Last fall UNC grad Carolyn Janssen created three billboards featuring digitally manipulated worlds filled with marauding Amazons, in environments that were both strange and appealing. This spring we’ve opted to do something entirely new: we invited college students to submit images and ideas for billboards. And what a response we received! After sorting through all the entries, we chose three artists: Sydney Cobb (Alamance Community College), Isaiah Johnson (St. Augustine’s College), and Cindy Kohnen (Meredith College).

Cobb’s billboard, Fireflies, refers to a favorite Southern pastime. “This piece portrays a childhood memory of catching mystical fireflies in one of my grandma’s mason jars,” Cobb says. “I always loved opening the jar and watching them fly away.” Cobb notes that our current exhibition, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, provided inspiration. “My piece is a free-flowing and natural piece, much like his artwork.”

Johnson’s winning entry, One Brick, One Seed, is a photographic manifesto about the linked urban and natural landscapes. “I didn’t want to be literal with nature and all the beautiful aspects of it, but to show the evolution of today’s world through one brick and one seed,” Johnson says. “This piece was inspired by the beginning of life itself, the buildings we live in, and the hands that built them. From that first hammer or screw, their constructions offer limitless inspiration. The components of this piece are the forest and the cityscape. The trees were placed above the buildings to highlight the line between two different worlds that are also closely related.”

Kohnen’s Cycles presents, in her words, “the different stages of life after death.” Kohnen explains, “I chose the white and pink petals to show the beauty in life but paired these elements with dirt to convey the sense of a fallen petal to the ground. As spring turns to fall, leaves also observe the remaining life in nature’s dying elements. The third [segment] shows the reincarnation of the dead petals and leaves through the image of live mushrooms and their roots. The repetition of the circular formation created with grass embraces earth’s life cycle. I used color throughout this series to depict and stages of human life, starting with birth, softness, and purity, and ending with wisdom, age, and decomposition.”

Congratulations to our three winners, and thanks to all our participants! Be sure to explore our Museum Park to view these billboards, and come back in the fall to experience a new round of Park Pictures.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Images and captions:

Top: Sydney Cobb, Fireflies, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Sydney Cobb

Cindy Kohnen, Cycles, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Cindy Kohnen

Isaiah Johnson, One Brick, One Seed, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Isaiah Johnson

It’s that time of year again, dear readers! With the change of the seasons comes a new edition of our billboards project, Park Pictures. We’ve been promoting Park Pictures here on Untitled for more than two years now, and we’re still going strong! As you may recall, our Pictures are three “billboards” installed along the paved walking trails, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. These billboards change regularly to feature new works by different artists, both from North Carolina and elsewhere.

Last spring Anthony Goicolea created three billboards in conjunction with his solo exhibition Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea. This time around we’ve commissioned three works by California-based artist Carolyn Janssen, who completed her master of fine arts degree at UNC–Chapel Hill in spring 2011. Janssen’s works are digitally crafted worlds created by the expert superposition of images from Janssen’s own daily environment, including multiple representations of herself. This consistent layering allows the artist an element of control as she focuses on the process itself. “I used individual objects in the same way I would use a single brushstroke,” Janssen notes, “building each scene mark by mark.” Janssen’s knowledge of art shines through in her works, which are reminiscent of traditional landscape painting as well as the complex scenes of Bosch and Breughel. The images also refer to video game worlds and science fiction tableaux, which keep Janssen’s works rooted in pop culture.

The subject matter of Janssen’s billboards pertains to an imaginary dystopic society populated solely by Amazon-esque women who, the artist notes, “question and commandeer the landscape, engaging in narratives and mini-dramas, in which they build, fight, kill, and rest. At times calm, at times acting in apprehension to a present or past disaster, the figures reflect on a landscape broken, uncertain, and strange.”

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Last fall, Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker shook things up by riffing on three popular paintings from the NCMA’s American collection. This spring, we highlight three photographic works by Brooklyn artist Anthony Goicolea. Goicolea’s billboards coordinate nicely with the solo exhibition of his works, Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea, which will be on view in the East Building through July 24. The artist has long been interested in fabricating images of new, fantastical spaces that are familiar yet strange, enticing yet unsettling. The photographs the artist chose for Park Pictures stem from a series examining issues of environmental destruction, globalization, and the influence of humanity on the world at large. In addition to being inspired by the world around him, Goicolea also takes cues from art history. As he notes, “I’m influenced by the tradition of the sublime in 19th-century American landscape paintings,” much as Nancy Baker had been in our previous billboard series. Goicolea continues, “My series of photographs treat their environments as hyper-exaggerated frontiers … providing physical evidence and visual proof of an ongoing past narrative.”

