'The Activist Impulse' at Women & Their Work
Today's women artists have a global view and practice a more nuanced form of activism

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Monday, November 03, 2008

Thirty years ago, a handful of female artists in Austin wanted an exhibit space of their own.

Identity politics reigned in the late 1970s. Separatism seemed the answer. Activism proved the method. If Texas women were woefully under-represented in all strata of the art world hierarchy - as institutional leaders, as curators, as critics and especially as exhibiting artists - then it was time for Texas' female artists to start their own organization. And that organization would be run by women and support female artists in Texas by giving them a professional, museum-quality surrounding in which to exhibit their work.

Jump ahead three decades, and Women & Their Work has come a long way from its activist origins. Or maybe not.

For its 30th anniversary, Women & Their Work has mounted "The Activist Impulse," an exhibit that features female artists whose work expresses topical, timely messages. And it's not exactly coincidence that the current election season gives "The Activist Impulse" greater resonance, say Women & Their Work leaders. Nor is it inconsistent that the artists on view don't hail from Texas - a fact contrary to the organization's long-standing regional focus.

"We didn't want to be looking backward to celebrate an anniversary, not this year," says Katherine McQueen, associate director of Women & Their Work. "We wanted to be looking forward. We wanted to comment on how global artists' concerns are today - and right now, more than ever."

Yes, Women & Their Work still will continue to focus on Texas artists as it has in the past and continue to give about half a dozen women solo exhibits each year. (The organization, which has a current annual budget of $600,000, pays an honorarium to each exhibiting artist, finances the cost of supplies for the exhibit artwork and produces an exhibit catalog.) But for right now - and in the future, about once a year - Women & Their Work will mount a group exhibit that considers how complex and how diffuse the concerns of female artists are in today's swirling matrix of world events.

Activism in 2008, says McQueen and Women & Their Work Executive Director Chris Cowden, means something quite different for female artists than it did in 1978. Its concerns are global. Its methods are diffuse, individualistic and open-ended.

"You're not being yelled at with (this art)," Cowden says. "There's a maturation, a subtlety in the approach to the issues."

There's even a little humor. In whimsical drawings and court transcripts, New York artist Kristin Lucas documents her experience having her name legally changed from "Kristin Sue Lucas" to "Kristin Sue Lucas" - the artist's gesture to refresh herself as one would refresh a Web page and also to comment on the bureaucratic absurdity of the contemporary world.

"It's like you're being asked to enter a dialogue with these artists and their projects and maybe go away with more questions than answers," McQueen says.

Questions, for example, about what borders and boundaries truly mean. Palestinian American artist Emily Jacir documented her year-long project during which she asked Palestinians living outside the West Bank and Gaza if she could do a favor for them. With her United States passport, Jacir has the mobility most Palestinians do not to move freely in and out of the occupied territories. Jacir found the requests touchingly quotidian and even domestic. One man asked Jacir to place flowers on his mother's grave. Another asked the artist to water a specific tree in his home village.

Jacir's project is not a reflection of specific movement-based diatribes, McQueen suggests. Jacir's "is a humanistic, very individual and very conceptual approach to a political situation," McQueen says.

Argentine artist Judi Werthein also takes an imaginative approach to a hot-button political issue, and she also doesn't offer final answers. Werthein designed a cross-trainer survival shoe to assist immigrants crossing the border from Mexico to the United States. The shoes contain a miniature compass and flashlight. The inner soles bear a map of the border region. Inside a hidden pocket is a phone number for immigrants to call an aid organization when they make it into the United States.

Interestingly, Werthein had the shoes manufactured in China, not at a low-paying maquiladora factory in Mexico. She gave the shoes to potential emigrants in Tijuana, Baja California, just south of the border from San Diego. But then she sold the shoes for $215 in high-end boutiques in San Diego.

Werthein's multilayered project garnered strong media reaction on both sides of the border when it was launched a few years ago. And yet, the artist remains ambiguous about the political impulse behind her project. Her shoes, she maintains, are hardly an answer to the problematic confluence of world trade, survival, privilege and economic power.

