Meet the Artist
During my first year at Central College in Pella, Iowa, an exchange program was initiated for art students to spend a trimester in the Yucatan, thanks to Dr. Larry Mills. It was amazing to sleep in hammocks and see tarantulas, yet more profoundly for me was the experience of being in the region of extraordinary ancient architecture. Numerous sites were there yet some were not so easily accessed so we hiked through jungle areas being led by a Mayan foreign exchange student who had previously been at Central Colleague for a year. Being there opened a door to contemporary and historic cultures far beyond the Midwest, where I was born and raised. During that trimester in Merida, in the spring of 1969, I saw ancient Mayan ballgame patios, tall pyramids with thin stone stairs going to the top, corbel vaults that held these buildings up, cenotes (sinkholes) and more. This experience has stayed in my mind ever since.
I moved to New York in 1970 and spent two years of five evenings per week studying and making abstract paintings with Theodoros Stamos in the Art Students League. There I became aware of the work of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, and many other highly significant artists.
I won a McDowell Travelling Scholarship that took me to Europe for a year in 1972-73, which enabled me to delve more deeply into art history. I learned as much as I could about these ancient and contemporary societies, while learning Greek and Italian. Instead of making lots of work, I travelled to numerous Greek archaeological sites and to Italy to see High Renaissance paintings and architecture. I was so intrigued by history and archaeology that several years after I returned to New York, I chose to get a bachelor’s degree in Classical Studies of the Mediterranean with a minor in ancient Greek at Hunter College.
The artists Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt, Dorothea Rockburn, Eva Hesse, and conceptual art, along with musician Phillip Glass and his Ensemble were my predominant influences then. Robert Morris selected my conceptual work for a solo show at Artist Space in 1975. I tried other forms of expression, including photographs as well as performances that were sometimes photographed without an audience. In 1980, theater director Jerzy Grotowski invited me to Poland to participate in his Tree of People Project. It was a week of much silence; “conversation” happened by nonverbal expression and movement. It was not far from Auschwitz, so I went there after the Tree of People was finished. I have no words about how tragic that was.
My course of travel continued: in 1989, I had a residency in the Dominican Republic affiliated with the Parson’s School of Design, where I discovered the remarkable pre-Columbian Taíno triangular stone carvings, the exquisite landscape of the area and merengue dancing for hours in the evenings. I made paintings there with lots of acrylic wash.
My friend, artist Carol Haerer, invited me to join her for a tour of Peru, starting in Lima and then hiking from Cusco to Machu Picchu. We hiked for five days to get to Machu Picchu, and en route encountered a Quechua home that was having a ceremony. They generously invited us to join them for the evening, sitting on the earthen floors, surrounded by flowers and images, offering drinks of alcohol and gesturing to us as our guide translated what was being said. We arrived at Machu Picchu in another day or two. The stone walls of Machu Picchu were carved to exactly echo the near-by mountain formations, a brilliant construction format, and further, Machu Picchu was spread across the steep top of the mountain. This site made an indelible impression on me, revealing how conscientiously the indigenous people respected the earth that surrounded them.
In 1991-92, I lived in Oaxaca, Mexico, for a year on a grant from the Institute for International Education, sponsored by the Fulbright Foundation. I made art with ceramists and two weavers –– one Zapotec, the other Chontal –– and I continue such work to this day. When making work in Oaxaca, I used only indigenous materials, organically made from local organic dyes, papers, lime, compel and concrete. When working with the weavers, I added their initials along with mine to acknowledge their involvement. History, archaeology, contemporary social concerns, legends, landscape and materials were key elements in the works of art I made there.
Concerned about the ecological dangers of fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, I became a member of the steering committee and later the board of Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (DCS), an environmental group whose mission is to help establish clean water, air and land as basic human rights. DSC bases its advocacy on the relationship between scientific findings and governmental plans and regulations.
Melding anthropological interests, contemporary aesthetics and environmental activism is challenging. I seek to balance these forces. Some of my work is heavy, pointing to the need to bear the weight of social responsibility. My whole material procedure is to instigate a situation, whether in two or three dimensions, such that the materials will naturally modify in ways that I cannot actually see because they are encased inside a cardboard box. For example, concrete cast in cardboard boxes will create cracks, textures and colors in its casting process, and I cannot specifically anticipate where or how these will generate. I let the material process be, largely based on water, surface alignments, and weight. As the materials dry in that process, they move and shift ––– which I see as letting the material express its life. Considering unknown life is a powerful experience.
The verbal associations of these materials are another way to understand what the concrete and cardboard materials can characterize: concrete represents fact and truth, while cardboard is considered as something insubstantial. Functioning out of the box (so to speak) adds to the visual presence and aesthetic impact of the work. With cardboard and concrete paired together, opposing forces meet, bringing to mind fathomless discord and the need for understanding and compromise. Historically, concrete has been used in buildings both in the pre-Columbian Mayan era and the late Roman Republic. Today, it is the most widely used industrial material.
My steals-like sculptures are influenced by totemic forms from early cultures that followed the movements of stars and created legendary images of creation. The Envoys, as the larger concrete sculptures are titled and can be seen as abstract concrete shapes of varying textures and shades of gray, simultaneously referencing messengers. My idea is to let the potential references that generated the work in the first place spill out of the abstraction into another phase. This is not intended to reduce the power of abstraction, but to add a layer that brings a further vision. The Envoys can be read, for example, as satirizing our worship of industrial matter that has changed the earth’s underground in atrocious ways such as mining, extracting fossil fuels, creating storage pits for gas and oil, or planting seeds in soil laced with pesticides. In order to highlight my environmental concerns (the implicit message carried by the silent emissaries), my conversations with scientists about environmental damage and climate change are printed to accompany an installation of the sculptures.
The works illustrated in this issue of Black Renaissance vary widely in materials, encompassing concrete, drawing paper, graphite, cardboard, and fabric. They span large stretches of time, symbolically connecting the intelligence and imagination of earlier cultures with the problems of our present Anthropocene age. I wrestle with the arrogance of today’s society. My work is hands-on. Yet I use computers to store and share the daily bombardment of information.
In my works titled Envelopes/Envelop, I used graphite and abaca to express vitality. The powder is dusted across the paper as though wind blew it there and the scale is left to the viewer’s imaginations. For many years I’ve worked with powdered graphite, which I recently learned is a pure carbon element (along with diamonds). Pure carbon is not carbon dioxide; carbon becomes a greenhouse gas only when mixed with other elements.
Created with graphite, milk and sometimes plaster, the Pathways drawings are about movement of geological rock. Underground rock sections are naturally pushed around by the water, but pressure from extraction industries and mining shove the rocks violently, breaking them and leaving un-natural pathways. The paper used for the Pathways images was folded, as a first step in creating Golden Mean proportions, the mathematically defined measures of beauty in ancient Greece and Egypt. Then, I’ve torn the paper apart, reconnected formations or left sections unconnected. When I make these works, I feel critical of human behavior in the underground, I am making an image that expresses the beauty of dirty procedure. The Pathways compositions are also intended to express hope for the cycles and changes that may lead us to adopt healthier ways to sustain Mother Earth.