Monuments
1983–1998
Artist statement
After graduating from Yale, I left the studio for museums and colleges around the country where I created community monuments. From Jeffrey Lord Amherst and Biological Warfare at the University of Massachusetts to Margaret Bourke White’s clandestine steel mill photographs for Cleveland, each one addressed an under-recognized aspect of local history. A few public sculptures such as Muted Belles for the University of Memphis were permanent, while my finalist design for a Boston Women’s Monument remains un-built. Most of these commissions, however, for institutions such as the Bronx Museum, and the Socrates Sculpture Park were impermanent, or even destroyed at the end of installation, simply due to the cost of transporting and storing their elements.
My role in the construction and destruction of my own work, and my interest in the ancient world led me to the Odyssey and Penelope’s cycle of weaving and un-weaving and my current Portraits of Ancient Linen paintings.
Muted Belles, 1994
Mixed media installation
14 x 8 x 8 feet
Commissioned by the University of Memphis, Tennessee
In this quietly subversive monument, the Southern belle’s hoop skirt morphs into a liberty bell. Printed around the entablature are named women of Memphis: Ida B. Wells, Annie Cook, Myra Driefus, Julia Hooks, Alberta Hunter, Suzanne Scruggs, Juanita Williamson and Frances Wright, all selected as “muted belles” by a spirited committee of professors and local historians.
The Nature of New York, 1994
Wild Plants, Bricks, Steel. Dimensions; 6'6h x 40'w 49'd.
Commissioned by Operation GreenThumb, NYC Department of General Services. South Bronx, NY
This South Bronx formal garden is complete with: brick pathways, flower beds, and a series of bright red follies. But the geometric hedges are carved from the rampant Mugwort and the blossoms are Queen Anne’s Lace.
Working with students from the High School for Environmental Studies, we invited New Yorkers to reconsider all plants--cultivated and wild--in their urban environment. Many of these opportunistic plants--botanists call them “ruderals”--have medicinal properties or are edible. “I call them New York plants,” said one of the community gardeners, “because they are so tough!”
The red steel sculptural “houses” form a symbolic village amid beds of collard greens, okra and corn, “They stand for the community working together”, said Abu Talib, the founder of Taqwa Garden.
Margaret Bourke-White Photographs the Flats, 1993
Mixed media installation
7 feet tall with variable width/depth
In her pre-WWII Life Magazine days Margaret Bourke-White photographed the thriving steel factories along Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River.
In post-industrial Cleveland, The Flats’ warehouses have been transformed. There are cafés and for one of its galleries I created five steel sculptures of Bourke-White's camera, each containing the memory of molten steel depicted in painted cut-out cardboard.
Woman In The Nineteenth Century: A Conversation. 1992
Steel, Hay, Text. Size: 6'h x 14'w x 14'd
Commissioned by the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. Lincoln, MA
The sculpture takes its title from Margaret Fuller's manifesto. Although an important Concord Transcendentalist, and valued intellectual sparring partner, Fuller is less well-known than Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry Thoreau.
Finding Harvard’s gates locked to her and insisting that higher education was the key to woman's advancement, she organized a Conversation Group for women which included the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and the writer Elizabeth Peabody.
I based the sculptures on a Windsor rocking chair in the Concord historical museum. Oversized, and fabricated out of steel, they are no longer images of benign domesticity. Instead, they become cages or even traditional New England stockades where an outspoken woman of an earlier generation would have been publicly displayed and pelted with rotten fruit.
Hot Spot, 1991
Hay, red clay, army surplus blankets, steel, and canvas. Dimensions variable.
Commissioned by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
Re-created at the City Gallery of Contemporary Art, Raleigh, NC, 1993,
with catalogue essay by Eleanor Heartney.
In June of 1763, Jeffery, Lord Amherst’s gifts of Smallpox-infected blankets devastated a Native American population that had no resistance to the white man's disease.
During my first visit to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I learned about Anthrax research in a Department of Defense-funded lab on campus. Inspired by the community’s concern, I wrote to scientists, activists, and military personnel involved in biological weaponry and public policy, soliciting their statements. My letters and their responses lined the walls of the gallery.
Students helped fabricate twenty cots of steel and canvas. They supported supine figures molded of hay and red clay. Draped over each was an army surplus blanket stenciled with names like “Dengue Fever”, and “Chikungunya”, virulent exotics that the US military has researched for potential use in biological warfare.
