​The art of building community: Catherine Mulligan retrospective at the Rourke

By Deb Wallwork

dwallwork@icloud.com

I first met Catherine Mulligan at a party at her house. It was a small gathering, spontaneous, just a few people over for dinner. Directed toward a stack of plates and bowls and a big pot warming on the stove, I found a place to sit in the living room where people were circled about on couches, hashing out ideas that were percolating in the culture. The bowl I was handed was striking, glazed with dark blue triangles, green and yellow polka dots.

In my one-room apartment, complete with a hot plate and a Murphy bed, the dinnerware I had came not from the gallery, but from the thrift store. Yet, if you want to know how the arts community in Fargo-Moorhead came to be, this is the real answer: Artists supported artists. We were building our own art infrastructure in a town on the prairie; restoring a beloved theater, turning underused commercial spaces into galleries and studios and attending each other’s poetry readings and dance performances so we could make work where we were at.

Catherine was then casting resin into bold, imaginary flora. Outspoken, generous, with an authority that was rooted in her own experience as a woman, a mother and intellectual.

The Creative Art Studio (CAS) took up the whole basement of Clara Barton School. It was a pottery studio, gallery, sculpture area and printing press, with an idea that the teaching of art was best done not in a classroom but in the presence of working artists in a space where students could observe and question and work alongside them.

I was, in those years, using the darkroom. There was enormous vitality at CAS, but each year it was pruned back until only two working artists remained on staff, one of which was Catherine.

Jon Offutt, a prominent Fargo-Moorhead artist, was a student. “It was an amazing place to grow up, just to be around other professionals, artists whose work I’d seen at The Rourke. They were committed to their work, and treated me as one of them.”

Catherine was a vital presence. For one of her exhibitions, he and other high school artists photographed and printed her catalog.

As an artist, she was moving away from abstraction, making art that expressed the physicality and exuberance of life as we experience it. She molded bodies neither idealized nor distorted, but bodies as fact, as vessels through which we navigate the world. Her work was filled with human fallibility, that impressionable clay on which the imprint of experience makes its mark.

For many of us, Catherine’s work was in building community, connecting artists with other artists, providing the spaces to bring people together. She did that literally with a beautiful bowl, bread to break and people to share it with. She encouraged us to be serious about our work, to make work that could be difficult or challenging. And while that isn’t something you can hang on a wall, it, too, leaves a long and lasting impression.

At ninety-one, Catherine has lived through an era when, in the harsh realities of life on the Plains, art was considered frivolous. She and others, such as Jim O’Rourke, did a lot to change that. Today art is a verb, it is being carried into the streets, as protest; art is an ongoing ticker tape of digital spectacle.

Still, as the great film critic André Bazin wrote, we are mesmerized by objects. Things we can truly touch and feel emanate with a subtle aura, an energy that reflects the “here and now.”

The work of Catherine Mulligan, above all, exudes hope and possibility. It is an inviting presence, one that enlarges us and the spaces around us.

Catherine Esmond Mulligan: Earth Patern is currently on view at the Rourke Art Gallery + Museum in Moorhead through August 10.