Graffiti & Ornament Exhibition Catalogue

GRAFFITI & ORNAMENT

PAST PRESENT PROJECTS

GRAFFITI & ORN

March 31 - April 28, 2019

PAST PRESENT PROJECTS

Curated by Elizabeth Essner Organized by Past Present Projects

GRAFFITI & ORNAMENT

A site-responsive exhibition at The Woodlands with artists Roberto Lugo & Leo Tecosky

ST PRESENT PROJECTS

GRAFFITI & ORNAMENT

Past Present Projects presents Graffiti & Ornament at The Woodlands in West Philadelphia. The exhibition brings the work of artists Roberto Lugo and Leo Tecosky into the historic Hamilton Mansion. Bridging past histories of Philadelphia with the present, the site-specific exhibition connects The Woodlands’ historic mansion and cemetery to these two contemporary artists who embrace graffiti and hip-hop culture within their artistic practice.

In Graffiti & Ornament, the site-specific works of Lugo and Tecosky shed new light on the historic interior of the Hamilton Mansion at The Woodlands, connecting Philadelphia’s past to its present in unexpected ways.

Installation view of Leo Tecosky’s Cut Arrow with Roberto Lugo’s Self-Portraits and Kendrick Lamar Plates

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Exhibition Checklist

ROBERTO LUGO

LEO TECOSKY

Do you know how hard it is to get a black man through High School?, 2019

Ev, 2019

Earthenware, paint 64” height x 34” diameter

Jarring: What’s Within, 2019 Resin 64” height x 30” width x 18” depth

Same Ole’ Crack, 2019 Earthenware, china paint 49” height x 24” width x 24” depth

Stuntin’ Bowl 13, 2019 Earthenware, paint 14” height x 25” diameter

Stuntin’ bowl 14, 2019 Earthenware, paint 16” height x 11” diameter

Method Man and Jimi Hendrix, 2018 Earthenware, china paint 13” height x 13” width x 26” depth

Dulce, 2019 Red earthenware, china paint 12” height x 10” width x 6.5” depth

Self Portrait, 2019 Earthenware, hyrdrographic paint., epoxy 14” diameter

Self Portrait, 2019 Earthenware, hyrdrographic paint., epoxy 14” diameter

Neon glass 34 3/8” height x 25 5/8” width x 14 ½” depth

Ev, 2019 Neon glass 34 3/8” height x 25 5/8” width x 14 ½” depth

Nostalgia Styles, 2019 Blown, sculpted, cut and enameled glass, steel Installed: 10’ height x 6’ length x 6 width

Cameo in Pink, 2019 Blown sandblasted glass 1 ½” height x 12” diameter

The 18th Letter (for Rakim), 2016 Mold blown glass 18” height x 14” diameter

Ruby, 2017 Blown, sculpted and cut glass 18” x 9” diameter

Granite, 2017 Blown, sculpted and cut glass 16” height x 6” width x 10” depth

Cut Arrow, 2017 Blown, sculpted and cut glass 10” height x 12” width x 3” depth

Untitled, 2017 Blown, sculpted, assembled and cut glass 12” height x 10 ½” width x 4” depth

GRAFFITI & ORNAMENT Sgraffito means to scratch through the surface. This near-ancient technique plies one surface over another: glaze over clay, plaster over plaster, layer upon layer, incising decoration to reveal what’s underneath. Throughout time, it has conveyed skill: highlighting the decorative patterning in early Islamic pottery, or illustrating the splendor of Caravaggio’s Renaissance mural masterpieces.

Sgraffito precedes a more modern mode as well—it is the etymological antecedent to today’s graffiti, its ancestral link with ornament.

In some form or another, it is likely that in 1766 the sgraffito technique would have been known to a twenty-one year old wealthy Philadelphian named William Hamilton (1745-1813) who had just inherited three hundred acres of land on the west side of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Over time, Hamilton would shape this into his picturesque estate, so celebrated that its splendor would come to be illustrated on a Staffordshire pottery set.

Hamilton’s neoclassical mansion and grounds represented the height of thencontemporary taste, an American example that looked to the English Adam style—classical forms and repeating ornament framed by symmetry. And like the British country estates of Hamilton’s inspiration, the grounds were open to visitors. Its stately bay windows nod to this purpose, their scale so large that passersby were offered a glimpse of the treasures inside.

