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     MHD Citizen Username: Mayhewdrive Post Number: 3680 Registered: 5-2001  |
The New York Times, Nov 3, 2002 p10(L) col 01 (19 col in) South Orange Seeking To Honor a Native Son. (New Jersey Weekly Desk) Bernice Napach. LENNIE PIERRO, a South Orange painter and professor of fine arts at Kean University, had long appreciated the work of Tony Smith, the artist who achieved fame in the 1960's and 70's with his huge geometric black sculptures. But about five years ago, Mr. Pierro discovered, to his surprise, that Smith, who died in 1980, was born and lived most of his adult life in South Orange, producing many of his famous works here. So why didn't the town own a Tony Smith sculpture? The absence of a Smith work in South Orange bothered Mr. Pierro, even more so after 1998, when the Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective of Smith's career. So Mr. Pierro, who with his wife, Judy Wukitsch, also an artist, founded a local art gallery in South Orange's community center in 1994, decided to do something about it. He began talking to his friends about helping the town buy a Smith work. Somehow, though, the plan never progressed beyond talk. When Mr. Pierro died from cancer at age 61 last October, a group of his friends took up his mission, forming the Lennie Pierro Memorial Arts Foundation to oversee the Tony Smith Sculpture Project. The project, led by Cheryl Arnedt, a South Orange resident, is dedicated to securing a Smith sculpture for South Orange. On Nov. 16, it will hold its first major fund-raising event at the Women's Club in Maplewood. Earlier that day, the gallery that Mr. Pierro and Ms. Wukitsch founded will be renamed the Pierro Gallery of South Orange; a new exhibition will show a retrospective of Mr. Pierro's work. ''Lennie always reached for the sky,'' said Ms. Wukitsch, assistant director for recreation and culture affairs in South Orange. ''Who's to say it's impossible?'' The project is working with the Tony Smith estate, which is ''very supportive of the idea and wants to help realize it,'' said Sarah Auld, its director. The estate owns many sculptures, one of which will go to the town, partially as a gift, Ms. Auld said. The project will have to pay the rest of the cost. Smith's sculptures sell for about $500,000, Ms. Auld said. Art historians find the origins of Smith's artistic aesthetic in his childhood in South Orange. Smith's family had long lived in the area, and owned a waterworks factory in East Orange. When Smith, who was born in 1912, was 4 years old, he had tuberculosis and was quarantined in a small, pre-fabricated house set up behind his family's home on Stanley Road. Heat for the house was provided by a black stove, which may have inspired Smith's later work with black metals. While quarantined, Smith built pueblo-like structures from boxes of medicine. Later, he became an architect, working with Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930's, and continuing to design homes until the early 1960's. He began painting in the 1950's, and took up sculpture in the 1960's. Plywood mockups of his sculptures, built to actual size, often filled the backyard of his family home on Stanley Road in South Orange and the backyard of another house, on Berkeley Road in Orange, that the artist bought in the late 1960's. ''I remember one mockup that took up the whole backyard of the house on Berkeley,'' said Martha Smith, the artist's niece, who was living with her parents in South Orange at the time. Smith was ''rooted in South Orange,'' said Joan Pachner, a curator at Storm King, in Mountainville, N.Y., and an art historian who has written about his work. ''He was comfortable in that environment. His black geometric structures work in suburban square backyards. That proportion gives them the most power. It's where they belong because it's where they were created.'' But the organizers of the Smith sculpture project hope to install its sculpture in a public space in South Orange. One likely site is the gazebo in front of the train station, near the proposed site of an arts center. Outdoor art is already a part of the fabric of South Orange, which has had several major outdoor art exhibitions. The last one was ''Earthline Landscape,'' shown last year. ''Public art not only symbolizes and signifies a community commitment to art, but makes it accessible to everyone,'' said Susan Napack, who is on the board of the Pierro foundation. ''It takes you out of the day-to-day. It provokes, challenges, makes you think, makes you feel.'' A Tony Smith sculpture especially has that effect on people, she added, because ''it's different from every angle.'' Jane Smith, Tony Smith's widow, who lives in New York, said he would have been pleased to receive special recognition from the town to which he felt loyal throughout his lifetime. |
