Filmed and created by Emily Driscoll and Stavros Basis, Spark Documentaries.
MARYLYN DINTENFASS PARALLEL PARK is the first book to document this internationally-known artist’s most recent work that reveals her life-long love affair with automobiles, especially the culturally iconic high-powered, sporty, sexy muscle cars that streamed out of Detroit from the late 1950’s to the mid-1970’s.This monograph is the story of the artist’s most recent achievement: one of the largest and most transformative art installations in the United States of the past decade. The book expands upon Dintenfass’ drawings, monotypes and paintings on the automotive theme and critically explores how they are the genesis for this site-specific installation—the latest in a long series of such works—entitled Parallel Park in Fort Myers, Florida. Parallel Park is a major new study on the artist, a review of popular culture and gender issues in contemporary art, and an invaluable public art reference.
As visually stimulating as its message is groundbreaking, the book’s punctuated division into three sections—with full color plates—boldly progresses like rhythmic traffic lights. A brilliant scholarly essay by Aliza Edelman provides an innovative and gendered look at the artist’s primary and biographical sources in postwar automobile culture. Included are all of Dintenfass’ automotive themed oils and monotypes as shown at her 2011 exhibition at the Robert Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers, Florida. The third and final section documents the commissioning of Parallel Park. Barbara Anderson Hill, Consultant to the City of Fort Myers Public Art Program, outlines a detailed account of the project’s initial proposal and realization. Dintenfass then follows with her own comprehensive narrative on her artistic vision of Parallel Park’s evocative subject matter and challenging fabrication, accompanied by a remarkable, on-site photographic essay of the installation, including incisive commentary by the architect, the printer and members of the construction team. In conclusion, an interview by John Driscoll, with public art expert Jennifer McGregor, places the project in context and discusses the qualities that distinguish Parallel Park.
While the automobile provided the artistic vocabulary to champion the machine, it is Marylyn Dintenfass and her individual lexicon of symbols that express the irresistible thrill and freedom associated with the automobile. All that exuberant driving around—with ‘No Particular Place To Go’—gave rise to another twentieth-century necessity: the ubiquitous parking garage. The Lee County Justice Center Parking Garage in Fort Myers, Florida—a once bland, mundane municipal space—is now an ultimate destination with Dintenfass’ three-dimensional work of art, stretching 529 feet long by 33 feet high, around the four facades of the building. Exploring the conceptual correlation between contemporary art and the transformation of public space—a common theme in Dintenfass’ work—several primary subjects link the artist’s career with her installation. At play here are the relationships of color, chromatic density and light on geometrically arranged surfaces; the repetition of interlocking units suggestive of organic forms; and the effects of translucence and opacity.
MARYLYN DINTENFASS PARALLEL PARK
11 x 11 inches, 140 pages, 178 illustrations/ photos (including 11 black & white)
Authored by Aliza Edelman with contributions by Ron Bishop, Michele Cohen, John Driscoll, Barbara Anderson Hill and Jennifer McGregor
ISBN 13: 978-1-55595-346-1
Publisher: Hard Press Editions
CONTRIBUTORS:
Aliza Edelman, Ph.D.
Barbara Anderson Hill
Jennifer McGregor
John Driscoll, Ph.D.
Michele Cohen, Ph.D.
Ron Bishop
PHOTOGRAPHY:
JoAnn Sieburg-Baker
Tim Pyle
Howard Goodman
Matt Booth
Alexis Medina
