VILLAGE PORTRAIT PROJECT

My work over the last 35 years as an environmental installation artist has concentrated on creating artworks that play with an ecology of scale, kinetic sculptural movement, and humor in architectural placement to better mine the concept of community. Perhaps because of my early exposure and involvement in the theatre, I was drawn to the sense of drama that the large scale implied. In my most recent work I am focused on the dynamics of the human village and how a large-scale environmental depiction of people can begin to engage members of a community, creating through installation exhibitions and outreach a fostering of social engagement to both build a stronger community and to battle a surge in isolation. The VILLAGE PORTRAIT PROJECT is my current project that, hopefully with LensCulture's support, continues to embrace an ambitious artistic undertaking to visually portray the kernel of civilization, the Village. The ambitious goal of the project is to digitally paint 781 portraits – a number drawn from the U.S. Census for 2010, which corresponds to the permanent population of Woods Hole, MA, the village where I live. This project explores the interaction between portraiture, an art form that is historically intimate and individuated, with the broader ideas of public art and community, conceptually antithetical to the portrait. In the 19th century, several artists created village portraits in contemporary media. Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849-50) changed the depiction of portraiture by using real people, rather than models, in his revolutionary act of Realism in oil-based painting. Similarly, photographers Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini documented through photographic portraiture cinematographer Zavattini’s home town in Italy (Luzzarra) in their book Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village (1955). However, by painting digitally I am interested in using current technologies as a way to record a sense of place through its people, and in advancing the canon of portraiture to reveal, on an environmental scale, what the concept of “community” can look like through its inhabitants. To date I have painted 200 portraits, starting in 2012. The first one hundred are viewable through my website, http://goldmanarts.com The work takes many forms including: the original digital paintings, the metal prints for exhibitions; the planning and installation of exhibitions to share the process; the documentation through eight volumes of the portraits; a website where the paintings are always on view and a linked online database of accompanying information, like oral histories of the individuals. I plan to continue to paint about 100 a year until completed as this is an integral part of my practice. The planning of exhibitions, web presence, publishing, fundraising and preparations for the final installation runs concurrently with all other parts of the project. I target museums mostly for periodic exhibitions when another grouping is complete. Once completed, a major installation site will be determined, and permanently installed. Integral to the process is the documentation including the creation of a series of volumes that comprise a compendium of all of the paintings, with each volume containing 100 portraits. Volume One was published in 2015.