Dania Interview

     Where did you grow up and how did you become involved in art?

     I grew up in and around Washington DC. My family was from Alabama and Tampa, Florida so I spent a good deal of time in the south in the 1950s and 60s. I saw the apartheid south as a child and it left a lasting impression on me. My father's family was in politics in Alabama and my mother was a debutante in Tampa, Florida. They worked in Washington; my mother for Senator John Sparkman and my father was in charge of peanuts, yes peanuts for the government. It was an interesting childhood my parents were involved with Democratic party politics and I got to meet many of the major politicians of these two decades; the Kennedy's, the Johnson's, the Humphery's and the lot. As you can imagine the talk at home was not about the arts but about social issues. My older brother Jim Merrill became an artist, a painter, and taught at the Maryland Institute of Art and led the way for me to be an artist.

     So you went to the Maryland Institute?

     Yes, I started in 1968 and immediately flunked out. I went to work for the government for a year then returned to MICA and entered a remarkable community and was able to work with artist's such as Alan Ginsberg, Fairfield Porter, John Waters, Divine, John Cage, and Larry Rivers. The real education was with this community out side the school-- in the end I graduated with a 1.9 average in 1973. In spite of my grade point average, I was accepted to Yale- got my Master of Fine Arts. After several years of teaching on the East Coast I came to the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976 where I have been a professor of printmaking/painting and community arts ever since.

     How have you seen art change over the past several decades?

     I have been involved with the arts for 35 years as student, MFA candidate, professional artist and as an educator. In this time the significance and mission of art has changed as radically as the social and economic environment. When I was a student at Yale University the focus was solely on the development of each individual's studio work, it was a reductionist paradigm, We honed our personal visions searching to remove all aspect that were extraneous. The model of creativity and aesthetics were the beautiful works by Ellsworth Kelly, Rothko, and Sol Lewitt. Artists who had achieved highly systematic and reduced aesthetic visions.

     In my generation there was a sensation that continuation in a reductionist mode would lead to the very death of painting itself, what were left were concepts with out materials. But there was a shift in direction and art making began to add, think of the works by Jonathan Borofsky, Judy Phaff, Linda Bingless, Hollis Siegler, William Wylie Terry Allen, Dennis Oppenheim, and you see a world of expanded possibilities.

     And there were other forms of expansion, led by the women's movement the opening of the art world to broader segments of society and eventually the world community. Not only was there a rebirth of the way artists approached their studio work but there was a redefinition of the role and function of art in society that we are still developing.

     You were and are a studio artist .You have had your studio art work collected by numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When did your path go from private work to public?

     To understand the transition of working from only an inner voice, creating, prints, paintings and drawings from an individual internal vision to opening the creative process to allow other voices in is a concern for content, for asking the work of art to function in society in a direct way. It is a perception that began in the mid-1970s and has slowly developed to the present. I am still a studio artisst and the personal studio work feeds my community and public projects.

     What so you mean by function in society, doesn't all work function in society at some level?

     Yes but it is about who is let in and who is left out. Over the past two hundred years Art has been concerned with breaking out of past pictorial, social and political restrictions. This led to as Robert Irwin says "to an emptying out of content, leaving only the pictorial container, only formalism, only the color red on the canvas.' Once we arrived at Ellsworth Kelly's red canvas where were we to go? A good many of my generation changed their approach from a minimalist subtraction to a new additive approach. An approach that involved new values. Deconstructing modernism is asking art to take on new values and functions, asking for social content, communication, and audience interaction.

     Where does the audience fit in?

     The audience when I was in school was defined as critics, collectors and the art elite. Over the past thirty years the audience has been redefined in great part due to the feminist revolution. More is being asked of art, for it to have social and political values, to be a social critique of media and society, to enrich community, to come from the outside in and from the bottom up. Art over the past thirty years has spiraled out to engage society in new and unexpected areas. Art has broken free of the world of "isms"

     What role does art play in society if it is more than an aesthetic progression of isms?

     Writer Lucy Lippard points to an art that goes beyond "isms" or the heroic condescension of art for the people, or the universal language of abstraction-- to a more modest position. She describes an art that strives for local context and cultural authenticity. This idea asks for art to come from the fabric of community. I think photojournalists are an interesting model for community art. They have always been involved with both their unique individual perception of the world while simultaneously giving the community they work with a voice. Can works of art that comes from a locale context have broader meaning and influences, be universal or affect contemporary art theory or practice? Good question. I would point to the ideas of Joseph Beuys, Amelia Mesa-Bains, and David Hammons all artists who believe that art provides a revitalizing process for individuals, communities and society. They reject the commercial ego-based aesthetics of mainstream art production.

     Bains says "Chicano art is based on respecting the family and your community.

     David Hammons has said "the art audience is the worst audience in the world. It's overly educated, its conservative, its out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun.

