2017 Featured Sculptors
The development of site-specific dance related to the incredible sculptures at Grounds For Sculpture is a cornerstone of The Outlet Dance Project. We are committed to deep explorations of interdisciplinary collaboration and conversation. Below is information about the artists whose work this year's choreographers have been inspired by and are working with.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Magdalena Abakanowicz's work often combines groups of figures or animals that occupy a single space. Though on the surface each is a multiple, each figure is unique. Rather than imbuing the groupings with a sense of solidarity, Abakanowicz's figurative groupings often give the impression of isolation and obscurityy. "I immerse in the crowd, like a grain of sand in the friable sands. I am fading among the anonymity of glances, movements, smells, in the common absorption of air, in the common pulsation of juices under the skin...” - from the artist's website.
More information at www.abakanowicz.art.pl.
Robert Cooke &
Daniel Goode
Born in Pennsylvania and now living in New Jersey, Robert Cooke earned an undergraduate degree from the Newark State College and an MFA with a concentration in ceramics and sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan. He was an associate professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University for almost thirty years and he had conducted numerous workshops, lectures, and special projects off campus as well, including one on cast iron techniques. In New Jersey, he is represented in public collections at the New Jersey State Museum, and other fine art institutions. The study of dreams, Zen Buddhism, and alchemy are among Cooke’s varied interests.
Daniel Goode (b. New York, January 24, 1936) is an American composer and clarinetist. He studied philosophy, and then music with Henry Cowell, Otto Luening, Pauline Oliveros, and Kenneth Gaburo. Goode’s works show influence from several sources, including bird song, Cape Breton fiddling, drone, Indonesian gamelan music, and minimal music (specifically music as a gradual process). Often two or more of these elements are combined in a single composition.
Goode served as Director of the Electronic Music Studio of Rutgers University from 1971 to 1998 and is co-director of the DownTown Ensemble which he co-founded in New York in 1983. As a clarinetist he is proficient in the technique of circular breathing, which he uses frequently in performances with the group. Since 1976, Goode has been a member of Gamelan Son of Lion, a Javanese-style iron gamelan ensemble dedicated to new music, for which he has composed many works. His most recent project is the Flexible Orchestra, a reform of the Western orchestra inspired to some degree by his experience with the gamelan as a musical, social, and cultural phenomenon. His works are published by Frog Peak Music and Theodore Presser. More info at www.danielgoode.com.
Kevin Lyles
Kevin Lyles has been a professor in the sculpture department at the University of the Rio Grande in Ohio since 1990. In earlier years, he earned his BFA at Abilene Christian University in Texas and MFA from Bradley University, Peoria, IL. Lyles has exhibited his sculptures and drawings in this country at such notable museums as the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art in Ohio; the Mitchell Museum in Mount Vernon, IL, where Lyles was awarded “Best in Show” for his sculpture; and at university campuses in Rio Grande in Ohio and Muncie, Indiana. He has also exhibited his works at art centers in Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas. More information on this artist can be found at www.kevinlyles.com.
Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas
Strong-Cuevas studied at the prominent and long established Art Students League of New York, learning wood and stone carving under the tutelage of John Hovannes in the mid-1960s. She later expanded her approach to creating works and began to work in plaster, this time with Toto Meylan. Besides bronze, some of her works have been cast in stainless steel and aluminum. Careful attention is paid to the surface of her sculptures; and, according to the medium, some are polished to a gleaming finish, some are brushed, and others are treated with a patina. Sculptures by Strong-Cuevas have been exhibited in one-person shows in New York City and the Hamptons on Long Island. In addition, her works have been represented in group exhibitions in galleries in the United States and Europe, such as The Bruce Museum in Greenwich and the Kouros Gallery in Ridgefield, both in Connecticut; The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY; Shidoni Contemporary near Santa Fe, NM; Biennale III and IV held in MonteCarlo; and the Tolman Collection in Singapore.
More information on this artist can be found at www.sc-sculpture.com
Elyn Zimmerman
Although best known as a sculptor with an emphasis on large scale, site-specific projects, Elyn Zimmerman has created and exhibited drawings and photographs since graduating UCLA in 1972 with an MFA in painting and photography. She continues to mix and match these media in her two dimensional works. Until the mid 1980’s all the drawings were black and white or monochrome, but the series entitled “Ceremonial Objects” done in vividly colored encaustic medium on paper was a departure--introducing color and texture into her two dimensional work. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s her photography continued in black and white but printed in both conventional and unconventional media. Then, in 1987, looking for more color and texture, she created a portfolio of images entitled “Magna Graecia”. These photographs are sepia-colored prints on watercolor paper. Other print portfolios followed, and work with full color printing started in 2001 and was the subject of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery at that time. Zimmerman's sculptural works range from studio pieces and private commissions to large scale, site-specific projects. In the mid 1970’s Zimmerman created a number of temporary, site-specific installations for museum and gallery exhibitions. Projects were done at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hudson River Museum, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. Returning to the USA after a trip to India in 1977 (where she was inspired by archeological sites to do outdoor projects), she was invited to do temporary outdoor works at places like Artpark, Lewiston, NY; 1980 Winter Olympics, Lake Placid, NY; Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, TX, and others. Her permanent outdoor projects, beginning in 1980, are best known for the use of stone, often in association with water, (reflecting pools, fountains) and landscape elements. Included among these large scale, public commissions is a fountain to memorialize the World Trade Center bombing, New York City; the design of the Sculpture garden at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama; a fountain and seating area for AT&T headquarters in New Jersey; the plaza design including a large pool and granite sculpture at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC; a plaza project in San Francisco, CA with multiple water elements and seating areas; and a plaza in downtown Vancouver with sculpture and water elements. Zimmerman was born in Philadelphia, PA, received both undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Art at UCLA, and taught university level art classes from 1974 to 1986 in California and New York. She has lived in New York City since 1977. More info at www.elynzimmerman.com.