But, times change. Hamilton left no direct descendants and few heirs, all deceased by 1840 when his estate was sold to become The Woodlands Cemetery Company. What was once a testament to a single legacy gave way to a place that would memorialize many. The rural cemetery movement of the 19th century had taken hold and the Woodlands’ park-like setting served as a site for Victorian family outings set among the rare tree specimens and the solemn weight of gravesites, a final resting place for those mainly wealthy and white. The mansion itself was transformed into a place of business. What was once a dining room became a parlor for mourning guests. A period photograph reveals its mantle in a high Victorian crush: pots, paintings, painted pots, figurative sculptures, oil lamps and more.

Kendrik Lamar, 2019 Earthenware, hyrdrographic paint., epoxy 13” diameter

Column Composition 1, 2 and 3, 2019 Earthenware, paint, plastic 38” height, 29”height, 18” height 4

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Graffiti & Ornament is set against this historical backdrop, bringing the work of artists Roberto Lugo and Leo Tecosky into the Woodlands. Although their materials and methods differ, both draw from history and hip-hop in equal measure. There are many ways to leave one’s mark: building a grand estate like the Woodlands or by way of the graffiti that inspires Lugo and Tecosky.

And like Hamilton’s grand estate, graffiti was also arguably born in the city of Philadelphia when a teenage Daryl McCray began tagging ‘Cornbread’ on the walls of his North Philadelphia neighborhood in 1967.

Artist and self-titled ‘ghetto potter’ Roberto Lugo grew up writing graffiti on the same Philadelphia streets as McCray, just a few miles and a few decades later. Born in Kensington, Lugo’s Puerto Rican family was like many in their neighborhood. Having recently moved to the mainland, they struggled, barely making ends meet in their new home. As Lugo has often explained, in his youth graffiti served as the art class he never had: his means of expression, mark making and material understanding. Years later in community college, he discovered pottery and soon combined his knowledge of graffiti with his love of clay.

Activism is central to Lugo’s artistry, using his hip-hop pottery mash-ups as a means to insert his history and heroes into the grand narrative of ceramics.

Portraiture is his vehicle, an age-old way to raise-up and record individual lives. Standing more than five feet high, Do you know how hard it is to get a black man through High School? (2019) anchors the Woodlands’ oval dining room, matching the house’s majestic scale.

View of Leo Tecosky’s Nostalgia Styles through Hamilton Mansion Window [Photo: Ryan Collerd]

It was during the Victorian period that a carved name and date were left on a wooden beam on the south portico of the mansion: J. Haslet, Nov. 1876.

Discovered in 2016 during a restoration, this simple but skillful inscription— barely five inches tall—was likely unsanctioned, moving beyond sgraffito to become graffiti. However, looking out from the portico today onto the quiet splendor of carved headstones and rolling hills that lead to the river and the city beyond, it is easy to imagine how any person might want their own name, and indeed their own legacy, inscribed to memorialize that moment.

Late 19th Century Photograph of Hamilton Mansion Mantle

There was a time when J. Haslet’s mark and the history it carries would have been cleaned up, erased. Today, preserved by the Woodlands, this piece of 19th century graffiti serves an essential point. It is a tangible reminder that history is often told through individual lives. Some are carved in stone, remembered in near perpetuity, and others are hidden under the surface, ready to be revealed.

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Roberto Lugo, Do you know how hard it is to get a black man through High School?

[Photo: Ryan Collerd]

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Roberto Lugo, Jarring: What’s Within [Photo: Ryan Collerd]

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On one side, its central cartouche depicts Michael Brown, Ferguson’s fallen youth who was fatally shot by police in 2014. On the other side, the artist’s own high school portrait. In their physical similarities, Lugo confronts their different life outcomes. The title of the piece comes from Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, voicing her anger and resignation that for her son—a black boy becoming a man—the simple act of growing up was against the odds. Lidded urns have often been used as funerary vessels, and here its grand silhouette also becomes a self-portrait: Lugo’s height, the slope of his shoulders, the curve of his head collapse portrait, pot, and memorial into one.

Historical ornament carries power, linking new objects to time’s vast continuum. Lugo wields this power, rewriting history along the way. By presenting Brown’s memory and his high-school self onto the same cultural stage as the ancient Greek meander and Chinese blue and white that have endured long before the days of Hamilton, Lugo places himself and Brown into the grand timeline of art history.

