Smoke and Water: A Living Painting at Southeastern Alliance for Community Change

November 2014 to February 2015
317 Castle Street
Wilmington, North Carolina

On a cold December morning, I met Working Films Initiative co-director Anna Lee to discuss the documentary Coal Ash Stories and to view Greg Lindquist’s installation Smoke and Water: A Living Painting at Southeastern Alliance for Community Change (SEACC) in Wilmington, North Carolina. Smoke and Water is part of a collaborative project that aligns community organizations and residents by using art to highlight and draw on local expertise. A native of Wilmington, Lindquist’s work reflects his connection to the area. The immersive installation spans across three walls of paintings, photographs, and statements, which provide an intimate glimpse into a community struck by one of the largest coal ash spills in the nation’s history: in early February 2014, officials estimate up to 39,000 tons of toxic coal ash spilled into the Dan River in Eden, North Carolina.[1] It lined the banks of the river for 80 miles downstream from the spill site.

Upon entering, I am impressed with the command the installation has over the small community center. Paint pervades the open space normally reserved for community gatherings, yoga, and meditation groups, setting a reflective tone on the way the environment concerned is simultaneously experienced and imagined. Presenting a multilayered narrative of wide-ranging voices and imagery, Lindquist juxtaposes abstracted impressions of an empty and disconnected landscape with interwoven memories and stories presented as text on canvas.

As if looking at multiple screens open on a laptop, Smoke and Water simulates a space of interconnected thoughts, urgency, and action. The painted walls invite and sensitize its inhabitants to the viewing space — a platform for discussion and contemplation. Warm analogous tones envelope the room. On the wall, painted forms play with perceived edges. Swirls of gray and brown — reflections of the coal ash residue unyoked and spreading across the wall — intersect and overlap large paintings that evoke a still winter along the Dan River. The effect is attention to the organic forms and beauty of the paint’s application on the wall and, at the same time, one is charged by its symbolism.

On the floor, taped and gridded texts, drawings, and photographs direct the viewer to navigate the space in a curious and conscious path. I turn to read the texts painted in muted tones on stretched canvases. The narratives speak to the damage inflicted upon the community, and they pose cultural questions on corporate culpability. Local residents’ expressions of how the spill affected their personal health, relationships, and the community spirit, surface as distinct whispers yet layered voices speaking to an urgent and collective cause.

As a native North Carolinian, I’ve always been drawn to the still and powerful character of our state’s rivers and lakes. I feel an immediate connection to the voices of local residents whose nostalgia and experiences have been displaced by the ruin and waste of industrial carelessness. The spill happened over a year ago. Although time has passed, the impact on our sense of place and purpose remain.

As I turn to leave, the late morning light casts a glow on the walls of the art installation, one that suggests the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm or perhaps something ominous. With this illusion, Lindquist subtly advances the cause. These stories travel beyond the walls from a small visual impression to a much larger and more serious discussion involving social engagement around environmental pollution. Lindquist’s work radiates, igniting both tranquil rumination and a charged call to action. He presents the facts while simultaneously distilling sincere experiences and memories. Smoke and Water lingers, encouraging not only reflection, but also reaction… the storm after the calm.

[1] This is the estimate provided by Duke Energy officials.

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Weatherspoon Art Museum
Greensboro, North Carolina

August 6 to October 15, 2006

Recently the art world has been much concerned with its own recent history. “The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984,” organized by the Grey Art Gallery, 2006, told part of that story, displaying Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and a number of other influential figures who turned away from painting. “High Times Hard Times: New York Painting 1967- 1975” tells another part of the history, showing artists who tried to keep painting alive.

Like the art world at large, they rejected Clement Greenberg’s ways of thinking. Most were Americans, but some distinguished visitors, Blinky Palermo and Kayoi Kusama for example, passed through this New York art world. Some of these artists worked with other media. Lynda Benglis and Carolee Schneemann did video while Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne made installations. Others were using traditional materials in untraditional ways. Alan Shields created painted sculpture constructions; Harmony Hammond did fabric and acrylic constructions on the floor; Howardena Pindell and Louse Fishman constructed hanging grids; and Lynda Benglis poured paint on the floor. Artists tried to keep painting alive by using spray paint (Dan Christensen), by laying the canvas on the floor (Mary Heilmann), or by employing big mounds of paint (Guy Goodwin). Jo Baer and Jane Kaufman were minimalists; Michel Venezia and Lawrence Stafford played with optical effects; and Ron Gorchov, Mary Heilman, Ralph Humphrey, and Elizabeth Murray, who went on to have distinguished careers, were finding their styles. What perhaps unified this community was their desire to distinguish themselves from the clean designs of Greenberg’s color field painters. Their shared ambition, it might be argued, was to return to the era of Abstract Expressionism when, after all, painting was the dominant medium.

This exhibition interested me greatly, because when I started writing art criticism just a few years after this period, I too focused on abstract painting. I got to know some of these artists, and saw their paintings. And then in the 1980s I read (and participated in) the debates about whether painting remained viable. The catalogue gathers a great deal of interesting sociological material. I hadn’t known, for example, that four gifted black artists – Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell and Jack Whitten— were painting abstractly in this period. Nor was I aware of the range of women’s art presented in this exhibit. It was hard then to be an abstract painter, especially if you were female or black.

A great deal of this art is fascinating, at least to me, but in the end this style of abstraction didn’t have carrying power. The most important American who belongs with this group, Thomas Nozkowski, is not in the exhibition. And, to my surprise, David Reed, who advised the curator Katy Siegel and contributed an evocative essay to the catalogue, did not include his own early art. Some of the artists on show went on to have distinguished careers, but in the end, the interests of the art world moved elsewhere. And so now when the terms of debate have shifted so dramatically, it’s hard to recapture the sense of this moment when the attacks on painting were so ferocious.

What did in painting, Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in his catalogue essay, was October. As I see it, the situation is different. There is a lot of fascinating art on show, but nothing I would want to take home. Many of the artists in this show were immensely talented, but in the end none of them are as significant as their immediate precursors, or the Abstract Expressionists. In the end, then, painting survived, but not in the hands of the artists in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on show at the National Academy Museum, New York, February 15-April 22, 2007

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