There were two chairs for this session, Con/Texture: Surface and Sense, which was about texture in art. One chair was Roja Najafi from Chandler-Gilbert Community College and the other was Catherine Ingersoll from Virginia Military School.
In the first talk, Carolyn Hauk from the University of Delaware spoke about the history of mosquito nets. The history dated back to slave trade days where slaves tended to the nets around their owners beds but seldom did they have nets for themselves. The nets morphed from a practical way to keep from being eaten alive by mosquitoes to a status symbol in the age of air conditioners where outdoor air was kept out of the home.
Antje Gamble from Murray State University then presented Chiseling Bronze: Surface Textures in the Sculpture of Marino Marini. The sculpture she was referencing was of a naked man riding a horse and the man in many cases had a large erection. It was interesting how the elephant in the room remained unmentioned until she talked about one of the sculptures having a removable phallus which kept getting stolen. She picked apart the unique textures to each of the castings of the sculpture. The artist didn’t accept the texture of the cast but would then take a hammer and chisel to each surface and carve away metal.
I decided to sketch Tara Kohn from the University of Southern Maine who presented Soil and Skin: The Texture of Grief in Ben Altman’s The More That is Taken Away. She went to Altman’s studio as he was working on a huge environmental sculpture which was a nine‑year solo earthwork, performance, and memorial exploring mass violence, historical trauma, and the act of inheriting such histories. Altman’s work was inspired by a 2005 visit to a mass grave in Belarus, near the birthplace of his Jewish grandfather, which marked the start of his focus on violent turning points in modern history. I identified with the angst inherent in Altman’s work. He dug a trench on his property and lined it with castings of his form. He expressed his grief by cutting his hair and creating a trench which was reminiscent of the cast bodies found at Pompeii. The body forms laying in the trench later grew grass so the raw earth and human forms lying in anguish nourished new growth.