“Save Vakulichuk,” a ceramic piece by Bruce Breckenridge.
Exhibition curator Daniel Swadener, leading me up a wide sunlit stairway in the atrium gallery space at the Promega BioPharmaceutical Technology Center in Fitchburg, says it was probably Mona, more than any of the four seminal artists exhibiting now in his new Summer Art Showcase, who most embodied the creative spirit of community in the 1960s Madison art scene.
Mona Boulware Webb was, after all, the self-styled “Queen of Willy Street,” the larger-than-life Haitian American painter and sculptor who helped set the tone for the funky, alternative energy that persists to this day on the near east side. Webb and her collaborators decorated every inch of the Wayhouse of Light, a three-story building at 1354 Williamson St. (now the Madison Greenhouse Store).
“Mona would put you to work,” says Swadener, an Arizona-based sculptor and photographer who has been curating and producing the Art Showcase at Promega since 1996. “When we look at her paintings, we’re not sure which parts Mona did and which parts were a result of her prolific collaborations.”
A mentor of legendary inclusiveness who worked outside the local arts establishment, the Houston-born Webb took scores of young Madison artists under her wing. She died in 1998, and the Wayhouse was dismantled.
Her best works on wood panels show washes of muted colors in scenes of epic sweeping landscapes or intimate, loopy face portraits. Her human figures, from black-line stick drawings to fleshed-out trippy musicians and abstracted fairytale men and women, flow in gritty rainbows that blur together in a style that evokes everything from Marc Chagall to Grandma Moses to the symbology of traditional Hmong fabrics.
Exhibit highlights include (clockwise, from upper left): "Untitled," a vintage poster by William Weege; "Untitled," an oil-on-metal painting by Mona Boulware Webb; and "Tea bowl," by Don Reitz.
Webb’s work is displayed in the circular two-level space at Promega alongside three of her contemporaries who revolutionized the UW-Madison art department in the ’60s and who, in addition to inspiring hundreds of students, have all made it to the big time. MoMa, the Smithsonian Institution and the Whitney are among the venues that own works by ceramicists Bruce Breckenridge and Don Reitz, and Tandem Press founder, print-maker, poster designer and paper-making collage artist William Weege.
Reitz, who died in 2014, is represented by his works of sensual earthiness; he brought back an older technique called salt-glazing to his at-times abstract vessels and forms, and the process is now synonymous with his name.
“I get paid to play in mud,” he once delightedly told Swadener. Accompanying black-and-white photographs from the ’60s show Reitz’s joyful expressions as he demonstrates techniques to rapt students at flaming outdoor kilns and fire pits where he influenced a generation.
You can feel the weight and solidity of these gently curving, deceptively simple shapes in colors of sand and rough stone. It’s easy to relate these objects to the much larger, massive works Reitz became known for.
The wonderful back-to-the-earth sensibility in Reitz’s work contrasts with the soft-bright colors in Breckenridge’s witty and whimsical ceramic pieces. Here are flawless depictions of machine-engineered or factory-wrought letters, like a child’s stacked alphabet toys, and gorgeously glazed domestic objects psychedelically reconfigured in the hard-fired solidity of clay.
Breckenridge and Weege are both still producing works that speak to a mind-expanding psychedelia. Weege was a pioneer of photo silk screening, and his anti-war posters evoke the often comic irreverence of protest and rejection of a crassly commercial, war-mongering establishment. They are high-energy paradigms of graphic-design cool.
Weege’s visionary images, typography and humor are nothing less than thrilling, and there are many to view in this generous display. Among my favorites are posters from Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign (“Unbought and Unbossed”), with her buoyant smile and open hand in a high-contrast half-tone image on a flower-framed, cinnamon-shaded field, and a super-charged, cinematic poster for a Wisconsin Print Show International exhibit that must have been a mind-blower.
“All of the artists’ works speak not only of the past but of and to the present generation,” says Swadener. “This is about questioning things. We knew we were being lied to back in the ’60s, and it inspired action. The themes are very relevant to now.”
At the top of the atrium stairs, we reach the largest work in the exhibit, Weege’s luxuriously abstract, multicolor and gleefully patterned collage: “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Catchy title. The entire show rocks.
Madison Mentors, A Reunion of Influential Artists runs through August 31 at Promega BioPharmaceutical Technology Center, 5545 East Cheryl Parkway, Fitchburg. Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
