In the Vero Beach Museum of Art’s latest exhibit, “Glass and Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection,” local artists are rubbing elbows with the big shots in a show that highlights two important areas of the museum’s collection.
Along with the likes of Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Dale Chihuly, there are works by past and present local artists: Betty Abbott, Charlotte Brown, Janvier Miller, Virginia Neagle, Sean Sexton and Geo Sipp, among them.
Just as viewers may see familiar names, they may run across familiar works among the glass sculptures in the show, pieces the public has come to know from prior VBMA exhibitions. At the same time, the works-on-paper show highlights gems that the museum has seldom, if ever, put on display.
The exhibition pays its respects to the late artist Harvey Littleton (1922-2013), a sculptor in glass who has been called the father of the American studio glass movement, who was a seasonal resident of Fort Pierce. Littleton is represented in the Schumann Gallery’s glass exhibition by a sculpture that the museum purchased in 2008.
In the Titelman Gallery’s works-on-paper show, Littleton is represented by his gift of four prints by his University of Wisconsin teaching colleagues, Warrington Colescott, Dean Meeker and John Wilde. Littleton donated 43 works on paper from his personal collection to the VBMA in 2001.
The artworks on exhibit have been specially selected to appeal to year-round residents.
Curator Jay Williams notes that last summer’s Holmes Gallery show of paintings by members of the celebrated “Highwaymen” group of local African American artists was one of the year’s best attended exhibitions, in or out of Vero’s “season.”
“I chose a lot of these (for display) simply on the basis of what they looked like, whether I knew the artist or not. So some of the artists are well known and some of them aren’t,” says Williams.
Gallery-goers might be surprised at how well the home team holds up against its big-name competition.
Williams says that he has wanted to mount an exhibition from the permanent collection for a long time.
The reason that a selection of works on paper from the collection has not been trotted out sooner was a simple matter of logistics, say Williams. What was necessary was to mat the works to standard frame sizes and purchase frames into which the works could be mounted, as needed, for exhibition. (Works on paper are usually stored unframed when not on display.)
Executive Director Lucinda Gedeon and Williams began discussing the presentation of the works of paper collection when Williams arrived as curator in 2011, but the VBMA’s expansion and other must-dos pushed the project into the future. Making the museum’s works on paper exhibition-ready became a priority this year. It’s a big deal because that part of the collection, which includes prints, drawings, collages, paintings and mixed media, accounts for more than 550 – nearly two-thirds – of the collection’s 910 objects.
“I feel good that people are going to see these now,” says Williams.
He says works on paper comprise “the heart of the collection.”
“It’s a major portion of what artists are doing,” he says, adding that works on paper are the artworks most people are likely to collect. The museum’s collection reflects those trends.
Take for example, the screen print titled “Cut Flags” by Janvier Miller, a seasonal resident of Vero Beach. The print shows a bunch of purple irises (“flags” is one of the common names for the flowers) angled across the corner of a bamboo-trimmed tabletop. The artwork came into the collection as a gift from the artist in 1990.
“It’s very painterly for a screen print,” says Williams. He praises the artwork’s composition and its subtle colors.
Industry adopted screen printing in the early 20th century as a quick and inexpensive commercial printing technique. But the garish colors and crude art of screen printed ads are a far cry from what the medium eventually became in the hands of fine printmakers.
The word “painterly” comes up again in front of a Jasper Johns “Flags” screen print from 1973. This time the flags in question are two depictions of Old Glory, positioned vertically and side by side.
“It has the seeming freedom of one of Johns’ encaustic (pigmented wax) paintings, drips and all,” says, Williams.
The print may look as spontaneous as a painting, but its technique is anything but direct. Screen printing is a form of stenciling that uses a matrix composed of woven synthetic material, a “screen,” through which ink is forced onto paper. For each color used in a print, a separate screen is prepared. Johns’ “Flags” required 31 screens printed in exacting register to execute; it is an exceptional achievement in the medium and one of the earliest examples of Johns’ work in screen printing.
“Flags” is not the only example of Pop art in the collection: nearby hangs “Flowers,” a screen printed composition of four eye-popping yellow blossoms on a green ground by Andy Warhol, who had no compunction about using the vivid colors of commercialism in his work.
Pop art and surrealism in combination influences several other works in the show, including Warrington Colescott’s 1987 color etching “A Brief History of Flight to the Present Day.” That work shows travelers shuffling through an airport checkpoint staffed by sadistic-looking security agents. Above that hell on earth is a sky full of aircraft, from the Wright Brothers’ experiment to a Rockwell B-1 bomber.
Another cross between Pop and the surreal is “Wildeworld,” a lithographic fantasy by John Wilde (pronounced WILL-dee). The print’s theme is the contrast between the “real” world and the world of the artist’s imagination, says Williams. In the composition’s foreground the figure of the artist stands on a promontory with his back to us. Behind him lie the scattered remains of dead things: animal carcasses, bones, empty shells. Before him stretches a panorama teeming with earthly delights, including a piece of cake, a high-heeled shoe, a giant eggplant and a winged female nude.
The variety of media and artistic styles contained in the show is in itself notable. The line-up includes “Buick,” a watercolor by photo realist Harold Brooks; “Squash and Bones,” a color pencil-and-ink drawing by Sean Sexton that puts Williams in mind of the realism of the Dutch masters; and “Minute Man,” a patriotically colorful abstract lithograph by Washington Color School painter Gene Davis.
The glass part of the exhibition features some of the museum’s showiest works, including a resplendent multiple-piece glass sculpture from Dale Chihuly’s “Persians” series. The largest component of that sculpture, an undulating disc of blue-on-blue concentric rings edged with a flaming red lip, holds smaller, vessel-shaped closed forms. The vitreous treasures look like they have been plucked from an ancient shipwreck.
Chihuly’s work is not the only fireworks display in the glass show. If his “Lapis Blue Persian” is an explosion of contrasting color and form, Harvey Littleton’s “Blue Sliced Descending Form” describes the arc of a rocket. Its concentric overlays of blue glass wrapped with delicate hot orange threads are encased in a pellucid atmosphere of clear glass. Other favorites on view include an untitled work by Dominick Labino from his “Emergence” series; Duncan McClellan’s “Rain Forest,” Benjamin Moore’s “Interior Fold” and Therman Statom’s “Chair on Pedestal.”
The exhibitions run through Sept. 7.
(Note: Ellen Fischer donated the Sean Sexton artwork “Squash and Bones” to the museum in 1998.)