Daniel Clayman
Daniel Clayman is a sculptor, born in 1957 in Lynn, MA. Always the tinkerer, Daniel had planned a career as a theater lighting designer, studying in the Theater and Dance Department at Connecticut College, eventually dropping out of college to work in the professional theater, dance and opera world. A chance class in 1980 introduced the artist to using glass as a sculptural material. In 1986, He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and has maintained a studio in East Providence, RI since then.
His interests in engineering, the behavior of light, and the memory of experience, acts as an impetus for much of the work. In the end, Clayman’s sculpture is a “manifestation of a moment of thought.” Working large and small, he employs technology from the simplest hand tool to the latest three-dimensional modeling and production tools. More information at www.danielclayman.com.
Linda Cunningham
Cunningham’s sculptures in metal and stone, another medium this artist frequently works in, have been presented in solo exhibitions and outdoor installations in New York City, at the United Nations Plaza, for example, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Public art projects include stone memorials constructed to honor significant historical events that took place in Berlin, Cornberg, and Kassel, all cities in Germany. Other works have also been included in numerous group exhibitions in those areas previously mentioned, as well as the El Paso Museum of Art, Texas; the Mitchell Museum, Mt. Vernon, Illinois; Moorhead State University, Lewistown, Kentucky; and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Linda Cunningham has received a theater grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Artists Grant for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to work in Berlin in 1994, and others over the course of her career for sculptures and multi-media collaborations.
Layers of torn edges and severed forms distinguish Linda Cunningham’s large format drawing/ constructions. The tactile sensibility of her work comes from her interest in the qualities of materials, observed or found. She transforms found materials, a kind of “Urban Mining,” and preserves the qualities of found materials with the material history inscribed in their surface. In the wall-constructions she fuses relief elements, such as exposed structural fragments or sand-cast bronze, shaped by the physical process of the pour. Even the bronze forms she casts from military surplus scrap.Cunningham’s work is concerned with time, transience and contradictions, and she gravitates to architectural and structural remnants of current and previously existing cultures. She often poses the veracity of the photo-based transferred images against interpretive, fluid calligraphic drawing line and form. With sensually gripping form she tempts the viewer to take in sometimes discomforting, underlying content. Discarded materials such as twisted steel beams & unraveling copper cable from the former German border become metaphors for the transience of 21st C development. More on her work at www.lindalcunningham.com.
John Ruppert
Over the past 35years, John Ruppert has been working in cast metals; manufactured materials such as chain-link fabric; mixed media; and more recently, video, digital 3D printing and digital composite photography - all in response to where natural order and human decision-making meet, and the paradoxes that lie between. His work stems from a long tradition of artists who have been inspired by the grand and sublime beauty of the land, from the ancient Chinese poets and artists of Tao to the 19th century American landscape painters and more recently, to artists working directly in the landscape considering our relationship to the environment.
His interest in natural phenomena - both in source and in the way that he works - is what drives his creative practice.
Ruppert received his MFA from the School for American Craftsman, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York, in 1977. Ruppert’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in museums, sculpture parks and galleries both in the United States and abroad.
Meryl Taradash
MerylTaradash earned her MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute in 1978. She has a devoted interest in public art and has received several commissions including her first public work of art, Light Dance (1984), at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Camden. One-person exhibitions and group shows for Taradash include: the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA; The Newark Museum, NJ; the University Art Museum of California at Santa Barbara; and the Montclair Art Museum, NJ. Taradash’s work is also part of Grounds For Healing at the Cancer Care Center at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton, NJ.
Artist Statement
My sculpture is designed to move with the wind and change with the light. The unpredictability of natural forces is essential to my work as a sculptor. I want people to see these elements in my work. As an artist, I am interested in creating public art because I believe it affects people in subtle and unexpected ways, and I also believe that movement invites participation. Each of my completed sculptures assumes a life of its own, totally dependent upon the will of the wind and the light of the sun.
More information at www.meryltaradash.com.