In the most specifically Austin project in "The Activist Impulse," Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez took Austin's self-described status as the "Live Music Capital of the World" as a starting point. After the artists put out a call on the social networking site myspace.com, three Austin bands stepped forward to participate in a performance of the artists' new but not-so-specific and very philosophical protest song for the new millennium, "We Need A Theory To Continue." On a hot night in August, the Lovers, Najeeb Sabour and the Noise Revival each took to the Austin City Hall Pavilion Stage to film their renditions of the song. The resulting video shows in the exhibit. And copies of the lyrics are available for visitors to take away and perhaps consider creating their own protest song.

Like the current exhibit, Women & Their Work turns 30 with maybe a bit more complexity and intricacy than it originated. But don't mistake its watchdog attitude.

"I think we still keep the feet to the fire," Cowden says.

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'Peat Duggins: Black Room'
Art Palace Through Nov. 15

By Rachel Koper
Austin Chronicle
November 7, 2008

Peat Duggins has evolved. In his current exhibition, "Black Room," eight tapestries hang in a circular-walled black room. It is very plastic and orderly. In a talk about the show, Duggins mentioned the museum of a future race, one that displays narrative tapestries as historical relics of past civilizations on walls with imitation Victorian wainscoting and imitation bas-relief wood-carving. The tapestries tell of various cycles, specifically day to night, the four seasons, the four directions, and order and culture shifting into entropy and nature. Duggins used earlier drawings as the basis for this odd fabric-and-plastic installation. The show comes with a hand-drawn chart for a gallery guide, but the plastic panels and trim were manufactured, as were the tapestries. Duggins moves between media deftly and considers every method of production equal. He seems most interested in his planned atmosphere; in setting a stage, he's very goal-oriented.

Duggins is very intentional and thorough in depicting a personal mythology. This series contains a proletariat worker character which is visually distilled into a red ball with two hands. These little builders join hands, constructing domes and forming patterns across an interconnected web. I just watched an episode of Nova on fractal geometry, so I immediately enjoyed this use of trifurcation and soothing repetition. The seasons and time of day shift through these tableaux, which feature enjoyably complex trees and buildings, some encircled by spiraling flocks of birds, some visited by wild deer. So while Duggins has created a formal interior space, he's addressing the outside world. His imagery is imbued with an odd environmentalism – hopefulness, respect, powerlessness, and nostalgia all seem to be in play.

This is an interesting show. It also contains several sculptures, each made of Duggins' studio detritus; he's turned recycled and reformed paper pulp, electrical wire, and aluminum cans into a deer, a bird's nest with eggs, and a tree. In the future museum, these remnants have gained relic status. I have to say that the walls would have looked better to me if they had been real wood. (If there is still paper in the future Black Room, couldn't there still be real wainscoting?) The plastic panels have a ton of seams and screws that I found distracting. Their bumpy texture left me wishing for the same idea but executed in real wood and with real paintings done by Duggins. I like the look of natural materials; that's the short of it. For plastics to look good to me, they need to be überslick and shiny – hypermanufactured almost. If the room has been contrived to resemble a museum display, it should look more seamlessly expensive.

That said, I completely recommend "Black Room"; I've been charting Peat Duggins' fearless evolution as an artist since 2000. His work is thoughtful and thought-provoking. His art process is deeply sensitized, and you really get a sense of the hard work and time he puts into these creative visions of civilization.

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Improvisation on Four Legs and a Seat
Eighty Texas artists accept Damian Priour's invitation to riff on the idea of chair

Katherine Catmull
Austin Chronicle
November 14, 2008

Imagine a group of jazz musicians improvising – really fine musicians, let's say, and nearly a hundred of them. One tosses out a gift, a theme for the rest to improvise on. One by one, the others respond, taking the original theme and making it their own.

But now imagine that this improvisation happens not in the immediate and ephemeral medium of music but in the slower, weightier realms of stone and glass, metal and plastic. Their unhurried, haunting composition is called the Texas Chair Project, and starting this weekend, you can see it at the Austin Museum of Art – Downtown. AMOA Executive Director Dana Friis-Hansen calls it a "call-and-response" – local sculptor Damian Priour introduced a theme, and 80 other Texas artists have improvised on that theme. Only instead of a musical theme, Priour has asked artists, in Friis-Hansen's words, "to revise and re-envision – even reinvent – the chair as we know it."

Once the idea struck him, Priour and his studio assistant, David Hesser, set to work making what Priour describes as "100 small chairs of stone and glass, each one different," a project that took six months. A striking collection, Priour's original hundred chairs explore a myriad of seating possibilities in limestone and glass. One of these original chairs is shaped like a woman's torso; on another foursquare stone chair sits a translucent green glass pod; on still another fat-limbed chair is perched two even tinier chairs, one stone, one glass.

