HIGH ART CONNECT

“It was all really impossible. The street was very antagonistic, and it was sort of hidden away. I managed to survive; I made a lot of friends of other craftsmen sometime in there.” - Art Smith

As the Interpretation intern this summer, I was asked to research the connections between Smith’s jewelry and modern dance. I quickly saw that his early collaborations and friendships with other creators heavily influenced his artistic practice. Smith found inspiration in a community of artists, many of whom shared his identification as a black, gay man. Although many of these artists—Smith included—faced discrimination, they built a network of mutual support. I felt that these early connections, which sparked and propelled Smith’s career, were worth sharing. The circle of creative individuals Smith surrounded himself with and the collaborative practices that emerged reinforce the important role art can play in building communities and in fostering both artistic and social solidarity.

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After graduating from Cooper Union in New York City in 1940, Smith worked for the National Youth Administration and took a night course in jewelry making at New York University. In 1946, Smith opened his own shop on Cornelia Street in the Village. Singled out for his race in an otherwise predominantly Italian area, Smith faced harsh discrimination and violence, including an attempt to run him over and the smashing of his store window.

Speaking of this difficult time, Smith said: “The thing that really sort of saved the day, in a sense, were a couple of civil rights organizations.… They did rally around a number of these incidents, and they did have street meetings and demonstrations indoors as well, and they did have petitions, and a lot of what you might call liberal, or just decent people of the Village rallied to our aid.” (Oral history interview with Art Smith, 1971 August 24–31, Smithsonian Institution)

Art Smith (American, 1917–1982), Storefront Window at 140 East 4th Street with Art Smith and Woman in Reflection, ca. 1955, gelatin silver print, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell.

Smith was able to make it through these tough times thanks to the artists he befriended as well as the socially conscious community that surrounded him. One of Smith’s most influential friends was Talley Beatty, a prominent black dancer and choreographer. It was Beatty who brought Smith to the Manhattan parlor of Frank and Dorcas Neal, its members virtually all black artists—painters, dancers, writers, musicians.Frank Neal, a dancer and painter, and his wife, Dorcas, known as an excellent hostess and chef, hosted hours of conversation every weekend night and, often, once or twice during the week.

Speaking about the salon, Dorcas explained: “I guess you could say this was a safe place to be. It was a place for a group of people who were just different to be in the company of those who were the same. It was all like a family situation. This was a breeding ground for a certain group of artists at a certain time when they had nowhere else to go...They all faced a lot of the same problems and a lot of the same questions regarding their careers and their place in the world, which was white at the time. I think they were able to answer many of those questions for each other and solve those problems and become successful in the world…. For those in the group who were black and gay, and that wasn’t everybody, it meant the world just to see that there were others like them in the arts.”

Dancer Talley Beatty recalled the many conversations around the arts: “It was highly animated, wonderful. Everything was criticized. No one came away unscathed. It was very sociopolitical. A black gathering, very sociopolitical.… At the salon, we could discuss our observations and frustrations together and argue about them, which is what inevitably happened.” (Hajdu, David. Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. 114–16.)

Unknown photographer, Art Smith Holding a Wire-Loop Ball, ca. 1955, gelatin silver print, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Charles L. Russell.

Beatty would eventually introduce Smith to other influential choreographers and dancers, such as Pearl Primus, for whom Smith would create jewelry pieces that moved with the dancers and enhanced the visual appeal of stage performances. These collaborations would shape his designs, influencing the way he saw jewelry and its relationship to the human body. He kept on with his practice of crafting jewelry out of a variety of metals and materials, making his works accessible and affordable for people of widely ranging economic backgrounds.

Smith steadily built his career, ultimately moving his shop to a less hostile area in the Village, West 4th Street. He continued to collaborate with and find support in the New York artist community. By the mid-1950s, Smith’s career was flourishing; he received feature pictorial coverage in both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and boutiques across the nation sold his work. His new location, where he remained until three years before his death in 1982, became another gathering place for avant-garde musicians, beat poets, actors, and artists.

Caption: Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Norman Fontenelle, Sr., 1967

When I was taking photos of Robert Desmond, I only took candids and tried to have his face be the focus of the picture in order to show every single detail about him. His tired eyes. His layers of clothing. The stubble on his chin. I wanted the photo to have as much detail as possible.

Taking this photo was a bit challenging because, as he was talking to us (my father and me), it was hard capturing still photos because he was a person who spoke with a lot of emotion and talked with his hands quite a bit. Afterward, I was able to find the photo with the least blur because I took many shots at different angles, trying to see which one I liked best. I hope my photo has the same amount of emotion in it as the one by Parks, because his photo said so much with no words.

