Artist Dorothea Rockburne sent me an email message recently from her studio in New York saying she had just come down off of a scissor lift and was exhausted as she was completing her current project, a 41-foot high mural, "Homage to Colin Powell," for the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica.  

Powell was born in Jamaica, and the mural depicts the sky as it appeared there at approximately the moment when he was born.  Powell is not sure about the exact time, Rockburne said, so she picked 1:00 a.m., the traditional time astrolgers choose to align the stars when they don't know the time of birth.  The mural was commissioned by the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies, a nonprofit organization that installs works in U.S. embassies.  Rockburne spoke to me over the telephone about a month before she came to Asheville as the keynote speaker for Re-Viewing Black Mountain College, a conference at UNC Asheville.

The conference also coincided with an exhibition of Rockburne's recent "Astronomy Drawings" at Asheville's Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center.

Dorothea Rockburne is a commanding figure in the arts. 

During her 50-year career she has exhibited widely and received many prestigious awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  In 2009 she received the National Academy Museum Artist's Lifetime Achievement Award.  Rockburne’s work is included in important public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Rockburne says she accepted the commission for the mural not because of politics (she is Canadian born), but because when she first met Powell, he was an impressive personage to her.  Rockburne defines herself as an abstract artist and came up with the perfect response to the commission, a mural depicting the probable appearance of the night sky on the day and time of Powell’s birth.  It's an interesting choice of subject matter because in Greek mythology dead heroes and heroines became constellations.  Powell, of course, is very much alive.  Vincent Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" (1889), one of Rockburne’s favorite paintings, also conveys the stars as representing the deceased, and Van Gogh once described himself as becoming a star himself after he died.

Intimate scale

In contrast to the mural’s grand scale, Rockburne’s show in Asheville, "Dorothea Rockburne: Astronomy Drawings," provides an intimate experience on a smaller scale.  The drawings are notable for their richness, complexity and depth.  Even though the exhibit focuses on work from 1991 to 2000, it pulls together the many recurring threads of her life, art and scholarly interests.  A student at Black Mountain College in the 1950s, Rockburne incorporates ideas based in mathematics and astronomy that she first encountered at the experimental college.

As Rockburne explains, astronomy combines shapes, math, metaphysics and feelings that the cosmos will continue to exist long after the lives of humankind.  In the press release for the exhibition, she said she started to work on the drawings in 1992 after a long period of gestation.  "A friend had given me a very good small telescope," she said, "which I could mount on the hood of my car.  I would drive to the beach at night and study the stars; the Astronomy Drawings are an exciting direction my work has taken, which, in a way, came as a complete surprise.  They combine nature, geometry, topology and painting in an easy and natural way.  The transition to move from certain higher forms of geometry, which I had used in former work, to astronomy just seems to flow.  I have been working that way ever since."

In an  interview with Rolf Sinclair and Amy Baker Sandback published in the catalog of "Dorothea Rockburne, Ten Years of Astronomy Drawings, 1990-2000," at the Greenberg Van Doren gallery in New York, Rockburne explained that she is not trying to reflect what she sees in the sky.  Instead, she is "trying to create parallel phenomena; much the way artists have studied flowers and the human form, responding to the wonders of nature."  The drawings are not religious in the usual sense of the word, she said, but "they are religious in the sense that I think we are born with an expansiveness within us, a sense of belonging to a larger universe."  

When I interviewed Rockburne recently, she helped me see how she creates.  "The way art works for me," she said, "it is a combination of thought, research, intuition and very hard work.  I don’t think things out in words; instead I see it in my mind’s eye." Rockburne compared her approach to the classical musicians she heard in Montreal in her youth.  "When I was growing up," she said, "I attended concerts of musicians playing classical music. I began to notice that the musicians weren’t reading the music; instead they were listening to what they heard in their heads.  Their concerts  were informed from a deeper source."  

Rockburne sees herself in what she has called "a state of grace" during which her art evolves over time between intuition and fate or even another power.  But she always sees it in her "mind’s eye" first.  She explained that classical musicians can indeed lose themselves in the music in performance, but to do so requires extensive preparation for this level of comfort. Rockburne always knows what she will paint before starting a piece.  She works quite differently from, and in reaction to, the Abstract Expressionist approach, which was mostly to go with the flow and convey the inner voice or the subconscious through less determinism.
Studying at Black Mountain College

Even at a young age, Rockburne was already aware of her path in life.  She loved to draw and paint, to hike and to read her mother’s many books about Egyptian art and architecture.  Her progressive interests led her from the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal to Black Mountain College, where she was awarded an entrance  scholarship in 1950 when she was 18.  At Black Mountain, her approach to art, her interdisciplinary interests and her thought processes and techniques coalesced.  

By the time Rockburne enrolled in the college, its most famous art teacher, Josef Albers, was no longer there.  She studied painting with Franz Kline and Philip Guston.  She also studied music with John Cage and dance with Merce Cunningham.  Cage, Cunningham, Kline and Guston were not members of the regular faculty but taught at summer sessions during Rockburne's time at Black Mountain.  Her friends and classmates were Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

Rockburne credits her deep interest in the intersection between art, nature and mathematics to Black Mountain College mathematics professor Max Dehn, a one-time colleague and long-time friend of Albert Einstein.  Dehn essentially tutored her in mathematics and directed her to Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry.  Rockburne’s study of Sacred Geometry, which focuses on the Golden Mean throughout nature - in astronomy, music, architecture, art and the human body began during her school days in Montreal. She also credits Dehn for her interest in topology, the area of mathematics concerned with spatial properties.

