Today's Edition
Michael Janofsky (New York Times) - It was 2:15pm on a late-summer Friday afternoon, time for Creative Growth’s (CG) weekly dance party in the lunch area. The artists began gyrating to tunes from a boom box. Soon, a conga line formed. It was a joyous way to celebrate another week of artistry.
Creative Growth is a sprawling art centre and gallery near downtown Oakland in a building long ago converted from an auto repair shop. Far more than the dancing on Fridays, what happens here every day is a celebration – of art, of life, of the human spirit.
It is foremost a tribute to the mystery and marvel of the brain’s capacity to overcome deficits and, through artistic endeavour, open a window onto an inner self.
The artists here have intellectual and developmental disabilities –autism, Down Syndrome, some nonverbal, blind or deaf, and many who communicate better through the work they produce. Untrained in the conventional sense of art schools and mentors, they respond, instead, to an inexplicable force that guides their eyes, hands and instincts.
Monica Valentine, 68, originally from San Mateo, California, whose creations have reached museums around the country, slides beads onto pins, then inserts the pins into Styrofoam blocks, careful to somehow keep colour groups in specific design patterns. How does she do that; she has been blind since birth. “I feel their temperature,” she says of the beads.
John Martin, 60, who lives with a complex developmental disability, moulds ceramic pieces into what appear to be colourful everyday objects like pliers, wrenches and keys, only some of them have faces.
Like Valentine and Martin, who both now live in Oakland, each artist creates according to a particular muse with no outside instruction. As many as 90 artists a day, five days a week, immerse themselves in media of their choice – painting, drawing, sculpting, weaving, sewing, woodwork, beadwork, ceramics, video. For most of them, it is their job; some have been coming here for decades.
While many of the finished pieces get only as far as an exhibition in the centre’s own gallery, some artists have achieved international acclaim. Their works are regarded as on par with those by artists without disabilities and with more formal training.
Pieces by Creative Growth stars – Judith Scott, Dan Miller and William Scott (no relation to Judith), among them – are eagerly sought by private collectors and leading gallerists. Some of their pieces sell in the upper five figures.They and other CG artists are also part of major museum collections, including the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the National Gallery in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The State Department has secured on loan 100 pieces to display in US embassies around the world as part of its Arts in Embassies programme. On most days, the artists’ works are on public view somewhere in the US.
Creative Growth and its two Bay Area sister organisations were founded as nonprofits by the late Elias Katz, a Bay Area psychologist, and his artist wife, Florence Ludins-Katz, who pushed to expand rights and quality of life for disabled people through art as an essential human experience. Creative Growth was the first to open in 1974, followed by the others in the early 1980s.
While all three studios share the same mission, CG has been the most aggressive in promoting artists beyond the region with an expectation they will be appreciated – and sold – more for the quality of the work than for the disability of the artist, much as Frida Kahlo’s paintings are revered for their brilliance and imagery, not the ill health she suffered much of her life. (She died at age 44 as a result of injuries from a streetcar accident when she was 18).
It is a critical distinction that helps move disabled artists closer to the contemporary art mainstream, mirroring the experience of other minority groups, whose early works might have been venerated more because of the demographic of the artist.
“What you lead with matters,” said Tom DiMaria, Creative Growth’s director since 2000 and chief marketer. “If it’s the art that interests you, then the conversation is first about who made it and the story behind it. If disability leads, then it’s a charity case.”
Judith Scott’s oeuvre – random objects wrapped in yarn and fabric – offer no clue that she was born deaf. Other works offer hints of an atypical life.
Miller, who works wearing a helmet to safeguard against an epileptic seizure, marries swirling patterns with images and words that are sometimes typewritten or scrawled, but each included for reasons known only to him. So there are words mentioned such as light bulbs, electrical sockets, drill, string, metal and so forth.
The MoMA in San Francisco will celebrate Creative Growth’s 50th anniversary with a major exhibition of 113 pieces by 10 artists. Unlike the Oakland museum, which is buying 20 pieces for its own collection, SFMoMA has purchased the entire exhibit, plus an additional 43 pieces from the adjacent non-profits, for $578,000, the largest acquisition of works by disabled artists by any US museum.
Many of the pieces selected for the exhibition are fanciful representations of people and objects that reveal almost nothing of the artist’s life.
As with all sales, the money is split equally between the studio and the artist, but a show of this size is almost certain to raise artist profiles, drive prices higher, increase public appreciation and, by extension, boost museum attendance.
