Dreaming Red: Creating ArtPace

By Linda Pace, Jan Jarboe Russell, Eleanor Heartney and Kathryn Kanjo

Since its founding in 1993 by the late Pace Foods heiress Linda Pace, Artpace has become one of the premiere foundations for contemporary art. An artist residency program based in San Antonio, Texas, Artpace's goal is to give artists time and space in which to imagine new ways to work. Each year, nine artists (three from Texas, three from other areas of the United States and three from abroad) are invited to the foundation to create new work. Selected by guest curators the likes of Robert Storr and Okwui Enwezor, the list of artists who have undertaken residencies at ArtPace is impressive, prescient and diverse, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Annette Messager, Tracey Moffatt, Xu Bing, Nancy Rubins, Cornelia Parker, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Glenn Ligon, Kendell Geers, Carolee Schneemann, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Arturo Herrera, and Christian Jankowski.

Dreaming Red includes illustrations of all the works created at ArtPace since its inception, an essay by art historian Eleanor Heartney, short essays on selected artists by the guest curators, including Cuauhtémoc Medina, Lynne Cooke, Chrissie Iles and Judith Russi Kirshner, and a lengthy essay on the personal history of the foundation and its founder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781595341976

Linda Pace

Linda Pace (1945–2007) was an artist, collector, philanthropist, and founder of ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art in San Antonio, Texas.

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Contents

The Why and the What

Kathryn Kanjo

Cultivating Creativity: The ArtPace Experiment

Eleanor Heartney

Dreaming Red: Creating ArtPace

Linda Pace and Jan Jarboe Russell

FOREWORD BY JAN JARBOE RUSSELL

PREFACEMoving the Dream Forward

CHAPTER 1The Family Scripts

CHAPTER 2Feeling My Way

CHAPTER 3New Works for a New Space

CHAPTER 4Losing Chris

CHAPTER 5Jewels in the Concrete

CHAPTER 6Changing Direction

CHAPTER 7Expanding

CHAPTER 8The Red Project

A Closer Look

Jesse Amado

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Annette Messager

New Works 95.1: Introduction | Robert Storr

Tracey Moffatt | Frances Colpitt

Xu Bing | Frances Colpitt

Nancy Rubins | Frances Colpitt

Cornelia Parker | Shaila Dewan

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle | Lynne Cooke

Hale Tenger | Lynne Cooke

Glenn Ligon | Bill Arning

Kendell Geers | Chrissie Iles

Teresita Fernández | Lisa Corrin

Carolee Schneemann | Eleanor Heartney

Mona Hatoum | Laura Cottingham

Chris Sauter | Okwui Enwezor

Isaac Julien | David Frankel

Arturo Herrera | Judith Russi Kirshner

Rebecca Holland | Judith Russi Kirshner

Tracey Rose | Judith Russi Kirshner

Rivane Neuenschwander | Kathryn Kanjo

Christian Jankowski | Lisa Corrin

Jim Mendiola and Rubén Ortiz-Torres | Cuauhtémoc Medina

New Works 1995–2002

About the Authors

Curators and Panelists

Acknowledgments

Artists’ Biographies

Photograph Credits

Index

The Why and the What

Kathryn Kanjo

Dreaming Red: Creating ArtPace is a book in two parts, just as ArtPace is a name with two elements. ArtPace is, first, the legacy of exhibitions that have been created and mounted in its San Antonio facility: Art. It is also the story of the philanthropic vision of its founder: Pace. This volume seeks to capture the organization’s dual identity, both the motivation for its existence and the product of its effort. As such, the publication features a personal narrative penned by Linda Pace, with the assistance of writer Jan Jarboe Russell, as well as a series of texts by a number of curators and critics on selected projects created at ArtPace, and an insightful essay by art historian and author Eleanor Heartney about the history of artist residencies and that of ArtPace itself.

