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Metadata
Artist |
Shaw, Ernest |
Object Name |
Outdoor Sculpture |
Title |
Jericho XVII |
Date |
1979 |
Medium |
Burnished steel |
Dimensions |
Each part: 69 x 32 in. (175.3 x 81.3 cm) |
Accession Number |
2.0.0 |
Credit line |
Gift of Philip and Muriel Berman |
About This Work |
As the artist has written: All of my work, paintings, sculpture, and drawings, is titled in series, as my interest is not in naming individual pieces but each group of works that relate because of visual and developmental concerns. In the case of the Jericho Series, where I used walls as a planar foil for the linear columns, the title came not only from the direct image link to the walls, but from the particular fascination I had as a child, its powerful and stirring visual, emotional, and mythic imagery--an incongruous, indeed magical, episode of fortresslike walls crumbling before a blast on a ram's horn trumpet. It was, for me, a catalyst for wonder, hinting at ambiguities I would not fully appreciate until later in life: what is real and illusory, substance and spirit, knowable and unknowable, and the power of belief in the face of insurmountable obstacles. As artists consciously or otherwise draw from the well of their experiences, those vivid personal associations carried from my childhood meshed with my explorations as an adult artist, and I used this reference to a legendary Jewish epic to do homage, through art, to tradition and the sense of wonder. Artist's Statement, "Jewish Themes/Contemporary American Artists," exh. cat., The Jewish Museum, New York, 1982. |
Legal Status |
The artist of artist's estate retains all copyrights to their work. |