Trilogy
When Louise stumbled on,
In a jungle overrun
With the rising tangle
Of the Mayan sun,
The inhuman ruin
Of an ancient race,
She drew in
Just the angle
Of her face,
And found,
In the stone
Of hieroglyphics,
A resting place
In a ground unknown,
Somehow specific
To our own.
August 30th, 2023
Roscoe
September 4th, 2023
Roscoe
Explanation
This is a paean to Louise Nevelson’s sculpture Trilogy, at Tippet Rise.
When Diego Rivera introduced Nevelson to Mayan ruins in Guatemala and in Mexico, she found in them a surprising parallel to her own Jewish upbringing, which had been mostly denied her. It resulted in an upwelling of recognition. Nevelson found cosmic validation for the forms she had been intuiting for decades. Ancient Mayan hieroglyphics are embedded in contemporary Mayan art, and Nevelson paid homage to those shapes in the found art, the moldings, dowels, spindles of her 1958 Sky Cathedral, the 1969 Atmosphere and Environment series, and her Trilogy, a triptych of her family commissioned by the Bendix Corporation in 1979.
Quiriguá was an acropolis complex that lasted for some 650 years in southeastern Guatemala, where the Mayans built out of sandstone the tallest freestanding stele in the Americas. Nevelson’s industrial steles were taller still (Trilogy rises to a height of 44 feet) and embody the decorative borders of Mayan paintings and the stone facades in Chichen Itza in the Yucatán, as well as the tentacular beams of sun they used to represent the hair of Upakal K’inich, the son of the sun god, Kinich Ahau.