The interdependency is wonderful. I got quicker. Tell me about the wax again. Why did the planetarium .
MS. SHEA: Because I don't think, it seems to me not that many people are reading seriously. MS. OKA DONER: All the themes.
Web1998 yankees coaching staff; michele oka doner husband. I collected physically and visually.
In fact there's a beautiful spread in the Miami Beach book of her Sumi-e painting because my parents went to Japan head of the People-to-People program for the city of Fujisawa and Miami Beach.
MS. OKA DONER: No, it wasn't part of my calling. MS. SHEA: Do you feel like you've been in a screen test? The round cast-bronze piece in the center is an outtake from A Walk on the Beach for the Miami International Airport, not included because it was miscast around the edges.
And did you read his writings? And then the last hour I wrap and get things set up for the next day. For some reason that reminded me of St. Jerome in the I don't know why that image just came to me. MS. OKA DONER: Yeah.
That was such a typical non sequitur.
I did. And in a way this is a feedback loop. MS. OKA DONER: Well, I made a wax form. The two of them were geniuses.
The Freudian myth of the [solitary] artist is way past.. I'm moving to Paris and I bought Andy Warhol's set on the street and it's in bad shape. Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. MS. OKA DONER: My Aunt Dorothy, my difficult Aunt Dorothy [Heller] was still in the Village.
(1968), was Alumna-in-Residence (1990), received the Distinguished Alumna Award from the School of Art (1994) and was a Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker (2008).
MS. SHEA: No. So I wised up quickly, and the next project was in terrazzo and it worked, which meant I got rid of the texture on the bronzes, but I found out the beautiful texture was holding the dirt, too. MS. OKA DONER: We do, though. There were burials in that Natufian culture. We promised eternal devotion. It's so beautiful. For example, like when they started the poetry in motion in the subways, one of the first poems was called Hope [1924] by Emily Dickinson. MS. SHEA: And it's also interesting because I assume, though, it's surrounded by little silhouette cutout are those leaves or different types of shapes that are drying?
I was a teaching fellow.
MS. OKA DONER: It's true.
So I go and I go up in my room, and I open the curtain and I look out at the river and all of a sudden I realize that down the river is the flame. I fertilize the raw materials I have, I guess, and make something that's my honey. That project was probably about seven years ago. Now shes a fashionable grandmother, known for wearing custom-made tunics with draped necklines and leggings.
In fact, the signature bowl has a silver scribe. Joel Chen Loft, Los Angeles, December 2009. Plus travel has become more difficult because of the security issue. And so I didn't have a very classical education. [Laughs.] I said, no, no, I passed it. He walked over and whistled outside our bedroom window. I brought several books I bought in Sun Valley where I have an exhibition at the present of my Miami Beach Library as an installation. And I do my best work early and usually by four in the afternoon.
MS. OKA DONER: Yes, we had fabulous Eucalyptus trees, and on quiet afternoons we'd sit there and just peel. MS. SHEA: [Laughs.] MS. SHEA: Kind of grow and develop in new . I think it was Louella Parsons. But yes, absorbing things and then coming to where you could really work on them. That was "City of Trees" [1994]. And it's quite beautiful.
Well, they used to be beautiful buildings. And then of course when the Ice Age came and it shrunk up all the water, froze it up and so the water level went down to what we've lived with, all the corals were sticking out and they died. The studio is a vast and elegant space with sixteen-foot ceilings, a wall of double-height windows, fluted neoclassical cast-iron columns encircled by white-painted radiators, and an upper mezzanine from which you can look down on an abundance of chairs, benches, and tables, including pieces by Carlo Bugatti and an ultramodern table that was a fiftieth birthday present from her friend, collector Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Everything in the open area has been introduced with intentionality, positioned with the same balance and asymmetrical symmetry as the stars and space matter that seem to float across Celestial Objects. MS. OKA DONER: Well, there's the one you're sitting on.
He said, do you mind if show this? Monday-Friday, excluding Federal holidays, by appointment.
