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Art: Five 'voices' in a song of diversity

Fabric Workshop brings together artists with a broad ethnic and geographic range.

Marie Watt's "Engine" - among works by five artists at the Fabric Workshop - projects on interior walls of an igloo-shaped "cave" ghostly video images of American Indian storytellers.
Marie Watt's "Engine" - among works by five artists at the Fabric Workshop - projects on interior walls of an igloo-shaped "cave" ghostly video images of American Indian storytellers.Read moreWILL BROWN / The Fabric Workshop and Museum

'New American Voices" is the kind of exhibition we have come to expect from the Fabric Workshop and Museum, in that it features a relatively few large, sometimes complex, works. Three of the five featured artists represent minorities - two are American Indian and one is Latino - and consequently offer a less-familiar cultural bias.

Geography also enhances diversity. The three minority artists - Tommy Joseph, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Marie Watt - live on the West Coast. Bill Smith lives in a suburb of St. Louis, while Robert Chambers comes from Miami. So with just five artists, the exhibition embodies a broad range of viewpoints and media.

There is one common denominator: All five artists either are in residence at the workshop or have been recently. Some works involve collaborations with workshop artisans, particularly Watt's igloo-shaped "cave," made of felted-wool pads fastened to a frame of wooden battens.

The differences among these "new voices" mainly involve degrees of material and intellectual complexity. Watt's cave, enigmatically titled Engine, occupies the middle of the pack in this regard. Felt stalactites and stalagmites and washes of orange light make it moodily atmospheric inside. Ghostly video images of American Indian storytellers projected on the walls suspend time and transport visitors into a different cultural dimension.

The installation works best if you remain in the structure for more than a minute or two (shoes off before entering, please). It's not sufficiently isolated from the gallery environment to produce total immersion, but it's reasonably effective in simulating a process of cultural transmission that predates history.

Ortiz-Torres' video Hi'n'Lo offers a more superficial, but more entertaining, interpretation of his cultural context. He took a hydraulic scissor platform of the type used by museums to install large pieces of art and to change lightbulbs in galleries and modified it to mimic the performance of a "low-rider" automobile associated with Latino culture.

The modified platform, with the artist at the controls, spins like a top, bounces, bows, and even splits into three winglike sections. The video is brief because there isn't much more than that to communicate, except that Ortiz-Torres has spent a lot of time, energy, and money on a one-trick pony.

Likewise Tommy Joseph, an Alaskan woodcarver of Tlingit ancestry, has crafted five warrior helmets that represent tribal totems. These are invented forms, not replicas, but that doesn't matter in terms of how a museum audience perceives them, as an uneasy amalgam of tradition and invention.

The cultural bias of the other two artists, Chambers and Smith, is technological. Chambers does performances with colored fabric ribbons (the residue of one such sits in the window of the workshop's Temporary Contemporary a few doors west on Arch Street), but more intriguing is a glistening fiberglass pod on the floor, Giant Orbit Egg.

It's a pure Brancusian form that alludes through its ovoid profile to astronomical geometry. It's as elemental as a sculpture can be, like a satiny beach stone, and it expresses purity and logic effortlessly.

The most fascinating artist of the five is Smith, who combines a refined aesthetic vision with technical inventiveness far beyond the ordinary.

One of his sculptures, a lament for vanishing songbirds, sports fire-breathing flowers. Another resembles a giant dandelion puff constructed of fine steel wires that form a three-dimensional web.

A third piece, activated by a spherical magnet, mimics a biological ecosystem in which various parts move at different speeds while harmonizing perfectly. Smith's sculptures achieve a sublime marriage of science and art, no mean feat. His work is easily the deepest intellectually and the most compelling visually.

Rockwell Kent. Kent (1883-1971) might be the only American artist to receive the Lenin Peace Prize, in 1967. That's not surprising, considering that he was subpoened by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953 and that he subsequently donated a large portion of his art to the Soviet Union.

Kent's leftist political activism, which made him a pariah in the American art world 50 years ago, doesn't intrude on the exhibition of his illustrations at the Brandywine River Museum. The show presents an apolitical Kent that people of my generation, and perhaps the one before, remember fondly, as an illustrator who brought to life such literary classics as Moby Dick, Beowolf and The Decameron.

Kent was a Hemingway-esque character who lived in distant and exotic places such as Alaska, Greenland, and Tierra del Fuego in search of subject matter. He was a painter, printmaker, and writer, as well as an illustrator and adventurer. The exhibition, organized by Brandywine, contains 10 paintings in addition to more than 70 drawings, lithographs, and wood engravings.

(Three of the oils have been lent by Jamie Wyeth, who owns Kent's former house on Monhegan Island off the Maine coast.)

Once past his early years as an illustrator, Kent's drawing style became distinctive and memorable because of its crisp, clean boldness. His dense, forceful line tends to classicize whatever subject he addresses, whether a Greenland Inuit, Captain Ahab, or a character from Shakespeare. The poses of his figures are usually static and hieratic rather than fluid, as if they had been lifted from the frieze of the Parthenon.

Yet this idealized approach was ideal not only for the classics but also for the period during which Kent matured as an artist. Art deco's precise, unadorned typefaces complement his drawings perfectly; together, they impart a timeless monumentality to books like The Canterbury Tales and Beowolf.

Kent's drawing style also was made to measure for wood engraving, which produces effects similar to those he achieved with pen and ink. There aren't many engravings in the show, which was odd for me because it's those that I remember from my youth.

The paintings are a bit softer in mood than the drawings and prints, largely because the oil colors are toned down, even though a typical Kent landscape such as Dogs Resting, Greenland is stark and desolate. Comparing the two, one senses that he was more comfortable with the unattenuated power of the masculine black line than with the feminine softness of a buttery Nordic sun.

Art: Workshop Voices

"New American Voices" continues at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1214 Arch St., through Nov. 22. Hours are

10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and noon to 5 Saturdays and Sundays. Admission: $3. Information: 215-561-8888 or www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org.

"Intrepid and Inventive: Illustrations by Rockwell Kent" continues at the Brandywine River Museum, Route 1, Chadds Ford, through Nov. 19. Hours are

9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily. Admission is $10 general and $6 for visitors 65 and older, students and visitors 6 through 12. Information: 610-388-2700 or www.

brandywinemuseum.org.

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