Chinati’s ‘Art in Context: Art, Architecture’ set for Houston this weekend
There are plenty of examples of someone’s hard work and creative genius vanishing without a trace. It happens every day. What once was now exists only in the vault of the mind, or the mind’s eye, if we are lucky. From cave paintings to frescos, those artists weren’t thinking, “It’s scheduled to be gone next week or tomorrow,” and much of it has been stumbled across by accident, restored and preserved through photos like the frescos from Pompeii. And yet temporary art paintings on walls are made with an end date printed in catalogues and on gallery schedules.
Smith College Museum of Art chose to have Nancy Spero apply text and images directly on the wall of a stairwell shortly before the museum was to be closed for renovation in 1990. It was moving work. Her figurative women in repetition and text from Bertolt Brecht cascaded down the stairwell. It seemed dismissive to have the artist first create and install the work only to have it erased forever, painted over shortly thereafter.
Former Chinati Foundation artist in residence Kate Shepherd created and exhibited wall paintings in Marfa that indeed are different in every way from Spero’s wall paintings, however, both elicit that reaction of so much work, so wonderful, powerful, and gone too soon.
Shepherd’s exhibition at Do Right Hall in Marfa last April was concurrent to the “Art in Context Part I” at Chinati, definitely part of a tradition of ephemeral work. The strength of her painting, the abstract and geometric calling of light on the flat surface, the sheer size of the work, the color blocks, all add up to a dynamic and lasting impression. It’s left to each of us to conjure again in memory or photos. It’s a bold and courageous way to make a great viewing experience for those who are able to learn about the new wall painting and travel to see the exhibition before it’s gone.
The Chinati two-part symposium, “Art in Context: Art, Architecture, and the Middle Landscape” launched with Part l in Marfa proper. Many of the participants in Part I of the symposium got the chance to see the Shepherd exhibition that included these Marfa wall paintings, and as they headed out of town at the close of the symposium, white paint went on the gallery walls covering it. After the first coat of white paint there was a ghost image, and then the subsequent coat of paint made them but a memory, image here and gone. In an attempt to help me understand Shepherd’s statement, “They are like rainbows,” answers all my questions.
Part II of the Art in Context symposium takes place in Houston at Rice University November 14 and 15 and will continue the conversations of Part I that were more specific to the artillery sheds, the site overall and environmental concerns of the campus in Marfa, and will then expand to the context and concerns of other environments.
In Part II, participants can see Shepherd’s first and only permanent wall painting, Tricycle Red, Pelican Gray, etc., partial octagons, 2021, installed in the rotunda of the Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business. What a happy accident of art in context adjacent for the participants.