Lyn Bolen Warren – C-VILLE Weekly

The Charlottesville arts community lost one of its greatest champions and brightest stars in Carolyn “Lyn” Bolen Warren, who died on Sunday, November 21, at the age of 60 after a valiant battle with cancer.

Warren’s art gallery, Les Yeux du Monde, has been a cherished Charlottesville institution for more than two decades, featuring beautifully curated and thought-provoking shows with work by both established and emerging artists.

Warren opened the gallery in 1995, after receiving her Ph.D. in art history from UVA. In those days, Charlottesville’s arts scene looked very different than it does now—Second Street Gallery, McGuffey and UVA were the only public venues to view art. At first, Warren operated out of her stylish contemporary home just north of town on Wolf Trap Road. Though she moved the gallery into Charlottesville, first to West Main Street and then to The Terraces, just off the Downtown Mall, LYdM eventually returned to its original Wolf Trap setting in 2009, this time situated in a striking building designed by esteemed architect WG Clark. Like all of Warren’s choices, the building is both structure and sculpture, reflecting her imagination and vision.

Whether you were an important client, an artist, or a casual visitor, Warren was equally welcoming. Her passion was art, and her life’s work was sharing that passion. She reveled in the world of ideas and devoted enormous amounts of energy to community outreach, with artists’ talks and trips to studios and museums. She was also generous with her time and resources, supporting artists and collaborating with other organizations like UVA and Second Street Gallery.

“She was a beloved member of the arts community, who is now a kind of icon,” says artist and UVA studio art professor Dean Dass. “What she accomplished here is almost unbelievable.”

Among her many accomplishments, “Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium,” was perhaps the most ambitious. Warren conceived and curated the NEA- funded show and the accompanying publication, “Siting Jefferson,” for the UVA museum in 2000. The exhibition featured over 20 artists including luminaries such as Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil, Dennis Oppenheim, and Agnes Denes, whose site-specific work was presented around Charlottesville.

Always gracious and accommodating, Warren moved through the world with an innate elegance. She was full of good cheer and enthusiasm, and was exceedingly kind. She was also uncompromising in terms of the high standards and strong convictions she held, and she helped make contemporary art an active public discourse in Charlottesville.

“We came up in the department together,” says Dass, who joined the UVA faculty at about the same time as Warren began working on her degree. “My wife Patsy put it so well—‘Lyn was not an art historian, she was an art history maker. She affected the careers of many artists and brought Charlottesville to a better place in understanding how to make art a part of life.’”

Warren and Victoria Beck Newman co-directed the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies. “Lyn and I wrote our dissertations under the legendary Picasso scholar, Lydia Gasman, who maintained that modern art should often be viewed as a quest for a new sacred that was relevant to contemporary existence,” says Newman. “As a brilliant art historian and gallerist, Lyn endorsed that idea by exhibiting and writing about art that had a transformational impact on both viewers and culture. Her deep understanding of art history underlay the authoritative and serious choices she made as a curator.”

Deftly balancing her career with family life, Warren raised two children, Hagan and Ray, by her first husband, Eugene Ray Rushton, who died in 2004. She wed artist Russ Warren in 2005; theirs was a true marriage of the minds. Warren’s warmth and passion brought dozens of others into her fold.

UVA art professor David Summers, who likens Warren to a daughter, sums up her beautiful, enduring spirit. “Lyn completed her art-historical studies with the conviction that art is an unmixed good, not just a reminder of the woes of life, and not just an illusion that makes life bearable,” he says, “but something more like love, spring, and sunshine, all the joys of life, to which we might reasonably think we have a right, and by which she seemed herself to be carried along and sustained.”

Land here now: Les Yeux du Monde challenges traditions of landscape art

In the Anthropocene, what does it mean to paint the landscape? Pristine, unspoiled wilderness no longer exists (even places that look “untouched” are affected by climate change), and we’ve learned to cast a suspicious eye at bucolic pastoral zones, now that we know how often they involve Roundup runoff and soil erosion. This isn’t meant to harsh anyone’s plein-air buzz; it’s just reality, and one that Lyn Bolen Warren, director of Les Yeux du Monde, readily acknowledges.

“It’s just such a crucial time now for the Earth,” she says. “It’s disappearing in the way we knew it before.”

When she found herself putting together a group landscape show to hang at Les Yeux this summer, she titled it “Landscape Re-Imagined”—a nod to the genre’s weighty history as well as to the urgent need for humans, whether artists or not, to reframe our view of the planet.

The show, which includes work by 38 artists, surveys many different conceptions of landscape. There’s land itself, and then there’s landscape—an artifact of a distinctly human endeavor, one that does rest on imagining, a la Warren’s title. When we picture the land, we’re making choices to see it in a certain way, and a show with this kind of range invites us to step back and ask the meta-questions.

Take, for example, the difference between Priscilla Long Whitlock’s canvas “Reflections, Mirrored Marks,” and Isabelle Abbot’s “Spring Fling.” The first seems to immerse the viewer in a body of water—as though our heads were just above the surface, gazing through Whitlock’s suggestive brushstrokes in space—and the second positions us at some high viewpoint, the sea a distant band of blue. These are not just different places to stand; they imply different ways of being, one as an intimate of the land, one as its commander and surveyor.

Yet as we move through the show, an even deeper sense of possibility emerges. The simple act of including houses in a “landscape” painting, as in Ann Lyne’s “The Smiths, Lexington, VA,” reminds us that even in town, nature is present. To take this a step further, we might ask whether our dwellings are part of nature just like bird’s nests and anthills. If that seems obvious (on the one hand) or simplistic (on the other), consider all the contexts in which wilderness images are still de rigueur. There is a certain view of nature as not-human to which we remain firmly attached.

There are material choices, too, that push the traditional boundaries of landscape art. Molly Herman’s piece is subtly sculptural, with woven fabrics incorporated onto its painted surface. Just barely 3D, the piece—at least in the context of this show—invites us to reflect on our habitual conversion of land, which has depth and surrounds us, to a flat representation that we regard as separate.

Dorothy Robinson’s “Full House” takes the legacy of, say, van Gogh and refracts it into a postmodern space where floral fragments are adulterated by abstract sweeps of color and brushwork. Accustomed to single-point perspective, our eyes may find Robinson’s realm disordered, but in truth it’s a realist depiction of how any landscape artwork is a fiction of sorts, an impermanent gambit—someone’s mind and eye at work. Anne Chesnut’s quilt-like multimedia collage of images gathered on a drive between Crozet and White Hall is another kind of personal landscape view: the eye that’s an I.

Importantly, the works of David Hawkins and Richard Crozier focus on the built (and in Crozier’s case, the post-industrial) environment. Carefully representing streets, buildings, vehicles—and including such images in a landscape show—might be one of the deepest ways to re-imagine inherited ideas about how we picture land. After all, if we insist only on all-natural beauty, we’ll ignore most of what the world offers to our seeing.

The scraped, paved site in Crozier’s piece, “Monticello Dairy Demolition,” shares some DNA with the sculpture outside by UVA Aunspaugh fellow Charles Lambert: a concrete-and-rebar form that hovers between rubble and transcendence. Titled “Quiet,” it’s made of materials we tend to completely disregard. Yet here it is, inviting us to stand and be present with it and the dizzy view from the Les Yeux lawn.

It’s entirely appropriate that this landscape show has an outdoor sculpture component. One emerges from the building and engages, via many senses, the place that had been framed by its large windows. And in these outdoor works, human beings appear—the figures that, in the paintings indoors, had been only implied.