Photo courtesy of artist
Medea by Swoon - Installation Art
Swoon's "Medea" (2017)Wood, hand cut paper, linoleum block print on paper and mylar, acrylic gouache, found object, telephones, and audio
In our increasingly anxious era, self-help nostrums of varying efficacy are almost as common as air. “No One Knows All It Takes,” running at the Haggerty Museum of Art through December 20, offers something larger by examining “the inextricable ties between personal health and collective wellness.” It’s juxtaposed with concurrent exhibitions housed on the Haggerty’s two floors, “Life Lines” and “Capture the Senses: Attraction and Horror in Early Modern Art.”
By implication, the trio of exhibits form a whole. “We made a concerted effort to program a season of mental health and wellness,” explains the Haggerty’s director, John McKinnon.
“No One Knows All It Takes” consists of work by four artists. Milwaukee’s Raoul Deal addresses the immigrants’ trauma of leaving and finding home in a series of expertly executed woodcuts. Several are inspired by the poetry of family members, others through dialogue with immigrants. McKinnon describes the latter as “collaboration.” Particularly striking is Deal’s wall-filling acrylic on canvas, Eli (2015), featuring a woman’s face, a violin cradled at her shoulder and a band of neatly written text along a bottom panel telling her story, beginning with her arrival in the U.S., age 18 months. Deal’s mixed media sculptures address those issues on a more personal level, including Woven Vessel (2000), configured as a fragile boat, and Ladder/Shovel (1991), an unusually constructed tool with a long, snaking handle.
Photo courtesy of artist
Disappearance Jail (Wisconsin) 2 by Maria Gaspar
Disappearance Jail (Wisconsin) 2 by Maria Gaspar, perforated Archival Inkjet print on rice paper 5 x 7 inches (installation dimensions variable)
Chicago’s Bryana Bibbs contributes a roomful of prints and weavings made from or replicating artifacts of her grandparents and their final months in hospice. Her grandfather’s sweater became raw material; one weaving reproduces the tile pattern on their bathroom floor. She made prints with a unique process giving impressions of hospital gowns and slippers. Chicago’s Maria Gaspar offers 113 color photographs of Wisconsin jails and prisons arranged in six horizontal bands across one wall as a mute comment on the emotional injury of incarceration. An installation by New York artist Swoon depicts home as the site of childhood trauma.
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“Life Lines” consists of abstract or quasi-nonrepresentational pictures whose presentation suggest that viewers “slow down, look at the art and be present,” McKinnon says. The exhibit includes Jean Dubuffet’s colorful morphic figures and Victor Vasarely’s Zoeld Red/Blue (1971), an op art painting of circles and squares. MERatT (1980) by Milwaukee’s Jill Sebastian resembles strips of writing melting in long columns. In addition, there are, along the route of the exhibit, “multiple stopping points, recombobulation areas” McKinnon calls them, to encourage people to stop and think.
Capturing an onrushing anticipation of doom, Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498) is the most familiar image from “Capture the Senses: Attraction and Horror in Early Modern Art.” “The curator, Kirk Nickel, looked for work that balanced beauty and horror,” McKinnon says. An unknown artist painted the compelling Richard III Visited by the Ghosts of his Victims (c. 1800), depicting the agonized tyrant gripping his bedsheet as implacable specters hover overhead. Among other inclusions from the Haggerty’s permanent collection are 18th century prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi of ancient Egyptian and Roman sites, capturing the melancholy of ruins. A similar mood is conveyed by the withering flowers of a 17th century still life attributed to Nicolas Baudesson.
An extensive series of special programs has been scheduled to accompany the fall exhibitions, including presentations by wellness experts and art therapists, a performance by dancer Catey Ott and an all-day “community retreat” (November 15) bringing together experts and the public “in a conversation around different themes of wellness,” McKinnon says.
For more information, visit marquette.edu/haggerty-museum.
Admission to the Haggerty Museum is always free.
