Enrique Martinez Celaya sculptural piece on display at Sheldon

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BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star

“Coming Home,” a stunning sculptural piece featuring a boy made of tar and feathers confronting a gigantic elk, also made of tar and feathers, is one of the most important works by Enrique Martinez Celaya.

Purchased by German collector Dieter Rosenkranz and largely unseen since its original exhibition in 2000, “Coming Home” is now on view at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, its new home.

Martinez Celaya has created a new installation environment for the piece and will be in Lincoln this week to talk about “Coming Home” and his career.

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 “It’s one of the seminal pieces people always talk about,” Martinez Celaya said from his Florida studio. “It’s great it’s being shown again. I wanted to give it a context. The piece belonged to an original context, but Rosenkranz kept those photographs. So I wanted to create something new that, in some ways, reflected some of my thoughts that followed it. I’m excited to come out there and see it.”

“Coming Home” is now part of the Sheldon collection primarily because of Sheldon curator Daniel Siedell, who has become the leading scholar on Martinez Celaya and his work.

In 2003, Siedell published “The October Cycle: 2000-2002,” an examination of one of Martinez Celaya’s most important groups of paintings. Earlier this year, Siedell’s essay “Enrique Martinez Celaya’s ‘Thing and Deception’: The artistic practice of belief,” the first scholarly article on a contemporary work owned by Sheldon, was published by the journal Religion and the Arts.

In conjunction with “Coming Home,” “Enrique Martinez Celaya: Early Works,” a book on the artist’s initial works with essays by Siedell, is being released.

This spring, Siedell traveled to Florida to join Martinez Celaya in a public discussion of his work during the annual Miami art fair, Art Basel. Rosenkranz attended that discussion.

“There are museums in the U.S. and, especially, around the world that would love to have this piece, for free,” Martinez Celaya said. “Rosenkratz was so impressed with Dan, who he was and how he understood the work that he decided the piece should be where that curator is. So he chose the Sheldon.”

The donation of “Coming Home” has made Sheldon one of the major museum repositories of Martinez Celaya’s work, and it could become even more so. In addition to “Thing and Deception” and one of the “October Cycle” paintings, Sheldon already has some of Martinez Celaya’s photographs.

The new “Coming Home” installation includes a series of photographs. If Sheldon buys those, Martinez Celaya said he will donate the large “wallpaper” piece that surrounds the room, which was made in an edition of three. That would allow the “Coming Home” installation to remain intact, making it of even greater value for scholars and for Sheldon.

Martinez Celaya has developed another Nebraska connection. Since 1998, he has published books with his Whale and Star publishing house, which recently entered into an agreement with the University of Nebraska Press to distribute its publications.

“It is great for us,” Martinez Celaya said. “We have kind of operated on the fringes, blurring the boundaries between what is an artist book, what is a trade publication. Now with having the University of Nebraska Press behind us, it adds credibility to us.”

The agreement with the press, together with his relationship with Siedell and the Sheldon collection, has given the Cuban-American artist a connection with Lincoln that he would never have imagined when he first came here five years ago.

“I used to say I know both coasts and was known there, but I didn’t actually know the Midwest,” he said. “My first time in the Midwest was when I was invited to give that first talk about the photographs. I grew up in a small town. It was easy for me to relate to the place, the feeling, the people. It has been interesting to have the connection deepening further and further with Nebraska.”

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or at kwolgamott@journalstar.com.