Triangle Shirtwaist Study, 1993. Graphite and sepia ink on paper 10-1/2 x 8-3/4 inches
Triangle Shirtwaist Memorial Proposal, 1993
On March 25, 1911 a fire broke out in a rag bin at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building. It quickly spread to the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors. But fire ladders only reached to the 7th floor. Finding the fire doors locked, workers jumped to their deaths from the burning building. In all, 146 Triangle employees, mostly women, died.
What do you know about sweat shop conditions in New York City today?
Triangle Shirtwaist “Dress Form Dress”: From design to custom print as modeled by the artist
Women’s Memorial for Boston, 1998
I was one of five finalists invited to submit proposals for a permanent monument to women of Boston. The program required some figurative representation of three historic women associated with Boston: Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Stone.
The central form is a traditional sculpture pedestal. But none of these three women were ever put on a pedestal during their lifetimes. Whatever they achieved was through their own grit. By reading their stories printed on the stairway’s risers, the act of climbing reclaims local history.
The space where a monumental statue would be located is left vacant, open to possibility and representing each individual’s desire to climb up and have her say.
Monument, 1996
Mixed Media. Dimensions: 10’h x 8’w x 8‘d Created for Chesterwood, Stockbridge, MA With Stephen Furnstahl, AIA
This piece was commissioned for a site at Chesterwood, the home and studio of Daniel Chester French. His Lincoln Memorial in Washington epitomized early 20th century ideals of how a monument should represent the American past for new immigrants.
Chesterwood’s dramatic view of Monument Mountain invites us to consider the eponymous mound of stones that the Muh-he-ka-ne-ok built at its base.
What is a monument? People punctuate the landscape with various gestures and for various reasons. Where culture and place intersect, we create repositories for collective memory.
Artists Space Underground, 1990
Hay, Wire Mesh, Wood, Ink Wash Drawings, Paint etc. Installation size: 8'h x 12'w x 35'd
Commissioned by Artists Space, NYC
Seated around rough-sawn cedar benches are forty huddled figures sculpted of hay and chicken wire. They fill the basement gallery.
On the lap of each lies a charcoal drawing of exposed female genitals bound with cord to a block of wood. To view each drawing one must peer, voyeuristically, over the shoulder of the hay person who holds it.
The walls of the space are covered with grey-spattered negative prints of the artist's hands. They resemble the handprints found on Paleolithic cave walls.
Is this a conference room? Is this a prison? Or, is this a space for artists to engage in activities no longer permitted “above ground”?
Four Views Muskingum Valley, 1988
The project was commissioned as part of an artist residency in rural Ohio. I constructed four gateways from branches I found on the meadow site. These gateways are each different, becoming more structural from the first (a dense nest, barely fabricated at all) to the last (a skeletal structure with the branches lashed at taut angles).
Each gateway frames a human disruption in the landscape beyond. They range from a 2,000-year-old burial mound of the Adena civilization to an abandoned and un-reclaimed strip mine of the area’s Meigs Creek Coal.
People From Off, 1992
200 Sculpted Figures: earth red clay, cages: wood/wire mesh, paintings on wall: latex paint/rice, Texts on Glass walls. Installation size: 12’h x 20’w x 60’d.
Commissioned by the University of Arkansas Little Rock
Hundreds of tiny wire and clay sculptures march across the floor of the gallery at the University of Little Rock. The Trail of Tears passed directly through Little Rock en route to Oklahoma where they were promised land “forever”.
The hanging wood cages are based on those used in Arkansas’ poultry industry, but also refer to World War II Japanese American internment camps located in the state.
Historical documents were printed on the outside of the galleries’ glass walls juxtaposed with inward facing personal narratives from the community. This created an opposition between “official” and “unofficial” history--Insider and Outsider. The glass walls, covered with a web of black text, thus became a metaphor for different ways of experiencing this place, posing the question: who will we permit to tell our stories and write our history?
Rubber Union: Akron Amazon, 1992
Steel, Rubber, Latex, Rubber Gloves, Text. Install size: 16’h x 25’w x 55’d
Commissioned by the University of Akron. Akron, OH.
