Big, small, or medium-sized, the breed does not matter to artist Gretchen Green. She is as happy creating a metal collage of a Great Dane as a chihuahua, a slender dachshund as a chunky bulldog.
“Dogs – that’s a big theme of mine,” she says. “They’re so full of expression.”
Her canines – as well as a sampling of other species (including a cow and a fish) – currently enliven the walls of the Emerson Center’s Foyer Gallery.
Somewhere in their DNA is the training she received working in experimental theater in New York, when among other things, Green once studied mask-making with Julie Taymor, the Tony-award director; Green herself earned praise in the New York Times for her own theatrical creations.
Today Green assembles her collages from sheet metal salvaged from commercially printed steel and aluminum cans, trays and boxes. Sometimes the imagery is humorously appropriate for the subject, as when a picture of glistening meatballs suggests a lolling tongue, or the blossoms printed on candy tins mimic the interior of a floppy ear.
The artist, however, does not always use this “found” imagery imitatively; Green is first and foremost a modern-day Pop artist. Bold paisley patterns, rainbow-colored peace signs, benign rural landscapes and luridly colored serving suggestions for everything from soup to nuts find their way into her animal portraits. Bits of jewelry chain, wire, google eyes and an epoxy-based material called “Magic Sculpt” provide low-relief details to the collages, which she tops off with a glossy “pour” of epoxy resin.
“The pour makes them glow like jewels,” she says.
The Port St. Lucie-based artist says that thrift shops, home supply stores and even dumpsters are rich sources of material for her work.
“I used to pick through the garbage at Jetsons,” she says, scouring the appliance store’s trash for slabs of packing styrofoam to mount her smaller pieces.
The collages are mounted on stiff foam, thin plywood, or a combination of the two. This not only stiffens the thin metal artworks, but also gives them the dimensionality they need to stand out from the wall when they are hung.
Green began creating metal collages when she lived in New York City. Although “making things” has been a part of her since childhood, Green was not always an artist. Raised in Miami, she was lured to the Big Apple by the 1965 World’s Fair, where she waitressed in a Schraft’s restaurant. After a stint as a secretary and a dozen years in Pan Am’s baggage claim department, she found a show-biz job at La Mama E.T.C. (Experimental Theatre Club).
“That’s the oldest off-off-Broadway theater in existence,” says Green. “It was run by one of the most dynamic women in theater, Ellen Stewart.”
Stewart, an indomitable fashion designer-cum-theater director and producer, started La Mama in a basement in New York City in 1961. By1980, when Green began working there, the theater had moved to its present location on East Fourth Street, and was comprised of three houses in two separate buildings.
“Ellen brought in theater from Yugoslavia, Brazil, South Africa, you name it,” says Green, who started at La Mama as a stage manager and ended up as managing director.
Life at La Mama was exciting, often hectic and sometimes unpredictable. In addition to her managerial duties, Green was ready to jump in when necessity and a flair for art demanded it.
“I made a lot of props,” she says.
“I would make, like, a loaf of bread that you could hit somebody over the head with, from latex. I made a lot of masks. Ellen was into the great classics – they all had masks,” she says, referring to the traditions of ancient Greek and Asian theater.
Green, who says that the theater was her art school, learned from the best. One of her more notable teachers was Julie Taymor, the Tony Award-winning director of the musical “The Lion King.” Green studied innovative puppet- and mask-making techniques in a workshop led by Taymor.
Green went on to make masks for at least two plays produced by La Mama’s repertory companies, including “Herakles via Phaedra” (2006) which was based on the mythological labors of the Greek hero, Hercules. New York Times reviewer Miriam Horn mentioned “a terrifying mask designed by Gretchen Green” for the actor who played the Nemean Lion; Horn also gave a nod to “a gorgeous boar and three-headed dog” devised by Green.
Green’s props even made it to Broadway by way of La Mama. In 1989, when the AIDS crisis was ravaging the ranks of New York’s artistic community, playwright Harvey Fierstein wrote, directed and acted in “Safe Sex,” a trilogy of one-act plays. After its initial month-long workshop engagement at La Mama, “Safe Sex” moved to the Lyceum on Broadway for an additional run of about six months, according to Green.
As part of the stage setting, Green made seven sculptures of “people in all different positions” out of Friendly Plastic, a modeling material that becomes pliable with gentle heat.
Green molded the warm material by pressing it onto the bodies of willing friends. She cast different body parts separately, deliberately leaving gaping holes between the components when she reassembled them. That, she says, increased the poignancy of the mute figures.
“The main part of the sculptures were the parts that were missing. It was very cool,” she says.
Green began to create art for herself when she got into metal collage about fifteen years ago.
She originally intended to learn to weld metal. One of her brothers, a professional welder, offered to teach her his craft.
Green says that it took her about an hour to realize that she wasn’t going to weld. The work was difficult, hot and dangerous and required expensive equipment. Instead, she learned how to solder, cutting up empty printed metal food containers from her pantry and tacking the pieces together to form collages.
“From that I went into coffee cows, where I was making cows out of coffee cans,” she says.
In 2009 Green retired from La Mama and moved to Florida to be near family.
“It was time to do it,” she says. “I couldn’t take winters up there much longer.”
That is not to say that Green has given up on New York. Last year she had her first solo show at La Mama’s art gallery, La Galleria, which did well in sales.
She protests that she doesn’t miss the excitement of the big city. “Everybody in New York is now thinner, richer, and younger than I am,” she jokes, adding that she was surprised to find “so much art going on” on the Treasure Coast.
Soon after settling in, Green read a newspaper article about the Fort Pierce-based artist’s cooperative, Art Mundo.
“I came right in, and a year later I was on the board,” she says.
A short stroll from the site of the Fort Pierce Farmer’s Market, Art Mundo is open to the public on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“I was so happy to find this place,” says Green, who adds there are hundreds of people involved in Art Mundo, both working artists and member supporters. The energy and cooperative spirit that Green finds there is “a little bit” like that of a certain experimental theater she was long involved with.
Art Mundo is “off-off-Fort Pierce,” she says.
The show at the Emerson Center runs through Oct. 31 with a “Meet the Artist Night” scheduled for Oct. 23 from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.