Pop Star: Diane Samuels
Abby Mendelson |
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
She’s
something to see, loose-limbed and lanky, Diane Samuels, in her blue
and white Reese Brothers baseball cap, perched behind a row of orange
highway cones, pressing her thick, furry paper into the street, right
into Sampsonia Way, all 21 x 806 feet of it, wiping her hands, waving
jauntily to passing city sanitation workers. “The alley,”
she says, “looks like a giant scroll with incredible line
drawings.”
Samuels
is hardly as ethereal – or ersatz – as she might
seem. Collected, exhibited, Samuels was tapped as a Distinguished
Daughter of Pennsylvania, in part for her multi-media art, in part
for her work as a co-founder of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, a
non-profit agency that provides living spaces and stipends to writers
forced to flee their homelands.
Growing
up on Long Island, Samuels came to Pittsburgh for CMU. Exhibiting as
an undergraduate, she taught at Slippery Rock and her alma mater, and
by the ‘70s gravitated to the Mattress Factory, sharing
community suppers, moving to the North Side in ’79, and her
current Sampsonia Way digs a year later.
Gig
to gig, Samuels has exhibited in the Mattress Factory, the Carnegie
(which owns some of her work), the Westmoreland, and other venues,
including various colleges. In the Kim Foster Gallery, she has the
requisite New York dealer.
One
season following another, she’s worked all over Central Europe,
Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary; in 1998 she completed a commissioned
memorial garden in Grafeneck, Germany, Site A of the infamous 1940
euthanasia experiments.
In
the new century, she’s won prestigious competitions for major
installations at New York City’s Center for Jewish History and
Brown University.
In
New York, her 2004 two-story Luminous Manuscript, a glass-and-stone mosaic, hearkens to a tidal wave of artifacts -- folk
tales, stories, what she calls “amazing things” from the
archives. From an Isaac Singer manuscript to Albert Einstein’s
scratch paper, Samuels created an installation in the shape of a
traditional page of Talmud. As a glorious jigsaw puzzle of history,
Samuels placed some 80,500 pieces of glass and 440 stone tiles,
containing 112,640 alphabet characters from 57 writing systems. “I
don’t get daunted by numbers,” she smiles.
At
Brown, her 2006 two-story Lines of Sight bridges two life
sciences buildings. At 2,000 square feet, the 140 double-pane windows
contain 650,000 prisms, magnifiers, beads, and small glass rectangles
hand-engraved with poetry or prose. In all, it’s a magnificent
celebration of seeing, of human hands in science.
Then
there’s her street, which she had previously documented in
Mapping Sampsonia, some 5,642 digital photos, each in glass,
each with an artifact -- a leaf, a snippet of interview, an
observation -- on the reverse, all amounting to a grand testimony of
city life at street level.
“This
is a lens to view the world,” she gestures at the lumpy
pavement. “It’s also home. I’m exploring that now,
what home means to people. Is it physical? Is it in your heart and
mind? Is it understanding where you’re situated, understanding
your responsibility and your place?”
Abby
Mendelson’s latest book, Ghost Dancer, a collection of
short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.
Captions:
Diane Samuels in her studio
Glass tile and plant from Samuels' "Mapping Sampsonia."
Samuels at home. On the couch, a book, wrapped in twine, by Delanie Jenkins: "The History of Our country."
All photographs copyright Brian Cohen