Wilmington's arts counterculture topic of exhibition
Newark native Flash Rosenberg knew art with a capital A was happening in New York City and Philadelphia in the 1970s.
She was less convinced of the art "scene" in her own backyard.
"There was a wish to be irreverent, with a great concern that being in Delaware we were too irrelevant to be irreverent," the photographer, writer and performer remembers.
It was a heady time of upheaval for Wilmington, after National Guard troops departed a city ravaged by race riots. With an infusion of federal and state funding, commercial galleries flourished alongside comic book shops that screened cult classics and record stores peddling incense and rolling papers. Collaborative work spaces for poets, writers, painters and performance artists evolved into institutions like the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts and the Delaware Theatre Company.
"It was a real sense of we could do anything," says Rosenberg, a University of Delaware alumna now living in New York City.
Through Sept. 27, "Dream Streets: Art in Wilmington 1970-1990" at the Delaware Art Museum celebrates two of the most artistically vibrant decades in the city.
The show features work by more than 50 local artists, including Rosenberg, landscape painter Mary Page Evans, clay monoprint-maker Mitch Lyons, abstract painter-turned-presidential portrait artist Simmie Knox and sculptor and DCCA founder Rick Rothrock. The format is separated into four themes: Abstraction, Figuration, Photography and the Zine literary and arts magazine scene.
As part of the exhibition, museum staff conducted interviews with 63 artists, musicians, arts advocates and former politicians supportive of the arts in Wilmington. Roughly a dozen artists will reunite over the next three months as the museum hosts a series of gallery talks, literary readings, dance performances and an outdoor after-hours festival. For a complete schedule, visit www.delart.org.
The timing of the exhibition is spot on. Today, Delaware ranks among the top five states in the nation for state arts funding based on population. Last year, the state Division of the Arts distributed nearly $3 million to 110 arts initiatives.
Meanwhile, the Wilmington Renaissance Corp., a public-private partnership between government officials and local corporations, is spearheading a $50 million plan to develop live-work spaces for creative professionals in the historic Quaker Hill neighborhood.
Artist collectives like the Creative Vision Factory, New Wilmington Art Association, the Chris White Gallery, Film Brothers and Barrel of Makers, pump new energy into the city's monthly downtown Art Loop.
"Both then and now we're equally pushing contemporary art in the city," says exhibition curator Margaret Winslow.
Winslow, assistant curator of contemporary art, found the first nugget of the exhibition during a tour of the old Queen Theater in 2009. There, she learned that the second-floor had housed Fifth Street Gallery, a 3,000-square-foot community fixture that opened in 1974 with an exhibition of photography from the News Journal.
In "Love Your Neighbor" by former News Journal photographer Fred Comegys, two fur-collared women dramatically cross their legs at the Wilmington Train Station, apparently mimicking a stoic man in a top hat seated beside them.
Fifth Street would go on to host monthly exhibitions, organized by Robert Jones, a Delaware native who produced haunting fiberglass and polyurethane shrouds.
Jones, a UD arts graduate, considered moving to New York, but he knew Wilmington offered a bigger challenge.
"More than anything, I would love to break the Brandywine mystique," he said at the time.
Beyond Fifth Street, regional artists benefited from the opening of Wilmington's Carspeken-Scott Gallery, Sommerville Manning in Greenville and the Blue Streak Gallery on Delaware Avenue. They formed clubs like Aesthetic Dynamics, devoted to improving cross-cultural communication, and Artsquad, an environmental arts project based at Absalom Jones Community Center.
They also began experimenting with new industrial materials like olefin yarn, which artist Margo Allman transformed into 75 modular forms that could be assembled in different configurations. Her weighty, floor-to-ceiling "Black Herculon Assemblages" consists of durable, colorfast fiber produced by the old Hercules manufacturing company in Wilmington and texturized by Kenitex of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
Capitalizing on a renewed interest in crafts, Padua Academy student Teresa Barkley created her "Labels Quilt" using more than 3,000 clothing labels.
With Xerox's introduction of the first color copier in 1973, Wilmington became a hotbed for Xerography, a process of manipulating color, collage, texture and images. Pioneers included Delaware natives Tom Watkins and Anne Eder.
"Artists will continue to push a product to see what its capabilities are," Winslow says.
Dream Streets, the exhibition, takes its name from a popular arts and literary magazine at the time. One of several locally-based Zines, its first issue in 1977 cost $1 and appeared amateurish, with a cover resembling crayon scrawls on construction paper.
But inside grassroots journals like Dream Streets, "The Diamond Edge," "Emergency Illustrated," "Espresso Tilt," "Fine Times, and "Viewpoint" (the last of which was published by UD's Cosmopolitan Club), was an indictment of mainstream media, the war in Vietnam, the nuclear arms race and gender inequality.
One Zine, "Sleaze," hosted an off-color convention attended by Blondie's Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
Lured by affordable housing, northern Delaware's proximity to larger arts meccas, and faculty appointments at UD, Wilmington and Newark artists contributed to a burgeoning avant garde scene. Debra Loewen, a modern dance instructor at UD who founded the New Space Company, staged performance art in an empty swimming pool.
Watkins, owner of Xanadu Comics and the Wilmington Costume Shop off Market Street Mall, presented the "Center for the Deforming Arts," where he served tofu alongside local independent films.
Others were hired to document the city as part of Bicentennial Metroscope, a one-year publicly funded photography and film project that employed artists nationwide. Four of those photographers were later hired by the Delaware Art Museum, which dramatically expanded its public outreach arm.
Rosenberg, whose real name is Susan, remembers feeling exhilarated by the prospect of documenting injustice and the countercultural movement. Working in a small state, she was able to display her work on buses and in bowling alleys. She created a series of "Listening Photos," portraits captioned with the subjects' handwritten notes about life in Delaware.
One of her subjects, arts student Jan Roberts, characterized Newark as small and informal.
"It keeps getting smaller all the time," she wrote. "Newark's kind of blue with orange spots, I'd say, colorwise."
In "Ass Heels," Rosenberg veered into absurdity as she attempted to answer the question: "What would be worse than high heels?"
Her black-and-white photograph features a model perching her buttocks on a pair of heels that could double as daggers. Visible on her waistline are the indentations from the tight Jordache jeans she pulled off moments before.
Other artists documented Wilmington's changing skyline, as the Hercules Inc. Plaza rose at the north end of Market Street and the American Life Insurance Co. building overshadowed lower north King Street.
Kevin McLaughlin's oil painting "Southern Approaches" offers a view of sparkling, blockish skyscrapers from I-95.
In contrast, James A. Anderson's "Scenes from Everyday Life," presents a desolate street slated for demolition, reminiscent of Edward Hopper's psychologically charged, empty road.
Contact Margie Fishman at 302-324-2882, on Twitter @MargieTrende or mfishman@delawareonline.com.
IF YOU GO:
WHAT: "Dream Streets: Art in Wilmington 1970-1990"
WHERE: Delaware Art Museum, 2301 Kentmere Parkway, Wilmington
WHEN: Now through Sept. 27
TICKETS: (included in museum admission): Adults, $12; seniors, $10; students with ID and children ages 7-18, $6; children under 6 and museum members are free. 302-571-9590, www.delart.org.