Although the two stories could be told separately—one as a biography and the other as an institutional history—we have chosen to bring them together to show their connection to and their independence from each other. At eight years old, ArtPace is still a young and unique organization. While art foundations are often identified with their namesake’s personal collection, ArtPace reflects not its founder’s possessions but her commitments. These commitments are driven not by acquisitiveness per se or a need to carve a niche in history, but rather by the desire to endorse a belief in the import of personal creativity and risk-taking. Linda offers support for the why of art, not the what of it. However, the what of it remains. It is offered to the public and is put into play—as an exhibition, as a brochure. This constitutes the second half of our book.

And what a half—the ArtPace roster is impressive. Since it opened in 1995, through the insight and rigor of its guest curators and panelists, ArtPace has presented artists whose work is timely and of the highest quality. Yet if the list of residents reads like a who’s who, we must recognize that ArtPace is not merely the sum of its exhibitions (although that may be enough). What makes ArtPace even greater is that before the artists came here, the works on view simply did not exist: ArtPace is a site of production and exhibitions, of art patronage and art objects. It is a different model, one that landed in a dramatically changing art world—where a museum’s functions and a curator’s duties have shifted, where collectors reassess their roles, where artists move frequently and fluidly across continents. It is a landscape marked by high-profile biennials and festivals, international artists and exotic locales. And then there’s ArtPace: a foundation for contemporary art, in San Antonio, Texas.

Located in the southern tip of this enormous state, San Antonio—the ninth largest city in the United States with a small-town feeling—has welcomed artists from Estonia and Australia, South Korea and Cuba, Japan and Germany, and beyond. Each ArtPace residency brings three artists to San Antonio to make new work: one from Texas, one from elsewhere in the U.S., and one from outside the U.S. These geographic distinctions are clear at the beginning but they fade away by the show’s conclusion and become a conceit, a process that reflects the globalization of the art world without relying on strategies of cultural tourism.

More than eighty artists and counting. They come for two months at a time to realize projects of their own choosing, and are given an apartment, a studio, a budget, technical support, a publication, and a deadline. The pieces debut in San Antonio, and while we’re enormously proud of our following—Texans and visitors alike—it must also be acknowledged that ArtPace does not capture the broad press coverage that international biennials and similar events do. Here artists can unveil new ideas, off-center. Whether they work differently away from their home bases (if, in this nomadic age, they can even identify a base) is one question ArtPace poses. The responses vary: many artists react to the Texas mythology, terrain, and history, others do not. There are no requirements of site specificity or even media specificity (although the majority of the artists have created installations). ArtPace also allows its guest curators to operate in a less traditional manner. Freed from their organizations’ histories, collections, and reputations, they can move extra-institutionally and with greater freedom. Some choose to reiterate support for a favored artist, whereas others take a chance on a new discovery.

Change is inherent in ArtPace’s makeup. What remains consistent is the desire to focus on the artist. Each cycle is four months long, with equal parts for the residency and the exhibition. Effectively 50 percent of ArtPace’s yearly calendar is devoted to art production. Yet ArtPace is not a collecting institution. At the end of each show, the work returns home with the artist. For better or worse, it is allowed to leave ArtPace and appear in another exhibition at a museum, festival, gallery, or in a collector’s home. As such, the legacy of ArtPace—its objects, people, and effect—is globally diffused, and is contained only in this publication.

Cultivating Creativity

The ArtPace Experiment

Eleanor Heartney

In its short life as home to ArtPace, the self-effacing former auto dealership in downtown San Antonio has undergone a series of transformations unimaginable in its earlier days. Walls have been cut away, restored, or covered with thick swirls of colored clay; its floor has been briefly excavated to create a dirt wall; sunflowers have sprouted on its roof; its facade has hosted a Las Vegas–style light display; and its ceiling now contains an underlayer of silver leaf. Its interior has served as a Thai marketplace, a multimedia sound environment, a meditative memorial chapel, a virtual outpost of the sculpture archives of the San Antonio Museum of Art, a sensory-deprivation chamber, and a re-created horror film set. It has housed artworks made of dried grapefruit peels, Texas barbed wire, charm-invested soap from a local botanica, activated car engines, airplane parts, thrift-store lamps, frozen snakes, computer mousepads, and melted LPs. Resident artists have used their time to take off on road trips, haunt neighborhood music and vintage shops, collaborate with area artists, preachers, and DJs, hang out at San Antonio tourist sites, and explore local politics.