Because I talked with my subject, Mr. Desmond, while photographing him, it was very important to me to include his story as part of my project.

Artist of Mercy

The rectangular-shaped brick building could be seen through the fog as we walked up the cracked driveway. There was no one in sight but one lonely man, bent over in the alleyway next to the building, stuffing papers into his black backpack.

Nervously, I walked up to him. He wore layer on top of layer, a bulky public service jacket covering his hoodie and button-down shirt. A shark tooth necklace hung down from his neck, and a New York Phillies hat covered his head. His eyes were yellowed, from exhaustion or age I didn’t know; his face was unshaven, grey and black stubble around his mouth and jaw. Dark bags hung under his eyes, and as he looked up toward me, I saw a flash of apprehension go through his eyes.

I told the man that I was doing a project for school and asked politely if he would let me ask him some questions and take a picture of him. He laughed and agreed. He told me his name was Robert Desmond. He had lived in Atlanta for a couple of years but grew up in Virginia. He graduated high school with a diploma and came to Atlanta due to family issues. When I asked him if he would mind sharing his age, he responded, “I’m … like 32.” His tired eyes and the creases in his face aged him greatly.

He was religious and had gone to a black Baptist church growing up. He was well informed about other religions, even talking about how he had learned extensively about the Bhagavad Gita.

He became interested in art during elementary school, and drawing was what kept him stable and grounded. Robert went to an art class every week to learn, and he said his teacher stored a lot of his drawings. He taught art in the church across the street from the shelter but said the kids didn’t want to learn, much to his disappointment.

He carries around a few of his drawings with him and asked if I wanted to see any. I was happy to, and he opened up his backpack. He had difficulty retrieving the manila folder with the papers inside, and looking into his bag gave me a brief look into his life. The neatly folded button-down shirts. His other clothes, well looked after.

As he showed me drawing after drawing, he explained to me what each was supposed to represent. He told me his artist name was “Artist of Mercy” or “Black Rob.” The sketches were all drawn on printer or scrap paper, and Robert told me the library gave him scrap paper to work on. He could afford regular clean paper, but not buying that saved him extra money, something he had learned to be very careful with.

Robert told me his dream: to be an architect. “If you got a goal, you gotta work to achieve it.”

He said he would go to the library, sit, and draw. He told me his mission was to help other people and that he volunteers at the Food Bank. Robert feels sad for all the homeless people on the streets, who unlike him, have lost hope and given up. He talked about how everyone, homeless or not, has a dream, and it wasn’t right to just give up on that dream.

“I can’t give up on education,” he says; “if I wanna help others, I gotta stay sharp.”

“They blame the government,” he says about others out on the street, “but I’m not blaming anyone. I take full responsibility for my circumstances.”

Caption: Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

I saw an old couple, sitting on a couch looking straight at the camera. There was one picture on the wall and a little table with flowers in front of them. I then looked at it a little longer and noticed a big detail I had completely missed the first time: there were pictures on the table. Those pictures on the table changed the whole photograph. They were old black-and-white pictures, each featuring young African American people. These people were being oppressed. The pictures on the table represented generations of people subjected to racism. This was the picture I was looking for, and I already had an idea.

I decided to try and do what Gordon Parks did to show how generations of people were treated because of the color of their skin, but a little differently. I thought about what I have experienced in my life, but I am young. Then I realized that this did not have to be about my life; it could also be about my parents’ lives.

My parents are from Nicaragua, a poor country in Central America. I remembered all of their gruesome stories about eating dirt, having no bathrooms, starving, the war, and death. My picture wouldn’t be about generations of racism; it would be about generations of poverty. We have pictures of family members in Nicaragua that represent the ugly past of my family. Some of the people in the pictures are already dead, but the rest of them are still there, right now.

Caption: Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Even though racism was clearly the main theme in the photo, I chose to portray a different aspect of the photo. My picture is more of a representation of social standards. I used myself as an example. The Parks photo shows social standards in a subtler way than racism. The mannequins are impossibly perfect; i.e., impossibly symmetrical, impossibly happy, impossibly rich, and impossibly white. This is the standard the little girl is going to look up to and mimic. She will notice this in society and take up the lesson that being “happy” is the equivalent of being perfect. If this is the lesson she learns, then she might as well be a store mannequin on display.

My photo takes the idea of society’s standards and brings it to the modern day. People are still pressured by these standards and still look to magazine models and mannequins for answers on how to be the “right” kind of girl or boy. Always showing skin, wearing too much makeup, being skinny no matter what. People only do things like this to fit in with the world, to blend, but who set these impossibly high standards?

