More Than a Deer in a Sweater

By John DeFore
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, March 1, 2007

Works by Houston artist Elaine Bradford -- where old taxidermied animals are wrapped in colorful crochet that spirals off into Seussian shapes -- are so eye-tickling and accessibly weird that any gallery showing them becomes an instant kid-friendly zone. (On a random visit Saturday afternoon at Women & Their Work, toddlers and tweens accompanied grinning parents.)

But there's more to the work than chic craftiness and oddball entertainment in Bradford's "Freaks of Nurture" exhibit. This new collection might not have the room-dominating showiness of last summer's Okay Mountain exhibit, but it's much richer conceptually, provoking an array of responses beyond "aww, look at the deer in a sweater!"

For one thing, the knitted coverings are never simply clothing: In "Divided Attention," a ram's head is completely (and tightly) shrouded, with eyes trapped behind cage-like yarn; in "Conjoined," a pair of deer share a single mask, peering through eye holes with a hint of menace. In other pieces, snaking masses of yarn extend an animal's body or (as in "Snarl") engulf it like an angry predator.

Conflicting associations make these pieces stick in the mind. Bradford is reclaiming hunting trophies, wrapping them lovingly in warm materials as if they again had body heat to conserve. On the other hand, the out-of-control shapes can suggest weird post-mortem phenomena -- as if antlers and tails, like hair and fingernails, could continue to grow after death. In some cases, as in "Divided Attention," the shapes have a life of their own, like parasites that just needed a place to take hold.

Though her work might inspire some ruminations about life and the food chain, Bradford refuses to approach it with complete seriousness. If the playful color combinations in the sweaters don't convince you, check out the hand-crocheted beer koozies -- $10 and $15 each -- for sale in the gallery gift shop.

("Elaine Bradford: Freaks of Nurture" continues 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through March 31. Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St., 477-1064.)

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It's not Latin American art -- it's just art
New Latin American art exhibit represents a breakout moment for the Blanton, and art history.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, March 03, 2007

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros remembers very well the last time a portion of her Latin American art collection was exhibited at the University of Texas' Blanton Museum of Art.

In fall 1999, about 40 vibrant abstract sculptures and paintings from the 1950s and 1960s -- just a sample of Cisneros' 3,000-plus collection, considered one of the best in private hands -- went on view in a cramped second-floor gallery at the Ransom Center, which the Blanton was using for its exhibits. Though the venue was far from ideal, the kinetic, zoomy, geometric artwork made an impression on some UT administrators who came to the opening reception.

Just perhaps not the kind Cisneros had expected.

"I remember these officials walking in and exclaiming 'This is art from Latin America?' " Cisneros recalled recently. "To see the shock on people's faces that something so pure and sophisticated could come from South America was a shock to me. I realized how important it was to explain to everyone possible that Latin American art wasn't all murals and figurative scenes, Frida Kahlo and bananas and watermelons."

Today Cisneros -- who is the wife of Venezuelan media magnate Gustavo Cisneros -- believes that's going to be easier to explain. It's not just because a new exhibit from her collection is now on view at the Blanton -- the first major Latin American show the museum has presented in its spacious new building, a show accompanied by the publication of a major catalog and launch of an educational Web site.

It's because with "The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection," the Blanton -- which has attracted 150,000 visitors since opening last April -- finally has the means, and the potential audience, to trumpet the story it's been quietly composing for years.

Call it a breakout moment for Latin American art in this country. It's certainly a breakout moment for the Blanton. Its effort to change the misconceptions about Latin American art can be widely appreciated for the first time, instead of being shown in small, out-of-the-way campus digs that few found their way to.

Today, visitors to "The Geometry of Hope" can learn about the dynamic, logic-inspired abstract visual language that percolated in cosmopolitan South American cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps more importantly, they can wander upstairs and see "America/Americas," the permanent installation of modern and contemporary art that unifies the Blanton's collection of art from 1900 to the present day, organizing it based on chronology and aesthetic progression, not geographic origin.

In other words, the Blanton and "America/Americas" is proposing a startling proposition: It's not "Latin American" art. It's just art

Geography and art history

Before this new art history could be written, though, geography had to be redefined. For one thing, Latin America isn't what -- or even where -- you might think it is. In the broadest sense, it spans both hemispheres and oceans.

"There's this perception that Latin America is one monolithic entity," says Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, the Blanton's curator of Latin American art. "And that all you do is go south of the U.S. and get there and everyone speaks one language -- Spanish. And conversely, every one who speaks that language and comes from that 'one place' has the same traditions, ideas and beliefs."

