Past & Present: Art Historian

Past Reference Point (Postcard Collective Summer 2011 submission):

Current Reincarnation (completed August 2013):

Clockwise from top left: Monterey, CA, Marfa, TX, Ucross, WY and Bellevue, WA

I learned about the retired art historian who couldn’t bear to look at the artwork on her hotel room walls a couple years ago. She sought any article of cloth to drape over the printed reproductions before she carried on with her activities. This became known when she attended a conference and shared a room with a colleague who witnessed this behavior. She was no longer living when the Art Department shared this story but one additional phrase was used to describe her: “control freak.”

Three months later I began to replicate and document her actions. I started in Monterey, California and continued throughout Northern Italy (here, here, here and here). Intermittently over the next two years, I hung towels, bedding, clothing, and even a yoga mat over paintings of cupid, horses, flowers, golf courses, abstract geometric forms and bales of hay. I only hesitated at covering one print advertising a Josef Albers exhibition in Marfa, Texas. I felt certain this image was “art historian approved.”