Alice Cooper (the sculptor)

Alice Cooper, or Alice Cooper Hubbard, was a midwestern sculptor who studied with Lorado Taft. Her best known work is probably the over-lifesize 1912 monument to Shoshone explorer and guide Sacajawea, who famously guided the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Ocean, having given birth to her son Jean-Baptiste along the way. Cooper depicted Sacajawea pointing confidently west, in the direction of the ocean, with her infant son carried in a sling on her back. An embodiment of the perfection of late American neoclassical sculpture, this dramatic monument was undertaken at a time when women had still not won the right to vote: the suffrage fight was ongoing.

From Oregon visual arts: “Sacajawea and Jean-Baptiste” was commissioned by the Committee of Portland Women as the centerpiece for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition to represent “the only woman in the Lewis and Clark Expedition and in honor of the pioneer mother of old Oregon.” It originally stood in the center of the Plaza at the Lewis and Clark Fair in 1905, at the end of which, it was moved to Washington Park. Sacajawea was a Shoshone woman who guided Lewis and Clark in their journey westward. At the time this sculpture was commissioned, equal suffrage was not yet in effect and the women of Oregon were still fighting for the right to vote. Many prominent women suffragists were present at its dedication including, Susan B. Anthony, Rev. Anna Shaw and Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway. Funds for the work were raised by women across the western states. Alice Cooper of Denver was selected to design the work. She is the first woman artist to be represented in Portland’s Public Art Collection.

Sculptor Lorado Taft, who taught at the University of Chicago, hired his most talented students to construct the enormous number of plaster sculptures needed for the magical “White City” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Known as the “White Rabbits”–perhaps because they were perpetually covered in a fine sift of plaster dust–the group of students included Bessie Potter Vonnoh and Helen Farnsworth Mears. Mears, who was commissioned to sculpt Genius of Wisconsin for the fair, went on to study with Augustus Saint-Gaudens and complete various public commissions, including a statue of the suffragist Frances E. Willard for the U.S. Capitol. When Taft, who was overseeing the fair’s sculptural ornament, asked chief architect Daniel Burnham if he could hire women, Burnham reportedly replied, “Hire anyone, even white rabbits if they’ll work!”

Not enough is known about Alice Cooper, who must have been one of the Chicago World’s Fair sculptors. These young women are regrettably not identified individually in contemporary photographs of them at work on monumental White City sculptures. A picture of Alice as a very young woman, working on a lifesize sculpture of a small child, is in the University of Illinois archives. This is described as: “Photo of sculptor Alice Cooper Hubbard of Des Moines, Iowa, and a work in progress.  Script on front of photo reads This is the only print I have of this one – unfinished.”

Images: Alice Cooper, Sacajawea and Jean-Baptiste. Bronze, 1905. 7 x 3 1/2 x 3 feet.

More about the White Rabbits: https://interactive.wttw.com/art-design-chicago/white-rabbits

Harriet by the Sea

Harriet Hosmer‘s charm and love of decoration is evident even in this very small marble bas-relief, Morning and the Setting of the Stars: An Allegorical Relief. Made in 1856, when Hosmer, a Massachusetts native, lived and worked in Rome, the figures demonstrate both her fashionable knowledge of Greek mythology and her inventiveness. Greek gods Phosphorus and Hesperus circle Venus, the large central star they share. Phosphorus is the ascendant figure, holding a bright flaming torch while roses surround him and a bird takes flight into the distant day. Hesperus tumbles downward into sleep, signified by the poppies that fall from his hands. A bat, Hosmer’s own playful symbol, wings away from the day and into the viewer’s space.

The Portland (Maine) Museum of Art has a notable collection of neoclassical American sculpture, including another relief by Hosmer, and Paul Akers’ Dead Pearl Diver, to name just two.

A Garden of Blue

At Lucy Lacoste, Kyoto ceramic artist Aya Murata‘s transcendent ceramic sculptures are gemlike and amazingly intricate. Murata’s Nerikomi technique involves assembling many delicately patterned sections of clay over the course of several firings. Murata offers a complex explanation of the forces that drive her work:

“My work is based on the theme of life force. In the biological world, things with bright and flashy colors are often poisonous, such as mushrooms, frogs, caterpillars, and spiders. But I think that poison is the life force. If I were to compare that poison to humans, I would say that it is jealousy and ambition, which are not generally considered good things. But I think that it is because of these poisonous feelings that humans enjoy life. Without that, I don’t think the energy to want to improve and grow upward is born. I would be happy if you could feel that kind of energy from my work.”

At Lucy Lacoste in Concord, through March 9

Photo: Aya Murata, Garden of Blue, 2023, ceramic with clear glaze

When painting flirts with sculpture

Carole Rabe, Summer Day Kitchen, 2020

Three dimensions are playfully obvious in Carole Rabe’s collages in “Chasing Color” now at Concord Art Center. Rabe, a painter of interiorscapes in changing daylight, has said that after painting she uses up extra color by cleaning her brushes on scrap paper. The artist arranges the scrap papers to create new compositions, a sometimes-laborious process that Rabe says can take longer to complete than an oil painting. Summer Day Kitchen employs an intense palette–a bright, filtered light transfigures everyday objects. Skillfully arranged color, texture, and cutout shapes form a teasing puzzle of visibly three-dimensional surfaces.

