Just a few blocks from the original home of Walmart. A new exhibit at The Momentary takes visitors back to the beginning of convenience. Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis takes us through the museum's two new installations that offer intimate views of everyday items.
Some small things come in big packages, and maybe that's OK when the package is a free exhibit at The Momentary in Bentonville.
The museum just opened the doors to two new experiences that emphasized the small or often overlooked things in life: late artist Chuck Ramirez's "Ordinary Wonders" and Lucy Sparrow's "The Beginning of Convenience" focus on stuff, things, everyday items.
“Chuck Ramirez loved stuff, and so much of this exhibition is driven by that reality.”
Alejo Benedetti is a curator at The Momentary. He stands among large, zoomed-in photographs. He says Ramirez was a native of San Antonio, and that is reflected in his work.
"So for 14 years he worked for H-E-B foods. He was a graphic designer and art director, and a lot of that comes out, a lot of those aesthetics that he honed in his commercial work end up coming out in the personal work that he does. There's a lot of him that comes into this. And so when you walk through, you're not going to see people in the photographs in this exhibition, but they're always sort of like in the wings. He's always talking about people as he's looking at objects, because he says, stuff is such a good reflection of who we are. It's a way of understanding who we are, how we exist within our everyday lives. The fact that we can look at what we consume, what we live with, what we keep on our person and what we throw out, that all of those things become really great mirrors onto who we are."
Works like the backside of an empty Whataburger cup may reflect the viewer at large.
"This is called 'Whatacup' We're in the South, so folks are aware of Whataburger, and for Chuck Ramirez, he decides he's going to photograph the Whataburger cup. He doesn't go and take the cup and then show us exactly what we were expecting to see. We don't see the big W, like the sort of iconic logo. He instead turns it around because there's a little anti-littering message that is printed on the backside of the cup, and it says, 'When I am empty, please dispose of me properly,' which is funny because all of a sudden now we're having this reflection on our own mortality. And the vehicle for that whole discussion is coming through the form of a Whataburger cup, which is a silly thing, but is also a thing that is kind of brilliant."
Other pictures, like those in Ramirez's series "Long Term Survivor," take an introspective look at the artist's life and how a mix of chemicals allowed him a longer one.
"In the early '90s, Chuck Ramirez goes and he gets tested. He finds out that he is HIV positive, and it's a watershed moment for him because up until that point, he had been working his commercial job. And he realizes, 'This isn't what I want to be doing. This is like a good gig. This is a solid gig, but it's not what I really want to be doing.' And so he shifts completely, and he focuses on his artistic practice. And then a few years later, reflecting on all of this, reflecting on the fact that his whole life is a normal life and it is a normal, exciting, fun, sexy life. And it is all of these different things. And in part, it's afforded by the fact that he is on protease inhibitors. He's able to live a normal life because of this cocktail of drugs that he is taking on a daily basis. And so in this series, this is one work from a much larger series, but it's one work where he's nodding to that: this is the vehicle. This is the sort of cheeky nod that he can make by calling this his daily cocktail."
Ramirez further inserted his personal life into his work in other series, too. Specifically, Benedetti says that he celebrated his Hispanic heritage in a unique way. He often took photos of items or scenarios after the action had occurred. Brooms warped after years of use, a table covered in bottles and wrappers after a party, empty boxes of chocolate piñatas wrecked to pieces.
"And what he's showing is not the sort of act of doing that, but rather the sort of aftermath of it all. And that this is sort of what you're left with. This is the sort of detritus of all of that. And there's something still remarkably beautiful about all of that. But it also is showing the evidence of all of that different conversation, all of that different violence that has been enacted, and these ways that violence and celebration and mortality are all sort of wrapped together in a work like this."
Benedetti, a Texas native, says Ramirez's work is distinctly San Antonio as well. The artist consistently represented his city, and its essence is present in "Ordinary Wonders."