Clearly, we have come a long way from the days when artist residency programs were designed to provide painters and sculptors with a quiet refuge from the cares of daily life. ArtPace provides a marked contrast to older residencies and artist colonies, which feature rustic cabins in bucolic settings and offer the seductions of seclusion, serenity, and communion with nature. Though the apartments provided to ArtPace’s visiting artists are spacious and comfortable, it is clear that isolation is not the point. For many artists, one of the great attractions of this residency is San Antonio itself and the diverse population that resides there. For others, it is the wide Texas landscape and its complex mythology of individualism, freedom, and violence. For yet others, it is the opportunity to experiment with new ideas, using the resources of a remarkable staff. Meanwhile, the kind of work participants create is as likely to employ video, film, found objects, performance, light, and vegetation as it is paint, stone, or metal. In this, ArtPace reinvents the artist residency to reflect the changing realities of art and the world at the beginning of a new century.

The notion of the artist residency goes back to the early twentieth century, and its origins are inseparable from the utopian ideals of that era. An important inspiration for early art colonies in the United States was the English Arts and Crafts movement and its effort to revive an idealized version of the medieval workshop. That movement’s leaders, William Morris and John Ruskin, promoted communal creativity, the elevation of craft to the level of high art, and an egalitarian work ethic. In keeping with this model, Byrdcliff, an artist community founded in 1902 on a woodland site in the Catskill Mountains of New York, features houses and studios for artists and artisans and facilities for furniture making, pottery, weaving, and painting. Similarly, both Yaddo, established in 1900 on a four-hundred-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York, and MacDowell, which opened to artists in 1908 on 450 acres of woodlands and fields in Peterborough, New Hampshire, are set on former farms and emphasize the power of nature to heal and nurture the creative soul. They offer writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians an opportunity to work without interruption in a supportive environment.

Such ideals persisted into midcentury America, when they were joined by a newfound sense of confidence in American art’s place on the world stage. This attitude is reflected at Skowhegan, which has been operating out of a former farm in Maine since 1946. Skowhegan is part residency, part school, in which an annual class of young artists is given the opportunity to be mentored for the summer by more-established figures.

In the 1980s, however, the model of the art residency had begun to change drastically. Recent additions to the roster tend to be located in metropolitan settings and to eschew isolation for engagement with other artists and with urban environments. Sometimes, as is the case with the International Studio Program operated by P.S.1 in New York City, they are attached to preexisting institutions, and offer the residents small studios in the midst of a vital art community. Or, like the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, which houses fifteen studios for selected local and international artists in a beautifully renovated Gothic-style church, they may be independent entities created with the purpose of encouraging the intermingling and interaction of a wide range of artists within an urban setting.

In the early 1990s, when Linda Pace was searching for models for the San Antonio artist residency program that would become ArtPace, she found herself drawn to two prototypes. One was the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, which also was the inspiration of a single patron and provided a studio and residence for visiting artists in an old warehouse in the center of the city. The other was the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, which is not a residency program but provides support for invited artists to create spectacular installations in its massive exhibition space. Blending the two with her own desire to create an environment in which artists would be totally supported in their endeavors, Pace initiated ArtPace.

The ArtPace building...

