Sunday, April 17, 2016

sculpture and history


NC Museum of Art, in Raleigh - a terrific museum in its own right - has hugely grown its sculpture park since I was last there.  OK, it didn't have the pristine rural quietness of the state park that I was in yesterday - the roar of I-40 was rather too present - but it was a great space for walking, with sculpture popping up over a wide area.  I didn't know there was a Yinka Shonibare here, called Wind II (2013) - which doesn't give much away - one of his transnational scraps of fabric turned into something very large and solid.


This is part of a whole grove of chairs up trees, Tom Shields' Forest for the Chairs (2013) - found chairs (in thrift stores; by the side of the road - a man after my own heart, given my own, infrequent Abandoned Chairs series) which are fixed to trees, and left to decay and disintegrate in the weather.


And this, Martha Jackson-Jarvis's Crossroads/Trickster - built at an actual trail split, and a tall, tall obelisk.  She calls the shattered bricks "time capsules" - they come from the Polk Youth Correctional Facility (which used to be on this site), and they have carnelian stones and Italian tiles pressed in between them.  I had to dig around a little to find out why, but she's drawing on African and African-American traditions of adorning gravesites with broken plates and crockery.

It's very much a sculpture park, that is to say, that looks to the history of NC.

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