Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 73

ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Sunday, January 6, 1991 115 Concern About the Environment Renews Interest in Recycled Art "We've been doing it for years. But it is almost as though we were rediscovered with Earth Day 1990." Elaine Bentley training for the past 12 years. Outsider art is work that often does not fit into the confines of mainstream art because of the material used or the subject matter and style of the work. "The tiny (1-inch brushes) go for $175, and the bigger ones go for $250," Kroul said. "They're very hot at the moment." Carl Hammer, the gallery's owner, said interest in Warmack's work stems from increased popularity in what has been considered outsider art.

"A lot of the mainstream today is actually using outsider art as an inspiration," he said. As a child growing up on Chicago's South Side, Warmack began painting on cardboard, then working with other objects. His grandmother was an artist, and his mother encouraged his interest in art because it kept him out of trouble, he said. "People think I'm crazy," he said, sitting in a cluttered room of an apartment he and his brother share near Wrigley Field. He is sitting atop a 6-foot-tall throne, which is made out of wood he found and decorated with bottle caps.

"Ever since I was little, I've just been finding stuff," he said. "Now I realize that was recycling. But I didn't really think it was recycling then. Nobody called it that." Getting shot, he said, pushed his life as an artist into high gear. The robbers got only 41 cents, but Warmack found a new source of inspiration.

Faces and noble images of African and African-American people came to him while he was in the coma, he said. k'l KHKI g( Warmack, 42, who has dubbed himself Mr. Imagination, has gained a reputation among artists as an accomplished carver. During December, he held a workshop at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and gave a demonstration in sandstone carving at the annual Christmas tea at Chicago's Field Museum. A tall, pensive man, Warmack is considered a folk artist of sorts, though he concedes he didn't really know the meaning of that description until a gallery owner approached him.

A collection of his recycled work discarded stiffened paint brushes transformed into colorful "people" with bits of plaster and gobs of acrylic paint are selling very well, said Jamie Kroul, an assistant at Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, the exclusive broker of Warmack's works since 1983. The gallery has been handling "outsider" and folk art created by artists with little or no formal Now is the This is the place Country Latin Ballroom Niteclub CALL NOW! 888-1880 PG i Distributed Buena Vista A DEAN HANSON JOURNAL DEAN HANSON JOURNAL Youth Chamber Orchestra 3 iff 1 Kathy Dollahon, conductor of the Music Teachers Learn While Students Play CONTINUED FROM PAGE H1 concert. Conductor Schutz said his portion of the program will be devoted to classic band works from previous generations, including the Suite of Old American Dances by renowned Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett. Schutz was the president of NMMEA last year. An all-day Saturday All-State Music Festival will conclude the music teachers' meeting.

The afternoon session will feature the festival's first-string, all-star groups directed by guest conductors who have regional and national reputations. These include Rene Clausen, conductor of Minnesota's noted Concordia Choir, and Eph Ehly, conductor of the Kansas City Symphony Chorus. According to cellist Collins, who played in an All-State orchestra last year, this festival and the auditions and rehearsals leading up to it are intensely competitive and an exhausting grind for the young players. But they are good experience for later performing situations and competitions, she and other players say. Listeners in Popejoy Hall will enjoy the benefit of those efforts Saturday.

FILM JOURNAL: "THE BEST MOVIE OF THE YEAR." -MYRON MEISEL edward i muni -111111 iin iMiiiinrnw aiimiiafi ry by Pictures Distribution. Inc. TOUCHSTONE PICTURES By Debran Rowland CHICAGO TRIBUNE CHICAGO Greg Warmack has gotten used to being considered a crazy man. He's used to people frowning as he sifts through rubbish in search of something he can transform into art and extra income. Now he must get used to the local and national attention his work is gaining.

Warmack has been living on disability checks since being shot twice during a 1978 robbery that left him in a coma for four weeks. But he has hit a nerve for some Chicago-area consumers, and carved out a modest niche in the increasingly popular market for "recycled" art. Though it is still a relatively small piece of the modern art pie, interest in recycled art has increased along with concern for the environment, said Elaine Bentley, a coordinator at the Recycled Arts Center of the Expressways Children's Museum in Chicago, which holds family workshops on ways to re-use household items to create art. "We've been doing it for years," Bentley said. "But it is almost as though we were rediscovered with Earth Day 1990." "Recycled" or "found object" art is basically a 20th-century phenomenon, said James Yood, a critic for Artforum magazine and a professor of contemporary art history, theory and criticism at Northwestern University.

"Recycled" art is made by working with and changing items people have thrown away. "Found object" art is displaying discarded objects, unchanged, as art. Artists using discarded materials to create recycled art have always been around. But current events and growing interest nationwide in the environmental movement has begun to focus more attention on them, he said. Yood said many artists have used recycled materials to create artwork in the past two decades as a "gesture" to remind people to be more sensitive about the environment, and on some level the public has begun to respond.

This new interest stems largely from "two urges," he said. "First is that the stuff (recycled objects) is overlooked, but can be something really beautiful," he said. That draws some artists, like Warmack, to it, he said. "And there is more concern about the environment and resources," Yood said. Warmack's works run the gamut from sandstone carvings of animals and human faces to plaster of Paris statues, bottle cap furniture and "found object" art, in which the artist does little more than display something he found.

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