Chasing Color is up until March 22 in Concord, Massachusetts.

Doris Salcedo, Untitled

Stainless Steel 2004-2005 Fogg Museum, Harvard University

A painful and incomprehensible emptiness, the aftermath of some unknown, violent occurrence, is suggested by Doris Salcedo’s Untitled chair. Salcedo often employs chairs, in large aggregations or singly, suggesting a human presence–even an entire community–that has been damaged beyond repair.

Says Salcedo: “Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.”^[6]

The Untitled chair is roughly contemporaneous with Istanbul, an installation of 1500 chairs piled between two buildings. Salcedo means Istanbul to represent mass graves of anonymous victims, and it is redolent of the Holocaust as well as more recent horrors of wartime violence and chaos. Salcedo lives and works in her home city of Bogota, Colombia; it is a rare moment of grace to see her sculpture here in New England.

Visit “Untitled” at the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

Istanbul pictures, description: https://mymodernmet.com/doris-salcedo-1550-chairs-stacked/

Faith Ringgold at WAM

The Worcester Art Museum‘s current exhibit of Faith Ringgold‘s work, Freedom to Say What I Please is small but powerful. Included are her posters, paintings, prints, and a quilt-illustration from her beloved book, Tar Beach. Ringgold is 93 and still working, and the strength of her vision through the decades is arresting. These life-size soft sculptures are “Bessie and Faith” from her Family of Women Series (1974), reminders to the art world of the time to include more women artists, instead of merely representations of women. These two figures represent the artist’s Aunt Bessie alongside Ringgold’s self-portrait, and are inspired by carved wood masks from the Dan people of Liberia.

Lured by the prospect of finding other women artists at WAM, I went on a treasure hunt. Judith Leyster, Gabriele Münter, Maria Marc, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the mighty Käthe Kollwicz are represented in the permanent galleries. Kollwicz’s sculpture Mother with Child Over Her Shoulder (below) was cast in bronze almost 50 years after the artist’s death. Her sculptures are thankfully beginning to be better known.

Freedom to Say What I Please is up until March 17, and has an accompanying reading room stocked with Ringgold’s childrens’ books.

Louisa’s Elizabeth, found

Elizabeth, the Exile of SIberia and two medallions surface

Before the pandemic wreaked havoc with schools, teachers, and life in general—not to mention my research—I received an exhilarating message from a sculpture collector in Florida. That first message contained a tantalizing image—a signature on a marble figure that is virtually identical to the signature on the Nathaniel Hawthorne portrait bust in the Concord, Mass. library: “L.L. Romae. 1858.”

Lander’s powerful portrait of Hawthorne, then one of the most popular and venerated novelists in America, should have cemented her reputation as one of the 19^th century’s most talented and original sculptors. Instead, rumor and gossip surrounding Lander’s relationship with Hawthorne led eventually to the downfall of her hard-won professional reputation.

How wonderful, then, to see images of what I believe to be Lander’s “Elizabeth, Exile of Siberia.” The existence of this half-lifesize sculpture was documented by 19^th century journalist and art historian Elizabeth Ellet in Woman Artists of All Ages and Countries (1859). Ellet describes the figure in Lander’s Roman studio:

“…a spirited, yet feminine figure, very pretty in its picturesque costume—the short cloak, Russian boots, and closely fitting cap” 1

Lander’s recently-revealed Elizabeth sculpture is dressed in a fetching costume extremely close to Ellet’s description (if not warm enough to survive a Siberian winter). The close-fitting cap is sits on the back of her head, almost like a beanie. Her waltz-length skirt was scandalously short for the time, but it is meant to convey athletic exertion and is worn over high boots. Her ¾-length jacket (Ellet describes it as a “cloak”) is fashionable by mid-Victorian standards and no doubt represents an artistic compromise between padded warmth and modeling of a svelte, youthful figure. The face and hair of this sculpture so closely resemble Lander’s Evangeline and even Virginia Dare, that one wonders–as the current owner does–if the same model was used.

The character of Elizabeth, from the popular novel Elizabeth; or, the Exiles of Siberia by Sophie Ristaud Cottin, portrays the true story of a young woman loyal to her father in his Siberian exile. Elizabeth journeyed to Moscow, in a Russian winter, to try and secure his pardon.  This enormously popular book, by a best-selling French author, was first published in 1806, 20 years before Louisa’s birth, but the edition I’m currently reading was published in New York in 1864. The “Elizabeth” of Cottin’s book is exceptionally pious, chaste, and devoted to her parents—an embodiment of all Victorian virtues. It seems to have remained popular for some time, and perhaps the book’s descriptions of a lonely girl, growing up in an isolated wilderness, spoke to a certain solitariness in Lander’s character observed by Elizabeth Ellet. The subject fits well with Louisa Lander’s penchant for portraying tragic or thwarted heroines of popular literature, such as Maud Müller, Evangeline, and Undine.

