PRESENTS CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman Contents Introduction ............................. 10 Foreword ..................................19 Artist’s Statement ..................... 33 PRESENTS Interview ................................. 38 Neil Goodman Biography .......... 48 CLOSE PROXIMITY: Artwork Plates ......................... 50 A Retrospective of Sculpture by Founded in 1981 with the mission of “making art a part of everyday life”, the Museum of Outdoor Arts (MOA) is a forerunner in the placement of site-specific sculpture in Colorado. Our art collection is located at public locations throughout the Denver metro area. From commercial office parks to botanic gardens, city parks and traditional sculpture gardens; art is placed to interpret space as Neil Goodman “a museum without walls.” MOA also curates indoor galleries and hosts world-class art exhibitions and educational programs. Please visit our website to learn more about MOA. MOAonline.org MOA INDOOR GALLERY Follow Us @OutdoorArts 1000 Englewood Parkway, Second Floor, Englewood, CO 80110 Exhibiting September 15 – November 17, 2018 OUTDOOR INSTALLATION AT WESTLANDS PARK All photography by 5701 South Quebec Street, Greenwood Village, CO 80111 Heather Longway Exhibiting September 2018 – August 2019 2 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 3 4 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 5 6 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 7 8 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 9 INTRODUCTION retrospective exhibition. We all became fast the massive sculptures frame the landscape. friends and enthusiastic collaborators. Indoors, the sculptures possess iconic patterning that harkens back to archetypal Two years later and we have opened familiarity. The richness of the patinas resonate Close Proximity: A Retrospective of Sculpture the forms. by Neil Goodman. Three monumental sculptures are on exhibit outdoors at Westlands The symbolism of the 40 shapes in Script Park in Greenwood Village and 33 bronze evoke a code or an invented ancient language. By installations are displayed indoors at MOA’s Three Graces — a six-foot, 400-pound bronze — Cynthia Madden Leitner gallery in Englewood. is balanced and counterbalanced to set on three small points of contact. Feats of engineering In 2001, MOA acquired the International Bronze, dense and heavy, becomes visually and an understanding of geometrical proportion Sculpture Center’s Collection IV. Many of the light in Neil’s sculpture. He often works the are uniquely utilized in many of the sculptures. pieces were installed as part of the City Center bronze to an architectural capacity. Outdoors, Englewood Sculpture Garden. In Subjects and Objects, Neil disconnected the pieces to “push the viewer to a more dynamic Included were artists Magdalena Abakanowicz, relationship with the work… they had to finish IMark Di Suvero, Sir Anthony Caro …and Neil the composition.” Neil’s relationship with Goodman. Of the 32 exemplary works of sculpture is that it tells a story, “where it begins sculpture, Goodman’s Variable Composition II and where it ends and the middle part is always remains a personal favorite. As Neil stated in the narrative. If the viewer doesn’t understand his film produced for the exhibition,“Everything the beginning, the ending won’t be grasped, so that happens in ‘Close Proximity’ happens in they won’t want to get involved with the story.” the original MOA piece on some level. It is a Neil also believes the viewer deserves classic assemblage.” aesthetic quality. Fifteen years later, Neil visited Denver. We had After 40 years of teaching sculpture, Neil a casual first meeting at MOA, which led to a retired this year from professorship at Indiana site tour the next day, and spontaneously University Northwest. Neil’s presence at IUN evolved into planning a major indoor/outdoor remains through Shadows & Echoes, a series of 10 large-scale cast bronze sculptures nestled 10 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 11 INTRODUCTION into the landscape of the sculpture garden in Cynthia Madden Leitner is the Founder and the center of the IUN campus. Executive Director of the Museum of Outdoor Arts. She has also served as a board member Close Proximity here at MOA is serendipitous on the International Sculpture Center (ISC) and for him — perhaps as a poignant and symbolic is a founding member of the National Museum exhibit to celebrate his past and to lead him of Women in the Arts (NMWA) for which she into the next creative transition — inspiring the serves on the advisory council. work to come. The team at MOA