Department of English
333 Kimpel Hall
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville AR 72701
September 23, 2013
Professor Stephen Sheppard, Chair
Honorary Degree Committee
School of Law, University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Dear Professor Sheppard and
the Honorary Degree Committee,
I write to
you today to nominate Anita Huffington, a highly
accomplished, nationally lauded sculptor based in
Winslow, Arkansas, for an Honorary Degree from the
University of Arkansas.
In a story
that has now been told many times, Anita and her husband
Hank Sutter happened into the Arkansas Ozarks in the
mid-seventies. They had left New York City and their
life there a year earlier, hoping to find a new life of
connection with nature, through which to continue
cultivating their lifelong devotion to art. Anita, after
a career in dance, had begun to realize that her
interest in human form was moving in a new direction,
influenced not only by her inspirational roots in
classical Greek and Renaissance statuary but also by her
immersion in the explosive and enriching art scene of
New York in the fifties and sixties.
I heard this
story from Anita herself, as a guest at Arkady, the
clearing in the woods that has now been her home for
more than thirty years. The original log cabin, which
she and Hank refashioned into an abode of rustic
elegance, is now reached by passing two studios—one for
sculpting and one for thinking—and a pond where she
swims with frogs. Arkady and all its contents are a
record of Anita’s life in art: finished sculptures
adorning niches in the buildings, standing guard at
their entrances, watching over the pond; unfinished
sculptures in and around the carving studio; photos of a
young Anita in Merce Cunningham’s dance studio or in the
company of a new generation of American poets and
artists at the Five Spot Café. All this history
is now being remade into and out of the Arkansas
landscape.
When Anita
moved to the land that would become her Arkady, she
realized she had found the raw materials for her work:
many of her sculptures are inspired by and carved from
stones she finds on her property. It seems almost
too-perfect a metaphor, given the nature of her work,
that she would see, incarnate in the stones of this
hidden-away place, a shared history of humanity.
I urge you to
see pictures of her work on her
website—www.anitahuffington.com—or, preferably, to visit
the sculptures themselves. One is to be found in the
landing of the Mullins Library spiral staircase, another
very close to the entrance of Crystal Bridges. In addition to
Ozark native stone, she works in alabaster, bronze and
wood. Most of the sculptures show human torsos, rarely
including faces or limbs. Most often, the places on her
figures where the faces, limbs, even backs, would be,
melt off into the rough-hewn rock, as if to suggest the
sources of the sculptures, also our own sources, in
earth and water—as if our essence alone were emerging
from these elements. In this way, Anita shows us what is
most often hidden: our physical and cultural origins,
our physical and emotional centers. In some of the
sculptures— “Moonrise,” for example, the alabaster
sculpture that opens a book about her and her work (Anita Huffington,
Photographs by David Finn; Ruder Finn Press, 2007)—the
spiraling line of the body suggests an attitude of
worship or ecstasy. The texture and light of the stone,
brought artfully into play by Anita’s exquisitely
measured work, suggest the vulnerability of veins and
sinews, but also the trailing lines of maps, whether
through some classical netherworld or through the
Arkansas geography that leads to and from her work. In
her bronzes, I sometimes see the elegance of a
latter-day Brancusi. In all her work, I see a capacious
human vision, delighting and grieving at once for what
is most perfect and most fragile in us and in the earth
from which we spring.
I became
friends with Anita on arriving in Arkansas seven years
ago. She is a model and inspiration, to me and to other
young artists here: graceful, consummately generous, and
very reticent to promote herself. She has led a life of
dedication to art and place, to the creation of immortal
works out of the Arkansas landscape. Her work is now
housed in distinguished museums and private collections
across America, yet, among the quotes from critics I
perused as I assembled this petition, the phrase
“shockingly under-recognized” stands out. This quote is
highlighted on this “Heritage” page about Anita, on the
website of the University of Arkansas chapter of Eta
Sigma Phi, an organization dedicated to developing and
promoting interest in classical study, as lovely a
testament as any to the admiration she finds among
scholars and artist at this university:
http://www.uark.edu/rso/etasigma/heritage.huffington.html.
I hope you
will see fit to remedy this under-recognition with a
Honorary Degree from the University of Arkansas.
Because this
narrative includes a biographical sketch, I have
included with it, instead, a selected list of
exhibitions and awards. It is a couple of years out of
date, and because the guidelines for nomination
stipulate that the nominee cannot be informed of the
nomination, I wasn’t able to ask Anita to update it for
me. I do, however, think it gives a sense of the breadth
and depth of her accomplishments. Another letter of
support for this nomination will be sent under separate
cover by Bethany Springer, Associate Professor in
Sculpture at the University of Arkansas.
Please don’t
hesitate to contact me if I can provide any other
information.
Sincerely,
Padma Viswanathan
Visiting Assistant
Professor Programs
in Creative Writing and Translation
(479)251-8228/445-9701 pviswana@uark.edu