A Chance Encounter
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Jackie Ferrara’s break into the New York art scene was a matter of chance. As the story goes, the late artist Sol LeWitt, who was an avid buyer of art, attended Ms. Ferrara’s first show at the A.M. Sachs Gallery in 1974 and bought five of her pieces. LeWitt had them lying around his home where art dealer Max Protech saw them and decided to track down the artist. With Mr. Protech as her agent, Ms. Ferrara’s career shot forward with public commissions, national shows, and inclusion in museum collections.
Ms. Ferrara has since forsaken her earlier small-scale studio work, such as the kind suitable for gallery shows, in favor of largescale public art commissions. Now, however, her first New York gallery show in nearly five years, “Jackie Ferrara: New Wall Drawings and Sculpture,” is on display at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery until October 13. It is a combination of wall drawings and furniture in a one-room space. With the three-dimensional pieces — a chair, coffee table, two stools, and two taller coffee tables — the space has the feel of a salon or living room. As Ms. Ferrara puts it, instead of just a blank room with artwork on the walls, “the gallery has become a place.”
This exhibit is also a celebration of Ms. Ferrara’s mastery of wall drawings, a medium she has never before tackled. Derived from studies on specialized graph paper with 10 squares to the inch, the wall drawings in dark charcoal gray, gray, and shades of red pastels will vary in length from between 13 feet and 40 feet. Ms. Ferrara’s longtime assistant, Russell Bush, translated the drawings from paper to the plaster on all four walls of the gallery space. One long wall drawing (done in dark charcoal gray and gray) has undulating, abstract forms along with one arch on the left side, while the other is more geometric. It displays a series of nine arches in varying shades of red that eventually fade into gray. The two smaller walls are covered with arches. While references to the earth and the sky are conspicuous, Ms. Ferrara said she is not aiming for weighty theoretical statements. “I just like the idea of walking into a place surrounded by pastel-colored shapes,” she said.
The small studies display a rigorous and painstaking pre-design process, defined by a series of mathematical progressions that address such issues as curvature and negative space. The furniture portion of the exhibit is also based on mathematical progressions analogous to those of the wall drawings. The furniture designs are intended to complement the drawings in style and color. And it was a feat to match the color of the wood — more black-grayish than Easter egg colors — to the pastels of the wall drawings. Ms. Ferrara spent several days testing dyes in her studio, opting for light and heavily diluted colors. In response to the question of why she chose these particular colors, Ms. Ferrara adds, “Colors like green and blue are fugitive. They disappear into wood.”
While wall drawings are new terrain for Ms. Ferrara, the aesthetic of the furniture, as well as the use of blocks of wood, is not too far removed from that of some of her early work. What has remained throughout her oeuvre, however, is a dominant geometric quality that is quintessentially “Ferraran.”
Architectural in style, the furniture closely resembles her wooden sculpture pieces that can be found all over the country in the collections of institutions such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. And similar in spirit to the wooden piece at the Walker, “Belvedere” (1988), which assumes the shape of a platform replete with seats and openings providing enviable views of the Garden, Ms. Ferrara’s furniture pieces here are practical. “I made something I also could use,” she said. “In case they don’t sell, I could really use a new stool.”
Before the show opened, Ms. Ferrara took deliberate care to decide on the arrangement of the furniture. She waited to see where the lighting would suit the furniture best, as if she were setting up the living room of her house and could only finalize it after the wall drawings were complete.
This obsession with the personal experience of interacting with art is what eventually led Ms. Ferrara to create more complex pieces — functional spaces to walk through or spaces to climb on — beyond the simple freestanding sculptures that defined her work of the 1970s. It was during the 1980s that she began considering how her work related to the site, as well as how it would be received by the public. Over time, her artwork became larger, taller, and more architectural. “I was no longer making objects. I was making places,” she said.
With a new approach to art also came the desire to experiment with new forms and new types of media, which would become a recurring theme throughout the rest of her career. In the early 1980s, for example, she started compulsively making a structure she defines as a “wallyard,” which is more or less a synthesis of a wooden wall and a tiled courtyard. In 1981, General Mills Inc.commissioned her to make a “wallyard” for their Minneapolis headquarters. Here, Ms. Ferrara uses a combination of cedar (for the wall) and yellow and off-white limestone (for the courtyard), the latter being a completely new material for Ms. Ferrara. But once again, Ms. Ferrara maintained her signature geometric style.
Her style itself has always been a point of contention for critics. To those who compare her work to the pyramids of Mayan art or the decorative patterns of Islamic art, Ms. Ferrara scoffs. One critic who wrote a review of an early show containing numerous pyramidalshaped wooden structures had searched through Mayan art books to find an historical reference for Ms. Ferrara’s work. The artist, however, had a simple response to the critic’s insinuation. “I’m not very into art history,” she said. “I didn’t even go to college.”
“Jackie Ferrara: New Wall Drawings and Sculpture” at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery, 535 W. 22nd St., September 7–October 13, 2007.