observe + collect

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OBSERVE COLLECTart market art world

KARA WALKERMEQUITTA AHUJAALISON SAARJOHN + SHARI BEHNKE

October 2011

October 2011

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CONTENTS OCTOBER 2011

PREVIEWS

TO BE OBSERVED

Dana Schutz

Gerhard Richter

pg. 4

REVIEWS

OBSERVE NOW

Jasper Johns

Tracey Emin

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WATCH

THE MARKET

Cindy Sherman

Andy Warhol

Jeff Koons + more

at Sotheby’s

8

IN CONVERSATION

WITH KARA WALKER

Walker discusses her

most recent work.

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EXHIBITION IN PRINT

ALISON SAAR

A look at her recent

installation in Madison

Square Park.

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THE LOCAL ELEMENT

JOHN & SHARI BEHNKE

These art enthusiasts

show their home and

their art collection.

30

SOLO SHOW

ARTIST TO WATCH

We interview painter

Mequitta Ahuja.

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PREVIEWS TO BE OBSERVED

GERHARD RICHTER: PANORAMA Tate Modern | October 6, 2011 – January 8, 2012 Curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey

A decade after MOMA’s much – contested but hugely

popular Gerhard Richter retrospective, Tate Modern, in

a departure from the 2001 exhibition’s painting – only

approach, will survey the German artist’s career by looking

chronologically and comprehensively across a half century

of the artist’s practice. Including, in addition to paintings,

a selection of drawings and photographs, as well as the

largest assortment of Richter’s glass works ever assembled,

the show will also be the first outside Germany to present

the monumental Stroke, his sixty – five – foot – long painting.

Organized with an eye to the distinct historical contexts

and diversity of aesthetic modes in which Richter worked,

“Panorama” promises a new look at the artist just in time

for his eightieth birthday in February. — Graham Bader

DANA SCHUTZ: IF THE FACE HAD WHEELS Neuberger Museum of Art | September 25 – December 10 | Curated by Helaine Posner

Dana Schutz and Gerhard Richter are rarities: mavericks leading the way in the mainstream.

Dana Schutz paints with directness and expediancy, and

her work has an exhilaration the comes from giving form

to internal feelings. She is an American symbolist who is

sometimes mistaken for a realist. Her paintings often depict

scenes that are absurd, goofy, or grotesque: things seen in

the mind’s eye. A woman eating her own arm, a nude man

lying prone in the desert, someone caught midsneeze — the

pictures revel in the power of pictorial visualization. Schutz

has a winning curiosity about strange forms that the self,

and self – destruction, can take; you can imagine her saying,

“Nothing human is foreign to me.” This survey, with more

than forty paintings and drawings made over the past

decade, will prove Schutz to be that rare thing: a maverick

leading the way in the mainstream. — David Salle

BELOW: Dana Schutz, Presentation, 2005, oil on canvas, 120 x 168 in.

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TRACEY EMIN at Hayward GalleryLove Is What You Want

One thing about Tracey Emin: she lives her art and, to some

degree, she actually is her art. Everything that appears over

her signature or on her say – so carries the imprints and

scars left behind by her lifestyle. Her notoriety — particularly

in Britain — doesn’t just guarantee her prominence in gossip

columns, it colors the way her works exert their impact.

“Love is What You Want,” the title of this retrospective, is

quintessential Emin: a plain statement that can be read as

either pleading or defiant, self – possessed or self – centered.

It suited the show. Emin’s great achievement over the past

20 years of her professional practice has been to engage

on several levels, and in many ways, with audiences who

respond to the tirelessness with which she asserts herself

as a true original. — William Feaver

JASPER JOHNS at Matthew Marks GalleryNew Sculpture and Works on Paper

Despite my effervescing anticipation, Jasper John’s

“New Sculpture and Works on Paper” inspired but a cool

response. This owed, no doubt, to the academicism that

has crept into John’s work over several decades bow —

that is, if we think of academicism as the preservation of

the model, the paradigm case, rather than its overthrow.

But let me quickly add that even the most conservative of

John’s works still overshadows the larger field of players.

My quasi detachment from these reliefs — they are much

more reliefs than sculpture — is heightened by the memory

of the blinding enthusiasm that greeted the original

encaustic flags, targets, gridded numbers, and alphabets

that, at midcentury, established the territory this new work

still mines. — Robert Pincus ‑Witten

REVIEWS OBSERVE NOWTracey Emin and Jasper Johns both continue to pursue the themes that made them famous.

Numbers (detail), 2007, aluminum, 107 x 83 in.

Just Like Nothing, 2009, embroidered blanket, 82 x 72 in.

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Sotheby’s sale began

convincingly enough in the

scheme of these things but

never fully picked up, with

audible bids for the most

hyped works (Lot 10: Koons’s

porcelain Pink Panther, 1988,

put up by Benedikt Taschen,

and Lot 21: Warhol’s Sixteen

Jackies, 1964) staying below

the low estimates. “This is

a tough night for Tobias,”

someone in the press pack

observed sympathetically,

referring to chief auctioneer

Tobias Meyer. In the end, the sale brought $128.1 million with

premiums, just over the house’s low estimate of $120 million. “We

took slightly larger steps, anticipating a market that isn’t there quite

yet,” Anthony Grant, one of the house’s senior contemporary art

specialists, explained during the press conference.

The press pack is a kind of collective hermeneutics — a para-

society forming around a common impossible task and a similarly

restricted view of events. Members try to divine meaning from the

smallest gestures: a glance at the phone banks, a stutter in the

bids — any wrinkle in the proceedings is weighed and interpreted.

Thus, seeing is everything: “Those ladies better get out of our way,”

a writer said loudly before the proceedings. “Press don’t get many

perks, but one is a fucking sight line.”

The plot of Christie’s sixty – five – lot sale that night was

strategically calibrated, with the right mix of pathos, climax,

denouement. The first “moment” was Lot 6, Cindy Sherman’s

Untitled #96, 1981, one of the artist’s iconic centerfolds, first

commissioned for Artforum. Consigned by Jane Kaplowitz, wife

of the late Robert Rosenblum, the print went to adviser Philippe

Ségalot for $3.89 million (with premium): a world record not just

for Sherman but for any photograph at auction. “It’s great to see

an artist from our community, a real collector, reap some rewards,”

an exuberant Amy Cappellazzo said later.

