68. • OCTOBER 1, 2009 – NEW YORK: Public Art Fund is
pleased to present the first major outdoor exhibition in
New York of artist Peter Coffin. Populating City Hall Park
with 13 monumental silhouettes of iconic sculptures,
Coffin’s Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes) takes the viewer
on a journey through the history of sculpture in space and
time.Variations on Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, an Easter
Island moai, Louise Bourgeois’ Untitled (With Hand), one of
Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes, and Pablo Picasso’s
She Goat, among others, hover like apparitions throughout
the Park. Ranging in size from eight to ten feet tall, their
commanding sculptural presence is somewhat of an illusion;
each work is only one inch thick. The sculptures slip in and
out of view, similar to the way in which memories slip in
and out of one’s mind. The decision to hold the vision in
place or let it fade is left to the viewer.
115. • 1. Liza Lou’s portraits of presidents George Washington through William Clinton are created
entirely out of beads and bordered in wide bands of gold beads to look like framed black and
white photographs. To Lou, the “zillions of beads” used in the portraits symbolize “grand
campaign promises of a sparkling future for America and the fulfillment of the American
dream.” But there’s a fun side to the portraits, too, as Lou remarks, “It’s humorous to see men
in beads. Herbert Hoover is not someone you associate with glitter.”
• 2. A former student of the San Francisco Art Institute, Lou describes her transformation
from painter to beader: “I began as a painter and I walked into a bead store and it was just
like a flash in my mind. I just thought, ‘My God, that’s the most amazing paint I’ve
ever seen.’” She was “hated” for her use of beads and “mortified” her teachers and
classmates, but her $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2002 helped
silence some of those who believed her work wasn’t real art.
• 3. The glass beads used in Lou’s work are all from the Czech Republic; she explains that
Czech beads “are really the most wonderful beads on earth.” Though she originally bought
them in small packets, she now buys so many at a time they’re delivered by truck and
unloaded with forklifts. Her 1999 sculpture “Back Yard,” a full-sized (600
square feet) suburban lawn, is comprised of more than 30 million glass
beads, many of which are in the 250,000 individually beaded blades of
grass that make up the lawn.
• More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2006/mar/21/1