"We have to rethink the way geography and culture intersect," he continues. "Previously, there was always some big art historical theory that unites everything in Latin American art, then compares it with art in the United States or Europe. That's just not accurate."

And that's why Pérez-Barreiro included Paris as one of six Latin American cities highlighted in "The Geometry of Hope," where abstract art fomented.

"Paris was most certainly a hub of Latin American abstract art," says Pérez-Barreiro.

After all, the creative exchange between the major Atlantic coast cities of South America and European cultural capitals was -- and still is -- inextricable. Caracas, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, fueled by their strong post-World War II economies, were hotbeds of modernist thinking and societal progress. A faith in science and its potential to better the world inspired artists to create a purely abstract aesthetic language of vibrating lines, clean geometric forms and kinetic shapes.

It's like the Blanton and scholars such as Pérez-Barreiro having been saying for years: The development of modern Latin America art is inseparably linked to the development of modern art the world over.

The art world takes notice

"(The re-hanging of the permanent collections at the Blanton) appears to be a small gesture, but it represents huge strides in the field," says Marysol Nieves, assistant vice president of Latin American art in the New York office of the auction house Sotheby's. "The market for Latin American art has continued to expand during the last decade with collectors no longer coming primarily from Latin America, but also from the U.S., Europe and Asia. That shift is directly related to the greater visibility museums and other cultural organizations have given to art from Latin America."

One of Brazil's foremost contemporary artists, Katie van Scherpenberg, who did a residency at UT several years ago, says, "The Blanton has the possibility to show Latin American art in another, much broader light, bringing people from all around to see and perceive unknown forms of expression-- not only Frida Kahlo exists."

Van Scherpenberg's comment is a reminder that the presentation of Latin American art in this country has never been politically neutral.

As the world slid toward global war in the late 1930s, the United States developed a keen interest in the continent to the south and its abundance of natural resources. Art was the perfect cultural arm of this new diplomacy.

But after World War II, the U.S. had little need for Latin America. And hence Latin American art all but dropped off the radar in this country, regarded as little more than a footnote, folk art or exotica.

Then, in the 1970s, America began a love affair with magical realism, thanks to English translations of books by Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez. That in turn sparked interest in artists such as Kahlo. But the popularity of Kahlo, Márquez and their like only served to perpetuate the misconception that everything Latin American was mystical, exotic and filled with fantastic color. In other words, ethnic.

Things were a little different in Texas, though, with its historical and cultural ties to Mexico. Back in 1940, UT was the first university in the country to establish an institute of Latin American Studies, leveraged in large part by a strong library of Latin American materials.

When UT founded its first art museum in 1963, director Donald Goodhall was a pioneer, collecting Latin American art when almost no other U.S. institution did so. In the early 1970s, New York art collector Barbara Duncan began giving hundreds of artworks from her collection, choosing UT specifically because of its serious study of Latin America.

More art world "firsts" followed. In 1981, UT established the first professorship of modern Latin American art history in the country. And in 1988, the Blanton became the first museum in this country to hire a full-time curator of Latin American art.

When discussions about a new museum building began in the mid-1990s, Blanton curators also began thinking of a new way to showcase their art of the 20th century. The forward-thinking "America/Americas" is the end result.

Cisneros picks the Blanton

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has been watching UT for a while.

Cisneros, who turns 60 this year, founded her Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 1980. It's an offshoot of the Caracas-based Fundación Cisneros, the philanthropic arm of the Cisneros Group of Companies. One of the largest privately held media conglomerates in the world, the Cisneros Group includes in its vast holdings Venevision, Venezuela's primary television network, and significant shares in Spanish-language TV network Univision. The Cisneroses are ranked No. 114 on Forbes magazine's World's Richest People list, with an estimated net worth of $5 billion.

Through her foundation and collection, the petite, birdlike Cisneros spends her considerable energy promoting Latin American art by loaning works to museums, organizing traveling exhibits and developing art education programs and materials. The foundation just recently wrapped up an 11-country, eight-year tour of multiple exhibits around the world.

"I've always thought of the collection as functioning as a museum without walls," Cisneros says in her accent-free English as she wanders the Blanton exhibit before its opening. "Though we've lived with much of this art work in our home over the years, we're really just stewards of it. So it's important to me that the collection go out and have a life of its own."

