Houston artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian creates waves at Venice Biennale 2022
Buzz generated by her work is similar to that created by Texan Robert Rauschenberg in 1964
Following Rachel Lee Hovnanian through the narrow streets of Venice, Italy, the multimedia artist points to haunts along the way.
This is the floating gondola-turned-farmers market where she buys fruit and vegetables from three kind young men. This is the canal where her 200-pound white bronze angel sculptures and bases were delivered by mistake. This is the uneven path where she and some interns carried those cherub busts to her exhibit, “Angels Listening: An Interactive Cathartic Performance,” a collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. This is her favorite hardware store.
The hardware store is important — Hovnanian, who grew up in Houston, likes to visit one in every city. It’s part ritual, part tradition.
“Grocery stores, too. They tell you about the culture of a place,” she says. “I love carabiner (clips). The functionality and sculptural aspect and their usefulness, they’re such beautiful objects. One time, I bought 200 of them in all different sizes and knew I wanted to make something.”
The rock climbing tools eventually became part of an installation in Tuscany, her Italian home base.
She keeps an apartment in Venice as well, on the top floor of a historic palazzo. Outside her window is sculptor Anish Kapoor’s latest exhibition, a presentation of retrospective and new works at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia.
Hovnanian is lesserknown, though several pedestrians stop her to chat as she weaves and darts across the cobblestone. A young college student and admirer of her work volunteers his assistance with “Angels Listening” and doesn’t take “no” for an answer. And Claudio, a silverhaired photographer who is filming Hovnanian’s show for a project, waves hello when he spots her sunny mane in a crowd.
The last time that Alison de Lima Greene, curator of modern and contemporary art at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, recalls a Texas artist’s participation in the Biennale was 1964.
“Robert Rauschenberg, he absolutely stunned the world,” de Lima Greene says. “The Golden Lion Award had always gone to a European artist, and this boy from Texas living in New York marches off the stage. It was really controversial at the time.”
A then 39-year-old Rauschenberg from Port Arthur made history when he became the youngest artist and first American to win the coveted top prize. Technically, he only exhibited one artwork at the U.S. Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, an official venue and sprawling garden where each participating country is assigned a pavilion. His other paintings were on view off-site at the former American consulate, which rendered Rauschenberg ineligible. The U.S. Pavilion commissioner transferred three additional works to the Giardini.
And now the guy from an oil town in East Texas is a creative legend. “It’s a great tradition that Rachel belongs to now,” de Lima Greene says.
Angels listening, people talking
Controversy has become its own tradition. In 1999, sculptor Georges Adéagbo created an impromptu installation outside of the Arsenale, another official Biennale venue.
“He laid his artwork in the plaza, almost a guerilla-style action,” de Lima Greene shares. “By 2009, he was in the central exhibition of the 53rd Biennale, so there’s precedence going from the perimeter to the center. Rachel’s project was much more formal, better conceived and funded. That’s the magic of Venice, there’s all levels of possibility.”
Before this year, women had far less presence than men. The theme of Biennale’s 59th International Art Exhibition is “The Milk of Dreams,” based on a book of the same name by author and surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and curated by Cecilia Alemani. And two women were awarded the Golden Lion in April: Sonia Boyce, Britain, “Best National Participation”; and Simone Leigh, USA, “Best Participant in the International Exhibition.”
Most of Hovnanian’s “Angels Listening” visitors are women. She transformed a small, vertical structure behind a former school building into a provisional chapel. People instinctively lower their voices as they enter the space. Church chimes ring out in the distance. A bright neon sign spells out “Listening.” Reverence is all but implied.
The performative installation is at once meditative and immersive. Inside, guests walk among the seven largescale angels whose mouths have been covered. Their marked silence encourages the viewer to contemplate their innermost thoughts without fear of judgment. Afterward, visitors approach either side of a central confessional, take a ribbon and are instructed to write down something they feel they cannot, or could not, say. The anonymous messages are dropped into a box later attached to blankets on display in the adjacent lawn. The final steps are to ring an awakening bell and venture back into the garden for reflection, where thousands of unspoken thoughts cover dozens of “listening blankets.”
“People need to be able to say … whatever,” Hovnanian explains. “Art should evoke emotion, good and bad.”
Some of the messages are uplifting, “Find your limit” or “To live is to grieve, do not be afraid of grief.” Many are professions of unrequited love. Others are dark, “Technology rules the world. We did not vote for it. We have no opportunity to go back. Our lives serve it.” Or disturbing, “I want to kill my father.”
“These are very intense life stories that we know nothing about,” observed Adele Boreau. An 18-year-old college student from Paris. She and friend Danielle Abaya, from Hawaii, knelt over the blankets with Hovnanian after exiting the show.
“I wrote down ‘Waiting for romantic love is very exhausting,’ ”
Abaya said with a laugh. “But I’m concerned with just being a woman in general right now.”
Hovnanian’s assistant, who manages the exhibition day to day, shares that “Angels Listening” has welcomed its fair share of repeat visitors. People are reminded of something they have to say and come back. Most express feelings of relief. It’s common for lingerers to have long moments of contemplation in the garden.
“It was good to write ideas, because if you want to say something, you should,” said 7-yearold Iris, accompanied by her mother, Laetitia Dufoy, from France.
What did Iris write? “I think I’m being dependent on someone and I want to stop, but I’m scared.”
Deep Texas roots
Lone Star State supporters have made the trek, including Sara
Dodd and MFAH director Gary Tinterow. As the daughter of Peg Lee, former founding director of the Rice Epicurean cooking school and later Central Market, Hovnanian has a long history in Texas. Her mother championed Houston chefs Mark Cox, Greg Martin, Monica Pope and Robert Del Grande, which meant Hovnanian and her three brothers had a unique upbringing. Junk food and Mattel’s famous doll were strictly prohibited.
“I couldn’t play with Barbie because my mom wanted me to know that women could be more than what they look like,” Hovnanian says. “So I played with art supplies.”
She and Rauschenberg both attended the University of Texas at Ausand tin. He didn’t finish, though Hovnanian graduated with a fine arts degree. She credits some of her success and strong foundation to classical training and postgraduate studies at Parsons School of Design in New York.
“I learned things, like you can’t put acrylic over an oil painting,” she says. “I want young artists to know having an art degree is really helpful.”
De Lima Greene suggests that her years of travel and background have contributed layers to Hovnanian’s story. She splits time between New York, Miami and more recently, Italy. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Palazzo Mediceo di Seravezza in 2019 and a large-scale installation at the
Church of San Cristoforo in Lucca the following year. Her work has shown across Europe and Asia, too. On Instagram, her follower count is 26,000, with a number of bold-faced names.
Hovnanian shies away from all that. She describes herself as a multimedia artist first and a humanist second. Her practice explores the complexity of modern feminism, cultural ideals surrounding physical perfection and the psychological effects of new media and technology.
She observes more then she speaks. Outside of “Angels Listening,” Hovnanian nervously avoids revealing to visitors that she’s the artist.
Elena Vela, 22, from Spain, offers a genuine smile once they’re introduced. “I was having a bad day, so this was very convenient,” Vela says. “Actually, I already do feel better. This helped.”