A pair of Warhol self – portraits — a red “fright wig” from 1986

(Lot 16) and a blue quartet from 1963 – 64 (Lot 22) constituted the

pinnacle of the sale. The first went to Jose Mugrabi for $24.5 million

hammer, under its low estimate of $30 million. My neighbor in the

press pack was rooting for the second, which was “so covetable. I

really want it to go for more than ’Fright Wig.’” And it did. Auctioneer

Christopher Burge kept the bidding war going for an unheard-of

fifteen minutes, eventually landing it, to much

applause, at $38.4 million (with premium).

“That’s what you want — a little show,

some drama!” a colleague yelled.

Fischer’s Untitled was at Lot 32. It quickly

went for its high estimate — $6 million, an easy

record for the thirty-seven-year-old artist. In the

end, Christie’s raked in $301.7 million, selling 95

percent of its lots. “We broke the $300 million

barrier. You have to go back to 2007 to see

that,” a nearly giddy Brett Gorvy said during

the conference. — David Velasco

TOP: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #96, 1981,

chromogenic color print, 24 x 48 in. | LEFT: Jeff

Koons, Pink Panther, 1988, porcelain, 40 x 20.5

x 19 in. | RIGHT: Andy Warhol, Sixteen Jackies,

1964, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 80 x 64 in.

WATCH THE MARKETJeff Koons and Andy Warhol underwhelm while Cindy Sherman breaks records at Sotheby’s.

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INTERVIEW BY STEEL STILLMAN

InConversationwith

KARA WALKER

11OCTOBER 2011

Kara Walker’s rise to the top of the art world came fast and loaded with controversy. At the age of 24, three months after the artist received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), her work was included in a 1994 survey exhibition at New York’s The Drawing Center, wowing critics and viewers alike. Over the next three years, she had eight one-person

shows and became the youngest artist ever to win a MacArthur “genius” award. She also came under attack

by a group of 200 older black artists, led by Betye Saar, who mounted a vigorous letter-writing campaign seeking to prevent

the exhibition of her work, on the grounds, as artist Howardena Pindell later put it, that its representations of black people constituted

“visual terrorism.” • So singular and strong was Walker’s first publicly exhibited work — mural-sized, wall-mounted tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes depicting caricatures of antebellum slaves and slaveholders in scenes of sex, violence and dissolution — that it might well have eclipsed all that followed. But Walker had other tricks up her sleeve. Since the late ’90s, while continuing the cut-paper series, she has

developed significant bodies of work in other mediums, notably drawing, writing and filmmaking, that have deepened her multiform recasting of

tales of African-American life. Walker has been drawing since childhood — her father, Larry, is an artist and retired professor of art who moved the family from

Stockton, Calif., where Walker was born in 1969, to the suburbs of Atlanta, in 1983, to direct the art department at Georgia State University. And she’s been writing since her early 20s, typing streams of words onto 3-by-5-inch file cards

and scrawling the texts into drawings. Then, less than a decade ago, Walker began making films. Generally short — the first four were between 9 and 26 minutes long — they turn her silhouette figures into small, hand-operated puppets, and

transform the implied narratives of her wall pieces into more explicit, if still open-ended, parables. There’s a distinctly handmade quality to everything Walker does: her hand is her voice — her testimony — and its evidence is as

much the story as is any depicted event or incident. • Walker has exhibited in galleries and museums all over the world in dozens of

solo and hundreds of group shows. Her retrospective “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” originated in 2007 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and traveled to, among other places, the Hammer Museum in L.A., the Whitney Museum of American Art in New

York and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris. In late April, a two-gallery exhibition of new work opened in New York, with drawings and text pieces

at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in Chelsea and a new video installation at Lehmann Maupin’s Lower East Side location. Both will be on view until June 4. In addition, the Fondazione Merz in Italy will be hosting a survey exhibition of Walker's work until July 3. • Walker lives and works in New York and

teaches at Columbia University. We met at her studio on a sunny afternoon in February.

LEFT: Kara Walker photographed

by artist Chuck Close, 2007.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW: “Dust

Jackets for the Niggerati and

Supporting Dissertations,

Drawings submitted ruefully by

Dr. Kara E. Walker” at Sikkema

Jenkins & Co., and “Fall Frum

Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale,”

Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New

York, Apr. 23 – Jun. 4, 2011. “Kara

Walker: A Project on Memory,

Identity, Myth and Stereotype,”

Fondazione Merz, Torino, Mar.

25 – Jul. 3, 2011.


STILLMAN: I read that you made a cartoon strip when you were a kid. WALKER: I began drawing newspaperlike

strips when I was five and from then on I

wanted to be a cartoonist, inspired in part

by Charles Schulz, I developed characters

that commented, sometimes indirectly, on

my family’s life. By the time I got to middle

school I’d made plans for a multimedia

enterprise that, in addition to the strip,

included a Saturday morning TV show,

books accompanied by audio cassettes

and figurines that I’d made out of clay.

And then when you were 13, your family moved to the South. My dad was born in Georgia — his family

left when he was a child — so moving back

to a region that had supposedly changed

was, for him, something of a homecoming.

Yet, while he was interviewing for his

job at Georgia State, the Atlanta Child

Murders were at their peak. I had

actual nightmares about moving to a

place that was hostile to 13 – year – old

black children.

The Klan was alive and well in Atlanta

in the early ’80s, holding rallies and

putting fliers and American flags in

everyone’s mailbox. We spent the first

year in Decatur, but soon moved to

nearby Stone Mountain, where the public

park’s featured attraction is an enormous

stone monument commemorating the

Confederacy. We lived in a neighborhood

that changed from all white to all black

around the time we got there; James R.

Venable, an imperial Wizard of the KKK,

lived at the other end of the road.

Georgia never felt quite normal to

me; overt racism from whites was not

uncommon. And expectations for a black

girl were more limited than they had been

in California. I didn’t have the language to

understand it at first, but I could sense the

difference in the way people treated me.

Early on, I remember entering a poster

contest at school and being made to feel

that I’d stepped over a line: “None of our

girls ever enters the poster contest!”