As the great-granddaughter of New York-born, Harvard-trained ornithologist and businessman William H. Phelps, who settled in Venezuela in 1897, Cisneros received much of her education in the U.S. She and her husband have residences in Caracas, Madrid and Aspen, Colo., but spend much of their time in their Manhattan home.

For more than two decades Cisneros has been a trustee for New York's mighty Museum of Modern Art. She also sits on various committees at Harvard University, the Americas Society and London's Tate Gallery.

Yet when it came time to develop a more extensive relationship with an institution, she choose UT and the Blanton. Why?

"I would be very happy being a student here," Cisneros says with a laugh. "It has everything I want."

She has no current plans to divest her collection, and her financial donation to the Blanton covered the seminar, catalog and exhibit expenses (she declined to make public the exact amount). But involving the next generation of curators and art historians -- and having the chance to broaden their knowledge of Latin American art -- was the best way, Cisneros figured, to change the course of art history itself.

"We're fighting a lot of stereotypes about Latin America," says Cisneros. "But art is a way through which people can get past them."

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Owen McAuley: New Work
D Berman Gallery, through April 7

By Salvador Castillo
Austin Chronicle
March 9, 2007

Owen McAuley returns to Austin and shows off some finely rendered images. Both his paintings and drawings exhibit technical expertise in a photo-realistic style. Nighttime scenes lit by street lamps and other artificial sources suggest a relationship to Edward Hopper and the "Interchanges" series of photographs by "22 to Watch" alum Mike Osborne.

Hopper's work dealt with American issues of solitude in public or crowded situations, an isolation demonstrated in urban, suburban, or rural environments. McAuley takes a similar approach by revealing uncommon vistas from ordinary landmarks across the country. Daily routines become unfamiliar when you step out of the house, walk around your neighborhood, or drive down the highway around 3 in the morning. That general period is after a lot of parties but before it's time to make the doughnuts. Nocturnal insects, the rustling of trees, and buzzing from lampposts emerge as major elements. The stillness of late-night air inherits an alien character by powerful light sources.

The light in Osborne's photos appears to come supernaturally from within the subjects. In McAuley's paintings, the light is intruding on the night and reveals surrounding objects. The light emanates from its source(s) spreading across the picture and electrifying the image. Even the darkest shadow cowers from certain obliteration. This tension lends the imagery a Ray Bradbury/Rod Serling sci-fi presence. Everything is naturally at ease but still holding a sense of mystery.

Unfortunately, too many of the drawings in the exhibition fail to achieve this. A lot of them don't present a strong enough contrast of light and dark, and they struggle to move beyond late-night landscapes. When the light softens all of the black elements, the air is quieted and the nighttime character removed. Where light is the underdog, as in Thomasville, GA, 2005, the disruption of the light and the energy of the better paintings is more apparent. Yet every piece is strikingly beautiful.

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Advocating not-so-permanent public art
Artist Mel Ziegler makes his case in new Austin exhibit

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, March 11, 2007

Mel Ziegler wishes people would think differently about public art. Maybe not so many statues for the ages or bluebonnet murals.

"What about something ephemeral or temporary? Imagine the possibilities . . .," says Ziegler, who is an associate professor of art at the University of Texas, and until last fall had a seat on the Austin Arts Commission. "Look at the way artists used the Intel building shell for temporary installations," he says. "What if some of the city's (Art in Public Places) funds went towards projects like that?"

For 10 years, from 1985 to 1995, Ziegler and his late wife, Kate Ericson, did just that -- they produced art in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that was conceptual, temporal (sometimes not lasting more than a few days) and situated in everyday locations and made from everyday materials.

Sure, Christo and Jeanne-Claude grabbed headlines beginning in the 1970s with their short-lived, large-scale public projects. And conceptual artists in the 1960s rattled familiar preconceptions of what defined art -- and where it could be placed.

But in the 1980s, Ericson and Ziegler worked against the then-current artistic grain -- and ahead of their time.

What the duo did was use conceptual, temporary artwork to explore the quotidian places and processes of American life -- farming, house-building, neighborhood politics, residential landscaping, urban revitalization, civic institutions. While many artists of the era directed their energies toward feeding a marketplace-driven art world hungry in equal parts for big, splashy paintings and the singular egos behind them, Ericson and Ziegler worked as a team, often involving people and places far outside the art milieu.

