雕塑和绘画的集合ly distributed across the grounds of Saratoga’s Montalvo Arts Center attempts to address a common problem: How do we create inclusivity at places that bear racist histories?
Kelly Sicat, Montalvo’s director of the Lucas Artists Program, calls “Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape” “a stake in the ground” in the center’s efforts to make everyone feel invited. The curators hope the exhibition, which opened July 15, will counter white supremacist associations with European white marble statuary, much of which can be found on the property dating to the estate’s original collection. So far, Sicat said it’s resonated with visitors — so much so that the center has decided to extend its run through Jan. 15.
The installation places art centered on many who would not have been welcome there in the past — people of color, disabled people, trans people — throughout the lush setting, where an Italianate villa presides over formal Baroque-style gardens. The 175-acre estate was bequeathed by U.S. Sen. James D. Phelan to the state at his death in 1930. Its self-conscious European aesthetic conforms to Phelan’s unreserved “Keep California White,” anti-Asian political agenda.
Countering the legacy of Phelan’s exclusionary stance can be challenging, especially when reaching the Montalvo Arts Center requires a drive through one of the Bay Area’s toniest neighborhoods.
Impetus for the project came prior to 2020’s racial conversations. In 2016, California College of the Arts students stopped curator Donna Conwell during a tour, saying, “This is a place clearly for white people. … Look whose bodies are represented on this property,” Sicat recalled one observation. “This is about white people, this is about white bodies; this is a white space.”
It was at that moment, Sicat said, that Conwell began conceiving the exhibition.
The arts center solicited contributions from eight artists based throughout the country known for work insisting on the inclusion of marginalized people and their histories. Of them, the Bay Area boasts Pilar Agüero-Esparza, who received her bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz and master of fine arts from San Jose State University; Margaret Laurena Kemp, a professor of theater and dance at UC Davis; Oliver Lee Jackson, whose studio is in Oakland; and Wanxin Zhang, who serves on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute.
Contributors from outside the region include Los Angeles artists Cassils, a trans artist who works in performance, photography, sculpture and sound; and sculptor Alison Saar, daughter of the renowned Black artist Betye Saar. Two others are based in Chicago: Riva Lehrer, a disabled artist and instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Two works were commissioned specifically for “Claiming Space”: Agüero-Esparza’s “Of Color” sculpture, a large multicolor woven canvas mixing skin tone variations with natural colors from the landscape, and Kemp’s soundscape “It’s All About Love: Mixtape for the Landscape,” a two-hour recording of conversation, music and sound participants can listen to while walking Montalvo.
Inclusion of historically marginalized people, Sicat said, does not mean ignoring history or supplanting it.
“You either try to hide the history under the rug or you just pull it out and it becomes one more tool in the box,” she said, “and something you can really make dialogue with and have a real conversation.”
年代aar’s “Winter” (2011) sits at the villa entrance. Cast in dark bronze, a woman braces in fetal position on her side, arms wrapped around her knees and face protectively. The figure’s huddled human response to a winter’s chill contrasts with the airy allegorical serenity of the nearby “Summer,” a lithe, 19th century allegorical female sculpture of aquiline nose in light gray stone that dates to Phelan’s ownership of Montalvo.
Measuring 10 feet by 10 feet, “Strike” (2021) by Thomas, a Black artist, certainly resists the consequences of white supremacist thinking. Thomas based “Strike” on a 1934 protest lithograph, “Strike Scene” by the Ukrainian-born American painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick, featuring a Black worker halting the arm of a police officer about to strike with a baton. Thomas’ sculpture isolates and repeats the gesture. Arms emerge from the ground, refusing to be buried in history. Their mirrored surfaces reflect the viewer, including us in the history and future of resistance.
The presence of disabled artists and bodies serves as a challenge to the legacy of white marble sculpture and its unrealistic, idealized bodies, such as the 19th century Adam and Eve figures in Montalvo’s Italianate Garden. In the Cottage Gallery, which keeps shorter hours than Montalvo grounds, Oliver Lee Jackson’s marble torso “Untitled (Marble + Wood Sculpture)” (2007-22) rests on its side. During the carving process, the block cracked and split down the middle. Rather than rejecting it as “imperfect,” Jackson braced it with wooden supports, presenting the breakage as a natural phenomenon.
Ultimately, “Claiming Space” does what its title suggests: It claims space without erasing history. The serene face of Buddha gazes out of the body of a warrior in Zhang’s “Return to the Garden of Eden” (2011-13). Flowers grow beneath the figure’s feet.
Judy Dennis, the Lucas Artists Program manager, sees “Eden” as reflective of the artist’s spiritual journey. Zhang was educated at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art in China before immigrating to the United States, where he earned an MFA at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Zhang, Dennis said, “thinks of the U.S. now as his spiritual home because it’s a place where he’s free to express himself artistically without fear of censorship.”
Zhang’s figure now stands on the lawn of the site whose former owner Phelan plotted to build a California that would have excluded an individual like Zhang. But Phelan donated his estate “for the development of art.” Fortunately, a better and broader interpretation of that sentiment than Phelan must have imagined has prevailed.
“Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in the Landscape”:年代culptures and paintings. 8 a.m.-sunset daily. Cottage Gallery 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. Through Jan. 15. Free. Montalvo Arts Center 15400 Montalvo Road. Saratoga. 408-961-5800.montalvoarts.org
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Kelly Sicat.