The American Artist and Water Reclamation
1972–1974
Venues
Exhibition InfoOrganized by the Bureau of Water Reclamation, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Washington, D.C.National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Dane G. Hansen Foundation, Logan, Kans.
Tennessee Fine Arts Center, Nashville
Chattanooga Art Association, Tenn.
Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, Mont.
Caterpillar Tractor Co., Peoria, Ill.
South Dakota Memorial Art Center, Brookings, S. Dak.
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Calif.
Southeast Arkansas Arts and Sciences Center, Pine Bluff, Ark.
Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Tex.
Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum, Seattle
March 25, 1972
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May 28, 1972
Dane G. Hansen Foundation, Logan, Kans.
May 5, 1973
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June 3, 1973
Tennessee Fine Arts Center, Nashville
August 11, 1973
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September 9, 1973
Chattanooga Art Association, Tenn.
October 6, 1973
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October 28, 1973
Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, Mont.
November 17, 1973
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December 16, 1973
Caterpillar Tractor Co., Peoria, Ill.
January 5, 1974
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February 3, 1974
South Dakota Memorial Art Center, Brookings, S. Dak.
February 23, 1974
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March 24, 1974
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Calif.
April 13, 1974
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May 12, 1974
Southeast Arkansas Arts and Sciences Center, Pine Bluff, Ark.
June 1, 1974
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June 30, 1974
Witte Memorial Museum, San Antonio, Tex.
July 20, 1974
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August 18, 1974
Charles and Emma Frye Art Museum, Seattle
October 26, 1974
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November 24, 1974
Curated by John DeWitt
The traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue presented five works on paper by Richard Diebenkorn and commissioned by the United States Bureau of Reclamation and Department of the Interior.
"FEBRUARY 1970: Participates in the Bureau of Reclamation and Department of the Interior’s project to document the water-reclamation sites
in the Salt River Canyon in Arizona and in Colorado; John DeWitt organizes the program. Diebenkorn accepts the offer to survey the area and the commission to create artworks from what he observes, a rare acceptance as he dislikes commissions, considering the trip an opportunity to see the desert landscape aerially. He is flown over the area in a helicopter and takes numerous photographs during the flights. The Lower Colorado works, the first completed series of Ocean Park works on paper, are a result of this trip.
"'The project I was assigned to was the Salt River Canyon, in Arizona,' [recalled Diebenkorn,] we spent five days in a helicopter surveying it. In one place, we landed on the top of a towering pinnacle overlooking the river; the pinnacle actually had a surface of an acre and a half. I did some drawings—or, rather, paintings on paper—there; we were supposed to do documentary drawings, but mine came out as abstract impressions. I think the many paths, or pathlike bands, in my paintings may have something to do with this experience, especially in that wherever there was agriculture going on you could see process—ghosts of former tilled fields, patches of land being eroded. I also saw large areas where the fields were all planted in the same way for the same crop [but] showed unlimited visual variety. It boggled me! There was also circular farming: you could see clusters of concentric circles, made, I guess, by the combines, but they were cut in so many different ways that each was unique, surprising. Each was nuttier than the one before.'" —Chronology from Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 2016)
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