Ann Weber: It begins with a box

As high as they will stand

Cardboard sculptures by Ann Weber at the Palos Verdes Art Center

by Bondo Wyszpolski

“It’s a thankless job,” says Ann Weber, sitting across from me in her Angels Gate studio. “And why do we do it? Well, because of all the things I’d rather be doing there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than making art. And a lot of that has to do with making something out of nothing.”

We’d been running down a list of hurdles that most artists have to navigate if they hope to be shown and seen beyond a group of close friends and family. But, thankless though it often may be, there are those moments when the spotlight finds you, and for Weber that’s going to happen again on Sept. 14 when “Ann Weber: Let the Sunshine In” opens for two months at the Palos Verdes Art Center. She’ll be featured in the Main Gallery, while upstairs the work of another San Pedro artist, Ron Linden, will also be on view. A double-whammy, so to speak, of smart, thought-provoking sculpture and painting.

Weber’s totemic creations will tease and challenge us. Some of them look as if made by Native Americans on a mushroom high, while others resemble artifacts with a Moorish vibe. Alice may have encountered some of these pieces as she rambled through Wonderland. But they could also pass as abstract paintings from the 1950s suddenly morphed into three dimensions.

We discover that we were born two weeks apart (I’m the youngster in this scenario), which means, if it means anything, that we came of age under the same cloud. “We have a lot in common,” Weber says. “There’s a lot that happened in that period.

“For me,” she continues, “that was the reason I became an artist, being born during the time of the Revolution, as I think of it, where things really changed in the late Sixties.” She quickly recites key moments and events that impacted and influenced her: the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the anti-war movement, the back to the land movement, as well as “The Whole Earth Catalog,” the first Earth Day (1970) and ecological awareness. And I’m not even mentioning the explosion of musical styles, the likes of which had never before been seen.

Weber was inspired and motivated and yet…

“I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I started to take a pottery class my last two years of college in Indiana.” It didn’t go well at first, she admits. “But finally I learned how to center and how to throw, and so I always say that my art life started around 1970 when I fell in love twice — with the material of clay and with the person sitting next to me on the potter’s wheel. We joined forces and decided that we were going to open up a pottery business and be potters.”

In the early 1970s, many young people would have been onboard with that.

“There was a lot of attention on the arts and crafts movement then,” Weber says; “there was a resurgence of crafts, with pottery and weaving and glass blowing and the revival of those pre-industrial ways of an occupation.”

She was a hippie in those days, Weber says, or confesses, which I think means she was a free spirit with like-minded friends who had visions of communes and living off the land. However, “Robert and I had to get married because my parents were so upset that we were living together in 1972, and so we said, Well, we’ll get married the day after graduation so that nobody has to make more than one trip.” Weber’s BA degree, from Purdue, was in art history.

The newlyweds drove around the country and came to the West Coast, which they didn’t find suitable, and meanwhile their friends scattered to find their own destinies. Weber and her husband finally settled in Ithaca, not the one where Ulysses lived, but rather the Ithaca that’s in upstate New York, five hours or so from the Big Apple. Why Ithaca? “There were a lot of people that were opening small businesses and starting communes.” Remember, this is in the afterglow of Woodstock and all that it came to represent.

“So we rented an old grocery store on the outskirts of town, built a kiln in the backyard, and divided up the store into a showroom, a workspace, hung a curtain, and lived in the back room. That was the beginning of my art career, as a production potter making functional pottery.”

About 15 years later Weber left Ithaca — with a different husband — for New York City, where she acquired a pottery studio in the meatpacking district. “I did that for a number of years until I burned out. A lot of the craft people that I knew who had been doing craft fairs and selling things in that kind of community setting were getting burned out, too, because we were doing everything — making it, showing it, shipping it, ordering supplies.”

A big change was on the horizon. “I took a class with a ceramics person who had started making more one of a kind things. And he said, Go to graduate school, and go to the West Coast, because that’s where artists are using clay as an art material. So I closed up the pottery business and my husband and I drove across the country.”

Although Weber had applied to various schools, she chose the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland because Viola Frey — known for her larger than life figurative clay sculptures — was in charge of the ceramics department. And it was here that Weber received her Masters of Fine Art degree.
After college and again in the workaday world, Weber knew that she wouldn’t again be setting up a pottery studio because now she was making sculpture and at the same time beginning to experiment with other materials. A new course had been set.

