WO R C E S T E R A RT M U S E U M

In 1998, the Worcester Art Museum announceda significant addition to its endowment for anongoing program in Contemporary Art and withit, a renewed commitment to collect work madewithin the last 10 years by living artists fromaround the world. It is an outlook that assures theMuseum’s ongoing engagement with the presentand emphasizes acquiring works by a youngergeneration of artists. Frontiers marks the firstoccasion that a significant selection of acquisi-tions from this growing part of the collection is onview. Characterized by a youthful and multicul-tural personality as well as a diversity of materi-als, processes, and concepts existing simultane-ously, Frontiers is a mirror of the formal andcultural hybrids typical of art making today.

While we might imagine how the art in Frontierswill reflect for future generations many of thecultural developments and social conditions ofrecent years, when seen today within thecontext of the Museum’s historic collection, itreminds us that all the art in the Museum’scollection was at one time “contemporary art.”The Worcester Art Museum has a strong tradi-tion of meeting the unique challenges of collect-ing the new work of living artists, going back tothe daring purchases of the 1903 WaterlooBridge and 1908 Water Lilies canvases by ClaudeMonet in 1910. Nearly a century later, theMuseum’s acquisition in 2001 of Bill Viola’sUnion, a video created in 2000, exemplifies howthe Museum’s collection continues to reflect the

Bill Viola, Union, 2000, color video diptych on two plasma display monitors, 8 minute duration, 102.87 x 127.00 x 17.78 cm. Partial gift from Don and Mary Melville with additional funds from the Sarah C. Garver Fund. Photo courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

Frontiers: Collecting the Art of Our TimeNovember 13, 2005 – February 12, 2006

most current artisticpractices and embodythe same dynamics asthe time to which itbelongs.

Contemporary art, in anyformat, is a critical toolfor everyone who is inter-ested in learning aboutand participating intoday’s world throughthe creative core inherentin each of us. The art in Frontiers broadlyexplores the contradic-tions of the times inwhich we live with delib-erate and provocativejuxtapositions of detailednaturalism and purefantasy, the handcraftedobject and the digitally-produced image. Artistsare experimenting with new forms of narrativeand revitalizing the potentials of abstraction.They are sampling from the grab bag of the latestscientific and technological data while also look-ing for meaning through a thrift-store vernacular.

“Frontiers” alludes to new territories in which tooperate, expanded sensibilities, and conceptualgaps in preexisting practices in which innovationcan happen. With a combined spirit ofexpectancy and urgency characteristic of thebeginning of a new century, today’s artist-visionaries necessarily embrace the world’suncertainties while navigating its complexities.Appealing to our innate sense of adventure anddesire for knowledge, artists regularly opendoors to thinking about contemporary experi-ence in ways that did not exist before. This exhi-bition features over 40 artists, from as far awayas Bogota and as close to home as Boston andWorcester, who inspire us to follow themthrough four thematic “frontiers” as they envi-sion the possibilities of place in UncommonTerrains, re-imagine the human body’s symbolicpotential in Human Nature(s), probe the sensoryand physical worlds in Material Revelations, andweave narratives of life and myth in Telling Tales.

Uncommon TerrainsThe dialogue between the exterior world andthe interior self that these images inspireconnects the sometime disparate languages ofphotography, painting, and etching. Ideas ofplace include those that look to the lessons ofthe past as well as the uncertainties of thefuture. Whether they revisit familiar subjects orexistent sites, or they are the result of pureimagination, these works map concepts of placethat exist foremost in the minds of the artists—worlds where, in the place of natural laws, therules are those particular to an artist’s medium.

Alexander Ross’ enigmatic painting, Untitled(2001), exists somewhere in the gap betweenthe tangible and the imaginary, betweenmodernist tradition and science fiction. Itsimagery morphs between the organic (cells,plants, pods) and the artificial (pixels, plastics,maps). While he cites computer-generatedimagery as well as current trends in biotechnol-ogy, material science, artificial life, and topogra-phy as some of the influences behind his paint-ings, his studio process is very hands-on, begin-ning with making detailed models of biomorphicforms in Plasticine (jade-colored clay),

Alexander Ross, Untitled, 2001, oil on canvas, 142.24 x 168.91 cm., Gift of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, New York; Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Fund.

photographing them, and then painting from thecropped and edited photographs. Ross’ hybridimage of two alien creatures against a pixilatedblue sky—born of myriad data but realized inpaint— emulates both the anxiety and promisewe feel about the external world at the begin-ning of the 21st century.

