The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation

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Nancy Shaver – Reconciliation


Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation

Nancy Shaver, Studio view, Jefferson, NY, 2015 Courtesy of the artist


As humans, we are hard-wired to categorize visual experience, usually on the subconscious level. One walks into a room and sees an object; is it a person, an animal, a chair? Subconsciously, we decide, with the conclusion prompting our conscious actions: if the object is a person, we might say hello; if it is a chair, we might choose to sit down. Our minds constantly process this kind of information and it informs our moment-by-moment behavior. But not all categorization is natural, the way we interpret the world is affected by our personal experiences and what society teaches us; both nature and nurture create blinders to our being freely open to visual experience. The most complicated and contradictory field of categorization exists in the interpretation of visual culture: is the object art, craft, design, decoration, utilitarian? And if it is art, is it “high” art, folk art, or merely kitsch? Lurking in this room of categorization is an 800-pound gorilla that is not often acknowledged: class. Aesthetics (and almost everything else) are tempered by the sociology of class, with some placing a porcelain urinal inscribed by “R. Mutt” on a pedestal, while others reserve that spot for a bear carved with a chainsaw. Nancy Shaver, in a career that has now spanned four decades, has consistently worked to challenge expectations on the aesthetic hierarchies found in visual culture. Her practice, which involves finding objects, making objects, and recontextualizing objects, has been informed by a critical eye that looks—and looks hard—at the culture of materiality with an attitude approaching that of an anthropologist. But Shaver’s practice is not just based in an intellectual pursuit; it is equally informed by personal experience—specifically a life that has been lived in the dichotomy between her rural, working-class roots and the high-art world that she has engaged since the 1970s. The majority of exhibitions of Shaver’s work include hierarchy-bending components, and Reconciliation is no exception, bringing together in juxtaposition sculpture (made by the artist out of found materials), works by other artists, found objects, folk art objects, and utilitarian objects. But in this instance, the collection is framed by the presence of two artists whose names have probably never been linked before: Walker Evans (1903–1975) and Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979). Evans is the American photographer who became known in the 1930s for his stark depictions of life during the Depression, particularly in the rural South; Delaunay, the French Modernist artist, was a painter and textile, fashion, and costume designer. By bringing Evans and Delaunay into this dialogue between objects, Shaver is revealing the reconciliation involving class and aesthetic values that informs both her art and her life, while acknowledging two artists whose work has impacted her own.

Walker Evans, Fireplace and wall detail in bedroom of Floyd Burroughs’ cabin, Hale County, Alabama, 1935 or 1936 Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC

Shaver began her career as a photographer in the early 1970s, when she lived in New Haven, Connecticut. During this period, she audited the classes that Walker Evans was teaching at Yale, and began a friendship based on appreciation of the vernacular. Shaver’s pictures at the time were of detritus found on the street, and this interest in the commonplace and seemingly worthless was subject matter that had long interested Evans. One of Evans’s favored subjects was hand-painted signs, and he enlisted Shaver’s help in actually cutting down and stealing signs found in both urban and rural environments. The hand-painted signs that Evans photographed and collected occupied an interesting territory: not quite folk art, but rather handmade objects that exhibited a particular type of beauty, based on their simple honesty. Included in this exhibition is Evans’s photograph Fireplace and wall detail in bedroom of Floyd Burroughs’ cabin, Hale County, Alabama (1935 or 1936). Taken in the home of a family of impoverished cotton sharecroppers, the image pictures the objects lovingly arranged by Allie May Burroughs, Floyd’s wife, around the Burroughs’s hearth: an illustrated calendar, four small ceramic or glass vessels, and a decorative cut-oilcloth mantelpiece coverlet, among other things. Allie May clearly needed beauty, even within her limited means, and made an effort to obtain it. Evans’s photographs from the Depression are usually looked upon as primarily social statements about economic and racial inequality in America, but this read overlooks the fact that Evans found grace in the people and things he trained his camera on, striving to picture the dignity of everyday human endeavor. Following in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, who found value in humble subject


