3 Philadelphia-area museums collaborate on a retrospective of artist Syd Carpenter

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Well into a 50-year career as an artist, sculptor Syd Carpenter still takes big chances. She has said she prefers the glorious failure over a safe success.

“My studio is a dangerous place,” Carpenter recently said during a talk at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen in there,” she said. “I often don’t know the process, because everything I do is a new event. I have to invent it.”

The drive to take risks extends into coordinating a retrospective exhibition spreading across three Philadelphia-area museums: the Woodmere Museum in Chestnut Hill, the Maguire Museum at St. Joseph’s University in Lower Merion and the Berman Museum in Collegeville.

“That I have this opportunity, which as far as I know is pretty unique, to have a retrospective that’s spread across three institutions, and have it produced on the level that it has been produced, that to me is humbling to say the least,” Carpenter told WHYY News.

“Coordinating three shows and feeling, ‘Is this going to be a three-ring circus or is this going to be a story of my work?’” she said. “I finished the installation of the last show up at the Berman and it was just, ‘Damn!’ I was so happy.”

The director and CEO of the Woodmere, William Valerio, said now is the time for a large-scale retrospective of Carpenter’s work, which for decades has dug deeply into personal experience and African American history to produce a body of work that is equally intimate and expansive.

“There’s this broad footprint that Syd has, and it’s complicated,” Valerio said. “There’s a strength there, but we want to be able to spin it out and look at it more deeply. What are the stories that this artist is telling over and over, but in different ways that change over time.”

A maternal connection to the land

The three exhibitions take on different aspects of Carpenter’s artistic life.

The largest is “Syd Carpenter: Planting in Place, Time and Memory” at the Woodmere, which traces Carpenter’s creative trajectory from the 1970s, shortly after she earned a degree at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, up to work she was doing in the early 2000s.

The show traces Carpenter’s exploration of what clay can do, starting with the most fundamental form of pottery: the pot. In the 1980s, the artist threw pots that pushed ideas of volume, texture and a relationship with gravity. Those evolved into misshapen heads, the “Child” series, which then morphed into spiraling organic shapes that hang on walls.

“I like to look at objects and ask the question: What is it doing?” Carpenter told Valerio in an interview for the exhibition catalogue. “If a mug is just sitting there on a table, how is it sitting? Is it sitting low? Is it sitting high? Is it reaching? Is it spiraling? Is it tilting? I always think objects have gestures.”

Many of those spiraling, reaching and tilting sculptural gestures are born from the lives of plants. Carpenter is a committed gardener, and her home in Mt. Airy has been profiled many times by gardening enthusiasts. Her connection to the land spurred research into African American farming heritage, leading to sculptural pieces that are abstract representations of specific Black farms in the South.

Her interest in farming is rooted in her own mother, Ernestine Carpenter of Pittsburgh, herself a gardener and a deep source of inspiration.

“I’m embodying her in that work. It’s always going to be her,” Carpenter said at Berman. “There’s a warmth there. It’s not about professionalism and accomplishment or achievement. It’s about this sense of sharing these experiences and these opportunities with her.”

For about a decade, Carpenter has been channeling her mother in an ongoing series of sculpture works, the “Mother Pins,” featuring old-fashioned clothesline pins Ernestine used to hang laundry.

The curvature of clothing pins as a feminine shape, and their function is bursting with emotion.

“Whenever I’m traveling and looking at things, I notice how the clothesline with clothes on it is still an important practice, a necessity,” she said. “But it’s still, to me, the loveliness of it. To see those clothes blowing. It feels like a home.”

Lifting her friends up with her

The Maguire Museum joins Carpenter with her peers. “Re-Union” is a group show of five Black women artists who came up together in the ‘70s: Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, Winnie Owens-Hart and Carpenter.

“They’ve been my crew,” Carpenter said.

All the artists went to art school in Philadelphia in the 1970s at either Tyler School of Art or Philadelphia College of Art — later University of the Arts — except for Musasama, who graduated from City College of New York. The artists discovered each other through mutual admiration of their work.

Although they never united as an artist group or collective, formally or informally, their relationships have endured for decades. In a group discussion recorded for the exhibition catalogue, the artists describe introducing one another to influential dealers and curators, bringing one another into exhibition opportunities and generally looking out for each other.

“During the pandemic, when I lived in a senior community and was incredibly isolated from my four sisters, who I only saw on Zoom … it’s Syd that invited me to come stay in her house,” said Musasama. “She’s been healing, she’s been loving, she’s been caring, and she made me feel whole when I didn’t.”

Each artist’s creative practice is remarkably different from the others. For example, Owens-Hart is rooted in traditional African pottery techniques; Moonelis’ installation works are based on neurological networks of the human brain; Jackson Jarvis makes large-scale mixed media wall hangings evoking history and ecology.

“Re-Union” highlights a community of mutually supportive artists in Carpenter’s retrospective. Maguire associate curator Erin Downey said the three-museum collaboration allows for such examinations.

“That’s what museums in this area are starting to do. We’re starting to connect with each other,” she said. “It’s about highlighting these stories and these artists and really enhancing and maximizing the impact by working together.”

‘If you don’t own land, you are powerless’

The Berman Museum at Ursinus is the most dramatic of the three venues. The gallery’s high ceiling is supported by tell white columns. The dark room uses spotlights to highlight the works, and a farmyard shack has been built inside as a multimedia installation featuring projected photography of Black farms Carpenter has visited in the South.

“Syd Carpenter: Home Bound in Wood, Steel and Clay” features the artist’s most recent work, which still embodies ideas she has been carrying for decades, particularly Black stewardship of land.

“One of the things that I like to emphasize is, they must own it. In this country if you don’t own land, you are powerless,” she said. “Especially if you’re doing something that’s farming and gardening. That is an important symbolic if not actual physical indication of vitality and spirit and strength.”

The pieces on view continue Carpenter’s “Mother Pins” motif, with the clothespins becoming larger and more formidable. “Mother Pin Ascending” lifts the ancestral maternal protector to monumental scale.

“The ideas that she’s exploring in terms of placemaking and community, the importance of being on the land and owning land and describing name to place, that’s something she has been investigating for, at this point, many years,” said Berman director Lauren McCardel. “Those conversations are only becoming more relevant as some of those issues are in jeopardy for a lot of people in this country.”

“It’s a timely exhibition, but these are not topical issues for her,” she said. “These have been core to her practice for a long time.”

“Re-Union” at the Maguire Museum will be on view until March 29. “Syd Carpenter: Home Bound in Wood, Steel and Clay” at the Berman Museum will be on view until April 5. “Syd Carpenter: Planting in Place, Time and Memory” will be on view until May 24.