New Sculptures…

I’ve been working on a few new pieces and just had them photographed in my studio by the talented Teresa Coates. This one is “Cumae,” approx. three feet high not including weaving.

image © 2012 Teresa Coates

Gwen Lux Information

I am writing a short article on Gwen Lux, and would be grateful to get information about her work aside from what’s already in the Juley photo archives and Charlotte Steifer Rubinstein’s books. I will be happy to credit all sources.

Ella Buchanan: 100 Years Ago

Ella Buchanan grew up in Springfield, Illinois and Pittsburgh, Kansas, where her father was a newspaper editor. She attended the Chicago Art Institute and became a sculptor whose themes included social issues such as slavery, women’s rights, poverty, and early settlement of the California frontier. Among her works were “The Young Lincoln” (1927), “The Spirit of the West Going Forward” (1917) , and “Navaho Indian and Zuni Girl” (1931). In 1938, her smaller-scale sculptures of cowboys, Indians and soldiers toured California as part of the WPA Federal Art Exhibition.

Shown is a postcard of Buchanan’s most well-known sculpture, the heavily allegorical “The Suffragist Trying to Arouse Her Sisters” (1911). This sculpture was widely reproduced in small scale, and on posters, banners, and cards in the final decade of the American womens’ suffrage movement.  The caption states: “Central figure-Suffragist. To right – Vanity at her feet lies Prostitution. To left is dozing Conventionality. Behind Conventionality is Wage-earner.”

See: “Western Woman Symbolizes the ‘Cause,’ ” Sault  Ste. Marie Evening News, October 20, 1911.

Malvina Hoffman Considered

Marianne Kinkel‘s new book, “Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman” is ultimately less about the sculptor and more about theories of racial equality in the United States during the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Malvina Hoffman (1885-1966) was both a consummate sculptor and a consummate self-promoter. In 1929, Hoffman was at the height of her fame, with studios in both New York and Paris. She approached Stanley Field, president of Chicago’s Field Museum, with the idea of representing the races of the world in sculpture. Soon, Hoffman had a very lucrative contract to produce 147 sculptures for the Museum, many of which are still on display.

As ethnographic representations, the set of sculptures embodied then-current notions of race, including assumptions of white superiority. The lifesize bronze “Nordic Type,” for example, was modeled after Rodin’s “Age of Bronze,” showing a muscular, nude caucasian man with upraised arms. Other races hold attributes of primitive technology, like baskets or spears, and are shown crouching, or with downcast eyes, making clear visual statements about their inferior culture and status.

Hoffman’s methods of gathering information, and her research, which included gathering widely-reproduced ethnographic images of the day, is written about in some detail. The process of making the sculptures, and the organization of her large-scale studios, however, is not given the same consideration.

I was hoping to find out about Hoffman’s day-to-day life as a sculptor, and how she managed her studios, assistants, and foundries, but was disappointed. This is not to say that the book is not an extremely well-written investigation of an era of American cultural history that many people would rather forget. But in the end, it is less about Malvina Hoffman’s work than the society she lived in.

“Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman,” by Marianne Kinkel, Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2011: 260 pages, $40.

Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman

Raku with Eleonora Lecei

I recently met with two members of my sculpture group, Joyce Audy Zarins and Eleonora Lecei, at Eleonora’s house and studio for a day of outdoor raku.

We glazed our bisqueware and heated it in Eleonora’s smaller electric kiln, which she’d placed outdoors. When the glaze was molten, we fished the pieces out with long metal tongs and deposited them in a steel drum that had been filled with a mixture of shredded newspaper and sawdust. Once the sawdust caught on fire, the chamber was covered and left to smoke like a captive dragon. Eventually, we pulled the finished pieces out again and sprayed them with water until they cooled.

I used a combination of colors including copper metallic glazes on this head. The result is a finish like tarnished silver that still shows the red earthenware underneath.

Louisa Lander

(Maria) Louisa Lander (1826–1923)

Born in Salem, Massachusetts to a wealthy merchant family, Louisa Lander grew up in a mansion in Danvers, Massachusetts, surrounded by sculpture. Lander modeled dolls as a child, and later, family portraits. In 1855, she and her father sailed to Europe. Louisa was accepted as a student by Thomas Crawford, the first American sculptor of the 19th century to establish a studio in Rome. Lander opened her own studio in 1857. Her subjects were women of American literature and legend: Virginia Dare, and Evangeline.

   In 1858 fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Rome and posed frequently for Lander; the two artists formed a close friendship. Hawthorne described Lander as “living in almost perfect independence…keeping within a homely light of right.”

   A whispering campaign against Lander soon flourished. Allegations were made that she had posed in immodest dress for a fellow artist. It is possible that these allegations were begun–they were certainly embellished upon–by William Wetmore Story, a less-talented rival. Perhaps her “perfect independence” was judged too threatening by prudish Victorian men and women alike.

   In any event, Lander traveled to Russia in 1859 and then returned to Salem. She had a successful exhibition of her work in Boston, but major sales of her lifesize marble “Virginia Dare” fell through. The artist moved to Washington, DC, and seems to have spent the last 30 years of her life in embittered obscurity.

