'Niki in the Garden'

PREVIEW
Whimsy blooms with 'Niki in the Garden'

By Alison Neumer Lara
Special to the Tribune
Published May 4, 2007

A parade of whimsical, colorful and enormous sculptures traipses through Garfield Park Conservatory this spring in "Niki in the Garden," an exhibit of 34 works by the late 20th Century French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Mosaics of glass, stone, mirror, shell and ceramic cover Saint Phalle's bulbous forms, which run from animals to mythological figures to her well-known "Nanas" -- lively, womanly forms that are testament to the artist's feminist outlook.

Many of the works, although vast (the largest on display, a skull, weighs six tons and measures 15-feet tall), are scaled to children. "Guardian," a sprawling lion tiled with sand-colored river stones, turquoise and bright yellow beads, welcomes crawlers on its limbs and head. "Nikigator," an open-framed alligator, is a veritable jungle gym. "La Cabeza," the skull, plated with red and lime-green mirrors among other materials, actually houses a little room with a bench that's entered where the ears would be.

Visitors to Garfield Park Conservatory will spy many bright-hued sculptures scattered around the large lawn behind the main building. On a recent spring morning, Nathan Mason, curator of special projects for the Cultural Affairs Department, ran his hand over one of Saint Phalle's totem poles called "Large Yelling Man," the wide-open mouth just perfect for a little body to scramble through. "Everything is tactile. The surfaces vary from smooth to rough," Mason says. "[Saint Phalle] couldn't include smell, but as many senses as she could incorporate into her artwork she did."

In keeping with this sense of fun and play, the exhibit arranges figures in relationship to their settings, Mason explains. The bathers stand at the edge of a pool, the baseball player bats out to the field, musicians -- towering, glittering versions of Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong -- play their horns in the conservatory's entertainment spaces. (In fact, "Niki in the Garden" is the centerpiece to the city's "Art of Play," a summer-long program of events centered on toys, games and performances that begins June 1.)

"Niki is a good artist for this space because she was conspicuously creating sculptures for a garden environment. Throughout her life, and especially her later professional life, she considered her work about outdoor spaces."

Still, the Saint Phalle sculpture on display here, produced during the last 15 years of her career, before her death at age 71 in 2002, is a far cry from what critics consider her most provocative work.

For example, "Hon," which first appeared in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1966, features a reclining Nana with an arched doorway located between her legs that leads to the figure's interior. (A small model is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, part of an exhibit titled "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.")

"Yes, the original Nanas were very powerful women, very sensuous, whimsical, colorful and, in a way, celebrations of her own psychotherapy," says Drea Howenstein, chair of the art education department at the School of the Art Institute.

"Niki de Saint Phalle is important in the sense of rebelling against patriarchal society and putting feminism out there in a sense so bright and loud it can't be overlooked."

But while her work fits into the style and sensibility of the movement she emerged from, 1960s French New Realism, she's not really a pivotal example of her time, says Dominic Molon, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which has one Saint Phalle in its collection.

"It's questionable as to whether it's aged well," Molon says cautiously. "I don't want to say that art should only address serious issues, but [Saint Phalle's] art hasn't transcended like other art from other artists of that period ... such as Claes Oldenburg and Yves Klein."

That's probably a result, in part, of the overtly male nature of the art scene at the time, and the fact Saint Phalle wasn't formally trained as an artist, argues Howenstein, who teaches sculpture and environmental design at the Art Institute.

Almost all of her Nouveau Realisme contemporaries, including Christo and Gerard Deschamps and her collaborator Jean Tinguely, were men.

Also, public art, such as Saint Phalle's work in this exhibit, is meant to respond to different questions, Howenstein adds.

That is, just because it's accessible and engaging -- and fun -- doesn't mean it isn't thought provoking.

One example, pointed out by Nathan Mason, the city's curator, is Saint Phalle's series of prominent African-American figures (such as Davis and Armstrong): strong role models intended as examples for her bi-racial great grandchildren.

Howenstein puts it this way: "When people get older, they become more mellow and less radical," she says. "One doesn't stop resisting rebellion, the manifestation changes."



'Niki in the Garden'

When: Through Oct. 31

Where: Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N. Central Park Ave.

Price: Suggested donation of $5 per adult; free for children; 312-744-2400, www.artofplaychicago.com. Free tickets for express train service from Randolph and Wabash available Saturdays and Sundays on a first come, first served

ART REVIEW / 'NIKI IN THE GARDEN'

Playful and inviting

By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
Published May 17, 2007


The odds were low that any public art project at the Garfield Park Conservatory would achieve the magic of its 2001-02 exhibition of glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly, but "Niki in the Garden," a temporary show of a very different sort of sculpture by the late self-taught artist Niki de Saint Phalle, has come close, and that is saying something.

Unlike the Chihuly exhibit, this time the large sculptures are both outside and inside the conservatory, and anyone who may have thought that 34 brightly colored pieces of glass, stones and ceramic mosaics might prove too much will be surprised. The artist's human and fantastic forms are as agreeable to adults as children, and monotony is dispelled through siting that places each piece in near-ideal relations not only to one another but also to the plants and land.

For a serious show of abstract sculpture, go to the five steel pieces by Mark di Suvero in Millennium Park. But for high spirits that at once embrace feminism, religious ecumenicism, giants of sports and jazz plus animals, "Niki in the Garden" is a raucous, bounding delight.

The artist's famous "Stravinsky Fountain," a 1983 collaboration with sculptor Jean Tinguely next to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, has movement as well as Tinguely's machinelike pieces beautifully offsetting Saint Phalle's cartoonish forms. Nothing is as elaborate at the conservatory. However, major early influences on the artist were Antonio Gaudi's Park Guell and the fantastic garden of Bomarzo, so she was always sensitive to how her stationary pieces would function in natural settings, and here they do especially well.

The ensemble is announced inside by the 1999 "Star Fountain," one of the larger-than-life women that Saint Phalle called "Nanas," who celebrate athleticism and play. Other female figures in this vein appear throughout the exhibition, sometimes with a male companion but usually not. They are like deities who preside over distinguished figures such as Louis Armstrong and Michael Jordan, human and animal representations on totems, and wild animals that, as in Edward Hicks' "Peaceable Kingdom" paintings, lie down with each other, tamed.

Several of the pieces outside may be entered by children or adults. Some even provide seating and function as wonderful oases. But even more are intended to be climbed upon or touched, and helpful signs, which sometimes include quotations from the artist, alert visitors to the tactile possibilities throughout.

Art expressly intended to be fun often overstays its welcome. That it does not here owes largely to winning placement. Again and again, pieces are "framed" by, say, foliage or an arbor to heighten the viewing experience. But just as often, as with the "Large Firebird on an Arch" that provides a gateway to the grounds, visitors are made more aware of the beauty of the setting by the presence of the sculpture, and this reciprocal relationship is uncommon.

In 2001 Chihuly and his team took an active role in placement. Saint Phalle, who died in 2002, could not. However, the conservatory has once more achieved a model of how sculpture can richly coexist with nature, and once seen, it points up how popular places in the city such as Millennium Park could have benefited from comparable sensitivity. ---------- "Niki in the Garden" continues at the Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N. Central Park Ave., through Oct. 31. 1-877-CHICAGO (244-2246). Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursdays. Suggested donation: $5. Single pieces by the artist also are at the Chicago Children's Museum, 700 E. Grand Ave., the Lincoln Park Conservatory, 2391 N. Stockton Drive, and the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.

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