DALLAS, Texas (October 11, 2023) – The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Of Moth and Rust, its newest Nasher Public exhibition by Dallas-based artist Linnea Glatt. The exhibition will be on view in the Nasher’s Public Gallery through December 3, 2023.
Over five decades, Linnea Glatt has developed an artistic practice that engages ideas of placemaking through site-specific sculptures, public art commissions, large-scale immersive installations, artist books, works on paper, and textiles. In Of Moth and Rust, Glatt fills the gallery with steel sheets placed on the floor bearing aqueous yet earthly textures.
Using a range of solutions like vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, salt, water, and sweat, Glatt etched perfect circles into the surfaces of four square plates, resulting in unique forms evocative of planets floating in space or a polluted earth. The resulting circles are sensuous and rich in colors ranging from bright yellow, amber, and burnt sienna. Left open, they remain active zones of entropy and are symbolic of nature’s ability to recover from the traumas inflicted upon it. The arrangement of the plates to mark the North-South-East-West coordinates aligns them geospatially, connecting this installation with the outside world.
Along the back wall of the gallery, a gauzy white cotton curtain with a tattered, rust-stained bottom edge softens the gallery, draws connections to Glatt’s work with textiles, and recalls domestic interiors like those from the artist’s childhood home in North Dakota. Curtains are used to initiate privacy, cover windows and sometimes doorframes, partition space, and filter light. In this installation, the curtain serves as a foil to the hard edges of the steel and an airy, vertical element juxtaposing the weighty horizontal plates. Common among the disparate materials of cotton and steel is rust, an element typically associated with neglect, decay, and ruin. Creeping up the bottom edge of the curtain or contained within perfect circles on the steel plates, the rust developing on Glatt’s works conjures images of a degraded landscape or scorched earth.
Her title for the installation, Of Moth and Rust references the Biblical passage that instructs its reader not to “store up yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy…” and serves as a metaphor for the truism that nothing lasts in this life. Altogether, the different elements that comprise Glatt’s installation provoke important questions of care and attention to the natural world and what may result if humankind does not change how it treats planet Earth.
About Linnea Glatt
Linnea Glatt grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and received her B.A. from Moorhead State University in Minnesota, before moving to Dallas, where she earned an M.A. at the University of Dallas and has lived and worked for the past 50 years. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Texas and the Unites States, including presentations at the Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina, Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, and the Honolulu Academy of Art in Hawaii. Glatt has received fifteen public commissions across the country including permanent installations in Houston, Phoenix, and San Francisco. Her seven public works in Dallas-Ft. Worth include the Walnut Hill DART Station (1998–2003), installations at the Bachman Lake Branch Library (2009) and Fire Station #10 on Frankford Road in Far North Dallas (2011), as well as Mimi’s Garden at the Dallas Arboretum (1988), which she designed in collaboration with artists James Cinquemani and Brad Goldberg and landscape architecture firm Boyd, Heidrick, Armstrong, Berger. She has shown her work locally at Barry Whistler Gallery since 2006.
Press contact:
Adrienne Lichliter-Hines
Manager of Communications and International Programs
+1 214.242.5177 (p)
+1 214.802.5297 (c)
[email protected]
About Nasher Public
Nasher Public is an ongoing, two-pronged public art initiative which aims to generate access to public art by North Texas artists at the Nasher and throughout the greater Dallas community. The project launched first at the Nasher in a newly formed gallery, presenting monthly exhibitions, followed by an ongoing series of offsite exhibitions in partnership with area businesses.