Antique

You may have thought you used mountains of index cards while working on school research papers, but Tara Donovan shows you what mountains of index cards actually look like in her installation for the "Wonder" exhibit.

When you were a little kid, everyday objects could be amazing — twigs, bugs, old tires, there was potential in everything. And it's that sense of awe that the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery is trying to recapture in its new show, Wonder.

In the Renwick's newly renovated gallery in Washington, D.C., nine artists were each given free rein over a space to create inspiring installations. Tara Donovan used hundreds of thousands of index cards to create a mountain range. Gabriel Dawe made a rainbow out of some 60 miles of colored thread. Patrick Dougherty turned sticks into giant, swirling nests.



Stick sculptor Patrick Dougherty creates nests in his 2015 work Shindig.

"I wanted people to be overwhelmed, to feel as if there's something in the world greater than yourself," says Renwick curator Nicholas Bell. He spent over a year reflecting on wonder — that feeling you get before mental clutter like "intellect" and "taste ... drown out the senses," as he puts it in the show's catalog.
The Renwick was closed for two years for renovations, and for its reopening, Bell looked for artists who would transform the building's spaces. Seattle-based artist John Grade told Bell he was going to "bring" him a tree. Bell wasn't entirely sure what Grade meant.



Artist Maya Lin made a map of the Chesapeake Bay using blue-green marbles.

"I'm going to find a tree that is the same age as your building and I'm going to build it for you," Grade explained.
The Renwick was built more than 150 years ago, so Grade went to the Cascade Mountains and found a hemlock tree of a similar vintage and made a plaster cast of it.

"They rigged up ropes and they covered this whole tree with tin foil so that it would protect it, and they covered it with plaster," Bell says. "They popped these pieces of plaster off the tree and took them back to his studio. Then they used that as a mold. So they had hundreds of volunteers coming in off the street — people on their lunch hour, people coming in after work and on the weekend."

Those volunteers helped Grade rebuild the tree using a half a million small blocks of reclaimed wood from a bridge that was being torn down. At the Renwick Gallery, the tree is now suspended on its side, filling the entire room.



John Grade modeled this tree on a 150-year-old hemlock he found in the Cascade Mountains.

The natural world is where most of these artists found their wonders.
Maya Lin created what she calls a "jewel-like map of the Chesapeake Bay," using clear, blue-green marbles. "If you look at each marble they're not precious," says Lin. "They were very functionally made. They're cracked. They have flaws. But the color to me is probably the closest I can get to capturing the shimmer and glimmer of water."



more...