Anne Dushanko Dobek has been making art in Newark and abroad—she just returned from a huge installation she built last June at Templehof Airport, in Berlin—for more than two decades. Usually her work involves some issue of social justice, one that often has a basis in personal stories told in the major media, and her practice usually requires some form of public participation to make it complete.
Dobek is perhaps best known in our area for her “butterfly” pieces: the artist (sometimes she uses volunteers) will cut the shape of Monarch butterflies out of paper and then cluster them on gallery window sills, or on the filaments holding up a paper dress pattern (as she does in “Layers,” the current show at City Without Walls). The butterflies represent immigrants who, like Monarch butterflies, pay little attention to artificial boundaries--the Mexican border, for example.
Through the end of this month, Dobek has taken over Gallery 1978, the Maplewood Arts Center on Springfield Avenue, with the latest in a series of installations and artists’ books she began in 1982, “Promises, Promises.” Here her material is taffeta dresses, from bridal slips to tutus, stretched on chicken wire-covered wood frames and linked to form a narrow path over a floor spread with clods of dirt. Most of the dresses drip red acrylic paint.
Read more HERE.
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