THREE TO SEE—TAYLOR, FENSTERSTOCK, and CUTLER
MAINE LABOR HISTORY MURAL
By Judy Taylor
On permanent display at the Maine Department of Labor administrative offices in Augusta, Maine
PARTERRE
An installation by Lauren Fensterstock
On view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine
From October 3, 2008 through January 11, 2009
FANTASTICAL FABLES
Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by Amy Cutler
On view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine
From October 3, 2008 through January 11, 2009

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

Recently I have had the good fortune to see three incredible art exhibits in Maine, and they were all done by women. (A sign of the times, I hope. While we can and should appreciate artists who are men, we should also be mindful that gender balance has long been due in the art world.) On the surface, the art in these three exhibits is so strikingly different that, aside from gender, there doesn’t seem to be any common element to bind them together. Judy Taylor has produced a bold, striking mural with large panels depicting scenes from Maine’s labor history; Lauren Fensterstock, in a mind-boggling display of virtuosity, has created a black hole of a garden, combining at least three centuries of ideas about nature; and Amy Cutler’s big paintings, whimsical and menacing at the same time, feature women doing different tasks, very different tasks. Yet all three artists have something to say about the past and the present—how the two are twined so tightly that it’s foolish to think of them as separate events. (Lauren Fensterstock addresses this directly in the booklet that accompanies her exhibit Parterre.) It is this attitude that connects Taylor, Fensterstock, and Cutler with what we suspect to be true about the quantum world, and each woman, in her own way, has become a visionary, looking in many directions, which, in turn, dissolve nostalgic notions about the past. Through art, Taylor, Fensterstock, and Cutler have layered concepts of time to produce work that is startling, thought provoking, symbolic, and—dare I say it?—new. For the past several years, I have seen this type of art emerging, especially from younger artists, and now it seems to be coming into its own to form a genuine movement filled with spark and vitality. If this trend continues, then there are some exciting times ahead for the visual arts.

It must be said that all three exhibits are enhanced by the text provided by booklets, which help explain the complexity of the art and the ideas of the artist. This, I know, goes against the idea of “art for art’s sake” and some concepts of what visual arts should be. Although in the twenty-first century art for art’s sake might be regarded as “old school,” it should not be entirely dismissed. All art, whether complex or simple, should provide a visual and emotional current. If it doesn’t, then no explanation of ideas will save it. Fortunately, in the case of Taylor, Fensterstock, and Cutler, the visual and emotional run very strong indeed. And while some of the meanings may be hidden beneath the surface, most viewers will get more than enough from the work itself, which is the way it should be. In the case of the booklets, enhanced is the word to remember.

MAINE LABOR HISTORY MURAL—JUDY TAYLOR
When you think of murals in public buildings, you might envision rather grand spaces, circa 1930, with an abundance of marble and art deco and maybe even a column or two. But when it comes to the Maine Department of Labor, you would be wrong. Instead, it is housed in a huge complex that was once a technological business, which, unfortunately for Augusta, closed many years ago. Ironically, the Maine Department of Labor’s public waiting area is a small, narrow corridor of a room, a seemingly incongruous place for Judy Taylor’s Maine Labor History Mural, whose large size and scope lend itself to being placed in a more sweeping dramatic, space. Especially, as is noted in the Maine State Employees online bulletin, “[t]he mural is the only work of its kind in the state.” Yet, the small waiting area gives viewers something they might not get in a larger space; that is, a panoramic, almost cinematic, experience of being fully immersed in the eleven-panel mural. As is fitting for a project of this scale, the viewer’s senses are completely filled by this dynamic mural, and the small space turns out to be serendipitous.

Each oil-on-board panel, seven feet high and thirty-five feet long, focuses on various labor events, starting with apprenticeship, once common in the trades, moving through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and then ending in the twenty-first century. The panels are painted in muted tones with only a bit of color—all of it soft—but mostly what comes through are impressions of gray, black, and white, which in turn give them a historical feel, a look back at laboring men, women, and even children. (Those who bemoan how “fast” American children grow up today should consider that it was not unusual for children as young as eight years old to work in mills and factories. And the money the children earned helped support the family. Growing up doesn’t get much faster than that, and few American children today work so hard at such a young age.)

