Public Art

Disappearing Transformation: Public art & censorship


	Transformation, H. Anderson Giles. Acrylic on canvas, 1985, 48" x 60."

This article is excerpted and adapted from the essay by Gail Scott and the artist's statement by Anderson Giles in the catalogue brochure published by the University of Maine at Presque Isle. The brochure accompanied the exhibition, "Anderson Giles: Selected Paintings 1985-2005."

In 1986, the Maine Percent for Art program commissioned a paint-ing from Anderson Giles to be hung in Wieden Hall, at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. Giles installed the painting, Transformation, and then left campus for the summer. When he retuned, the painting had disappeared.

Anderson Giles is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, videographer, World War II historian, documentarian, lecturer, Reed Art Gallery director and - last but not least - professor of art in the University of Maine at Presque Isle's thriving Fine Arts Program. For more than 25 years in his campus studio, Giles has produced the large, luminous abstract paintings that have gained renown and admiration across the United States and abroad. The list of solo and group exhibitions of Giles' work is impressive and extensive - from the Nancy Moore Gallery in New York City to the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Concetta Gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Until now, however, Giles' own paintings have never been gathered together in a solo show on his own turf - largely as a result of the censorship incident that affected the direction of his career.

Despite Giles' efforts to learn why the painting mysteriously disappeared, no official explanation was given for the removal of this piece of public art. The University of Maine at Presque Isle administration appears to have removed the painting after complaints by a number of individuals who found the painting objectionable, based on their personal interpretation of the imagery.


	Anderson Giles, Professor of Art, teaches a class at the University of Maine at Presque Isle's thriving Fine Arts Program. For more than 25 years, Giles has produced, in his campus studio the large, luminous abstract paintings that have gained renown and admiration across the United States and abroad.

By law, any work of art commissioned through the Percent for Art process cannot be moved, removed or altered in anyway except through formal written application to the Maine Arts Commission and with express permission and involvement of the artist. No one from the University informed the Maine Arts Commission of the removal of the commissioned piece, nor did they inform the artist. Transformation was never reinstalled, nor was the issue of artistic censorship ever given an adequate public hearing - causing Giles to conclude that his paintings could not be accepted in or by his own community. Turning his sights elsewhere, he sought exposure and development of his artistic career outside of Maine.

The solo exhibition, recently on view at the Reed Gallery at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, as well as this article, seek to amend the injustice surrounding the removal of Giles' painting. Transformation is included as a key work in the present exhibition, at the conclusion of which it will be permanently re-installed on campus, bringing this saga to a rightful conclusion. Nineteen years was too long a time for the Public Art process to be completed, raising an eerie specter of the ease with which censorship can invade first amendment rights.

We can look to commentary by noted art critics around the country to discover the enthusiastic reception that Giles' paintings have enjoyed. Showing her grasp of the essence of his work, CeCe Bullard of the Richmond Virginia Times Dispatch, for instance, observes that Giles' paintings "...seem to spring spontaneously from the subconscious and are visual metaphors for the arduous journey of the spirit." Moreover, they "...speak to our primal passions and to those profound truths, which are strongly felt yet difficult to articulate with words." Alison Corlett (City Pulse) notes that his work "shakes the ground I walk on with intense, lively and thought provoking images... He treats his paintings as souls needing to be touched rather than pristine objects of art." And Maine author and critic Edgar Allen Beem (Maine Times) sees his work as "...big, bold, colorful canvases, evocative of deep psychic space and hot with the residue of myth and mysticism... One sees in the painting of Anderson Giles the same searching, haunting lyricism that one hears in the music of Van Morrison. His paintings seem not learned, but lived, like direct transcriptions of intuited experience. He brings to the modern conventions of abstract painting both a powerful emotional urgency and a sense of art as a personal quest for knowledge... He ignores the obvious physical beauty of Maine in favor of pursuing the deeper spiritual and emotional dimensions of life lived in the North Country." Accolades like these are a significant measure of success and an affirmation to the artist of his achievement.

Through the work of Anderson Giles, we glimpse precisely that union of life and creative spirit so eloquently expressed in the paintings: luminous light and layered, evocative color, the energy and physicality of imagery and the tensions and mythic proportions of his subject matter.

Read comments from Anderson Giles himself, on a life lived as a Maine painter.