In my photo I am alone in a bathroom, drenching my face in makeup, looking at myself in the mirror. Looking at someone else in the mirror. I don't wear makeup, ever. But I am self-conscious in other ways. This is just one way people try to “fit in” they change themselves to appeal to others. Their makeup is a mask that they hide under in an attempt to justify it, but if they look in the mirror, they are still the same people, just humiliated and ashamed.

Caption: Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 

I thought this was an interesting photograph because I liked the angle I got for the picture. I also liked it because you can see the contrast of what it’s like today and what is was like back then, yet the photographs are similar. In both pictures, the mannequins are white with blond hair. I observed in Lenox Mall that clothing stores sell their products mostly presented on white mannequins. Another reason the pictures are similar is because both show an idea of beauty that is very small. They show that people of other races don’t see themselves represented as something beautiful. In Gordon Parks’s photo the little girl doesn’t have the choice of a doll that looks like herself, and in my photo the two women don’t have a choice of wigs like their own hair.

Caption: Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006),Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

I thought about how to take the photograph for this project because I don’t know many young children. I also wanted to show how “integrated” things have become by getting a photo of kids of many different races playing together. After a while, I decided to go to a park to take the image. After driving to six parks on a nice Sunday afternoon and seeing only white children, I thought about giving up. There was obviously not much mixing of races at those parks. Finally, as a last-ditch effort, I went to the Candler Park playground expecting to see only whites there as well. To my surprise, the kids there weren’t segregated as they were at the other parks. I saw white and black children swinging from the jungle gym. I snapped a few photos and left, happy that there was some equality in Atlanta.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006), Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-shopping, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

To re-create this picture, I chose to do a more modern take on the message Parks was trying to convey in his original photo. I knew I wanted to use my friend Ahalya as my model very early in the creative process, because she has been so open in her writing about growing up feeling different because of her skin tone and feeling the need to assimilate to white standards of beauty.

Originally, I thought about having Ahalya sitting in front of a computer screen glowing with images of blonde-haired, blue-eyed women, or to have her do the same thing with an iPhone. I realized that might not be the best way to get the message across in the raw way I wanted to. My third idea, and the one I stuck with, was to literally project these images of other women onto Ahalya. This really captured what I was trying to say with the picture in a much more stark, and accessible way.

My eighth grade literature students recently read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is set in 1940’s Alabama, a time and place scarred by the intractable twins of poverty and racism. When I learned the High Museum was exhibiting Gordon Parks’ powerful photographs of segregation in Alabama during the 1950’s, I wanted my students to experience the way a visual artist could communicate the same themes as a writer.

For our visit to the High Museum of Art, I designed an activity to help the students deeply engage with the exhibition. First, they walked around the entire exhibition, scanning each photograph to absorb the overall impact, much as one might read an entire novel without pausing. Next, they went back to a few photos that spoke to them, observing more closely. Finally, they each chose one photo for further study, just as students choose a quotation, character, or theme of a novel as the subject of an essay. Each student had an iPad loaded with fifteen questions to draw further attention to the details of the chosen photo. Questions ranged from asking students to notice clothing, weather, and contrast, to asking them to describe their emotional responses to the photo. I wanted them to pay close and lasting attention and give the photo the same scrutiny I ask them to give a text. I took great pleasure watching seventeen eighth graders silently observe and write for nearly an hour.

After visiting the High Museum of Art, students were required to take their own photos. They could choose to replicate their chosen Parks photo, create a photo in conversation with the Parks photo (such as responding to a theme or element of that photo), or create a photo specifically showing how things have or have not changed since Parks produced photographs for “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” They also were required to write a short piece describing their reaction to the Parks photo, how they created their own photo, and what they hoped to convey in their photo.

The results of this project exceeded my expectations. Students went to various places in Atlanta – parks, bus stops, the Amtrak station, the Open Door Community, Lenox Mall. Some took photos in their own homes or neighborhoods, using siblings or parents as models. Most used only a phone camera to capture their subjects; a few used digital cameras or set up special lighting. Each took multiple shots to get the one perfect shot, just as they might revise their writing.

Young adults, particularly disadvantaged youth, often struggle, and lack opportunities, to express themselves. Homeless youth can feel mute and powerless. Translating the feelings of chaos and the burdens they carry into orderly sentences can be an excruciating task.

The workshop organized here at the High Museum was developed with the hopes of creating a safe space for these teens to express themselves. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words: although self-expression can often present itself as a challenge, art can offer a unique and powerful platform for sparking discussion. Our topic for their visit was to explore how colors can convey emotions. Color is an almost universal experience and has been used by artists to carry meaning and emote on their behalf for centuries. We felt that color would make both an accessible lens for viewing artwork and an entry point for discussion during our tour.