As a Black Mountain College student, Rockburne participated in Cage's "Theater Piece #1" or "The Untitled Event" in 1952, now considered the first "Happening."  Cage created the work to experiment with time and explore the outcome of melding diverse threads of various arts and literature within the same time frame.  Utilizing the completely white paintings Rauschenberg created at the college that year, the event also became a moment in time into which everyday life might enter.  The attendees, a barking dog and the participants became the warp and woof of real life.  Yet they were all art, though not visual art like Rauschenberg’s paintings stuck on the ceiling.  Rather they represented everyday life immersed in and creating art.

Rockburne remembers mostly being on a ladder reading a text, while Rauschenberg was playing a Victrola on another ladder, and M.C. Richards, a professor of literature who became a potter in later life, was on her own ladder reading her poetry.  Merce Cunningham danced around, while most of the other participants were on more ladders.

New York happenings

After moving to New York, Rockburne continued to paint and to research math and science.  She performed with groups in the 1960s in New York, including ones formed by Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg.  She was part of Carolee Schneemann’s controversial 1964 performance piece entitled "Meat Joy" at the Judson  Dance Theatre.   She easily met other New York artists, she said, because they were such a small group back then.  She was often asked to join groups at the Judson  Dance Theatre because she was one of the few who had been trained in ballet from an early age.  Rockburne says now she preferred more minimalist and intellectual dances choreographed by artists such as Bob Whitman, who created and still creates performance using technology, most recently cell phones.  

In 1991, Rockburne became fascinated with issues of time and space and began exploring them in her art.  That same year, she studied Renaissance cosmological images during a residency at the American Academy in Rome.  Although Rockburne has experimented with a wide variety of media, she almost always returned to drawing.  "Astronomy Drawings" show depth through textures, different papers and pigments, along with a plethora of art historical references.  Layering creates depth and distance not through perspective, but through accumulation of materials and textures.  Thus while some drawings are similar in their materials and images, all have unique personalities.  

The drawing "Tacoma Bridge Resonance" (1998), 

for example, corresponds to the astronomy pieces because its subject indirectly refers to the atmospheric pressure between planets.  This mile-long bridge in Washington State was built in 1940 and collapsed four months later due to gale winds that made it twist, hence its nickname Galloping Gertie.  Rockburne said the drawing "is partly based on the newsreel of the Tacoma Bridge breaking up, but also on what happens between planets, with a lot of speculation on my part about gravitational pull."   Elementary forced resonance caused by aeroelastic flutter was its death knell.  This dance between the bridge and the resonance in the air recalls her dancer’s training.

Egyptian references

The drawings in this exhibition also refer to aspects of ancient cultures, a longtime interest of the artist's.  Some of the drawings use papyrus, an ancient Egyptian material that symbolized the Nile.  Rockburne includes shapes cut out of papyrus in "Magellanic Magnification II" (1994-98), 

and she draws on papyrus in "Ancient Sky," from her 1994 "Egyptian" series.






"Magellanic Magnification II," 1994-98 Colored pencil, charcoal, labels, conservator's glue, papyrus on handmade paper mounted on ragboard 49 1/2" x 39








Papyrus as a material speaks volumes.  In ancient Egypt it was seen as representing the people of the Upper Nile kingdom (modern day Cairo and below), who had supposedly been conquered by the king of the Lower Nile.  As with many of Rockburne’s other works, she uses papyrus and other textures as gateways, almost false doors, such as those found in pyramids, leading to the "ka" of her work, the force, the soul, an intermediary between our world and the world of the sky.  

Before working on the "Egyptian" series, Rockburne studied Egyptian archeology at length.  After Black Mountain College, she frequented the Brooklyn Museum, where she studied the collection of Tel El-Amarna pieces.  She helped catalog for the first time some of the Egyptian collection of art and artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum.

Different levels of dialogue are going on in the exhibition.  One is a meta-narrative between the pieces and ancient times and materials.  One of the first works one sees in the exhibition is "Universes" (1994-99), six panels showing various universes created at different times.  They are shown in two rows of three.



Universes 1994-99 Raw pigment, acrylic medium and charcoal on watercolor paper 6 panels, each 22 1/8" x 29 3/4" 


Many of the panels emphasize the artist’s touch.  You can imagine her swishing the materials of indigo and charcoal around to form the geometric, circular shapes.  The mixture of the two chemicals clashes, and the indigo paint ends up in flecks, producing a texture you want to touch.  Indigo was valued by the ancient Egyptians and found on a tunic of Tutankhamen.  And charcoal is the other part of the picture in Egypt since kohl, resembling charcoal, was used to line the eyes.  The dance brings the cosmos together and connects these images with the ones to their left that are using papyrus, the significant material of the ancient Egyptians.  And there's an unexpected swatch of copper in the top middle panel of the "Universe" pieces.  According to Rockburne, copper is a basic element of the universe.  As her use of materials in "Universes" shows, everything in her work is beautifully constructed and elegantly thought out.

Was the culmination of Rockburne’s interest in Egypt her 1989 series called "Memories of the Light in Egypt," works of watercolor and India ink on papyrus, exhibited at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1989?  To me, it is this show about astronomy where her interests in Egypt, geometry and topology come together.  Where are the pyramids pointing, after all, except to the heavens?  Thus, while "Astronomy Drawings" seems to be only about one subject, the show represents the depth of Rockburne's education, her research and her life.



Dorothea Rockburne: Astronomy Drawings
Through Nov. 7
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Wednesday through Saturday 12:00 - 4:00 pm.
56 Broadway, downtown Asheville, NC, 28801
828-350-8484
www.blackmountaincollege.org

Exhibition curated by Ann H. Murray, professor of art history and director of the Beard and Weil Galleries, Wheaton College, Illinois, where the show originated.  From the Black Mountain College Museum, it will travel to the New York Studio School.

All images courtesy of Dorothea Rockburne and Greenberg Van Doren Gallery