Walker, Martha (b. 1953)
Martha was born in 1953 in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest in the family, and the only girl. The family moved from Kansas City to St. Louis, Missouri, followed by Carmel California, and Seattle Washington, all by the time Martha was eight years old. The Walkers moved to Sweden for three years, starting in 1961, spending one full year in a remote forest location. After this, Martha landed back in the United States, attending both junior high and high school in Miami Beach, Florida before her move to Brooklyn, New York, where she attended Pratt Institute from 1971-1976, majoring in sculpture and drawing. Martha stayed in Brooklyn, going back for her Masters Degree at Pratt Institute from 1999 – 2001, where she graduated with honors. She is now a Brooklyn native, married with two children.
The unusual travel history of her youth was precipitated by her parents’ desire to travel. Her father, Leonard was a nuclear physicist opposed to the arms race, opting instead for medical research. (Leonard was credited with the original use of radioactive isotopes as a means of tracking infection and cancer in the lymph system.) His research laboratory was a place that Martha frequented, viewing microorganisms under the microscope, something that she sites to this day as an influence on her abstract visual perspective. Additionally, Martha’s middle brother, David, was an avid painter, who “raised the bar” for her artistically.
Other influences on Martha came from the frequent relocations as a child. The most obvious was the disparate geography that she observed, from the American Plains, to the Pacific Coast and mountain ranges, along with the rich Swedish forests, followed by the Atlantic Ocean and sandy beaches in Florida. However, the cultural influences were also important. In almost every new place, Martha became aware of what it meant to be an outsider, looking in, especially in Europe, where she became acquainted with Jewish children whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust. This had a profound effect on her, even as a nonreligious Jew, resulting occasionally in work with themes of Jewish identity and the Holocaust.
When asked, Martha will tell you that she considers herself to be an emerging artist. Her business career over the course of her lifetime enabled her to establish a financial foundation for raising a family. As a welder, her art was not something that she could pursue in her spare time at home, or without the considerable expense of a fireproof studio including the necessary accessories and equipment. When she returned to school in 1999, she started welding again, and with her financial situation improved, Martha established her first welding studio in 2001. It is in the interim that she has created her first body of work (Adapted from Sculptor.org).
Walker’s sculptor The End Justifies the Means, Justifies the End... (2009) is located south of the library to the east of the cannon.
Wexler, Allan
Allan Wexler has worked in the fields of architecture, design and fine art for forty-five years. He has been represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City since 1984 and has exhibited, taught and lectured nationally and internationally since 1972. Wexler currently teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Wexler is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, winner of a Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and the Henry J Leir Prize from the Jewish Museum in New York.
He has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions, has lectured on his work internationally and has been reviewed by major art and architecture publications.
Wexler’s career resists easy classification. In the late1960’s he was an early member of the group of architects and artists who questioned the perceived divide between art and the design disciplines. They called themselves non-architects or paper architects.
Wexler’s work explores the poetics of space and non-function in the functional. “I’m an artist in an architect’s body,” says Allan Wexler.
His medium is the complex relationship between art and design. The work considers the power of the handcrafted in the time of digital, the use of chance and the value of accident, our body’s relationship to the built, and our roots from the primitive hut. These experimental works have sought to examine architecture in order to re-evaluate our most basic assumptions about our relationship to what we build, why we build and how that affects our daily lives.
Wexler is best known as a hands-on maker. He investigates using series, permutations and chance rather than searching for definitive solutions. He makes buildings, furniture, vessels and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday human activity. The works isolate and elevate our daily activities: dining, sleeping, and bathing. And they, in turn, become mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony and movement, turning the ordinary into theater (From the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation).
Wexler’s sculpture Pratt Desk (2012) is located north of Pantas Hall near the security booth.
Allan Wexler (allanwexlerstudio.com)
Review of Allan Wexler's work at Venice Architecture Biennale by American art critic Aaron Betsky (2021)
Celebrating the power of transformation at Venice Architecture Biennale 2021
Creating Problems: A Conversation with Allan Wexler (2021)
Allan Wexler: Artist Spotlight (2021)
Wheaton Conversations: Artists Allan Wexler & Virgil Marti (2020)
Art Critical - The Andy Warhol of Architecture: Allan Wexler talks about his art and thinking (2017)
Hyperallergic - Allan Wexler - A Radical Deconstructor of Habitation
Allan Wexler, architecture and nature by Michele Calzavara (2016)
Irony and the Power of Artistic Production, Michael Fehr (2001)
Furnishing the Primitive Hut: Allan Wexler’s Experiments beyond buildings by Aaron Betsky
Vaadia, Boaz (1951–2017)
Boaz Vaadia was an Israeli–American artist and sculptor who worked primarily in stone and subsequently by casting in bronze. Based in New York City since 1975, his studio is located in Brooklyn. The power of natural materials and the relation of human beings to that power determine the content of Vaadia's sculpture. Vaadia said of his work, "I work with nature as an equal partner. The strongest thing I address is that primal connection of man to earth. It's in the materials I use, the environments I make, and the way I work."
Numerous public and private collectors from around the world have acquired Vaadia's works for their collections. They include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, Japan, and Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ.
Vaadia succumbed to pancreatic cancer at age 65. (From Wikipedia)
Vaadia’s sculptures Sara (2002), Rebecca (2002), and Meir (2002) are all located south of the library to the east of the cannon.
Van de Bovenkamp, Hans (b. 1938)
Renowned for his monumental sculpture created primarily for open-air public locales, Hans Van de Bovenkamp has been described as an artist-mystic whose work -- with its signature power, lyricism, and grand proportions -- heightens the viewer's sense of imagination and discovery.
A Dutchman and a youthful immigrant to Ontario, Canada, and then the United States, he was a part of the avant-guard Tenth Street scene in the New York City of the 1960s, an adherent of Abstract Expressionism, and has maintained residences in New York City and Sagaponack in the Hamptons. Mr. Van de Bovenkamp has earned an international reputation in the past 55 years for designing, fabricating, and installing over 100 unique commissioned sculptures and fountains in collaboration with architects, cities, museums, and private individuals. His works can be seen in public, civic, corporate and private collections. Recent solo exhibitions include Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, the Danubiana Meulensteen Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia and Season of Sculpture, Sarasota Marine Park, Florida (From VanDeBovenkamp.com).
Van de Bovenkamp's sculpture Undulation (1974) is located south west of Cannoneer Court.