My group was quiet and a little hesitant at first. All were first time visitors to the museum, my favorite kind. Walking through the Stent Wing, they stared up, wide eyed and open mouthed as the sunlight filtered through the glass panes four stories above them and rested on their faces.

As the elevator doors closed behind us, I explained that we would be exploring color and emotions in art. But before we dove into the galleries, I wanted to open with something a little more familiar.

I started with the walls. White. I asked: “What does white mean to you?”

I was impressed by the depth and breadth of their shyly offered answers: “Serenity, purity, cleanliness, a blank slate.”

“How do white walls make you feel?”

A few more spoke up, “Sanitized, cold, impressive, perfection.”

My heart sunk.

Youth who once felt voiceless here had the opportunity to speak. They were able to speak in a space that, despite our efforts as museum educators to facilitate warm feelings, open up dialogue and create opportunities to engage, is a space that often thwarts us. White walls, although good as a blank slate, can also leave people feeling marginalized.

“Why would we choose white walls for an art museum?”

After a pause, one teen replied, “They can act as a frame, they aren’t distracting.”

I smiled.

Philip Guston (American, born Canada, 1913 – 1980), Painter, 1959, Oil on canvas

To dive into color, we naturally chose to visit examples of modern art from the museum’s permanent collection, works that often inspire the response, “I just don’t get it.” Sitting on the floor looking up at Philip Guston’s Painter, we talked about what we saw. I didn’t tell them the artist’s name or background, or even the title of the piece. I simply invited them to look and to talk.

They felt and saw a great deal, and they shared these feelings: “Heavy, dark, angry.”

Why? “The colors. The messy brushstrokes.”

One young woman was quite combative in her language. I loved her. “I just don’t get why this is in an art museum. What does the label say? Who was he? Why is his work in a museum?”

I finally acquiesced and read the label.

It included a quote by Harold Rosenberg, a writer and art critic for the New Yorker who coined the term “action painting.” It read, “A painting that as an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist…The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”

The experience I had with these students not only allowed them to convey their feelings, but also helped me to begin to understand their perspectives. Many of these youth have entered into darkness I could never feign to understand. The tempestuous colors of Guston’s Painter, however, helped me begin to learn more about them and their experience of the world. We were able to share a common ground: Here at the museum we came together to unravel and interpret the common experience of color, of gesture, of joy of process and the intrinsic beauty of materials.

Mark Rothko (American, 1903–1970), #73, 1952, Oil on canvas

It is so terribly simple on paper. But staring up at Mark Rothko's #73 and asking “Why?” leads to the plumbing of deep personal truths.

I spoke to them about how modern art was like poetry; these paintings embody the elegance and challenge of saying the most with limited materials. By limiting the viewer’s experience to nonrepresentational imagery, they are being offered a haiku rather than a tome. How did the vibrating slabs of color in the Rothko translate to my group of six?

“Warm, hungry, peaceful, sunrise…Lion King.”

They compared Rothko to Guston, speculating about their personalities. They decided that Rothko must have been very “chill,” and that Guston seemed more energetic and moody.

Like many hundreds, maybe thousands, before us, the more we looked at #73, the more we found.

When the first flippant, “Why?” at the beginning of our tour that was lobbed at Painter transformed into an awe-filled “Why?” while standing before the Rothko, I realized what a powerful experience this had been for all of us.

Working with young adults and art, I often think of my favorite quote by Emily Bronte: “I have dreamed dream in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”

After a tour or outreach I sometimes ask myself, “But really, did we help them, did we teach them?”

I think of my group from Covenant House, and of how long we stood staring at Rothko #73, peering deeper and deeper into the translucent layers of color, and looking further into ourselves. I wonder: how did the image stain their consciousness?

I saw the first effects in the art room at Covenant House, where I hauled out the paint, colored pencils and stencils. In response to the tour, they were given the assignment to depict an emotion, mood or memory, and to do so without using representational images.

Some made puddles of envy and smears of confusion. The girl who earlier asked “Why?” struggled with her stencil set, asking several times for a fresh sheet of paper to start over. I encouraged her to let go, and just to enjoy the act of painting. “Don’t try to make something,” I said, “Remember the artists we saw?” I urged her to let the movements and colors translate into her intentions on their own.

