Randuwa II: Toledo Museum of Art: Marisol: A Retrospective.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Toledo Museum of Art: Marisol: A Retrospective.

The other special exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art was a retrospective of the artist, Marisol (need Maria Sol) Escobar, who goes by her first name only. I had heard of her, but could not have told you squat about her or her art before visiting this show. She was described as a Venezuelan-American Artist; however, she only ever visited Venezuela and not after her mother died at the age of 11. She was born in Paris, France and lived the majority of her live (1930 - 2016) in New York City. She demonstrated an interest in art as a young girl, and was sent to a succession of prestigious art schools through her early twenties. The majority of her worked moved between pencil sketching and sculpture using wood as her primary medium.

Her greatest fame as an artist came in the 1960's, but then faded. Although she continued to create art throughout the rest of her life. Upon her death, she bequeathed the bulk of the works in her care along with journals, notebooks, sketchbooks, and other items to the Buffalo AKG (Albright-Knox Gallery) Museum in Buffalo, New York. This is the second retrospective exhibition of her work, the first was presented by the Memphis Brooks Art Museum in Tennessee in 2014, two years before her death.

This exhibition is larger than the first one. It is also organized by the Buffalo AKG Museum which has the luxury of a butt-load of objects unavailable to the curators of the previous show. In fact, the lion share of the art in this exhibition are from the bequeathed materials given to the Buffalo AKG Museum. Like similar exhibitions of this nature, in cooperation with others lenders this exhibition has a four museum itinerary: First stop, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art in Montreal, Quebec, Canada; second, the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio; next the Buffalo AKG Museum in Buffalo, New York, and finally in the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas. I absolutely LOVE that museums do this. At each stop with time in between to break down and set up the artwork, the exhibit will be on desplay for between four and five months.

Whenever I visit a museum and encounter work like this unknown to me before, I can't help but make connections. Looking at her colorful sketches I was reminded of the work of Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890 - 1973) who was a contemporary of the first half of her life. She spent his fascinated by color and chromatic relationships. He championed a movement he called "Synchronism". Likewise her wood block sculptures beginning the mid-60's (many made with found and gifted wood and wooden crates) certainly speaks to the utilitarianism of fellow sculptor, Louise Nevelson (1899 - 1988). And the combination of added objects with drawings on the wooden surfaces reminded me immediately of the contemporary works by Whitfield Lovell (1956 - ).

A work by Stanton McDoald-Wright

A work by Whitfield Lovell

Without further ado, I give you some of the pieces that caught my attention form the exhibition "Marisol: A Retrospective" at the Toledo Museum of Art.