This building was the first in the United States constructed exclusively as an art museum
when it was begun in 1859 to house William Wilson Corcoran’s art collection. The museum
nearly fell to the wrecker’s ball in the 1960s, then was restored and reopened in 1972 as the
Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. Now another critical renovation has renewed the building,
ensuring it will continue to play a central role in what Corcoran called the “development of
American genius.”
WONDER celebrates this commitment by emphasizing the value art museums bring to our
lives as places to encounter the unexpected, to lose oneself in awe and amazement, and to
experience wonder. The nine featured artists inspire this enchanted looking through their
passionate approach to making and materials, which are core concerns of the Renwick
Gallery. They remind us of the importance of coming to the museum to witness art firsthand
and draw attention to the building itself as the museum’s most enticing object. In filling the
Renwick’s galleries with new wonders, the artists reaffirm the auspicious carving above the
museum’s front entrance: “Dedicated to Art.”
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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A Sense of Wonder
People have debated the meaning and value of wonder for more than two thousand years. It has been
described as everything from the origins of our understanding of the universe, to how we respond to
something defying categorization, to a naïve emotion delaying us from reason, to a shock to the heart,
and a surprise of the soul.
Jennifer Angus
born Edmonton, Canada 1961; resides Madison, WI
In the Midnight Garden, 2015
cochineal, various insects, and mixed media
Courtesy of Jennifer Angus
Angus’s genius is the embrace of what is wholly natural, if unexpected. Yes, the insects are real, and no,
she has not altered them in any way except to position their wings and legs. The species in this gallery are
not endangered, but in fact are quite abundant, primarily in Malaysia, Thailand, and Papua New Guinea, a
corner of the world where Nature seems to play with greater freedom. The pink wash is derived from the
cochineal insect living on cacti in Mexico, where it has long been prized as the best source of the color
red. By altering the context in which we encounter such species, Angus startles us into recognition of
what has always been a part of our world.
Chakaia Booker
born Newark, NJ 1953; resides New York City
ANONYMOUS DONOR, 2015
rubber tires and stainless steel
Courtesy of Chakaia Booker
Booker was inspired to explore tires as a material while walking the streets of New York in the 1980s,
when retreads and melted pools of rubber from car fires littered the urban landscape. By massing,
slashing, and reworking a material we see daily yet never fully consider, she jolts us out of complacency
to grasp these materials for what they are: a natural resource marshaled through astonishingly complex
channels into a product of great convenience and superabundance.
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Gabriel Dawe
born Mexico City, Mexico 1973; resides Dallas, TX
Plexus A1, 2015
thread, wood, hooks, and steel
Courtesy of the artist and Conduit Gallery
Dawe’s architecturally scaled weavings are often mistaken for fleeting rays of light. It is an appropriate
trick of the eye, as the artist was inspired to use thread in this fashion by memories of the skies above
Mexico City and East Texas, his childhood and current homes, respectively. The material and vivid colors
also recall the embroideries everywhere in production during Dawe’s upbringing.
Tara Donovan
born New York City 1969; resides New York City
Untitled, 2014
styrene index cards, metal, wood, paint, and glue
Courtesy of Pace Gallery
Employing mundane materials such as toothpicks, straws, Styrofoam cups, scotch tape, and index cards,
Donovan gathers up the things we think we know, transforming the familiar into the unrecognizable
through overwhelming accumulation. The resulting enigmatic landscapes force us to wonder just what it
is we are looking at and how to respond. The mystery, and the potential for any material in her hands to
capture it, prompts us to pay better attention to our surroundings, permitting the everyday to catch us up
again.
Patrick Dougherty
born Oklahoma City, OK 1945; resides Chapel Hill, NC
Shindig, 2015
willow saplings
Courtesy of Patrick Dougherty
Dougherty has crisscrossed the world weaving sticks into marvelous architectures. Each structure is
unique, an improvised response to its surroundings, as reliant on the materials at hand as the artist’s
wishes: the branches tell him which way they want to bend. This give and take lends vitality to
Dougherty’s work, so that walls and spires are a record of gestures and wills. Finding the right sticks
remains a constant challenge, and part of the adventure of the art-making sends him scouring over the
forgotten corners of land where plants grow wild and full of possibility.