matter, Evans was the first photographer to focus almost exclusively on the commonplace. Even at the beginning of her career, Shaver understood this was the artistic linage of which she was a part. Shaver moved to New York in 1976, a period that saw both the near bankruptcy of the city and the emergence of a visual culture based on the gritty D.I.Y. aesthetics of the East Village and the Bowery. Her passion for collecting objects had started in New Haven, but in New York in the 1970s she found a goldmine of the cast-off and derelict. Making objects and collecting objects began to blur in Shaver’s mind, and the found began a slow process of assimilation into her practice, leading to a gradual abandonment of photography. By this point, Shaver was entrenched in the art world, with her primarily intuitive approach being tempered by both education and the critical, intellectual atmosphere of New York. Despite the fact that she rejects art that is exclusive (primarily intellectual), she has stated, “I can never go back,”1 indicating that a reversion to a pure, naive artistic state has been rendered impossible by both her education and awareness of art history. The work of Sonia Delaunay is in many ways the antithesis of that of Walker Evans: highly refined and sophisticated, it is solidly entrenched in the high art world of 1920s and 1930s Parisian haute couture, art, and design. As exclusive as Delaunay’s practice was, its influences included the utopian side of Modernism that came out of the Arts and Crafts movement and continued into the Bauhaus, specifically the interest in merging art and everyday life. Delaunay was a radical, yet many of her influences came from folk culture. “About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants,” Delaunay stated. “When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.”2 Delaunay took this type of vernacular influence and applied it to high art, a situation that other artists would repeat through many phases of Modernism. But Delaunay was a radical in other ways too—a woman artist in the primarily male-dominated milieu of European Modernism who focused on textiles, a move that was ultimately feminist in nature. As different as Delaunay and Shaver might seem at first glance, they share a love of abstract textile design and a desire to integrate the separate fields of furniture, fabric, painting, and clothing. Interestingly, both Shaver and Delaunay brought their passions to the world of retail. Shaver opened a shop called Henry in Hudson, New York, in 1999, bringing together found objects, including folk art textiles such as embroidery, hooked rugs, and quilts; Delaunay opened Boutique Simultané at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925, where she exhibited and sold her textiles and clothing.

This exhibition, much like Shaver’s shop, has brought together a disparate range of objects: sculpture made by the artist that combines found fabric, paint, wood, and metal (among other materials); furniture; rugs; art by other artists (including Sonia Delaunay, Walker Evans, B. Wurtz, Earl Swanigan, Tracy Miller, and Shaver’s husband, John Jackson); found objects (including a fantastic coil of handmade rope from Nova Scotia, ceramic vessels, and a plastic kitchen decoration from the 1960s that resembles an antique telephone); and found photographs. Several of the objects have significant back stories that relate to Shaver’s interests, including an object made by Swanigan, a self-taught artist living in Hudson, New York,3 and a Moroccan “Boucherouite” rag rug. Swanigan, who is well-known in Hudson for his figurative paintings done on scraps of plywood and Masonite, here has taken a carpet sample and covered it with paint and bits of glued yarn. The resulting object, which is strangely ugly and beautiful at the same time, is displayed by Shaver on the wall, existing somewhere between painting and sculpture. Boucherouite rugs4 hold a particular fascination for Shaver, but not for the usual reasons. In Moroccan society, it was traditionally the Berber men who made rugs, using locally sourced wool; but in the 1960s, with nomadic animal husbandry on the decline, men left rural areas for the cities to find work and the women took over the looms. Instead of wool, the women began utilizing rags, and over the ensuing years gradually transitioned to using discarded T-shirts and other industrially made textiles imported from Europe by Oxfam and other charity organizations. The circularity of this process, involving the change in value and the sociology of material culture, appeals to Shaver: clothing, much of it barely used, is thrown away by Western consumer culture, brought to North Africa to be transformed into art, then returned to the West to be sold as a high-value decorative commodity. This brings us to Shaver’s sculpture, which more often than not utilizes fragments of used clothing fabric and other textiles. All of the American fabric that Shaver utilizes comes from two sources near her home in upstate New York: the Salvation Army in Oneonta, and Core Values, a thrift store in Stamford. Both these sources reflect the poor and lower-middle-class demographics of the western Catskills and Mohawk Valley areas, and the majority of the material she acquires there originates in the region’s “big box” stores. Shaver selects fabrics not just for the abstract patterning and color, but also for their encoded sociological meaning. For instance, included in this exhibition is the work Diamond Information, which is made of wooden blocks, dress fabric, children’s flannel pajama fabric, T-shirt fabric, flashe, acrylic, house paint, and oil pastel on paper. At first glance, the piece reads as a purely abstract composition; but on closer inspection, Shaver’s fabric choices suggest another level of interpretation: fancy dress material is


Nancy Shaver, Blue Chair as Base, 2015 Courtesy of the artist


adjacent to camouflage fabric, tweed is butted up against boy’s pajama material printed with sports motifs. There is a certain democracy at work; everything is presented and valued equally. Many artists who work with materials or images that originated in popular culture attempt to elevate them, moving them vertically from their populist, working-class roots to high-art commodity status. However, Shaver’s work suggests horizontal movement, a socioeconomic leveling where there really isn’t much of a difference between haute couture and Walmart. Besides “cheap” textile material, Shaver frequently incorporates fragments of highly refined Japanese textiles, as well as patterned fabric that she creates by drawing with a china marker on muslin. The collaged fabric-scrap nature of these works suggests quilting, and Shaver is very aware that her process relates to vernacular fabric collage; but by wrapping fabric around wooden blocks and assembling the blocks into three dimensional objects, she is declaring them more part of the world of art—not craft—a position where both making and philosophical inquiry are on an equal footing. Shaver’s free-standing works usually have textilebased elements that are elevated by metal “legs,” and often resemble small pieces of furniture, such as footstools or hassocks. Recently, she has begun placing her made objects on top of actual pieces of furniture, including chairs, integrating found with fabricated, and creating a complicated dialogue between classes of objects and styles. For instance, she might drape a