It took me years to acknowledge how

insidious and effective the stereotyping

was within the black community. In the

meantime, I just sort of bumbled along,

trying to figure out what exactly I was in

relation to all that baggage.

You began cutting out silhouettes at RISD — what led to your discovery of their potential?

First at the Atlanta College of Art and

then at RISD, I spent much of my time

Writing is often the first stepto making drawings.

13OCTOBER 2011

trying to find something that would

have the impact of painting without

robbing me of my identity. In Atlanta

I’d run afoul of teachers who believed,

correctly enough, that I was sidling

up too close to traditional, patriarchal

modernism, and that I hadn’t come to

terms with black liberation ideas. So

when I got to Providence, in the libraries

of RISD and Brown, I began researching

what having a black body meant in art

historical terms. From there, I followed

a branching network of clues that linked

early American art, various folk or

“second – class” art traditions and work

made by black artists of the 19th and

20th centuries.

As I went along, I investigated

minstrelsy, looking especially tor evidence

of what blacks working in blackface had

experienced. And I read Thomas F. Dixon’s

1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical

Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (which

became the basis for D.W. Griffith’s The

Birth of a Nation), where I found Lydia

Brown — described as a tawny vixen, the

unruly mistress of the carpetbagger lead

character, I adopted her persona as my

own — I called her Negress — and realized

that through her I could bring historical

subject matter into my work.

At RISD I was still painting, but I was

also typing things out, appropriating

imagery and making prints. One

day while drawing, I was thinking

about physiognomy, the notion that

identity can be divined from external

appearances — when it occurred to

me that identity was more likely to

be revealed by editing away external

assumptions, I cut out a shape I’d been

drawing and then cut out a few more

before abandoning them. After one of my

professors said they looked interesting,

I tried again. The first successful ones

weren’t very big — 3 by 4 feet at most —

but they had too much detail and it was

hard to get the paper to lie flat.

Is there still a lot of drawing hidden on the back of the silhouettes?

Yes. The drawings start out furtively;

they’re not drawn from life. They develop

in a flurry of ideas and mark-making. It’s

always satisfying to find — from among

the fifty smudges that count for an arm,

say — the one that’s going to make it. The

cut is a form of editing.

Since your early large – scale piece at The Drawing Center, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs

ABOVE: An installation view of “Dust

Jackets...”, a new series of large – scale

drawings and text pieces, now on view at

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.


of One Young Negress and Her Heart, you have deployed cut figures and motifs across large expanses of white wall. How do you choreograph their arrangement?

For Gone: An Historical Romance, I had

two or three anchoring characters and

then, as with a comic strip, I found actions

and situations that connected them. The

silhouette installations can be like three –

ring circuses: there’s this going on here,

something else in the middle, and, over

there, a clown. In 1997, I did an installation

in the round, inspired by 19th-century

cycloramas, like the 360 – degree Battle of

Atlanta. But in a more metaphorical sense,

all the cut-paper works occupy a kind of

endless panorama, their ongoing narrative

suspended between what can and cannot

be seen by the viewer.

Gone with the Wind was your starting point for that piece?

When I first read Gone with the Wind in

my early 20s, I never got much beyond

standard feminist or black studies

interpretations; but then, at RISD, I picked

it up again and loved it, swept along by

its relentless storytelling, fully aware of all

the complicated reasons that I shouldn’t

like it. The experience helped me realize

that my own conflicting reactions —

esthetic, or even physiological, on the one

hand, and political on the other could be

useful in making work.

There are facts and experiences at

the root of most race issues — hard

to get to, but there — around which

layers of hyperbole and fiction grow. It’s

often impossible to know what actually

happened, historically speaking, but

it can feel necessary to knock those

descriptions around. I’m not a historian

or a social scientist; to be an artist is to

fictionalize. Making work that connects to

Gone with the Wind or The Clansman is a

matter of weaving fictions around other

fictions — trying, by subversive means, to

approach another truth.

Your work also appropriates the language of slave testimonials. Genuine slave narratives have a rough,

manhandled quality, full of sex and violent

material, which was often cleaned up

for readers — black and white — in polite

society. I like drawing from sources

where the demand for authenticity is

satisfied before the censors show up. I’ve

adopted the testimonial format but have

abandoned nearly all its reform – minded

aspirations. Being a black girl means

that I operate as the narrator, rendering

testimonials in the language of art.

After seeing several silhouette installations, I remember being very surprised to see your watercolor drawings in the late ’90s. The content is familiar from the cutouts, but their figure – drawing style seemed to come from a different place altogether. I’d taken figure drawing classes at Georgia

State since I was 14, and I’d made lots of

drawings leading up to the cut pieces, so

it felt important to bring all that into the

open. I had a teacher at ACA who made

I spent much of my time trying to find something

that would have theimpact of painting without

robbing me of my identity.

15OCTOBER 2011

us do 100 drawings in an afternoon, and

while I’m not always as disciplined as

that, I do love to draw. Though my line is

cartoony, my gods are Goya, Daumier and

Hogarth; I’m still trying to make figures

emerge from darkness as wonderfully

as theirs do!

Your drawings often have words in them — but I was also surprised to discover your typewritten text works. I started typing on my mother’s IBM

Selectric the year I graduated from

ACA [1991]; it was kind of a lifesaver

because I didn’t talk much in those days.

Writing — which half the time is just letting

the sound of the typewriter accompany

the voice in my head — is often the first

step to making drawings. I don’t think of

myself as a writer, but I like struggling

with words; and I like the way they move

on the page. I’m always astounded by

what comes out. Occasionally, when

the phrases haven’t sounded like mine,

I’ve Googled them; but I’ve yet to find

anything that wasn’t original.

You often make drawings and text pieces in series. For example, “Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk?”, a suite of drawings, many of them bursting with words, was made as a response to

ABOVE: Untitled (detail), 2010, graphite

and pastel on paper.


the attack Betye Saar and others had mounted after you won the MacArthur “genius” grant. Three major things happened that

year — in addition to the MacArthur

and the letter writing campaign, my

daughter was born, so I was mostly

at home struggling with postpartum

depression. I didn’t know at first how

to respond to the furor. But then I

embraced the 100-drawings process

and opened a notebook. Drawing (and

writing) helped me sort out what the

controversy was about and what I

wanted my work to do. Eventually,

I understood that my attackers had

turned me into a fiction; they were

vilifying me for making caricatures of

blackness by doing the same thing to

me. They were, in effect, rewriting the

narrative of my Negress character and

turning her into a whore. That irony

got lost in all the noise.

