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Michele Oka Doner will install the new
bronze-in-terrazzo floor in the rotunda of the new campus..
About the Artist
Internationally
acclaimed artist
Michele Oka
Doner will install her signature bronze-in-terrazzo flooring in
the
rotunda of USF Sarasota-Manatee's new campus center, opening
this fall. To learn more about the rotunda floor, please read the
article below.
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Natural Wonder
From Bay Bulletin,
Spring 2006
Michele Oka Doner
wants you to take a look. Not simply to look but to observe.
Nature.
Deeply. Quietly.
Personally.
The calcified sea
shells that gently wash ashore. The vascular structure of a leaf.
The abstract segmentation of tree bark.
Barnacles, dog
whelks, brittle stars, sculpins and sea urchins.
These are the subjects of Michele Oka Doner’s Epiphytes:
Absorbing From Nature, the
artist-cum-paleontologist-cum-botanist-cum-oceanographer’s
enchanting
field guide to the
Gulf Coast’s littoral zone, where land meets water.
Over 80 of these
shimmering, spinning, and radiant two-dimensional bronze sculptures
randomly emerge from the auburn depths of the terrazzo floor in a
pattern evocative of the sublime rhythm of nature.
The work,
commissioned by the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee,
will be installed in the rotunda floor of the university’s new
campus, opening this fall.
As Vincent Ahern
explains it, Oka Doner makes art you can walk on.
“For Michele, the
floor is her canvas. The bronze elements are her subjects and the
terrazzo is her background,” said Ahern, Coordinator of Public Art
for the Institute for Research and Art at the University of South
Florida.
“Michele has a
great track record of connecting to the environment,” continued
Ahern. “During several excursions to campus, she was moved by her
impressions of the Gulf and its wildlife.”
Ahern noted that
the artist was particularly intrigued by the bark of a pine tree.
“It was really a
point of departure for her because the tree was so dominant in the
environment and its segmented bark had such an abstraction to it
that really appealed to her at both the macro and micro levels. It
was a simple connection that had profound implications.”
Oka Doner agrees.
“I try to help people achieve an awareness
of the beauty of their natural surroundings as they go about their
daily routines. Remind them that there’s another wavelength.”
As the artist
explains, such a connection can be meaningful. “A transcended moment
becomes art,” mused Doner. “That’s communication.”
Aptly called
“nature’s scribe,” Oka Doner has been inspired to engage in such an
ecologically enlightened dialog since childhood.
”I knew at an early
age that I wanted to express poetically and manually the scientific
theories, research, and formulas that inspired me.”
Raised in an era
when “mothers were goddesses and men were philosophers,” the artist,
who now lives and works in New York, is a native daughter.
Her father, Kenneth
Oka, was a two-term mayor of Miami Beach in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Being
a Miami native, I’ve been coming to Sarasota for over 50 years. On
family trips during the summer, we would visit the Selby Botanical
Gardens and Sanibel Island. I love the west coast, it’s quite
different than Miami. In a sense, it has an intensity that Miami
doesn’t have visually. The west coast of Florida is such a different
place – from its pine trees to its fossils -- and that’s something
that I emphasized.”
Designed to evoke
Sarasota’s beaches and shallow waters, the artist's sensuous oasis
will lend a contemplative, calming sensation to the area that will
eventually be the hub of the new campus.
Sarasota Bay
provided a sublime image bank from which the artist could draw. The artist credits
the unexpected red undercurrent of the Florida pine as her
inspiration for the motif.
“I
always want to push my thinking – to do something that hasn’t been
done before. Without that pushing, the floors wouldn’t have the
energy of discovery.”
Framed by
three-story-high walls, the rotunda's expansive terrazzo floor will
be embedded with saltwater plants, invertebrate sea creatures,
crushed shells, and mica cast in bronze – creating what the artist
described as a “subliminal reminder of the area’s natural
resources.”
Whirling and swirling, the amulets will be arranged to achieve what
the artist described as a “natural effect.”
“There
is a randomness in nature that I try to bring to my work.
Construction is rarely random. In
years past, much more of our physical landscape was made by the
hand. That’s something that’s missed. It’s wonderful to bring things
back that the hand makes. “
Over the past 30
years, Oka Doner has devoted much of her attention to the field of
public art. Her public projects range in scale from monumental ("A
Walk on the Beach," a terrazzo and polished bronze
floor at Miami International Airport and "Radiant Site," a wall of
gold lustre tiles at the
Herald Square Subway Station in
Manhattan) to small (including
a new line for Steuben Glass and
“Science Benches” at the University
of Michigan, the artist’s alma mater).
As Oka
Doner sees it, public art should be an accessible, humanizing,
social force that
leaves a community
better for generations.
“That’s
what it wants to be. Not put on a pedestal, but something that
belongs to the people.”
The
artist was pleased to work at institution of higher education. This
is a country that needs to return its value system to education and
young people.
“It’s
the endowment of the university with the gravitus and the
specialness it deserves.”
This fall, you’ll
be able to glimpse the natural wonder yourself. Right in your own
backyard. Michele Oka Doner will
remind you that, in a sense, it was there all along. Naturally.
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For more information
about Michele Oka Doner, visit
www.micheleokadoner.com.
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