Acquisitions
The James Renwick Alliance helped the Renwick Gallery build this pre-eminent museum collection, contributing more than a million dollars (as of the end of 2001) towards the purchase of select objects by many of the most significant artists in the century.
The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum collects crafts and decorative objects representing the creative achievements of contemporary American artists with the goal of establishing a select collection in a variety of media. The Gallery seeks to acquire works by established artists recognized as significant for the development of contemporary American craft.
Selected Recent Renwick Gallery Acquisition:
Karen LaMonte: Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery
Using funds donated by the James Renwick Alliance and JRA members John and Colleen Kotelly, The Smithsonian American Art Museum recently purchased Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery, a major glass sculpture by Karen LaMonte. The “empty” dress evokes the ephemeral quality of our corporeal selves and the fragility of the human condition. Further, it references the idea of clothing as a kind of controlling container. The sculpture is currently on view at the Renwick Gallery.
In her cast-glass sculptures, Karen LaMonte uses clothing as a metaphor for identity and human presence. Each dress is a kind of portrait, revealing and hiding elements but still allowing the viewer to peer beneath the surface. She uses clear cast glass, consciously avoiding color. But at the same time, her sculptures are active, even playful, in stark contrast to the more austere cast pieces of Howard Ben Tré or Mary Shaffer.
Each dress by LaMonte requires a minimum of six months to create. To create her life-sized glass sculptures, Karen LaMonte, who works in the Czech Republic, makes a wax casting of a woman’s body, which she then dresses in an evening gown. Multiple lost-wax casts are made to capture both the texture of the model’s skin and the weave of a vintage dress.
Reclining Dress Impression with Drapery
Life Size: 18.5" x 61" x 23"
2007, cast glass
She makes another mold of this clothed figure and casts it in glass. The inner cavity retains a haunting image of the imprint of the body once enveloped by the gown. The flowing folds of its drapery, permanently captured in glass, define the sculpture’s ghostly translucent exterior. The firing of the cast glass takes forty days to cool, completing a process that is a study in technical virtuosity.
It's no coincidence that LaMonte currently executes her large-scale work in the facility which produced what are often identified as the first studio glass sculptures, made by the team of Libinsky-Brychtova. LaMonte developed the complex techniques for her castings while on a Fulbright in the Czech Republic working at Pelechov, the glass casting facility of Zdenek Lhotsky in Prague. Together LaMonte and the skilled technicians at the factory developed techniques unique to her sculptures which weigh up to 600 pounds.
The figures are made in several sections which are later joined. LaMonte casts the bodies of real women, including herself. She places a mold made from real clothing around these human positives, invests the whole and fills the interstices with hot glass. The vanished female body in LaMonte's sculpture is a "given" which determines the gross form of the completed sculpture--just as living bodies determine the gross forms of apparel.
Past Renwick Gallery Acquisitions:
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1
Silas Kopf, Bad Hare Day
Macassar ebony, walnut, maple, and various woods
40" X 58" X 27"
Gift of the James Renwick Alliance, 2008
Silas Kopf of Easthampton, MA, displays his skill in this piece of marquetry, Bad Hare Day. Marquetry is the traditional craft of piecing together different species of wood and occasionally other materials to form pictures or graphic designs. He builds objects to the highest standards using time-tested techniques and quality materials. The piece is a gift from the James Renwick Alliance to the Renwick Gallery, voted on by the acquisitions committee in May, 2008.
2
Paula Bartron, Red Cylinder, 2004
Glass and glass powders
11 x 9 7/8"
Gift of Colleen and John Kotelly and Gisela and Ben Huberman, 2007