Nancy Shaver, Diamond Information, 2014 Courtesy of the artist

piece of her hand-drawn “fabric” over the back of a chair, a move which would seem natural in both a domestic and retail setting, but in an art context provocatively raises questions about display strategies and the hierarchies found in material culture. Is the chair—not made by the artist, but specifically chosen by her—merely a pedestal for the artist-made fabric drawing, or is it as much art as the drawing? The answer is that Shaver wants us to look at it as one thing, not two separate objects, a consideration that confounds expectations on both form and function. Sonia Delaunay called her approach to art making simultanéisme.5 She believed “simultaneous design” happens when individual elements—color, pattern, material—are placed next to one another and the adjacency creates new meaning in those elements. This approach echoes Shaver’s style of collage and assemblage, as well as the environment of Henry, Shaver’s shop; in both situations, meaning is generated by juxtaposition. Henry is not a separate, purely mercantile enterprise, but rather a hybrid form combining elements of Shaver’s studio practice, a retail antique and collectable shop, and public art installation. Often, objects that Shaver acquires for the shop are brought to the studio to become integrated into her sculpture. Unlike most antique shops, the decision to purchase an item to offer to the public is Sonia Delaunay, Plate 10 from Sonia Delaunay: Ses Peintures, Ses Objets, Ses Tissus Simultanés, Ses Modes, 1925 Published by Librairie des Arts Décoratifs Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1968, Accession Number: 68.580.1(10) Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image Source: Art Resource, New York © Pracusa 2015085


Nancy Shaver, Pie, 2014 Courtesy of the artist

based on Shaver’s quirky aesthetics, not the possible sales potential. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t run the shop as a business, but rather what makes it into Henry’s inventory is governed by the artist’s moral sense of authenticity. Shaver’s photograph of the window of her shop, reproduced on the cover of this publication, exemplifies her approach: a hand painted sign from a farm stand (a nod to Walker Evans) is propped up between the upside-down capitols of two cast iron columns that are festooned with floral organic curlicues (Evans also loved debased baroque ornamentation). The sign’s commanding presence in the window might confuse the passerby; what does this shop carry, produce, antiques? Or is it an antique store that also sells sweet corn? One definition of class is “a number of persons or things regarded as forming a group by reason of common attributes, characteristics, qualities, or traits.”6 Shaver’s subversion of the taxonomy of material culture consistently undermines our proclivity to assign a class to the world of made objects (and the people who make them), and in the process makes us aware that our prejudices only act to narrow the life of both the mind and the eye. — Richard Klein, exhibitions director Nancy Shaver was born in 1946 in Appleton, New York; she lives and works in Jefferson, New York.

Endnotes 1 From a conversation with the artist on February 1, 2015. The information in this essay on Shaver’s life and practice as an artist was gleaned from a series of conversations between July 2014 and March 2015. 2 Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, eds., Manifestations of Venus: Art, Gender and Sexuality (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 131. 3 Swanigan began selling his paintings on the street in Hudson in the 1990s, but now his work is found in many of the antique and collectible shops in town. “Earl is one of the most successful businessmen in Hudson,” quips Shaver. “His paintings are offered for sale in both the highest end and lowest end stores.” Shaver has collected his work for many years. 4 From the Moroccan Arabic bu sherwit (pronounced “boo-shay-REET”), meaning “a piece torn from preused clothing, scrap.” 5 Petra Timmer, Matteo de Leeuw-de Monti and Matilda McQuaid, Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay (New York: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2011), p. 10. 6 The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition (New York: Random House, Inc., 1987), p. 381.


The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. It is the only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, and throughout its fifty-year history, has engaged its community through thought provoking interdisciplinary programs.

Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/ Secretary; Diana Bowes; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Michael Joo; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine

Nancy Shaver Reconciliation Curated by Richard Klein May 3 to October 25, 2015 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in addition to significant support from its Board of Trustees, receives contributions from many dedicated friends and patrons. Major funding for Museum programs and operations has been provided by the Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts; the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation; The Leir Chairitable Foundations; the Goldstone Family Foundation; and the Anne S. Richardson Fund. Generous support for Nancy Shaver: Reconciliation has been provided by The Coby Foundation.

Alyson Baker, Executive Director Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

Cover (top) Helio Faucheux, Sonia Delaunay’s Boutique Simultané, plate 18 from René Herbst’s Devantures, vitrines, installation de magasins a l’exposition international des arts déoratifs, 1925 Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC (bottom) Nancy Shaver, Window of Henry, Hudson, NY, 2012 Courtesy of the artist

258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877 203.438.4519 aldrichart.org

Additional support for exhibitions has been provided by The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. and the SAHA Association.


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