Mason Gross Professor Recognized as Contemporary Art Innovator with UCLA Medal
Performance, therapy, ritual and meditation infuse Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s pieces
'Life and death and suffering and love – all these form my connection to art. I’m so fortunate to have been given the opportunity to seek the meaning of the creator.'– Raphael Montañez Ortiz
In a career spanning more than six decades, Raphael Montañez Ortiz has destroyed a piano with a pickaxe, crafted collages out of burned shoes and dirt and guillotined a chicken to protest the war in Vietnam – all in the name of art.
Most recently, he and a helper systematically wielded an electric saw and their bare hands to pulverize a shopworn two-seater sofa while the strains of “Pennies from Heaven” wafted through the air.
At 84, the distinguished professor of visual arts at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts is still going strong, creating what he calls “historically significant” pieces of art, including works on permanent display at the Smithsonian, the Whitman, the Pompidou Center, the Tate and other world-class museums.
Now Ortiz has joined the likes of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Toni Morrison, Carol Burnett and former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a recipient of the UCLA Medal. It’s the latest in a long string of awards honoring his work.
“The best artists try to find a relationship to art that has mystical and religious value,” said the Highland Park resident, who has been helping to turn out the next generation of artists at Rutgers since 1971. “That abstract mysticism that guides me has a lot to do with my childhood upbringing.”
His creations reflect not only the aboriginal heritage of his great grandmother, a member of Mexico’s Native American Yaqui tribe, but also his mother’s Christianity and the sensibilities of the Orthodox rabbis in the Lower East Side neighborhood where he grew up.
As a small boy, Ortiz served as a “Shabbos goy,” the Gentile who kindles the lights in the synagogue on the Sabbath, when observant Jews do not touch electricity. All the while he was absorbing the mysticism of the Kabbalah and the teachings of the sages that would later permeate his videos, sculptures and paintings.
“Life and death and suffering and love – all these form my connection to art,” he said. “I’m so fortunate to have been given the opportunity to seek the meaning of the creator.”
When it came time to select this year’s winner of the UCLA Medal, university officials recognized Ortiz as “an innovator and influencer in contemporary art.”
They also cited his role as founder and director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, the first Latino art museum in the United States, in 1969. The museum now boasts a collection of 6,500 objects representing 800 years of Latin American, Caribbean and Latino art.
“The Museo is about cultural justice,” Ortiz says, noting that he had long wrestled with the role of ethnic heritage in art, and had been immersed in a search to bridge the disparate elements of his own roots: American, Puerto Rican, Portuguese, Mexican Yaqui, Irish, southern Spanish, Basque, French Pyrenees and Latino.
While still a student at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, by then a disabled Korean War veteran on the GI Bill, he began focusing on the role of social class and the role of art education in the lives of the disenfranchised.
“In what ways,” Ortiz pondered, “did cultural institutions in American, by their inclusion or exclusion, affect their participation in the larger culture of America?”
He continues to grapple with these issues while filling his shows with what one New York Times critic described as a “a mix of performance, therapy, meditation and ritual.”
Typical – if there’s anything typical about Ortiz’s one-of-a-kind, avant-garde creations – is “Couch Destruction: Angel Release (Pennies from Heaven),” an installation that captivated both viewers and judges at the Los Angeles Art Fair earlier this year.
The artist prefaced the performance at which the piece debuted by explaining that the idea stemmed from a Kabbalistic parable he heard from his childhood rabbi. The cleric told of an elderly couple who sat together year after year in a cherished love seat, reading poetry and expressing their devotion to one another.
“When people have that kind of love, their energy roots itself, permeates the furniture,” Ortiz told the audience.
After the couple’s daughter died of polio, her energy combined with theirs, Ortiz went on, trapping the girl in the couch forever as an angel.
Even when the bereaved parents died years later, the light from that energy remained. The only way it could be released would be to disassemble the couch, allowing the angel to follow her parents up to Heaven.
Thus was born “Couch Destruction,” now on permanent display on the West Coast.
“I’m always working within a symbolic framework,” Ortiz said later, summing up the force that guides him. “The best artists try to find a relationship to art that has mystical and religious value.”
For media inquiries contact Ken Branson at 848-932-0580 or kbranson@ucm.rutgers.edu.