Visiting Artist Response
I went to hear Lowery Stokes Sims speak at the Weisman last week. A lot of people showed up to hear her speak as it was a packed house. Her topic was very broad. She talked about how art can engage the environment. She wanted to show many different art pieces from around the country in which artists used the environment to portray their message and their art. It was a pretty interesting topic. One quote she gave the audience was that, "Instead of puting a work of art on the land, some land is now put into a work of art." She gave three general topics of how/why this could be done. The topics were recycling, response to social issues through the production of objects or discourse, and engagement of landscape.
She then showed various pieces of works in each category. There were pieces of sustainable art, excavation projects, and other out of the ordinary works. A few of my favorites included a picture of a piece in which 10,000 trees were planted around a mountain in a spiral position. It was accomplished in 1996 first and was just an amazing acheivement. It took many years for the trees to grow but when each one grew to its potential, the benefit was a great piece of art. That piece has inspired many new planting projects. Another piece I liked was a drawing of an apocolyptic, end of the world type scenario called "Manifest Destiny" in which the artist illustrated what Brooklyn would look like in the future because of global warming. The whole town was flooded and the piece in general held a very strong message.
The lecture as a whole was okay. It was a little boring but definitely better than the one I went to last time. Sims had a lot of good things to talk about and seemed very familiar with everything she had mentioned. One thing I would have liked to see would be more time for artist names and titles of pieces. On her presentation, she didn't include either and she talked too fast to catch most of the names of artists or their works. Also more pictures would have been nice to see.