May 1990: A site-specific installation by Brooklyn-born artist Winifred Lutz will open in the Grand Lobby of The Brooklyn Museum June 15 and will remain on view through September 4, 1990. Entitled Ago/Anon, which refers to the past and the near future, the installation will base itself both figuratively and literally around the Museum’s architectural features and the history of its collections.
Working in her signature medium, handmade paper, Lutz will enclose the Lobby’s two columns, stained a terracotta color, in sheaths resembling giant beehives or cocoons. A passageway will give viewers access to the interior of each column in which, eight feet from the floor, Lutz will position an 1890s stone head from the Museum’s collection.
Hanging from the ceiling in the center of the Lobby will be two concentric cylinders made of black nylon-mesh, which Lutz will light from above. On the floor beneath the cylinders will be a circle of metal leaf with concentric rings of white gravel, suggesting natural phenomena such as ripples in a pond or growth rings of a tree. The latter suggestion is reinforced by a painting of a growth diagram of a tree Lutz will create on the Grand Lobby’s back wall.
Winifred Lutz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942 and later moved to Cleveland[,] where she received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Since earning her masters of fine arts degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1968, Lutz has had a series of successful site-specific sculpture installations as well as group and solo exhibitions. She is currently Professor of Sculpture at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.
The exhibition is organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. The Grand Lobby installations are made possible by a generous grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. Additional support comes from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1989 - 1994. 04-06/1990, 052-53.