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John Grade
born Minneapolis, MN 1970; resides Seattle, WA
Middle Fork (Cascades), 2015
reclaimed old-growth western red cedar
Courtesy of John Grade
To commemorate the Renwick’s reopening, Grade selected a hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains east
of Seattle that is approximately 150 years old—the same age as this building. His team created a full
plaster cast of the tree (without harming it), then used the cast as a mold to build a new tree out of a
half-million segments of reclaimed cedar. Hundreds of volunteers assisted Grade, hand carving each piece
to match the contours of the original tree. After the exhibition closes, Middle Fork (Cascades) will be
carried back to the hemlock’s location and left on the forest floor, where it will gradually return to the
earth. Grade’s second tree, Middle Fork (Arctic), is on view downstairs in the Palm Court.
Middle Fork (Arctic),
2015
Shortly after completing Middle Fork (Cascades)—the larger of his two trees, on view upstairs— Grade
traveled to northern Alaska, where he was dropped by bush plane at the fringes of the tree line to search
for the elusive balsam poplar. After several days’ travel by raft and foot, he located and cast a specimen
using the same technique as for the Cascades hemlock. Astonishingly, given its stunted size, the balsam
poplar used as a model is the same age as the hemlock re-created upstairs, about 150 years old. The
difference in its scale is attributable to the harsh climate in the rocky plains just below the Beaufort Sea.
Janet Echelman
born Tampa, FL 1966; resides Brookline, MA
1.8, 2015
knotted and braided fiber with programmable lighting and wind movement above printed textile flooring
Courtesy of Janet Echelman, Inc.
Echelman’s woven sculpture corresponds to a map of the energy released across the Pacific Ocean during
the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, one of the most devastating natural disasters in recorded history.
The event was so powerful it shifted the earth on its axis and shortened the day, March 11, 2011, by 1.8
millionths of a second, lending this work its title. Waves taller than the 100-foot length of this gallery
ravaged the west coast of Japan, reminding us that what is wondrous can equally be dangerous.
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Maya Lin
born Athens, OH 1959; resides New York City
Folding the Chesapeake, 2015
marbles and adhesive
Courtesy of Maya Lin Studio
Growing up in Ohio in the 1960s, Lin watched her father participate in the fledgling studio glass
movement then gathering steam in nearby Toledo. The marbles used in this installation are the same
industrial fiberglass product Henry Huan Lin and other glass-blowing pioneers experimented with then,
which were soon abandoned by artists as technical knowledge matured. Folding the Chesapeake marks
their first use by Maya Lin and a new chapter in her decades-long investigation of natural wonders. By
shaping rivers, fields, canyons, and mountains within the museum, Lin shifts our attention to their
outdoor counterparts, sharpening our focus on the need for their conservation.
Leo Villareal
born Albuquerque, NM 1967; resides New York City
Volume (Renwick), 2015
white LEDs, mirror-finished stainless steel, custom software, and electrical hardware
Leo Villareal, courtesy CONNERSMITH
Only part of Villareal’s artwork is visible in the materials suspended above the staircase. This hardware
serves primarily as a vehicle for the visual manifestation of code—an artist-written algorithm employing
the binary system of 1s and 0s telling each LED when to turn on or off. This simple command creates
lighting sequences that will never repeat exactly as before. It also changes how we think of code, from a
line of characters that can be read on any screen to an object that must be witnessed in the museum.
Wall quotes:
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion
which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it can no longer
wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.”
—Albert Einstein, 1931
“The only reason for bringing together works of art in a public place is that . . . they produce in
us a kind of exalted happiness. For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle: we pass on
refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky.”
—Kenneth Clark, 1954
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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“Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things
remote.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837
Wonder—is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not—
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt—
—Emily Dickinson, 1874
“It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in
the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about
the great matters too, for example, about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the
stars and about the origin of the universe.”
—Aristotle, 4th century BCE
“Wonder is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the
sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart suffers a
systole.”
—Saint Albertus Magnus, 13th century
“Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, the broad
flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and they neglect to marvel
at themselves.”
—Saint Augustine, about 400 CE
“It is not understanding that destroys wonder, it is familiarity.”
—John Stuart Mill, 1865
“The mere knowledge that such a work could be created makes me twice the person I was.”
—Goethe, 1787
“All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I
saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle Ingenia of men in
foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.”
—Albrecht Dürer, 1520
“At the farthest reaches of the world often occur new marvels and wonders, as though Nature
plays with greater freedom secretly at the edges of the world than she does openly and nearer
us in the middle of it.”
—Ranulf Higden, 14th century
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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