Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020

abstract shapes painted in silver with seven silver ornaments.

Timothy Horn, Tree of Heaven 7, 2016, nickel-plated bronze and mirrored blown glass, Courtesy of the artist

Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 features artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts. Nature provides a way for these invited artists to ask what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art’s engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives.

Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 is the ninth installment of the Renwick Invitational. Established in 2000, this biennial showcase highlights midcareer and emerging makers who are deserving of wider national recognition. 

Description

The four featured artists were selected by a panel of distinguished jurors, each with a wide knowledge of contemporary American makers. The panel included Emily Zilber, independent curator and director of curatorial affairs and strategic partnerships at the Wharton Esherick Museum in Malvern, Pennsylvania; Nora Atkinson, the Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge for the Renwick Gallery; and Stefano Catalani, executive director of the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. Emily Zilber is organizing the exhibition.

Lauren Fensterstock (b. 1975, resides Portland, Maine) creates detailed, large-scale installations using labor-intensive modes of making drawn from the decorative arts, including paper quilling and mosaic. For this exhibition, SAAM has commissioned a site-specific work—the first in a new series for the artist inspired by sources like The Book of Miracles, a richly illustrated sixteenth-century German manuscript—that will transform an entire gallery at the Renwick into a celestial landscape that captures the power and awe inherent in natural phenomena.

Timothy Horn (b. 1964, resides Provincetown, Massachusetts) creates exaggerated adornments that combine natural and constructed worlds, taking inspiration from objects as varied as seventeenth-century jewelry patterns and nineteenth-century studies of lichen, coral, and seaweed. He works with traditional materials, such as bronze and glass, as well as surprising ones, like crystalized rock sugar, which refers to the extravagant Amber Room of Russian Empress Catherine the Great.

Debora Moore (b. 1960, resides Seattle) is best known for her exquisitely detailed glass renderings of orchids, to which she devoted her practice from the mid-1990s until recently. In her new tour de force series, Arboria (2018), featured in this exhibition, Moore has branched out from the orchid to focus on four life-size flowering trees of different varieties: cherry, magnolia, winter plum, and wisteria. Moore’s work presents a new chapter in the long history of representing plants in glass, which ranges from ancient renderings to nineteenth-century models used for scientific study. For Moore, she focuses less on realism and more on capturing an intensely personal experience of beauty and wonder.

Rowland Ricketts (b. 1971, resides Bloomington, Indiana) creates immersive installations using handwoven and hand-dyed cloth. His holistic artistic practice begins on his farm, where he cultivates the indigo plants he uses to color his artwork, fully linking his material and process with the finished product. Ricketts often incorporates participatory engagement from non-artists, emphasizing the relationship between nature, culture, the passage of time, and everyday life.

Visiting Information

October 16, 2020 — November 22, 2020 and May 14, 2021 — August 152021
Open Daily, 10:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m
Free Admission

Publications

the cover of a book
Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020
Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 features artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts. Nature provides a way for these invited artists to ask what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art’s engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives.

Videos

Credit

The Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family Foundation Endowment provides support for the Renwick Invitational. The Cohen Family’s generosity in creating this endowment makes possible this biennial series highlighting outstanding craft artists who are deserving of wider national recognition. Additional support has been provided by the Carolyn Small Alper Exhibitions Fund, Ed and Kathy Fries, Cary J. Frieze, Bannus and Cecily Hudson, James Renwick Alliance, Klorfine Foundation, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Eleanor T. Rosenfeld, Myra and Harold Weiss, and In-kind support has been provided by the Tokushima Prefectural Office.

SAAM Stories

Image of large installation artwork of a comet suspended from the ceiling
Nora Atkinson, curator-in-charge of SAAM’s Renwick Gallery, reflects on an unprecedented year and a half and the universal force of nature
Photograph of Nora Atkinson by Libby Weiler.
Nora Atkinson
The Fleur and Charles Bresler Curator-in-Charge, Renwick Gallery
An installation photograph of trees made out of glass.
Sculptor Debora Moore works with glass to achieve great feats of creativity, craftsmanship, and natural wonder.
An installation inside an art museum
The 2020 Renwick Invitational offers an inspired vision of nature
An installation inside an art museum
The work of fiber artist Roland Ricketts, featured in the Renwick Invitational, begins on his farm in Indiana
An installation photograph inside the renwick gallery.
New artwork explores how weather and celestial activity have been used as metaphor
Laura Baptiste
Head of Communications and Public Affairs
Artist Timothy Horn standing on ladder next to his large chandelier sculpture made of rock sugar
Learn more about the artwork and evolving career of Timothy Horn, feature artist in Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020
An installation photograph of trees
Watch our Forces of Nature Virtual Program Series

SAAM presented a virtual program series featuring artists Lauren Fensterstock, TimothyHorn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts as part of Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020. Each of these invited artists looks to nature as a way to contemplate what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Enjoy programming that ranges from artist conversations with curators to workshops and studio tours. 

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“Natural motifs are common in the decorative arts. But there is nothing dainty or domestic about the works on view in Forces of Nature... The four invited artists use traditional techniques to make pieces that are distinctive, timely and way too big to fit in the pantry.”

– Mark Jenkins, The Washington Post

 

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