The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 41

coming to terms with mortality. While the term “temple”
suggested a place of worship, the forms the works took
aligned with ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman crypts. The
artist was making a series of his own idealized resting places,
one after the other, many of which today find their homes
in leading museums like the Victoria and Albert in London.
Granny’s Necklace (1997–2000), our final ode to our short
Daisy Youngblood, Romana, 1987.

tensely arched as though to hold up a heavy head. The
elephant trunk drops in a perfectly straight line, stopping
provocatively just above Romana’s groin. The bulge of
her belly pushes it away so its tip does not touch her, but
it hovers. And lastly the negative space between trunk
and torso creates a well of intimacy in which the heavy
girth of the trunk contrasts with the tiny breasts and small,
sharp nipples, fiercely present in relief. It is a masterpiece.

time on earth, is the result of what the writer Glenn R.
Brown calls Mary Jo Bole’s “haunted sense of her own
deceased ancestors and their legacy in her life.” Brown
writes, “Having grown up in an environment redolent of
Victorianism and remembrance, she chose to top her bronze
commemorative bench with a ceramic mosaic depicting
portrait photographs of nineteenth-century women. In
the beads of a pearl necklace, which runs like a Roman
guilloche pattern around the borders of the image, she
repeated a series of faces of Victorian ladies…” 6 The central
image is of the Sutherland Sisters, who in the 1880s starred

Tied Goat (1983) touches on death in a direct way. A tied

in Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, achieving

goat is either about to be a sacrifice or become a meal

great fame and wealth. The seven sisters grew their tresses

(or both), but in this case the animal has been given a

all the way to the ground, sometimes up to seven feet

human head, oddly out of scale and skeletal. This adds a

in length and endorsed hair products, mostly bogus.

bizarre twist to the notion that it may be food. Like a lot of
Youngblood’s figures it is a gaunt, mummified thing, a desert
creature desiccated and in danger of crumbling to dust.

Their place in a memorial seems odd but Brown suggests
that the symbolism was immortality in that hair, if cut
and preserved can last forever, but its host cannot, thus

Death is present in William Wyman’s Temples, pure spiritual

advancing “themes of vanity and preservation—ephemerality

works that arrived after he ended a long period of making

and immortality—that are recurrent in Bole’s art.” 7

pots and began working exclusively in a sculptural mode.
Temple no. 15 was made in 1977, three years before his
death and for many of his friends it represented his own

6 Glen R. Brown, “A Poetry of Odd Opposition,” in Dear Little Twist of Fate: Sculptures, Drawings and Bookworks by Mary Jo
Bole, exh. cat. (Cincinnati: Weston Art Gallery, 2006), 10.
7 Ibid., 12.

39