Standing sentry on the entrance to Web site 131 is a small pig. It’s attainable when guests enter the area to see the autumn exhibition, …to see is a present: the Seth Davidow assortment, they are going to stroll proper by with out noticing. However that piece performs an necessary function on this exhibition, which memorializes the gallery’s co-founder, Seth Davidow, who died in June.
“Noticed Animal,” a raku-fired ceramic work by Texas sculptor Billy Ray Manghum, was one of many items that lived alongside Seth in his bed room in the course of the last months he battled Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s illness). The piece is whimsical and a bit valuable, however now imbued with that means. That is how gathering works – the artwork you buy lives alongside you in your personal moments. Nevertheless it’s a chunk the exhibition’s curator, his mother, Joan Davidow, didn’t keep in mind him shopping for.
“He’s a cool little pig I don’t keep in mind in any respect,” Joan tells me, only a few days after loading all of the work into the area. She culled Seth’s assortment of greater than 60 artworks down to only 32 items. “After I noticed him within the bed room, I used to be simply considering the place did this man come from?”
Like most of the works within the exhibition, he bought this work at an public sale organized by Joan when she served because the director of the Arlington Museum of Artwork within the early 2000s. For practically 20 years, he would buy work yearly in assist of the museums, AMA and later Dallas Modern, each run by his mom. And although the gathering on show right here is Seth’s distinctive sensibility, it’s not possible to disregard the affect Joan’s inventive style had on his explicit manner of taking a look at artwork.
When Seth and his brother, Malcolm, have been rising up in Florida, Joan was continuously exposing them to artwork. She’d try prints from the library and cling them within the household room. When Seth was a young person he introduced that he was carried out taking a look at artwork. Years later, she remembers, he was in Miami on enterprise and referred to as to ask if she would assist him purchase some artwork from a financial institution that was promoting its assortment. “He got here out and in of artwork fully on his personal,” she says.
Then, about 10 years in the past, they have been wandering an artwork honest collectively and he requested Joan if she needed to begin an artwork area collectively. Web site 131 was born. He advised D Journal he considered the area as a solution to give his mom a solution to do one thing she loves. “And provides us a chance to do one thing collectively,” he stated within the interview. The plan was that she would run issues and handle the artwork. “And I’ll assist the place I can.”
That plan led to quite a few exhibitions centered on the best way pairing artists from totally different areas or working in several types or media can change the viewing expertise. She referred to as her method, “right here, there, and past.” Final 12 months, after briefly contemplating shutting the area down, Joan shifted the main target to exhibiting the holdings of various collectors within the space. She didn’t know then that she’d be exhibiting Seth’s only a 12 months later.
Trying on the works right here in totality, it’s obscure the underpinnings of Seth’s gathering method. Even Joan struggles to place it into phrases. I had her strive. “Trendy classics” was the outline she got here up with, which is only a manner of claiming, he had an intuition for what may nonetheless be price taking a look at many years from now. I feel what’s true is Seth was shopping for artwork he believed he would nonetheless need to have a look at many years later.
In a lot of the work, guests could discover a penchant for abstraction and restraint within the colour palate. Take Tom Orr’s 2007 serigraph “Fingerprint 1” or Jacqueline Humphries’s 2012 untitled oil and linen portray. Each items are defiant, moody abstractions filled with vitality, however devoid of narrative. And but, they inhabit a world with Todd Chilton’s “Circle Stars,” a 2013 buzzy geometric oil portray and Benjamin Terry’s bumble bee-striped, small-scale “Object II,” each of which add vibrant animation to the partitions they inhabit.
There are works that could be understood as funding purchases, just like the restricted version lithograph print by John Cage, “Not eager to say something about Marcel,” or Christo’s “Pont Neuf (2 Components).” Seth was a savvy businessman, in spite of everything.
He dabbles in materiality with works like Joel Morrison’s stainless-steel sculpture or Arthur Peña’s “Try 102d,” which is an meeting of razor blades coated in resin on a backbone of pine. And although the figurative works are essentially the most restricted, they’re unavoidable. Dirk Skreber’s “Kaylee 1” stares again on the viewer, her face an assemblage of froth tape; Sofia Schweger’s “Library #2” is extra tranquil and welcoming, one other piece Seth hung out with day by day within the last months.
Holistically, Seth’s assortment wasn’t assembled with the attention of a curator, however with the precise whims and proclivities of a residing, complicated human. All people depart behind traces of themselves within the houses they lived in and the objects they amassed, however these traces could be organized, categorized, and redistributed.
Ultimately, the artwork Seth collected will probably be handed all the way down to his daughters, donated to universities and museums, or offered. However the traces people depart behind on the folks they liked is tougher to categorize and stays eternally with those that stay. For Joan, the impulse to place collectively this exhibition was about sharing the Seth that is still. And on the finish of the exhibition, she says, the little piggy will most likely go dwelling along with her.
“…to see is a present: the Seth Davidow assortment” stays on show via December 9 with open hours Friday and Saturday afternoons. A model of this text seems within the exhibition catalogue for “…to see is a present: the Seth Davidow assortment.”
Writer
![Lauren Smart](https://www.dmagazine.com/wp-content/themes/dmag/resources/assets/images/writer-headshot-default.png)