For most of the 20th century Akron, Ohio was synonymous with rubber. Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone and other tire manufacturers were located in Akron. The Rubber Workers in Akron set the standard for industrial unions when they organized in the 1930’s. In the last decades of the 20th century most of the tire companies moved their plants to non-union southern states. Akron, like so many rust belt cities, struggles through a post-industrial identity crisis.
Rubber tappers or Seringueiros in the Amazonian rainforest are fighting to preserve the rainforest and thus their livelihood. As Henry Ford discovered in the early 20th century, rubber plantations will not survive in the Amazon as they will in Southeast Asia. Therefore, to preserve the rubber trees, the entire ecosystem must be kept intact.
The attenuated figures with upraised arms are based on paintings by indigenous rainforest people. The figures and floor are covered with rubber scraps donated by one of the few remaining tire manufacturers in the Akron area. The striped pattern formed by the rubber scraps on the floor resembles the cuts made in rubber trees by the Seringueiros to extract latex, the raw material from which rubber is made.
The hanging panels are covered with latex. The workers’ rubber gloves have been loaned from the Surplus Store in Akron. And, yes, the gallery reeked of rubber.
Burning The Jungle, The Rainforest Burns, 1990
Wood Branches, Cheesecloth, Natural latex.
Installation Size: 9’h x 4’w x 30’d
Commissioned by The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Bronx, NY
This installation was conceived for the tunnel-like space of the handicapped-access ramp corridor at the museum. The images of Amazon rainforest animals and plants are based on the paintings of the Tikuna and other indigenous rainforest peoples. They are cut from plywood panels that run the length of both sides of the corridor. The panels are back-lit with red and amber light - the rainforest on fire. A suspended ceiling of woven branches arches overhead. At the bottom of the corridor hangs a panel of cheesecloth thick with drips and globs of natural latex, a product of rainforest trees. The text on the panel reveals two voices: that of the indigenous people and that of the conquerors representing two very different ways of seeing the same place.
Plowshares Into Swords, 1991
Wood, Steel, Shovels, Paint. Installation size: (28 figures) 1’h x 20’w x 40’d. Commissioned by the Socrates Sculpture Park. Queens, NY
“And they shall beat their swords into plowshares…”
Historically, we have accepted that as an act of improvement. However, environmental degradation caused by current agricultural practice should make us think again. Plowshares, carelessly used, have now become swords against the earth.
The installation consists of fourteen “foot soldiers” carved out of re-purposed wood from local buildings. The heads are warrior masks welded and burnt from ordinary garden shovels and wielded defiantly by the foot soldiers. Into the spine of each figure I routed out a word that describes an act of environmental violence such as: PESTICIDE, HERBICIDE, CHEMICAL FERTILIZERS, BURNING THE RAINFOREST, DUSTBOWL, MONOCULTIVATION, DESERTIFICATION, SOIL EROSION and AQUIFER CONTAMINATION.
Peace Mandala, 1991
Corn, Beans, Rice, Clay Figures.
Installation size: 3”h x 72”w x 72”d.
Created for the Food Stamp Gallery. New York, NY
The Food Stamp Gallery was located in a storefront window in East Harlem, where I taught. On January 15, 1991 I spent the day in the window where I dribbled rice, corn and beans – typical foods in this Hispanic community – into the shape of a classic Tibetan mandala. As I worked, people gathered to discuss this celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace in the face of the impending Gulf War.
My young students came to visit and later made their own mandalas in the classroom. The window text in English and Spanish said:
A Mandala is a symbol of peace that comes from Tibet
It forms the shape of a house.
Usually the mandala is made of sand,
But this Mandala is made of rice, corn, and beans
The figures march across the Mandala.
They search for shelter, food and freedom from violence.
All people deserve these things.
Why should we spend so much to make war
When so many are hungry, homeless, and afraid?
Acid Rain, 1990
Coal, steel barrels, exhaust pipes, wire, wood, plaster bandages.
Commissioned for Out of the Woods. Fairmount Park. Philadelphia, PA.
A garden of wounded (dead?) tree sculptures, bound in plaster bandages. The lawn has been scraped away to reveal bare earth, automobile exhaust pipes, beds of coal, steel drums filled with water that acidifies over the course of the exhibition.
The piece was controversial. One review stated flatly:
“Rothschild’s piece is an altruistic sentiment expressed in the heavy-handed and technically casual style characteristic of much political art.”