May Issue 2000
Major Outdoor Exhibition by Joel Shapiro for Spoleto Festival
Spoleto Festival
USA in Charleston, SC, and the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum
in San Antonio, TX, have joined forces to present Joel Shapiro:
Sculpture, an exhibition of Shapiro's complex, highly animate
bronzes, curated by Martin Friedman, former director of the Walker
Art Center. From May 22 until Sept. 4, the exhibition of seventeen
sculptures ranging in height from five to twenty-four feet will
be installed initially on the greensward of Middleton Place Plantation
near Charleston while another Shapiro sculpture will seemingly
defy gravity as it "dances" along the façade
of downtown Charleston's Dock Street Theatre. Subsequently, all
eighteen works will be presented at the McNay, from Oct. 3, 2000
until Jan. 7, 2001. The exhibition will then travel to the Denver
Art Museum.
Both installations will occupy landscapes that surround former residences of historic significance in their regions. These landscapes especially lend themselves to showing sculptures representative of the three major interrelated themes that, over the past twenty-five years, have become central to Shapiro's imagery. Two of these motifs, his trademark geometric, human figure and the twisting tree are descriptive; the third, exemplified by his "stick" constructions, is wholly abstract.
Martin Friedman writes in his essay Joel Shapiro: Three Themes:
"What has been taking place in Joel Shapiro's art is a lively three-way exchange among these motifs, each of which reflects particular aspects of his sensibility. The animated geometric figure is not just a surrogate self but an embodiment of emotion. His trees, whose forms are as human as they are arboreal, objectify nature's inexorable life and death processes and symbolize our absolute identification with them. The abstract pole constructions are intuitively realized mind-works whose barely balanced forms are expressive of the perilous equilibrium in which we exist. While each Shapiro theme clearly possesses attributes of the other, they are, at basis, three views of the same subject. Together, they constitute the artist's enigmatic but compelling self-portrait."
Now in its 24 year, Spoleto Festival USA traditionally begins on Memorial Day weekend, going full tilt for 17 days with over 120 performances in opera, dance, music and theater in the historic churches, theaters and outdoor spaces of Charleston, SC. This year, however, Spoleto Festival 2000 will have an early start with the Joel Shapiro: Sculpture exhibition at Middleton Place opening on May 22.
Founded in 1741 on the shores of the Ashley River 14 miles northwest of Charleston, Middleton Place is home to America's oldest landscaped gardens. Shapiro chose for his site a three-acre circle on the greensward, a flat expanse between the entrance to the plantation and the surviving wing of the original house. At Middleton, the exhibition will take the form of a large-scale composition, virtually an energy field of angular shapes that will seem to both attract yet keep their distance from each other. Though the sculptures will be widely spaced, the installation is intended to be cohesive and function as a totality.
For the McNay, the first museum of modern art in Texas, the exhibition will take on a very different configuration. Originally the home of artist and art collector Marion Koogler McNay, the museum rests on a hilltop surrounded by twenty-three acres of gently sloping, carefully tended grounds. For this site, Shapiro has planned the installation as a rambling progression-a serpentine of small groups of bronzes-beginning near the entrance to the grounds and continuing along the road up to the museum. Unlike Middleton, the sculptures will not be visible all at once, but will reveal themselves singly or in small groups as visitors approach the museum.
Shapiro was born in New York City in 1941, and received his BA from New York University in 1964. From 1965-67, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in India, and returned to New York to pursue his art. He graduated with a master's degree from NYU in 1969.
Shapiro's work was shown in Anti-Illusion: Procedure/Material at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969. That year he began exhibiting his sculpture and drawings at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, in individual and group shows that continued for the next two decades. Other early exhibitions include those at The Clocktower, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York in 1973; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1976; and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1980.
Since the mid-1970s, Shapiro's work has been presented in many international contemporary exhibitions, among these the "Venice Biennale" and "Documenta" in Kassel, Germany. A traveling mid-career retrospective was organized by the Whitney Museum in 1982, and one-artist shows in Europe were organized by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1985, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 1990.
The first major outdoor installation of Shapiro's bronze sculptures took place at the Walker Art Center/Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 1995, then traveled to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art/Kansas City Sculpture Park the following year. Since 1993, his sculptures in both wood and metal have been shown in successive exhibitions at the PaceWildenstein gallery in New York. Shapiro's work is in 75 public collections worldwide. In 1998 Shapiro was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Martin Friedman, curator for "Joel Shapiro: Sculpture", directed the Walker Art Center from 1961 to 1990, overseeing the ambitious expansion of the museum's collections and public programs and the creation of the ten-acre Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. He has organized numerous exhibitions of twentieth-century American and international art, many with an emphasis on sculpture. Among the contemporary sculptors about whom he has written extensively are Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg and Ursula von Rydingsvard. Since moving to New York in 1990, Friedman has been a guest curator and consultant for a number of museums and arts organizations, including the National Gallery of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Madison Art Center, the Columbus Museum of Art and the American Center in Paris.
For further information check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings or call Spoleto USA at 843/722-2764 or Middleton
Place at 843/556-6020.
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