Directly facing this human-scale pot is Jarring: What’s Within (2019), a bronzed resin sculpture cast from the artist’s body. Uncanny in its likeness and vulnerable in its near-nakedness, Lugo’s eyes are closed but his body stands tall, existing somewhere between a death mask and a monument. “Fear not death; for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, among his many maxims in Poor Richard’s Almanack. But, not all receive the gravesites and grandeur that ensure Franklin’s adage, especially people of color whose rich histories have also included the devastation of enslavement and the yoke of poverty. Lugo’s body and pot offer that immortality.

Artist Leo Tecosky casts the memory of loss through a personal lens: glass.

Now based in Brooklyn, in his youth much of Tecosky’s family was centered in Philadelphia around his grandparents. An amateur architectural historian, his grandmother Evelyn Rose Tecosky (1925 – 2017) or ‘Ev’ as she was known, passed away just as the planning for Graffiti & Ornament began. A lifelong Philadelphia resident, her collection of early 20th century Depression glass inspired the artist’s own work in the medium.

Nostalgia Styles (2019), a ten-foot chandelier-like installation of blown glass arrows and stars begins his visual epitaph to her at Woodlands. In it, Tecosky combines traditional cut glass techniques with innovative enamel graffiti. The glass’s amethyst and smoky grey colors recall those from childhood memories of his grandmother’s Depression glass. Highlighting the medium’s multiple contexts, the height of Nostalgia Styles matches the mansion’s celebrated bay windows, building a material connection between past and present.

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Leo Tecosky, Nostalgia Styles [Photo: Ryan Collerd]

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Installation view of Roberto Lugo’s Dulce and Leo Tecosky’s Ruby [Photo: Ryan Collerd]

Tecosky often draws on the arrow, a reference to the intricate graffiti form known as wildstyle. Graffiti’s source is the written word but by using the arrow— a near-universal typographical symbol—Tecosky communicates dynamism and direction without the limitations of language. Tecosky’s glass harnesses the light, casting long shadows across the monumental room as the morning moves today in an on-going conversation.

Tecosky memorializes Ev (2019) into two repeating sculptures, using neon to reflect the ephemeral mark of graffiti tagging. They are placed as mirror images in the room, echoing the neoclassical symmetry that defines the house.

Mantles are where Tecosky and Lugo’s work meet. Lugo’s teapot Dulce (2019), an ode to his own grandmother, sits next to Tecosky and collaborator Simon Klenell’s Ruby (2017). Its blown glass arrow crashes into cut glass – the past and the present colliding.

Installation view: Leo Tecosky, Ev [Photo: Ryan Collerd]

When William Hamilton built the mansion-house that has become the Woodlands, its art-filled interiors were described as a “‘living canvas’ whose very walls could speak.” Graffiti & Ornament returns the house to that vision, while acknowledging the layers of time that have led us to the present. Now Tecosky and Lugo leave their marks upon the house, adding their own histories to its layers, revealing what’s underneath.

-Elizabeth Essner, Curator

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Installation view: Roberto Lugo’s Method Man and Jimi Hendrix and Column Compositions in niches; Jarring: What’s Within shown in background [Photo: Ryan Collerd]

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GRAFFITI & ORN PAST PRESENT PROJECTS GRAFFITI & ORNAMENT PAST PRESENT PROJECTS GRAFFITI & ORNAMENT ST PRESENT PROJECTS

Past Present Projects believes that historic house museums and landmarks are potent community resources and the best way to preserve them is to engage audiences within these resonant sites. Our exhibitions bridge the worlds of historic preservation and contemporary art to create innovative meaningful programming.

PastPresentProjects.org The Woodlands’ 54-acre undulating landscape is at once a one-of-a-kind 18thcentury English pleasure garden, 19th-century rural cemetery, and a modern green oasis for its neighbors in bustling University City and West Philadelphia. Our mission is to enrich the lives of area residents and visitors by serving as a hub for activities and educational programs that interpret, celebrate and make available to the public The Woodlands’ historic buildings and tranquil green space. WoodlandsPhila.org Graffiti & Ornament is generously funded by the Knight Foundation with additional support provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. In-kind sponsorship has been provided by Baldwin Fine Art & Residential, Grounds for Sculpture, Justin Long, and Joe Shapiro.