In June 2007, all 100 of Priour's chairs were exhibited at the Austin Museum of Art as a group. After the exhibition, a few chairs were set aside as gifts for project donors. The rest were mailed to Texas artists or Texas-associated artists whom Priour admired. (Narrowing down this list "was the most difficult part," Priour says.)

One of the best parts of this game is that the mailing was unannounced. A chosen artist would open an unexpected box to find one of Priour's chairs, along with a request to respond by making a new chair, in any medium the artist chose, and sending it back to Priour. The only "rule" was that the new chair must fit inside the 8-inch-square box that Priour's chair had come in.

The dissemination of the original chairs was a genuine gift, freely given, with no strings attached. Although Priour asked artists who did not want to participate to consider returning his chair so that it could be sent to someone else, it was not a demand, and not every chair was returned – and that's "part of the project, too," as Priour notes. But remarkably, 80 of the 88 artists contacted did send back a chair of their own making. AMOA had promised to do an exhibition if at least 50 were returned, and that exhibition – including 20 of Priour's original chairs which have been borrowed back from artists and donors for the occasion, as well as seven new chairs – opens this week Downtown.

A wide range of Texas artists is represented. Friis-Hansen, in the exhibition catalog, observes that "although Priour is a sculptor, he didn't limit his exchange to only artists working in three dimensions, and thus invited painters (for example, Ellen Berman, Judy Jensen, Will Klemm, Sydney Yeager), printmakers (Bob Schneider, Ken Hale), photographers (Kate Breakey, Charles Mary Kubricht) and architects and designers (David Webber, Mike Reese)."

Yes, by the way: That's musician Bob Schneider, who is also an engraver and printmaker. He submitted what Priour described as "a print very typical of his intriguing dark-side drawings, titled Today you are alive. Tonight you're dead."

Priour, the creative spark behind it all, is the Texas Commission on the Arts' 2008 State Three-Dimensional Artist. Although he grew up on Padre Island, for the past 21 years he has lived on a 50-acre ranch on Hamilton Pool Road west of Austin, where he and his wife "raised three children and also raise fainting goats." In the studio near his hilltop home, he creates sculpture in limestone and glass, examples of which Austinites can see at the Blanton Museum of Art, the Austin Convention Center, and AMOA's Laguna Gloria home, where his AquaPoint fountain is permanently installed, among other sites. Priour also created the altar, pulpit, baptismal font, and a number of other pieces for Emmaus Catholic Church in Lakeway, and they are fine examples of his signature style: The altar is clean, earthy limestone enclosing watery green glass; in the center pillar supporting the altar, a cross is sunk into the glass, appearing underwater, present but untouchable. But Priour's work can also be seen far beyond Austin, in other cities, in private collections, and in major corporate buildings around the country.

He has always been interested in chairs, and in his statement for the Chair Project, he suggests, "It's likely that my interest in chairs originated – like most everyone else's whether they know it or not – from mother's lap." But he has taken that interest a good bit further from the lap than most of us do. "I made my first full-sized chair in 1972 out of copper pipe," he explains. "Then I purchased a chair sculpture by New York artist Alan Siegel about 10 years later." He and his wife began collecting unusual chairs, "and our collection grew huge over the years. We now have about 200 chairs, large and small, in our collection, and I would say that with this collection by these incredible Texas artists, it is arguably the finest small chair collection in the world."

But when it comes to the Texas Chair Project, Priour insists that "it's really not about me but about the artists who have participated," and he expresses great pleasure at the number of artists who responded to his call and were willing to, as Friis-Hansen puts it, "step outside their routines, to replace their own artistic goals and aspirations with a set of standards provided by another artist." Discussing the scores of chairs he received, Priour has nothing but praise. He calls David Hesser's Attack Chair "a beautifully dangerous piece. It is an actual weapon, and the four legs are made of stainless steel blades sharpened to perfection. Probably the best thing he's ever done. I've sliced myself three times just unpacking and repacking it." Priour also praises Jesús Moroles, one of the best-known artists in the group, who provided, in his signature granite, an austere, delicately colored "O" faced with a stone, semicircle seat. Kate Breakey sent in one of her hand-painted photographs – in this case, the elongated shadow of a chair on a desert landscape, with an attenuated shadow that may be the photographer nearby. (The Breakey piece is 32 inches by 32 inches – she folded it to fit inside the box, as did Schneider with his print.)

