight and inspire generations.

Goldsworthy has many books and DVD's chronicling his work.  In March, he completed a new stone installation for the Doerr/Hosier Center in Aspen, Colorado.  The wall combines the beautiful red Colorado sandstone of my childhood with red sandstone imported from England, China, India, and Jordan.  I can't wait to see it when I visit Colorado in the fall.  It is a permanent wall, requiring a team stone masons and architects, but I hope it still captures the essence of Goldsworthy's earlier, solitary work made when his only collaborator was nature itself.