Item of the Week: “To Imagine a Language is to Imagine a Form of Life”

We're getting ready for Women of the Chrysler: A 400-Year Celebration of the Arts, part of Minds Wide Open: A Statewide Celebration of Women in the Arts in Virginia.  The exhibition opens March 24, 2010 and will feature an amazing variety of artwork by women artists drawn from the Chrysler Museum Collection. In the Library you'll find books and other resources about each artist included in the exhibition.  Spring Library Intern Victoria M. Schwab was inspired by one of the works in the show  - Deborah Butterfield's 2000 peice Kakiwi to write the following about one of the volumes featured in the reading room:  Horses: the Art of Deborah Butterfield.  Victoria writes:
"Deborah Butterfield’s work establishes a language with another species through her ability to understand and communicate with the horse. When constructing her sculptures she relies on her memory of the horse’s internal gestures and energy rather than a mere copy. Butterfield compares the process to learning how to dance with someone who cannot talk to you.

Butterfield claims art is meant to advance human beings and that a single work is the “debris from thinking and growing.” She specifically believes that art is geared to confront the viewer with what may initially appear uncomfortable through a vulnerable and complex position. Through her expression of language, growth and perception are made achievable in the physical presence of her sculptures. The viewer is asked to climb into and connect with the shape, which offers a view of the world through another set of eyes. The transference of oneself into the form allows the viewer to bring their unique life experiences to the work of art, meanwhile perceiving the remnants of Butterfields’s energy. The wonderful result is that the viewer utilizes what makes them unique from the next person and grows from the experience; one that begins with yourself and then working outward."

By: Victoria M. Schwab

Derived from the 1988 interview with Marcia Tucker

More information about Women of the Chrysler  will soon be available here, or your can learn about other events taking place as part of Minds Wide Open here.