Other artists stepped further away from their usual media or themes. Priour points to Fidencio Durán, the painter and muralist whose work can be seen at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport and elsewhere around town. But in this case, Durán "created a chair from foam core and attached to it his signature drawings," Priour explains. Melissa Miller, another of the better-known artists here, "made Crow Chair, looking as though it just flew out of one of her paintings. It's painted aluminum," Priour says. (Animals are Miller's preferred subject.) Priour also points out that Jimmy Jalapeeno, "known for his highly evolved paintings, stretched his creative muscle and made a chair out of wood" and that painter Joe Jansen "created his chair and ottoman from beautiful rusted wire."

In fact, the range of materials used for these chairs is remarkable. Friis-Han-sen lists "books, a beer can, bronze, buttons, cement, ceramic, fabrics, felt, found objects, granite, knives, lead, money, neon, paper, plastic bags, resin, sawdust, toy soldiers, twigs, and video" for a start. He adds that "other artists found inventive ways to fit a larger object into that small box by breaking, folding, or grinding up the original into sawdust."

The artists have done a superb job of reimagining the unremarkable object we expect to keep our backsides well off the ground. Friis-Hansen observes that some of the pieces stretch the formal structure of a chair, "the basic concept of four legs, a back, and arms, in all directions," while other pieces "morph from a chair into a cat, the moon and the sun, or an orchid, all while still remaining seating."

Some of the works have a warm emotional tone, such as Michael Reese's The Orchid Chair, which Priour says is "based on the flower and dedicated to his wife, Pamela. [Reese] is a designer by profession and made it from metallic flip-flop paint over a nylon plastic." But some of the chairs are dangerous, such as the aforementioned Attack Chair or Eric McGehearty's Sitting Pretty, a red steel school desk with a spike thrusting diagonally from the seat.

This is not the first collaborative project that Priour has initiated. "My public art installation Waller Creek Shelves was a collaborative piece," he recalls, "with homeless persons who helped me gather 'found objects' from along Waller Creek to use in the sculptures." The piece, which now hangs in the Austin Convention Center rotunda, features glass and limestone shelves which support blown-glass containers. Inside the containers are found-object sculptures made from objects collected by Priour's homeless assistants. "The homeless were paid for their efforts," Priour says, "and when they told me they were so proud to be involved in something like this for the city, it made me feel great."

Once "The Texas Chair Project" exhibition closes in February, Priour will take the chairs back to his home. And yet the project will not end there. Priour has plans for the Global Chair Project: "A worldwide call will be sent out asking artists to make a chair suitable for collecting and restricted to a size that will fit into an 8-inch-by-8-inch-by-8-inch box." Photographs of the chairs they make will be posted on a website, and a chair will be auctioned off daily, with proceeds going to a foundation benefiting the arts and the environment. That would be a fitting continuation of a project that Friis-Hansen says "transcends the specifics of each chair and becomes a manifesto for community creativity."

Priour made a gift of art, and 80 Texas artists responded with a new gift, one we can all share at AMOA this winter. Come hear a slow, dreamy improvisation in stone and wood and steel and paint from some of Texas' finest artists.

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Blanton Museum of Art
Grand opening, take two

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
November 14, 2008

Since opening in 2006, the Blanton Museum of Art's Michener Gallery Building has been a major success for the University of Texas institution, drawing record crowds and national attention. Still, it's only half the home that has always been intended for the Blanton; another building was planned to house administrative offices, classrooms, and those crucial revenue streams for the modern museum, the gift shop and cafe. For the 30 months that the gallery has been up and running, the 56,000-square-foot companion facility has been under construction, but this month, the Edgar A. Smith Building – named for the Houston businessman and Chancellor's Council member who contributed $4.5 million to the project – is finally complete. It'll be another few weeks before the Blanton staff can emerge from its cramped quarters in the art building basement to claim its new digs, but this weekend, the Smith Building opens to the public with a celebration featuring a special art lecture, film screenings, and concerts between the two Blanton buildings.

