Artist:
Ursula von Rydingsvard
Title:
For Ursie A.
Year:
1996
Adress:
T.G. Green Airport
Website:
respect
It seems that For Ursie A. is a mountain made from blocks of wood.
We love a tree; when it’s hot we find refreshment and protection. We also love a mountain; besides the sea there is nothing bigger and more powerful.
Ursula von Rydingsvard has carefully and with infinite patience assembled blocks of wood. It looks like a tree is sawn into small pieces and the artwork is composed with this. We see the life-force and the strength in the wood grain, tree rings, the knots.
A mountain usually has a pointed spike. In For the Ursie A. the mountain is turned around and commands therefore even more respect. The blocks stick out limitless so that you can't avoid: this mountain in a statement.
This artwork shows us life-force that commands respect.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
respect
Het lijkt alsof For Ursie A. een berg is, gemaakt van blokken hout.
Wij houden van een boom; als het heet is vinden wij verkoeling en bescherming. Wij houden ook van de berg; behalve de zee is er niets wat groter en machtiger is.
Ursula von Rydingsvard heeft met eindeloos geduld blokjes hout zorgvuldig gestapeld. Het lijkt alsof een boom in stukjes is gezaagd en dat het kunstwerk hiermee is opgebouwd. De levenskracht en de sterkte zie je in de houtnerven, de jaarringen, de noesten.
Een berg heeft meestal een spitse piek. Bij For Ursie A. is de berg omgedraaid en daarom dwingt de berg nóg meer respect af. De blokjes steken eindeloos vaak uit zodat je er niet aan ontkomt: deze berg is een statement.
Dit kunstwerk toont ons levenskracht dat respect afdwingt.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.culturemixonline.com:
The journey to become a professional artist wasn’t an easy one for von Rydingsvard. Despite knowing from an early age that she liked making art, she was confined by traditional gender roles (in an era when it was much harder for women to be accepted into the art world than men) and was trapped in a bad marriage to a violent schizophrenic. She ended the marriage after nine years because she said she could no longer help her husband and she feared for the safety of herself and their daughter Ursie.
At the age of 33, von Rydingsvard moved from Oakland, California, to New York City, where she says she felt reborn. Even though she was a financially struggling divorced mother, she felt inspired to become a professional artist for the first time because the New York artist scene was filled with a variety of women who helped pave the way for her to find her place in the art world. She also says that nature has always been her biggest art inspiration.
Her daughter Ursie remembergrowing up at that time in a 'raw' SoHo loft 'before living in a loft was cool.' And Ursie says that even though she and her mother were poor and living off of food stamps, it was a time of great freedom and artistic discovery for her mother. Ursie recalls the one main rule she had when she was growing up: '‘Do what you want. Just don’t set off the sprinklers.’ That was my childhood.'
Ursie also remembers that because of her mother’s decision to be a wood sculptor, 'I would go to sleep to the sound of chainsaws,' which Ursie says almost had a 'lullaby' effect on her. Living under financial hardship brought mother and daughter closer together. 'It was a very tight, close relationship,' Ursie says.
www.latimes.com:
... This background proves intrinsic to Von Rydingsvard's work. The nearly all-wood environment of the camps informed her use of timber as a primary material (cedar is a favorite). A later in life visit to Poland and its forests suggest an even deeper elty fueled her ambition and a shared work ethic (he often held down two factory jobs), as she overcame a hardscrabble start, earned an MFA from Columbia and established herself in the art world.
Much of Von Rydingsvard’s work is on a massive, primal scale, requiring collaboration with her team of assistants who appear devoted to their craft, even sharing family-style meals with their boss. ...
www.culturemixonline.com:
In the documentary, von Rydingsvard also explains why wood has a big emotional connection for her. Born in 1942, she grew up Germany with her Ukranian father and Polish mother, who were peasant famers forced to work for the Nazis. (Her parents had had nine children, including Ursula.) After Germany was defeated in World War II, the family lived in Displaced Persons camps. She remembers that at those camps, 'Everything was made of wood … in a rough, rugged way. There was a kind of safety that the wood gave me.'
But things weren’t always safe in the family householon Rydingsvard and her younger brother Stas Karoliszyn say in the documentary that their father was physically and emotionally abusive to all of his children. The children would endure vicious beatings and degrading insults from heir father. The abuse got worse after the family immigrated to the United States in 1950, because von Rydingsvard believes that her father had an inferiority complex about being an immigrant.
According to von Rydingsvard, art was an outlet to express her emotions: 'I’m so glad I did something with that anger and pain.' Her brother agrees: 'Her artwork is her driving force, always.' He adds that their mother was a source of healing strength for the family: 'We would not have survived the camps.'
