"... the shockingly under-recognized Arkansas sculptor."
Amei Wallach, New York Newsday
Biography
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.
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"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.
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| Rebirth (located in UA Mullins Library) |
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
Links
Valley House Gallery
Rebirth Sculpture Article
Art in Context Artist Page
A Fractal Homage to Anita
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| Anita Huffington and Kirsten Day making a wine libation to Apollo at Delphi in Greece |
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