New UMF public art project opens

FARMINGTON – For starters, the UMF Art Gallery was originally a barn.

The three-story barn, attached by ell to the Main Street-facing house of classic New England colonial style, is set smack dab in the middle of a farming town that, this time of year, is surrounded by electric-green pastures and autumn’s fiery hues.

It’s no wonder that when installation artist Sallie McCorkle from Oklahoma State University was given the assignment to create a public work of art at UMF’s Art Gallery, “rural life” screamed the obvious choice.

“The building is art and it’s what got me started to create the installation,” McCorkle said, surrounded by wooden pedestals that normally hold the gallery’s art up for inspection, but are now painted with fall-bright orange, dirt brown, sprig green and barn red.

She has been creating this work of art since Sunday, with help from UMF students and her students back in Oklahoma, from items and details she found in the gallery. The pedestals, triangular window coverings and the metal pipe wall dividers and railings are all fair game. So, too, will be the students who regularly art-sit the gallery’s work when its open to the public.

Capturing a local sense of place by using naturally found objects for her public art projects is McCorkle’s modus operandi. The professor of art at OSU and director of the Doel Reed Center for the Arts, arrives on whatever the scene and creates site-specific art work.

Art projects in this country include 1993’s “The Barn Raising,” a tall, red, partial frame of a barn erected at Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Penn. and 2001’s “

Remembering September 11th: A Memorial Sculpture,” she designed with students at Penn State University, University Park, Penn.

“Consuming Nature ‘Forest Art Path,’” Darmstadt, Germany in 2002. McCorkle’s work here included gold-gilding branches, logs and rocks found on site and marked with bar codes to identify in German and English. More U.S. exhibits include, “Women Artists/Women Subjects” at Lincoln Center in New York City and “Project Enduring LOOK” at the Chicago Art Institute.

Downstairs several students were busy painting green reminiscent of those green, green pastures, onto long plastic pipes. The addition of green piping will extend and connect to the gallery’s permanent ones, now painted green too, of course, and more found gallery pieces.

Piping will also run through or into a number of the 22 bales of hay she’s using to represent the students who have helped with this project. Those students who are working at a fast pace to finish up this installation in time for the 5 p.m. opening reception today.

Once completed, the gallery building itself will serve as part of the show and the five-day process to create it has provided students with a collaborative art workshop experience.

“It all ties into the history of the building,” McCorkle said. “Both pleasing and comical.” Comical, she found, were the names of the paint color chips found at the Farmers’ Union store she used to say rural place here. Nevermind fall-bright orange, dirt brown, sprig green and barn red. Instead, orange is “Clownfish,” red is “Dried Bouquet,” green is “Island Paradise,” and brown, well, brown is “Beehive.” 

The exhibition runs noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, from Thursday, Oct. 7 through Sunday, Nov. 7. The public is also invited to attend the exhibit’s opening reception at the UMF Art Gallery from 5-7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 7, featuring a gallery talk by the artist at 5:30 p.m. Read more about McCorkle here.