UALR magazine
Fall/Winter 2007 • Vol. 3 No. 2
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As Good as it Gets
By Judy Williams
Until about 10 years ago, Little Rock wood artist Robyn Horn had few shows in Little Rock because there wasn’t a market for her award-winning sculpture, even though her work was on exhibit and in collections in galleries and museums across the country.”I’ve been in Little Rock for many years now, and for most of that time there were only a few galleries in town,” said Horn, during an interview minutes before the opening of an exhibit of her work at the 2007 Fall Art Show at T. Lamarr Fine Art on Highway 10 in Little Rock. “I don’t think people paid much attention to art then, or at least 3-D artwork. It’s much better than it used to be.”
Education began to turn the tide. Horn credits programs offered by the Friends of Contemporary Craft at the Arkansas Arts Center and the Museum School classes for fostering an appreciation for different forms of art.
“The Arkansas Arts Center has also worked with UALR and its art department to share programming by bringing in visiting artists,” said Horn, a strong supporter of the program. “Most of the visiting artists are surprised that there is this much interest now in Little Rock,” she said, “particularly in 3-D work.”
The opening of more galleries in Little Rock has been critical. “That is a big step – now people are looking at art and wanting to put it in their homes. They are interested in looking at unique pieces rather than commercialized art that is mass produced.”
The wood artist does her share of creating opportunities for artists and fostering interest in art. She is founder and first president of the Collectors of Wood Art, an organization dedicated to the development of and appreciation of wood art. In 1997, to get the group started, she and husband John hosted 100 wood artists, collectors and museum professionals from around the country to a weekend conference at their home and studio near Roland.
She has served on numerous boards and committees including the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tenn., the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation, and New York’s Museum of Art & Design.
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One of her favorite creative communities is Asheville, N.C. - a model for the kind of cultural community Little Rock could become. “John and I just spent a week near Asheville at the Penland School of Crafts where he was teaching a class in printing. The area around Asheville is a community that embraces art and works to provide a culture that promotes it.”
With a population of 73,000 people, Asheville has a diverse cultural scene with several galleries, museums, live music, artist workshops and festivals, and is home to the Southern Highland Craft Folk Art Center, the Asheville Museum of Art, the Asheville Symphony, and the Lyric Opera. The University of North Carolina-Asheville, a public liberal arts university, is in the process of developing a craft campus on the regional landfill where all of the workshops will be powered by the methane produced from the landfill.
Providing more educational opportunities for artists and for students is key to Little Rock’s growth as a creative community, Horn said. It is also critical for the business community to take artists seriously and to support the “business of art.”
“To develop a career in music or art, you have to devote yourself to it,” Horn said. “But if people don’t appreciate the effort involved or understand what goes into the work, artists won’t be successful. The appreciation of the art is almost as important as making it. Our business leaders must also understand the positive economic impact art can have on the community.”
Horn, a Hendrix College art major and former painter and photographer, began working in wood in 1983 after her brother-in-law returned from a lathe-turning workshop at the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg. Her contemporary wood sculpture forms on exhibit at the T. Lamarr show are witness to the evolution of her work in wood. She started by making lathe-turned bowls and vessels, but her forms have moved from static semi-spherical forms to off-balanced architectural forms.
Horn prefers to work in a series, allowing her to develop a concept for a forum. “If I feel like I am improving the work with each piece I do, then it is a successful series. There are more and more possibilities as I work through the series to get to the point where I am perfecting techniques and improving the form. Right now I am working with steel, and I think the concepts I’m using with the steel have affected the work I’m making in wood. It is really nice to cross-pollinate like that.”
Type her name in a search engine, and you’ll find a trail of her work and awards at more than 2,000 sites - from the White House Craft Collection to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Long Beach Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Arts Renwick Gallery.
Being selected among the nation’s elite group of artists featured in the White House Craft Collection in 1993 brought an incredible amount of attention to her work. “More people were impressed that I was in the White House Collection than anything I have ever done, and the Collection ended up at the Clinton Library which is great for Little Rock,” said the Fort Smith native.
One of her favorite exhibits was a 2003 solo show at the Arkansas Arts Center, “Union of Souls.”
“That’s as good as it gets,” she said.
Artist’s Eye - Robyn Horn:
I am drawn to abstract, geometric sculpture, the volume of it, the form, the textures, the negative spaces. I am obsessed with tension and movement, the gestural qualities of sculpture. I believe that the individual character of the material can be preserved by the inspiration of the artist, that they can both exist by the combining of the curving lines of nature, together with the angular lines of geometry, resulting in a gentle merging of the two entities, one working with the other in a union of souls.
I am influenced by the nature of the material and its resistance to being changed. I think in terms of wood and stone, of the things of which nature is made, of the ease with which nature develops into shapes and forms, created throughout centuries of accumulated time. I persist in seeing sculpture in a purely visceral way, line and mass, the interplay of angles and planes to create effects of light and shadow, with a strong emphasis on visual grace, and a sense of structural strength and unity.