Since the Smith Building was always planned as a counterpart to the Michener, its design by architects Kallman McKinnell & Wood isn't radically different from its neighbor. That said, it has a much more open feeling. Without the need to filter sunlight to protect the art, the architects could really let the sunshine in. Windows abound, and you're never far from a great expanse of glass – such as the multistory curved section that rises above the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Grand Foyer – that provides a sense of connection to natural light, to the campus, even to the Capitol.

The showpieces of the Smith Building are the 299-seat auditorium, the cafe, and the museum shop. The auditorium is a welcome upgrade from its predecessor in the art building – nothing ostentatious, just a spacious, nicely curved room with a steep rake, which really directs focus down to the stage area and enhances visibility for projections and film screenings, which will benefit from state-of-the-art equipment.

The cafe, anchoring the first floor's south end, seats 88 inside and another 20 outside. The menu, developed by former Driskill chef Josh Watkins, covers mostly breakfast (pastries, bagels, fresh fruit, yogurt, smoothies, coffee drinks) and lunch (sandwiches such as smoked ham and Brie with caramelized onions; sides that include wasabi potato salad, peanut coleslaw, and balsamic roasted vegetable salad; 10 different flat-bread pizzas; salads; and signature desserts), with dinner on Third Thursdays and at B Scene, when the Blanton is open evenings.

The 1,680-square-foot museum shop will handle a lot of standard-issue merchandise (visual-arts books and magazines, jewelry, handbags, high-end chocolates, kids toys, and audio/visual items) along with note cards and posters featuring art in the Blanton collection and totes, umbrellas, and other items tagged with the Blanton's "Art Is ..." catchphrase. But it will also carry items by local artists/artisans, including Chandra Michaels of Sugarluxe and jewelry from Ingrid Kuper, and a wealth of glassware artfully showcased in a circular nook.

The opening celebration begins at 1pm Sunday, Nov. 16. Building tours, art activities, and film screenings are planned, with two major events:

2pm: Jed Perl, celebrated critic and art historian, gives a lecture related to his new book, Watteau's World: The Mysterious Life and Magnificent Afterlife of an 18th-Century Painter. Booksigning follows.

3:30 & 4:45pm: Guy Forsyth Trio plays on the Larry and Mary Ann Faulkner Plaza between the buildings.

Visit www.blantonmuseum.org for more information.

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'The Living'
Davis Gallery Through Nov. 29

By Wayne Alan Brenner
Austin Chronicle
November 21, 2008

What's alive? A plant, a person. A city, a system. A thing that changes to display, over time, reactions to the other living things in the world around it.

Observe what's alive, snap a photo with your mind's sharpest Hasselblad, and transfer that image via precise brushes and well-orchestrated pigments to a surface of two lucky dimensions. They're very lucky, those dimensions, if the artists doing the painting are the ones featured at Davis Gallery's current exhibition, because those artists are Stella Alesi, Miranda Gray, and David Leonard.

Alesi's new works expand her past mastery of living flora and bring, in canvas after canvas, a splendor of photo-real foliage most often heralded by a profusion of fiery pyracantha berries (although the sweet green of occasional loquats serves to cool that incarnadine blaze). A diversity of sizes makes up this latest Alesi selection, each painting seeming a vibrant square carved directly from the air in which the artist experienced it.

Leonard's large scenes eschew the arboreal completely, his deft brush instead capturing the human-built magnificence and constrained chaos of the modern city. New York, Austin, and ... is that San Francisco? The metropolitan densities, the peopled and vehicled hub-urbs captured with their guards down, their ineluctable structures rising to occlude an ever-shrinking sky. What pyracantha could hope to contest the argument of a traffic light whose most urgent red can nonetheless never halt the growth of the concrete (and steel and glass) jungle that surrounds it?

Gray's an atomy compared to the bigness of her co-exhibitors, working in tricky egg tempera to create images no less realistic yet consistently much smaller – tinier than this tabloid page – and sometimes arranged with a personal, cryptic purpose in mind. Even her straightforward portraits of people or their pets, her depictions of objects tangential to them, are framed by meticulously rendered patterns of ornamental intricacy. And when those human portraits have their heads replaced (as they do in several depictions) by a set of crafting tools or a cactus or an array of graphic novels, what are we to think? We might think – noting that the foremost of the graphic novels in the portrait called Fractal is Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra's Y: The Last Man – about what it means to be the last man alive and about what it means to be alive at all, among the living, among those creatures fortunate enough to spend time in this ceaseless world and in a venue that holds such two-dimensional delights as the Davis Gallery does right now.

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