Guardian features a snowy scene, completely populated by dogs that dwell amid the ruins of a colorful town. As such, it contrasts starkly with the verdant, lush surroundings of the Museum Park in springtime. Guardian can be seen in a different context in Alter Ego. Similarly, Ocean and Ghost Ship reveal water-based scenes that contrast with the types of landscapes in the Museum Park itself. Overall, the artist noted that his rationale for choosing images for Park Pictures was simple: “I thought it would be interesting to present a landscape within a landscape.” The novelty of the Park Pictures project was certainly an enticement for the artist. “I have never had any outdoor work presented before, but it has always been a bit of a fantasy of mine! I love the idea, and I am excited to see the billboards actualized.”

Anthony Goicolea, Guardian, 2008, digital print on vinyl. Photo credit: twbuckner via the NCMA Flickr group.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

In the fall of 1944 in the fifth year of the Second World War Valentiner wrote an essay in the Art Quarterly on the reclusive visionary artist Morris Graves.

Our whole existence has been weighed down by the horrors of war to such a degree that we have forgotten how necessary to the balance of our life is the aspect of untouched nature, of nature unaware of and unconcerned with human struggle.  There is only one thing that can save man from himself—his contact with nature. When we look up from our work at a bright moment nothing grips our heart more than a glimpse of the splendor of her colors and her forms, than the awareness of the power of her growth.  It does not need to be a glance into the crater of a Mount Vesuvius….  It is sufficient to become conscious that in the beauty of a flower, in the song of a bird, there is something more wonderful than all the mechanization of the world of which we are so proud.  But we people of the cities where wars are conceived, believe this truth only if it is explained to us by the artist-prophets who with their deeper insight into nature speak so convincingly that we cannot help but listen.

W.R. Valentiner, “Morris Graves,” The Art Quarterly 7 (Autumn 1944), 251.

The latest installation features work by Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker. You may be familiar with Baker’s work; her painting The Betrayal is part of the Museum’s permanent collection and is on view on Level A in East Building.

Nancy’s billboards are fun and funky, an interesting take on existing works. “Borrowing from three exalted artists from the NCMA’s American collection, mingling highbrow and lowbrow taste, I offer up three reinvented and reconfigured tableaus of the American tradition of landscape painting,” Baker says.

Her willing (or unwilling) subjects? Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls, Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador, and Inness’s Under the Greenwood. But viewers might not recognize them—the paintings have been bisected and then digitally reflected back onto themselves, as if by a funhouse mirror or a kaleidoscope. Suddenly something familiar becomes something new, strange, and even a bit disturbing. Surrounding the altered landscapes is a border of jewels, flowers, staring eyes, and other strange elements, acting, as Baker puts it, as “a Looney Tunes memento mori, in stark contrast to the dreamy realism of the [original] paintings.”

Baker links this memento mori theme with the title of her billboard series: Home Sweet Home. As she notes, “The title, appropriated from John Howard Payne’s ubiquitous poem, reminds us that ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ However, the idea of home in [works such as] Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador has become an historical rendering of a world now on the verge of self-destruction. Through no fault of Mignot, this unreliable narrative of fecund nature is testimony to our desire for fantasy. Like the oeuvre of Norman Rockwell, art can be the greatest and most convincing propaganda.” Baker’s works allow us to ponder important questions of reality vs. fiction, and how that distinction—or lack thereof—affects the natural world today.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Our Bierstadt has a history in contemporary art! Check out this post from 2008, which links the painting to an artist at the Brooklyn Museum–Ed.

As the curator of contemporary art, I try to see as much current art as I possibly can—visiting artists’ studios, going to gallery and museum shows, attending art fairs, looking at art magazines and auction catalogues, and reading online journals and blogs. I am always looking for ideas for potential acquisitions for the Museum’s permanent collection and ideas for exhibitions and artists’ projects. The contemporary art world is huge and virtually impossible to keep up with without traveling. I try to go to New York several times a year, occasionally get to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, and have often wished I could go to some of the international art fairs and exhibitions.

Thanks to generous funding provided for curatorial travel and research by a Mellon Foundation Bridge Grant, I traveled to Brazil in September for the first time.

