A storm brews in Chicago: Manglano-Ovalle's 'La Tormenta' dedicated at immigration center
[author:summermonica Public time:Mar 28, 2007] |
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Full circles are usually satisfying things, but Chicago artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's attendance at Tuesday's ceremony dedicating the newly renovated federal building at 101 W. Congress brought with it decidedly mixed feelings.
On Tuesday, the artist's "La Tormenta" ("The Storm"), a pair of massive, titanium-clad cloud forms hanging from a skylight above the central atrium of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' Chicago branch, was dedicated as part of a ceremony at which 14 people, about half from Latin America, were to take their oath of citizenship.
It was a proud moment for the artist, a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient and a professor at the University of Chicago, but also one of considerable inner conflict. "La Tormenta," based on meteorological data about a violent real-life storm digitally collected by researchers at the University of Illinois, is a literal representation of the interior of a cumulonimbus. This particular storm had barreled through Southern Illinois a few years ago, bursting into a damaging series of thunderclouds and tornadoes.
But the sculpture, as the artist explained in a Sun-Times interview before the ceremony, was also a symbol of another kind of storm: that of immigration.
For years, the idea of stormy weather had been connected in his head to the growing political fracas over traffic across the U.S. border with Mexico. "When I first started working on the idea several years ago, the El Nino effect was very much in the news, as was the metal fence they put up in San Diego to keep out immigrants," said Manglano-Ovalle. "You suddenly had Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather giving daily weather reports on El Nino -- an American invention, which translates as 'the brown child' -- along with reports on illegal immigration. El Nino, see, was the brown child who's birthed offland and crosses north of the border without permission."
"La Tormenta" seemed all too germane in an immigration building, and carried considerable personal meaning.
"I share an experience with the people who go through here," he said. "The relationship of naturalized citizens to their new homeland is a very complicated one. We're very, very conscious of it in a way that I don't think native Americans -- people who received citizenship by birth -- understand. No one goes into a building like this without a great degree of hope and ambition and anxiety. The storm literalizes that."
'Something menacing'
There were other forces at work in Manglano-Ovalle's inner storm. He had been asked in 2000 by the General Services Administration to submit a proposal, in part because of his background as a naturalized citizen. The GSA, which manages federal buildings, awarded him a commission worth about $160,000. But other officials -- those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was reorganized after 9/11 as part of the Homeland Security Department -- raised red flags.
The INS never asked Manglano-Ovalle about his inspiration for "La Tormenta," but it seems the agency had an inkling of bad weather ahead.
"Some people were concerned about it being a storm, and about what kind of interpretations could be pulled from that," said Michael Finn, a fine arts specialist at the GSA. "They are a lot of different connotations that come with a storm, and some are negative -- the idea of something menacing, something destructive. But we argued that at the same time, a storm is the carrier of water, the carrier of life, the carrier of vitality."
Source: http://www.msn.com
POSTED BY KEVIN NANCE
Printed From:http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200703/1175088770.html
Source:Free Press Release
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