Art bleeds into craft at the ACG

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Omaha’s Artists Cooperative Gallery is a collaborative gallery space staffed and maintained by the artists whose work is shown therein. The gallery is extensively connected to the local art scene here in Omaha, featuring regular exhibitions of work produced by students at Metropolitan Community College’s art program as well as works from area high school art students. The gallery itself takes no commission on sales and all proceeds go directly to the artists themselves; this results in a pleasant feeling of institutional unobtrusiveness when visiting the gallery—the sales apparatus is backgrounded and the art shines through. I went there on Friday night to take a peek around and this is what I saw.

The most noticeable thing about the gallery is the wide variety of kinds of art available for purchase here. The gamut runs from standard easel / museum pictures to assemblages of wall-mounted sculpture similar to what Lee Bontecou was making in the sixties; to collage-based craft items of a quasi-functional nature (several corkboards by Marcia Joffe-Bouska which incorporated things such as beads and slivers of glass were an interesting highlight); to ceramic tokens or emblems of a symbolic nature; ceramic cups and dishes; large freestanding outdoor sculptures in the form of bells (and which had quite a pleasant sound when rung); all the way to whimsical statues of “robots,” crucifixes, and jewelry. Truly, it was an impressive assemblage of objects visible here; the artists in the Omaha area are indeed quite a busily creative group, prolific and varied in their approach.

I suppose an uncharitable viewer might find the assortment of pieces at the ACG to lack a certain seriousness which we are used to seeing at many galleries or museums. Very little of the art present on Friday night seemed to come from a desire to communicate or work through a particular idea or theme, even one of a formal or technical nature. It all seems to come from a place of internal necessity, but not really the same kind of internal necessity that motivated, for instance, the New York School of the fifties; no particular movement or school is being propounded here, no particular philosophy—it almost feels as if this art is being created purely for the joy of making it . . . but isn’t that enough? If the art on display here exudes a whiff of naïveté, there is nothing wrong with that.

Much back-and-forth debate has occurred around the category of “outsider art” or “naïve art”; I’m of the opinion that these categories aren’t really worth anything. Who counts as an outsider anyway? There are cases, like that of Henry Darger—the janitor at a Chicago hospital who lived entirely alone and produced, for his own amusement and with no intention of ever showing it to anyone, the 15,000-page novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, and the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, and illustrated it with several hundred watercolor paintings, some of which are thirty-foot-long scrolls—which are unambiguously cases of someone from “the outside” producing art. There are other cases, though, where it is not possible to make that assessment. What does it take to get “inside” the art world, anyway? It doesn’t really matter—art is not some kind of closed shop requiring initiation into a guild-type system before it can be creditable. I don’t know if any of the artists showing at the ACG have any formal training, and I don’t care. Anyone can make art; the proof is in the pudding, as they say.

The artists at the ACG seem to be interested in exploring the concept of “personal style” more than anything else, and if there is any advice I would give to them—advice which, I am aware, has most certainly not been solicited—it would be to not let the concept of style tangle up their evident desire to craft and to create. Sure, Pollock or de Kooning or Kandinsky have representative styles, but that doesn’t mean every artist needs one. Speaking of de Kooning: I saw a number of abstract / figurative paintings which leant heavily on a visual idiom indebted to de Kooning and I’m not sure what to think of that. It’s difficult for me to tell whether these artists were exploring the implications of de Kooning’s style, or just playing around with his vocabulary. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Strongly evident at the ACG was the idea that art is fun, that it doesn’t need to be about theories or communicating or self-expression; it can be merely about craft and still be good—and this is where I come to the most important takeaway from my visit.

Imagine a spectrum, with museum paintings on one end and objects of pure craft, like chairs or silverware, on the other. The art objects displayed at the ACG incorporate everything between those two poles, but not the poles themselves. It’s true that there were easel paintings meant for hanging on the wall; but they felt more decorative than the kinds of art found in museums, where we’re supposed to furrow our brow and “observe” or “experience” the art (which can be an exhausting proposition sometimes). Similarly, the ceramics on display at the gallery took the forms of bowls and mugs but are they really meant for use in the kitchen? Take a look at this platter for instance—I would not be comfortable using this on my table; my kids would break it posthaste—

—which would be too bad, since it’s a beautiful craft object. Perhaps these ceramics are meant as display-only items, which is, of course, a perfectly appropriate use for them. Here is what I wonder: if the artists at the ACG who are making near-craft items were to double down on the “craft” aspect of their work, maybe study some William Morris books or something like that, would we see Omaha become a hub for artistically inclined craft workers and makers, who may then become the helm of a new movement? And if the painters were to explore their discipline’s capacity for meaning and communication, would we see them develop a stronger and more certain command of style reined to particular expressive aims—and would we then see a new Omaha-based art movement from the other end of the craft-to-art spectrum?

Or maybe—just maybe—the artists represented at the ACG are pushing forward in a third direction, a middle way, self-consciously blending the worlds of art and craft into a new hybrid idiom . . . ?

Enough verbiage. Here’s the art.

This trio of abstract paintings by Cindy Mathiasen were, I thought, some of the most successful works at the gallery. Their limited palette coupled with their concise gestural range gives them a freshness and immediacy which I found quite appealing—especially that little one at the lower left.

I was also intrigued by these assemblages of small pieces of wood by Kevin McClay.

These are the ones that I mentioned earlier as being akin to what Lee Bontecou was doing in the sixties. My wife and I have a running joke about sculpture; we don’t know what to think of it, what its purpose is meant to be (this might be due to our having little room in our house for displaying it—whatever the case may be, we both appreciate the witticism that “sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting”). Bontecou seems to have solved part of the problem by putting her sculpture up on the gallery wall; McClay has done the same—yet where Bontecou’s sculptures were terrifying, expressing a fearful congruence of death and the machine, McClay’s are simple pleasant abstractions. This is not to say they are any less effective as art; but it does slide them more in the direction of craft, which is good. McClay’s gallery bio displays several more of these kinds of wood-based abstractions; these are of a much larger scale and, he says, “are inspired by aerial views of the urban footprint.”

The last piece I want to mention is this painting by Jasmine Greenwaldt.

You can’t really tell by looking at this photo, but almost everything about this painting is the product of a randomizing process; the paint, which was dripped onto the canvas, swirls thickly around itself and mingles together producing effects akin to the marbling that is found on the endpapers of old books. What are the limits of the artist’s agency in a practice such as this? The surrealists were fond of introducing randomizers into their art, and I’ve mentioned before how such a randomizing effect is probably the best use case for the AI art generators. However, this painting has much more humanity in it than what would be made by telling MidJourney to make “an image of swirly colors.” The color palette was obviously Greenwaldt’s choice; also, presumably, were the directions the swirled paint was moved around on the canvas. This gives the resulting painting a depth and richness that rewards close looking. I was mesmerized by some of the effects Greenwaldt was able to produce, and knowing these effects were the product of a human mind—even if they were also the results of randomness—gave the painting significance and value.

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