She grabbed a bottle and squirted a blob on to her paper, then jabbed it with her paintbrush. She smiled. Out came a second tube, and then a third. She became reckless and exuberant in her application. She mixed, smeared and piled on more paint than the paper could handle, and still added more and more. We needed to get this girl a canvas. When asked to present at the end, her paper buckling under the weight of the paint, she said triumphantly, “This is how I feel right now. Mixed up.”

I know everyone here at the High Museum is so excited for Los Trompos after seeing the immense success of Mi Casa, Your Casa! Certainly, the two projects have a lot of similarities, but I am curious what might be different for you in this second iteration. Has the vision for your work changed or grown at all since producing the Mi Casa installation?

As you mention, the two projects were meant to have similarities; they were conceived as a first and second stage. In the second phase, we wanted to create a more motion-oriented experience, a very playful space where people can interact among themselves and the pieces, to share moments and experiences, to generate a colorful and joyful space.

What drew you to model these structures off the shape of spinning tops?

In this case, the concept behind Los Trompos is based on an approach of traditional toys, their colorful expression and the way they are constructed. We wanted to talk about the traditions and skills of the craftsmen in Mexico, as an inheritance of our culture, specifically the weavers. We like the idea of translating these techniques into new symbols.

What are some of the other inspirations for this project, and for your work in general?

We are inspired by ordinary objects that surround us. We are influenced by our context and our every day activities which allows us to visit and share with different cultures and different individuals. We are inspired by art, music, architecture, books and the city itself.

One of the amazing things about the work you do is that you aren't only designing objects but you are, in a way, designing experiences and interactions between people. What do you see as the relationship between design, craft, community, and social engagement?

We firmly believe that these are the goals of design: to weave and generate interactions, human connections and emotions, to relate to users, and to enhance and translate our inheritance and skills into new expressions. We are very interested in exploring the way each individual can relate with the same piece in different ways by responding to issues of individuality and collective consciousness.

What drew you to an interest in making public installations?

We as designers have a responsibility towards society to use our know how to create better communities, better cities, and to improve our experience as humans in this world.

Is there a political message or element of social practice to your work, vision, and/or process?

To promote collective consciousness.

In other projects you have completed, it feels as if you are very much in dialogue with Mexican community, history, and local culture. How does the legacy of traditional Mexican craft and design inform your work?

In many ways, we love our country, our people, and our roots. We believe in the possibilities that we have as a culture with many stories to tell and talent to share. But for sure, what we aim for the most is to translate this inheritance into new languages.

How does this interest and understanding of your own culture translate when working on projects in other cities or other countries?

What drew you to get involved in the Michael Lin project?

The drawing and painting club at Georgia State was my opportunity to show my dedication as an artist. My professors noticed as I committed to the club and began planning art shows for the student body. I became very invested in collaborating with other artists and just being in the presence of joyful creativity.

Tell us a bit more about your own artistic practice.

I love painting and studying color. In my work, I play with the concept that the mind is a garden where seeds are planted, tended to, and harvested. Being trained in drawing and painting, I can quickly manifest my ideas on paper using water-based media. I am able to employ drawing and painting to realize symbols which become the seeds that I hope to one day harvest.

Some of my "idea" harvests include creating a community garden and hosting art shows in my home. Both of these experiences stem from an interest in relational aesthetics, collaboration, and social practice.The garden connects me to myself so that I can bring my full self to being with other artists and "dream of doing something that's more social, more collaborative, and more real than art," to quote the artist Dan Graham.

Do you see any relationship between the work you do as an individual and the work you are doing as a part of this collaborative project?

There is something very beautiful about the affinities between my work and this collaborative project I've been able to participate in. For the Michael Lin project, we are working with traditional painting techniques to re-create an image that already exists in a new context. Some of my training as a painter includes teaching acrylic painting to others by recreating pre-existing paintings. I have also studied calligraphy in China, where I used the same types of brushes that we are working with for this project! I use Chinese calligraphy brushes for the watercolor elements of my work.

Micheal Lin brings artists together to take part in the creative process, which is very important to my own productivity. It is very important for me to achieve the creative safe haven such as we have in this project. Together, we are weaving together a creative community; this is the same impulse that has pushed me to host art shows in my home.

One of the interesting aspects of this project is its emphasis on collaboration and community. In what ways do you see art as a vehicle for collaboration and community engagement?

Art is a way for artists to engage with community. Through this project, we are creating a social experience that is positive, beautiful, and interactive. I believe in our responsibility as humans to take time to be with and care for one another and art creates the perfect space for allowing and accepting one another.

How do you envision visitors connecting with this work within the museum? What messages do you see the work conveying?

