Departments
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Week of 5 February 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 22 |
Feature
Article
Neri infuses visual arts master class with spirit of collaboration
By Eric McHenry
Sculptor Manuel Neri emerged from the San Francisco Bay area of the 1950s, where he studied painting with Mark Rothko, taught it to Jerry Garcia, and arranged Allen Ginsberg's first full-length public reading of Howl. It was an ideal time and place to be an artist, with multiple disciplines and sensibilities converging to nourish one another.
Leading a master class on Sunday, January 31, at the School for the Arts, Neri seemed to be simulating such an environment in microcosm: while students used hatchets and awls to modify their life-sized plaster figures, he paused at a portable stereo to replace Björk with Mozart, then returned to his roving instruction. After half an hour he asked Mary Julia Klimenko -- his collaborator, muse, and longtime model -- to read a sequence of her poems while the sculptors worked.
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Sculptor Manuel Neri (foreground) gives suggestions to graduate student Richard McKown (SFA'99) in a daylong visual arts master class. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
"What's important," adds Klimenko, "what Manuel and I are trying to convey, is that these genres allow themselves to be so insular. If you're in a creative writing department, you can go all through your college career and never see a painting. We're trying to open that up. I've been reading poetry to Manuel for most of the 26 years that I've modeled for him."
Neri, the only sculptor associated with the influential Bay Area Figurative Artists of the '50s and '60s, is an artist of international renown. He is best known for his textured, often partial, and sometimes painted female nudes in plaster, marble, and bronze. Hugh O'Donnell, SFA professor of visual arts and chairman of the visiting artists committee, says that Klimenko's permanent centrality to the work of Neri bespeaks his "remarkable quality of empathy with his model. It's a devotional relationship with his subject, really."
Neri's three-day residency at SFA was the first installment in this year's master class series. It began with a lecture on Friday evening, January 29, in the Photonics Center and continued through the weekend with two daylong workshops for visual arts students. O'Donnell says he created the series to address the "need for extended play" that is central to the development of young artists.
"It's wonderful to have a strong, stable canon that's essential to the regular curriculum," O'Donnell says. "But the program becomes truly wonderful when you can accelerate students into an extended, free-form activity with an artist of exceptional talent and reputation.
"Because of SFA's modular system and crediting structure," he says, "visual arts students are in three-hour classes, and they have a complex curriculum. I wanted to develop something that would complement that curriculum but not interfere with it. So I came up with this idea of classes that would not be credit-bearing, that would be purely for practice, and that would run on the weekends."
Participation in the master classes has thus far been limited to visual artists: space tends to be at a premium, interest has been high, and SFA students have had first crack at the sign-up sheets. Ultimately, however, O'Donnell would like the master classes to occur with enough regularity that students from other parts of the University could be included.
"The ideal is to create enough of them that they are no longer necessarily restricted to SFA visual arts," he says. "I'd like them to be open to other disciplines within the University -- creative writing students, film students, any students who are interested."
Belief in the importance of interaction among disciplines is not the only notion that Neri and O'Donnell share. Over the past 30 years, Neri says, careers in the visual arts have become lucrative for some, and the resulting sense of competition among artists has in many places driven a wedge between instructors and their students. He, too, touts the idea of extended play, in which accomplished artists and their students are united by the pursuit of a common passion.
"When I was in school," he says, "there was a closeness between students and professors that I haven't seen much of since. And I really think that had a lot to do with the fact that no one was selling anything. That's why people like Rothko were coming out to teach at the University of California-Berkeley. They needed the money. They were starving in the mid-'50s. And so there was a sense that we were all in it together. Certainly we were there for advice and direction from our teachers, but we all saw each other as working artists. I try to approach these master classes with the same attitude: we're all artists here, trying to help each other out."
Several additional master classes are tentatively scheduled for this semester. Artists-in-residence will include English painter Christopher Le Brun in February, a group of English printmakers in February and March, and Dutch graphic designer Anton Beeke in April. Entering its second year, the series has thus far been underwritten by the Humanities Foundation at Boston University. O'Donnell says he hopes that the success of visits such as Neri's will help secure the series a place in the annual budget of the visual arts division.
"We're hoping that down the road this can become an institution here at the University," he says.
For more information about the master class series, please contact Hugh O'Donnell at 617-353-4320 or e-mail to hodonnel@bu.edu.
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Poet Mary Julia Klimenko has been Manuel Neri's collaborator, model, and muse since 1972. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
