“Nathan’s”
“Coney Island”
“Cherry Blossoms”
“Bridge 1”
“I can drink you down”
Snugly sat against brown packing paper and rolls upon rolls of bubble wrap in the sedan of Hillyer Art Space’s Gallery Director, we (two Gallery Interns and a Gallery Director (don’t worry, this isn’t the start of a terrible joke)) headed to the warehouse in Baltimore where International Arts & Artists stores their artworks. Our mission: to prepare four Leonard Cave works for shipping.
Who was Leonard Cave? Lenny was a local D.C. sculptor and leader of an artistic community. He was born in South Carolina, the third of four brothers. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Maryland, and after he completed his graduate work, became a professor at Georgetown University. After seven years of holding a position as an adjunct professor, he started teaching for public school districts in the DMV. He even established an Academy of Commercial and Fine Art for the Montgomery County School District. In addition to teaching, in 1984 Lenny founded and ensured the stability of the Washington Sculptors Guild, an organization dedicated to forging a space for sculpture and sculptors in the DC community. Though a southern boy at heart, Lenny helped to forge the DMV artistic and sculptural community that thrives today.
Upon his death in 2006, Hillyer Art Space and its parent organization IA&A, the president of which was a close personal friend of Lenny’s, were honored to be willed several of Lenny’s sculptures. Having only received them earlier in 2013, we are been planning to hold an event during Fall 2013 in order to offer the collection up for public sale. In the meantime, however, auction galleries in New Orleans requested a few of his pieces to be put up for auction. Happy to bring Lenny and his legacy back to the south, we planned a trip to our storage unit.
We needed to ensure the works would not be damaged in the drive to New Orleans (We shipped works 2, 12, 15, and 16. Those plus his other works can be found here). This meant we needed to bring out the big guns. And by guns, I of course mean loads of bubble wrap, packing tape, duct tape, and packing paper alongside other tools (like our new favorite sharpie, the magnum, which we didn’t even know was a thing until last Thursday). With all of that, we felt prepared enough to face the tall stacks and infinite corridors of CDS logistics. We rode on, arriving just outside of Baltimore in just over an hour.
After locating and cataloging each of Lenny’s sculptures, we enlisted the aid of the warehouse workers who operate the forklifts (you know, those vehicles on which, regrettably, we weren’t permitted to play) to carefully maneuver the pieces we needed.
As we watched, eager to get our hands on these large wooden sculptures, we became nostalgic and thought back to earlier months when we and Lenny were first becoming acquainted. So we made sure that we took photos with these wooden legacies of Lenny. We couldn’t help but appreciate the unique relationship Lenny has with HAS, but like a parent sending her child away from home, we were glad to be sending Lenny off into the world to be better appreciated.
After uncovering the sculptures from plastic wrapping meant to protect from accumulating dust layers, we re-wrapped them in paper and bubble wrap, cardboard corners and packing tape. Packing the smaller pieces in a box, we secured the sculptures in place by using smaller cardboard boxes, more packing tape, and more bubble wrap as buffer.
(You should know that the temptation to pop all of those bubbles was strong, but we triumphantly resisted.)
Though we didn’t get to pop the bubbles, we were able to put some play to use. Our Director, Sam, put to good use her knowledge of plastic wrap. Awkwardly twisting and winding our way around these large sculptures with various protrusions was a task, but one that we successfully accomplished.
After washing the dirt from our hands and knees, and after removing residual tape from places we didn’t even know we had it, we were ready to leave. Leaving the packages to be picked up by the shipping company the following morning (which we were notified safely arrived in New Orleans earlier this week), we said a temporary farewell to Lenny.
Until next time, Mr. Cave.
Mr. Willem de Looper was one of those rare, incredible people who slipped quietly into the DC art scene and, over the course of 59 years, from his immigration here in 1950 until his death in 2009, changed it forever.
Born and raised in The Hauge during the second World War, de Looper was fascinated by American culture from an early age. During his childhood, he told Archives of American Art,
“My only art experience was – well, it’s not really art experience. It was exposure to the United States, and that took form in two ways. We listened as soon as we could after the war to the AFN… And so I became very early quite interested in America… I mean, also Americans – let’s face it – they were looked at – and Canadians and the British – they were looked at as liberators.”