Paul Noble refers to the cityscape he invented,Nobson Newtown (named after its creator) as“an exercise in self-portraiture via town plan-ning.” 1 This series of drawings and prints stemsfrom Noble’s personal experience of place—aBritish mining town near where he grew up andcontemporary London where he has lived as anadult—and forms a 21st-century caricature ofcity planning and the follies of urbanmodernism. With elaborate detail, Noble makesvisible the controlling roles that design andlanguage play in shaping our environments. Inthis fantastically eccentric architectural sprawl,buildings constructed from blocky (and oftenunreadable) typeface designed by Noble, spellout various place names in the city. “Paul’s Place”(a pun on his earlier and more luxurious Paul’sPalace) is home to a fenced-in sculpture parkcomplete with bizarre topiary, a giant pencil, andassorted weedy botanicals. In the companionprint, the deleted letter “A” becomes a furnace ina barren garden. Its inhabitants nowhere insight, Nobson Newtown stirs a range ofemotions we associate with the places we live,giving concrete form to our inner anxietiesabout urban development at the expense ofcommunities and individual lives.

Human Nature(s)Contemporary images of the human body andall its surrogate forms—from empty garment tobody fragment and genetic information—continue to search for answers to the timewornquestion, “Who am I?” While they may notengage in likeness in a traditional sense, theynonetheless wrestle with social issues underly-ing representations of the figure, such as genderroles, domestic relations, cultural stereotypes,public and private personas. With varyingdegrees of compassion and detachment (andoccasional humor), contemporary artists ask usto rethink what constitutes our “human nature.”

Kiki Smith is widely recognized for her role inbringing the human figure, in all its mortalurgency, back to the center of contemporary art

Paul Noble, A and Paul’s Place, 2002, etchings, 66.04 x 90.17 cm each, 21/30. Austin S. Garver Fund.

Kiki Smith, Girl with Blue Dress, 2003-4, painted ceramic,101.6 x 35.6 x 35.6 cm. Stoddard Acquisition Fund. © KikiSmith, Courtesy PaceWildenstein. Photo by Ellen Labenski.

making. While much of her work in the ‘80sexamined the body and its functions from theinside, during the ‘90s she began paying atten-tion to the figure’s exterior. Frequently exploringhuman nature from the perspective of femalesubjects (including herself) from goddesses andnymphs, to biblical figures or characters fromfairy tales, around 1999 Smith began to focus onthemes of childhood, addressing not only thetenderness and vulnerability but also the loss ofinnocence. In the painted passages of Girl withBlue Dress, we see evidence of Smith’s delicatehandwork. Subtle imperfections on the exteriorare proof of this young adolescent’s existence inthe physical world, while her thoughts, hopes,and fears, remain safely hidden behind a maskof mystery and calm.

Identity—how people see you and define you—can translate into opportunity or disadvantage.Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, a Cuban expa-triate of Nigerian ancestry who has lived in theU.S. since 1988, asks us to consider an extremescenario, how Identity could be a Tragedy.Purposely leaving a “trace of herself” (and hercolor) in her art over the years, here she faces thelarge-format Polaroid camera (and us) eyes shut,and confronts the threat of social invisibility. Herbody is symbolic of the collective absence of theblack body in the history of art and a fragile linkto the imposed transparency experienced by her

ancestors who came to Cuba inthe 19th century as slaves. In therepetition of image and text,Campos-Pons is emphatic aboutoffering herself, not someone elseand not once but six times—asaffirmation of her individual andphysical presence, no matter howvulnerable.

