Growth
Creative Growth: Dan Miller and Judith Scott Curated by Matthew Higgs March 24 to August 25, 2013, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum September 6 to November 3, 2013, The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Judith Scott, Untitled, 2002 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA
Creative Growth: Dan Miller and Judith Scott
Creative Growth: Dan Miller and Judith Scott brings together works by two artists who are closely associated with Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center: Judith Scott (1943– 2005), who worked at the center between 1987 and 2005, and Dan Miller (b.1961), who has now been working at Creative Growth’s studio for more than fifteen years. The Creative Growth Art Center was founded in 1972 by the artist Florence LudinsKatz and her psychologist husband Elias Katz, both pioneers in the arts and disabilities movement of that era. Creative Growth is one of three centers in the Bay Area founded by the Katzes—the others being Creativity Explored in San Francisco and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities (N.I.A.D.) in Richmond—that continue to serve an extended community of mentally, developmentally, and physically disabled adult artists. The Creative Growth Art Center consists of a studio art program and, since 1980, a gallery. Its mission is to establish an environment that fosters and nurtures the creative process, rooted in the fundamental idea that people with disabilities “can gain strength and fulfillment through the visual arts.” Writing in the British art magazine Frieze in September 2006, critic James Trainor observed that: “Creative Growth isn’t a hospital, a clinic or even a school in the strictest sense. No formal instruction is given, and there are no theoretical programs about how to educate the autistic or schizophrenic. What it is is an experiment, now entering its fourth decade, rooted in distinctly northern California ideas about grassroots involvement, collective creativity and social change, about giving disenfranchised people the tools, space and support to express themselves.” Each day more than one hundred adult artists, all of whom live in the immediate area, work at Creative Growth’s studios, which are housed in a former car body repair shop on Oakland’s Auto Row that Trainor described as: “a beehive of focused energy and activity . . . [that is] a lot like art school, except without the self-doubt, posing, competition, and careerism.” As the curator Lawrence Rinder observed, the centers established by the Katzes “offer an experience that is in many ways the antithesis of that envisaged by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 when he coined the term ‘outsider art’ to identify the work of artists who have no contact with the art world and who are physically and/or mentally isolated.” Indeed, from the outset the Katzes’ vision was for the art produced in these centers to be shown alongside that of other contemporary artists—without any of the typical prejudices or hierarchies that serve only to reinforce the marginalization of people with disabilities. Judith Scott was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1943 with Down syndrome. In 1987, after many years of living in isolation, Scott was introduced to Creative Growth, where for the remaining eighteen years of her life she created highly idiosyncratic objects: organic structures fastidiously assembled from found materials, that radically challenge—and actively resist—our attempts to define or rationalize them as sculpture. Working intuitively and without any apparent influences or precedents—art historical or otherwise—Scott’s works are perhaps all the more extraordinary given that she was also unable to hear or speak. At the center of each of her works is a found, often scavenged commonplace object, the significance of which was known only to Scott. Sitting at her work table in Creative Growth’s main studio space, Scott would focus on each sculpture over a period of weeks or months, slowly and methodically wrapping, assembling and making final adjustments before determining a piece was finished. The resulting cocoonand nest-like structures are of startling complexity—and originality—and provoke an almost infinite set of formal and psychological associations. Diagnosed with autism, and with few verbal communication skills, Dan Miller has developed an intensive and constantly evolving body of work that employs language as its fundamental subject and departure-point. His exquisite drawings—and more