Another recent discovery, this time a portrait medallion hiding in plain sight in Salem, was confirmed by Lander enthusiast Diane Hale. This small marble bas-relief of the Rev. James Oliver Scripture hangs in Saint Peter’s Episcopal church, Louisa’s former congregation. It may have been carved by Lander herself, which raises interesting questions about Lander’s process. Ellet documents that Lander carved small objects as a child, and she doubtless honed this craft as a student of Thomas Crawford’s in Rome.

There is a small bronze medallion signed “Lander” in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a low relief bust of George Washington. My research has not turned up a date or context for when Lander may have produced this.

Many thanks are due to Katherine Manthorne for bringing these two medallions to my attention, and for her encouragement and invaluable correspondence generally. Thanks to her interest in Louisa Lander, I was able to re-connect with the owner of Elizabeth, and continue my research into Lander’s methods and media.

Slowly but surely, Louisa Lander’s life and work are being uncovered, rediscovered, and recognized.

1. Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, Woman Artists in All Ages and Countries (New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1859), 332

A remarkable collaboration

Fresh Ink at the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, MA is a deep and thought-provoking show. Featured is a collaborative sculptural piece–an artists book–by Ania Gilmore, Gunta Kaža, Malgorzata Oakes and Stephanie Stigliano for the traveling exhibit FREEDOM Project. FREEDOM Project presents global conflicts and issues related to human rights, violence, aggression, war, social and racial injustice. Says Ania Gilmore: “In order to bring us back together, we need to recognize what tears us apart; 
a collection of words written by people from all over the world answering the question: 
What divides Humanity today?”   

Gunta Kaža: “Freedom is messy, it is prickly, especially when one person’s freedom dominates 
and impinges on others.”  

Malgorzata Oakes: “FREEDOM Project is my contribution to speak out about the significant issue regarding lack of freedom that touches many lives around the globe. It is important we continue 
to be resilient to strive for a better future.”  Stephanie Stigliano: “As I feel increasingly desperate in a hostile world, these prints represent 
my hope that nature will ultimately prevail.”

Ania Gilmore, Gunta Kaža, Małgorzata Oakes, Stephanie Stigliano
Four Women for Freedom
Artist Book, Ania Gilmore binding technique; Strathmore 400 series heavyweight, Astrobrights® Colored Paper Re-Entry Red, Collagraph, Dry Point, Dry Transfer, Monotype, Linocut, Lithograph, Painting, Photocopy Transfer, Relief Print, & Stencil, Silkscreen, Cotton Thread, Akua Intaglio Inks, Speedball Water Based Block Printing Inks, Cranfield Relief Printing Inks, Binder Ring
29 pages of  9.5″ x 5″ (Open: 22 x 22 in)
$850

Open Studios Season

When I moved back to Boston from New York in 1998 the art scene was bleak. Galleries were few and conservative, two shining exceptions being Bernie Toale on the then-corner of Thayer and Harrison, and the then-home of Boston Sculptors in a suburban Newton church. A few artists buildings in Allston, Fort Point, and Waltham were a haven for working artists in need of cheap rent and a space to work in, and they opened their buildings once or twice a year to show new stuff. It was a scene, but not one that was overly curated, and artists seemed to be of all ages.

Boston real estate has become obscenely expensive in the last 20+ years. Rents in artists studio buildings have risen accordingly. The gray hairs of the artists and visitors have increased in number. Renting a studio in formerly scrappy, DIY buildings seems now to be an achievement for the retired rather than an affordable space for young people to develop their style. On open studios weekends, greeters hand out printed brochures of work by the graying studio tenants, and the graying visitors (of which I am one) prowl hallways to maybe buy something for over the couch.

Real artists will always make work, since they are driven by inner necessity. They will make art wherever there is a sliver of space—on a kitchen table or in a bedroom corner—and whenever there is a scrap of time: after work, when the kids are asleep, on the bus ride home. New artists also need the benefit of room to experiment and  a sympathetic community. Can current artists buildings carve out community spaces for local artists that are truly affordable, or even free, as the BCA has done? The immediate benefit would be breathing new life and new ideas into packed studio buildings, where visitors shuffle down hallways seeing much the same thing, year after year.

Hybrid creature, hybrid materials

Rose B. Simpson‘s 2022 sculpture, Sip 1, on view at the Rose Art Museum is constructed of various materials–fired ceramic, string, steel, stones, and grout. The resulting creature is a hybrid of animal and human parts–a human head, lizard tail, reptilian scales, a serpent’s neck.

Rose B. Simpson, a young Tewa artist, has said “I think in clay…Clay was the earth that grew our food, was the house we lived in, was the pottery we ate out of and prayed with. So my relationship to clay is ancestral and I think it has a deep genetic memory. It’s like a family member for us.” Sip 1‘s unearthly presence is both belied and accented by its heavy, earthly materials. Simpson’s foremothers were also artists, and her work eloquently represents both deep knowledge of materials and construction, and a melding of spirit and clay.