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Discovering Connections at the Renwick

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BmoreArt’s Picks: Baltimore Art Galleries, [...]

A Visit to the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC Reveals Commonalities in Art Across Media and Time

By Brendan L. Smith

Since prehistoric times when our distant ancestors first brushed paints of burnt bones and red ochre onto cave walls, art has connected us.

Art binds us together across countries and cultures, expanding our understanding of the world, deepening our appreciation of beauty, and revealing the horrors and tragedies that reverberate across the globe. Inspiration, fascination, hope, and revulsion are all woven together in the vast tapestry of art, which explains the appeal of a new exhibition titled Connections: Contemporary Craft at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Renwick Gallery curator Nora Atkinson avoids the typical boring arrangement of craft by medium. (Let’s stick the pottery here, the glasswork over there, throw some quilts on the wall, and repeat until everyone flees for the exits.) Using colored circles on the floor and small icons on wall labels, the exhibition challenges viewers to think creatively and discover connections that link the artwork, whether it’s the relationship between a knitted Batman suit or Nick Cave’s whimsical Soundsuit.

Created from colorful crocheted doilies and cloth remnants stitched together, the Soundsuit welcomes, or confronts, viewers at the beginning of the exhibition, a silent sentinel who guards the trail of connections. As a mixed-media artist, I have always loved Cave’s soundsuits for their diverse range of materials, a stunning and at times bewildering sculptural array of embroidery, trinkets, discarded toys, beads, buttons, bric-a-brac, fake flowers, imitation fur, and a rainbow of wigs that come alive when they are worn in energetic performances.

It’s a successful marriage of form and function created by an artist who also trained as a dancer, merging two artistic worlds that don’t often meet. Cave built the first Soundsuit in 1992 in response to the Los Angeles riots triggered by the acquittal of police officers who savagely beat Rodney King. It was one of the first highly publicized recorded incidents of police brutality against unarmed black men that continues to rock the country today and galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. Using a thicket of twigs collected in a park, that first Soundsuit represented a suit of armor that protects the wearer by concealing race, age, and gender, but the Soundsuits have become more quirky and comical over the decades.

roth hopeLaurel Roth Hope, Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Carolina Parakeet, 2009

A small icon of the Soundsuit appears on a nearby wall label connecting it to Laurel Roth Hope’s Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Carolina Parakeet, a sculpture of an unloved street-scavenging pigeon disguised with a suit of colorful knitted yarn resembling the bright plumage of a Carolina parakeet.

As the only parrot species native to the eastern United States, they were wiped out almost a century ago by agricultural clearcutting and use of their feathers in women’s hats. The unusual parakeets also exhibited a rare instinctive trait of flying back for their dead and wounded, but that took them directly toward the barrels of hunters’ guns where entire flocks were often mowed down. Like the Soundsuit, the work offers a whimsical take on a serious issue about how our incremental actions can have indelible effects.

2010.20_1aMark Newport, Batman 2, 2005

Those works also are tied to Mark Newport’s Batman 2, another humorous disguise that both conceals and empowers the wearer. This suit also is made from knitted acrylic yarn, not the shiny black armored plates of manly comic books and films, so this Batman would look like a giant child wearing onesie pajamas or a skier who wanted some flair in his outerwear on the mountain.

Washington, DC, Foreclosure QuiltKathryn Clark, Washington, DC, Foreclosure Quilt, 2015

Kathryn Clark hits close to home with Washington, DC, Foreclosure Quilt. Created in 2007, the large quilt depicts a street map of D.C. with a proliferation of red boxes representing actual foreclosures caused by the U.S. financial collapse triggered by corrupt banks. The foreclosures are concentrated in Northeast D.C. where many African-American families lost their homes, presenting an understated indictment of pervasive, racially-based economic inequalities.

The exhibition of more than 80 objects dating to the 1930s will be on display indefinitely, and the show reveals the arbitrary distinctions we make between craft and fine art. Craft often is relegated to second-tier status in part because quilting, crocheting, and embroidery are traditionally associated and underappreciated as “women’s work.” But the unhelpful gender distinctions cut both ways.

Leg SplintCharles Eames and Ray Eames, Leg Splint, 1942

Wood often gets pegged to male carpenters and the utilitarian construction of chairs, cabinets, or even leg splints, such as the plywood model in the exhibition that was created in 1942 by famed furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames to help wounded WWII soldiers. The artful curves and ovals of negative space reminded me of how few products are made with care or craftsmanship anymore in our modern industrialized age. The splint is paired with Drift, Matthias Pliessnig’s undulating white oak and bamboo sculpture that is the coolest bench you will ever see if it’s craft or a captivating piece of contemporary art if you aren’t allowed to sit on it.

I broke my hip in a recent accident, so this was the first (and hopefully last) exhibition I saw from the seated height of a wheelchair. At 6 feet 3 inches tall, I’m usually looking down at artwork, but the wheelchair put me at eye level with glass cabinets, offering a more direct experience with woven baskets, a mill stone carved from redwood, and a beautiful glass from Dale Chihuly’s Blanket Cylinder Series inspired by American Indian blankets he saw while teaching at the American Indian School in Santa Fe.

2002.8.1_1aDale Chihuly’s Blanket Cylinder Series, 1984

My favorite part of the exhibition was wheeling around with my 6-year-old son. Since I am a mixed-media artist as well as an arts writer, Soren is used to getting dragged through art museums, but he was excited about this show even though he had already seen it during a special summertime trip with his first-grade teacher. Soren usually fades after 15 or 20 minutes and starts angling for the door, but he pulled me from one piece of artwork to the next, following the colored dots on the floor or carving his own path.

The exhibition wisely uses minimal wall text, which challenges viewers to find their own connections between the artwork. Too often, people are intimidated by contemporary art and don’t believe their own opinions are valid, and this show skillfully avoided that trap. Museums also need to find similar ways of engaging young audiences because the rest of us are all getting older and grayer.

*****

Author Brendan L. Smith is a freelance journalist and mixed-media artist based in Washington, D.C.  

Connections is an ongoing exhibit of The Renwick Gallery’s permanent collection. Read more about it here.

Top image is Anna Von Mertens, 2:45 am Until Sunrise on Tet, 2006     

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