On a recent sunny morning, while Ziegler took a break from his East Austin studio, it's hard not to notice that some of today's younger artists have readily followed in Ericson's and Ziegler's footprints. Indeed, one of Ziegler's students, Jarrod Beck, has an enormous sculpture made of steel, plaster and found objects -- one of eight temporary installations sprawled over an empty lot next to Cafe Azul on East Cesar Chavez Street. The site is just one of four exhibit locations for the 2007 Texas Biennial, a cooperative artist-initiated project. When the exhibit ends, so does Beck's sculpture.

Understanding how Ericson's and Ziegler's work was ahead of its time is easier to understand thanks to "America Starts Here," an exhibit at the Austin Museum of Art through May 6. Organized by the Tang Museum at Skidmore College and List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the exhibit is accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, the first that thoroughly documents the duo's artistic output. The exhibit includes photos of their temporary projects along with objects created from those projects.

"I think people can better understand (our work) now," says Ziegler, who turns 51 this year. "Museums and art institutions are much more willing these days to literally go outside their own boundaries. And the art-going public accepts more, too."

But in the 1980s, the couple's creative strategies seemed singular. They embarked on detailed research, gathering information on arcane subjects (such as the name of every street in San Francisco or the shape of cracks in architectural elements of national monuments). They re-imagined maps or other visual schemes (like military camouflage color patterns or house paint categories) as new texts to be read and decoded. And all along Ericson and Ziegler sincerely celebrated common Americana. Indeed, the work of Ericson and Ziegler emerged as both modest and sophisticated, precise yet also surprisingly everyday, cerebral but sometimes utterly -- generously -- practical.

In Durham, N.C., in 1989, for example, the couple wrote the text of a 65-page downtown revitalization plan on a 150-foot strip of disrepaired sidewalk near the downtown post office. After being on display for several days, the sidewalk was jack-hammered into pieces and loaded into dump trucks that parked in front of the Durham Arts Council building during a public art conference. The artists then used their grant money to pay for a new sidewalk and donated the old chunks for erosion control along the banks of a local river.

With their "Feed and Seed" series, a portion of which is on view in the current exhibit, the artists bought empty seed bags from Pennsylvania farmers for 10 percent of the seed costs and then framed the bags in neat arrays under acrylic sandblasted with information on the crop and the farm. When galleries sold the works -- some of the few Ericson and Ziegler made for the conventional art market -- the remaining 90 percent of the seed cost was paid to the farmers.

"We're all part of (the system)," Ziegler says. "And Kate and I never felt that we were above it all. It was important to us that a meaningful, practical exchange be a part of our artwork."

Ziegler was born the fifth of eight children on a dairy farm outside Hershey, Pa. His parents come from Dutch-speaking Pennsylvania Dutch families; his mother grew up a Mennonite. Ericson was the daughter of an ad executive. The two met in 1977 while students at Kansas City Art Institute. She studied painting, he, sculpture. By the time they finished graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts in 1982, the two had embarked on their collaborative creative process, eventually making a farmhouse in eastern Pennsylvania their home and creative base.

"We just lived our lives constantly talking about art," Ziegler says. "When you know someone so well, you can be vulnerable -- you have so much freedom in developing any idea and taking it to its farthest point."

The couple intensely shared their lives and their art until Ericson died of brain cancer in late 1995. Emotionally, the exhibit and accompanying catalog, which he spent the last five years working on, was a very difficult journey for Ziegler. "A lot of times I had to just walk away from it -- it brought up so many memories of Kate."

As tough as the exhibit was, learning to work solo was even tougher.

"The hardest part for me to adjust to in working alone was not having anyone to have that constant dialogue with," Ziegler says. "I had to rebuild my career, and rebuild the creative dialogue. It's still there, it's just scattered in different places with different people."

Since 1997, Ziegler has been on the UT faculty. He lives just north of campus with his wife, writer Lisa Germany, and their 6-year-old twin boys, Atticus and Phineas. As a solo artist, Ziegler has received commissions for projects in the U.S., Canada, Japan and Austria. Although he has been a finalist for several important public art projects in Austin, including one at the new City Hall, he has never been offered a commission here

And while he's shown his artwork around the world, he's also exercised his creativity -- perhaps not surprisingly -- via public service: Ziegler spent six years on the City of Austin Arts Commission, ending his term last year.

"It's important, creatively, for me to be a part of the public dialogue about public art," he says.

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Art of the generous heart
Like photographer Russell Lee himself, the images he captured were grounded in a spirit of empathy.

By Brad Buchholz
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, March 19, 2007

Russell Lee (1903-1986) was all about empathy, connection and respect. It was his trademark as a photographer. It was his signature as a teacher. It was the message writ large on his face, in his very posture.