When I started making my real work

I knew I was stepping into an arena

that I didn’t want to get stuck in. I

didn’t want to take on all the baggage

that goes with being a Black Artist:

I didn’t want to have to uphold the

race. Recently, I’ve been reexamining

the New Negro movement of the ’20s, in

which Alain Locke and others admonished

black artists to make responsible,

respectable work and to proclaim our

past and struggles. The art associated

with black liberation movements tends

to be propagandistic in tone and is often

redundant — the subject matter can’t

expand and complicate.

In 2000, you began putting overhead projectors on the floor to cast colored shapes and motifs onto your cut – paper wall works. Viewers moving through these installations cast their own shadows onto silhouettes that were already there. What led to that development?

I bought a Super 8 film camera in 1999,

RIGHT: Still from “Fall Frum

Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale,“

2011, DVD, approx. 18 minutes.

RIGHT, BOTTOM: One of Walker's

world –famous silhouette pieces

installed at the Fondazione Merz

in Torino, Italy.

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never having held

a movie camera

before. but then

found I couldn’t

trust myself with

it. The projections

became a way of

sketching out an

approach to film

and video. I wanted

to see what it

would mean to

make works that

traveled through

space from point

A to the wall.

My projection

pieces were

on the verge of

becoming animate,

but there was

something halting about them; compared

to the viewers’ moving shadows, the

cutouts seemed particularly static. I loved

the overhead projectors, those funny,

sculptural bits of antiquated technology,

sitting on the floor, staring, like me.

And then, it seems that you got braver with Super 8. For your first

film, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004), you worked with puppets, mounting small backlit silhouette shapes on sticks, cobbling together a narrative that turned the plot of The Clansman inside out completely. In Testimony the Negress has the power.

Considering the simplicity of their means

and execution, my films have all been

difficult to make. I’m always piecing

things together on the fly, and trying not

to be too precious or romantic with the

medium. I learned how to construct the

puppets by trying to translate a German

book about shadow puppet theater and

the work of the pioneering animator

Lotte Reiniger, whose 1926 feature The

Adventures of Prince Achmed preceded

Disney’s Snow White by 11 years.

Do you think of yourself as a storyteller, in a way?

No, not really. Whenever I try to tell or

write a story all the way through I stumble

around and hesitate. It may be that I’m

only really interested in beginnings:

my second film 8 Possible Beginnings

or: The Creation of African – America, A

Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker (2005)

is a catalogue of creation stories. I

sometimes think the only tale I can tell

goes something like this: Once upon a

time there was a beginning followed by

another beginning, and another, and so

on. The primary situation in my work is

that of the African – American telling her

story. My job is just to tack onto that

existing, historicized narrative bits that

I’ve picked up along the way.

For your upcoming shows in New York, you’ve made two large – scale series of drawings on paper. One of the drawing series consists entirely of texts. I’m still trying to find a way to make large

text pieces that have the immediacy of

typewriting and the visual presence of

the silhouette work. For these new works

I cut out letters, and block printed them

on large sheets of paper. I was thinking

about the weight of words, about all the

things I had read: histories of colonialism

in America; dissertations on the black

subject in relation to X, Y or Z; and a few

things that have been written about me.

Among the text works are a number of

portraits — biographies of creative black

women, historical figures like Louise

Beavers and Nina Simone. The words I

When I started makingmy real work,

I knew I was steppinginto an arena

that I didn't want to get stuck in.

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used came from Wikipedia entries, which

are peculiarly fixated on their subjects’

personal problems, profiling legendary

black women by way of their endless bad

marriages and drug addictions. I’ve since

heard that Wikipedia is looking for more

female contributors.

The other drawings are more figurative; like the text works they cover themes and incidents from Reconstruction to the present day. The figurative drawings are loosely

situated in the period between

Reconstruction and the Jazz Age. I’m

interested in the moments when black

identity multiplied in ways that it couldn’t

when most blacks were slaves. The

process of making these large – scale

drawings sort of parallels that multiplicity,

and allowed me to work across a range

of subjects and times. Going back and

forth between the drawings and the text

pieces, alternating between intuitive and

analytical modes, seemed also to reflect

how my imagination works.

One of the most explicitly up – to – date of these drawings (He Will Be, 2011) prophesies the lynching of President Barack Obama. I’m certainly not the only person who

worries about the assassination of our

first black president. Around the time of

the election, the collective anxiety about

this was palpable, and I felt I needed to

confront my own fear directly. The text

is mostly lifted from an 1899 newspaper

article, with some additions. There will

be at least three pieces in the show at

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. that warn of this

maddening danger. My hope is that they

will function as protective talismans.

Recently, you’ve been making your films on video. What is the new one, now showing at Lehmann Maupin, about? [Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale (2011)] I’m just preparing to do the last shoot, so

I’m still working on the narrative — who

knows what will happen once editing

begins! But essentially it’s a lament,

like the Blues, about forbidden love

and inevitable, devastating loss. I have

material from a number of places,

including some things I shot in Mississippi,

which I may or may not use. I’m not yet

sure how it will come together.

A year after Hurricane Katrina, you curated a remarkable show at the Metropolitan, “After the Deluge.” Using water as a theme you wove a number of your own works into an extended conversation with pieces that had mostly come from the museum’s collection. I wonder if that show might offer an image of your practice as a whole — in which materially diverse bodies of work call out to one another, each in their own way reflecting the same undeniable subject. My sense of the whole flickers, at

best, I often feel my work is having

conversations with work by artists from

other periods. But here in the studio, the

conversations among my own pieces

can go off on deviating paths. Years ago

it struck me that I arrive at what I need

through a kind of negative process, not

unlike what I went through when I found

my way to the silhouettes. Working

from the inside out, thinking about

what isn’t visible, I can’t always see the

connections — but right now, with things

in a flow, I think I can.

RIGHT: Untitled, 2010, graphite and pastel on paper, 72 x 72 in.

