Art
Email
Print
'INSIDE OUT': SECCA project is welcome return of public art to city
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: June 14, 2009
Nearly six months after the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art closed its main building at 750 Marguerite Drive (off Reynolda Road) to prepare for a year-long, $1.8 million renovation, the most expensive and complicated part of that process has yet to get started. For now, the renovation is still officially scheduled to be complete in time for SECCA to reopen at the beginning of 2010.
In the meantime SECCA's relatively new staff is trying to maintain the center's visibility and relevance through the end of 2009 by way of a public-art program titled "Inside Out: Artists in the Community II."
It's not the first time that SECCA has commissioned artworks to be presented in public settings outside the center's galleries. Setting aside for the moment the center's present need for such a program, "Inside Out" is an inherently worthy undertaking because this city could well use more public art.
For a place billed as a city of the arts, we've got a paltry inventory of permanent public artworks. More than 20 years ago, in 1988, the Arts Council tried to stimulate a change in that reality by leading a drive to have public artworks commissioned for permanent installation along the Strollway leading from downtown to the N.C. School of the Arts. Nothing ever came of the endeavor, though, and the relatively few examples of temporary and permanent public art that the city has seen since then have largely resulted from efforts by a regional group known as the Tri-State Sculptors' Association, a few community-minded local sculptors and SECCA in its former incarnation as a private, nonprofit organization. (It was taken over by the state last year.)
SECCA's "Artist and the Community" program -- inaugurated in 1993 and not to be confused with the current program -- brought internationally known artists to Winston-Salem for extended residencies during which they collaborated with local community members and groups to produce artworks uniquely relevant to aspects of the city's life. Some of the artist-participants in that invitational program used their local residencies and community collaborations to produce works for gallery settings, but a few created artworks that they installed in public locations outside SECCA's grounds.
Past public art
The enduring example is the Memory Wall of Peace and Love, the 4-by-4-by-55-foot concrete wall that visionary artist Gregory Warmack (aka "Mr. Imagination") elaborately reworked during his 1999 SECCA residency. It's conspicuously located on Trade Street behind the Winston-Salem Transit Authority Transportation Center (aka the bus station). Although weather-beaten and vandalism-scarred, this physically imposing work -- festooned with celebratory sculptural motifs and densely encrusted with hundreds of ordinary objects donated by local residents -- still commands attention in a public setting that would otherwise be something of an aesthetic dead zone.
Also noteworthy among the public-art projects resulting from the first "Artist and the Community" program were a historically resonant sculptural installation that Fred Wilson created in 1994 at St. Philip's Church in Old Salem, and Lesley Dill's outsized photo-and-text prints about local residents' experiences of visionary consciousness, installed as billboards alongside U.S. 52's route through Winston-Salem in 2001.
Like Wilson's installation and Dill's billboards, the works SECCA is presenting under its "Inside Out" program are temporary. The program began in March with Charlie Brouwer's Rise Up Winston-Salem, an installation of about 125 stepladders temporarily loaned by local residents and businesses. Until it was dismantled in mid-April, this slapdash assemblage in Old Salem functioned as a kind of aspirationally themed shrine, recalling ad-hoc structures integral to the yard environments of some outsider artists. The participatory element of the donated ladders brought to mind local residents' donations of the objects that Mr. Imagination encrusted in his Memory Wall.
Next on the "Inside Out" bill was Anna Von Gwinner's video installation in flight, in which images of variously sized and colored balls moved up and down against a black background, calling to mind a range of celestial, subaquatic and molecular phenomena. Unfortunately, it was available for viewing for only three hours per evening on three successive evenings in early April, in a relatively remote location -- a self-storage unit in an industrial area off Stratford Road several miles northwest of Hanes Mall.
The program's third project was "Small Plots," a series of six performance vignettes by Lee Walton, each performed three times in various public places around Winston-Salem. Each vignette was brief and based on everyday occurrences such as a reunion of old friends, a couple's personal argument and a stranger's getting lost in an unfamiliar city. Performed by local volunteer actors, the "plots" were informally presented every Saturday and Sunday between May 3 and May 30 in several downtown locations, three public parks and other public settings in centrally located commercial and residential neighborhoods. While they may have successfully blurred the line between theater and daily life, they were mostly witnessed by people who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Future public art
SECCA has scheduled "Inside Out" projects by four additional artists -- Kianga Ford, Mark Jenkins, Roadsworth (aka Peter Gibson) and Michael de Broin -- to be presented in succession between August and November. Some of these works, at least, promise to be available for viewers on a less limited basis than were Von Gwinner's video and Walton's performances.
SECCA curator Steven Matijcio -- who is co-curating the series with SECCA's installations manager Cliff Dossel -- described de Broin's piece as an "iceberg-like structure" covered with mirrors to reflect its surroundings. Matijcio said that, as the "Inside Out" program's final piece, it will be installed in November in the pond on SECCA's grounds, as a symbolic prelude to the center's scheduled reopening in January 2010.
But will SECCA really be able to reopen at that time?
A number of indoor renovations at SECCA were finished early this year, and additional work is in progress on the building's interior and grounds. But work has yet to begin on fixing SECCA's roof -- the main problem that shut the building down, and the most expensive one to repair. Although the release of money to cover that cost awaits a pending resolution of the state budget, SECCA Director Mark Leach said a date for resuming the repair work remains undetermined.
Leach said that on June 26 SECCA will begin creating a new strategic plan. Among the questions to be addressed is whether to extend the "Inside Out" program into 2010 if renovation of the center's buildings is not finished by the end of this year.
Email
Print