In school, von Rydingsvard’s artist talent was recognized from an early age. She remembers being someone who was often chosen to do artwork for the school, such as make posters or Christmas decorations. 'It gave me special attention that was positive,' she says. Sheilm about art: 'It helped enable me to figure myself out as something other than lazy and stupid and worthless.'
But growing up in working-class Plainview, Connecticut, there weren’t any professional artists that she knew about, so it never crossed her mind that she could make a career out of being a professional artist. She comments, 'I have a tremendous yearning to be an artist. And somehow, I thought that I really didn’t deserve that. And it took most of my life, actually, to gain confidence.'
www.culturemixonline.com:
One of the first pieces by von Rydingsvard that got attention in New York City was 1980’s 'St. Martin’s Dream, a wood sculpture in Battery Park that resembled birds perched on a long fence. Several other von Rydingsvard pieces are seen and mentioned in the documentary including 'Ona,' 'Uroda,''Dumma,' 'St. Eulalia,' 'Sunken Shadow and Echo,' 'Ocean Floor,' 'Mama Your Legs,' 'Ene Du Rabe,' 'For Paul,' 'Bent Lace' and eorld are interviewed in the documentary about von Rydingsvard, including artist Sarah Sze and art patrons Agnes Gund and Lole Harp McGovern. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Alice Pratt Brown director, comments that 'the essence of her work is touch.' Galerie Lelong president Mary Sabatino adds, 'Her process is laborious. Her process is almost medieval.' Fellow artist Judy Pfaff calls von Rydingsvard 'very driven,' 'focused' and 'very disciplined.'
Studio owner Elka Krajewska comments that part of von Rydingsvard’s identity that comes through in her art is 'definitely the immigrant story, coming into this world that’s very new, and trying to figure out how … to deal with it' Art writer Patricia C. Phillips says, 'I think Ursula loves beauty, but I don’t think she’s really setting out to make beautiful things. And I think she’s also setting out to make things that unsettle us a little bit. It’s why I think people find it fascinating.'
As foshe comments in a conversation with her second husband, Paul Greengard, a Nobel Prize-winning brain scientist/researcher from Yale University. (Greengard and von Rydingsvard got married in 1985. He died in 2019, at the age of 93.) 'I actually hate the word ‘beauty,'' von Rydingsvard says. 'I feel very uncomfortable using it because nobody actually knows what it means.'
She continues in her thoughts on beauty: 'Everybody has their own understanding of it. It’s kind of an idealized state, and I’m not even sure anything like that exists. There’s no criteria for beauty. There’s no criteria to art, to begin with. You can’t define it.'
Greengard then smiles and says to her, 'I started going out with you because of your beauty.' She smiles back and indicates that she’s flattered. It’s an endearing moment in the film that shows how much these two still loved each other after decades of being married.
Some of the documentary’s footage is at Richard Webber Studio in Brooklructed. Richard Webber and von Rydingsvard have been longtime colleagues. She gives credit to the team of workers who assist her in building her visions. Far from being an aloof leader, von Rydingsvard is hands-on by doing a lot of the labor too, and she eats meals with her team, whom she calls 'superb.'
'I like them all so much,' von Rydingsvard says. 'The fact that we have lunches together every day—all of that’s an important part of the mix. We’re always extremely respectful. That’s an atmosphere that we created that works to help make the art.' Members of von Rydingsvard’s team are interviewed in the film include studio manager Sean Weeks-Earp, cutter Ted Springer and cutter/studio assistant Morgan Daly, who echo the camaraderie spirit.
One of the best aspects of 'Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own' is the excellent cinematography from Traub, with assistance from cinematographer Michelle Zarbafian. From the lingering closeups to the rapturous views, the movie provides aence, which is the next best thing to seeing von Rydingsvard’s art in person. The neo-classical musical score from Simon Taufique also complements each scene in a mood-perfect way.
'Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own' isn’t a long film (the total running time is only 57 minutes), but it packs in a meaningful chronicle of von Rydingsvard’s lifetime of art and experiences. The movie is bound to please fans of the artist, as well as win over new admirers of her unique talent.
www.wikipedia.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard (born 26 July 1942) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugor displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC's Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (Ceta).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
It seems that For Ursie A. is a mountain made from blocks of wood.
We love a tree; when it’s hot we find refreshment and protection. We also love a mountain; besides the sea there is nothing bigger and more powerful.
Ursula von Rydingsvard has carefully and with infinite patience assembled blocks of wood. It looks like a tree is sawn into small pieces and the artwork is composed with this. We see the life-force and the strength in the wood grain, tree rings, the knots.