Artistic exploration frequentlyparallels the scientific invention ofits time. In the area of contempo-rary portraiture, markers of indi-vidual identity and family rela-tions have moved beyond exter-nal appearance to geneticmakeup. For a family portrait ofartist Byron Kim, his partner Lisa,and their son Emmett, Iñigo

Manglano-Ovalle worked with a genetics labo-ratory to digitally convert DNA samples of hissubjects (like those typically used to determinepaternity, predisposition to genetic diseases, orcriminal culpability) into three correspondingcolor photographs. Abstract by conventionalstandards, these portraits are nonethelessexacting in terms of genetic “likeness” and chal-lenge traditional identification. As the artistnotes, “With genetics there is a possibility thatthe categories at stake in the future are notgoing to be the old categories. Let’s say blackand white. Or let’s say brown and yellow. Let’ssay kinky hair or straight hair. If the categoriesare going to be different, they are going to bebeneath the skin.”2

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Identity Could be a Tragedy, 1995, 6 large formatPolaroids, 60.96 x 50.80 cm each, Eliza S. Paine Fund.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Byron, Lisa, Emmett (from the seriesGarden of Delights), 1998, 3 C-prints, 152.40 x 58.42 cm. ElizaS. Paine Fund.

Material RevelationsThe translation of an idea into a physical objectentails a delicate and complex balance betweenrepresentation and invention, between whatalready exists in the world and what an artistbrings into the world. Today, that world is beingreconfigured digitally and our lives are increas-ingly structured by daily encounters with virtualreality. By subtly putting pressure on what wethink we know about the things around us, someartists invite us to consider how even the mostobvious “facts” of the physical things weencounter—wax-print fabric, plastic bottles,silver chains, a wooden door, even paint—arenever only what they first seem to be; rather, artregularly depends on the possibility of one thingrevealing another.

Tony Feher’s use of “forgettable” materials,which surround us constantly and have littleaesthetic value to most of us, is indebted to theradical practice of Marcel Duchamp, whosesimple yet extraordinary act in 1914 of selectinga common bottle rack and signing it wrenchedthat object out of the “useful” context and

placed it in the context of a “work of art.” InLinear B, Feher employs the ubiquitous plasticsoda bottle and materials purchased at thehardware store with little, if any, alteration, sothat their physical natures function in terms oftraditional sculptural tasks: density, color, light,mass, texture, scale. Clear bottles of watercreate transparent planes and horizons; ascend-ing blue bottle caps articulate a column; lengthsof cord, chain, and wire read clearly as lines inspace yet at other times seem to disappear.Feher has observed, “ I think people are lookingall the time, but I don’t think they are seeinganything. And I think that’s true not just with apiece of art that’s in front of them, but in a largercultural sense…If you can accept a soda bottlewith condensation on the inside as a work of art,then maybe that’s a way of seeing a broaderpicture, or of seeing the world from a differentpoint of view.”3

Yinka Shonibare was born in London but spentmost of his youth in Nigeria and returned toLondon to attend art school. His dual nationalityis central to his art and the questions of identityit provokes. Like many of Shonibare’s multi-partinstallations, Deep Blue raises questions aboutauthentic origins, both cultural and aesthetic.What is African? What projections are involvedwhen we automatically judge certain colors andpatterns as “African” or “European,” “modern” or“primitive?”

Tony Feher, Linear B, 2001, plastic bottles, caps, galvanizedsteel D-chain, stainless steel wire, water and cotton sash cord,241.30 cm height, 45.72 cm diameter. Sarah C. Garver Fund.

Yinka Shonibare, Deep Blue, 1997, emulsion, acrylic ontextiles (25 panels), 30 x 30 x 5 cm each. Charlotte E. W.Buffington Fund.

Consciously hybrid in nature, Deep Blue was notpainted on traditionally stretched canvas, but onpanels of what appears to be “authenticallyAfrican” textile. Although structured with a nodto modernism (the grid on a field of “deepblue”), the abstract painted passages play offthe brightly colored and patterned traditionaldesigns visible in areas of exposed cloth. ButShonibare’s strategy of using a signifier of“African-ness” is ultimately to expose it asethnic myth. While the fabric looks “African,” itscomplex hidden history is connected to 19th-century European colonial activity (the wax-print technique is based on Indonesian batik andwas manufactured in Holland and Britain forexport to West African markets) and makes itan apt metaphor for the often overlooked ordeeply-buried entangled relationship betweenAfrica and Europe.

