For Immediate Release
Sculptor Kendall Buster Creates Installation Pieces for the Haggerty
(Milwaukee) The Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, will present Kendall Buster: highrisevessel, October 7– January 8, 2006. The exhibition will open on Friday October 6, at 6 p.m. with a talk given by Kendall Buster, at the museum. A reception will follow at 7 p.m. Buster was awarded the a prize in art at the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational 2005, in New York.
Kendall Buster created two new sculptures for the Haggerty exhibition. The two site-specific works Yellow Highrise (Model #2) and White Highrise (Model #3) respond directly to the architectural space of the Haggerty, designed by architects David Kahler from Milwaukee, and the late O’Neil Ford, of Dallas, Texas. The sculptures are large scale vessels and building-like structures.
Buster’s sculptures are monumental organic structures suggestive of biological forms. The works are made of translucent and transparent material or “membranes,” such as drafting paper, greenhouse cloth and insect screening, to represent the permeability of cellular matter. Buster invites the viewer of her sculptures to view them from the inside out, bringing the viewer into a physical and interactive experience with the artwork.
“Kendall Buster’s sculptures combine aesthetics and science with a fresh approach to materials and sculptural form. Her interactive spaces will appeal to children as well as adult viewers who appreciate contemporary sculpture,” says Dr. Curtis L. Carter, curator of the exhibition and director of the Haggerty.
Buster’s sculptures are influenced by the twentieth-century theorists Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault who wrote about “the gaze”, or the act of seeing and being seen. Buster explores these ideas in her sculptures by using translucent fabrics to form interactive sculptural spaces.
Her work has been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Washington Project for the Arts, Baumgartner Gallery, and Fusebox in Washington, DC, Franklin Furnace and Diane Brown Gallery in New York City, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, PA. Recent large scale ‘biological architecture’ projects have included installations at the NSA in Durban, South Africa, the Bahnhof Westend in Berlin, the Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, MO, and Artists Space in New York.
Born in Selma, Alabama in 1954, she studied microbiology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She earned her BFA from Corcoran School of Art, and then went on to receive her MFA from Yale. She currently is a professor of sculpture at the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at North 13th St. and West Clybourn Avenue on the campus of Marquette University. Museum hours are Monday - Wednesday, Friday - Saturday, 10 am-4:30 p.m.; Thursday, 10 am-8 p.m.; and Sunday, noon-5 p.m.. Free parking is available in the Mary B. Finnigan Parking Lot (enter on 11th St. through Marquette Lot J). For more information please contact Brian Moore at 1-(414)-288-7290.