Rachel Owens: Making Art, Making Change
As assistant professor in the School of Art+Design, she affords many students the opportunity to join her on the journey.
WORKING IN A VENN DIAGRAM
Owens’ work tends to lie where environmental, humanitarian, social, and political issues merge. “None of those things live in separate bubbles and can only be discussed together,” she says.
For a public commission by the New York City Parks department in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza outside the United Nations, she installed Inveterate Composition for Clare in 2011. The sculpture is formed from parts of replica military-style Humvees, painted white and reengineered into a shape reminiscent of an iceberg, while a sound component emits ongoing whale songs.
Four students helped fabricate the work, welding it together piece by piece in the alley behind Owen’s Brooklyn studio building. “It was me and four other women, and every day we would literally throw a 200-foot extension cord out the window and roll the welder into the alley.”
The women were graduate students Mel Skluzacek ’08 (MA/MFA) and Amanda Gale ’11 (MFA), and BFA students Rebecca Acosta ’10 and Diana Doherty ’10.
The piece is now on view near the rear of the Visual Arts building through 2017.
EXHIBITION QUESTIONS SPACE IN RED HOOK
Last June, Owens organized a project in her Red Hook neighborhood called GUT REHAB that explored hierarchies of space. She gave artists a list of words that included, among others, landscape, racial isolationism, maps, sustainability, occupation, and migration, and asked them to create work in response.
Once branded the most dangerous neighborhood in the entire United States, Red Hook has become one of the hottest places to live in the borough. Ironically, the GUT REHAB exhibition was held in the epicenter of gentrification—a real estate office.
Once again, students worked alongside Owens. Christopher Jiles ’17 had work in the show, Emily Greco ’16 and Jasmine Yeh ’16 assisted Owens in its organization, and Jason Guevara ’16 designed a “newspaper” for the project.
For her part, Owens created a fascinating work from her signature media, cast glass and resin, in which she represents a single item from each group of objects paid to the Nyack Indians by the Dutch West India Trading Company for the tract of Brooklyn in the work’s title, All of Brooklyn from Gowanus to Coney Island: six coats, six kettles, six small looking glasses, six axes, six chisels, 12 knives, and 12 combs. (A clever installation conjured by two graphic designers, The Trump Hut, garnered some media attention.)
MAKING ART, MAKING CHANGE
This summer she took students to Detroit to work on a neighborhood revitalization project with fellow professor Chris Robbins and his art collective Ghana Think Tank, in collaboration with Detroit’s Oakland Avenue Artist Coalition and the North End Woodward Community Organization.
In its nascent stage, the art and architecture project will transform three buildings in Detroit’s North End into apartments and small businesses that serve the neighborhood’s needs.
“I thought it would be a super beneficial trip in terms of allowing students to see the other side of our economy,” she explains. “Generally speaking, most of our students come from a pretty prosperous part of the country, even if they’re not from wealthy families. They have definitely never seen two square blocks where every single house is boarded up or burned down. In turn, they were also able to see the alternative methods that many Detroiters are employing to revive their city.”
THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED
In the spring, Owens will teach a new class, Theatre of the Oppressed: Process to Action, in which students will delve into the arsenal of techniques developed by Augusto Boal in the 60s, to help both their own artistic practices and to affect change on a broader level.
The class will move to the PC4 space in Yonkers to help achieve social change in the wider community. Owens’ students also engaged in these participatory performance exercises with Ghana Think Tank and members of the Detroit community.
She believes a broad set of experiences in and out of the studio will ultimately shape how students approach their art practice. “I think you need to move your body, literally, away from where you’re used to having it, to be able to make your brain work bigger as well,” she says.
ON THE HORIZON
Owens is looking forward to her spring show at ZieherSmith gallery, which will feature casts of the oldest living being in New York City, a 400-year-old tree located deep in a public park in Queens (below). Once again, her students will be at her side.