My attackers turned me

vilifying me for makingcaricatures of blacknessby doing the same to me.

into a fiction; they were

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Madison Square Park Conservancy’s Mad. Sq. Art

announces Feallen and Fallow, a six-piece installation

featuring four newly commissioned works by Los

Angeles – based artist Alison Saar. Drawing inspiration

from the cyclical qualities of life and nature, Saar’s

Feallen and Fallow will take park – goers and visitors on

a journey through the four seasons as inspired by the

ancient myth of Persephone in the urban oasis that

is Madison Square Park.

EXHIBITION IN PRINT

AlisonSaarFeallen& Fallow

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The series will premiere alongside two

of the artist’s known Treesouls (1994),

standing fourteen feet amidst the Park’s

surrounding foliage. Feallen and Fallow

is a commission of the award – winning

Mad. Sq. Art program, and will remain on

view daily from September 22 through

December 31, 2011.

For the occasion of the Madison Square

Park installation, Alison Saar presents

four larger than – life works cast in bronze

featuring the seasons as embodied by

the female form at different stages of

maturation.

Spring is depicted as an adolescent girl

perched high upon an existing tree trunk.

Her wild head of roots cascade downward

to conceal her face as chrysalises in

various stages of hatching are shown

woven within her hair and covering her

body as if lively, fluttering moths emerging

from cocoons. Summer is depicted as

a pregnant woman whose womb holds

a swarm of fireflies, illuminated at the

center of the bronze sculpture. Fall is

represented by a woman of the harvest

with a head of branches extending

upwards, barring no leaves but a

smattering of pomegranates. The woman

holds her skirt in both hands catching

the fallen fruit while others descend to

the ground. Winter is shown by a curled

stone-like figure, cast in bronze in which

the seasons come to rest, only to start

anew once more.

Together the series tells of the

Greek myth of Persephone, daughter

of Demeter and Zeus, who embodied

the earth’s fertility and whose tale gave

rise to the establishment of seasons.

Abducted by Hades and forced to live

in the underworld, Demeter’s mourning

of her lost daughter lead the earth to

become barren. In turn, Zeus negotiated

Persephone’s release on the condition

no food would pass her lips though

Persephone was eventually tricked by

Hades into sharing pomegranate seeds.

In consequence, Persephone was

confined to living in the underworld for six

months, and the earth for six, giving rise

to the four seasons.

In addition to the new series, the artist

presents two Treesouls (1994) — which is

on loan to the Park from the permanent

collection of the Denver Art Museum —

to stand 14 feet high among the Park’s

existing foliage. Comprised of found and

sculpted wood with copper cladding, the

pair depicts a coupled young man and

woman whose legs dissolve into the

earth as a web of searching roots.

Spring is depicted as an adolescent girl perched high upon a tree trunk.

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Summer is depicted as a pregnant woman whose womb holds a swarm of fireflies.

25OCTOBER 2011

Summer is depicted as a pregnant woman whose womb holds a swarm of fireflies.

Fall is depicted as a woman with a head of branches extending upwards.

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27OCTOBER 2011

OBSERVE + COLLECT: How were you

approached by Madison Square Park

Conservancy’s Mad Sq. Art? Was there a

prompt for “Feallan and Fallow”? How did

you come up with the concept?

ALISON SAAR: The invitation to submit

a proposal to the Madison Square Park

Conservancy was initially in response

to my earlier work, Treesouls. I took

these works as a cue for scale and

then proposed four new works, which

also investigated natural elements as

metaphor. The Mad Sq Art installation

“Feallen and Fallow” is a continuation of

ideas I am exploring in my current body

of work, addressing the genesis myth of

the seasonal cycles and life cycles. Each

figure represents a season as well as a

phase in the development of a woman’s

life. The figures also represent the ebb

and flow of creativity.

Although the sculptures tell the myth of

Persephone, Queen of the Underworld,

did you draw inspiration from any other

Greek myths? For example, the figures

metamorphose into trees themselves,

which recalls the myth of Daphne, who

escapes love-struck Apollo by changing

into a tree. How is Demeter, Persephone’s

mother and goddess of agriculture and

fertility incorporated into the narrative?

Could the sculptures be understood as

composite figures?

The Myth of Persephone served as a

springboard for these works which

address the seasons, which came to

being a result of the legendary mourning

of Demeter and her refusal to aid in the

growing of crops until her daughter was

returned. The “Treesouls,” which were

made in 1994, do not draw from the myth

of Daphne. They represent some of the

older trees that remain in some of New

York City’s urban parks and all that these

trees have witnessed over the course of

New York City history.

How did your own experience as

a daughter and mother influence

the conception and creation of the

installation?

As my daughter prepares to graduate

from high school and leave for college, I

believe our relationship was very much an

influence for this body of work. It is also

a time in my career where I feel the work

has come full circle since the Treesouls

were created some 18 years ago. I feel

that as I approach the end of my years as

a nurturer, my work will now take on new

issues and ideas.

Is there significance as to why the

installation is occurring during the fall

and early winter?

Not really, but I like the possibility that the

works can potentially be seen in three

different seasonal settings, late summer,

fall, and winter.

How does the one male tree soul

influence the theme of the female change

of seasons and “every woman’s journey?”

Did the other commemorative statues in

Q&A with Alison Saar


the park in any way effect the pieces?

I feel the female figures of “Feallan and

Fallow” create a balance against the male

centric history of the monuments within

the park.

Does the general blending of the figures

into their environment and the subtlety

of their coloring and placement, facing

into the park and obscured by its foliage,

suggest something about female nature

as a whole?

The works are about making the invisible

visible, and their subtle placement in the

plantings contribute to the quiet power of

the figures.

What inspired the installations’s title?

I suppose on one hand the title represents

my personal placement in the cycle as

a post-fertile female, but the title has

also come to signify, for me, the barren

economy over the past years.

Did the future audience of the installation

alter your vision for the works in any way?

Not really other than I saw this as an

opportunity to reach an audience that

may or may not find themselves going

to art museums.

Did the fact that the sculptures would be

in the public realm affect your approach?

What I find most compelling about New

York’s Madison Square Park as a venue for

art is the overwhelming diversity of the

viewers. I also enjoy the fact that although

these works are in a very public setting,

people are still able to have an intimate

relationship with the work, which is not

always possible in a gallery setting or an

art museum.