   It is somewhat heartbreaking to read descriptions of the catalog of Lander’s works that have been “lost”, among them lifesize marble sculptures of women in heroic, or at least un-traditional, representations, like “Elizabeth, the Exile of Siberia.”1 Perhaps these will one day be rediscovered, or their attributions corrected. If Edmonia Lewis’s monument to Cleopatra could be rescued from a shopping mall service yard in Illinois, surely more such surprises are in store.

Pictured: Louisa Lander’s bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts

Sources: Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors: A History of Women Working in Three Dimensions

1 “In 1882, Phebe Hanaford wrote of Lander, “She executed ‘To-day’ and ‘Galatea,’ ‘Evangeline’ and ‘Elizabeth, the Exile of Siberia,’ all of them delightful each in its own way, and to these she has added ‘Undine,’ as a sculptured creation of beauty, ‘Ceres Mourning for Proserpine’ and ‘A Sylph.’… Miss Lander has continued to brighten the world of art by her genius. May she long live to mould clay, and chip marble into forms of loveliness!” All of these works are lost.  Source: Kathleen Lawrence files.

New piece in progress

I’ve been working on “Sphinx” for a few months now. It’s lifesize (for a sphinx, I guess), and is paper mache and plaster over foam (you can see the Pink Panther-pink bottom edges where the laminated foam chunks show through). I’m trying to get away from making so many molds! Right now I’m wrestling with the question of whether or not to add a ceremonial beard, worn by both male and female rulers in ancient Egypt. Am leaning toward the beard, then a final texturing and coat of wax.

See this live and in person at Open Studios tomorrow!

Cast metal with your microwave!

My friend Nick sends these instructions for casting low-temperature metals in a home microwave:
http://www.periodictable.com/PopSci/2003/09/1/index.html
Here’s a more technical set of instructions:
http://home.c2i.net/metaphor/mvpage.html
Also, the home page of that site (more background):
http://home.c2i.net/metaphor/index.html
[Click on "the Reid Technique"]

Has anyone done this at home? I’m going to try casting tin solder as soon as I can get a microwave-size refractory rig set up.

Open Studios at ArtSpace Maynard this weekend

I’ll be in my studio working on some new pieces on Saturday, Sept. 24th from around noon until 5pm. Come on down!
ArtSpace Maynard studio 9W (basement level)
63 Summer Street
Maynard MA

Open Studios continues on Sunday the 25th, but I won’t be in town although my studio will be open.

http://www.artspacemaynard.com

Anne Whitney

I have blogged about Anne Whitney before, after being mesmerized by her bronze portrait of an elderly woman asleep, titled “Le Modele,” in the collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. This fascinating sculptor had a long career as an artist and seems to have been equally passionate about abolition, a dedication she shared with many other Bostonians of her generation. Today, only her bronze monuments to Leif Erikson (pictured) and Charles Sumner (Harvard Square) remain as lasting contributions to Boston’s urban landscape. I doubt many people who see the Erikson monument, for example, know that it was created by a woman artist. Ironically, even fewer may realize who the subject actually is, given the huge shifts our collective historical imagination has undergone since the Victorian era.

Whitney was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, just outside Boston proper, on 2 September, 1821. She was educated privately, and even as a child was interested in art and writing. Whitney could not attend college since women were not admitted to Yale or Harvard. In 1846 she opened a small school for girls in Salem, Massachusetts, and the poetry she wrote at that time was collected in a volume simply titled “Poems” (New York, 1859). After the Civil War she made several visits to Europe where she studied sculpture, and on her return in 1873 she established a studio in Boston.

A well-known supporter of both the abolitionist and womens’ suffrage movements, Whitney herself was to publicly feel the brunt of sexism. In 1875, she won a commission for a statue of Charles Sumner but the work was denied her when it was discovered that the winning model was created by a woman.

Among her extant public monuments are: the statue of Samuel Adams (1876) located in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol; “Leif the Discoverer” in Boston  (another casting was in that same year placed in Juneau Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin); and the seated, monumental portrait of Charles Sumner which casts a thoughtful presence over Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whitney’s choice of portrait subjects (John Keats, Samuel Adams, Toussaint l’Ouverture, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, Frances Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Sewall, Alice Freeman Palmer, Robert Gould Shaw, Eben Norton Horsford, Harriet Martineau, Jennie McGraw Fiske, Lucy Stone and others) reveals her political and cultural interests. Whitney’s aim seems to have been to create traditional bronze and marble memorials to radical subjects (like Toussaint l’Ouverture and Lucy Stone), the effect of which must have been quietly revolutionary in her own time. Whitney died in Boston in 1915.

For the sculpture’s location and an interactive map of public art in Boston: http://www.publicartboston.com/map/node

http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/le-mod-le-37521

http://www.examiner.com/arts-in-boston/leif-eriksson-statue-by-anne-whitney-endured-major-changes
Source: Rubenstein, Charlotte Streifer, American Women Sculptors, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1990.

Pictured: “Leif Erikson” (1886), unveiled in Boston, 29 October, 1887. The statue (formerly above a fountain) represents the Norse-Icelandic discoverer of America as a man of physical beauty and vigor, in the costume of an ancient Scandinavian warrior.