Product Description

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the municipally-approved "authentic colors" of historic Charleston, South Carolina. The commercial name of each paint, commemorating an aspect of the city's history, is also painted on the house, revealing and illuminating the lingering Civil War-era past of the region. Like the Earthwork pioneers, Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than impose a conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly, creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated. The windows rescued from the old National Licorice factory in Philadelphia in the title piece America Starts Here—which takes its name from the slogan used to promote Pennsylvania tourism during the 1980s—are hung according to the location of the original windows in the factory; the cracks in the glass echo the famous cracks in two of Philadelphia's tourist attractions, the Liberty Bell and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass.

Kate Ericson's death from cancer in 1995 at age 39 made the body of Ericson and Ziegler's collaborative work finite. America Starts Here offers a generous selection of Ericson and Ziegler's work, with much of it reproduced in color, and provides a critical analysis of the artists' still under-appreciated position in the history of twentieth-century art. It accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of Ericson and Ziegler's work.

Copublished with The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and List Visual Arts Center at MIT.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1112584 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 216 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Witty, intelligent and politically astute, the projects created by Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson in the decade before her 1995 death straddled the line between "public" and "conceptual" art-adapting techniques from rarified discourses of high art to create a visual language both accessible and aesthetically effective. Published to coincide with a touring retrospective, this thorough documentation of their influential activity, with 10 essays and an interview with Ziegler, includes works such as the 1985 "Travelling Stories," created for the Seattle Transit System, in which citizens' silhouettes were inlaid onto sidewalks and quotes from them were sandblasted into stair risers, or the later "America Starts Here," which involved replacing the glass in a decrepit licorice factory on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Ericson's and Ziegler's decade of collaboration ends, poignantly, with a series of cocktail napkin drawings made when Ericson was too ill to begin new projects, but still bursting with ideas. Their work benefits more than most from the documentation this book makes so generously available, a book that is sure to make their influence on succeeding generations of artists even clearer.
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Review
"Their work benefits more than most from the documentation this book makes so generously available, a book that is sure to make their influence on succeeding generations of artists even clearer."
— Publishers Weekly

"a must-read in the form of the wall texts and the catalogue. . . . [I]f you regard the show as necessarily more elusive and renegade, an extension of the catalogue as our only means of recapturing this couple's evanescent art, the rewards, subtle and cerebral and, yes, moral, are many."
— Christopher Millis, The Boston Phoenix

"enchanting... hefty catalog bubbles with chatty, thoughtful reminiscences by students, artists, and curators who knew the pair."
— The Boston Globe

About the Author
Ian Berry is Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Malloy Curator at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Bill Arning is Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT.

Customer Reviews

Unprejudiced Father and Stepmother
An incredibly fine documentation of the work of two amazing conceptual artists whose work was devoted to exploring the basics of American life and history and exploding them into amazing works that forced one to look at the American world in new and engaging ways. Every project was the result of faithful research, interaction with the community, respect for tradition and their own personal contributions to the community at large.

The quality of the publication itself is a monument to Mel and Kate's work. Tang and MIT are to be lauded for their accomplishment.