"He had this huge smile, these big smile lines that radiated out from his eyes," remembers nature photographer Jim Bones, who worked as Lee's teaching assistant at the University of Texas in the late 1960s. "And he almost always had his head a little bowed toward people, in an unconscious recognition to their humanity. . . . I think he believed everything that existed had a certain dignity."

Lee believed the photographer's job was to be "a sensitive witness" -- an ethos reflected most vividly in his famous Depression-era photos, which captured both the heartbreak and dignity of Americans suffering through hard times. He seemed to know, innately, in photography and in life, that there could be no connection without holding his heart open and getting really, really close. With the camera. And in a spirit of empathy, too.

This month, the life and legacy of Russell Lee are being celebrated in Austin, his adopted home town. (Lee, a native of the Midwest, moved to Austin in 1949 and taught in the UT art school during the 1960s and 1970s.) The University of Texas Press has just released "Russell Lee Photographs," a coffee table book with 144 black-and-white images ($50). In conjunction with this project, the first book of Lee's work in more than 20 years, UT's Center for American History is exhibiting 40 Lee photographs at the Flatbed Press gallery.

The book and the exhibit (culled from 28,000 negatives belonging to the Russell Lee Photograph Collection at UT) champion the same thesis. That is: The body of work Lee produced before and after his stint with the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression in the 1930s only enhances his reputation as a photographer who matters. The breadth alone is fascinating. There are images from Tuscany, from South Texas, from Saudi Arabia, from Austin. And what holds them together is what photography guru John Szarkowski (a director emeritus at the Museum of Modern Art) describes as Lee's "generous heart."

"When I think of the legacy of Russell Lee, I think kindness without the least bit of sentimentality," adds Austin artist Jimmy Jalapeeno (aka Jim Bonar), who also worked as Lee's assistant at UT during the 1960s. "I think of directness without confrontation. And I think art without artiness.

"As a photographer, Russ wants to get involved positively with what's in front of him -- invariably people, in all their complexity and their pain, everything, their whole story. He wants to know it. He wants to make it live. He wants other people to see it. He wants to report it, and he wants to celebrate it. I really do think he's more about celebration than interpretation -- and that was one of the things that always startled me most about both his teaching and his work."

Russell Lee events

Photo exhibit
Where: Flatbed Press, 2830 E. Martin Luther King Blvd.
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, March 30 to May 31
Information: 477-9328
Panel discussion
Where: Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, University of Texas
When: 7 p.m. March 27
Information: 495-4696

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Owen McAuley

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, March 22, 2007

Owen McAuley is on to something. And that's abundantly clear with his captivating new paintings and drawings at D Berman Gallery.

While a graduate student at the University of Texas a few years ago, McAuley impressed with his elusive yet highly stylized nocturnal paintings of quotidian unpopulated mid-American urban scenes: parking lots, strip malls, etc.

Since moving to New York — where he works as an assistant to that 1980s icon and maker of elusive art, Robert Longo — McAuley has used a new source for his subject: randomly found Web cam images. McAuley is particularly fond of weather cams and security cams, and as he did before, he selects the most mundane locales.

There's some wonderfully sly commentary within McAuley's method of taking low-res digital images from the Internet and transforming them into high-res scenarios through that most old school of art mediums: oil paint.

But beyond that clever metamorphosis, McAuley continues to compel as he has before, again using the mysteries of nighttime — especially the way artificial light transforms the everyday place — to invite all kinds of speculation about what's really going on in his exquisitely rendered contemporary landscapes.

It's not easy to tell. Take the drawing "McKinney, Texas" with its shadowy parking lot foregrounded with a huge satellite receiver. Is it a benign or dangerous place?

It's rewarding to imagine it either way.

("Owen McAuley: New Work" continues 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday through April 7 at D Berman Gallery, 1701 Guadalupe St. Free. 477-8877, www.dbermangallery.com.)

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Good Old-Fashioned 'Animations'

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Saturday, March 22, 2007

The best part of "Animations," the video exhibit organized by the Hammer California's Museum and now on view at Arthouse?

Evidence of the artists' hands.

In an age of proliferating digitally created cartoons, here's a coterie of young artists — Nathalie Djurberg, Brent Green, David Shrigley and Chris Shepherd — who are doing some good old-fashioned drawing and simple clay sculpting.

The result is refreshing, lively, entertaining — and in the end, really sweet.