The scale and detail of these pieces is recognized as time, synergy, and effort by visitors to the physical museum as well as visitors experiencing the work on digital platforms. The interactive floor piece conveys the energies of the artists who collaborated to create it. The interactions that took place during the creation of the work determine the message of the final piece. That is the beauty of painting: every paint stroke conveys an attitude or thought pattern. As we worked on the floor together, we connected to one another and I envision the audience similarly connecting with one another in space and time on this meditative work of art.

What has it been like collaborating with other artists in the production of this project? What have been some highlights? Some challenges?

What drew you to get involved in the Michael Lin project?

I’ve always admired Lin’s work, so it was pretty easy to say yes. He is well-known for his large scale installations which is what I love to do. I’m always interested in other artists' processes, and I knew I’d be able to learn a lot working on this project.

Tell us a bit more about your own artistic practice.

My work is grounded in the artists who’ve come before me and those working today. From the beginning, I’ve made a point to look deeply at other artists and learn as much as I can. I'm always researching somebody and learning everything I can from them.

In addition to studying other artists, I make a point to make art daily. Even if ninety-five percent of what I make is never seen, for me, the process of creating is important. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to say and normally have a good idea of how I want things to look before I start.

It’s frustrating when things don’t turn out the way I want them, but I’ve also learned that sometimes the so-called mistakes end up taking me in a new and even better direction.

Do you see any relationship between the work you do as an individual and the work you are doing as a part of this collaborative project?

Absolutely. Two of the biggest similarities that I see between my work and Lin’s is that we both use floral motifs and love to work large scale. Of course, Lin has had a lot more experiences than I’ve had and is much better at using color. I hope to remedy both of these issues.

One of the interesting aspects of this project is its emphasis on collaboration and community. In what ways do you see art as a vehicle for collaboration and community engagement?

My first mural was in 2014 for Living Walls in Atlanta. I thought that I was going to show up and put my art on a wall. Instead, I spent two weeks really getting to see the impact that art can have.

First, there was a daily stream of people who lived in the neighborhood who took the time to come to the site to tell me how much they loved the painting and to thank me for bringing my art to their community. Many of them visited multiple times and I really got to know them and their stories. They were genuinely excited that I was there doing something for them.

Then we had this amazing group of volunteers. People who were willing to come out in the heat and humidity for free to help me realize my vision. I was just hoping a couple of my friends and my family would help out, so having complete strangers show up was a really nice surprise, especially since most of them knew my work and chose to be there.

It was a humbling experience. I've always had a deep connection to art, but this was the first time that I realized that what I create can impact others. This experience showed me that art has the power to bring people together and elevate how they feel not only about themselves, but also about their communities.

How do you envision visitors connecting with this work within the museum? What messages do you see the work conveying?

People are used to seeing art on walls that they aren’t allowed to touch, so I can’t wait to see how people react when they are actually able to walk on this painting and touch it. For many people, it’s going to be the first time they’ve been able to interact with art in this way, especially in a museum. I hope it helps people realize how intrinsic art is to our world and that the installation narrows the gap between art as a special object and art as a part of our everyday life.

So far, what has it been like collaborating with other artists in the production of this project? What have been some highlights? Some challenges?

Making art can be kind of lonely, so the highlight for me has been working with the artists who are part of this project. It’s nice to have other people around to bounce ideas off of and to help solve problems as they arise. We’ve had a good time, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know them better and hear how they channel their emotions into the art they make.

Artist Michael Lin. Photograph originally published on the AJC Blog.

Michael Lin is a Taiwanese conceptual artist currently living and working in Shanghai and Brussels. He was born in Japan, raised in California, and returned to Taiwan in 1993 after graduating from the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena. Much has been written about this pinning to or, rather, unpinning of Michael Lin from various locations, construing him as a wanderer and drawing parallels to the nomadic lifestyle that is, in the words of Annette Tietenberg, "now the red flag of world experience in the contemporary art scene." Although this tendency to view him — and by extension, the larger contemporary art world— as reified globalization is correct, Michael Lin's installations are, by nature of their site-specificity and familiar motifs, of a more intimate scale. They are domestic, accessible, and vernacular. To encounter his work is to be instantly at ease, like traveling a great distance only to find someone who speaks with your accent.

Michael Lin’s “Utah Sky” being installed in the High Museum’s Stent Atrium

Lin began developing his most recognizable style between 1994 and 1996 while working and tending bar at IT Park Gallery in Taipei, which afforded him the opportunity to watch others interact with art leisurely and at ease. "It became clear how important the audience was and the way they interacted with art," Lin explained in a 2008 interview with Jerome Sans. To bring his audience into his space, he began painting floral motifs and patterns lifted from traditional dowry cloths: "They felt at ease to enter the work," explained Lin, "It was something that they were familiar with." His work, then, has primarily become about finding the right language to engage his audience.

