The Old, Weird America Folk Themes in Contemporary Art
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The Old, Weird America Folk Themes in Contemporary Art FRYE ART MUSEUM Guide for Educators and Students . The Old, Weird America was organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and has been made possible by the patrons, benefactors, and donors to the Museum’s Major Exhibition Fund. This exhibition has also been made possible by generous support from Union Pacific Foundation and Michael Zilkha. This self-guide was created by Deborah Sepulveda, the Frye’s manager of student and teacher programs; studio art instructor Coral Nafziger; and teaching artist Chelsea Green. CONTENTS Educators Getting Started 04 About the Frye 04 The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art 04 Background Information on Selected Artworks 05–08 Nineteen Lincolns 05 Dancing Squared 05 Your Lullaby Will Find a Home in My Head 06 Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching 07 Main Drag 08 Post-Tour Activities 09 Story Telling: Source + Share 09 Holidays: Celebrate All Sides 09 Online Resources for Selected Artists 10 Students 11–16 Welcome! 12 Experiencing Art at the Frye 12 The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes In Contemporary Art 12 What is contemporary art? 12 What are folk themes in contemporary art? 12 Selected Artworks and In-Gallery Discussion Questions 13–15 Nineteen Lincolns 13 Dancing Squared 13 Your Lullaby Will Find a Home in My Head 14 Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching 15 Main Drag 15 In-Gallery Art Activity 16 EDUCATORS Getting Started 4 This guide includes a variety of materials designed to help educators and students prepare for their visit to the exhibition The Old, Weird America, on • view at the Frye Art Museum October 3, 2009–January 3, 2010. Materials include resources and activities for use before, during, and after visits. The goal of this guide is to challenge students to think critically about what they see and to engage them in the process of experiencing and discussing art. It is intended to facilitate students’ personal discoveries about art and is aimed at strengthening the skills that allow students to view art independently. Specifically, this guide introduces students to American contemporary artists who use realist styles and storytelling imagery to consider American social history. Reaching back into American folklore, these artists create new works that illuminate ingrained social forces and overlooked histories as well as contemporary concerns. The guide also gives students permission to challenge their own assumptions of American folklore and history. About the Frye The Frye Art Museum is dedicated to artistic inquiry, a rich visitor experience, and civic responsibility. A primary catalyst for our engagement with contemporary art and artists is the Founding Collection of late- nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century art by Munich-based artists. Admission to the Museum will always be free. Located on Seattle’s First Hill, the Frye Art Museum first opened its doors in 1952 as the legacy of Charles and Emma Frye, prominent early-twentieth- century Seattle business leaders and art collectors. Since that time, works from the Frye Founding Collection of 232 paintings, primarily by Munich-based artists, have continuously been on view. The Museum also hosts notable exhibitions of works by recognized and emerging artists from around the world. The Old, Weird America Folk Themes in Contemporary Art The Old, Weird America considers the widespread resurgence of folk imagery and mythic history in recent art from the United States. Illustrating the relevance and appeal of folklore to contemporary artists, as well as the genre’s power to illuminate ingrained cultural forces and overlooked histories, the exhibition borrows its inspiration and title from music and cultural critic Greil Marcus’s 1997 book of the same name examining the influence of folk music on Bob Dylan and the Band’s seminal album, The Basement Tapes. Featuring a wide range of media—sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, and video—The Old, Weird America includes artwork by Jeremy Blake, Sam Durant, Barnaby Furnas, Matthew Day Jackson, Brad Kahlhamer, Margaret . Kilgallen, Dario Robleto, Allison Smith, Kara Walker, and Charlie White, among others. The exhibition is accompanied by a 162-page fully illustrated catalogue made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON SELECTED ARTWORKS Greta Pratt 5 Stop ➊ Photographer Greta Pratt documents the way Americans remember the past. For years she attended public events such as parades and pageants • and traveled to historic locales including Civil War battlefields and Mt. Rushmore, collecting images of ordinary American history. On several of her photographic road trips, Pratt met an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, Gerald Bestrom, who travels the country in an R.V. painted to look like a log cabin. Through Bestrom, she was introduced to the Society of Lincoln Presenters, an organization of men and women channeling