MANITOGA / THE RUSSEL WRIGHT DESIGN CENTER PRESENTS WORK BY ARTIST ANNE LINDBERG AND COMPOSER PETE M. WYER AT MANITOGA, GARRISON, NY 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                              

MANITOGA / The Russel Wright Design Center
Contact: Vivian Linares; 845-424-3812; vlinares@visitmanitoga.org; visitmanitoga.org

Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center is pleased to announce this year’s Artist Residency Program with presentations of work by New York based artist Anne Lindberg and British composer Pete M Wyer.

Anne Lindberg’s luminous large-scale drawings cycles of seeing will be installed in the main House through November 9 while Wyer will create an immersive sound installation in the landscape this summer as part of his evocative iForest series from July 10 to September 26. Both works find inspiration in and community with Nature at Manitoga as Russel Wright did from the moment he took stewardship of this sacred land.

At Manitoga, Wright was keenly aware of the seasonal cycle and rhythms of nature, of the daily and often barely perceptible changes in color and light in the landscape and within the house. Nature was the inspiration for Manitoga’s design, and it framed the rituals of every day life here as woodland footpaths followed the arc of the sun and the home’s furnishings and wall panels changed with the turn of season.

In her two-part drawing series cycles of seeing, Lindberg’s palette of thousands of colored parallel lines will transition from cool to warm as summer becomes fall at Manitoga, reflecting concerns of time, sequence and causality. Lindberg’s works unfold at the pace of her step as she pulls lines across a pliant mat board, and she finds context for her work within a long tradition of other “walking artists” including William Wordsworth, Rebecca Solnit, and Virginia Woolf. “Like these artists, philosophers and writers, I use walking as time to encourage a fluid state of perceptions, to contemplate place, and to affect change and adaptation as it informs incremental, moment-to-moment decisions in the making of my work.”

To Lindberg’s list of walking artists, we might add Russel Wright who routinely walked his seventy-five acres of woodlands over many years, observing, mapping and refining Manitoga’s footpaths and trails and placing his house and studio as part of a mindful and orchestrated movement through and dialogue with nature. Lindberg’s deliberate and measured pace informs the scale of her work as Wright’s was the measure of Manitoga. 

Near the House and Studio, Wright designed the Winter Walk to lead east through a woodland bathed in morning light. An offshoot of the path brings us to Pete M. Wyer’s iForest within Wright’s theatrical setting of towering boulders and framed views of the Hudson River Valley. Over twenty-four audio speakers will feature a 72-voice choir singing primarily in the indigenous Mohawk language a western response to the Mohawk Thanksgiving Ceremony. Originally created for a forest in the Adirondacks, Wyer’s composition I Walk Towards Myself tells a story though music, echoing voices from thousands of years past who thanked every part of Nature. “Each person will experience the work differently depending on where they are walking, the weather, and the time of day. My hope in creating this piece is that people will have a deeper sense of connection to nature, to themselves, and to others because we are all part of nature. When we have that empathy, there is no longer us and them because they are us. This matters greatly because it affects the way we make decisions and how we view the world.” 

About Anne Lindberg

Artist Anne Lindberg makes immersive installations and drawings that tap a non-verbal physiological landscape of body and space. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions at such places as The Drawing Center (NYC), Tegnerforbundet (Norway), SESC Bom Retiro (Sao Paulo), The Mattress Factory, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Arts and Design NYC, CAM Raleigh, US Embassy in Rangoon Burma, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Akron Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, and the Omi International Art Center, among others. Lindberg is a recipient of awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, Lighton International Artists Exchange, Art Omi International Artists Residency, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Lindberg earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art; she lives and works in Ancramdale, New York.

About Pete M. Wyer

PETE M. WYER is a composer and musician from England with an interest in storytelling and innovation. He has created scores for the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Juilliard, the orchestra of Welsh National Opera, The Crossing, BBC Television and the Royal Opera House as well as creating seven operas and music theatre works. His immersive installation The iForest opened in a permanent home at The Wild Center in the Adirondacks in 2017. Other iForests have been created for the Winter Garden (2016) and Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan (2018) and Descano Gardens in Los Angeles (2020).

About Manitoga:

Located in Garrison, New York, approximately one hour north of New York City, Manitoga is the House, Studio and 75-acre woodland garden of American industrial designer Russel Wright (1904-1976). Manitoga is a National Historic Landmark, an Affiliate Site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and one of the few 20th century modern homes with original landscape open to the public in New York State. Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center stewards and shares Manitoga as a masterful integration of design and nature, a powerful example of land reclamation, and a resource for inspired design in daily living through public tours, programs and events. 

The Artist Residency program was initiated in 2014 to foster creative responses to Manitoga that invoke Russel Wright's legacy of creative experimentation and celebration of place. Previous participants in the Artist Residency program include artists Michele Oka Doner, Melissa McGill, Stephen Talasnik and Kazumi Tanaka, choreographer Ivy Baldwin, and composers Ben Neill and Suzanne Thorpe.