whitehot | July 2011, Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies: U.S. Mission to the United Nations
Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies Diversity is the moniker for this visually stimulating installation that appears across 19 floors, that is site-specific as well as multi-faceted. The main floor of the building opens with Untitled, (2009-10) by Carrie Mae Weems which consists of 42 panels that individually measure 11-inches square and expands to about six-feet across the gray marble wall. Collectively this piece utilizes an array of colors, an immediate metaphor for issues surrounding race in America. In each row of colored panels, at least two anonymous portraits of individual from African-American descent appear. Weems uses bright hues such as green, blue and pink to pose the question, “What is color?” A site-specific mural by Odili Donald Odita titled, Light and Vision, (2010) also appears on both the first and second floors near the bay of elevators. Odita’s mural presents a geometry of contrasting colors that appear immediately vibrant through sharp-angled juxtapositions. A flurry of paintings, photographs, and prints appear throughout the upper floors of the US/UN building. Ellsworth Kelly’s The Mallarmé Series, (1999) consist of four framed lithographs that represent a singular shape in either red, green, blue or black. As seen in another piece by Kelly titled, Red Curve, State I, each of these depictions is part of the artist’s larger examination of abstract forms. Geometric abstraction also appears in three screen-prints by Joel Shapiro titled, Boat, Bird, Mother and Child (2009) – studies for his sculpture maquette, GZ 1:8 model (2010). Located in the United Nations Plaza, the US/UN building features work by over 50 artists such as Romare Bearden, Christo, Ellsworth Kelly, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Kenneth Noland, Martin Puryear and Catherine Opie. An outstanding proscenium features a wall piece by Sol LeWitt and is balanced with sculptures by Ron Gorchov and Lynda Benglis. The catch to this vast installation is that it is closed to the public, available to viewers only through pictures. This stands in stark contrast to the fact that Andy Warhol’s first Factory was once located only a few blocks away on the corner of 2nd Avenue and East 47th Street, where contemporary art was nothing but a series of experiments open to anyone who wanted to stop by, contribute or lounge. Still, this amount of contemporary American art within a government institution is remarkable given that federal support for the arts is far lower than it was in the 1960s and 70s.
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #832: A red spiral line on blue, 1999 Ron Gorchov, Totem, 2009 Paul Warchol
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