The purpose of the trip was to attend the opening of the Bienal de São Paulo (a gigantic international contemporary art exhibition), to see a new sculpture park (Inhotim in Belo Horizonte), and to visit museums, galleries, and artists’ studios in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The contemporary art world has become increasingly global over the past decade, and the who’s who in the art world (artists, gallery dealers, collectors) are contemporary nomads who circle the globe, going to one art fair after another, trying to keep up with the next new thing—São Paulo in September, Frieze Art Fair in London in October, Istanbul Biennial in October, Art Basel Miami Beach in December, the Armory Show in New York in March, Art Basel in Switzerland in June, Venice Biennale in June . . . and on it goes.

In its 60^th year, the Bienal de São Paulo featured 161 artists from all over the world and filled a three-story convention center. During the two days in São Paulo, I also went to several contemporary galleries, the state art museum, and the studios of several artists, including the painter Caetano de Almeida. In Rio de Janeiro, I visited an incredible private collection of contemporary Brazilian art (in a penthouse overlooking Copacabana Beach) and went to several galleries and museums, including Museu é o Mundo, which had an amazing Hélio Oiticica show, and the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi, which was designed by the world-renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. It is a fantastic space-age building that looks as if it belongs in a Jetsons cartoon.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to Inhotim, a new sculpture park in Brumadinho, which felt like the middle of nowhere after an hour and a half bus ride from Belo Horizonte. This 3,000-acre sculpture park and botanical garden is filled with thousands of unusual plants (including one of the world’s largest collections of palm trees—over 1,300 species!) and over 500 works of art by international contemporary artists. As you wander through the park, on foot or by golf cart, you come across outdoor sculptures by artists including Dan Graham, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Olafur Eliasson, and Yayoi Kusama, among many others. You can also wander in and out of mini galleries or pavilions that are scattered throughout the park and feature highly ambitious and complicated artworks by current contemporary art “stars” including Janet Cardiff, Doug Aitken, and Matthew Barney.  The Brazilian collector who built the park, Bernardo Paz, invites artists to make their “dream project” at Inhotim, and it appears that the sky is the limit. Chris Burden’s immense Beam Drop consists of 71 steel beams dropped by crane into a cement foundation. Matthew Barney’s project includes a massive mirrored double dome housing an installation with a gigantic dirt-encrusted backhoe and a separate gallery that features a video filmed during Carnival.

Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion is a round, transparent glass pavilion perched on top of a hill. You enter an empty room with a 360-degree view of the landscape that is filled with an ambient sound that is constantly changing—rumbling, whispering, groaning, creaking. The sound comes from a live microphone that has been placed at the bottom of a 600-foot-deep hole in the middle of the pavilion and amplified in the space so that you are listening to the inside of the earth in real time.

My two favorites were Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s sound installation, 40 Part Motet, which consists of a room filled with 40 freestanding speakers playing the Salisbury Cathedral Choir performing a 16^th-century motet, and Yayoi Kusama’s floating garden installation, Narcissus Garden, made up of 500 stainless steel spheres that float in a rooftop water garden, constantly moving and re-forming, and reflecting you back to yourself, like Narcissus, hundreds of times over.

The NCMA’s Museum Park seems tiny in comparison to Inhotim, but I came back full of ideas and plans for future park projects. Next stop, Miami in December.

Sometimes I need a little extra inspiration to lace up my running shoes and go for a jog. With the scorching summer temperatures giving way to cooler weather, I changed into my running clothes after a recent day of work and headed out to the Museum Park. I grew up visiting the Museum, but the farthest I had ever gotten into the Park was the theater.

Eager to get outside and squeeze a bit of exercise into my schedule as a journalism student at UNC-CH and marketing intern at the Museum, I chose the Explorer Trail. The scenic 2.3-mile path winds past the Museum, beside the newly terraced pond, along rolling hills, and through shady woodlands, offering a comprehensive view of the Park.

Dramatic works of art scattered throughout the grassy fields and along the tree-lined trails make the Park a unique setting for running. I stretched on benches constructed from remnants of the former youth prison that once stood on the grounds, pounded across pavement tattooed with floral designs, and ran between skyscraping circles. The art kept the run interesting as the works appeared in the distance, serving as an incentive to push forward. A monumental human form sprawled across the top of a ridge, while another one curled up into a ball in the woods. Towering sculptures like surreal tree trunks made for a dreamlike landscape. I had seen many pictures of the Park before, but the pieces were much more powerful in the natural setting. And for a tired runner, they offered a great excuse to rest and take a breather.

The trail was fairly quiet, with the occasional bicyclist whizzing by me on the downhill and a few fellow runners passing by with a casual wave. The scenery and seclusion the Museum Park offers is just the incentive I needed to get out and enjoy this refreshing fall weather.

