New Haven ARTS
Publication of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven
New Haven, Connecticut
USA
February 1989
BEVERLY RICHEY:
A PRIME MOVER MOVES ON
BY MIMSIE COLEMAN
Intense, outspoken, and sometimes outrageous, Beverly Richey is a local artist committed to experimental art and to caustic criticism of contemporary values. With her short, black self cropped hair, and expressive eyes that crease into smiling eyelashes when she is amused, Beverly Richey is an easily recognizable figure in the local art scene, she is also generally recognized as a one-woman dynamo.
For over ten years Richy has been a creative generator within the New Haven art community - and originator of concepts, an organizer of happenings, and a basic prime mover. She has also served, for the past four-and-a-half years, as a resident artist and general communications director for the Arts Council. Richey is now leaving her Arts Council post; she is shifting gears and moving to other challenges. "It's clearly time to go," she explains. "I feel I've completed my job, and that there isn't anything left for me to do. It's time for other issues and other questions."
Richey's role at the Arts Council has been a unique one. She has helped design and implement community arts programs; helped to facilitate the growth of the Arts Council itself, and also has served as a meaningful liaison with the art world.
As a photographer, Arts Council board member, and friend, Tim Feresten, points out, "Her major contribution to the Arts Council has been her creative ability to involve the Council with the arts community. A lot of the things the Arts Council started doing were her ideas. ... She's an artist on the cutting edge of contemporary art, and having an artist of her quality involved with us put us in touch with the community of artists and art organizations in New Haven."
Richey, New Haven born and bred, began her career in the traditional genres of drawing and painting. Always attracted to the unusual, however, and equally interested in stretching herself beyond her current limits, she joined the city's former Papier Mache Video Institute in 1978. There, first under the tutelage of artist Paul Rutkovsky and later as the Institue co-director, she gave full rein to experimentation. The Institute, then on Hamilton Street, was a loft-space where a loose collaboration of artists explored experimental, non-traditional forms of art. They were the committee to the belief that art need not be hung on walls, that it is far more a creative process than a product to be bought and sold in the art market. They sponsored group exhibitions, performances, and happenings; they explored public art, conceptual art, transient art - interests which Richey helped them cultivate, and which have remained with her.
During her years of affiliation with the Institute, 1978-1984. Richey also began her investigations of edible art. She was making art at home at the time; kitchen products were easily accessible. In addition, with edible art she could combine an avant-garde interest in the transient and non-traditional with one of her many domestic interests. Richey's domestic talents are richly diversified: besides having a degree in nutrition, she has worked as a seamstress, can iron with precision (she is especially skillful with tablecloths), and of course, has turned cake-baking into a fine art.
More important, Richey's interest in cake art stemmed from a desire "to elevate traditional woman's work." "I had realized that I got that same flush you feel when you're working in a studio, when I was baking in the kitchen, that I was doing the same thing, only manipulating different materials. It's been that way with women all along, only their product is transient and it has become under-appreciated. With cake, I became committed to the belief that manipulating frosting and cake has just as much value as working in steel and wood."
Once cake became her major medium, Richey began giving it a variety of satirical forms. For a 1983 exhibit, The Spring cleaning Show, which was sponsored by the Women's Caucus for Art she designed a Comet scouring-powder can which stood 20 inches high. As with all her cakes, it was intended for viewing and eating pleasure.
For a 1984 exhibition which she helped conceptualize and organize, entitled
The First Show of 1984 (a la George Orwell), she submitted a chocolate frosted military cake, topped with plastic soldiers and American flags. Later that year she continued them in an exhibit,
Buy and Sell, which was a sometimes humorous indictment of our commodity-oriented society and our war-dependent economy. She hand-made flyers, coupons, and discount notices utilizing all the tools of marketing to complete the satire. In these pieces, transient, conceptual, and public art merged.
Last summer these same elements converged when Richey and Company served 3,500 slices of her art at New Haven's official 350th birthday party on the Green. Her piece, called the A-Mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake, was multi-faceted. In tribute to a city and its institutions, she decided to pay homage to its bureaucracy. The piece itself involved not only continuous sheets of cake (donated Leon's Bakery), but also an elaborately decorated booth, from which the cake was served; and also a bureaucratic maze to facilitate an orderly approach to the cake, and to allow bureaucratic-inspired activities to befall cake-eaters.
Due to its size and complexity, the
Bureaucratic Birthday Cake also necessitated the creation of an actual bureaucracy - a bureau of people, including designers, bakers, and decision-making commissioners to plan and carry out the plans. Richey's involvement was mostly conceptual. She gave the project shape and direction; others gave it form. Her public art reached a new height.
It is with kind of undertaking, where she merges avant-garde art with public events, where Richey probably has her greatest impact. Fellow artist Robert(a) Chambers observes: "By doing public events she's gotten a lot of people exposed to her kind of thinking who wouldn't otherwise be... It's one thing to do things in an art gallery and another to do them at open-air festivals where the general public wanders. ... Beverly has brought a lot of original ideas to New Haven... she's influenced a lot of people in her brand and her presentation of art."
Richey's art is never separate from her life. Her creations often directly reflect her present situation. Once within the offices of the Arts Council, amazed by the accumulation of paper that ended up being trashed, she explored the concept of "waste". She also developed sticker art in response to experimentation with the office copy machine. And she has helped organize and coordinate events around those moral/political issues which are close to her heart. The
Women in the Arts celebration, which was an original conception of Erector Square Director Ann Langdon, was thrust into being thanks to the joint efforts of the two.
Where Richey's inspiration lies right now is unclear.
"I feel I'm in the same place in my work as in my art - nowhere right now," "I've finished my work at the Arts Council. And I also feel I reached a crescendo with the Bureaucratic Birthday Cake. All the elements of the work came together for the piece: serving a huge amount of cake, working with large numbers of people, exploring organization.
The public side of me has become accomplished, she says. "The stuff now at issue is inside stuff. Where do I go from here? I don't know. I don't think it can be in the same direction. At this point, I need to recharge this whole organism.
"Not having anything ahead is scary. But facing that emptiness is what it's all about."
