Athena Tacha, Sculptor, born 1936

1981   VISUAL ART

Unlike many contemporary artists, Athena Tacha can be identified as a Renaissance woman, not only for her varied artistic accomplishments but also for her humanistic view of life.  She has said that her goal is no less than to understand the universe, and her many pursuits indicate that she is constantly questioning the meaning of all life within the cosmos.  Perhaps this view results from her birth in pre-World War II Greece and her youth lived amid the chaos and uncertainty of the war’s aftermath. Perhaps it comes from her upbringing in a rural environment while pursuing her artistic studies and nurturing an interest in the sciences.   In any case, her unflagging energy has produced beautiful and thought-provoking work in almost every medium: from photography, visual and literary conceptual art, wearable and installation art, to site-specific sculpture.  In fact, she has been credited with not only creating some of the earliest site-specific pieces in this country (for which she is best known) but also with coining the phrase “site-specific sculpture” in the mid 1970s.

Athena began drawing and sculpting by the age of ten.  She completed her practical art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Athens in 1959 receiving a masters degree in fine arts.  She received another masters in art history at Oberlin College two years later and finished her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, earning a doctorate in aesthetics in 1963.  She returned to Oberlin where she became curator of modern art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum and produced books on Rodin and Brancusi.  From 1968 until 1998 Athena devoted her time to teaching sculpture at Oberlin while earning an international reputation as an artist. Since 1998 she has lived in Washington DC. She has had over 50 commissions for site-specific sculpture in this country, numerous one-woman exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, at least four books and many gallery catalogues written on her work, and received awards and honorary degrees.  Dancing in the Landscape, Washington, D.C. 2000 is the most complete book on her outdoor sculpture.

The ideas for many of Athena Tacha’s works have come from her relentless travel all over the world, which she has enjoyed with her husband, the art historian Richard Spear.  Many of her travel photographs inspire her sculptures, especially reflecting the rhythm of movement in water and rock formations.   An essential part of the artist’s credo is “all things flow” (the great insight of the Greek philosopher Heraklitos) and indeed they do in most of her work, from the 1970s’ experiments with viscous materials dripping in plastic containers to step sculptures resembling waterfalls, to the movement of lava flows in her photography. Another influence in Athena’s work comes from ancient ruins in Greece and other parts of the world. Her outdoor sculpture resembles these monumental forms with their hint at past glory and future stability.  But, on a purely aesthetic level, these works of so-called “cosmic rhythms” have a beauty and utility for the enjoyment of the public (Athena is adamant that art should be for the greater public.)  The viewer is always a participant in her work and becomes a part of nature as she walks through the sculpture, making the work change in appearance from each step and each perspective.

This continual change in perception is at the heart of Athena’s many inquiries into her own life as a part of the universe: “I believe everything is one whole, and I am a little part of it, like a wave in the ocean.”  Her photographs of herself and her pamphlets on her life at different ages: The Process of Aging (Fragment of an on-going thorough self analysis and description to be completed by the end of my life) as well as her analyses of physiognomy, heredity, gesture, and emotion are only a part of her frank and inquiring personality and her belief in the integration of every one into a larger whole.

— By Diane De Grazia
Autumn 2008