Polly Apfelbaum: Evergreen Blueshoes
Burlington City Arts: April 18 - June 7, 2014
For the last twenty-five years, Polly Apfelbaum has situated her work as a hybrid of painting, sculpture, and installation. Apfelbaum weaves her way through ideas of Minimalism, Pop aesthetics, and Color Field painting to blur the lines between two and three-dimensional art making.
Evergreen Blueshoes continues Apfelbaum’s investigation of counter culture movements and nontraditional definitions of art making. The installation also marks a shift in her approach to color and use of architectural space. Evergreen Blueshoes contributes to the deteriorating distinction between fine or “high” art and craft as Apfelbaum designs and produces finely woven rugs and wallpaper. The wallpaper, appropriated from the album cover of a late 1960s Los Angeles-based underground, folk-rock band called Evergreen Blueshoes, merges Apfelbaum’s interests in pop culture, music, and design in her selection of imagery. The solid colors, shoe prints, and large scale of the four rugs reference Andy Warhol’s dance diagrams and Color Field paintings of the 1950s and 60s. Each rug was custom dyed and hand-woven by a single weaver in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Around the same time that Warhol was making dance diagrams, Evergreen Blueshoes was producing music, and the Color Field painters were active, Apfelbaum spent time in the 1960s at a progressive, Quaker camp in Plymouth, Vermont called Farm and Wilderness. She writes, "When I was asked to do a show in Vermont I had just returned from a year in Italy. My work has always dealt with color, but I was also now, after my Rome experience, thinking about place and time. Vermont is the Green Mountain state, it has in my mind a history of alternative culture and politics so I wanted to delve into this ripe territory."
As an installation, Evergreen Blueshoes is an adventure that asks visitors to pause, remove their shoes, and walk on art. It is about being in a space, with other human beings, and having the opportunity to consider the value of material, the hand made, and the iconic free spirit of 1960s American Culture. Apfelbaum provides a funky and beautiful space to contemplate the power of color and the richness of past ideas as a way to see our present world differently. Most of all, she’s asking us to imagine a future that is radically different and insists that we all have a responsibility to keep the adventure alive.
Walk carefully, look slowly, and experience deeply.
—DJ Hellerman, Curator of Art & Programs
Polly Apfelbaum lives and works in NYC. She has been showing consistently in the United States and abroad since her first one-person show in 1986. She was a 2012/13 Rome prize recipient. Recent solo shows include "Color Stations Portland” at the Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon, "Second that Emotion" at the Mumbai Art Room in Mumbai, India, and "Plainiverse" at Galerie Nächt St. Stephen in Vienna, Austria. Recent group shows include "AMERICANA" at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida, "Rewilding Modernity" at the Mendel Art Galley in Saskatoon, Canada, and "Regarding Warhol" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York.