MS. SHEA: It's another one of those undiscovered Detroit treasures that more people should know about. She began making these anthropomorphic forms in the late 1970s and returned to them during her 20082010 residency at the historic Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory in Germany, creating fifteen hundred more. I don't know if that's going to matter down the line, because it might be impossible to people who are sitting in front of a visual screen every day. WebMichele Oka Doner (born 1945, Miami Beach, Florida) is an American artist and author. MS. OKA DONER: No, I really thought they were not sophisticated enough. WebMichele Oka Doner has been called natures scribe. The sculptures and decorative objectscandelabras, tableware, and accessoriesshe creates recall organic forms, resembling bark, tree roots, microscopic molecules, and the human body. I have to build big crates to get these things moved. So I go through that museum and I can't believe how many copies of Rembrandts , MS. SHEA: It all looks amazingly familiar. Okay, I see. There was one big empty plaster column, so I went and referenced that same book. He said that people got together at the riverside, and after they traded and swapped, they stayed and told stories and sang songs and they made the arts, they communicated. MS. SHEA: And it can be both, I guess, beneficial and negative sometimes; things, you know, that might be washed away that are of value or things that are washed up that are of interest and value. But they're coming out. MS. SHEA: You got a good chuckle for that in Grand Rapids. Did you collect other things? And since my parents weren't interested in shells, we didn't go often. My mother had no interest in nature. In later years, Oka Doner co-authored, with Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden,[5] an intimate portrayal of Miami Beach from the 1920s to the 1960s using their families as prisms to reflect the times. And one seems to work mostly to hold projects, it looks like. Michele Oka Doner (b. So it was an industrial space. And I have another piece that's in a museum in Genoa, the Wolfsoniana. MS. OKA DONER: Well, Rembrandt did the bronzes. MS. SHEA: And you chose black candles for them. He's wonderful. And it was just you know, my younger sister always jokes that she hid from mother. And his name was Lee and he was killed in the war, and I am named for him; Michele Lee. This area of the studio, which contains Oka Doners 1995 Radiant Disk table surrounded by Carlo Bugatti chairs, serves as a place for meetings, discussions and writing. That's what you see. And my older sister was here. And the Walk on the Beach in Miami [Miami International Airport], I pick up things there. I'd never really understood how dirty urban life was . MS. SHEA: We're looking at the table base is round and presumably quite heavy. But she turns out to be more than a public relations; she was trying to get them to think about how they could be more current so that she could get magazines to be more interested. This trend is not likely to end in the near future. And then I learned that there was a lot of randomness, I just had to begin to look for it.
I love the fact that I could bring to life something that you would only see under the microscope.
I was wondering what kinds of trees those would be. She was a minimalist before there was a word for it, Oka Doner recalls. They're when you spread out when the tree spreads out to make the roots underground, you know how it makes this wonderful kind of accordion movement of in and out all the way around. So he called Gertrude Kasle and she didn't mind. "The curious tattooed porcelain pieces of Doner are rather disturbing truncated body parts, as if eaten away by some leper. MS. SHEA: Art historians. This steel work table is covered with what Oka Doner refers to as shapes and forms of interest, models for old and new projects. MS. SHEA: It's been interesting because some of the people that I've talked to had a very strong practical background that later on came to be very helpful.
The reason why Sanibel was such a fantastic place for shells is that most barrier islands run north-south, and Sanibel goes east-west. The Japanese: Their cups were their works of art, she says.
MS. SHEA: Did you spend much time at Cranbrook? And it's an amazing building. And then that you just happened to be staying there and look out the window from . MS. OKA DONER: Well, it's a Bachelor of Science and Design, and they don't give that anymore. MS. SHEA: Move forward. Well, I got involved after the shamanistic bee with speaking to the friend who sent it to me, and then we talked about trees, ancient trees. MS. OKA DONER: And so for me in many ways raising the sons was a reflection back onto skills I didn't know I had. And then when I moved here I applied for Herald Square in a competition [1987] and won that, and went back and used Pewabic tiles, 11,000 gold-luster tiles for a 165-foot long wall under Macy's at Herald Square. And it's not the one he had in the house, it's the one from the studio. So I said, "Okay, well, I don't think we're getting too many more coming around.
MS. SHEA: That's a long, serious, study working.
It had cement, as they all are outside walls.
WebNot long ago I visited Oka Doner at her remarkable New York SoHo loft, which occupies the entire second floor of a historic cast-iron building and where she lives with her husband, Frederick Doner, and raised their two now grown sons. So these are not meant to startle, shock, horrify or , MS. SHEA: Some of the things many people, I think, sometimes associate with contemporary art, the shocking, the horrifying, the , MS. OKA DONER: Well, we have a cult of violence now that is . MS. SHEA: I was going to say I think I think there was a real benefit to that.
We're certainly at a new frontier with our ability to digitize and to print at home.
MS. OKA DONER: I don't quite know how they did it.
I had a wonderful teacher. Did you ever go up to Canada? MS. OKA DONER: Lucy Lippard came and looked at the studio.
Merwin introduced Philip Levine.
And, let's see, North Carolina, when I did no, Greenville, Tennessee.
That's interesting. But their broken-off leg stumps suggest a narrative; you wonder if theyve been wounded or violated or if, perhaps, they came into the world incompletely complete.
And I'd say more than anything that's a little research library. Encircling it is her artists book Into the Mysterium, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name. MS. OKA DONER: I think we should all be trained as engineers. Reformatted in 2010 as 4 digital wav files. You talked about how you've kind have been looking at the intersection between water and earth. I was wondering if there were still relatives. MS. SHEA: do you think that's important? Do you find it reenergizing? I need to assign certain pieces of work. But I was also thinking of other places, too, where theres mud and dirt and human misery.