A mountain usually has a pointed spike. In For the Ursie A. the mountain is turned around and commands therefore even more respect. The blocks stick out limitless so that you can't avoid: this mountain in a statement.
This artwork shows us life-force that commands respect.
By Theo, www.artatsite.com
Vertaling
respect
Het lijkt alsof For Ursie A. een berg is, gemaakt van blokken hout.
Wij houden van een boom; als het heet is vinden wij verkoeling en bescherming. Wij houden ook van de berg; behalve de zee is er niets wat groter en machtiger is.
Ursula von Rydingsvard heeft met eindeloos geduld blokjes hout zorgvuldig gestapeld. Het lijkt alsof een boom in stukjes is gezaagd en dat het kunstwerk hiermee is opgebouwd. De levenskracht en de sterkte zie je in de houtnerven, de jaarringen, de noesten.
Een berg heeft meestal een spitse piek. Bij For Ursie A. is de berg omgedraaid en daarom dwingt de berg nóg meer respect af. De blokjes steken eindeloos vaak uit zodat je er niet aan ontkomt: deze berg is een statement.
Dit kunstwerk toont ons levenskracht dat respect afdwingt.
Door Theo, www.artatsite.com
www.culturemixonline.com:
The journey to become a professional artist wasn’t an easy one for von Rydingsvard. Despite knowing from an early age that she liked making art, she was confined by traditional gender roles (in an era when it was much harder for women to be accepted into the art world than men) and was trapped in a bad marriage to a violent schizophrenic. She ended the marriage after nine years because she said she could no longer help her husband and she feared for the safety of herself and their daughter Ursie.
At the age of 33, von Rydingsvard moved from Oakland, California, to New York City, where she says she felt reborn. Even though she was a financially struggling divorced mother, she felt inspired to become a professional artist for the first time because the New York artist scene was filled with a variety of women who helped pave the way for her to find her place in the art world. She also says that nature has always been her biggest art inspiration.
Her daughter Ursie remembergrowing up at that time in a 'raw' SoHo loft 'before living in a loft was cool.' And Ursie says that even though she and her mother were poor and living off of food stamps, it was a time of great freedom and artistic discovery for her mother. Ursie recalls the one main rule she had when she was growing up: '‘Do what you want. Just don’t set off the sprinklers.’ That was my childhood.'
Ursie also remembers that because of her mother’s decision to be a wood sculptor, 'I would go to sleep to the sound of chainsaws,' which Ursie says almost had a 'lullaby' effect on her. Living under financial hardship brought mother and daughter closer together. 'It was a very tight, close relationship,' Ursie says.
www.latimes.com:
... This background proves intrinsic to Von Rydingsvard's work. The nearly all-wood environment of the camps informed her use of timber as a primary material (cedar is a favorite). A later in life visit to Poland and its forests suggest an even deeper elty fueled her ambition and a shared work ethic (he often held down two factory jobs), as she overcame a hardscrabble start, earned an MFA from Columbia and established herself in the art world.
Much of Von Rydingsvard’s work is on a massive, primal scale, requiring collaboration with her team of assistants who appear devoted to their craft, even sharing family-style meals with their boss. ...
www.culturemixonline.com:
In the documentary, von Rydingsvard also explains why wood has a big emotional connection for her. Born in 1942, she grew up Germany with her Ukranian father and Polish mother, who were peasant famers forced to work for the Nazis. (Her parents had had nine children, including Ursula.) After Germany was defeated in World War II, the family lived in Displaced Persons camps. She remembers that at those camps, 'Everything was made of wood … in a rough, rugged way. There was a kind of safety that the wood gave me.'
But things weren’t always safe in the family householon Rydingsvard and her younger brother Stas Karoliszyn say in the documentary that their father was physically and emotionally abusive to all of his children. The children would endure vicious beatings and degrading insults from heir father. The abuse got worse after the family immigrated to the United States in 1950, because von Rydingsvard believes that her father had an inferiority complex about being an immigrant.
According to von Rydingsvard, art was an outlet to express her emotions: 'I’m so glad I did something with that anger and pain.' Her brother agrees: 'Her artwork is her driving force, always.' He adds that their mother was a source of healing strength for the family: 'We would not have survived the camps.'
In school, von Rydingsvard’s artist talent was recognized from an early age. She remembers being someone who was often chosen to do artwork for the school, such as make posters or Christmas decorations. 'It gave me special attention that was positive,' she says. Sheilm about art: 'It helped enable me to figure myself out as something other than lazy and stupid and worthless.'
