2015 marks the 30th anniversary of Jorge Luis Rodriguez’s “Growth” and the public art program that initiated its creation. “Growth” was the first project completed under the auspices of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs’ (DCLA) Percent for Art program (PFA). Growing out of the cobblestones of East Harlem Artpark on Manhattan’s East 120th Street, its image now serves as the program’s logo — and fittingly so, as the harmony of its design with the daily activities of the neighborhood comes as close as any project has to what the program’s founders had in mind.
New legislation to be submitted to the New York City Council on Tuesday could bring an end to a decades-long debate surrounding democracy and public art.
New York City Bill Could Give Citizens Greater Say in Public Art Process
(via Some Thoughts About Richard Serra and Martin Puryear (Part 2: Puryear))
Which brings me to the work of Martin Puryear. Like Serra, Puryear went to Yale’s famed M.F.A. program (1969–71), but he attended five years after Serra had graduated. In fact, Serra and Robert Morris were visiting artists while he was a student there. During his time at Yale, he studied with the sculptor James Rosati and took a course on African art with Robert Farris Thompson and a course on pre-Columbian at with Michael Kampen. Before attending Yale, Puryear had studied at Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. (1959–63), where he got a B.A in Arts; worked in the Peace Corps (1964–66) in Sierra Leone in West Africa; attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art (1966–68); and took a backpacking trip with his brother in Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. By the time he attended Yale, Puryear was what the poet Charles Baudelaire would have characterized as “a man of the world.”
(via Some Thoughts About Richard Serra and Martin Puryear (Part 1: Serra))
It is easy to forget that Richard Serra (b. 1939) and Martin Puryear (b. 1941) were born only two years apart. The different relationships that they developed toward craft and materials makes it all too easy to overlook that they are nearly contemporaries. If anything, critics tend to focus on the formal differences between them, with the emphasis on Serra’s reliance on prefabricated industrial materials and manufacturing processes to assemble his large scale, site-specific installations, while Puryear uses different varieties of wood for non-monumental pieces that require the knowledge of joinery and other aspects of non-art craftsmanship.
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