09/19/2024
Across Time and
Place: Liz Ward
and Robert Ziebell
Opening at DeVos Art Museum at Northern Michigan University
September 26, 2024
5:30 PM
Marquette, Michigan
Across Time and Place
celebrates recent work
of Liz Ward and Robert
Ziebell, and their unique
approaches to history
and geography.
Residents of both Eagle
Harbor, Michigan, and
San Antonio, Texas, in
each community and all
the places to which they
travel, they have
become known as semi-
nomadic “community
connectors,” “Texa-
ganders” who, through
their art and lives help us
to focus on the complex
richness of our world
today.
The U.P.'s landscape,
history, and culture have
inspired Ward and
Ziebell for thirty-five
years. The couple's
annual visits to
Keweenaw’s Eagle
Harbor community began
in 1988. In 2010, they purchased the Eagle Harbor General Store, which they renovated for
their home and studios and to create a museum in the store. Each summer since 2017, they
have hosted live music from the porch and organized contemporary art exhibitions integrated
into the Store’s displays of historic artifacts, juxtaposing past and present in new and innovative
ways.
“A key connection between us is shared experiences in the places we’ve explored together—of
course, Northern Michigan, but also Texas, Mexico, and elsewhere.” Ward explained, “This has
become a source from which our art is always drawn.”[1]Ziebell’s approach starts with “going into
places, finding the background…learning the history, and how people interacted with the
spaces.” This research inspired him to create bodies of work based in Mexican food markets,
motel rooms, and bridal stores, as well as collaborations with spray paint street artists, semi-pro
mushers in the “Copper Dog 150” dog sled race, and prisoners on death row preparing for their
last meal. Across over three decades of lens-based work, Ziebell has continually experimented
with the scale, materials, and modes, including black and white and color photographs, photo
sculptures, postcard collages, billboards and public photo murals, interactive computer
installations, and online video sites.
In contrast, Ward’s time physically immersed in natural wilderness is a springboard, an essential
starting point for her work. “I want to see the birds, the plants, the whole ecosystems …though
[recently] I’ve gotten really engaged with a natural history view…like how a 19th–century
polymath [sought to learn] about the world.” Ward has written that she “explores the meaning of
landscape and the natural world through layers of history, memory, and metaphor.”[2] This is
achieved by superimposing, embedding, or juxtaposing images and textual references, as well
as employing varied techniques and materials, including handmade papers and found fabrics,
collage, watercolor, pastel, graphite, silhouettes, ink-jet printing, and more.
In Ziebell’s earliest efforts to understand the past, present and future of the Keweenaw, it was
the area’s vernacular architecture that caught his eye and piqued his curiosity. Here, he draws
upon his photographic tracking of the continuing transformation of the sturdy, straightforward,
stock houses, known as “company provided locations.” Originally built for immigrant workers in
neighborhoods of eight to twelve houses lining the streets near a mine, there was a sense of
unity, coherence. After the mines closed, many homes were abandoned but still remained
standing. In the recent decades, new owners have taken advantage of the stable infrastructure
and, notably, personalizing the exteriors “with additions, mutations, facelifts, and an array of
alternative materials other than the original,” some “just securing them as shelter or from falling
into oblivion,”[3] while others offer a vivid pattern of colors and textures.
At the Museum, Ziebell will create a site-specific installation anchored by several large-scale
photographic prints mounted directly to the wall, consisting of local scenes such as a lone tree
at sunset and a mushroom in a verdant valley. A set of smaller photographs of the house
façades or profiles, wrapped over a wooden frame, will be hung overlapping or interspersed
between the larger prints.[MOU1] Mounting the house photos stretched over wooden structures
as objects in this way reminds the [MOU2] viewer that many of the key changes on the buildings
depicted are only on the surface, sometimes achieved solely by strategic applications of
housepaint. Ziebell concludes, “Assembled together, they are now small monuments to the past
—and to the present—and they are as unique and individual as the Keweenaw Peninsula is
itself.”[4]
Five works by Ward illuminate how she integrates personal, on-site observations with contextual
references, often drawn from art, science, and literature. During a September 2019 artist
residency on Isle Royale, she created a series of works based upon specific experiences from
the land’s topography, “a remote archipelago…covered by boreal forests, marshes and bogs;”
its light “with an almost palpable quality” due to its far northern latitude,[5] and specific natural
objects she found in the area. For example, the work presented here, Scoville Point Dawn,
2020, celebrates the early morning sky with a luminous yellow background while the precarious
journey to the remote artists' cabin across a dark land bridge is placed at its center, bordered by
actual physical imprints of leaves and rocks from the area.
Two subsequent works created during the COVID pandemic, Daily Labor, 2020 and In Memory
Of, 2020, began with gravestone rubbings Ward made in Eagle Harbor’s Pine Grove Cemetery.
The direct direct impressions from the headstones are enveloped within deep, somber hues of
blue. Additional layers of ornamentation reference the passage of time, and lives: imprints of
ferns and willow leaves at the top, landscapes lifted from antique prints at the bottom, and
stacked silhouette portraits lining the edges. While initially drawn to the memorials' nature
imagery of trees, especially the weeping willows, an ancient symbol of death and rebirth, Ward
later recognized how certain epitaphs for miners killed in the line of duty connect the past and
present, mirroring the contemporary dangers to "essential workers" performing their daily labor
to combat the spread of the COVID virus.
In her recent oil paintings, Ward has found attitudes towards nature from American artists and
thinkers from 19th-Century inspiring as she developed her own strategies to address today’s
environmental crisis of climate change. She is most engaged by the 19th-Century American
landscape painters known as the Luminists, “who created scenes characterized by luminous
color, empty spaces, and a contemplative quality of stillness—a motif of water as a mirror.”[6] In
the painting, Earth’s Eye, she explores water as a symbolic path to insight. Henry David
Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond as the “Earth’s Eye,” in which he said, “the depth of human
nature was reflected” [while calling attention] to “the very act of visual perception, and profound
epistemological questions about the reality of visual experience.”[7]
Marquette and Jolliet on the Mississippi (after Berminghaus), 2024 depicts the French explorers
in 1693, seeking the origin of America’s grandest river in the western Great Lakes. The work
resonates with Ward’s desire to connect past wilderness quests to how we might ourselves
experience these places today. She extends her visual trajectory into the "still waters" of the
Luminists while underscoring the local connection between the U.P.'s largest city, Marquette,
and the leader of that historic expedition. The mouth of the river has additional significance for
Ward – her great-grandfather was a riverboat captain in New Orleans.
Liz Ward and Robert Ziebell are “artist-explorers” driven by a wide-ranging curiosity which leads
them to source their best work while out in the world. Through their art as well as activities in
education and cultural advocacy, they offer us a valuable gift, connecting people across time
and place.
-Dana Friis-Hansen
[1] Interview with Liz Ward and Robert Ziebell, San Antonio, Texas, May 5, 2024. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from this
conversation.
[2] Liz Ward, “unpublished artist statement” 2024.
[3] Website, Robert Ziebell, “Locations.” https://robertziebell.com/styled-22/index.html, viewed on May 20, 2024.
[4] Artist statement, email to Emily Lanctot, DeVos Art Museum, February 14, 2024.
[5] Website, Liz Ward, “Silver River,” https://www.lizward.com/2022/08/30/silver-river/, viewed on May 20, 2024.
[6] Unpublished Artist Statement, email to the author, May 20, 2024.
[7] Ibid.