People are the focus of the panels, and nearly life-size, they are in the foreground. Their bodies are flat and outlined in black, but their faces are nuanced, expressive, fully present and arresting. In Child Labor, a dark-haired little girl, with a solemn, hopeful face, holds her dinner pail. In Labor Reformers, a thoroughly modern-looking woman with thick, shoulder-length hair listens to Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. The combination of styles and people melds the past with the present, blurring the distinctions, yet at the same time giving voice to both. It is an expansive point of view, broad, generous, and exciting. In the background are smaller black-and-white scenes, amplifying the theme and title of each panel. One of my favorites is in Apprenticeship, where off to the side, a young girl sits in a chair and holds a book. According to the booklet that accompanies this exhibit, it was common for apprentice workshops to bring in children who, in turn, read or played music for the workers.

As a Franco-American, I was especially pleased (make that thrilled) to see The ’37 Shoe Strike, where the focus is on Franco-American workers and their efforts to get “fair wages, shorter hours, and union recognition.” Over and over in my writing I make the same points: Franco-Americans are the largest ethnic group in Maine; they were central to Maine’s economy during our factory era; their history is Maine’s history. Yet, all too often, the Franco-American experience is left out of the various projects and histories that purportedly illuminate Maine. But not this time. We have been included.

The 37 Shoe Strike provided by Judy Taylor

All of the panels are absorbing, but the last one—the Future of Maine Labor—especially caught my attention. In it, an older worker passes a sledgehammer to a contemporary young man and woman. His expression is pensive, hers is sullen, and they don’t exactly look thrilled to be receiving these tools. The Future of Maine Labor poses a series of important questions. What kinds of jobs are left for young workers? Will those jobs pay enough to support a family? Will the jobs be manual or technological? Will they be service jobs? Does the future look bleak for young workers? And, a larger, question: What kind of economy can we have when a state (or a country) produces little of what it uses? Judy Taylor, the mural’s artist, was born in Nebraska. Her grandfather was a farmer, and when she was young, she painted portraits of him. Knowing she wanted to become a figurative artist, Taylor went to college in Chicago and New York City. But like so many of “those from away,” when she came to Maine for the summer, she “decided to stay.” Taylor lives and works on Mt. Desert Island, Maine, home to Acadia National Park and its attendant attractions, Cadillac Mountain, Thunder Hole, and Sand Beach. On her website, Taylor observes, “It’s not a bad place to hang out.” No, it isn’t, and it wouldn’t be too much of stretch to call Mt. Desert one of the most spectacular places in MaineWhen I recently spoke on the phone with Taylor, I asked her what aspect of the project was most challenging to her, and without hesitation she replied, “Getting the actual concept down, deciding which episodes to portray. How to convey history in a small space.” Initially, she thought about doing two murals, abstract yet realistic, but then the idea of panels came to her, and she asked the Maine historian Charles Scontras for advice. Before being chosen to paint the mural, Taylor didn’t know Scontras, but he was on the committee that selected the artist for this project, and they got along like, well, paint and canvas. Taylor featured Scontras in the first panel, Apprenticeship, and he is the mentor teaching the craft of shoemaking to a young boy, his apprentice. Appropriately enough, Scontras really did repair shoes when he was young, and according to Taylor, it was work with “soles” that influenced his decision to become a historian.Taylor asked for a year to work on the mural. “A certain mulling time was needed. I didn’t want to feel rushed.” She read all of Scontras’s books as well as other “labor books and publications, including works by Julius Getman…and Studs Terkel.” In addition, Taylor studied “images of labor in the archives of the Maine History Museum, Maine Memory, the Bangor Public Library, Maine Preservation, and online archives.”The year Taylor spent working on the mural was certainly a year well spent. The Department of Labor has an exciting yet thought-provoking work of art that is on public view Monday through Friday from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. I very much hope that those who live within driving distance or who are passing through Augusta, Maine, will stop by and see the Maine Labor History Mural. It is truly a state treasure.