Each figure represents a season as well as a phase in the development of a woman’s life. The figures also represent the ebb and flow of an artist’s creativity.

29OCTOBER 2011


the expansions weren’t enough to

accommodate their growing collection.

“Living with art kind of took over.” Another

drawback: The place was dark.

“There wasn’t sun until late afternoon,

and living in Seattle you really do crave

the sun.”

Once they had decided to build

a new house, the selection of the

Seattle – based architect Tom Kundig was

easy. He has made a name for himself

with conceptually oriented structures

in glass, steel, and concrete that reveal

a fascination with both the mechanical

and the natural. John explains that

they had seen other houses Kundig

had done and liked the combination

of industrial and airy. In January 2010,

after a more – than – two – year design

and building process, they moved into

their 5,500 – square – foot new home, just

a block from the old one. The rusting

unfinished – steel façade — a Kundig

trademark — distinguishes it dramatically

from the Craftsman and Tudor dwellings

that dominate Laurelhurst, where,

the Behnkes suggest, not everyone

appreciates the latest architectural

innovations. “It’s a risk to build a house

like this within a neighborhood where

people have very traditional houses,” says

Shari. “Nobody likes change.”

The main entrance is on the side of the

house, reached by a wooden dock that

traverses a shallow pool — a clever allusion

to the boat landing on Lake Washington

down a hill at the back of the house. Once

past the metal entry door, a visitor is struck

by the light. Even when it’s cloudy out, Shari

says, it’s light inside. That is because, in

contrast to the somewhat opaque front, the

back wall overlooking the lake is a virtually

uninterrupted expanse of glass on all three

levels. The views help integrate the structure

with the environment, something else Kundig

is known for.

In the foyer the visitor is also struck by the

art. The Behnkes call this space their portrait

gallery and have installed it salon – style.

Many of the works depict women, and nearly

all are photographs. “We were surprised

by how much photography we have,”

says Shari. There is a 2001 Cindy Sherman

self – portrait; “Meredith” and “Claire,” two

of Tanyth Berkeley’s pictures of women in

nature; a Sophie Calle self – portrait at the top

of the Eiffel Tower; and one of Valérie Belin’s

large – scale images from her “Black Women”

series. There’s also a portrait of Shari by

Jason Salavon.

In the middle of the foyer is Tara

Donovan’s pin cube, a massive block of

31OCTOBER 2011

THE LOCAL ELEMENTInside the Seattle home of art collectors John and Shari Behnke. by Meghan Dailey


David Levinthal primarily

uses large – format Polaroid

photography. His works touch

upon many aspects of American

culture, from Barbie to baseball

to X – rated dolls. Levinthal uses

small toys with dramatic lighting

to construct mini environments

of subject matters varying from

war scenes to voyeurism to

racial and political references

to American pop culture.

Sophie Calle is a French writer,

photographer, installation artist,

and conceptual artist. Calle’s

work is distinguished by its use

of arbitrary sets of constraints,

and evokes the French literary

movement of the 1960s known

as Oulipo. Her work frequently

depicts human vulnerability, and

examines identity and intimacy.

She is recognized for her

detective – like ability to follow

strangers and investigate their

private lives. Her photographic

work often includes panels of

text of her own writing.

Valérie Belin’s photographs

elude simple representation or

description, even though she

often chooses to photograph

simple objects. Instead she is

attempting to unveil the very

essence of her subjects and to

delve into the deepest secrets

of things, of matter and of light,

almost independent of the

objects themselves.

33OCTOBER 2011

Moving into a new

house has a way of

changing things —

what kind of art you

collect, how you view

a familiar neighborhood — in subtle and

shocking ways. For 26 years, Shari and

John Behnke lived in a 1929 Tudor – style

home in Laurelhurst, a quiet residential

area of Seattle that may be best known

as the place where Bill Gates grew up.

“We remodeled constantly,” says Shari,

but the expansions weren’t enough to

accommodate their growing collection.

“Living with art kind of took over.” Another

drawback: The place was dark. “There

wasn’t sun until late afternoon, and living

in Seattle you really do crave the sun.”

Once they had decided to build a

new house, choosing the Seattle – based

architect Tom Kundig was easy. He

has made a name for himself with

conceptually oriented structures in

glass, steel, and concrete that reveal a

fascination with both the mechanical

and the natural. John explains that

they had seen other houses Kundig

had done and liked the combination

of industrial and airy. In January 2010,

after a more – than – two – year design

and building process, they moved into

their 5,500 – square – foot new home, just

a block from the old one. The rusting

unfinished – steel façade — a Kundig

trademark — distinguishes it dramatically

from the Craftsman and Tudor dwellings

that dominate Laurelhurst, where,

the Behnkes suggest, not everyone

appreciates the latest architectural

innovations. “It’s a risk to build a house

like this within a neighborhood where

people have very traditional houses,”

says Shari. “Nobody likes change.”

The main entrance is on the side of

the house, reached by a wooden dock

that traverses a shallow pool — a clever

allusion to the boat landing on Lake

Washington down a hill at the back of the

house. Once past the metal entry door, a

visitor is struck by the light. Even when it’s

cloudy out, Shari says, it’s light inside. That

is because, in contrast to the somewhat

opaque front, the back wall overlooking

the lake is a virtually uninterrupted

expanse of glass on all three levels.

The views help integrate the structure

with the environment, something else

Kundig is known for.

In the foyer the visitor is also struck

by the art. The Behnkes call this space

their portrait gallery and have installed

it salon – style. Many of the works depict

women, and nearly all are photographs.

“We were surprised by how much

photography we have,” says Shari. There

is a 2001 Cindy Sherman self – portrait;

“Meredith” and “Claire,” two of Tanyth

Berkeley’s pictures of women in nature;

a Sophie Calle self – portrait at the top

of the Eiffel Tower; and one of Valérie

Belin’s large – scale images from her “Black

Women” series. There’s also a portrait of

Shari by Jason Salavon.

