Gavin Ashworth
Beth Cavener's "L'Amante."
It’s a gift that sets the Chazen Museum of Art apart from its peers. In early November, the campus-based museum announced it had received a major donation from contemporary ceramic art collectors Stephen and Pamela Hootkin. The diverse sculptural artworks of this collection, currently valued at around $5 million, will arrive in annual increments from the couple’s Manhattan home.
Twelve works from the Hootkins’ collection have been delivered since the announcement of the gift. The sculptures join an already impressive array from this collection initially loaned for the museum’s dazzling exhibit “The Human Condition,” which ran September through November.
“A collection of this depth will make the Chazen an international destination,” says Chazen director Russell Panczenko. “No other collection compares.” He cites the Clark-Del Vecchio collection in Houston as the only other large assemblage of this kind that comes close.
Stephen Hootkin, a Sheboygan-raised 1964 graduate of the UW, and his wife, Pamela, began collecting ceramic pieces about 30 years ago, eventually amassing more than 300 works representing the most important artists working in the field, including Montana-based Beth Cavener, former MacArthur Fellow Daisy Youngblood, Justin Novak and Michael Lucero.
Gavin Ashworth
Daisy Youngblood's "Brahmin Bull."
Panczenko distinguishes these clay sculptures from functional and decorative ceramic works of art. “All of these works have some psychological or emotional human content,” he explains. “We might individually have our own favorites, but what makes these pieces the best works of their kind is found in the physical achievement, materiality and complexity of the artists’ visions and talents.”
Climbing the stairs to the top-floor gallery of contemporary ceramic and glass sculpture that is named for the Hootkins is a fun and dramatic immersion into the powerful presence of these works. The immediacy, accessibility, beauty and sometimes strangeness of the three-dimensional human and animal forms, from small- to large-scale, inspire wonder.
Clay as a sculptural medium is more subtle and finely malleable than marble or bronze, Panczenko says. Indeed, mastery of technical details feels fulfilled in each of the works, from the sweet face of Youngblood’s umber-soft “Brahmin Bull” to the delicate fingers and toes in Novak’s ghostly stone-white “Thomas.”
Gavin Ashworth
Justin Novak's "Thomas."
The contemporary aspects of these dynamic pieces, while remaining unique to each work, often show an edginess and ironic humor. The animals are immediately compelling, particularly Cavener’s works, with their naturalistic wildness and haunting antecedents in Disney’s or Chuck Jones’ anthropomorphic creatures.
Cavener’s “The Question That Devours” is a ferocious, explosive chase between a coiled, open-mouthed coyote and a compressed ball of a rabbit, forming a question mark in shades ranging from silver-white to slate-gray. Cavener creates her gorgeous animals from 800 to 2,000 pounds of clay. Then she sections and hollows out the work, forming muscle and sinew from the inside. After the work is reassembled and fired, she uses ordinary house paint and ink to make a smooth finish.
Pieces from the collection can be found throughout the Chazen, including “L’Amante,” Cavener’s show-stopper housed in the newer, connected east building. This large-scale, deceptively languid rabbit has an unsparing soft gaze, delicate yet mighty ears and a draped muscular leg suggesting the creature is not to be messed with. The bunny’s intricate Yakuza (Japanese mafia since Samurai days) tattoos, painted by Alessandro Gallo, seem to underscore the point.
As a taste of what is yet to come, “L’Amante” is an appropriate envoy, a treasure and a triumph.
