Cultivating art at the garden
On a breezy, sunny Friday afternoon in May, the peaceful journey through the Texascape at the San Antonio Botanical Garden is punctuated by what executive director Bob Brackman accurately describes as the “element of surprise.”
Welcome to Art in the Garden, the annual collaboration between the botanical garden and Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum that strategically situates contemporary sculpture within the native flora — abundant and blooming after April's showers.
“Having these two elements — sculpture and landscape — merge creates an element of surprise as visitors round a corner,” Brackman said. “Being out in the landscape, there's nothing to limit the scale of the work, and it enhances the artist's intentions, I think, whether the work is whimsical or organic or architectural. We get nothing but positives from visitors. It's something the entire family loves.”
From the sensual curves of Chicago artist Jean Jacques Porret's bronze “Legacy II” to the steely geometry of Brooklyn native Isaac Duncan III's “Precarious — C” to Alabama sculptor Linda Walden's meditative “Altar to an Unknown God,” the 10 sculptures by nine artists from the Midwest, South and Texas reveal a wide range of approaches to contemporary sculpture. Curated by Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt, the exhibition runs through February 2014.
The first work encountered is Houston sculptor and San Antonio native Ben Woitena's “Shadow Land,” a leaflike form cut with a torch from steel panel and painted with green industrial marine paint. The artist used the cutout shape as a positive image placed at a right angle to the main panel, creating tension between the geometry of the joined forms and the overall organic shape of the piece.
“It does have a nice organic feel that goes well in this location,” said the 71-year-old artist, whose monumental work “Time Line” greets travelers at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. “I was playing with the idea of shadow, as well as creating a geometric arrangement within an organic format.”
Woitena also has a work titled “Traveler” further along the trail. The red-painted steel piece has its inspiration in the Buddhist mandala, the artist said.
Texas artist Julia Ousley's “Skyline II” is made of lumber from an old home-renovation project, the boards joined at right angles into five pillars of varying heights, resembling small skyscrapers, their tops cut in silhouettes of human forms. It speaks of human resiliency and adaptability.
“It is made of recycled cedar taken from my old deck when it had to be replaced,” Ousley said by email. “You may be interested to know it has also been damaged and repaired several times as it has spent time on the Brooklyn waterfront, lived through a New Jersey winter, spent 18 months in the Arizona desert in Tucson and been through several storms in other Texas locations.”
Walden's “Altar to an Unknown God” was conceived “as a sort of 'altar' for meditation like the small roadside Shinto shrines in Japan,” the artist said in an email. Viewers are encouraged to tie a knot in the cord attached to the white limestone pillar and ring the oxidized bell mounted at its pinnacle.
“I left the strings long in the back of the sculpture for knot-tying and would like for viewers to feel free to tie a knot, say a prayer or meditate, and ring the bell if they like,” Walden said he told botanical garden staff. “So feel free to encourage interaction.”
Ideal in this setting, with bees buzzing about, is the bright yellow-painted steel work “Bumble,” which Chicago artist Ted Sitting Crow Garner calls “an abstraction of the interaction between a bee and a flower.”
Begun in 2006, the Art in the Garden program has showcased the work of some 50 artists in group and solo outdoor exhibitions at the botanical center.
“We're so fortunate to have Blue Star as our partner in this program,” Brackman said. “It's a great venue for contemporary art, a new way of seeing it.”