*'Portals' made for The Whitney Museum of American Art Store. Forest Bess. Symbolism. Renzo Piano- Architect.
What an amazing project to work on. 29 Portals made for The Whitney Museum of American Art store.
I love how ideas, inspirations, meld & reveal themselves. This is how it came to be:
1 - A walk through the Whitney Museum with Lauri, head of product development, during which I discovered a painting by Forest Bess that I loved
2 - The experience of being in the new museum building & then learning about architect Renzo Piano's inspiration
3 - Lauri saying to me how she liked the idea that people took a little piece of their experience of the museum home with them
4 - The recent XL portals I had just made for the Landscape installation at Lawson-Fenning in Los Angeles and the idea of a portal being a window to another time, place or experience
Forrest Bess created a visual vocabulary of primordial images loaded with symbolic meaning in his paintings. His work feels deep and meaningful to me.
In my ceramic work I have drawn to images of sky, nature and energy that have been reducing to simplified geometric symbols, shapes and lines.
For these portals I attempt to combine them to symbolize the experience of art, city, sky, & building while at The Whitney. And bring them all together in a small 'portal' that a museum visitor could take home with them.
In this video architect Renzo Piano talks about 'Largo' -an open space. He also speaks of the building in relation to the water, the city and the people who are there to get lost in the art, but rooted in the reality of their surroundings.
PRESS RELEASE- MQuan Studio
May 12, 2017
Ceramicist Michele Quan of MQuan Studio has introduced a new collection of wall ornaments/plaques, created exclusively for The Whitney Museum Store in New York City’s meatpacking district. Quan refers to the stoneware plaques, which are hand crafted/built and hand-painted in her Brooklyn studio, as “portals,” as they are meant to be a physical remembrance of one’s experience of the museum, whether an interaction with a work on display, with the Renzo Piano-designed building, or with the city surrounding it.
No two pieces are alike in shape or motifs, but all were in some part inspired by Quan’s own experience at The Whitney. She was especially taken by Untitled (The Crown), a small-scale painting by the late Texas artist Forrest Bess, as well as the architecture of the museum, and the ability to walk outside and experience art on multiple terraces while simultaneously feeling immersed in the surrounding neighborhood.
“Forest Bess created a visual vocabulary of primordial images, loaded with symbolic meaning in his paintings and for these portals I drew from my own growing vocabulary of symbolic images that I use in my work,” explained Quan. Some of these images found their way onto the plaques, and are used to symbolize the water of the Hudson River, the sky, and even one’s own experience, both inside and outside.
There are 29 pieces in the collection, in sizes from extra small ($99) to large ($220). Each plaque is signed by the artist, hung from a hemp rope and sold with a hand-wrought iron nail.