Capital City Arts Initiative

The Capital City Arts Initiative is delighted to present another collaborative residency/exhibition with St. Mary’s Art Center in Virginia City, Nevada. Following a two-week residency during May 2012, Lexi Boeger produced the exhibition, STAND, at the Center from June 2 – July 8, 2012. CCAI commissioned Zoe Bray, Ph.D. to write the following essay about Ms. Boeger’s project. CCAI extends it sincere and ongoing appreciations to Lexi Boeger, Zoe Bray, Marie Louise Lekumberry, Anita and Jean-Pierre Izoco, Ted Borda and Gary Cook, Joxe Mallea Olaetxe, St. Mary’s Art Center, and everyone who participated in and supported the project.

With Words and Wool

As a fiber artist, the first step Lexi Boeger takes in every project she embarks on is to ask: “What is the pertinent fiber?” Sometimes the question relates to how she wants a specific artwork to function. Other times, it relates to the location or the nature of the project. Then, Boeger asks herself: “What story can the fiber tell?”

For her project STAND at Saint Mary’s Art Center, she found her answer in the Nevadan landscape. The force of Nevada’s plains and mountains was so dominant that she felt her artwork just had to tie into it in some way. Once that decision had been taken, it was clear that the “pertinent fiber” for her project had to be local. And in researching local fiber, Boeger thought of the wool shorn from the thousands of sheep herded on Nevada’s windswept mountains by Basque sheepherders.

the wool being felted

During much of the twentieth century, thousands of men and women left the green valleys and low mountains of their native Basque Country in northern Spain and southwestern France to seek their fortune in the New World. Many came to work for the ranchers of Nevada. The tough life of these young men, many of whom only spoke Basque, has been recounted by celebrated Nevadan writer Robert Laxalt, himself the son of a Basque sheepherder, in his book Sweet Promised Land.

In the heyday of this industry, sheepherders would be placed in charge of a flock of one to two thousand sheep and sent off to roam the wilds of Nevada and connecting states in search of fresh grass for fodder. Accompanied by their faithful sheepdog and a mule, they would spend months in isolation, broken only by weekly visits from the camp tender who brought them food. When resting from the heat and rigors of their daily life, they found solace in the shady aspen groves. There they marked their presence by engraving their names and their thoughts in the soft bark of the trees.

Boeger, who grew up in Placerville, California, had been vaguely aware of the Basque sheepherders as a child. On fishing expeditions with her father in the mountains, she would come upon their tree carvings. At the time, however, she had not been able to decipher these inscriptions, many of which were in Basque.

When she began thinking of wool as her material for her CCAI residency at Saint Mary’s, she says, “The images of these trees kept tugging at the edges of my thoughts.” As a body of informal artwork, she saw how they bore silent testimony to the contribution of a group of immigrants to the creation of Nevada, as we know it today. Similarly, the wool that came from the sheep that they reared created a link between the past and the present.

“I realized,” she says “that the fiber itself has a heritage and a story to tell, and it’s a cultural one. In this history, there’s not only the fiber but an entire legacy of artwork, created by the Basque shepherds during their time on the range.”

The rich variety and depth of the Basque sheepherders’ carvings on Nevada’s aspen trees has been empathetically recorded by another Basque American writer, Joxe Mallea Olaetxe in his book Speaking through the Aspens. To tell the story of these immigrants through her artwork, Boeger decided to re-create a grove, or stand, of aspen trees. The armature for the ‘trunks’ are made of recycled and organic material Boeger gathered around Virginia City. The hand-felted wool provides the ‘bark’ on which the story is ‘carved’.

different colors of felted wool

With the help of Marie Louise Lekumberry, of the J.T. Restaurant in Gardnerville, Boeger obtained wool from two local Basque sheep farmers, Jean-Pierre Izoco and Ted Borda. Brown wool came from Rambouillet sheep and cream-colored wool from Merino sheep. Using humidity and heat, she pressed the untreated wool, still with bits of vegetation and dirt from wherever the sheep had happened to roam, into large thick sheets of felt. The lighter-colored Merino wool provided the surface of the ‘bark’ and the darker Rambouillet wool an under-layer.

For the carvings, Boeger then distributed portions of the felt to representatives of the various Basque communities in Nevada, including Reno, Winnemucca, Elko, Ely and Gardnerville, inviting these people and their friends to ‘carve’ into the sheets of felt with small sharp blades. By scratching the cream-colored surface, the brown under-layer was made to appear, giving an effect similar to that of the carvings on the aspens.

Some of her present-day ‘carvers’ are direct descendants of the original sheepherders who lived and worked in Northern Nevada. Their contribution to the work links them to the Basque ‘artists’ of the past through the common thread of the fiber. “Though the environment has changed since the days of the sheepherders,” Boeger notes, “people’s need to respond to it hasn’t.” Her artwork provides an opportunity to respond in a way that respects the customs of the past while honoring the voices of today. “The idea is not to replicate the tree carvings of the past, but, like the herders who responded to their environment at the time, to engage with and reflect on the present.”

Today, sheepherding is no longer a widespread activity in Nevada. From the 1970s on, declining prices for lamb’s meat and wool reduced its profitability. In the Basque Country, economic conditions improved and emigration from the area slowed to a trickle. But many Basques have remained in Nevada, establishing themselves as American citizens and diversifying their professional activities.

artist carved felt for exhibition title

As the title of Boeger’s work suggests, STAND is as much about them as about the Basque sheepherders of yesteryear. The word is not only a reference to a group of trees: it also evokes having an opinion, an attitude or a belief, or a poise that enables a person to exist and to prevail. As Boeger points out, “when a person makes their mark, in this work or anywhere, they are making a stand, in an attempt to transmit meaning through their images and words, some of these are simple, some poetic, some are grand. But all of these messages create the cumulative voice of community.”

Zoe Bray, Ph.D.
Center for Basque Studies,
University of Nevada, Reno
May 2012

Zoe Bray

Artist and anthropologist, Zoe Bray, PhD, wrote the exhibition essay for STAND. Bray is 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 at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Lexi Boeger

 Lexi Boeger has published three books on the art of hand-spun yarn and co-designed (and engineered by Majacraft) her own purpose-built spinning wheel. As a yarn artist, she works with all kinds of fiber, tackling plastic, scrap paper, twigs, anything that relates to the theme of the artwork. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from the University of California at Davis. In 2012, Boeger gave a CCAI Nevada Neighbors talk about her work. She lives at her family’s Placerville, California winery where she runs a small community-based spinning studio.