Telling TalesStorytelling has been at the heart of imagemaking throughout history. Artists’ tales canreveal how we relate to the world or free ourimaginations and lead to new ways of interpret-ing contemporary circumstances. Because theyare born of both experience and fantasy, speak-

ing truths and fictions, artists’ narratives chal-lenge the knowable limits of the world.Contemporary myths, alternatives to the grandnarratives of religion, science, or aesthetics,don’t aspire to speak in a commonly understoodvoice; more often they are formally bound by anindividual artist’s rules of depiction but open toquestion and interpretation. Various degrees of“realism,” oftentimes integrating text, open thedoor to human tales of humor, anxiety, enchant-ment, danger, vulnerability, and courage.

Amy Sillman constructs her intimate narrativeslike scattered fragments of conversation orparagraphs in a long letter. She favors a paletteof pastels for her dreamlike juxtapositions ofimages and events, which result in an unusualfusion of figuration and abstraction. Her art hasbeen described as “simultaneously clumsy andbeautiful” with an eccentric yet authentic qual-ity that regularly brings to mind the paintings ofPhilip Guston. Frequently combining elementsof painting and drawing, Sillman creates multi-ple pictorial spaces and incidents within a singlework. With A Long Drawing (a sequence of 16drawings), Sillman explains she “was trying tounpack some images that in a regular paintingwould have been covered up by layers of

Amy Sillman, A Long Drawing: Untitled #15 (Twins), 2001, gouache on paper, 52.07 x 102.87 cm. Sarah C. Garver Fund.

changes that happen naturally while making apainting…I wanted to ‘write out’ a drawing in ahorizontal format…”4

On this page from the project, Untitled #15(Twins), a procession of image/ideas unfoldsfrieze-like from left to right, where we encounterthree possible sets of “twins”—two stand along-side one another, while a third duo hovers off tothe side in a thought bubble-like place. Thecartoonishly rendered bodies and emotionalfaces are simultaneously attached and distant,engaged perhaps in public rituals and privatedilemmas. Like the “jumble of thoughts” in ourheads, the passages in Sillman’s meanderingtales rarely cohere but nonetheless add up to anoriginal kind of whole.5

Jenny Scobel’s virtuoso graphite and gessodrawing, March, begs us to ask who this serious,freckled-7face young woman might be. Wemight wonder how that innocent face couldbelong to such a glamorously dressed body—herstrapless gown and long white gloves lookingstraight out of a Jackie Kennedy fashion shot. Isshe trapped by the expectations of womanhood?Does the cartoon streetscape behind her with itsominous sky offer an escape or spell loomingdanger? Scobel offers us no definitive tale, no

biographical truth; in fact, she regularly reuses anintriguing face she finds in vintage print media orphotographs and meticulously weds it to differ-ent torsos and backgrounds, exploring ways inwhich alternate meanings are constructed. Thesomber black-and-white palette lodges thisimage in the subterranean realm of memory orthe nostalgia of black-and-white film and TV.The heightened realism and classic formality ofthe half-length portrait style, when combinedwith the more flat and stylized background(culled from 1930-40s cartoons), encourages asense of tension and estrangement. Subtlewashes of oil color and a surface application ofpoured wax not only formally fuse thesedisparate aspects of the image, but also result ina drawing that can live in the world of painting.

Susan L. Stoops

Curator of Contemporary Art

Notes

1. Quoted in Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Paul Noble,”

The New York Times, March 10, 2000, E41.

2. Quoted in Genomic Art. www.geneart.org/ovalle.htm

3. Tony Feher in conversation with Adam Weinberg, “An

archaeologist of his own life,” Tony Feher (Annandale-on-

Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College,

2001), 50.

4. Unpublished statement via e-mail to author, February 2004.

5. Gail Gregg, “Streams of Consciousness,” ARTnews, April

2001, 120-3.

Generous support provided by the Don and Mary Melville

Contemporary Art Fund, Worcester Telegram and Gazette

and WICN Public Radio 90.5 FM.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to the artists and their

gallery representatives; Don and Mary Melville; Marlene

and David Persky; James Hogan; members of the Committee

on the Collections; and Museum colleagues Patrick Brown,

Kim Noonan, Janet Rosetti, and Katrina Stacy.

Jenny Scobel, March, 2003, oil, graphite, wax on gessoedpanel, 71 x 57 cm. Sarah C. Garver Fund.

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