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Here, There... While SECCA's being fixed, guest artists will select sites around the city and go to work
Photo Courtesy of Roadsworth
North American Footprint, on Park Avenue in Montreal, is an example of the type of public art that could appear this year during SECCA’s "Inside Out: Artists in the Community II" project.
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Published: January 11, 2009
Brother, can you spare a ladder?
Charlie Brouwer, an artist working in Virginia, wants to borrow it in February and March, along any others that locals can spare. He'll use the ladders -- and the stories associated with them -- to create a monument to Winston-Salem that includes audio and text archives of "memories, ambitions and anecdotes."
The monument, which will connect together all manner of ladders with temporary plastic binding, might resemble a house or take on a leaning, tower-like form. It is scheduled to go up in Old Salem in March. It will kick off "Inside Out: Artists in the Community II" -- a series of seven public-art installations that the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art will present through November around town.
"You'll notice that we call it ‘Artists in the Community II,'" said Steven Matijcio, one of two SECCA staff members who are serving as curators for "Inside Out."
"SECCA was actually quite active with public-art projects in the past," he said. "This is something that SECCA has really had a solid foundation in.…We definitely want that to continue to happen."
Each installation in "Inside Out" will last about a month and will have one of seven artists create and mount work in a different location. There will be artist talks and a range of other educational activities, and in many instances, SECCA will collaborate with schools or organizations.
SECCA intends to exploit the latest technology during "Inside Out." People will, for example, be able to dial their cell phones for a guided tour of a site, check out artist interviews on YouTube or download film of a project in the making on an Mp3 player.
"Inside Out" has $12,500 in seed money from the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, which has been advocating for public art in a variety of ways. Each installation will cost between $7,500 and $15,000, money that would have been spent on indoor exhibitions.
Work in progress
At this point, "Inside Out" remains very much a work in progress. Although Matijcio has recruited the artists, the show's other curator, Cliff Dossel, is still trying to line up preferred and alternate sites for their work.
"It's been a learning experience for all of us," said Dossel, who has been working at SECCA for about a year after moving here from Baltimore. "Most of us are new to the area, myself included. We're still learning about the history of each of the areas.
"It's literally getting in the car and driving around and going with a gut-reaction to a site and just saying, ‘This one particular site would be great for this particular artist's work.'"
In some cases, Dossel has needed to apply to the city for occupancy certificates and said he has found that officials "have been very open to the idea."
"They say, ‘This would be a great project to do; let's see how we can do it.' I haven't run into this kind of a mindset before."
"Inside Out" has several aims in addition to reviving SECCA's public-art presence, which will continue after the renovations are over, albeit on a smaller scale.
One aim is to keep SECCA visible at a time when its indoor exhibitions no longer are. The museum, on Marguerite Drive, closed on Jan. 4 for a year of renovations, which will entail spending $1.8 million in public money to replace a roof and install a new climate-control system. Mark Leach, SECCA's director, said that the renovations would move forward in their entirety despite uncertainty surrounding state budgets.
Another aim of "Inside Out" is to challenge popular perceptions of what public art is and does.
Element of surprise
"When most people think about public art, they think of a large sculpture (such as) a big, heavy bronze in front of an office building," Matijcio said. "We want these projects to be dynamic and agile and ephemeral. They won't be sort of these heavy, permanent installations; they'll be more flexible and dynamic."
And they should be surprising. Residents jogging along a trail might stumble upon figures made of packing tape, a specialty of Mark Jenkins, a Washington artist who will contribute to "Inside Out" in September.
Or pedestrians may notice, in April, that a once-empty downtown storefront has become the backdrop for German artist Anna von Gwinner's video projections in which silhouettes of rabbits of changing sizes romp about. Gwinner has also created illusions of stores filling up with water or people jumping on trampolines within the walls of basements.
Lee Walton of Greensboro (May) just might treat us to "subtle and playful performances where we least expect them."
Perhaps, too, residents will discover once-hidden aspects of a particular neighborhood.
This should come courtesy of Kianga Ford, who during the summer will make Winston-Salem the latest city in her "The Story of this Place" project. The aim is to collect stories that have escaped the official, historical record and make them the basis of "audio-guided tours of a city's forgotten places."
"Art has that ability to kind of re-engage you and to cause you to think about things in different ways," Matijcio said. "That's a big part of this public-art project."
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.
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