Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat

Since its establishment in 2002 on nearby Manasota Key, the Hermitage Artist Retreat has provided an unusual environment for creative thinkers and makers working in the visual and performing arts to take time within a natural setting to recoup, refocus, and recharge their creative energies. Unlike artist residencies that mandate the productivity of each individual’s time, the Hermitage asks only that artists determine their ideal balance between work and nature, with the sole obligation being a free public presentation about their work for the community. For most Hermitage Fellows, this radical change of environment and routine typically represents an unexpected rupture with their daily lives, irrespective of where and how they live, and this in turn affects their art in unpredictable ways. Writing from the perspective of someone who had the honor of serving for ten years on the Hermitage Artist Retreat’s National Curatorial Council, and the privilege of being a guest resident for a pair of transformative three-week stretches, there is something to be said about the physical impact that occurs when a hard-working creative person, whose typical working environment is likely a noisy metropolis, and whose typical day is a string of deadlines and interruptions, wakes up on their first morning at the Hermitage—or their eleventh morning—face to face with the splendor of the Gulf of Mexico stretching out to the horizon, and the contours of the day ahead beckoning as a mystery waiting to be revealed.

In recognition of the Hermitage’s unique contribution to the national arts scene during its 22 years of existence, I was invited by the Sarasota Art Museum to select ten Hermitage Fellows from the visual arts to return to the Sarasota region. Their return will take the form of a public presentation of their art within a group context that loosely addresses the thematic parameters of visual expression today. Within a broad range of media—painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, music, performance, conceptual art, ceramics, weaving, and printmaking—each invited artist makes a distinctly persuasive case in their work for expanding beyond conventional boundaries of style and discipline, and to touch upon themes and subjects that have affected their own lives, and through which they aspire to have a different kind of impact on their communities. Early on in the curatorial process, the overlapping use of the word “impact” to describe both the Hermitage’s effect on artists, as well as those same artists’ aspirations to reach a public outside the confines of the contemporary art world, made the title seem almost inevitable.

Of course, the word “impact” is tossed about somewhat flippantly in present-day idiomatic English, with the result that its two distinct but interconnected meanings often become blurred. In its most common application, an object, force, or living thing comes forcibly into contact with something or someone else, as in the case of the impact of my big toe hitting a chair. In its second definition, an action, person, place or

event exerts an effect or influence on some other individual or group, for instance when we speak of the impact of a beloved hit song upon its fans. Both meanings can be applied to the present circumstances, to the degree that many artists create their work in response to a collective sense of social and political crisis in the world at large. The first usage is more active—impact is what happens to you from outside—while the second implies a passive tense—impact is something you open yourself to—but both are essential to understanding how art feeds off the intensity and contradictions of contemporary life, and through that process becomes an active medium for understanding how cultural meanings are transformed over time due to shifting sociocultural mores. As a response to injustice, for example, influence may prevail over force in the end, but not until a heightened level of critical scrutiny and mediation can take place.

The work of several participating artists reflects upon core issues of history and identity, as in the case of Sanford Biggers’ loving appropriation of vintage African-American quilts. Throughout his career, Biggers has incorporated a broad range of materials, techniques, styles, and forms, but the overall motivation of his practice is his drive to reframe the role of art in discussions of race in American culture, in ways that challenge and ultimately empower. Whether it is in the form of a cast bronze sculpture or a repurposed hand-sewn quilt, his practice is typically characterized by the overlaying of forms from disparate sources. This can be seen in the colorful vertical bands that define the antique textile in his Blossom Study (2014). While very identifiable, they have also been seamlessly blended into the more painterly, abstract details that comprise roughly half of the work. Biggers also frequently appropriates the iconography of African tribal sculpture, as with the wood sculpture Eclipse (2006), in which a single carved figure has been hewn cleanly in two, with the mirrored halves separated by distance, height, and the stability of the bases on which they’re displayed. In 2010, Sanford Biggers was selected as the first visual art recipient of the prestigious Hermitage Greenfield Prize, furthering his memorable American quilt work.