"I think one of the coolest things about Chuck Ramirez is that he was very much of his community. Everybody knew him. He was a huge supporter of fellow artists of different folks there. He would have these Sunday night dinners and would invite people to come over. And so very much he was very much about San Antonio. And I think that because the show is so much about, I mean, it is how he saw the world. And so I think that that is infused into all of the works. And so, yeah, I think when you walk through and if you see it and you're like, oh yeah, it feels very Texas or it feels very San Antonio, that checks out. That makes sense in my mind because it's like that was so much a part of how Chuck Ramirez moved through the world."
After moving through Ramirez's larger-than-life photos, you'll find yourself in a Technicolor dream. Lucy Sparrow's "The Beginning of Convenience" is a fully scaled '80s grocery store made almost entirely of felt. Sparrow and a team of five assistants designed, hand-stitched and painted more than 20,000 items for this exhibit, and its immersive effect is immediate from floor to ceiling. Its bright colors, soft corners and iconic brands.
"We have a pharmacy, a snack bar that is based on the original Walmart snack bars from 1987, I think the photo processing center, there is freezers. We've got fresh fruit, there's neon signs. It's the most Technicolor supermarket. I always describe my work as being real life, but with a saturation turned to 300%. So 'The Beginning of Convenience' is all about the idea of life becoming more about enjoyment and less about toil. And so it's where that transitionary period of time when it became less about slaving away in the kitchen and more about fast meals, convenience, so that you can get focus on the more important things like living your life, enjoying things. That came with it. Some health implications."
Sparrow says she aims to offer an escape from reality. In addition to the supermarket aisles, the pharmacy and the photo center, there are VHS tapes, a snack bar, checkout lanes, a photo booth, a shrine to Sparrow's beloved stuffed banana and even an exact replica of her studio back in the U.K., of course, minus her cats.
"Yeah, it was an incredible amount of work. So it was two years constant sewing, painting, designing, making sure that everything was perfect. We shipped the furniture over. I mean, the amount of shipping involved in this show was unreal. But from concept, I think it was about three years to now. And then the first contact made with the Walton family was about six or seven years ago."
The proximity of the exhibit to the home of the ultimate supermarket, Walmart, is not lost on the artist. In fact, the company gave her an intimate look into its past so she could accurately recreate what would have once been on the shelves. Sparrow says this is not the supermarket she experienced, and the final product is a combination of research and imagination.
"It definitely wasn't the supermarket I experienced, but one of the joys of my job is that the amount of research that I get to do, I'm a massive history nerd, as well as being a supermarket nerd. So I had access to the Walmart archives in the run-up to the show. So I got to see all old pictures of the stores, certificates of incorporation of the stores, what the shopping carts looked like. So it was that tiny attention to detail that I was able to focus in on as an artist."
This is a full-circle moment for Sparrow, as this is her first full museum installation. Previously, "The Beginning of Convenience" was a pop-up exhibit, but during that period, she was familiar with The Momentary and Crystal Bridges before talks of the show even began.
"I remember being here back in 2017, coming to Crystal Bridges and standing below the Louise Bourgeois 'Maman' and thinking, wow, wouldn't it be amazing if one day I could have a show here? And then nine years later, here I am. Never knowing that was ever going to be a possibility. So it's been a long, hard two to three years, six or seven years in total from like original sort of contact, of making this happen."
And now her vision has come to life. You can practically smell the linoleum under the hum of fluorescent lights and the sound of music.
"It's the most rewarding thing, seeing people interact with the work, because I can work on something for two years with only five people helping me in like one room in my studio in Suffolk. But to have and to like suddenly sort of give birth to it, put it on the shelves and put it in public view. You can become very focused just on what you're doing in a very small space. And then when it's given out and seeing everyone smiling and having the reactions that I wish that I could have for the first time. But I know that I'm never going to get that because I can't get this wonderment that people do, but I get the reward of seeing the reactions."
You can go have your own experience with both Lucy Sparrow's "The Beginning of Convenience" and Chuck Ramirez's "Ordinary Wonders" right now for free at The Momentary. They're open every day except for Monday, and the exhibits will be there until next year. Just visit themomentary.org for more.
And for what it's worth, the exhibits play off of each other. Both encourage the viewer to take a closer look at the familiar, yet in entirely different ways. And after a trip to The Momentary this season, you might look at your groceries a little differently.
