Early in Corrina Sephora’s career, she accepted a mentor’s challenge to continue exploring metaphors and imagery of boats. This expanded to the topic of physical migration, then spiritual journeys, and finally to the realization that “we’re all in the same boat.” Lately, the boat has expanded to include the entire universe.
A retrospective of her work, Across the Waters of Time: 30 Years of Creativity, curated by Tisha Smith, is at Emma Darnell Aviation Museum and Conference Center through April 29 and it illustrates well her artistic journey. (Sephora will conduct a walk-through at the gallery on April 14 at 12 p.m., and give an artist’s talk on April 22, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.)
This tidy succession of boat symbolism is not immediately apparent upon entry into either of the two adjacent galleries, which contain a stunning array of freestanding metal sculptures, wall installations and paintings (plus a video that transposes her family history into a fairy story.)
These works feature not only boats by themselves, but ladders and tree roots that terminate in small boats and the oars that go with them. The boats become symbolic vessels of transformation, although trying to make immediate sense of the rich variety of symbols can sometimes be overwhelming.
The first thing that greets the viewer in the first gallery is a wall-spanning timeline stretching from the year of Sephora’s birth to the present day.
It includes the story about her mother who, in mid-dive into a body of water, heard a girl’s voice telling her the name that the child in her womb wanted to be given. Despite the sometimes daunting quantity of exhibitions and artworks in Sephora’s career, attentive readers of the timeline can quickly discern the main trajectory.
It isn’t, however, always apparent that such artworks as the mixed media pieces of Blueprint (Ladder, Wings, Oars, Majestic Waters) allude to family legacies (a step-grandfather was a boat builder) or to recent events: the We Are All in the Same Boat series began as a response to news photographs of migrants crossing the Mediterranean in overcrowded vessels.
Sephora was firmly in control of her chosen media from the start, as demonstrated by Crown & Scepter and several other early works dating from her 1995 art school graduation to three or four years thereafter. The elegance of these glass, copper and steel pieces may lead some to regret that Sephora ceased to add glassblowing to her strikingly fluid, artfully graceful, metal sculptural forms.
Sephora soon became widely recognized as a metal sculptor as well as, in the beginning, one of only 50 female blacksmiths in the United States. Her workshops for women sculptors have helped remedy that gender disparity.
The newest paintings and wall sculptures in the retrospective exemplify Sephora’s turn to cosmic dimensions, from a large 2018 painting titled Sun Moon and Universe to the stunning 2023 Lunar Calendar wall sculpture composed of a steel disc with inset mica lights.
During the development of this excursion into the cosmos, Sephora did not abandon the boat, ladder or tree motifs. 2020’s Curious Dreamer is a boat sitting atop a ladder, with a cascade of oars falling from it as though, once the ladder has been ascended, the oars are no longer needed.
Avirons Arbre, also from 2020, is a bronze and copper oar, the shaft of which is a ladder flanked by matching tree roots or branches (it is difficult to tell which), while 2023’s Avirons Lunar moves the motif into symbolic outer space with the addition of a moonlike metal disc.
In 2021, a series of miniature vessels represented here by Amoureux, Faery Boat I, II, and IV added quartz crystals to the metal boat-and-oar motif. This is one of many instances in which art world insiders might wish that Sephora’s wall timeline could include every detail; strong as these works are as wall-based sculptures, they take on new resonance when we know they were originally placed outdoors beside a flowing stream.
We could wish for more context regarding nearly every work in the show (only a few might be described, unofficially, as created “just for fun”). But this is, in a way, to miss the point. Despite the timeline’s presence, the artwork is the central feature, and the light touch on the biography versus a primary focus on the works themselves is one of the things that distinguishes an art-center retrospective from a museum survey.
After 30 years of art making, a span of time that might now qualify as mid-career, Sephora is a long way from being consigned to the stasis of museum status — although the addition of a few more chefs-d’oeuvre to museum collections seems more than justified.
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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Journal of African-American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020 he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.