Artists notes:

Michael Ray Charles – An illustrator who is commenting on blackness in America who is trying to replace the classical bad images of blacks with more modern ones, trying to change views a little at a time.

Maya Lin – Yale educated architect who won the opportunity to create the Vietnam War Memorial and survived the controversy over her plan as well as her gender and ethnicity. She has continued to design earth works, with one project at the expansive Storm King Sculpture Park in New York State that created hills in the shape of waves made with bulldozers and planted with grass. She also won the competition to design the sculpture at the second Charlotte Coliseum that was composed of a series of giant Holly spheres that looked as though they were rolling down a hill. Her pieces embrace nature in its simplest form.

Mark Dion – Has taken a giant hemlock tree that fell in a forest and transported it to Seattle along with some of the soil, plants, even a bird’s nest surrounding the tree. He has had a glass building constructed around the dead tree and created an environment that mimics that which would have occurred had it been left in the forest. Dion has brought the forest to the people so they can experience and learn what they might not otherwise have been able to experience.

Ursula von Rydingsvard – Has brought her past to create angry looking structures made of cedar along with graphite to express the agony she lived as a child. She has now made those pieces into pieces that now act as comforting caves and sort of whimsical places to play around. We have one of her sculptures at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

Andy Goldsworthy – His connection to the earth is palpable as one watches him build sculptures out of ice, sees how water carries leaves on a voyage down a stream,  I have loved his work from the first time I saw them four years ago. His meandering stone wall at Storm King Sculpture Park in NY state is an amazing work that embraces the stone of the land, seeming to cross through a pond, coming out the other side and zig zagging organically between the trees of the forest. It’s one thing to see it on film, but to walk along its path is an experience not to be missed.

Mel Chin – His projects include Revival Field that seeks to recover land that has been previously damaged with toxic waste or chemicals. His plan to plant plants that can absorb the toxic parts of the soil and recover it to usability shows his love for the earth as does his project to create self designed dollar bills to bring attention to the problem of lead in our environment that affects our health and learning ability.

Nan goldin – Goldins use of the snapshot to record her life and those of her friends and family in all the bare and raw reality of life is shocking, but her style of telling it like it is is her way of showing us something that most all of have observed or experienced but may not have readily admitted to. She talks of “the diary I let people read” and “creating a history by recording a history”. She continues her work by reflecting on the memories of her conections.

Shirin Neshat – Iranian by birth, she now lives in the US, but comments in her film Rapture on the universality of many aspects of the human condition. The movie was accepted on the one hand when she produced it and then after 9/11 it took on a different meaning for its viewers. The fact that the movie shows men and women in stark Iranian dress and in bleak locations that would indicate a situation that would serve universality no longer serve that purpose after the bombing. Neshat now lives in a world that is a composite of many cultures and lines that separate us are becoming blurred. Not so the culture of her birth.