This fascination grew until 1950, when de Looper –only seventeen years old– set sail on the New Amsterdam bound for America. It was during the subsequent years, while he attended American University, that de Looper’s ambition to be a professional artist solidified. Trying to be practical, he at first turned his talents toward illustration. Fate had another plan for Willem de Looper, however: just as he was hired to join the illustration staff for a department store catalog, his life was turned upside-down. “In retrospect again it looks like a total disaster – I got drafted in the American Army,” de Looper explained. “And without making a peep or anything or making any attempt to go into graduate school, I just went.”
De Looper drew and painted as much as he could during his two years in a transportation company of the US Army, and upon his return he found work as a security guard at the Philips Collection. Surrounded by art, de Looper’s painting went into overdrive. In his studio apartment on 20th and N de Looper spent every spare moment painting. His style slowly evolved from figurative painting to abstraction. In his own words,
“I painted in many styles, developing my first interest, which obviously had been born somewhat earlier, towards abstraction. And always, you know, it’s one of those things that people are constantly asking me about: do you – how do you start painting abstract paintings? You do that by learning how to deal with form and – but also you have to create not only the colors but also the form and all that sort of thing. And I did that, I think, by painting first landscapes and figures that became more abstract or – to use that word fairly loosely, as I went along from painting to painting.”
“I started really using my eyes when I was at the Phillips,” de Looper explained.By 1966, the security guard was showing his work in a solo exhibition at Jefferson Place Gallery, one of the premier exhibition spaces for the emerging Washington Color School. By 1975 de Looper had a solo exhibition at the Phillips Collection, where he was now an assistant curator. He was head curator of the Phillips Collection by 1982, a post he held for five years before retiring in 1987 to focus more on his own painting.
De Looper never stopped experimenting. His paintings phased through horizontal geometry in earthtones during the 1970s to freer brushstrokes of vibrant color during the 1980s, switching also between oil paints or water-based acrylic paints, canvas or paper. His various processes also shifted dramatically over the years, from pouring paint onto a canvas laid out on the floor to traditional easel painting to dyeing paper.
Willem de Looper died of emphysema on January 30, 2009, at the age of 76. He left an indelible mark on the Washington D.C. art scene, and is deeply missed to this day by his many friends and admirers.
International Arts and Artists, the parent organization of the Hillyer Art Space, is looking to sell Unknown, Willem de Looper, 1979 63″x 48″ acrylic on canvas (pictured above) to benefit the Hillyer Art Space. Please direct any inquiries to (202) 338-0680 or rachelw@artsandartists.org
Artist Spotlight is a weekly series that highlights Hillyer Art Space artists.
Judy Southerland is one of our Artist Advisory Committee members at Hillyer Art Space. The Artist Advisory Committee is a group of artists and art professionals who guide HAS with its programming and with this position, Judy curated our August show featuring local college artists. The show features seventeen artists from local schools such as George Washington, American, Corcoran, and MICA.
Judy became interested in curating the show because she felt it was a way to bring expose college students to the art world. “This way a great opportunity for committed students studying visual art to step into the ring in a professional way,” she said. She also felt that college artists would be an intriguing show because the students truly represent today’s society. Judy said, “Curating the show was interesting because various links developed among the works and certain themes emerged which the realities, the concerns, and the particular language of expression embraced by these students at the time in our cultures.”
In her own work, Judy is inspired by the idea of quest in western culture and how it is inspired by fear and desire. Other influences in her art include gender roles and iconic images in 16th century Northern Italian painting and action narratives in historical Japanese painting. As a result, her inspirations are translated into eye-catching mixed media works consisting of painting and screen-printing.
Judy will be featured in two upcoming exhibitions in the DC area. The first show “Vernal Migrations”, curated by Zoma Wallace, will be at the brand new DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities from September 7-December 7. The second show, “LIKENESS/Interpretations of Portraiture, curated by Twig Murray is being held at the Athenaeum in Alexandria, VA from August 11-September 23. Go check it out!
