Curating for the Universe
ARTIST MICHELE OKA DONER LITERALLY PICKS UP INSPIRATION FROM THE NATURAL WORLD.
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a walk is never just a walk for artist Michele Oka Doner (’66, MFA ’68). It’s a ritual of discovery, a gathering of nature’s treasures, the sweet surprise of inspiration. Like the stroll she once took through a friend’s garden in Miami, where orchids dripped like honey and begged to be cut. She snipped a few Cattleya stems to carry home, cradling the delicate plants in her arms until she could fashion something in which to transport them. Her eyes raked the ground for a clue, and that’s when Oka Doner had one of her “aha” moments— an instant both creative and practical, original and fun.
She scooped up a fallen palm frond, folded it into a funnel, and eased her orchids into the makeshift vase. Oka Doner smiles at the remembrance. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my God! That’s what Eve did!’ I love to capture the ‘aha’ moment—to give material form.” She took home the funnel-shaped frond, transferred her orchids to water and a more solid receptacle, and began to envision a new design. First, she drizzled and painted hot wax on the crude flower bearer. When it cooled, she shaped the vase so it would stand, which turned out to be something of a challenge. “That took a while,” she laughs.
The orchid carrier became one of her signature pieces for Christofle, a fan-shaped vase in silver that mirrors nature, and its birth is typical of Oka Doner’s designs, sculptures, jewelry, and other art. Nature’s inventions are her muse: a wedge of termite wood becomes a smart, silver evening bag; a clump of scraggly branches rages into a bronze “burning bush” candelabra; tubular sponges washed ashore on a Florida beach are drizzled in wax and dipped in silver to nest a glass fish bowl; cast bronze leaves and chunks of bark make strong, one-of-a-kind sculptures. She calls what she does “curating for the universe,” using natural, found objects. “I’m a real hunter-gatherer—I curate everything.”
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“Palm Vase,” 1998, recreates in silver an impromptu orchid carrier. |
For the 60-year-old Oka Doner, art first began as a child growing up in Florida, where she made her first self-portrait in kindergarten and honed her curating skills through the magic of ocean walks. “Water was everywhere. A day didn’t go by when I wasn’t aware of the smell of salt, a sense of rhythm, of waves. The horizon taught me about infinity,” she recalls. “As children, we look at what we played with, the wonder of it, how things sprout.” The beach was her playground, a sandy paradise that offered odd but wonderful gems that spoke to her creativity. At home, with her two sisters and brother, it was Oka Doner who set the table, wrapped the presents and otherwise sought simple outlets for her designing passions. She found pleasure in the simplicity of everyday life and in making everyday life ceremonial. “It’s part of what I do—the marriage of knowledge and delight.”
Her father, Kenneth Oka, was a lawyer, judge, and mayor of Miami Beach who played violin. Her mother, Gertrude Heller Oka, a linguist, was visual, sensual, musical. “Mother always said to me, ‘You have your grandfather’s hands.’” Her grandfather was a painter, Samuel Heller. “He came from a long line of scribes—the visual acumen was present in home.”
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| Part of the floor from “A Walk on the Beach,” a half-mile-long installation at Miami International Airport.. |
Miami Beach in the 1940s and 1950s, though outlandish, was also genteel, a society where women with tidy makeup wore white gloves and snappy hats, where teas were high and ball dresses long. “Miami was a blueprint for Eden,” according to Oka Doner, who captures the culture of the time in a coffee-table book she authored with Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., whose father was also a Miami Beach mayor. The title, appropriately, is Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden.
Oka Doner journeyed from Eden in the early 1960s, when she left the warmth of the Miami sun for the frozen North, Ann Arbor. At the University of Michigan, she majored in art and was awarded three degrees in five years. While at Ann Arbor, she met her husband, marketing consultant Frederick Doner, and they had two sons: Jordan, 37, a fashion photographer who graduated from Michigan in 1990; and Jeremy, 34, a screenwriter.
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| “Burning Bush” from 1995. Oka Doner calls her art “the marriage of knowledge and delight.” |
She took courses at the university that exposed her to artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and gave her a strong sense of public service. “You could change lives. I loved Lewis Mumford [and his humanistic approach to city planning and architecture]. Using him as a guide, I really plunged into libraries, airports, court houses… . I really learned a lot about America.” And engaging in public works projects became part of her risk-taking as an artist. “There are no right answers. I always…did what was right for myself…and not what I was told. I knew what my own particular hungers were."
Oka Doner, who lives in New York City and Miami Beach, has just returned from a hunt in Florida. She has carted a huge box of dried sponges from the airport to her loft in Manhattan’s SoHo. It remains unwrapped in a back room, sand raining along the sides of the carton with each shift of the box. When she later opens the crate, a faint saltiness freshens the air. She continues to collect as she did when she was a girl, but now she turns objects such as these sponges into gorgeous, acclaimed art. The sponges will be waxed and cast and fashioned as bases for the exquisite glass-etched “Ocean Reef Bowl” that she designs for Steuben. The limited edition sells for $23,000. Another Steuben piece beckons from a table: It’s her signing bowl, with sterling, diamond-tipped pen so guests can scratch their names into the glass. Oka Doner’s bowl has become so crowded with autographs that the letters flow into a lovely free-form pattern. Steuben sells the signature bowl and sterling scribe for $1,800. Oka Doner’s inspiration was a German beaker she once saw in a museum—noblemen would take a drink and pass around the beaker, and all who partook would sign their names to create a record of the occasion. It was another “aha” moment: what a wonderful way to preserve the memory of a guest.
Her studio loft, an 1885 button factory, is filled with finished pieces, works in progress, and piles, stacks and tables spilling over with raw materials—the skeletal remains of trees, sponges, broken shells and fragments of coral, palm fronds, bark, twigs, driftwood. A student intern and an assistant work quietly in a corner drizzling wax over seascape designs that will be made into tiles. Other wax molds cover a large section of the 5,000-squarefoot loft’s floor. Two life-size sculptures— armless, headless creatures created from coral and cast in bronze—loom near the elevator entrance.
Oka Doner breezes through the airy space, a room supported by wide, white pillars and lighted by huge, ceiling-high windows that are large enough to hoist an elephant through. She is dressed in a gentle draping of black that encases her body like a second skin; manicured toes peek out from gold sandals. Her ebony hair is swept into a soft bun, giving a full view of a wide, welcoming smile framed by lips painted a deep but quiet red.
While many of her artworks are small pieces, the influence of Mumford shows up in her high-profile public installations. Her ongoing Miami International Airport project is a half-mile long, mother of pearl, terrazzo, and cast bronze design of such sea life as sand dollars, shells, and starfish, an artistic floor creation that reproduces her beloved beaches. “A Walk on the Beach” opened on Concourse A in 1995. The project is continuing in other terminals at the airport. She also polished New York’s Herald Square subway station with “Radiant Site,” a walkway of golden tiles, and fashioned a terrazzo and cast bronze floor of leaves, twigs, and other local flora in the Evanston Public Library in Illinois. Other public works include a floor medallion at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and the floor at the Sacramento Public Library in California.
The floor’s segments evolve in a series of steps and materials, from wax to casting to terrazzo to mother of pearl. It’s the process itself that Oka Doner loves best, and if an item doesn’t work, she’s not afraid to give it up—but she’ll save it for another project. “Selfhood begins with walking away. That’s where art begins.”
Dolores Barclay is a New York-based journalist and author.