Donald Moffett, a San Antonio native whose work achieved success in the New York art scene, has returned to his birthplace, partnering on an exhibition at the McNay Art Museum with René Paul Barilleaux, Head of Curatorial Affairs. Donald Moffett + Nature Cult + The McNay features works by Moffett in combination with selected pieces by over 120 artists pulled from the McNay’s collection. On view until September 11, 2022, the show incorporates wide-ranging representations of animals and nature in order to draw attention to and politicize Moffett’s concerns about climate change.
Moffett graduated from Trinity University with degrees in art and biology and has worked as an artist and political activist since the late 1980s. As such, much of Moffett’s work is implicitly and explicitly political; Donald Moffett + Nature Cult + The McNay recontextualizes past and present works in order to voice concerns about nature, the changing environment, and uncertain futures. According to the wall text, the exhibition’s atypical layout and installation technique “hints at both the beauty and chaos of human relationships to nature.”
The exhibition space is eclectic and unconventional, to say the least. Moffett’s paintings and pieces from the McNay’s collection are hung salon-style, with works at scattered heights and locations from floor to ceiling. As opposed to traditional eye-level, single row hanging, the salon hanging functions to make the works available for collective analysis. The pieces strategically play off of each other in form and ideas; they meld into a concept created by the entirety of the show, powerfully opposed to any one concept from a particular piece. Taken together, the exhibition offers a critique of humans’ effects on the environment, while retaining an optimistic vision for the future.
Iker Vicente’s 2008 Puppet for Polar Bear in Hoy amanecí con el Polo Norte por dentro is strewn in an elevated glass case within the first room of the exhibition space. The Mexican artist created this haunting mechanical polar bear puppet with materials including wood, cotton cloth, screws, light bulbs and aluminum, among others. The polar bear’s wincing face reflects the turmoil evident in his deconstructed body, with strips of cotton cloth debilitatingly wrapped around its neck and legs. The mechanical polar bear puppet fails at imitating a polar bear found in the wild — instead, it points out how destructive human-made apparatuses are to the natural environment. Technical equipment and machinery are often manipulated for our own needs, similar to how animals are sometimes manipulated and taken out of their native habitats for our own wants. Trapped in a glass cage for our viewing pleasure, the work also points out the unmovable silence animals occupy — as they are unable to speak for themselves, it is sometimes necessary for humans to step in and stand up for them. This work screams that something is seriously wrong.
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