Rebranding

“You’re a beginning artist for the first ten years out of school,” Weber’s teacher had told her. “That was inspiring to me because it meant that whatever your final show was, that wasn’t what you were going to be tied to for the rest of your life. So I experimented with plaster and paper mache, like Nikki de Saint-Phalle. Claes Oldenburg inspired me to work with canvas and cloth. My father had a canvas company in the Midwest, in Indiana, and he sent me a big bolt of fabric. So I was cutting out shapes and stuffing them with chicken wire and plastic bottles, and then I was doing some drawings and some printmaking.”

Weber stayed in Oakland, bouncing around, she says, from little studio to little studio, but never seriously considering returning East because “once you get out here you realize ‘Why would I live anywhere else?’ It’s so beautiful, especially in the Bay Area.”

In that case, why did you leave and move down to L.A.?

“Let me first tell you why I started working in cardboard,” Weber says, so that we don’t bypass a crucial event in her story. “I had moved from studio to studio and I had a big pile of cardboard boxes that had been on the floor.” Remembering Frank Geary’s furniture that he’d constructed from cardboard, Weber thought to herself, Here’s another material to experiment with.

She bought a plier stapler at the hardware store and before long was cutting out strips of cardboard, creating simple shapes, and stapling the sections together.

“That was in 1991, and I never left cardboard. Somehow it just seemed to have infinite possibilities for me.”

Apparently many other artists have or are currently working with cardboard as a medium, and Weber mentions that 20 years ago she was in a group show called “Unboxed” with about 40 artists at a gallery in Walnut Creek.

And were they all doing something like this? I ask, gesturing to the work around us.

“No,” Weber replies, “but it’s just amazing how many things you can do with cardboard.”

Now we can skip ahead a few years.

“You asked how I happened to leave the Bay Area and come down here,” Weber says, “and that happened very serendipitously without a plan. I had run into a good friend of mine who had relocated from the Bay Area to here, and he said, when I saw him back up in the Bay Area, that he got more attention for his paintings in eight months in Los Angeles than in 12 years in San Francisco.

“So I thought, ‘Oh, shoot, I missed the boat. I’m too old, I’m too ingrained; I’ve been here for 30 years; I didn’t leave after graduate school.’ But then I woke up the next morning and I had a different point of view. I said, ‘Well, you’re only 65. Why don’t you go down there and see what it’s like? You know, you got 20 years left.’

“I called my friend who lives in Santa Monica to see if I could stay with her on the couch for a month or two,” Weber continues, “and I put out the word that my studio was available — I had a beautiful studio in the 45th Street artist cooperative in Emeryville.” Right away, a disillusioned Angeleno contacted her. Perfect. “So everything fell into place, and two months later I had found a place in San Pedro through Eric Johnson. I rented part of his space in his warehouse (at 19th and Pacific), found a little apartment, and then just started making work.

“And because Eric knows everybody, he very generously introduced me to Ron Linden. If Ron likes your work, then doors open. Eric took me around to all these galleries and introduced me to people at openings, and it was just so generous and open-hearted. And unexpected, because I thought that Los Angeles would be a hard nut to crack.” Here in L.A., Weber says, “people get excited about introducing you to their gallerist: ‘Oh, you have to meet this person,’ ‘Oh, I’m going to set it up and we’re gonna go meet this artist.’”

Not that Weber didn’t already know how to pull the levers of self-promotion, which she had mastered while living up north. “Unlike many artists,” she says, “I have a right brain and a left brain, so I have always felt that just making the art is not the end of it, it’s just half of it. I feel a responsibility to my artwork, to shepherd it to a wider audience” — and she recounts how she’s done this, “by sending out postcards, attending other people’s openings, getting to know curators, being in communication with other artists. I have 191,000 followers on Instagram by putting up two posts a week for the last three years, and not just putting up an image but telling people what I’m doing and how I do it.” The list goes on, but we can see that Ann Weber knows how to network along with the best of them.

She’s also got a few videos up on YouTube, and two of the best ones are by Walter Mladina, another key member of Peedro’s art colony, who recently completed a rather stunning video interview with Ron Linden as well.

“Now I even have a Los Angeles gallery,” Weber says. “It’s the Wonzimer Gallery, and they’re just great.”

A balancing act

You’ve often said that your sculptures combine the figurative and the abstract, and then it’s up to the individual viewer to make of it what they will.

