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Ursula von Rydingsvard draws on her childhood memories as a refugee from Nazi Germany to create roughly hacked cedar sculptures of enormous power, evoking everyday objects and architectural forms. She owes the direction her career has taken -- her work has now been exhibited at the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Walker Art Center and the Detroit Institute of Arts -- to the period when she studied sculpture at Columbia’s School of the Arts (SOA) in the 1970s. It was her mentors from that era -- Ronald Bladen, George Sugarman and Jean Linder -- who encouraged her to use her art to unlock her earliest memories.
It seemed fitting, therefore, that one of von Rydingsvard’s pieces, an indoor sculpture resembling a primitive vessel, graced the first-ever retrospective of SOA alumni work, “From Postwar to Postmodernism: Three Decades of Columbia Visual Artists,” held at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery from Feb. 28 to March 10. You can see work by von Rydingsvard and others in the exhibit in an online photo gallery.
The show’s other highlights included a video/performance work by Joan Jonas, who helped to pioneer the genre; an amazingly intricate multilayered mapping piece by painter Joyce Kozloff; and a magical three-dimensional painting by Charles Meyers. Jonas received her M.F.A. from Columbia in1965; Kozloff, in 1967; and Meyers, in 1959.
At the show’s opening reception, visual arts chair Gareth James said that the wide variety of works on display attested to SOA’s greatest strength, that of encouraging its M.F.A. students to “become the best artists they can be.”
Dan Kleinman, SOA’s acting dean, praised the exhibition for enriching the ties between current and former students. “The visual arts program is so vibrant now,” he said. “This program is something its alumni can be proud of.”
James added that he’d found it very moving to see works by the school’s visual arts graduates assembled in one place and to “hear their memories of the School of the Arts in decades past.” James was referring to the personal notes a number of the artists had contributed to the booklet, “Excerpts from the Archive,” which also serves as the companion volume for SOA’s first-ever visual arts archive, scheduled to go online on May 1.
Exhibit co-organizer Garth Graeper reported in an e-mail that one of his favorite stories had come from Elliott Bassman, the abstract painter known for his colorful works with a special focus on his Judaic heritage. For the Columbia exhibition, Bassman contributed a monoprint he did at Columbia in 1978 while working with printmaker Robert Blackburn. According to Bassman, he’d continued working on the piece after leaving Columbia: the black ink still life in the foreground was done about 12 years ago, while the blue acrylic border that completes the piece was done in 2005. Finally, he decided to call the piece Revisit as it “connects time, mediums, themes across a period of 28 years in one single work on paper.”
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