The ArtPace building in 1999. View from Martin and South Flores Streets

Details of the ArtPace program have altered over the years, but the basic idea remains the same. Three artists, one international, one national, and one local, are chosen for two-month residencies. During this time, all the resources of the foundation are made available to them for completion of a project of their design. At the end of the two months, the projects are exhibited publicly in the ArtPace galleries. Originally the exhibition period was a month; recently it has been extended to two months to allow more viewers an opportunity to see the work. Over the years, the participants have been chosen in various ways. For the first residency and once a year thereafter, one curator was invited to select three artists for a single residency period. The artists for the remaining residencies were picked by a revolving committee of curators and critics from a pool of candidates put forth by a nominating panel. Recently ArtPace has shifted to guest curators to determine all its cycles of residents, thus taking advantage of the cohesion produced by a singular vision. Like the artists themselves, the curators have represented the diversity of contemporary art, hailing from Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as across the United States. Meanwhile, ArtPace has also expanded the range of programs to include artist panels, travel grants to local artists, graduate internships, and other community initiatives.

While ArtPace departs in obvious ways from earlier art residencies, it clearly shares many of the utopian ideals that have always animated such programs. As Robert Storr, who curated the first residency, noted in the inaugural catalogue, The archetypal space, the ‘white cube’ of the modernist gallery, may or may not be the ultimate destination of the things artists make, but the ‘room of one’s own’ that they, like writers, require is still a neutral empty area waiting to be charged by an idea. Service to the creative impulse remains ArtPace’s primary goal, however much artists’ needs, concerns, and methods have changed.

Ken Little in the...

Ken Little in the ArtPace workshop in 1995

The projects created by ArtPace residents since its inception in 1995 reflect a contemporary art world preoccupied with the implications of economic and cultural globalism, with political and identity concerns, with the impact of new developments in technology and communications, and with the intermingling of other art forms and fields. Perhaps nowhere does the activity generated at ArtPace show its contemporary face more clearly than in the dizzying mix of genres and media its residents have employed to realize their projects. Reflecting the erosion of old boundaries, ArtPace artworks have seeped into other disciplines, colonizing music, film, anthropology, pop culture, agriculture, and religion. They have assumed hybrid forms like installation and performance, and explored the possibilities opened by new digital and electronic technology. They have drawn on ideas of audience and site that take them outside the studio and gallery and into the city streets or the electronic highway.

Take, for instance, California-based artist Diana Thater’s The future that almost wasn’t, a collaborative performance piece with T. Kelly Mason that consisted of two three-hour-long sound-and-image environments in which Thater wove together fragmentary sequences from films, television, and artist videos while musicians and DJs combined samplings of live and prerecorded music. Disorienting and mesmerizing, the event embodied the dematerialization of art while celebrating the vital interaction of experimental music and art.

Music also appeared in projects by San Antonio artist Dario Robleto and New York artist Christian Marclay. Robleto, who is also a DJ, translated his obsession with popular music into absurdist objects created by melting down or otherwise altering actual LP records, tapes, and other physical manifestations of immaterial sound. In a similar spirit of conflicted homage, Marclay presented an archive of one thousand LPs of Christmas music from San Antonio thrift stores arranged according to loose categories (rap, compilations by various artists, international Christmas music, and even an entire bin devoted to the ever popular Little Drummer Boy). Through the course of the exhibition, local DJs mixed samplings from the albums. Meanwhile, Marclay also infiltrated a nearby music store, placing several surrealistic instruments of his own creation on display as if for sale.

Christian Marclay...

Christian Marclay The Sounds of Christmas, 1999. Performance with approximately 1,000 LPs, two turntables, mixer, sound system, and six video projections of LP covers

Pop culture has permeated ArtPace projects in other ways as well. Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, inspired by the spectacle of the female Roller Derby, photographed a set of staged fights between supposed contestants. Danish artist Henrik Plenge Jakobsen re-created elements from the sets of iconic American horror films—suspending the spinning bed from Poltergeist from the ceiling and constructing the bloody shower stall from Psycho on the floor. South African native Candice Breitz created a multichannel video installation from short clips culled from the cliffhanger episodes of the television soap opera Dallas. For artists like these, all born outside the U.S., one suspects that the popular culture of television, film, and sports provides a window into the peculiar nature of the American psyche.