But growing up in working-class Plainview, Connecticut, there weren’t any professional artists that she knew about, so it never crossed her mind that she could make a career out of being a professional artist. She comments, 'I have a tremendous yearning to be an artist. And somehow, I thought that I really didn’t deserve that. And it took most of my life, actually, to gain confidence.'
www.culturemixonline.com:
One of the first pieces by von Rydingsvard that got attention in New York City was 1980’s 'St. Martin’s Dream, a wood sculpture in Battery Park that resembled birds perched on a long fence. Several other von Rydingsvard pieces are seen and mentioned in the documentary including 'Ona,' 'Uroda,''Dumma,' 'St. Eulalia,' 'Sunken Shadow and Echo,' 'Ocean Floor,' 'Mama Your Legs,' 'Ene Du Rabe,' 'For Paul,' 'Bent Lace' and eorld are interviewed in the documentary about von Rydingsvard, including artist Sarah Sze and art patrons Agnes Gund and Lole Harp McGovern. Adam Weinberg, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Alice Pratt Brown director, comments that 'the essence of her work is touch.' Galerie Lelong president Mary Sabatino adds, 'Her process is laborious. Her process is almost medieval.' Fellow artist Judy Pfaff calls von Rydingsvard 'very driven,' 'focused' and 'very disciplined.'
Studio owner Elka Krajewska comments that part of von Rydingsvard’s identity that comes through in her art is 'definitely the immigrant story, coming into this world that’s very new, and trying to figure out how … to deal with it' Art writer Patricia C. Phillips says, 'I think Ursula loves beauty, but I don’t think she’s really setting out to make beautiful things. And I think she’s also setting out to make things that unsettle us a little bit. It’s why I think people find it fascinating.'
As foshe comments in a conversation with her second husband, Paul Greengard, a Nobel Prize-winning brain scientist/researcher from Yale University. (Greengard and von Rydingsvard got married in 1985. He died in 2019, at the age of 93.) 'I actually hate the word ‘beauty,'' von Rydingsvard says. 'I feel very uncomfortable using it because nobody actually knows what it means.'
She continues in her thoughts on beauty: 'Everybody has their own understanding of it. It’s kind of an idealized state, and I’m not even sure anything like that exists. There’s no criteria for beauty. There’s no criteria to art, to begin with. You can’t define it.'
Greengard then smiles and says to her, 'I started going out with you because of your beauty.' She smiles back and indicates that she’s flattered. It’s an endearing moment in the film that shows how much these two still loved each other after decades of being married.
Some of the documentary’s footage is at Richard Webber Studio in Brooklructed. Richard Webber and von Rydingsvard have been longtime colleagues. She gives credit to the team of workers who assist her in building her visions. Far from being an aloof leader, von Rydingsvard is hands-on by doing a lot of the labor too, and she eats meals with her team, whom she calls 'superb.'
'I like them all so much,' von Rydingsvard says. 'The fact that we have lunches together every day—all of that’s an important part of the mix. We’re always extremely respectful. That’s an atmosphere that we created that works to help make the art.' Members of von Rydingsvard’s team are interviewed in the film include studio manager Sean Weeks-Earp, cutter Ted Springer and cutter/studio assistant Morgan Daly, who echo the camaraderie spirit.
One of the best aspects of 'Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own' is the excellent cinematography from Traub, with assistance from cinematographer Michelle Zarbafian. From the lingering closeups to the rapturous views, the movie provides aence, which is the next best thing to seeing von Rydingsvard’s art in person. The neo-classical musical score from Simon Taufique also complements each scene in a mood-perfect way.
'Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own' isn’t a long film (the total running time is only 57 minutes), but it packs in a meaningful chronicle of von Rydingsvard’s lifetime of art and experiences. The movie is bound to please fans of the artist, as well as win over new admirers of her unique talent.
www.wikipedia.org:
Ursula von Rydingsvard (born 26 July 1942) is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.
Von Rydingsvard was born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father. As a young child, the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugor displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975. In the late 1970s, she was part of NYC's Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, which was funded under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (Ceta).
Major permanent commissions of her work are on view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Storm King Art Center, New York; the Bloomberg Building, New York; the Queens Family Courthouse, New York; the Nelson-Atkins, Kansas City, and the Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was the outdoor solo exhibition presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.
In 2008, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters along with being featured in Art:21 Art in the Twenty-First Century on PBS. A monograph on her work titled The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1996 and in 2011 Prestel published Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. In 2014-2015 Ursula von Rydingsvard had her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (West Yorkshire, UK), her most extensive exhibition to date. The exhibition was accompanied by the Ursula von Rydingsvard 2014 Catalogue, a major publication featuring text by Molly Donovan, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.