In "Utah Sky (Blue Curve)," currently being installed on the floor of the High Museum’s Robinson Atrium, Michael Lin adapts his typically rectangular floor painting to the architectural language of Robert Meyer's original design. The curved shape also speaks directly to the Ellsworth Kelly works in the High Museum’s collection. This effortless merging of his style with that of the space proves inviting: "It’s culturally specific, but at the same time something that we all share," explains Lin.

Though it is not the only reason we approached Michael Lin to propose this collaboration, his practice of social engagement certainly reflects the High’s curatorial mission to highlight work that reaches across and beyond the white-cube of the museum and invites community participation. Michael Rooks, the Wieland family curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, also sees Lin's decision to work with motifs and themes often elided from modern art — the domestic, the ambient, the decorative — along with his use of non-gallery spaces, that is, in Lin's words, "inclusive spaces [that] create an opening," as rich forms of resistance. Through these inclusions, the work resists the reductive divisions that exist between high and low art, eastern and western art, the intellectual and the sensual, the museum and the community.

A group of seven local artists, hired to work with Lin and his studio to produce the work, hand painted the panels for the installation.

The execution of these installations, which frequently spill over floors and wrap entire facades, requires a dedicated team of traveling assistants, local painters, and museum staff. Success comes with the immense time being given by each member of the team; in this way, the community realizes the work together. The production size resembles the "all over" paintings of Abstract Expressionist artists and the industrial painters of the 1960s however, the tone is quite different and affecting. The final pieces are works of sublime beauty given from the artist, from the painters, and from the museum, to the community. The exchange is one freely given. It is an intimate exchange that takes place from hand to hand, because, as curator Ogawa Mitsuyo has noted, "Taiwanese textiles have always been handmade, Lin refuses to adopt mass production methods, and applies paint by hand when producing his art."

For the theoretically inclined reader, the intervention of exchange value is further explored in the writing of Mei-Lin Liu, Annette Tietenberg, and Hou Hanru, all of whom trace Lin’s work against ideas outlined in Derrida's "Given Time I: Counterfeit Money." Embedded in Tietenberg's work is also Deluze's "Nomadic Thoughts," and shades of the Frankfurt school. I also recommend the work of Kim Sunhee and Nanjyo Fumio, both of whom contextualize Michael Lin and East Asian contemporary art in a less western framework. Michael Lin's influences include Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Franz West, Elaine Scarry, and Taiwanese New Wave Cinema.

Alexander Gardner, A Burial Party on Battlefield of Cold Harbor, Virginia, 1865

Matthew Brady was one of the first photographers to begin documenting the war. Brady left his profitable portrait business in New York and, without any financial backing, embarked on an extensive documentary project. Brady invested over $100,000 of his own money to outfit his team of twenty photographers— which included O’Sullivan, Gardner, and Barnard— many of whom were former employees of his portrait business. Brady was the first photographer to capture images of dead soldiers in America. Just two days after the battle of Antietam, where over 23,000 were killed, Brady and his team documented the aftermath. The harrowing collection of twenty-one photographs was displayed in a New York gallery just a few weeks later. One critic from the New York Times commented that it was as if the photographer had “brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets.”

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Antietam Dead, 1862

These early examples of war photography set a precedent for the coming generations. In recent years, photographers like Kael Alford have embarked on dangerous and intrepid documentary projects in international zones of conflict. Alford, an independent journalist, traveled to Iraq to photograph the aftermath of the U.S. military invasion in 2003. Working outside of the confines of the U.S. military’s official embedded journalist program, Alford’s photographs provide a nuanced account of the conflict. Whereas much of the media coverage of the war focused on the impact of the war on American soldiers, Alford’s images captured the daily reality of Iraqi citizens living and dying amid immense social and political upheaval. Writing about her work, Alford has said:

“I consider these photographs invitations to the viewer to learn more, to explore the relationships between public policy objectives and their real-world execution and to consider the legacies of human grief, anger, mistrust and dismay that surely follow violent conflict. I hope that these images will also provide a window on the grace of Iraq and perhaps help to give a few of these memories a place to rest.”

