American Magazine Fall 05

American Magazine | Fall 2005

http://www.american.edu/american/fall05_artencompassing.html

Art Encompassing

BY SALLY ACHARYA

The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center is a place for the unexpected and the unusual. For reminding us that art is about opening our eyes and experiencing the world in entirely new ways. So it’s fitting that as soon as visitors enter, they are greeted not only by bold paintings and master drawings, but by a mystery. Wafting through the galleries from somewhere unseen is a tantalizing woodsy aroma, redolent of the depths of the forest.

One is tempted to hunt through each gallery, detective-style, until the mystery is solved. Such a search would be a whirlwind tour of styles, from historically important paintings to some of the most fascinating work on today’s cutting edge.

But it doesn’t seem possible to move quickly through this space. Everywhere are sights that force a visitor to stop, look, and wonder. After all, this is the region’s largest university facility for exhibiting art—so it doesn’t open with one exhibit, but with five, spread generously around three vast floors of gallery space.

The visit begins, of course, with the Katzens. A First Look: David Bates, Gene Davis, Nancy Graves, and Master Drawings from the Katzen Collection presents a selection from the rich trove of contemporary painting and sculpture collected by Dr. Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen.

“It’s just one small tip of the iceberg,” says Jack Rasmussen, director and curator of the museum. But it’s a small tip with some large names. Gene Davis is well known to art historians for his clean, vibrant striped paintings, part of the famed Washington Color School that put the nation’s capital on the artistic map in the 1960s. He also taught at AU around the time that Myrtle Katzen studied on campus, and the Katzens have collected his work extensively.

They also have in-depth collections of work by Nancy Graves, renowned for lively sculptural collages often created from salvaged material, and figurative painter David Bates, who specializes in landscapes and still lifes. One common denominator, Rasmussen says: “All of these works are bright, colorful, and show a real concern for craft, technique, and skill.”

Different facets of their collection will be shown over time. The Katzens have, for instance, collected the world’s greatest names in contemporary glass, whose work will be shown in January in the sparkling, sunlit atrium.

Leaving the Katzen exhibition and climbing to the second floor, the woodsy aroma gets stronger. Its source can’t possibly be the vibrant twentieth-century paintings in the exhibit Living Legacy: 60 Years of the Watkins Collection, but this is definitely another place to pause. For most of its 60 years, the 4,500-plus piece Watkins Collection has been the treasure in AU’s attic: carefully stored, but seldom seen except on special occasions.

No other institution has focused on Washington art like the collection named for C. Law Watkins, who was instrumental in the early years of the Phillips Collection and convinced AU to become one of the nation’s first universities to offer a master’s degree in art, offered jointly with the Phillips. Watkins headed the newly created art department until his untimely death in 1945, when friends created a collection by donating work in his honor.

“It was a very hip department,” says curator Jonathan Bucci. “In the 1950s, AU was where it was at in terms of contemporary art.” As it has grown, the collection “has taken on a more historical significance for the city,” Bucci says. “But I feel like it’s this secret most people don’t know about. Now we’re in this prominent location in this wonderful new museum. People will really get a chance to see what we have.”

If the first two floors are places for art historians to discover the breadth of the Katzen and Watkins Collections, the third floor is the place to find some of the sharpest of today’s cutting-edge art. And it is here, at the top of the museum, that we encounter the enigmatic source of that all-encompassing scent of the woods.

There is, indeed, a forest. Carved tree trunks loom like giants, transformed by Virginia sculptor Emilie Brzezinski into monumental artworks and then, incredibly, hoisted to the museum’s topmost gallery space. These sculptures can be found both in the sculpture garden and in the third-floor rotunda. “It’s about the power of nature, the mystery—the work is overpowering, like being in the woods is,” says Rasmussen.

The AU Museum with its grand architecture is a perfect site for the display of massive, gutsy sculptures that few spaces can handle. But it also has space for intimate works. Bruce Conner and William Allan may not be as well known as some artists in the Katzen and Watkins Collections, but for those in the know, they are not only big names—having attained a near-mythic status among other artists—but their work is so rarely on exhibit that displaying both at once is a coup that establishes the museum’s credibility as a hip contemporary space. “Everyone knows about them,” Rasmussen says, “but nobody gets to see them.”

William Allan’s elegant fish, each of which can take months to paint, are not only “very, very beautiful—so finely done, with tiny, tiny touches of watercolor,” but are part of a narrative context that many artists love for its eccentricity and stubborn anticommercialism. Allan also crafts rambling tales, displayed at AU as text, that are by turn philosophical, witty, and stubbornly down-to-earth, like those that concern his fisherman alter ego, “Salty,” an ordinary guy who lives to fish.

Then there’s the curiously named After Bruce Conner: Anonymous, Anonymouse, and Emily Feather exhibit. It appears that Conner, a legendary Beat-generation artist, announced at the age of 65 in 1999 that he has officially retired from art. His retirement would seem to spell the end to new exhibits of his meticulous, even obsessive inkblot drawings that invite the viewer into a disconcertingly personal realm that blurs the lines between interpretation and projection.

But Conner has, evidently, trained a coterie of unknowns—Anonymous, Anonymouse, and Emily Feather—to carry on his work. And although they will never be seen in the same place as Conner, they are carrying on his quirky and fascinating legacy.

From the art-world buzz surrounding the third-floor exhibits to the famed names in the Watkins and Katzen Collections, the new AU Museum proves that it is more than a fresh landmark in the nation’s capital. It’s a living space that entices visitors to explore the arts with wide-open eyes and curious minds.