is invested in Neil Goodman’s next chapter and all of us wish him the best to come. n 12 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 13 14 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 15 16 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 17 FOREWORD by Margaret Hawkins He begins a sculpture by fashioning a shape from wood or wax. It is slow going. He works To approach a bronze sculpture by until dark. (He says he likes California because Neil Goodman is to experience a calming drop the days are longer there and there’s more time in blood pressure and at the same time the to work.) excitement of the pure hum of attunement. It’s a little like going into a trance. What is When he gets the carvings right — and it takes Thard — metal, for instance, or life — softens, a long time, months sometimes — he makes or appears to, when rendered through heat, molds and has them cast in fiberglass, in time, breath. sections if they’re big. At this point he makes adjustments as possible, though the This oxymoronic softness in Goodman’s possibilities wane as the work solidifies. otherwise hard surfaces, the Brancusi-like When he gets the adjustments right, he has curves of the early work but also the more the work cast in bronze and welds it together. subtle twists of the new pieces, comes “My hands almost never leave the work, from hard-won. Goodman’s laborsome process beginning to end.” begins in carving and the work never loses its sense of the manual. Much of the work is small, This process is not conducive to improvisation. calibrated to human proportions, but even the “The creative part is quick and intuitive,” big outdoor pieces feel hand wrought. Goodman says. “Then you have to build the piece. The best asset for a sculptor is Goodman is a sculptor in the old-school sense. patience. If your brain works too quickly you He is not an orchestrator of technicians, but don’t have endurance for the labor. Every day a maker and a builder. you wake up and you pretty much know what Every morning after a solitary routine that you’re going to do for the next year or so. involves the meditative washing of dishes and You don’t worry about whether you’re happy or the making of coffee for his wife, he goes into unhappy, you just go to work.” his studio, formerly on the south side of Chicago and now located in a small coastal town in southern California, and works alone. 18 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 19 20 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 21 22 CLOSE PROXIMITY: A Retrospective of Sculpture by Neil Goodman MOA, September 15 - November 17, 2018 23 FOREWORD Like many artists, Goodman is attached to his arrangements, the buzz of connectedness in the structure but appealing instead to the unexciting routine. “I need to become really spaces between them, characterizes much of viewer’s sense of, or hope for, or perhaps boring,“ he says. “It helps me concentrate.” Goodman’s early and midcareer work. even belief in, an invisible order. Boring is a matter of opinion. The work he Early modular wall pieces are made up of What holds Goodman’s work together is makes is anything but. separate hand-wrought objects laid out like a subtle visual grammar that provides a Goodman cites two seminal influences. One is neatly organized tools hung on a pegboard, through-line from the earlier organic the industrial landscape of rustbelt America. meant to be picked up and used, shouldered, compositions to the later abstractions. In these, He grew up in Hammond, Indiana, and after applied to some meaningful task. Mixed in are Goodman emerges from the warm envelope of getting his MFA at the Tyler School of Art in artifacts that could be from the natural world. identifiable reference to arrive in the rarified air Philadelphia, he returned to the Midwest and We spot animal skulls, what might be fossilized of the high plateau of geometry. He credits the taught for almost 40 years at Indiana University fish, leg bones. The format suggests French still-life painter with providing a in Gary, commuting the whole time from the archeological collections in museum cases. foundation from which to make this leap. south side of Chicago. The arc of Goodman’s career begins in “Chardin opened doors and allowed me to “I lived by those great old bridges in Pilsen,” he representation and bends toward abstraction, invent. So much of my work is about taking says, referring to the formerly Czech, then as many artists’ careers do. In Goodman’s case, ordinary shapes and reconfiguring them into Mexican, now increasingly gentrified Chicago however, even the early pieces defy sculptural line and plane.