The second phase, funded by a grant from the Clean water Management Trust Fund, is a very innovative retention of storm water run off from the new building, landscape and adjoining parking areas into a series of planted terraces. It is under construction now and will be partially planted this fall, with the balance planted in May/June. By October 2010, we will be able to dedicate this ambitious project as part of a progressive green initiative at NCMA.

One sculpture in the Park that has always inspired my contemplation is Steven Siegel’s To see Jennie smile. This 24-foot-tall sculpture incorporated over 20,000 pounds of News & Observer newspapers. Siegel and a team of 50 volunteers spent two weeks installing the work in 2006. Community involvement is an important aspect of the artist’s work. as reflected by the title of the piece. In an interview with the artist, Siegel tells his story of a volunteer inspiring his naming of the work.
Download audio file (siegel.mp3)
Using specific materials to emphasize the ephemeral nature of our landscapes, Siegel always inspires discussion about environment and art. Visitors have often asked whether the newspapers are detrimental to the environment, as they are expected to decompose in the landscape during the piece’s lifetime. (The answer is no: the newspaper uses vegetable-based inks, and the glossy inserts were removed before installation.) I have found myself staring at the top of the sculpture among the trees and wondering if the local birds have taken part in the work as they construct their nests.

In June 2009, a conversation began among staff members regarding To see Jennie smile. We began to notice the sculpture leaning slightly to the right. Staff members of the Planning and Design, Conservation, and Curatorial departments decided to monitor the changes in the sculpture over the next six months. We photographed Jennie at various stages of deterioration and finally made the decision to remove the piece. On May 20 the NCMA staff said our goodbyes to a work of art that has delighted us, and the public. for four years.

The deinstallation took just a couple of hours and was pretty painless. After wrapping the entire piece in black landscaping fabric, the crew was able to pull the sculpture to the ground with a backhoe. The discarded newspapers and wood infrastructure were hauled off in a large truck. The staff, visitors, and the inhabitants of the Park will surely miss Jennie—especially the 3-foot-long black snake that had taken up residence inside it.

I revisited the sculpture’s footprint last week in search of remnants of the past. I performed my own little archaeological dig at the base of a tree and found small bits of Jennie. The ongoing presence of the work in the landscape—even after deinstallation—actually made me smile!

These remnants called to mind a quote in an interview with Siegel in Sculpture magazine:

“I believe that we are the landscape, not only by our physical presence, but also by the messes we leave and the way we reconfigure all of the material around us—from the roadway to the recycling of cans to nuclear waste. Our presence is there in every molecule.” Excerpt from an interview with the artist and John K. Grande, a contributing editor for Sculpture, and curator of earth art at Canada’s Royal Botanical Gardens.

André Leon Gray, The Choice is Yours, 2010, digital print on vinyl, 5 x 12 ft., Commissioned by the NCMA, funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health

Spring and summer are a great time to visit the Museum Park and discover the latest installation of the Park Pictures project. As you may remember, Park Pictures comprises three “billboards” installed along the paved House Creek Greenway. It is the second project in a continuing series of site-specific art entitled Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. The billboards change on a continual basis to feature new works by different artists.

While the last billboards featured one artist, the new set showcases three, one on each billboard. All of the artists—Stacy-Lynn Waddell, André Leon Gray, and Harrison Haynes—provide the viewer with a unique vision and interpretation. They were given freedom to design their own images without limits to a theme or guidelines, with one exception: artists were asked that their designs somehow relate to the natural environment or the park landscape.

Harrison Haynes, with Untitled (Two Hands), explores the timeless concept of our link to the natural world through a photograph featuring a man-made still life. “I’m interested in the modern human impulse to re-connect with nature,” he says, “And in this piece I want to address the potential for artificiality in fulfilling that impulse.”

In The Choice is Yours, André Leon Gray tackles a similar topic with an environmental slant. Gray’s large-scale image reproduces three mason jars used in canning or preserving food, with each holding a truly valuable treasure. The jars, Gray notes, “become a metaphorical solution to mankind’s neglect of his environment: preserve it or lose it.”

Stacy-Lynn Waddell’s work Look/See is comprised entirely of a mirrored vinyl covering, which reflects the world around it in a blurred, distorted manner. What exactly are we seeing in it? As Waddell explains, “By creating a sight of distorted reflection, I argue that we collectively grapple with determining the difference between perception and reality.”

The Art Has No Boundaries series is part of the Active Community and Neighborhood grant program funded by the John Rex Endowment through the Physical Activity and Nutrition Branch of the N.C. Division of Public Health.