Kael Alford, Shoala, 2003, Archival digital print

Alford’s testimony shares something with her photographic predecessors: a desire to reveal the continuous impact and devastation of war on people and places. As another contemporary photographer in the High Museum’s collection, Sally Mann’s, work suggests, the historical memory of war and destruction continue to endure in the present. Her haunting photographs of Civil War battlefields evoke some of the loss, pain, and even violence embedded in these historical sites. While the passage of time has served to visibly erase much of this traumatic evidence, Mann’s evocative and somber images conjure the invisible scars and enduring darkness of history. In Untitled (Antietam #1)(2000), Mann returned to the same battlefield photographed by Brady, Gardner, and O'Sullivan over a century before when they captured “live” images of the Civil War. Using the same collodion wet-plate method employed by Brady and his colleagues to produce photographic negatives, Mann’s quiet, solemn images look to the past as a means for reflecting on the continued legacies of violence, war, and conflict that endure in our present.

The text of McQueen’s quilt is drawn from recollections by former slaves and their children, which were documented in the 1930’s as part of the Federal Writers’ Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Alongside these testimonies, McQueen incorporates photographic transfers of her own enslaved ancestors. The photographs come from a series of fifteen daguerreotypes of five individuals made on a South Carolina plantation in 1850 by a local photographer named Joseph Zealy. The photographs were commissioned by a Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz, who was seeking visual “evidence” to prove his theory that Africans and Europeans were of different species. When Agassiz was unable to prove this theory, the photographs were stored away and forgotten until 1975.

McQueen appropriates these forgotten photographs in her work and brings the identities, words, and subjectivities of these individuals to the fore. Together, the patches of image and text form a geometric pattern inspired by traditional African textiles from West Africa. McQueen calls her work “urban kente,” referring to the kente weaving tradition which originated in the former Gold Coast (now Ghana). During the triangular trade, textiles played a crucial role, as they served as one of the main forms of currency that Europeans and Americans used in the purchase of enslaved people.

Asante Artist, Ghana, Kente cloth, ca. 1900-1925, silk

Kente cloths, made of pieced-together strips of fabric, are often worn as festive dress for special occasions. Although kente textiles most familiarly feature black, gold, green, and red patterns (such as the above example from the High Museum’s Collection of African Art), earlier weaving traditions originating in Mali often featured cotton cloth woven in designs of indigo and white. These earlier examples, which date as far back as the 11th and 12th centuries, eventually developed into kente during the rise of the Asante (or Ashanti) Kingdom in the 18th century. In the kente weaving tradition, the colors used in the textiles are sometimes regarded as symbolic. For example, the gold may denote prosperity, red symbolizes the political and evokes anger, and white evokes the spirits of ancestors.

Born into a middle-class Delaware family, Kress built a fortune through his eponymous 5-10-25 cent stores, then a ubiquitous part of the American landscape. As his wealth grew, he developed an interest in art and purchased his first Italian masterpieces to decorate his Fifth Avenue palazzo in 1927. Only a few years after he started collecting, Kress determined to share his art treasures with the American people. One Christmas, he put Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds—now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington—on view in the window of his Fifth Avenue New York store, much to the horror of his dealer.

Photograph of Samuel H. Kress

In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression raged, Kress made his first donations to American museums. He felt that his fortune had been built from the pennies of the American people, and thus they deserved to share in its fruits. In 1932, he made one of the first major gifts to the High Museum: a painting by Italian Rococo Master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, now titled Roman Matrons Making Offerings to Juno. He donated the “instructive and educational” work, as he wrote to the museum’s leaders, out of a desire to do something “of interest and benefit to the people of Atlanta,” before all such rare paintings vanished from the art market completely. Our Tiepolo remains one of the prized objects in our collection.

That same year, 1932, Kress put together a traveling exhibition of more than fifty of his prized works. The exhibition visited twenty-four cities over the course of nearly three years, and was met with enthusiastic crowds wherever it went. Upon the paintings’ return home, Kress decided to make his entire collection permanently available to the public under the auspices of the recently founded Kress Foundation.

In the mid-twentieth century, those works of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art that resided in the United States were largely concentrated in New York and Washington. The Kress Foundation began its Regional Galleries program in order to distribute great works of Italian art to cities that otherwise did not have access to such artifacts of history. It was through this program that the High Museum received, in 1958, 27 Italian paintings and three sculptures, many of which are on view on the second floor of the Stent Family Wing.

The gift was made on the condition that the paintings be housed in a climate-controlled, fireproof building. As a result, the brick building that housed the Museum from 1955 – 1983, now enveloped by the Memorial Arts Building, was constructed.

With a tone of incredulity, the editor of the distinguished British art journal Burlington wrote of the Kress gift:

We can be sure that these altar-pieces from Italian churches, these allegorical panels from French chateaux, which now stray across the American continent like bewildered refugees, will one day work their way, like every other foreign body in this astonishing country, into the very fabric of American life.