Shrigley's and Shepherd's hilarious "Who I Am and What I Want" is a morphing line drawing that charts the absurd and somewhat obscene rantings of Pete, a humanlike character who seems to have eschewed all civilized behavior while frantically trying to have every conceivable — and every inconceivable — experience. He wants to be fried in a pan with butter? OK.

Djurberg's sexually and psychically charged claymations might make a psychoanalyst shudder with their provocative vignettes of family relationships and children's fantasies. Yet, the crude goofiness of the clay figures oddly undermines the psychic ickiness.

Green's "Hadacol Christmas" imagines Santa as spindly cough-syrup addict who nevertheless tries to bring joy to the world despite his existential crisis. Jittery cuts link images crafted from bits of torn paper, rough sketches and stray materials to create a tale that's as melancholy as it is hopeful and heartfelt.

Unfortunately, a familiar set of problems besets "Animations" — the same that plague many video exhibits. Without discrete rooms for each film, soundtracks overlap — indeed, the gallery is a raucous din. And with nowhere to sit but the hard cement floor, only the most dedicated aficionado is likely to spend more than a few moments with each video, the longest of which is 11 minutes

So much for making it easier for audiences new to video art or even inviting prolonged art-viewing.

("Animations" continues 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays (Thursdays until 9 p.m.), 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through April 22 at Arthouse, 700 Congress Ave. Free. 453-5312, www.arthousetexas.org.)

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Site Unseen
'America Starts Here' shows how the pioneering artistic team of Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler made the overlooked visible

By Amanda Douberley
Austin Chronicle
March 23, 2007

Just inside the Austin Museum of Art's entrance, four rough-hewn stones, each one a little smaller than a shoe box, are mounted high on the wall. The stones are arranged in a row that's not quite straight, but their placement is very deliberate -- a look at the wall label reveals the work's title, From the Making of Mount Rushmore (1986), and provides a clue to the stones' arrangement, which mimics the position of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln's iconic portraits carved out of a mountain in South Dakota. These stones were removed from the base of Mount Rushmore by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, an artist couple who worked collaboratively from 1985 until Ericson's death a decade later. (Ziegler has been a professor at UT-Austin since 1997.) From the Making of Mount Rushmore is the first piece you'll encounter in "America Starts Here," a survey of Ericson and Ziegler's gallery work and public art projects, and it announces several themes that run throughout the exhibition, including coming to terms with the concept of the monument, the use of displacement as a way to make art, and a concern with labor. And like much of the show -- and a lot of conceptual art -- this work's meaning is not immediately apparent: The careful wording of the title leads the viewer first to Mount Rushmore, then to the work that went into the memorial's creation during the 1930s and 1940s, and finally back to the artists themselves, who have made their own version of Mount Rushmore out of leftover material from the monumental project.

The kinds of conceptual art strategies evident in the Mount Rushmore piece -- where the ideas in the work were as important as, or even took precedence over, its aesthetic qualities -- were also applied by Ericson and Ziegler to public projects in a way that created a space for concerns such as community involvement and the integration of art and the urban environment. Those ideas may be pervasive in public art practice today, but they were still rare in the late Eighties. The same year that Ericson and Ziegler's creative partnership began, a jury voted to remove Richard Serra's Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza in New York City. Opponents argued that the 120-foot-long curved wall of steel, which ran between the street and the building, interfered with public use of the plaza and attracted graffiti, rats, and even terrorists, who might use it as a blast shield for bombs. But since most of the sculpture's detractors worked at Federal Plaza and hadn't been consulted before it was installed, what the controversy really highlighted was the need for community involvement in public art projects and for artworks that addressed the site of their installation formally as well as socially.

That was also the year MIT completed the Wiesner Building, a structure designed by architect I.M. Pei, which was hailed for fully integrating artworks into the site rather than inserting them into or imposing them upon it after the fact. Artists Scott Burton, Kenneth Noland, and Richard Fleischner effectively became part of the Wiesner Building design team, with Burton contributing benches and a railing for the lobby, Noland designing the color pattern for ceramic tiles on interior walls, and Fleischner working out the exterior plaza paving design. The Wiesner Building experiment became a new model for collaboration between artists and architects during the 1980s and 1990s. Meanwhile, Ericson and Ziegler were already working cooperatively with community members to create temporary projects that addressed local conditions. Instead of adding a new object to the environment, Ericson and Ziegler used elements from the extant urban fabric to make their work through displacement or transformation. In both cases, the couple sought to leave the site for their work in better condition than they had found it once the project came to an end.