A review of the roster of ArtPace projects also reveals a surprising number that have delved into aspects of religion or spiritual practice. Belying the conventional idea that art and religion are natural antagonists, the projects at ArtPace reveal how influential this realm of human experience has been on contemporary artists. A number of artists have created quasi-altars or memorials within the gallery, while others have explored the role of religious ritual and belief in their lives.

For artists from Texas, this focus seems in part an acknowledgment of the powerful hold Chicano culture and ritual exert in this part of the world. In the program’s first year, San Antonio artist David Zamora Casas swathed the gallery in transparent draperies and covered the walls with paintings that drew on Latino folk art and popular devotional art. The centerpiece of his installation was a vivid Indian madonna floating on a lacy cloud above a low platform set with votive candles. Fellow San Antonian Kathy Vargas transformed the space into a shrine to her late mother. Moving between the personal and the universal, she combined photographs, thorns, hearts, kites, and gold leaf in assemblage works that suggested the enduring power of love. Holly Moe, from Bandera, Texas, also created a chapel of sorts, fashioning colored carpets into collages that formed an indoor garden celebrating the Good News of her status as a born-again Christian.

Kathy Vargas...

Kathy Vargas Miracle Lives: Diana, 1997. Mixed media with gelatin silver prints. 81c × 72c × 46 in. Detail

However, this preoccupation with spiritual matters is clearly not limited to Texans. In The Holy Artwork, German artist Christian Jankowski collaborated with a local evangelical preacher to create an actual broadcast sermon that likened the making of art to the experience of prayer. Irish artist Dorothy Cross filled a walk-in freezer with dead snakes, transforming it into a kind of chapel that served as a reminder of the centrality of death in the Catholic tradition.

Nor were the spiritually oriented works limited to explorations of aspects of Christianity. New York artist Carolee Schneemann took a more shamanistic approach to questions of death and memory in Vesper’s Pool, an installation dedicated to Vesper, her beloved cat who had died of feline leukemia. The darkened gallery presented images of Vesper along with a quasi-scientific display of objects and possibly paranormal signs surrounding the cat’s last days and death. Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook dealt with the funerary rituals of her culture in a video installation that pictured the artist reading from a Thai text and chanting to corpses as a gesture of love and solicitude. Austin artist Margo Sawyer drew on her experiences in Asia to create an Eastern-inspired meditation chamber filled with mysteriously lit black and gold vessels. Estonian artist Jaan Toomik suggested the spiritual seeker’s feelings of both longing and ecstasy in a haunting video installation featuring images of personal and public forms of worship in his native country. Austin artist Regina Vater created delicate assemblage objects that celebrated the myriad forms assumed by goddess figures in Western and non-Western cultures.

Margo Sawyer...

Margo Sawyer Ten + One Illuminations, 2000. Gold leaf on steel. Dimensions vary. Installation view

Taking a more abstract approach to the ultimate questions, English artist Cornelia Parker and American artist Leonardo Drew suggested the continuity of life and death, Parker with a cascading sculptural installation created from the charred bits of a Texas church that had burned to the ground, and Drew in an enormous wall work that reincarnated elements like blackened books, rusted metal, and earth-encrusted burlap that had been subjected to the natural processes of decay.

More or less explicitly, such works reveal how art can offer the spiritually inclined a way to get at the ineffable core of religion. But as other ArtPace projects suggest, art is just as effective at making the secrets of science manifest. New York artist Brian Conley used his residency to explore his fascination with biology and evolution. He created a room-sized mechanical sculpture based on the mating call of a particular species of frog. The call is replicated by a giant red balloon that inflates in the viewer’s presence and then lets out a distinctive croak as it deflates and pushes air through a sound-generating device. New York artist Joan Bankemper delved into horticulture, growing sunflowers in the ruins of an abandoned mill and on the roof of ArtPace. And London-based artist Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé took on anthropology and ethnography in an interactive digital work in which the public was invited to manipulate images of African sculpture from the archives of the San Antonio Museum of Art.