In the middle of the foyer is Tara

Donovan’s pin cube, a massive block of

ordinary stainless – steel straight pins held

together by the force of gravity. The piece

was acquired with the house in mind: it

weighs 800 pounds and requires adequate

floor support. “We want to take it apart

and reinstall it,” says Shari. “It needs to

be redone — everybody touches it.” John

adds: “It’s going to shed no matter what.”

They’re sanguine, however, about its

devolution. As Shari says, the piece “only

exists because of gravity and friction. It

makes sense that it falls apart.”

INSIDE THE COLLECTION

At the other end of the foyer a wide

hallway is lined with artworks by Mel

Bochner, Jim Hodges, Jenny Holzer,

and Gregory Kucera; Olafur Eliasson’s

“Turbosphere” hangs high overhead. This

central axis runs from the front of the

house nearly to the back, linking different

levels and helping to give a sense of

openness despite the numerous dividing

structures Kundig incorporated to make

sure the Behnkes had a maximum amount

of wall space for their collection.

The Behnke family has long been

a fixture in Seattle’s business and

philanthropic communities. John’s late

father, Robert, was a major contributor to

the University of Washington’s Henry Art

Gallery, where John was chairman. The

Behnke Foundation has given grants to

numerous nonprofit social, educational,

and cultural agencies around town, and

the family’s investment company, REB

Enterprises, owns the Seattle – based Sur

la Table chain of high – end kitchen stores.

John, who grew up in Medina, just across

Lake Washington, and Shari, originally

from Scarsdale, New York, met in Seattle

through a friend and married in 1980.

The couple’s experience in the art

world is likewise intertwined with the city

of Seattle. Although the Behnkes most

directly support local artists through

their extensive acquisitions, they are also

responsible for two important grants.

Recently, Shari and John launched the

Brink, a biannual award given to a regional

artist striving to push his or her career

to the next phase. The first recipient, in

2009, was the Vancouver – based video

artist Isabelle Pauwels, whose work was

featured in a show at the Henry.

Fifteen years ago, through the family

foundation, Shari established the Neddy,

named for John’s brother Ned, an artist

who died of aids in 1989. Two winners

each year, one of whom is always a

painter, receive $15,000 apiece and have

shows at the Tacoma Art Museum, where

Shari has served as a trustee. “The Neddy

really changed things, really began my

involvement in the field,” she says. “We

wanted to extend Ned’s legacy through

art. And through running the grant, we

really started to get to know local artists,

to go their studios, see their work.”

Soon they were venturing further afield.

They got hooked on fairs — “It’s so easy

to talk to 20 galleries in two days,” says

John — about the time the international

There is a different response to our collection because of the structure of this house.

35OCTOBER 2011

We really built this house to showcase our art collection.

circuit was heating up in the late 1990s

and attended their first Art Basel in 2000.

But they never abandoned younger local

artists, who are well represented in the

house. There are some arresting video

pieces, including a stop – motion animation

work by Cat Clifford and another, by Tivon

Rice, of a dog baring its teeth (it’s actually

asleep), both installed in a bathroom

with black steel walls. There is a painting

by Joseph Park (a Neddy recipient) of

says Shari. But they also used their move

as an excuse to adjust their collecting

habits. “While we were building the

house, we decided we would only buy art

for around $3,000 to $4,000,” says Shari.

“It was our austerity program.” They found

the two years of buying less – expensive

art freeing, and the budget suited their

commitment to locals.

Since completing the house and

installing their collection, they have been

bunnies and elephants in a harem and

a Steve Davis photograph depicting

inmates at a juvenile detention center.

There is also humor, as in Jenny C. Jones’s

“Breathless” — unraveled audiotape of

a Kenny G album — and Isaac Layman’s

photograph of frozen Otter Pop treats.

By the boom years, the couple had

grown weary of the feeding frenzy at the

fairs. “John and I decided some time ago

that we’re not going to play that game,”

LEFT: Visitors navigate a wooden dock that spans a shallow reflecting pool to reach the main entrance, a metal door located on the side of the

house. ABOVE: Shari and John Behnke’s house in Seattle designed by Tom Kundig. The glass walls flood the interior with light and integrate the

structure with the environment, while also offering a spectacular view of Lake Washington.


reconsidering the works’ placement.

Most pieces will stay put for now, but a

few changes have already been made.

They recently sold a James Rosenquist

painting, Shari says, “because we owned

two of them, and because we wanted

to buy different art.” In its former spot in

the living room is a mixed – media piece

by MadeIn, the Chinese collective formed

by the artist Xu Zhen in reaction to his

own fast – growing fame. “It’s actually the

first Chinese contemporary work we’ve

still wet. “It’ll take like 10 years before it

dries completely,” says John.

Although John acknowledges that the

house is “built to really showcase art,”

he stresses that it “is not a museum.”

But, says Shari, “since we’ve lived here,

people have responded that way when

they come in, even though we’ve had

a lot of this art for many years.” She

bought,” says Shari. “We got it at Frieze

in London last October.”

They’re smitten with a work by local

painter Andrew Dadson — who happens

to be this year’s Brink winner and was

a sensation at the 2010 Art Basel Miami

Beach (they bought their Dadson before

then, from the Seattle dealer Scott

Lawrimore). The canvas actually isn’t hung

but leans against the wall, all the better

to convey a sense of the weight of the

thick black globs of pigment, which are

ABOVE: Tara Donovan, Untitled (detail), 2001,

nickel – plated steel pins, 35 x 35 x 35 in.

37OCTOBER 2011

Last summer, there was a giant black

square on the lawn of the Olympic

Sculpture Park — it looked like something

had attacked, or something had formerly

lived there and been removed, or like

Seattle had a posthumous visit from

Kasimir Malevich.

That art was by Andrew Dadson, who

has just now been announced as the

winner of this biennium’s Brink Award.

The Henry Art Gallery is delighted to

announce that artist Andrew Dadson is

the recipient of The Brink award for 2011.

The Brink is a biennial award granted

to an early – career artist working in

Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia

whose work shows artistic promise and

who appears to be on “the brink” of a

promising career. Dadson will receive a

prize of $12,500 and a solo exhibition

at the Henry. A work of his art will be

acquired for the permanent collection.