PARTERRE—LAUREN FENSTERSTOCK
When you walk into the Halford Gallery at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art to see Parterre, your first impression is of walking into a dim, hushed room where it feels as though twilight is settling in. To add to the effect, the walls sparkle with something—at first you don’t know what—and one whole wall twinkles like a constellation. (Later I would find out that the constellation wall was a rhinestone construction of a map of the hedge labyrinth from the garden of Versailles.) Then you see the large rectangle on the floor in the middle of the room. As its black upon blackness draws you closer, it soon becomes apparent that what you are looking at is a water garden, or to use the modern term, a water feature. There are the lily pads, the tall grass, and what would be lush flowers, if they weren’t black. In fact, everything is black, even the water itself —shiny and shimmering, but black nonetheless, and with its complete lack of color, this is a water feature from the underworld. Staring down, perhaps even squinting a little, you gradually notice the intricacy of the construction, the sheer virtuosity, the layer upon layer of petals, the huge but delicately veined lily pads, the gently swaying grass.When I came to see Parterre and stared at this amazing yet disturbing installation, I wondered aloud, “What are the plants made of?” I wanted to reach down and touch, knowing, of course, that this was not allowed, but luckily for me, a museum attendant overheard my question and came over with a very small model of plants and flower.
Paper,” she replied. “Go ahead and touch.”

As I felt the plants, which were indeed paper, my admiration for this exhibit increased to the point of jaw-dropping cliché. From the attendant, I learned that the water was Plexiglas and the mounds of “earth” were charcoal, but the plants, right down to some glorious, unraveling quilling, were paper. Parterre, as readers will note, is a French word that means “on the ground.” In the gardening world, it refers to a very formal structure that has largely gone out of fashion today—most Western gardeners prefer the wild, informal look where the seasons bring a succession of riotous color. Parterres, on the other hand, are planned in symmetrical, geometrical patterns, can be edged with stone or hedges, and don’t have to have flowers at all. (Think about the gardens at the palace of Versailles. Think structure and order.) This type of gardening can be traced to the Renaissance, where an intense interest in math and science would spill into art and eventually would lead to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Then along came the Romantics, but that, of course, is another story.

On the walls in the gallery hang prints that were, among other pieces in the art museum’s collection, inspiration for Fensterstock’s Parterre. The prints, “separated by two hundred years,” feature Israel Silvestre’s 1661 etchings of Cardinal de Richelieu’s gardens at Rueil and William Sharp’s 1854 illustrations of Victoria Regia, huge water lilies from the Amazon. The Rueil etchings are exactly what you would expect—formal, carefully planned gardens that revel in structure and line. On the other hand, the Victoria Regia illustrations are lushly conceived and incredibly detailed, and they appear to be the antithesis of those carefully planned gardens. Yet, the gardens at Rueil and the water lilies represent the same contradictory urges that people, regardless of culture, seem to have—to construct gardens that manipulate nature and also to push its boundaries. In the mid-1800s, explorers brought those giant South American water lilies to England, where glass hothouses were built so that the lilies could live and grow in England’s chilly climate. Fensterstock’s Partarre presents a pessimistic view of this urge, blending the two centuries to say something about the twenty-first century and where this urge has led us. Fensterstock’s pessimism is not groundless. According to a recent piece on BBC News, some conservation groups maintain “that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.” Our dealings with the natural world have grown increasingly dismal. In the booklet accompanying this exhibit, Lauren Fensterstock writes about her “world view: a world…layered, mysterious, full of divine intervention, a thing of past and present merged and so completely other that its effect is impenetrably isolating.” Fensterstock’s own dark brilliantly conceived Parterre perfectly reflects her philosophy. No matter how much we discover, life continues to be a mystery, and human curiosity, whether scientific, mathematical, literary, or artistic, continues to probe that mystery, sometimes illuminating it, sometimes expanding it, and always questioning our role in it.

