Chakaia Booker

Some groups in Terre Haute got together to commission a permanent sculpture from New York artist, Chakaia Booker. Like most of her recent work, it is made from old tires - transformed into art. I think it's great.
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I do like some of her looser things, but this piece shows more of her textile background/thinking. I also enjoyed hearing her talk about her work. And her wearable sculpture.____________________________________




Indianapolis recently had a temporary outdoor exhibit, MASS TRANSIT, of several of her pieces - displayed around town.

Petah Coyne

Sandy Winters was visiting Indiana State University and while she was there she discussed the new work I have in an exhibit there. She mentioned Petah Coyne - whom I was happy to hear about. It sounds like she is someone I can relate to.



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The New York Times has an article with a story about her and fish that reminds me of a story that my husband likes to talk about with me and seaweed....

I've been experimenting with using a variety of material these days. I also like getting a natural feel going. An excerpt from the NYT article (2005):

ON a recent morning in her airy studio, Petah Coyne was finishing up some big sculptures - black, wax-covered, botanically inspired floral creations. They were stunning but a little scary, as if cultivated by a demented Mother Nature. "I love it when they look past maintenance," Ms. Coyne said, "like a plant on somebody's porch that's kind of lost its mind."

The artist, 51, concedes a long affinity for things run amok. In 1977, shortly after she moved to New York from Cincinnati, she filled her SoHo loft with installations of dead fish she found in Chinatown markets. When her husband could stand it no more, she hung the smelly things from a tree in her neighborhood, creating a public artwork.

Over the next decade, her materials grew more aggressive. For a solo show that cemented her reputation in 1987, she filled the original Manhattan space of the Sculpture Center with a spooky forest of decayed logs, roots, hay, tar and other things more often found in landfills than Upper East Side art houses. Before the opening, the Fire Department made her haul away much of the hay. Today, still a bit annoyed, she laughs about it.

In the 1990's, Ms. Coyne became known less for the gritty works - mud, oily black sand, razor-sharp metal from shredded cars - than for a series of pristine, ultrafeminine, chandelierlike white confections of dripped wax, birds, bows and candles.

As the first traveling show surveying her career opens this weekend at the Sculpture Center (an adjunct show opens on Jan. 29 in Chelsea), it seems that she is reconciling those material extremes. Common themes emerge among broadly different works, like metaphors of transition and redemption, or the strength, poetry and absurdity embedded in base and kitschy materials...

The artist's supplies, the fake and dead flora and fauna, are arranged in careful groupings: boxes of vivid silk flowers, foam slabs into which an array of wax-dipped blossoms are inserted, trays of vintage birds and squirrels preserved through taxidermy, pots full of black melted wax, branches, feathers and mundane materials like chicken wire and two-by-fours...

Ultimately, she said, "I am trying for the essence of something - the same way Japanese literature never points directly at something and says it's black, but just describes the darkness. It seems to me the way to tell the truth."

Another article - from Bombsite on Coyne.

Joan Giordano "Presences"

I also found Joan Giordano from the list of artists at the Tenri Cultural Institute. I think we must be on a similar wavelength.

I'm taking a sculpture class in addition to painting and drawing - and Joan uses some of the materials that I'm interested in - plus has a sense of the natural.

From Tenri

Giordano’s work is part of a continuing series of sculptures that relate to the energies of nature and a deeply felt affinity for the delicate balance between the fragility of the human condition and the power of humanity. Giordano fuses disparate elements such as metal, straw, paper, wire, wood, and other materials that work together in dialogue. In combining these various objects both man-made and natural, she references states of transformation between nature and urban life. Giordano’s work parallels states of growth and deterioration as well as the elements – wind, fire and rain that alter and transform her work’s surfaces while dealing with the processes integral to the evolution of life.

I noticed on Joan's site that she creates paintings (some on handmade paper), monoprints, wall sculptures, and outdoor sculptures.

Sylvia Wald: "Polymorphs"

These are images of Sylvia Wald's from her "Polymorphs" show from the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York in 2004.

Wald has dedicated herself to art making for over sixty years and is considered an American pioneer printmaker and Abstract Expressionist artist. This trailblazer innovated new methods of silk-screening with oil paint instead of ink, during the forties when the genre was still being defined rather rigidly in America. Moreover, in the late thirties Wald contributed political illustrations to publications such as the New Masses for the purpose of bringing about the social changes necessary for the parity that sustains democratic values. In the early forties Wald painted in an abstracted style, dignified figures of African Americans in their army attire while her sculpture reflected the conditions of tenement neighborhoods. Up to 1963 or so, Wald made prints, sculptures and paintings, but has concentrated mainly on sculpture for the past 30 years.

As an Abstract Expressionist Wald would have been exposed to the Surrealist developments that inspired many artists of that period to work with automatism and gesture. This voyage of discovery and use of found objects have been part of Wald's creativity as well as her use of the gesture as seen in her roughly textured built up surfaces. This body of work engages in a certain lyricism seldom found in very finished or pat constructions, but rather due to its ever-developing quality it retains freshness and vitality. Wald's sculptural entities, so called polymorphs in the essay because of their composite character, are composed partly of natural and part manmade materials. One such example is the work In-Flight, 2004, a piece made from chicken wire, cord and feathers. These hybrids interchange metaphor and space to produce fantastic creatures of powerful beauty.The show is accompanied by a deluxe hard-cover catalogue edition with three essays. The first one written by the curator Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos, uses psychoanalytic methodology to study a number of Wald's pieces in terms of Freudian dream mechanisms. The second essay written by Robert C. Morgan, situates Wald within her cultural context in terms of her lifelong dedication to art. And, the third is a piece by Raul Zamudio who brings Wald into the contemporary artistic context.