During his tragically foreshortened lifetime, John Sims strove to consistently apply the rigorous conceptual apparatus of his two main interests—critical inquiry and mathematics—to his own working methodology A Detroit native who lived and worked in Sarasota most of his adult life, Sims loved to teach, collaborate and nurture the sort of discourse among his peers and students that always had the potential to generate new, concrete forms of studio and classroom engagement. A conceptual artist and politically engaged Black northerner living in the Deep South, Sims’ love of logic inspired him to confront the insidious symbolism of Jim Crow with a keen sense of how symbols function as tools of persuasion. As if testing the proposition that the Confederate flag symbolizes cultural heritage rather than racism, Sims developed his Afro-Confederate flag project as a means of demonstrating that the original’s potency

was freely available to be appropriated and transformed into a visual symbol with a precisely opposite meaning that was also less viscerally threatening to Black viewers. Extending his interpretive reach deeper into popular culture, Sims’ ambitiously produced vinyl LP, The AfroDixie Remixes, with liner notes written by the esteemed music critic Greg Tate, features a dozen interpretations of the eponymous antebellum anthem, performed within a broad range of Black musical idioms, including Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Funk, Soul, R&B, House and Hip-Hop. Deftly transforming a symbol of white nationalism into a vehicle for Black artistry, Sims’ formula for disempowering symbolic hatred remains a model for how passive resistance can be boosted by such acts of conceptual jiujitsu.

A narrative approach to generative empathy informs Chitra Ganesh’s large-scale collage-painting, After the Storm, while embodying the artist’s restless search for a pictorial means of depicting overlapping crises of identity through a framework that leaves much of the actual story-telling to the viewer The four figures facing us include three humans, two of them essentially headless, standing side by side, accompanied by a seated deer with a fully articulated human face. The central figure, a possible stand-in for the artist, gazes boldly and directly at us, her right hand firmly encircling the fingers of the figure to her right, while the entity on our right wraps a protective arm around the protagonist’s shoulders. Dark passing clouds behind them and lush foliage below their feet together convey a sense of a world emerging from a cataclysmic upheaval, with the artist triumphant after escaping potential catastrophe, newly empowered by the ordeal she’s endured. The benign trio have positioned themselves as metaphysical bodyguards to the artist, whose task is to lead the effort to rebuild the world anew

With its thicket of upward-reaching, plantlike tendrils, the first impression made by Diana Al-Hadid’s sculpture Seed (2023) is that of a cluster of vines grounded by a bronze base. The base both supports and inhibits the sculpture, supporting the upward reach of the stems and leaves—while at the same time constraining its ability to expand beyond the limits of the structure. Like much of Al-Hadid’s work, the incorporation of natural and vegetative forms within an imposing and abstract sculptural framework invites an almost visceral response from the viewer.

Simultaneously, the work offers a historical perspective on contemporary events: a lifelike structure that incorporates a straining upward motion powered by a burst of emergent forms, and the earthbound slab from which these forms appear to have climbed. Embracing these implicit dualities is an essential characteristic of Al-Hadid’s artistic philosophy, in which the work embodies a metaphor rooted in conflicting forces of expansion and restraint. With an implicit suggestion of growth over time, the forces reaching upward and outward coalesce into a driving force which is nonetheless permanently tethered to the earth.

The art of Todd Gray has long been rooted in the photographic image, and for thirty years beginning in 1979, his work as Michael Jackson’s official photographer took precedence over the art he might have produced for himself. Not long after the singer’s death in 2009, Gray found himself developing his current working method, in which multiple images and frames are assembled together into a large, composite structure, where time and place appear to spill over into one another, with dramatic effect. In his tour de force, Sumptuous Memories of Plundering Kings (2021), fourteen overlapping framed images create a nearly dizzying barrage of images that run the full gamut, from antiquities shot in black-and-white, to dazzling flashes of tropical color. Many of his images were photographed in Ghana, where he found the historical entanglements between West Africa and the Age of Conquest visibly folded into the fabric of contemporary public life, reconstituted and contextualized as part of a process he calls “mental colonialism.”

Colonialism is also at the core of the multi-faceted ceramic figurative sculptures created by Kukuli Velarde, which straddle multiple worlds simultaneously, with her most powerful artistic insights concerned with manifestations of identity as they relate to the canonical history of art. Even her title for this series, Corpus, can be understood as a play on words, in which overlapping meanings of an individual human’s body and a collective body of multiple layers of distinctive histories are explored within the context of different religious practices and beliefs that are infused with the inherited experience of the colonized body Peruvian by birth, Velarde’s relationship to the ecclesiastical structures that enabled the Spanish empire to maintain control over her native country before its independence is a source of continual horror and fascination to her, if only because the visual evidence of that legacy is as prevalent today in Peruvian art and culture as the indigenous cultures of the Andes, which are increasingly at the forefront of Peru’s collective cultural identity. The interaction of these diametrically opposed world-views generates a dynamic that continues to shape modern Peru’s collective mestizo identity, while also providing the thematic soil from which Velarde’s earth-based artworks emerge into life.