Their best-known work, Loaded Text (1989), accomplished this ideal with a relatively simple gesture: replacing a broken sidewalk. The couple was invited to create a public art project to coincide with a national public art conference in Durham, N.C. As with many of their projects, first they conducted research by visiting the city and subscribing to the local newspaper (at the time the couple lived in New York). A proposed downtown revitalization plan captured their attention. Ericson and Ziegler were surprised to learn that only two copies of the proposal were available at the public library for review by Durham residents. At the same time, they read that an initial step in Durham's revitalization plans would repave downtown sidewalks in disrepair. The couple decided to copy the 65-page revitalization plan by hand onto the sidewalk in front of downtown Durham's post office, thereby making the document widely accessible. Rather than use their $10,000 art project budget to add a sculpture or other type of artwork to the cityscape, Ericson and Ziegler made their own small contribution to Durham's downtown revitalization by paying a contractor to remove the old sidewalk they had inscribed and to pile the broken fragments into dump trucks, which were parked in front of the Durham Arts Council Building for the duration of the conference. The contractor then repaved the sidewalk and after a few days deposited the inscribed pieces of cement at a local stream for erosion control.

A similar style of intervention characterizes many of the couple's public projects, which were often ephemeral and specific to a particular time and place. This poses obvious problems for a museum exhibition because there are no art objects to put on display; all that remains of Loaded Text are photographs documenting the project. In the past, curators were satisfied with hanging photographs such as these on the walls or putting letters, printed announcements, and newspaper articles about ephemeral projects in glass display cases for visitors to read. Today, however, new technology offers other options, with sometimes unfortunate results. At AMOA, photographs from Loaded Text and other intervention-style works have been condensed into slide shows with limited captions that loop on two flat-screen monitors. Only the most dedicated viewer would want to subject herself to a close cousin of PowerPoint in the museum. There is no time to linger over puzzling details, no chance to move back and forth between images and texts, when a slide show mechanically replaces one image with the next. Furthermore, while the monitors certainly save space compared with rows of display cases or framed photographs, they end up relegating key works such as Loaded Text to the sidelines of Ericson and Ziegler's practice. They barely have a presence, barely register, within the space of the exhibition. This is unfortunate because such works are otherwise widely recognized as the couple's major contribution to public art, as demonstrated in the exhibition catalog, which explores Loaded Text and other temporary projects in great detail.

Instead, co-curators Bill Arning, of MIT's List Visual Arts Center, and Ian Berry, of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, focus on artworks made primarily for commercial galleries or at the invitation of museums. In many ways, Ericson and Ziegler approached their work for museums in a manner similar to their community-based projects. For example, in the late 1980s, the couple was invited to be a part of the "Investigations" series at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In the course of their research for the project, Ericson and Ziegler were struck by an overabundance of derelict factories just minutes away from attractions like the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. They chose one, the National Licorice Factory, which had nearly all of its windows broken. In characteristic fashion, Ericson and Ziegler improved the factory by swapping a section of windows and old green fiberglass replacement panels with new panes of glass. In exchange, they took the broken windowpanes and fiberglass panels to use in their work at the museum. They sandwiched the windowpanes from the factory between two pieces of clear glass and etched the top layer with sinuous lines that trace rivers, railroads, and pioneer trails, as well as cracks in renowned buildings and American icons, each one identified by name. The panels were then framed and mounted on the gallery wall in the same position as they were in the factory facade. Ericson and Ziegler titled the project America Starts Here (1988) after the official tourist slogan of Pennsylvania.

At first glance, America Starts Here looks like a minimalist grid, albeit one without symmetry or an overarching logic. The work is actually a little too big for AMOA, where it is nearly impossible to stand back far enough to see the whole thing. Up close, however, each panel tells part of the story of American expansion and at the same time implies the conflicts that shaped these efforts via the layer of cracked glass. America Starts Here is also a clever reference to Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), (1915-23), a canonical artwork in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art also composed of cracked windowpanes.

Other museum-based projects deal more explicitly with the institution itself. Throughout the exhibition are glass panels sandblasted with phrases like "Rubin White" and "Riva White." They make up a work titled MoMA Whites (1990) and reference the names given by members of the Museum of Modern Art's painting crew to the shades of white paint preferred by different curators at the museum. In the initial version first exhibited at MoMA, eight glass jars, each filled with one of the white paints, sit on a black shelf. For "America Starts Here," the project has taken on a more ambitious format. Each wall at AMOA has been painted with one of the whites and labeled accordingly, drawing the viewer's attention to a museum convention that is all-pervasive but also nearly invisible. By bringing MoMA's whites to light, Ericson and Ziegler facilitated the questioning of such conventions, which are often accepted without being given much thought, both inside and outside the museum.

