Anita Huffington
"... the shockingly under-recognized Arkansas sculptor."
Amei Wallach, New York Newsday
Kore
Biography
Statement from Anita
Vita
Demeter and Persephone Themes
Goddesses and Women
Gods and Men
Links
Rebirth (located in UA Mullins Library)
The sculptor Anita Huffington's history includes a long period in
New York City starting in the late
fifties when she came to study dance with Martha Graham. She
encountered a circle of artists of the New
York School such as Kline, de Kooning, and others, as well as a
diverse and individualistic group of
painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets in this vital
idealistic period. These experiences and her later
choice to live in the wilderness of Arkansas sowed the seeds for
the sculptures she makes in stone and
bronze. Her work reflects upon both the world of art and of
nature.
"These small bronze and stone sculptures are based on ancient
Greek marbles, but look as if their
surfaces were dissolving to reveal tender archaic spirits lying
within the classical ideal. The fact that the
artist lives and works in a cabin in the Ozarks can't help but
add to her work a further sense of mystery
hiding under the ordinary," wrote Holland Cotter in his New York
Times review of her second solo show at
the O'Hara Gallery in New York City.
In the past year she had 3 one-person shows: at O'Hara Gallery in
New York, Lisa Kurts Gallery in
Memphis, and Triangle Gallery in San Francisco. The World
Sculpture News review by Susan Marquez of
the Triangle show states: "Her exquisite mastery of traditional
form may somehow chain her to the
recognizable characters coming from those traditions. But her
unique approach to bronze work evokes
the spiritual prima materia within those traditions so that we
might truly know them for the very first time."
Reviewing the O'Hara show in New York Mark Daniel Cohen in Review
says: "Her works possess
the severe beauty and inherent serenity of form without
extraneous detail. . I know of no contemporary
sculptor who better understands the contemporaneity of the past,
its continuing nature, and its necessity
to the heart, than Anita Huffington."
Other recent shows include the Louis Stern Gallery in Los Angeles,
and the Valley House Gallery
in Dallas. Her work was selected for the show "Body and Soul"
that toured four museums in 1997 and
1998. She was one of ten sculptors chosen in company with Calder,
Baskin, Lachaise, and Nadelman for
the exhibition "The Figure in 20th Century Art" at Two Sculptors
Gallery in New York City in 1998. Her
sculpture is regularly exhibited in the February Armory Art Show
in New York.
In 1992 she was awarded a fellowship by the Arkansas Arts
Council. In 1996 the La Napoule Art
Foundation granted her a prestigious residency at the Chateau de
La Napoule near Cannes, France.
Selected as a finalist by the American Academy of Arts & Letters
in New York for their 1997 Invitational
Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture she won the Jimmy Ernst
Award presented at the annual Ceremonial
to a painter or sculptor whose lifetime contribution has been
both consistent and dedicated.
Shade
I do direct carving in stone and make bronzes, often using the
stone as part of the process.
My sculpture is usually based on the human form, primarily the
female nude. I often carve torsos or
fragments of the body, believing that the part can be as
expressive as the whole. The sculptures are
in a sense totem objects that celebrate our ordinary everyday
life. Their function, as in prehistoric or
primitive sculpture, is to reveal and revere to make magic. We
can see in nature an organic energy
and essential beauty, a power that has the force of a religious
experience: an illumination, an intuitive
flash wherein we glimpse our original nature. In my sculpture,
through reduction and simplicity of form,
balance and tension, and interaction with the material, I seek
this revelation.
To name it always falls short. One must use contradiction and
paradox, freely choosing
elements from the rational and the intuitive, classical and
romantic, abstract and figurative, beginning
each time with the unknown.
My sculpture is my response to nature and art. There is a long
struggle to develop the skill
and vision that allows the freedom for a spontaneous response. It
is based on intimate experience
with the sensual, tactile images of life but not solely dependent
on the visible. Working through the
known to the unknown, I use the human form and sometimes animals
to penetrate the mystery and
express spirit.
What interests me most is the timeless element in the art of all
periods and places. My
sculpture has always been a composite and synthesis of elements
drawn from nature and the history
of art. With sandstones in particular (perhaps affected by their
rude nature), I seem to move backward
through time from classical, to archaic, to prehistoric to the
unknown form in the formless. Through
more and more reduction, down to elemental forces of rock and
earth, I seek a unity that expresses
something more than the visible.
- Anita Huffington
Valley House Gallery
Rebirth
Sculpture Article
Art in Context Artist Page
Art in Context Artwork Page
A
Fractal Homage to Anita
Anita Huffington and Kirsten Day making a wine libation to Apollo
at
Delphi in
Greece