MS. OKA DONER: We flew. MS. OKA DONER: And there it was. MS. SHEA: The kind of the art history 101 and 102 type of survey classes.
That's what it is. MS. SHEA: Ah. I have a friend on the board of Christofle. 
I've had that a long time. And it sits there like a scoop.
MS. OKA DONER: Well, I think that I had a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of youth. He wanted one of my silver trays ["Celestial Tray"]. ], MS. SHEA: This is another type of work. MS. SHEA: Ah. Photo courtesy of Cirque du Soleil, Oka Doner adds plants to Micco, a sculpture commissioned for the city of Doral, Florida, in 2012.
But I think that it's interesting that you know when the best time for you to work is and how to work. His brother, twin brother Ed, was a painter.
Oh, Hammurabi receiving the code of justice. I used the Japanese model that any spoon, any cup, was special. Or . 
He's an architect. Then we looked through some books shes made by handshe calls the small ones poetry books, and I would agree, though Id say they are concrete poetry or perhaps collage poetry since they contain found and salvaged objects and works on paper. So that was an idea that , MS. SHEA: Well, that's what I very interested in the and I think, you know, I'm [inaudible] about maybe younger artists, how ideas grow in sometimes kind of random ways. The breadth of her artistic production encompasses sculpture, design objects, furniture, jewelry, public art and video installations.
There's maybe one or two nights a year I wish I had a real reading light, when I'm having dinner by myself. She knows I read. Victor Building That's what's left after the trunk rots.
), I wanted to come in and be part of the dialogue, Oka Doner says. MS. SHEA: [Laughs.] She played piano; he played violin. Her first video, A Walk on the Beach premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach (2011) in the public screenings "Art Video" program in SoundScape Park on the 7,000 square foot outdoor projection wall of the New World Center.[40]. But if I'm here . And at the same time I was doing the wall at Herald Square, and so they just grew up simultaneously.
And that's more random in there, MS. SHEA: Yeah, it has a very different feeling, because I was noticing there are drawings . MS. OKA DONER: Micky Wolfson on Miami Beach. I mean, when you think of art schools it's maybe not one of the first schools that you think about, but your degree was kind of an interesting title to me.
I knew him. MS. SHEA: It's crawling forward. And I said it would be a privilege to work for Steuben. [Laughs.]. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. MS. SHEA: on a much grander scale. MS. OKA DONER: I don't know. MS. SHEA: How long ago was that exhibition? It was a beautifully edited, very unusual modernist home built 1951 in the new way, meaning there was everything built in, sliding doors, closed off. MS. OKA DONER: Both. Oka Doner's father, Kenneth Oka, was elected judge and mayor of Miami Beach during her youth (19451964). Breitmeyer, Eleanor. Those are from a collection two years ago.
In the spring, dressed in leotards, ribbons, and sandwich boards, we portrayed the planets orbiting the sun. And he says that sculpture began you know, plastic arts with picking up the stone that looked like a shaped buffalo or a skull or, you know, something like that, and in the niche in the cave. MS. OKA DONER: And then there was another dealer, Charles McGee, whose gallery I just loved and I loved Charles.
MS. OKA DONER: And I took five years of Islamic art.
Not like where I grew up art was still something that was hung over the couch., More boggling than the sheer size of the work is the fact that Oka Doner fashioned each wax model herself.
A cabinet inset in a wall displays one of her armless Tattooed Dolls, part of an early series inspired by the pricked surfaces and torso shapes of coral.
And the younger one went to Trinity School [New York City], which was very much like Cranbrook, where he had been going. She bought the newest sportswear that was coming out, all those California movies during the war that took place in the tropical islands. And then from ten to about 4 I'm on my feet and working and doing, and maybe five sometimes or six. And if we didn't go now it would . With a ruler and a knife.
MS. OKA DONER: Maybe that's my scribe ancestry. But they weren't necessarily thinking, oh, we want something . And did you see some things that interested you out in the gallery realm? And I had never seen woodpeckers that are as large as dogs, and they were so close to me.
It gets caught in the tangles and moves across the dense surfaces as if they were draperythe luster is always changing. MS. OKA DONER: I like that, so it's enigmatic. I was going to say it sounds so beautiful. So they're three different approaches. And then once I had it , MS. OKA DONER: That was the start.
Martin Z. Margulies Sculpture Park at Florida International University, Miami.
It's very important because . You can't grow it. MS. SHEA: More territory today. Shes interested, for instance, in the meaning of sitting on a chairthe privilege of elevation. MS. SHEA: And those were your figures, they're porcelain, right?
], MS. SHEA: And did you by any chance sketch at all with your grandfather?
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