Stuart Horodner, the Museum's new director and Janie Welker, Museum curator recently discussed the motivations behind our Landscape/Mindscape: Selections from the Wells Fargo Collection exhibition.
Stuart:
Landscape is a subject for art that has inspired artists for centuries. What
prompted you to curate a show on this theme from the Wells Fargo
Collection? And what about the title: Landscape/Mindscape?
Janie: I
think landscape art has always been a mindscape, especially in this country.
Nineteenth-century artists traveled the vastness of America and painted
awe-inspiring vistas from the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York to the
Yosemite Valley in California. They found a spiritual quality in the untamed
wilderness, yes, but they also reflected the national imperative to occupy and
tame this vast land. I thought it would be really interesting to move forward a
century and see how the same artistic dialogue played out as society, culture,
the arts—everything—changed. Plus, the Wells Fargo Collection had such great
twentieth-century pieces—I couldn’t resist!
Stuart: The
exhibition brings together acclaimed artists including Jennifer Bartlett, Helen
Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, as well as less familiar
names, like Aline Feldman and Peter Cuong Nguyen. How did you decide who to
include?
Janie: I
wanted to take advantage of some of their very large and bold works on paper,
given the scale of our gallery walls, but I was also just bowled over by some
of the lesser-known artists. I never get tired of looking at Aline Feldman’s
aerial landscape, with its view of mountains and fields, the clouds and the
shadows they cast. Some of my favorite works in this show are by artists I’ve
never seen before. Suzanne Caporael made these very elegant, simple geometric
abstractions that are etchings at their base, but then she hand-colored them
with gouache to make these luscious surfaces. On top of that, the forms she
used are based on blocks of poetry, which creates another level of meaning.
There are so many incredible, but relatively unknown artists out there, and the
people who assembled the Wells Fargo Collection did a wonderful job in their
selections.
What are the pieces that you
particularly respond to?
Landscape /Mindscape includes paintings, drawings, silkscreens, etchings,
and woodblocks; and of course, works that are realistic and abstract. Why was
that range important to you?
Janie: I
thought it was important to reflect the diversity of era—I mean, we have
artists using advertising techniques to make and mass produce fine art, and
artists very skillfully using historic techniques. Michael Berkhemer says he
was influenced by the “purity and soberness” of seventeenth-century Dutch
art—but he makes hard-edge geometric abstractions.
You started your career as an
artist working in a very conceptual way—how do you see the conceptual content
of the show?
Stuart: I was
a very earnest and committed painter/ printmaker as a young man, interested in
composition, mark making, and modes of representation. The various pictorial
strategies in the exhibition makes sense to me. You are correct, I am deeply
influenced by conceptual art, and so I have a soft spot for Christo and
Jean-Claude, whose site-specific projects are challenging on every level. I
appreciate the conceptual aspect of the show, and the question of how
landscapes are understandable as such, or when they become something else. That
to me, is the pleasurable tension of the works you’ve gathered.