recently paintings—typically take the form of accumulations of written descriptive texts, alphabets, and numerical sequences. (The texts and words often have strong biographical references, e.g. acknowledging specific Bay Area locales, or aspects of his immediate day-to-day life and family history.) Superimposed on top of one another, these individual words, numbers, and images start to merge, creating all-over fields of partially obscured and often illegible texts. Juxtaposing formal methodologies—such as the use of indexical language and alphabetical and numerical systems, and repeated motifs such as light bulbs and books—with dynamic, yet highly disciplined drawing and mark-making, Miller’s works intuitively combine both conceptual and expressive approaches to create a distinct hybrid form. As the San Francisco-based writer Kevin Killian observed, Dan Miller’s work “achieves a clattering poetry of infinite discrimination. Concentration often seems to go hand-in-hand with certain forms of disability, and Miller concentrates on building oneric forms into spaces of genuine rue and foreboding.” Approaching the creative act from radically different perspectives, the work of Judith Scott and Dan Miller is ultimately rooted in what might be thought of as an expanded field of “drawing.” Central to their respective approaches is an engagement with the everyday and the commonplace, evidenced in their choices of materials and subject matter, that is amplified through their respective processes of accumulation; the act of creating multiple layers in their work—whether through the use of yarn and twine, in Scott’s case, or language in Miller’s—which in turn create dense fields and structures of visual information that are simultaneously open and closed: a scenario which paradoxically serves to both elucidate and obscure the artist’s intentions. Matthew Higgs, curator
Judith Scott, Untitled, 2004 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA
Judith Scott, 1999 Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA Photograph by Leon Borensztein
Dan Miller at work, 2011 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA
Creative Growth: Judith Scott and Dan Miller has been organized by Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of White Columns, New York. Higgs has collaborated extensively with Creative Growth over the past decade, presenting the work of Creative Growth artists in exhibitions and projects in New York, Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, and Berlin. Dan Miller (b. 1961) lives in Hayward, CA, and works at Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Christian Berst, Paris, France (2012); Ricco Maresca, New York (2010); and White Columns, New York (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Create, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, CA (2011); Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); and Creative Growth, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2007.) His work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among other private and public collections.
Dan Miller, Untitled, 2011 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA
Judith Scott (1943–2005) worked at the Creative Growth Art Center between 1987 and 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include The Museum of Everything, London (2011); Museum Gugging, Vienna, Austria (2010); and White Columns, New York (2010.) Recent group exhibitions include Rosemarie Trockel—A Cosmos, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain (2012); Everyday Abstract—Abstract Everyday, James Cohan Gallery, New York (2012); Creative Growth, Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, Germany (2009); and Dereconstruction, Gladstone Gallery, New York (2006). Her work is in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other private and public collections.
Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches unless otherwise noted Dan Miller Untitled, 2006 Ink on paper 15 x 22 Private collection Untitled, 2006 Mixed media on paper 22 x 30 Collection of Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Untitled, 2011 Ink on paper 22 x 30 Untitled, 2011 Ink on paper 22 x 30 Untitled, 2012 Mixed media on paper 15 x 22 Untitled, 2012 Ink on paper 42 x 55 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA Judith Scott Untitled, undated Mixed media on paper 20 x 17 Collection of Eileen and Michael Cohen, New York Untitled, 2001 Mixed media 18 x 15 x 11 Collection of Pamela and Arthur Sanders Untitled, 2002 Mixed media 21 x 20 x 13 Collection of Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Untitled, 2002 Mixed media 4 x 14 x 14 Untitled, 2002 Mixed media 12 x 28 x 28 Untitled, 2004 Mixed media 14 x 18 x 28 Untitled, 2004 Mixed media 18 x 28 x 30 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA
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Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; Annadurai Amirthalingam, Treasurer/Secretary; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Chris Doyle; Mark L. Goldstein; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine
Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder
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Board of Trustees Marlene M. Grissom, Chair; Mary Stone, Chair Emeritus; Matthew D. Watkins, President; Patricia Johnson, Vice President; Eric Johnson, Treasurer; Lindsay Capps, Secretary; Chenoweth Allen, Natalie Bajandas, Jay Baribeau, Houston Barber Ph.D., Jamie Calzi, Meghan Doherty Ph.D, Mary Easterling, Clayton Gentile, Rick Heath, Steven Howell M.D., Priss Hovious, Jody Howard, Kimberly Jackson, Benton Keith, Kathy Lewis, Daniel Maye, Elizabeth Mays, Misty McCubbin, Leslie Millar, Martha Slaughter, Erik Smith, Lee Tatum, Sarah Willoughby, Bridgett Wilson
Exhibition programing at The Aldrich supported, in part, by Lori and Janusz Ordover, Kirsten and Andy Pitts, and Stuart and Cynthia Smith
The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft is supported, in part, by
Dan Miller, Untitled, 2012 Courtesy of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, CA
Board of Trustees