The couple adopted a similar strategy for their contribution to "Places With a Past," an exhibition of site-specific art curated by Mary Jane Jacobs for the 1991 Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. At that time there were 72 commercial paint colors approved by the Charleston Board of Architectural Review for use in the city's historic district. Ericson and Ziegler arranged for a house just outside the district to be temporarily repainted with a camouflage pattern specially designed by Army camouflage experts that incorporated all 72 colors (a maquette at AMOA reproduces the project in miniature). Each patch of color was labeled with its trade name, some of which were fairly innocuous -- Iron Scrollwork Black, Cypress Forest Green, Carolina Brick Red -- while others, including Plantation Red Brown and Confederate Uniform Grey, referenced problematic times in the city's history. Anyone could have seen these colors on any given day throughout historic Charleston, but actually noticing them and understanding their significance is part of the social outcome of Camouflaged History (1991).

Allowing the overlooked to become visible and critically examining taken-for-granted conventions are themes that run throughout Ericson and Ziegler's collaborative work. The tools they used to achieve these goals -- including mapping, archival research, and community involvement -- have been taken up by increasing numbers of artists in recent years. This is not, however, the only reason to see "America Starts Here." Over the past few years, the Austin Museum of Art has made an admirable contribution to increasing the dialogue about public art in this city. "Andy Goldsworthy: Mountain and Coast Autumn Into Winter," "Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection," and "America Starts Here" all seem particularly relevant to Austin right now as the city undergoes radical changes through an explosion of Downtown construction. Each of these exhibitions has demonstrated different ways art can impact the environment outside of the museum's walls. How we remember Austin's history, what we choose to preserve, and whether art plays a role in our urban development are decisions being made today that will impact the city for years to come. Especially if you missed the others, go see "America Starts Here," and start thinking about the possibilities for public art here in Austin.

("America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler" continues through May 6 at Austin Museum of Art -- Downtown, 823 Congress.

Mel Ziegler and guest artists will discuss the role of community in public art in a special program, What Is Community? Public Artists Respond, to be held Wednesday, March 28, 7pm, at AMOA -- Downtown. For more information, call 495-9224, or visit www.amoa.org.)

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Elaine Bradford: Freaks of Nurture
'Women & Their Work, through March 31

By Amanda Douberley
Austin Chronicle
March 23, 2007

Elaine Bradford melds two extreme forms of domestic kitsch -- taxidermy and needlework -- to create hybrid objects with open-ended significance. The Houston-based artist's embellished deer heads were featured at Okay Mountain last summer in "Outside In," a two-person show with photographer William Hundley. At Okay Mountain, Bradford connected the antlers of crochet-covered deer heads with looping strands of striped stitching, making a playful network of red- and aqua-colored yarn that snaked across the ceiling's metalwork from one mount to another. With "Freaks of Nurture" at Women & Their Work, Bradford further exploits the shock effect engendered by the convergence of polar opposites: masculine and feminine, violence and nurture, artificial and natural, freakish and conventional.

Stepping into the gallery is like walking into a really weird basement, minus the faux-wood paneling. At one end of the room, a crochet-covered antelope head lolls on the floor, connected to its mount by a thick umbilical cord of baby blue, light yellow, and dark-brown yarn. Two masked deer heads attached to a double mount hang on the opposite wall, a conspicuous row of buttons closing up the gap between their two faces. Bradford bluntly reinforces the distinct feeling that you've entered a mutant world -- she even titled one work Crossbreeding a Doe With Your Grandmother's Afghan. In this piece, a crochet-covered, taxidermied doe head mounted on one wall is linked to a huge striped circle of crocheted yarn that nearly covers a wall nearby. Crocheted ropes that pull the circular piece slightly off the wall, producing a cone, attach these two elements. As a formal experiment, it's beautiful work. Factor in the doe's head and the title, though, and it's not quite clear if this is the manifestation of a farmhouse daydream or a nightmarish parallel universe.

A similar sense of ambiguity pervades all of the work in this show: Bradford's menagerie is equal parts lighthearted nonsense and poignant sadness. Some of her animals stare pitifully out from their crocheted masks, while a coyote pathetically chases its tail, lost in a tangle of yarn. Bradford's afghans and sweaters can be interpreted as a token of comfort, but it's hard to take them quite so seriously, which just might be the point

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