Mary Todd Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln’s wife); their motto is “Would I might rouse Nineteen Lincolns the Lincoln in you all.” Nineteen Lincolns was inspired by meeting these 2005 Lincoln impersonators. Pratt discovered that the impersonators admire 18 archival inkjet prints Lincoln’s high moral character. They respect the fact that Lincoln rose from Courtesy the artist a humble family background through hard work, as well as the fact that he was not especially handsome or popular in his own time. Revisionist historians have recently posited new theories about Lincoln, but the impersonators continue to celebrate his life as a model of American goodness above all. In working with these top-hatted and bewhiskered Presenters on their portraits, Pratt came to view them as “a metaphor for the country—a group held together by a particular understanding of history.” Cynthia Norton Stop ➋ Artist Cynthia Norton lives and works in Louisville, KY, and has deep interests in “hillbilly, Appalachian, and bluegrass” themes. As Norton explains, “I like to find uncanny stories from the past and use them to describe something new.” Norton works with found materials—usually common household objects that she combines with performance, sound, and movement to give viewers a folk-inspired experience. Norton has to get into character before she can create. She transforms Dancing Squared herself into her art-making alter ego, “Ninnie,” who draws heavily on the 2004 domestic traditions of her Southern cultural heritage, creating work that Aluminum, hardware, electric goes beyond the traditional boundaries in art-making. motors, dresses, wire Collection Laura Lee Brown and For Dancing Squared, Norton was inspired by the spontaneous, ecstatic Steve Wilson, Louisville, KY dances of religious groups such as the Shakers and the Quakers, which many see as early influences on rock ‘n’ roll music. Four-square dancing dresses are hung from a metal frame and spin, imitating the technical and exacting quality of square dancing. “Dancing Squared is about how we organize ourselves spiritually,” Norton says. “Square dancing is very mathematical and patterned, and it’s about connecting and disconnecting with partners.” 6 Dario Robleto Stop ➌ Following the large number of deaths from the American Civil War (1861–65), • it became very popular for widows to create mourning jewelry and other objects to show their grief after a loved one’s death. Your Lullaby Will Find a Home in My Head is inspired by the many forms of mourning handiwork common among war widows. The materials included in this complex and elaborately researched, constructed, and titled artwork by San Antonio, Texas, artist Dario Robleto features a hair braid made from a tape recording of the bleak poem “November Graveyard” by Sylvia Plath (1932–63), material from a mourning dress, objects made from actual wartime bullets, letters, and human bone, all set in a nineteenth-century mourning frame. Inspired by the process of music sampling used by DJs, Robleto references history, memory, nostalgia, chance, and hope in order to understand the present. Sampling is a method of composing something new from existing sources in a nonlinear manner. To Robleto, this is a philosophy rooted in American history, rather than just a technique. With each new artwork, Robleto extensively researches an event or period of time, identifies and locates meaningful materials connected to that event or time, and then uses Your Lullaby Will Find those materials to create sculptures that stimulate memories of the past. a Home in My Head 2005 Hair braids made from a stretched and curled audio-tape recording of Sylvia Plath reciting “November Graveyard,” homemade paper (pulp made from soldiers’ letters to mothers and daughters from various wars, ink retrieved from letters, sepia), excavated and melted bullet lead, carved ribcage bone and ivory, mourning dress fabric and thread, silk, mourning frame from another’s loss, walnut, glass Collection Carlos Bacino, Houston Sam Durant 7 Stop ➍ Sam Durant is interested in the evolution of American culture. His drawings, photographs, sculptures, and installations draw on history, art, and popular • culture to excavate complex histories of race and politics, art and protest, and fact and fable. Particularly interested in clashes between ideals and reality, Durant often juxtaposes images and objects from charged historical events to expose rifts in the social fabric of the United States. Here, Durant presents a life-size rotating diorama in two parts entitled Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching. The work is made from two out-of-use displays the artist purchased from the defunct Plymouth National Wax Museum in Massachusetts. One side illustrates the story U.S. citizens commonly accept as the first Thanksgiving: a Native American teaching a Pilgrim settler how to grow corn by fertilizing the seed with herring, ensuring a good harvest in the fall. The other side tells the lesser-known true story of the holiday: Captain Myles Standish, military commander of Plymouth Colony, killing the Pequot Indian Pecksuot.