The Jesus depicted in these contemporary backlit works is rather olive skinned, light brown.

So impressed at how over and over again Lucy rethinks the question and delivers her own independent opinion. If ever the art world will care about Nancy Holt, Lucy boots up interest here in this interview. Also love the ending linking The Holt- Smithson Foundation to present climate change activism.

5 days since this story was posted and no comments….

Thank you for tackling this huge subject that stubbornly sits outside of the stubbornly patriarchal world of Art.

My own familial tale begins with raising and educating two offspring, which then slipped into fifteen years of caregiving of my parents – who lived five hours away, three by ferry.

The emotional toll of incremental loss was compounded by the draining work of keeping their lives, home, and finances afloat, which now continues as executor, trying to close the estate.

Louise Bourgeois was right, have small portable projects.

The first few years I would find myself yet again in the hospital – unable to even read. To survive, I began yet another sweater – that would remain in the unfinished basket – forgotten in the emotional flood of the next emergency call.

Facing this long-term reality I embarked on a long-term art project – hand-sewing fabric around discarded small appliances and single-use plastic containers. Enshrouding these empty vessels, as we once prepared the bodies of our loved ones for burial, my familial grief melded with my grief for the planet – to keep me sane.

Sewing on the ferry. Sewing on the bus. Sewing on the metro. Sewing in the hospital. Sewing in the doctor’s office. Sewing in the hospital, Sewing in my mother’s room.
Until I couldn’t anymore…

My father was dead, my mother was slowly fading away, my daughter was expecting her first child. I worked through the years of unfinished sweaters, I spent my time unravelling between death and birth…

Liberty, my wonderful, beautiful magical mother is dead. All the unfinished sweaters have been resurrected into clothes that Luca, my granddaughter wears.

I am now mostly back in my studio… which Luca loves to visit.

anna-gustafson.com

Thanks so much for your thoughtful article on legal protection for public artwork.

I would like to point out a few clarifications on your information, though, if I may:

1) “Works for Hire” are only applicable to “employees” of said organizations, not independent contractors (like most of us artists are). Yes, the org can try to stipulate the piece being a “Works for Hire” in a separate agreement, but the law states that there are only nine categories of work that an independent contractor can be classified as making a “works for hire”:

1) as a contribution to a collective work,
2) as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,
3) as a translation,
4) as a supplementary work,
5) as a compilation,
6) as an instructional text,
7) as a test,
8) as answer material for a test, or
9) as an atlas

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

No public artwork to my knowledge fits any of those nine categories, yet we see lawyers try to get artists to sign these illegal documents of “Work for Hire” over and over again. Every single time we come up against one of them, we inform them of the law and they change the agreement.

2) We’ve never had the need to go down to the copyright office to register one of Sharon’s pieces because, as is well known:

“You have a copyright in your artwork as soon as it has been created and fixed in a tangible object. It does not need to be registered with the copyright office or have a copyright notice attached to receive copyright protection. A copyright lasts for the life of the artist, plus 70 years after the artist’s death.”

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/how-to-copyright-artwork

3) Although case law on the Visual Artist Rights Act (VARA) of 1990 may be limited, the idea that it is has a “limited” scope as you write, is just not factually correct. Indeed, its range and breadth is wide and far-reaching and covers most public artwork. In fact, few lawyers would fight a claim to VARA rights by an artist. We actually won a suit against Yahoo! this very way, by citing VARA when in 2007 they destroyed a public piece installed at their corporate headquarters in 2000:

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/artnetnews/artnetnews10-4-07.asp

“Talks to restore Reflecting Tips broke down when former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel intervened, saying he wanted it removed, and in April 2007 the company “improved” the site by mowing away the grass and adding a border of perennial flowers — presumably destroying the confusion of wires with grass that was integral to the original piece. Louden is suing Yahoo, saying its actions violate the Visual Arts Rights Act.”

We won that case because of VARA and the piece was restored in a collaborative initiative between Sharon and Yahoo!

So in summation, artist have lots of legal protection when it comes to their public works, in my opinion. The most important one being the fact that we have copyright protection from the moment a work is completed and the fact that “Works for Hire” does not apply to independent contractors.

Artists need to know that they have more inherent legal protection than we’ve been led to believe.

Thanks!

Vinson Valega
Project Manager
Louden Studio
https://SharonLouden.com