Capital City Arts Initiative

Exhibition Dates: June 2 – July 8, 2012
Artist’s Reception: June 2, 4 – 6pm
Exhibition Venue: CCAI at St. Mary’s Art Center 55 North R Street, Virginia City

Lexi Boeger STAND
CCAI Exhibition at St. Mary’s

Lexi Boeger

The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] and St. Mary’s Art Center [SMAC] are delighted to present the exhibition STAND, a salute to Nevada’s Basque arborglyphs by fiber artist Lexi Boeger. The installation is the culmination of Ms. Boeger’s two-week residency at St. Mary’s and will be in the Center’s 4^th floor gallery from June 2 – July 8, 2012. CCAI and SMAC will host a reception for the artist on Saturday, June 2 from 4 – 6pm. St. Mary’s Art Center is located at 55 North R Street, Virginia City; the gallery is open to the public Fridays – Sundays, 11am – 4pm. The exhibition and reception are free and the public is cordially invited.

As a fiber artist and yarn spinner, Boeger was intrigued by locally grown fibers and Nevada’s rich Basque sheepherder traditions. “The Basque … have a history that defines them and is afforded a great respect ….” During the residency, Boeger will create a contemporary version of an aspen grove like the ones where the resident Basque sheepherders enhanced tree trunks with arborglyphs or drawings on the trees’ bark. She will recreate the aspen trees using found materials to build trunk-like armatures for the trunks and felted wool from local sheep as the bark.

Inviting Basque community members from across northern Nevada to carve on her felted wool tree bark, Boeger explained, “As for the markings themselves….people do not need to be artists to do it. Many of the original carvings are very simple. Just a name, or a date. Maybe a simple statement or figure. Those groves are powerful because they are a record of many simple, peaceful, individual moments. I think anyone participating in this project should think of it that way. Just carve what they feel in the moment they are with the felts. the weight is not on any one person to carve a grand thing, it’s going to be the whole collection of many voices that will make it powerful.”

Boeger described the project stating, “I think this project references the past but is [also] about the Basque of today. The original groves are the inspiration for the form of this artwork but not the content. This grove will be made from fiber shorn this spring, 2012, and raised by the current generation of shepherds. It is new. And so it is an appropriate place for this generation to make their mark. It’s a way for the community to express their cultural identity without defacing or competing with the past.”

STAND exhibition installation view

Boeger has presented her works in New York, Tokyo, New Zealand, Vancouver, Norway, and many other cities here and abroad. She is an originator of the hand-spinning genre often referred to as Art Yarn. Boeger has written Handspun Revolution, 2005; Intertwined, 2007; Hand Spun, 2011. She earned a BA in Fine Art at the University of California at Davis and lives at her family’s winery in Placerville, California, where she runs a small community-based spinning studio.

Artist and writer Zoe Bray, PhD, wrote the exhibition essay for STAND http://bray-stand-essay. Bray is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada Reno. She earned her Doctorate in Social and Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a MA in Social Anthropology & Development at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Dr. Bray’s essay is available online at arts-initiative.org and in the gallery at St. Mary’s during the exhibition.

artist felting wool

felted wool drying at the vineyard