February 2025

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Dear Readers,

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Time and place have always been important to me, not just as an Artist but also as one who finds looking at Art a significant experience. When I made my first pilgrimage to Marfa, Texas, I was not sure what to expect. I was having a solo exhibition in Laredo, Texas and was invited by a curator friend to join her group for an open house at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. I drove alone seven hours on a road that hugs the Mexican border with only the desert in my sight. When I arrived in Marfa, my experience of both Donald Judd’s and Dan Flavin’s work turned out to be a pilgrimage I did not know I needed. I understood their work in a new context that changed my perception. This type of journey became a kind of compulsion, to seek out art that was important to me. Later that year same year, I traveled to Italy with my spouse, and we took at city bus from the Duomo (this was pre-Uber) 30 minutes into the suburbs of Milan to the Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa church to visit Dan Flavin’s posthumously realized artwork “Untitled, with green, blue, pink, golden and ultraviolet light [that] constitutes the sole source of illumination and permeates the entire space, accompanying visitors. Walking through the entryway, the chromatic succession of the nave, transept and the apse suggests the natural ‘night-dawn-day’ progression of light.”  

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I can only imagine the passion for art that was ignited in John and Sue Wieland as they drove around Europe on their honeymoon. In September of 2024, I sat down with John Wieland at The Warehouse to discuss his collection, which he so generously opened to the public here in Atlanta. The Warehouse is the museum that houses the Wieland collection, filled with over 400 works of contemporary art, all on the themes of houses and dwellings. I appreciate this collection being here in Atlanta. It is a pilgrimage to go there and experience this collector’s distinguished eye.

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Mary Obering (1937-2022) was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and lived most of her life in New York City where, in 1971, she bought a loft in SoHo. Obering fell in love with Italy, and her visits there influenced her paintings, which pair geometric Minimalism with sumptuous color. Beginning in the late 1980’s, Obering lived part of the time in Salento, Italy where her interest in Italian Renaissance painting was manifest in her use of egg tempera and gold leaf. Sara Buoso, an art historian based in Rome, has written about a current exhibition of Obering’s work, Outside and Inside, at the Fondazione Giuliani in Rome. It is the first exhibition of this American artist in a European gallery. I feel it is the right moment to look at Obering’s paintings and I appreciate Buoso’s reading of Obering’s work through her interest in color and light. 

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Christian Walker (1953– 2003) was a photographer who moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1985 when he was offered a residency at Nexus Contemporary Art Center to publish an artist’s book, The Theater Project. I met Christian when I first came to Atlanta in 1987. A small group of artists and writers met at Art Papers Magazine’s office for weekly conversations about art. These were open conversations with no agenda. In the mid-1990s, Christian moved to Seattle and sadly died there at the young age of fifty. I felt bad not only about missing this artist friend, but also about how little has been said about his artwork and its significance for the last twenty years. Finally, the exhibition Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant debuted at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York, NY in 2023, traveled to Walker’s alma mater, Tufts University Gallery at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA in 2024, and will be shown at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center this year.  Jackson Fine Art, a photography gallery in Atlanta, brought his work to Paris Photo and is showing it in the gallery. I am more than happy that Andrew Alexander has written about Walker’s work for The Art Section. It is time for this artist to be revisited and his significance acknowledged.

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I also want to thank everyone who came to The Art Section’s “live” reading by three poets who all live and work in Atlanta: Victoria Chang, E. Hughes, and Lauren K. Watel.  This was an amazing evening of rich ekphrastic poems and language that was co-hosted by the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Their work can be visited on The Art Section where you can read their poems and dialogues as well as hear their work read in their own voices.

 

Warm regards,

Deanna

Deanna Sirlin

Editor-in-Chief

The Art Section

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