By demonstrating so graphically the intermingling of art with other fields of human endeavor, the ArtPace projects suggest how far we have come from the days when art was supposed to remain within its own boundaries and limit its investigations to questions of form and material. Formalism, of course, is long dead, but the public today may be excused for feeling a little confused about what has taken its place. Exploding out into all areas of life, contemporary art presents a very different set of issues, which go to the heart of the meaning and function of art today. Underlying many of the projects described above are such questions as: Is the definition of art infinitely elastic? Do distinctions between fields and genres still matter? How does this new fluidity reflect the nature of contemporary life?

Brian Conley...

Brian Conley Pseudanuran Gigantica, 2001. Inflatable vinyl balloon, aluminum scaffolding, and acoustic sound device. 16 × 25 × 15 ft.

In a similar way, the projects that have been created at ArtPace over the last eight years also reflect an ongoing debate about the meaning of place, the tension between the local and the global, and the significance of ethnic, racial, and sexual identities. These subjects have become increasingly urgent as globalism and technological advances undermine, and even dissolve, long-established national and regional boundaries. The contemporary art world is not exactly the global village imagined by such ’60s-era futurists as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, whose picture of a homogenous world culture seems more than a little nightmarish today. However, there is no question that certain cultural artifacts, commodities, and even attitudes have become common currency in today’s world. Often influences flow from the more to the less economically developed countries, as the recurring denunciations of the McDonaldization of places like China and Russia attest. But, as ethnographer James Clifford points out, they can also operate in the other direction—bringing us phenomena like the enormous Western popularity of Kung Fu movies from Hong Kong and mainland China or the spread of Afro Pop music.

Curiously, far from wiping out differences, this globalization of culture often seems to have the opposite effect, encouraging the preservation of local traditions and histories. In the face of a homogenizing modernity, Native Americans embrace rituals and crafts that had seemed in danger of dying out, and Koreans celebrate the opening of new hotels and office buildings with ancient shamanistic rituals.

Joan Bankemper...

Joan Bankemper Sophie’s Garden, 1998. 598 mammoth sunflowers on the ArtPace roof

For artists, this situation presents both a choice and a dilemma. Many of them embody the freedom of movement that is the essence of global culture. They may be natives of one country, schooled in another, and may have lived in several others. For such individuals, concepts like home, authenticity, and identity are slippery indeed. This is reflected in artworks in which aspects of personal, culturally specific experiences are couched in a more or less generally recognizable international art language. For artists in a global art world, it is increasingly necessary to wrestle with questions like: What is the significance of place? How does it relate to identity? Is authenticity a myth? How do we communicate across diverse cultures?

The global/local dynamic is dramatically visible in the way that many of the ArtPace projects deal with the surrounding locale. For some artists, Texas is their birthplace or current residence. For others, it is a place briefly encountered during the two-month residency. Yet even in many works by temporary residents from outside the state and outside the country, Texas looms large. It serves as a kind of metaphor for America, variously representing the frontier mentality, border politics, the American melting pot, and the ethnic tensions of a multicultural country.

Thus, for instance, Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata was fascinated by the phenomenon of the Texas ghost town. He toured the width of the state filming abandoned communities and collapsing buildings, creating a record of the strange beauty that accompanies architectural decay and dissolution. Australian artist Simryn Gill lived out her desire to be a plant in the American landscape by taking photographs of herself and various companions in open fields wearing face-obscuring headdresses made from native plants. California artist Laura Aguilar acted out a similar impulse with a series of nude self-portraits that borrowed from the early traditions of landscape photography while undermining the conventional aesthetic of the nude. In Aguilar’s images, the traditionally svelte, seductive physique is exchanged for a large body draped in folds of