Roy Staab is a leading practitioner in the field known as environmental art. He strives to integrate his work seamlessly into its natural setting, enhancing and harmonizing with nature. Amy Lipton, Curator of ecoartspace, is asking for your help to present a site-specific sculpture by Roy Staab on the grounds of the Garrison Institute, a retreat and meditation center overlooking the Hudson River. Lipton has worked with Staab at several locations in the past including museums, galleries, sculpture parks, and festivals.  ecoartspace is a bi-coastal non-profit organization that creates opportunities for addressing environmental issues through the arts.  

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An established artist, Roy Staab has been invited to create his outdoor installations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and South America.  The Garrison Institute has invited the artist for a period of residency to create a work on their grounds. Staab would like to begin work now during the fall of 2011.The funding received will help support the creation of the work over the course of two weeks, travel expenses from Milwaukee and back, video documentation, and the production of photographic prints of the sculpture. If sufficient funds are not raised in the next few weeks, he will wait and create the work in Spring 2012.

Roy Staab is a sculptor, environmentalist and photographer who creates site specific sculpture and land art in natural settings. For over 30 years he has created ephemeral installations on four continents using materials he finds on site such as reeds, bamboo, saplings and grasses. He works for long hours, using nothing but his hands to weave and bind these plants together, creating Zen-like sculptures whose duration depends on weather and the forces of nature. The artist’s process includes observing, collecting, assembling, refining and documenting. Staab’s works are large in scale, often 60 feet or more in size. His creations are simple geometries born of place, the materials used and the local cultures of the places he visits around the world. Their fleeting reflections when placed over water, the delicate nature of the materials themselves, and the relentless tug of gravity, which inevitably destroys them, serve as reminders of the fragile and transitory nature of life.

The Garrison Institute is a not-for-profit, non-sectarian organization exploring the intersection of contemplation and engaged action in the world. Their mission is to apply the transformative power of contemplation to today's pressing social and environmental concerns, helping build a more compassionate, resilient future. The Garrison Institute does not have an art program or any funding for the creation of artworks. Roy Staab’s sculpture built in and of the natural environment will be conducive to meditation and contemplation for all those on retreat at the Garrison Institute as well as for visitors.

“It takes a passionate vision to make art that is ambitious in concept and scale, meticulously engineered and handcrafted, and fully intended to be destroyed by the elements. “ - Joyce Lovelace, American Craft Magazine November 2010

 

Roy Staab studied at the Layton School of Art and received a BFA in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He spent many years in Paris and New York before returning to live in Milwaukee in 1994. Staab has received commissions to create environmental site installations in Italy, Denmark, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Brazil, as well as in many locations in the U.S. He has received many awards including a Japan/American Artist Exchange Creative Artist Fellowship, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, Pollock/Krasner Grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation award. His paintings, drawings and photographs can be found in the collections of the Musée d'art moderne and Le fonds national d'art contemporain in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), and the Milwaukee Art Museum.