When entering the United States Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica, one must relinquish both passport and cell phone. A well manicured and intensely air conditioned complex carved out of the Liguanea area of the city, the embassy was built in 2006 and is one of America’s largest consular offices. Inside, past the metal detector and a delightfully awkward trio of Obama, Biden, and Kerry portraits, is maybe the last place you might expect to find a newly-installed, 41-foot-tall mural by one of America’s greatest living artists. But thanks to the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE), a massive site-specific work by Dorothea Rockburne now calls the embassy’s atrium home.
“Folded Sky, Homage to Colin Powell” was commissioned to honor the former secretary of state, whose family hails from Jamaica, though he was born in the Bronx.
“When FAPE asked me to do this commission honoring Colin Powell, I could do whatever I wanted, but I knew immediately that I wanted to do the sky over Jamaica on the night he was born,” Rockburne told me recently as we sat in front of her work, which had been installed just days before.
“When studying art history, a lot of people have painted skies,” the 81-year-old artist said. “Constable painted some fantastic skies and Turner of course. Many skies were painted in the Renaissance depicting Jesus and the three kings. My most important reference, however, began with Egyptian art. There are many paintings of skies in Egyptian tomb paintings. There’s the goddess Nut, queen of the skies, doing a back bend over the ceiling of a tomb I saw in Egypt in the winter of 1980. The milk for the Milky Way is shooting out of her upturned breasts, which are pointing at the sky, spewing shooting stars, which are forming the Milky Way.”
Rockburne has long explored astronomy and mathematical concepts in her work. Since studying with renowned mathematician Max Dehn at Black Mountain College beginning in the early ’50s and continuing through the present, she has investigated ways to visualize geometric topology — a branch of mathematics that, according to Wikipedia, is “the study of manifolds and maps between them.” The title of the new work, “Folded Sky,” refers to a cosmological, topological concept. “The sky is a continuous surface that envelops the earth, the universe,” Rockburne explained. “They think of the sky as folded.”
“When you stand close, and directly in front of the work, you have the sense that the night time sky is floating over your head,” Rockburne said. “Topologists are not so interested in the planets or the stars. They are interested in the space in between, which they consider a continuous surface in the universe. I am attempting to deal with that concept in my own way. I’m not a mathematician or an astronomer but, as an artist, I somehow wanted to add to an art dialogue that has to do with astronomy and how other artists have painted the stars and the sky. Also, I am trying, in this painting, to invent a new perspective without using Renaissance diagonal perspective lines. When standing directly under the work, the viewer has the feeling that they are being engulfed by a painting.”
Rockburne’s mural has been 10 years in the making. “This project came up to us in 2003 when General Powell was secretary of state and long-admired by our organization,” said Jennifer Duncan, director of FAPE. “So it was a project we took on and we immediately thought of Dorothea. Our chairman has been dear friends with her for years and had introduced them [Powell and Rockburne] and spent time with them, so we thought Dorothea was a natural fit for this project, given their relationship.”
The fact that Powell is a contentious figure in many circles is not lost on Rockburne, but the artist is not concerned with the political controversies surrounding his legacy. “When I began in earnest to work on this painting in 2009, Colin Powell was being criticized,” she said. “My liberal friends said to me, ‘You’re doing a mural honoring Colin Powell?’ And they made a face. I said, ‘Yes. I admire him.’ I feel like it is a great pleasure to make a work that honors him, a military man who sought peace, presenting him in a more eternal light.”
FAPE, which was founded in 1986, is remarkable less for its mission (to give permanent artworks to US embassies) and more for the caliber of contemporary artists who agree to create works for just the price of fabrication. In the past five years, a Joel Shapiro was installed in Guangzhou, a Lynda Benglis went to Mumbai, an Ellsworth Kelly went to Beijing, and a Sol LeWitt went to Berlin, among others. This is, in large part, due to the efforts of Robert Storr, who chairs FAPE’s volunteer advisory committee and also happens to be the dean of the Yale School of Art.
Besides these site-specific commissions, FAPE has also built original print and photography collections that contain works from Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Julie Mehretu, and many other familiar names. This summer, the first comprehensive exhibition of all of FAPE’s efforts will be on view at the Museum at Guild Hall in East Hampton, from June 21 through July 27.
Recent acquisitions, like Carrie Mae Weems’s 2014 photograph “Echoes For Marian,” which pictures the artist standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, will be on view, but FAPE’s real work is, of course, spread across embassies around the world, where the artworks are experienced on a day-to-day basis by bureaucrats, not museum-goers. FAPE hopes to organize a trip down to Jamaica during Art Basel Miami so art-worlders can get a glimpse of Rockburne’s mural, but for now at least, the work mostly exists for the benefit of those working away in the consulate.
“When I was a kid I read this quote by Leonardo DaVinci, who said, ‘Don’t copy nature. Copy the ways of nature,’” Rockburne told me over dinner. “And I really took that to my heart a very long time ago, and that’s actually what I’m doing.”
