Shelley Spector is a people person—her art is figurative in form, human in content. It celebrates lives and legacies. It is joyful, guileless, clear, direct, colorful, and robust. Spector's creations merge the sensibilities, techniques, and strengths of fine art, folk art, and craft. She works within the realms of collage, assemblage, found object—with installation now added to her repertoire—putting these approaches in the service of art that marries humor with pathos and is always personable: warm, witty, and engaging.
Through her work, Spector has long explored identity and memory. She explains, “I’m lost in my memories. I’m inspired by recollections. Each of my sculptures is born in the past.” I Am on Your Shoulders expands her explorations and reveries. In it, Spector realizes a long-held goal: to create an all-encompassing, interactive "total environment" of sight, sound, motion, and meaning. Her work has been evolving in this direction for several years—her most recent exhibitions have presented thematically cohesive groups of paintings and sculptures that functioned as both individual, discrete works of art and elements of a unified environment—but has never before incorporated the interactive, multimedia, and kinetic elements that distinguish I Am on Your Shoulders.
Spector searches what is personal, and finds the universal. I Am on Your Shoulders reflects Spector’s own story, her experiences and concerns—losing her “deli man” father while she was still a girl; a love of music and movement instilled by her dance-teacher mother; the tragic death in 2004 of her friend and fellow artist Rebecca Westcott; and the rhythms, rituals, and worldviews of her Jewish heritage. It is informed by Jewish memorial practices (such as marking the anniversary—or jahrzeit—of a loved one’s death with special prayers in synagogue, candles lit in the home, and pebbles placed atop headstones) and coincides with the holiday of Yom Kippur, a day of repentance and remembrance. But I Am on Your Shoulders also accompanies the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II—an experience that shaped the lives of her parents and grandparents, exemplary representatives of a cohort dubbed America’s “greatest generation”—and evinces themes central to all people: remembrance, honor, and mortality.
Spector says that I Am on Your Shoulders is “about the lives of those who are no longer with us, rather than their deaths. We are their legacy. As we live, they live.” The show occupies both floors of the Painted Bride, using the space both literally and metaphorically. For Spector, the first-floor is “life on earth.” The multi-component, multi-sensory installation on the second floor is titled Above the Clouds.
I Am on Your Shoulders—the tower of twenty-two ascending and mutually supportive figures that welcomes visitors to this exhibition and gives the show its name—evokes Northwest Native American totem poles, the simultaneously high-modern and primitivist search for infinity and transcendence contained in Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Columns,” and—most pointedly—a sculpture by Bettye Saar, beloved by Spector, that conjures poignantly the lives of three generations of African American women in a trio of stacked washboards.
Groves of painted olive trees—given added dimension with raised, wooden leaves—cultivate a host of associations on the exhibition’s first-floor walls. In Jewish tradition, the Torah is referred to as the “Tree of Life,” and many synagogues reflect this theme in their architecture and fittings. General parlance refers to genealogy as one’s “family tree,” and the olive tree is a universal symbol of peace, fertility, and longevity. Spector has added the names of those she remembers on some of the olive leaves, and invites visitors to register their memories by doing the same.
Ten figures—built largely from layers of raw wood, much as a tree is the sum of its rings—face east toward the rear of the first-floor exhibition space. Eight members of this Minyan—the quorum of ten traditionally required for recitation of the Kaddish, the life-affirming prayer for those who live in memory—display (re)collections of timeworn objects in their glass torsos. Two are empty, awaiting objects and notes inscribed with the stories, memories, and dreams of those who care to join the minyan.
One ascends to Above the Clouds, walking amidst a bright blue, billowing sky through which endearing spirits seemingly are borne aloft on the bittersweet lilt of klezmer music (with further propulsion provided by the electric mobiles from which they are suspended, powered by disco-ball motors). Parents, loved ones, friends, mentors, heroes—we marvel at them, while they watch over us.
Matt Singer
[Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art at Congregation Rodeph Shalom]
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