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When Leah Rhodes, a Jewish girl from Philadelphia,
began her art training at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine
Arts in 1951, her eye was on the skills of Classical Art on
which that training focused. She never imagined at that time
the varied career into which she would be led and the connection
with Native American culture that would grow out of that career.
When her one-woman show, “Baby Carriers: the work of
Leah Rhodes and Native Americans” opens August 2nd for
a one month run at the Athens Cultural Center at 25 Second
Street in Athens, themes that have been insinuating themselves
into Rhodes’ work for decades will be brought to the
fore, and the full sweep of that work, from her earliest to
her latest explorations of that connection, will be on display.
“Ever since my early-childhood,” Rhodes writes
in her artist’s statement, “I have been haunted
by the ghost of the American Indians. At times they have entered
my dreams, and finally became a “reality” in my
work.”
But the influence was initially obscured by what was supposed
to be a relatively conventional career in Fine Arts—as
it was understood in the 1950s. While at the Academy, Rhodes
was awarded a Cresson European traveling scholarship. The
opportunity to experience classical European art and architecture
in the original context has influenced her work both stylistically
and conceptually ever since.
After her Academy training, in 1959 Rhodes was accepted into
a special one-year program at the University of Pennsylvania,
with a specialization in architecture. The program was overseen
by legendary, visionary architect and teacher, Louis Kahn,
and was presented as a course in “morphology”—the
study of form. There she found herself part of a group of
artists/architects/engineers, which opened the connection
between materials as structural and aesthetic elements, and
design as structural as well as aesthetic.
Her exhibition career began with a solo show in Edinburgh,
Scotland in 1957, and she has never looked back, logging more
than 35 solo and group events over the ensuing 50 years. The
venues have ranged from the America Academy of Arts and Letters
in New York City to the Galerie Akiyana in Tokyo, Japan, the
Atea Ring Gallery in Westport, NY, The Parsons School of Design
in New York City (where she was an adjunct professor for two
decades), and the Galeri Bernard Jordan in Paris, France.
In 2004, the retrospective exhibit “Pieces of a Life”
at 504 Space in Swarthmore, PA honored more than 40 years
of Rhodes’ work and her artistic development.
As early as the 1960s, partly as an outgrowth of her studies
in architecture, Rhodes was already experimenting with “shaped
canvases” and the interaction between the “form”
of an art object and its resonance. While always continuing
to work with paint, crayon and other media on relatively flat
surfaces, much of her work began to break the boundaries of
the conventional “frame” and to emerge from the
two-dimensional surface into the three-dimensional world.
Collage and assemblage became increasingly familiar to her,
as she experimented with the interface between object and
symbol, between concept and representation. Her “Baby
Carriers” series, which first emerged in the 1980s consisted
of three-dimensional sculptural objects inspired by images
she had encountered in the Museum of the American Indian in
Manhattan (now incorporated into the Smithsonian in Washington,
DC). Her object was not to copy the originals, but to come
up with an interpretation of what was evoked for her—Rhodes’
own sense of enclosing, making comfortable, entertaining,
and “enshrining” the (archetypal) child.
Rhodes was struck by the unself-conscious sculptural “artistry”
of many of the artifacts she saw there and began creating
her own objects—“totems” and “shields”—in
response, items that “told a story” or symbolized
certain energies or qualities.
She describes her reaction to the encounter this way; “The
American Indian is a myth-maker, his art animates or personifies
the forces and phenomena of nature. To him, all things have
life, including his baskets and bowls.” The Native American’s
recognition of the spiritual force within created objects
sounded a deep chord in Rhodes’ being, which connected
her back to Native American images and dreams of her childhood.
The baby carriers she found particularly fascinating because
of the intimate domestic connection they had with the lives
of mothers and their children, with details like charms, feathers
and rattles attached to entertain the baby. Their design combined
structural and aesthetic concerns, while their function was
a spiritual/developmental one—enabling infants to be
fully included in the active life of the community—as
well as practical. Rhodes found herself mingling and integrating
notions of the symbolic “significance” of the
shields and totems with the representational and functional
“meaning” of the baby carriers as both cultural
objects and personal posessions.
She became fascinated with the creative process, which combines
a framework of a “form” with a discipline of materials,
incorporating found natural materials, constructed objects
and traditional arts media like plaster, adhesives, wax, wire
and paints. Describing her study of the artifacts and her
process in creating her own interpretation of them, she recalls
consciously internalizing the sense of “identity”
she discovered. “To me, my baby bags, each has a life
of its own. Among them, there is a diversity of form and sometimes
seemingly magical qualities. They become my obsession—all
the babies I never bore, each a separate personality.”
It is this incarnation of spirit in the object—recognition,
if you will, of the object’s many qualities beyond the
physical and material—that has energized this series
of works. The sense of something present by implication rather
than representation, “as if something was inside;”
of something “missing” that “could exist
within the space;” is the source of the inherent tension
and mystery in these gorgeously-colored stylized objects,
some glossy-textured and almost featureless—except for
shimmering, subtly-changing colors—others alive with
minute detail and relief.
The exhibition will feature a selection of Rhodes’ constructions,
a few dating back to that first show in 1989, and several
newly constructed in the aftermath of her trip to the Four
Corners region of the Southwest in 2007. “It felt very
familiar to me,” Rhodes relates, “from my ‘dreams.’
After this awe-inspiring trip, I returned to my...studio and
began work on this project.”
The fruits of that inspiration, and the life-long journey
leading up to it, will be on display Saturdays and Sundays,
from 1 p.m. - 4 p.m. in the Athens Cultural Center’s
entire ground floor Gallery from August 2 - September 2. Special
events will include an illustrated talk on Baby Carriers as
Native American artifacts. For more information you can visit
the website at: www.athensculturalcenter.org, email info@athensculturalcenter.com
or call the gallery at (518) 945-2136. Other work by Rhodes
will be shown in July at the Atea Ring Gallery, Sam Spear
Rd., Westport, NY 12993. For more information on that show,
you can email atearing@westelcom.com or call (518) 962-8620.
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