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Collaboration as a Medium: 25 years of Pyramid Atlantic

25 years of experimental works
Pyramid Atlantic exhibit at Maryland Art Place
Wednesday 2/15/06

By Glenn McNatt  
(SUN ART CRITIC)

This year's 25th anniversary retrospective of works produced at Pyramid Atlantic, the artist-founded experimental print- and paper-making workshop started in Baltimore and now in the Washington suburbs, marks a milestone in the region's development as an artistic and cultural center.

So it's appropriate that the local venue for this large traveling show is Maryland Art Place, which also is celebrating its 25th anniversary and was founded out of a similar impetus to create noncommercial exhibition spaces where regional artists could show and discuss new work.

Helen Frederick, the founding director of Pyramid Atlantic and still its inspirational genius, wanted to establish an alternative to commercially oriented printmaking workshops.

From the start, Pyramid was willing to take chances on new artists, new techniques and new ways of thinking about art, especially those with a small chance of turning a quick profit.

The MAP show, Collaboration as Medium: 25 Years of Pyramid Atlantic, presents about 70 nationally and internationally recognized artists who have worked on projects produced at Pyramid with the help of the workshop's master printmakers and papermaking experts.

The exhibition includes a pamphlet by the Guerrilla Girls, who helped spark a feminist revolution in the art world of the 1970s; fiber and paper works by Renee Stout; prints by Michael Platt, Joyce Scott and William Christenberry; installation by Yuriko Yamaguchi; and an artist's book by the conceptual artist collective Tim Rollins + KOS.  As might be expected, the show as a whole looks like a survey of postmodern trends over the past two and a half decades.

To me, the standout in this show is the portfolio titled The Creation, by Tim Rollins + KOS. Rollins, who worked as an assistant to conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth in the 1970s, is widely recognized for his innovative projects undertaken in collaboration with the learning disabled and disadvantaged schoolchildren who attend his Art & Knowledge after-school programs.

Begun in the 1980s, the programs offered Rollins' students a chance to hone their academic and social skills through artmaking projects related to a study of the world classics of literature and music.

During one of the group's early projects, the students were so pleased by their accomplishments that they dubbed themselves "Kids of Survival," or KOS. Rollins has retained the moniker in subsequent collaborations with young people.

The work on display at MAP is a boxed set of seven waterbased screenprints and digital inkjet prints whose imagery is loosely based on Franz Joseph Haydn's The Creation, an oratorio written in 1798 that the composer considered his masterpiece.

Haydn's text is derived from the first verses of the Book of Genesis and describes God's creation of the world from the featureless void of eternity.

The prints by Tim Rollins + KOS are a series of highly fanciful visualizations of episodes in Haydn's musical epic. Each includes a fragment of the oratorio's printed musical score as well as freely drawn figures, abstract designs and random brush- strokes that together create a poetic impression of form evolving out of formlessness, of light emerging from darkness. Under the supervision of a MAP staffer, visitors may leaf through the exquisite example now on view, one of an edition of 25.

The Creation is great art by any measure, made all the more amazing by the fact that it was created not as an end in itself but as nourishment for the hungry souls of disadvantaged youngsters. Bon appetit!

The show runs through March 4. The gallery is at 8 Market Place, Suite 100. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. Call 410-962-8565.