A constant flow of playful energy runs through the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, with its deep roots in the imagination-building realm of toys, games and comic books. His creativity also moves effortlessly from painting and drawing into sculpture and large-scale installation, although his childlike sensibility is vividly present in all of them. The painting Bringback Condiments: Ketchup (2020) looks at first like an abstract field of black and gray shapes mixed with patches of bright red, until closer inspection reveals hundreds of eyes staring out at us from within countless variations on the same striped hoodie, as the red spots morph into splotches of ketchup. Although the combination of street clothes and condiments is inherently offbeat, there is nothing funny about the grim mood of the faces, nearly half of which lack pupils where their

eyes should be. Similarly, Hancock’s life-size sculpture, Undom Endgle and the Souls’ Journey, frames profound metaphysical speculation within the context of an oversized sci-fi figure that seems to have emerged directly from one of his vast collection of 1970s-era board games. Trenton Doyle Hancock was the recipient of the Hermitage Greenfield Prize in 2013.

The interdisciplinary art of William Villalongo regularly brings together painting, drawing, print-making, and assemblage within a single object. In Sphinx (2023), Villalongo built up a complex surface texture using multiple pigment prints to create the image of the monumental pharaonic symbol, using a meticulously selected and reconstituted mosaic of shells, stones, and artifacts from antiquity. Most prominent of these is the statuary head atop the figure, in the Etruscan style known as janiform, where two heads are created back-to-back, often to emphasize contrasting images. With Sphinx, Villalongo has rendered the head of a Black man, while the splayed hands in front of the figure belong to someone with darker skin. But the vibrant hive of dynamic energy between the head and the hands is what holds the viewer’s attention, overflowing with interwoven historical narratives represented by artifacts and talismanic images that directly connect the world of antiquity to the present-day moment.

The room-sized sculptural installations created by Michelle Lopez are characterized by the artist’s longstanding interest in challenging the stability of architectural spaces until they become frail and highly conditional structures, often using basic principles of engineering to undermine their own stability In House of Cards (2018), viewers encounter an open structure of eccentrically bent wire forms, some suspended from the ceiling, while others lean against themselves, or lie on the floor as a form of ballast. Many of the shapes have bungee cords or lengths of cloth connecting them to their supports, reinforcing the already improvisatory, jerry-rigged nature. Despite its seemingly casual appearance, House of Cards is a carefully designed and fabricated sculpture that subtly combines linear content with tenacious materiality in a fresh and unexpectedly dynamic combination, while offering wry commentary on the purported solidity of our human-built world.

When Ted Riederer presented the first version of Never Records a dozen years ago at the vacant former flagship location of the now-defunct Tower Records retail chain, it was in the form of an amalgam of several overlapping themes that were of significant interest to him as an artist who also made music, and whose visual and aural practices kept arriving at unplanned points of convergence. At the core of Never Records is the tacit recognition that vinyl recordings have once again become the gold standard in the world of recorded music, and Riederer has paired that implicit value with his personal vision of the gift economy. The result is a pop-up recording studio set up within an exhibition space, where local musicians or sound artists make appointments to come in, record a song, and then watch as their performance gets cut into a vinyl

record—actually two records, as one copy stays behind, to join the growing library of records from around the world that Riederer and Never Records have produced over the years.

In bringing together a group of diverse works by a wide range of artists, Impact strives to articulate a number of questions that are often associated with contemporary art. Can art play an active role in revealing and understanding core realities of our day-to-day lives? What effect do present-day challenges in the world have on the choices that artists make in their studios? Can art help us to bridge the empathy gap between persons whose world-views represent a full spectrum of religious and philosophical beliefs? While there does not exist, and will likely never exist, any simple answers to any of these questions, Impact offers viewers a complex, multi-disciplinary experience of new art as a way of ensuring that the public is in a position to newly appreciate that the possible ways of making and understanding contemporary art are as varied as the multitudes of individuals who devote their lives to it.

Dan Cameron Independent Curator 2024