FANTASTICAL FABLES: PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, AND PRINTS—AMY CUTLER
For some reason, this exhibit is perhaps the most baffling of the three covered in this piece. Amy Cutler is a Brooklyn-based artist who studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and her work defies easy categorization. Ostensibly, there are pictures, very large pictures, of women and a few men doing various things. The style seems light, the tones muted, and much of her work has the look of illustration. But look closer. What exactly is being illustrated? Do those hens in Hen House have human heads complete with little bonnets? They do. Is the henhouse up where the hayloft should be, and does it have a sort of gangplank where two hens are waiting and where one hen has already fallen, perhaps to her death? Yes and yes. There are farm workers, women wearing long dresses, black stockings, and black shoes. One carries a bundle of straw or wheat, and she’s heading to where some normal-looking pigs are penned. Two women, one holding a small child, appear to be visiting the farm. The child’s back is turned toward the hen house, and she looks as though she is holding her little hand over her face, horrified, perhaps, by the death of the hen. At this point, certain adjectives come to mind—whimsical, surreal, humorous yet ominous. Again, as with Taylor and Fensterstock, there is a blend of past and present. The men and women are dressed in old-fashioned clothes, but they certainly don’t belong to any recognizable past, and, at the same time, there is something modern about them. They all seem to be outside time in a fey, symbolic world of chores, rural life, and rituals.

Here’s a description of another picture from the exhibition. This one is called Irrigation, and four dappled horses are galloping as they pull a wagon. A woman drives the wagon, and buckets of water surround her. Carrots on string or rope dangle from the back of the wagons, enticing a trio of pigs, with little tubs, presumably filled with water, tied to their backs. The three small water-carrying pigs are noteworthy in themselves, but there is much more to bemuse the viewer. Two men, carrying buckets, stand on the horses, and two women, holding up their skirts, balance themselves on the men’s shoulders. Another man, with a woman perched on his back, stands in the carriage, and the woman holds, one in each hand, two women by their apron strings. Irrigation is filled with odd, busy commotion, and if something like this ever careened down Main Street, it would be sure to attract plenty of attention. (At least where I live in Maine, and we’re used to seeing various rural devices tooting down the road—tractors in the summer, snowmobiles in the winter, but never a wagon like this.)And how about Trial? Thirteen visible women, looking like acolytes of Emily Dickinson, are clustered behind a brick wall in the process of being constructed. The women wear long black dresses with various types of collars, and the women’s brown hair, parted in the middle, is pulled back into a bun. Most of the women have what look like kite spools in their hands, but the spools are, in fact, bobbins. The strings are pulled upward and are also attached to the women’s dresses except for one that seems to be attached to a woman laying a brick on the wall. A closer look reveals that this woman has bricked part of her dress into the wall, and a woman kneeling not far away has done the same thing while laying her bricks. Two other edges of dresses dangle from the wall, but the women wearing the dresses are not visible. In counterpoint, tree stumps dot the land in front of and behind the wall, and women, wall, and stumps are situated in an expanse of white. (This is true for many of Cutler’s pictures.) So what do we have here? Some things come to mind—women, of course, factory work, the industrial revolution, and the abuse of the environment—a modern perspective couched in images from the past. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine an American artist from the mid-1800s painting such a scene.

In the booklet accompanying the exhibit, Alison Ferris, the curator, describes Cutler as “an old soul, who nonetheless deftly spins her visual tales in the twenty-first century.” Ferris goes on to explain how in Cutler’s work “textiles play an integral role in creating meaning” and how the “subtext of her stories…can be found in the patterns of the fabric or the character of the clothes worn by her figures.” While fashion and clothes are of some importance for men, they are of vital importance for women, even for those who shun such things as they age. Few young women are indifferent to what they wear, and through the ages they have been defined and, at times, confined by clothes. In addition, what a woman wears denotes her class, her occupation, and her approach to life. Soft or severe? Hardworking or decorative? Calico or lace? The women in Cutler’s work tend toward the calico or the plain, but in Dinner Party there are frills and frippery galore as upper-class women duel with the legs of chairs perched on top of their heads. Most women, remembering their teenaged years, will at some level know exactly where Dinner Party is going. Women of all eras have been there, too, even though they might not express it in exactly the same way.

Cutler has mixed surrealism with images of the past to produce art that is startling and innovative. Even those who like more realistic art are sure to be engrossed by the nuances and imagery of Cutler’s work and its depiction of people who simultaneously inhabit both the present and the past.