Abraham Cruzvillegas: Campus Collaborations

MARY ABOWD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

In keeping with Climate Changing’s themes of access and questioning traditional museum hierarchies, exhibiting artist Abraham Cruzvillegas invited four Ohio State graduate students in the Department of Art, as well as a local artisan, to create sculptures from his abstract line drawings. The Paris-based sculptor laid out his simple guidelines: make something at human scale; use only found materials; paint it black and red—oh, and sign your name to it because the work is yours. At the heart of the assignment was Cruzvillegas’s desire to rethink authorship in art-making and undo the hierarchy between artists and the often unnamed fabricators they employ. “It became clear that we were to be collaborators with Abraham,” said glass artist and second-year MFA student Brianna Gluszak. “That allowed me to take more liberties—to have fun and not be worried about doing it right or wrong.” It also points to what Cruzvillegas calls autoconstrucción, or self-building—creating through improvisation, with whatever materials are at hand. The approach was freeing for first-year MFA student Akeylah Wellington, an artist working in collage and sculpture who’s used to a more painstaking process. The sketch Wellington chose reminded her of a Möbius strip—a one-sided, looped surface used in mathematics and engineering among other fields. She quickly constructed one from discarded vacuum tubes using a drill, a hammer, and nails. “It felt quicker, freer, looser,” she said. “In a pandemic year, that just felt nice.”

See the sculptures by Tony Ball, Brianna Gluszak, Aaron Peters, Akeylah Wellington, and Bradley Weyandt in Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment, on view in the center’s galleries through August 15.

SKETCHES Abraham Cruzvillegas, Untitled Sketches for Climate Changing 3 and 5, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, New York and Mexico City. WORKS IN PROGRESS Akeylah Wellington, Untitled, 2020. Brianna Gluszak, Untitled, 2020. Photos courtesy of the artists. INSTALLATION VIEW Gluszak’s and Wellington’s works on view in Climate Changing along with sculptures by Aaron Peters and Bradley Weyandt.