     And Beuys says, "Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of our senile social system

     They all point a way to put the content back into art and to make it a part of the lives of everyday people. Their ideas have changed the dialogue from aesthetics to social concerns. They are not talking about easy sentimental images they are talking about deeply felt works like the installations of Christian Boltanski.

     You had the opportunity to work with French contemporary artist Christian Boltanski on the project Our City Ourselves at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, how did that affect your ideas on community art or art in general?

     The Kemper project was the beginning of my work as a community artist. Boltanski and I sat down in New York in 1997 and brainstormed a project for Kansas City. Boltanski had done many projects in which he had presented in museums the remnants of what people had left behind. His work always referenced the lost and the dead. I was working on the Project Portrait of Self in which I directed people in creating archives of their everyday lives. The Kemper museum project Our City Ourselves asked residents of Kansas City to bring family photos or documents to the museum which they could photo copy and have put up in the Kemper Museum, eventually the gallery walls were covered with thousands of photocopies of residents from the metropolitan area.

     What was the project Portrait of Self?

     I was invited to be visiting artist at the Kemper Museum during the Boltanski exhibition and created the artwork Portrait of Self. POS begins as a series of workshops. The participants are given a set of questions, ideas and directions in a black three-ring notebook. The Portrait of Self-notebook begins a collaborative and self-directed process of social, visual and autobiographical investigation. The participants turn their POS notebooks into multiple volumes of spine-breaking visual and annotated data, which trace their life experiences. It is an amazing process to be involved with. I ask questions like Draw your neighborhood and mark on it all the places you were bad. Activities such as these ask the person to create visual representations of their past and present living circumstances. POS asks people to document and share their daily life in detail. It gets them to collect the ephemera that pass through their hands each day. They fill their notebooks with lists, drawing, poetry, rap, I have seen them include audio tapes, cigarette butts, pop top tabs, baby pictures, syringes even pieces of their infant clothing. One girl placed ashes sealed in envelopes of her private thoughts. Well, at the end of a month's work they had created an archive crammed into multiple notebooks.

     What do you think the participant gets out of doing this archive?

     The archive is a remarkable representation of their values. This representation shows them how they act, who they affect and what they desire. The participant's archives are intense vernacular works of art created directly from the fabric of daily life. The notebooks, were exhibited at the Kemper museum in conjunction with the Boltanski exhibition.

     To my surprise Portrait of Self took off, and has been implemented with the help of designer Bruce McIntosh with incarcerated youths, at the Kansas State School for the blind, and with several other communities. Archiving is the basic method behind my community/public works.

     Your projects seem to often be based in schools, what is the relation between your art and education?

     At the heart of using artistic methods in the educational process from k-12 and beyond are the concepts of visual literacy and creative non-linear thinking. These are educational methods and values like reading that should be of concern to all students. Art is no longer an activity, it is a method for children to learn to think. To think freely, creatively and critically about their world.

     What is visual literacy?

     When we think of literacy we think of written language, Visual literacy is a process which trains the eye and mind encouraging the development of visual and mental imagination. Visual literacy is the understanding and creation of social, intellectual and aesthetic content. Why teach it? Why is this important now, because a majority of the jobs children will be facing in the future will demand the use of both image and text. Creative thinking and visual literacy are basic skills in the new economy.

     Can you describe the project Millennium voices you are doing here in Browden county?

     The project is based on Portrait of Pelf and Our city Ourselves, it combines having the students at Dania Elementary school create both individual/personal archives and using the walls of the school to create a living communal archive. The students have access to a copier and have made hundreds of images of the hands of the people in the community, students, administrators, teachers and staff all have had their hands copied and placed up as a large mural in the building. Other walls in the school are covered with copies of toys and family pictures. The teachers brought in photographs of themselves as elementary school students, the halls of the school are filled with easily over a thousand copies, it is a visual feast.

     But that is only the beginning of the process, I am collecting and using the images as the resource for a mural that will cover four school buildings that face Rt 1. The images will be made from the childrens archives, my interaction with them, the Dania school archives and the city archive as well.

     It is hoped that we will expand the project to involve city hall and perhaps the streets around the school. So to complete the project I will be returning to Dania 5 times over the next 9 months.

     What does the project Millennium voices leave the community?

     The community must be left with more than an aesthetic experience, more than a plop art experience, in other words left with more than the art object or sculpture. I feel that Community art is functional-not-purely aesthetic. It is not imposed on the community but derives from direct interaction between artist: and the community. That Community art is a process not a product. A process that has long lasting effects, leaving the community methods for evolving personal and social changes. Community art is a process that nurtures awareness and is a celebration of others and is deeply rooted in cultural/personal identity. It is these values that Millennium voices brings to Dania, plus added on are the educational values we have all ready discussed, visual literacy and creative thinking.