“Oh, absolutely,” Weber replies. “And I would say that all of my sculptures are about relationships. A lot of them are about my personal life and my personal stories. I would build something as high as I could before it collapses, because it’s talking about balancing acts. That’s what we’re doing in our lives, we’re balancing our work and we’re balancing our time with our family, and we’re balancing our paying job — and then time in the studio. So I would say that there’s a lot of sculptures that are just balancing on a little pin.”

This seems to be both a literal and a figurative statement because, as she explains about “O Buddy, O Pal,” “they lean in towards each other a little, these two. But they’re also balancing; it’s kind of a fine balancing act.”

What keeps them from toppling over?

“What keeps them from toppling over,” Weber replies, as she tilts up one of the pieces, “is this little steel base under here, and I hide it.”

And this is the natural color of the cardboard, right?

“Uh-huh. People don’t realize how colorful cardboard boxes are, particularly wine boxes. Mine come from Trader Joe’s; and you can see behind you all these different colored boxes.”

Do a lot of people save boxes and then give them to you?

“Well,” Weber says with a laugh, “they try to, but I’m too picky.

“But every once in a while somebody will come up with something. A good friend of mine was in New York City and she saw this green box on the street and she brought it back for me ‘cause she knew I would like it. She knows me well.”

Weber’s work isn’t always very color-diverse, and I recall, from seeing it at Gallery 478 some time ago, that much of it seemed predominantly white. That won’t necessarily be the case when we step into the PV Art Center. “Because I know how much Daniela loves color,” she says, “I decided I was going to push myself and make more artwork that has color in it. Plus, if your friends are going to come to your shows, you don’t want them to see the same old same old.”

“One of her inspirations this time around is Barnett Newman, who’d done a piece called “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.” “I raised my hand,” Weber says with a smile, “and said: I’m afraid of red, yellow, and blue,” and so she took up the gauntlet and we’ll soon see the results of that self-imposed challenge.

“So I decided to experiment with this blinding red, and for the first time I couldn’t find enough red boxes. So I cheated and I painted the cardboard red, and I cut it into strips. And I said, Nobody’s going to fine me for painting the cardboard.” She indeed pondered this transgression, because before she could always claim that the color the viewer saw in her completed work was the same color that was on the original boxes. “But then I thought, Nah!… ‘cause I couldn’t find enough red to offset it.”

After all, an artist makes her own rules. And if she makes them, she’s free to break them.

Dancing to the rhythm

Weber shows me a cluster of sculptures in the second room of her studio, some of them vaguely reminding me of wrapped mummies standing upright. “I’ve done about 40 different sculptures in this series that I call ‘Personages.’ Again, they’re half-abstract, half-narrative. They look like you could make up a personality about them.”

I mention that several of the forms call to mind the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy.

“I love those artists,” she replies, Tanguy and Miró and others. “A lot of my early work, transitioning from pottery to abstract shapes, came from sitting in front of a Kandinsky painting and throwing the shapes — ‘cause we had a lot of shapes, not just great explosions of color, and that took me from narrative to abstraction. That was a Eureka! moment for me.”

Eyeing these works, and getting an impression of spontaneity and improvisation, one might be tempted to compare them to jazz. In this case, snappy music captured in mid-stride.

Weber agrees. “Ron Linden gave me a solo show at Harbor College and he called it ‘Pedro Boogie Woogie.’ He said (of the work) that they just had this jazzy syncopated rhythm to them.” The title, of course, is a nod to Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” a piece created in 1942-43.

Now, if jazz is temporal and of the moment, aren’t these pieces somewhat close behind? I mean, cardboard doesn’t seem to be a material that will last as long as metal or stone. In a couple of hundred years they won’t be in the same condition they are today.

“I talked to a couple of conservators,” Weber replies, “and they say between 100 and 150 years. And they think it’s going to lose its strength from the staples corroding from the inside. Because on the outside there’s two layers of Spara varnish, which protects the cardboard and helps seal it. That’s what they’re concerned about. But I think 100 to 150 years is long enough for me.

“These are made to reflect my life in the here and now, and when I’m gone” — she lowers her voice — “I don’t care. I don’t worry about it too much. The important thing is that the sculptures have some kind of reference to something in people’s daily life.”

Ann Weber: Let the Sunshine In (showcasing 15 years of work), along with Ron Linden: The Look of Disquiet (a title inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet”), opens with a reception on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 6 to 9 p.m., at the Palos Verdes Art Center, 5504 Crestridge Road, Rancho Palos Verdes. Through Nov. 16. Hours, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; closed Sunday. Free. (310) 541-2479 or visit pvartcenter.org. PEN