Andrew Dadson, of Vancouver B.C.,

creates paintings of intensely worked

layers of oil paint, pushed unidirectionally

across the painting’s support, allowing

a thick blur to settle on the picture

plane while excesses of color build

up at the edges. Combining multiple

canvases in small groups that often sit

on the floor and and lean on each other,

he emphasizes the physicality of his

process and the object – like nature of the

results. Through these paintings and his

ANDREW DADSON: ON THE BRINK

39OCTOBER 2011

This painting will take about 10 years to dry completely.

equally characteristic series of landscape

photographs altered by monochromatic

applications of paint, Dadson explores his

assertion that “everything has boundaries;

the delimitations between such can be

static and opaque or permeable and

imagined. In my practice, I search for the

spaces where society manifests these

invisible distinctions, and how they can

be indiscernibly breached and stretched.”

Dadson received a BFA from the Emily

Carr Institute of Art and Design. He is

represented by Galleria Franco Noero.

Andrew Dadson and many of the other

short – listed nominees for the award and

jurors will take part in a public program

at the Henry. The artists will share images

of their work, and members of The Brink

selection committee will respond to their

presentations. The event is designed to be

an open – ended, free – wheeling discussion

about contemporary art, and will be an

opportunity for dialogue between artists,

arts professionals, collectors, and the

general public.

The Brink Award, now in its second

biennial cycle, is given to an early – career

artist in Washington, Oregon, or British

Columbia whose work shows artistic

promise and who appears to be on

“the brink” of a promising career. The

selection committee considers artists

whose work explores a range of ideas

beyond the surface of mainstream

culture and demonstrates innovation and

high artistic quality. Evidence of some

professional achievement is required as a

demonstration of the artist’s commitment,

but the artist does not need to possess

an extensive record of accomplishments

(exhibitions, critical reviews, commissions,

grants, residencies, etc.). Appropriate

benchmarks include a first significant

exhibition, the receipt of an MFA or

equivalent degree, or other evidence

within the last five years indicative of the

beginning of a professional artistic career.

The Brink Award, now in its second

biennial cycle, was established by

long – time Henry Art Gallery benefactors

and Seattle art supporters John and Shari

Behnke. In developing the idea of The

Brink, John and Shari Behnke sought a

name that would evoke a critical point

in an artist’s career, described by the

Behnkes as “a crucial moment, the

point at which something is likely to

begin.” The award reflects the Behnkes’

adventuresome art collecting interests as

well as their desire to support artists in

the region and purchase their works.

The Brink complements the Henry Art

Gallery’s role as a catalyst for the creation

of new work, while still demonstrating the

museum’s commitment to artists working

in our region. Said Henry Director Sylvia

Wolf, “Since its founding in 1927, the

Henry has advanced the art, artists and

ideas of its time. Today, John and Shari

Behnke are building upon that mission

with the Brink Award. All of us at the

Henry are deeply grateful for the Behnkes’

extraordinary generosity and support of

artists in the Cascadia region.”

The selection committee completed the

review of artists’ submissions in March.

For this year’s award, 62 nominations

were received from arts professionals

across the Pacific Northwest. Of those

nominated, 43 artists submitted materials

for consideration. The 2011 selection

committee comprised Henry director

Sylvia Wolf and curators Elizabeth Brown

and Sara Krajewski; Seattle artist Victoria

Haven; Vancouver artist Ken Lum; Reed

College’s Cooley Art Gallery (Portland, OR)

curator and director, Stephanie Snyder;

and John and Shari Behnke.

In addition to Andrew Dadson, six other

artists were chosen as finalists: Grant

Barnhart (Seattle, WA); Debra Baxter

(Seattle, WA); Dawn Cerny (Seattle, WA);

Tannaz Farsi (Eugene, OR); Allison Hrabluik

(Vancouver, BC); and artist team Anna

Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen (Portland,

OR). The committee conducted studio

visits with all of the finalists before

selecting the award winner. Henry Art

Gallery Curator Sara Krajewski remarked,

“Evaluating this year’s Brink artists was

a compelling and delightful process. The

work of emerging artists in our region is

thriving, strong, and provocative. The jury

appreciated all the entrants’ efforts in

submitting work for our review.”

LEFT: Andrew Dadson, August, 2001, oil on canvas, 72 x 96 in.


SOLO SHOW ARTIST TO WATCH

Ahuja’s layered musings on race and identity have made their

way into museums around the country. She had a solo show at

Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005, and her work

was included in the Brooklyn Museum’s groundbreaking “Global

Feminisms” show in 2007. Recently the Philadelphia Museum of

Art and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts acquired some of her

pieces, which range in price from $5,000 to $20,000. She moved

from Houston to New York last fall to start her residency at the

Studio Museum in Harlem, and she is considering staying in the

city for a few years once her residency is finished.

With this in mind, Ahuja has long focused on depictions of her

hair. In paintings and waxy chalk – on – paper drawings, strands

come to life as tangled masses, folding in colors and shapes

suggestive of the artist’s African American and Indian heritage.

It’s a powerful symbol and, for Ahuja, a way to work through

her personal issues of race. “At some point, I kind of confronted

Mequitta Ahuja’s portraits are large –scale abstractions and symbols of a multiethnic mix.

LEFT: The artist in her studio at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2010.

RIGHT: Forge (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 84 x 72 in.

my parents about the fact that they never really addressed our

having this multiethnic background, and our living in a mostly

white town,” Ahuja says, referring to Weston, Connecticut.

Her father was born in New Delhi, and her mother came from

Cincinnati. “It was pretty confusing because each group — white,

Indian, black — had certain expectations of me that I never really

fit. Through my work, I get to be involved with these different

communities on my own terms.”

Her latest works — mainly self – portraits, as well as some large

paintings that hover between landscape and abstraction — will

be exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem this July. In one, a

nude with just the slightest hint of facial features wields a sword,

hacking her way through crosshatched brushstrokes resembling

branches on a dark forest floor. A figure dressed in a bright

orange ensemble that evokes the artist’s Indian roots strikes a

strong stance atop a tree. Some densely textured patches create

a ripple across a few canvases — a pleasant byproduct of the

artist’s tendency to paint over her work. “It allows for the sort of

things you wouldn’t plan for,” she explains. “I have started seeing

a failed painting as an opportunity.” — Rachel Wolff

I’ve started seeing a failed painting as an opportunity.

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