From Anne Healy: Carol, As a public art artist and site specific sculptor, I have to defend Kara Walker's marvelous piece. Ms Walker stated her intention for the piece in all the press for it and in Creative Time's press release. Why can't critics and others just accept her intention? Why burden the work with investigative reporting on the source of the commission, the source of the money and the source of the space to deem her and her work hypocritical at best? It is a beautiful, grand and intense piece of public art that creates in that vast space a hallelujah to the beauty of the thousands of black women and children forced to work in the slavery of the sugar industry. All of your investigations have nothing to do with the piece...NOTHING. I think it is the second best work of public art that I have ever seen and experienced, the first being the Vietnam Memorial, another work weighted down with other people's political interpretations. No work of art should be burdened with that kind of weight. As to Creative Times Mission Statement in the '80's, I cannot address that as I do not know it, being in Ca from 1981 to 2008. BUT, I did the first site specific piece for Creative Time in 1974 at 55 Water Street, a new building with a vacant, huge ground floor space that Anita Contini was very happy to acquire for my show, SAIL. I can assure you that as Anita, her husband and I piled into his truck to go to City Island to pick up actual sails from sailmakers that we had talked into lending us for the show, no one was thinking of the social significance of this work. We just wanted to make an installation that was beautiful and grand showing the beauty of ordinary objects in space.That was my intention and Creative Time accepted and supported the artists' intentions. It still does.
Kara Walker's marvelous piece. Ms Walker stated her intention for the piece
in all the press for it and in Creative Time's press release. Why can't
critics and others just accept her intention? Why burden the work with investigative reporting on the source of the commission, the source of the
money and the source of the space to deem her and her work hypocritical at
best? It is a beautiful, grand and intense piece of public art that creates
in that vast space a hallelujah to the beauty of the thousands of black
women and children forced to work in the slavery of the sugar industry. All
of your investigations have nothing to do with the piece...NOTHING. I
think it is the second best work of public art that I have ever seen and experienced, the first being the Vietnam Memorial, another work weighted
down with other people's political interpretations. No work of art should
be burdened with that kind of weight. As to Creative Times Mission
Statement in the '80's, I cannot address that as I do not know it, being in
Ca from 1981 to 2008. BUT, I did the first site specific piece for Creative
Time in 1974 at 55 Water Street, a new building with a vacant, huge ground
floor space that Anita Contini was very happy to acquire for my show, SAIL.
I can assure you that as Anita, her husband and I piled into his truck to
go to City Island to pick up actual sails from sailmakers that we had
talked into lending us for the show, no one was thinking of the social significance of this work. We just wanted to make an installation that was beautiful and grand showing the beauty of ordinary objects in space.That
was my intention and Creative Time accepted and supported the artists' intentions. It still does.