Athena Tacha’s art studio is brimming with hundreds of works, the tangible results of decades of creative labor. Laid out on tables and rows of well-organized shelves are magnificent wearable body sculptures created from organic materials, photo collages mapping the earth’s extreme topographies — and her body’s aging and changes over time (Tacha is now 89). There are delicate abstract prints made from mushroom spores, and models and drawings from public art competitions, 37 of which she built in plazas and recreation areas from Alaska to Florida.
But in mid-September, the art historian Richard E. Spear will sell the studio’s free-standing building near the University of Maryland, College Park, to commercial realtors. Tacha, his wife of 60 years, has Alzheimer’s disease and uses a wheelchair, and Spear, who is 85, made the painful decision that it no longer made sense to maintain her studio. With the clock ticking on the closing of the building’s sale, Spear is making a full-court press to find good homes for Tacha’s pioneering artworks from across her long, prolific career, produced largely outside the commercial art market.
“I managed to place some, but it’s a dent in what there is,” said Spear, a Baroque specialist and former professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he and Tacha taught for decades until they retired in 1998 and moved to Washington, D.C. (Full disclosure: I took Spear’s class in Baroque art at Oberlin in 1985, but had not seen him since my commencement).
Spear has offered significant pieces as gifts to friends, former students and museums nationwide and in Greece, where Tacha grew up, and has found takers from the Yale University Art Gallery, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine and the National Gallery in Athens, among other institutions.
Kristen Hileman, a curator and former graduate student of Spear’s at the University of Maryland, connected him with colleagues at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., who are now attempting to fast track their acquisition processes.
As a student, Hileman found Spear’s “originality” seminar, spanning ancient Roman copies to the conceptual photography of Sherrie Levine, — to be eye opening. After she was invited to her professor’s home, and met Tacha, “I understood how a Baroque scholar could have such insight into contemporary art,” said Hileman, who loved how the couple complemented each other. “He’s been such an advocate for her work.”
But many of Spear’s offers to institutions have gone unanswered.
He has decided against renting a storage unit for work he can’t place — what would be “just kicking the bucket down the road,” Spear said. “I’m not young and there’s no one to leave anything to.”
For anyone charged with how to handle a lifetime of a loved one’s possessions, such decisions are heart-wrenching, and familiar. When it’s the material legacy of an underrecognized artist like Tacha, working in active dialogue with the ideas of her time, the potential loss is art history’s as well.
“This is a huge issue, work that unfortunately ends up in the dumpster, by artists who’ve had substantial and impactful careers but may not be market recognized,” said Christa Blatchford, executive director of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, which is committed to helping artists with long-term planning to preserve their legacies.
Even when a well-known artist places all their remaining work with a major museum, that is no guarantee of visibility. The Pop artist Marisol left her entire estate in 2016 to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, resulting in new scholarship and a four city-touring retrospective that closed last month. But the legacy of the minimalist sculptor Scott Burton has languished since he bequeathed his work on his deathbed in 1989 to the Museum of Modern Art.
Blatchford applauded Spear’s advocacy for Tacha, including documenting his wife’s output of more than 1,600 works in a catalogue raisonné and donating her papers to the Archives of American Art, the type of thing the foundation recommends to artists. Blatchford suggested that he consider other ways to seed future scholarship, such as creating a fellowship in Tacha’s name “as broad as studying public art or as specific as studying her work within Oberlin’s art history department.”
Anne Collins Goodyear, co-director of Bowdoin’s museum, has acquired 17 works from across Tacha’s career for its collection. “Museums have a responsibility to protect the legacies of artists in a way that no single human can ever do,” she said.
As a graduate student, studying the intersection of art and science, Goodyear wrote of Tacha’s first public proposal from 1974, an unrealized monumental terraced sculpture sited along the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass., which echoed the water’s transformation from liquid to ice in its curvilinear and crystalline forms and was designed as a place for people to congregate.
The river’s “flow took a special meaning in my mind, and led me to a totally new method of composing, resembling that of music,” Tacha wrote at the time. She and Spear traveled to Oberlin last year for her 88th birthday to celebrate their gift of the 15-foot cast aluminum model of “Charles River Step Sculpture (Homage to Heraclitus)” to the college.
Tacha first came to Oberlin in 1960 on a Fulbright grant to study art history, after getting her M.F.A. in Greece. She returned in 1963, with a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris, to work as a curator at Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum while making experimental kinetic sculptures.
Tacha’s colleagues purposely seated her next to Spear in 1964 at a dinner when he was interviewing for a teaching position. “It took,” Spear said. They married the following year.
The artist Mary Miss remembers Tacha including her in the 1973 exhibition “Four Young Americans” at the Allen, along with Ree Morton, Ann McCoy and Jackie Winsor. “It was a really big deal for all of us,” said Miss, now 81 and renowned for her earthworks. That same year, Tacha shifted to teaching sculpture, and the feminist curator Lucy Lippard included her in an exhibition alongside the land artists Nancy Holt and Agnes Denes at the California Institute of the Arts.
“We are a generation of women who had a hard time being taken seriously,” Miss said, “intent on remaking the art world to reflect our interests, our experiences, our history in a way we felt wasn’t being represented by the all-male cast of characters.” She lamented that she and her friends were having to face “what happens to all this stuff” after a lifetime of work.
The director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Christopher Bedford, who was an Oberlin student of Spear’s in the mid-90s, remembers Tacha as “a luminary.”
She is “a victim of the fact that the history of land art and women hasn’t been properly rewritten,” he said.
At Oberlin, Tacha built her first public piece in 1975, called “Streams,” into an incline beside a creek, which I discovered while exploring with my camera for a photography class. I don’t think I realized at the time that this little amphitheater with syncopated stairs interspersed with groupings of boulders was an artwork, just that it was an unexpected, magical and contemplative environment where I spent a memorable afternoon.
“My work needs to be walked on and lived with in order to become fully communicable,” Tacha wrote, driven by the democratic ideal that her art should be accessible in everyday life, not just in museums and galleries.
Among her most beloved public commissions is “Connections” (1992), a sculpted landscape of arcing and intersecting planted terraces, defined by low stone walls and gently rising in a two-acre park in Philadelphia. Today, a volunteer “Friends” group with more than 120 members helps the city steward the well-used park. (Spear has donated all the drawings for “Connections” to Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, one of nine institutions to accept works related to Tacha’s nearby outdoor installations.)
While 28 of these public works remain accessible in cities including Washington, D.C., Trenton, Cleveland and Louisville, most of Tacha’s wearable sculptures exhibited in 1994 at Franklin Furnace in New York have yet to find a home. Imagined as armor and shields to protect vulnerable bodies from cancer, rape and homelessness, these works were made, paradoxically, from fragile found materials including feathers, pine cones, shells, hummingbird wings and acacia pods.
Hileman, the curator, acknowledged they pose archival challenges for museums but sees a silver lining for those that step up. “We can expand our expertise in preserving different types of artist materials this way and maybe learn something that will help us collect other artists as well,” she said.
Spear now spends his days contacting institutions, packing and shipping works to new caretakers and visiting Tacha each afternoon in the memory care facility of their retirement home. She speaks in what sounds more like Greek than English. “I’m never sure,” Spear said.
He knows the end is inevitable.
The last piece Tacha designed, in 2022, was their memorial, which has been installed in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., where their ashes will be interred. Two conjoined granite blocks have tendrils of steps descending in multiple directions. On one face of the side-by-side rectilinear forms are Spear’s and Tacha’s names, occupations and birth years; on the other, the words “United” and “Forever.”
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