Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Hello, the Roses

Richard Tuttle
 Part OnePOETRY

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
SCULPTURE

Richard Tuttle

Part Two ESSAY

Richard Tuttle

Part Three
ESSAY AND ARCHITECTURE

Steven Holl

Part Four ESSAY

Barbara Rose
 GLITTER

A wood violet has bloomed, when I come back from my walk in early spring.

I stop and welcome it, cooing, walking around it, not as if I were floating, but the surface of the
world circled unfurling petals.

Part One Person and violet with so little in common are revealed by my voice as a resonance of identity.

The violet looking back, loses objectivity and enters the expansion of recognized things.

You could say our identities reach out to encompass the forest environment, like telepathy; a
moment opens space by rendering it transparent in intensified consciousness.

Others embrace weather and wild land as their means to the supra-sensible; in violets, it’s
emotional desire for spring light: glitter, the mirror.

Connection, often the form emotion takes, appears to me as a visual image.

 Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 15, 2011-2012
wood, foam, paper, spray paint, paint, wire
36-1/16” x 11-1/16” x 6” (91.6 cm x 28.1 cm x 15.2 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich
The following photograph is a detail of Hello, the Roses 15

Thoughts are sent out by one rock informing other rocks as to the nature of its changing
environment, the angle of sun and temperatures cooling as night falls, and even its (loosely
called) emotional tone changes, the appearance of a person walking, who’s not appropriately
empathic.

Thoughts meet and merge with other thoughts sent out, say, from foliage and other entities.

I tell you, your own thoughts and words can appear to inhabitants of other systems like stars
and planets to us.

Intensities of thought, light and shadow between us, contain memories coiled, one within the
other, through which I travel to you, and yet are beautifully undetermined.

For, what you say to me is not finished within my thought or memory, but you grow within my
memory and change, the way a shadow extends as light passes over it in Akashic emptiness.

You grow through what I have to say to you, as a tree grows up through space, then what I have
to say changes.

That’s why we need the identity of our physical forms.

Here, we don’t know what’s behind physical stars and planets.

3

The tree encompasses its changing form, while ego, my self of physical experience, looks in the
past for something to recognize.

Flexibility would be the key word to another, since the experience is plastic, carrying a larger
identity.

When he looks into my eyes, she said, I see adoration that makes me feel wonderful.

Then, I can do things.

Here we mean sun, alteration, myself are actions, the culture of Tibet disappearing, one
thousand hopes of David Foster Wallace.

Imbalance between identity’s wish to maintain and intrinsic drives results in an exquisite
by-product, consciousness of self, so richly creating reality, which seems plastic, but continues
like a light beam, an endless series of beams.

Creativity breaks through identity, and my awareness flows through transparency as spontaneous
synchronous phenomena experienced with others as a day.

Its changing light and weather spectacles are fantastically aesthetic.

The moment it sees me, the violet grows more deeply purple and luminous to me.

Its looking collapses violet frequency into a violet in the world, cohering attention and feeling.

What I perceive as a flower in woods may be the shadow of a flower-being’s action in fairyland,
a transcendent domain of potentia.

Transparency I imagine moving through is being through, not actually seen or touched, not the
buzzing of a million invisible bees.

What you call feeling, like connective tissue or vibrating lines between us represents this vitality.

I prefer the term vitality to time.

In fairyland, all violets are simultaneous.

Slow Down, Now

I’ve been sitting looking at a plant, without feeling time at all, and my breathing is calm.

There are tiny white rosettes, and the whole bush is a glory of feathery pink seedheads, here in
the arroyo.

Even with closed eyes I see roses in the center of my sight, new ones opening, with pink petals
illuminated by sun behind me, and gray green leaves.

There’s no stopping this effusion.

Looking at the plant releases my boundaries, so time is not needed for experience.

Late afternoon is like a stage, a section of vaster landscape, and my mood is of a summer idyll.

The dry arroyo sparkles all around.

Meaning I come upon on wild land strikes me at first as a general impression, then joy suffuses
me.

I accept that I’ve aged and some friends have died.

At first, meaning is part of the rose, not unified with my experience as a whole, the way my sight
opens out to peripheries.

There’s an impasse between my will, desire and the resistance of a phenomenon to reveal itself.

My seeing is so slow, it seems to disengage; it becomes very cloudy, then suddenly, meaning as a
whole interweaves with my perception.

A delicate empiricism makes itself identical with my plant.

Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 2, 2011-2012
wood, paint, wire, paper
36” x 5-9/16” x 8-1/2” (91.4 cm x 14.1 cm x 21.6 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich
Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 25, 2011-2012
wood, string, paint, sandpaper, metal
12-1/16” x 4-5/16” x 5-1/8” (30.6 cm x 11 cm x 13 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich 2

I repeat the words freshness, tenderness, softness, the happiness of birds, as if speaking directly
to a plant.

Sun lights the profusion of pink plumes, thousands of feathery seeds already reaching into
empty space where I’ve taken a branch.

That space was left open by the vision I’m having now!

I hold my first sight of the Apache plume and this moment next to each other; I go back and
forth, comparing them.

I see her multiple aspects as living representations; one is medicine administered by an oracle.

These aspects are not referred to, not associative, but intrinsic to my sight, as slowly gaps
diminish and missing images appear or experience fills in; one transforms to another along an
extending multidimensional axis of seeing a plant.

It’s not a metaphor for the flow of our surroundings.

One day you need a plant you don’t know, in order to connect pieces in yourself, or in a person
you’re trying to be with.

It may be a rosebush at the end of the road, a summer rose, whitish on the outside of each petal
and pink inside, expressing its gestalt visually.

When a plant receives this kind of communication, it begins altering chemicals its wavelengths
reflect, in order to offer itself to your imaginal sight, for you to gather it.

The plant or another person awakes from embedding in the livingness of the world and takes
notice of your request.

The internal chemistry of plants is one primary language of response that they possess.

Through this method of your perception of its color, its fragrance, an infusion of its petals, you
not only receive molecules of plant compound itself, but also meaning in yourself the plant is
responding to, so there’s meaning in a chemical compound.
4

Even though the rose I want is in the garden of my friend I miss, another reveals itself in late
light in the arroyo when I’m alone, a wild rose, Delphic.

Illness is not healed simply by supplying something rose-colored and lovely as a medicinal opiate.

The beauty provides form for meaning, and though it does help my body, form to form, I’m not
only what my senses perceive, and my disease not just a physical absence virus fills.

When my fluctuating electromagnetic field touches that of another person, plant or entity,
emotion is my perception of data encoded in that field.

So, when a plant is projecting coherent energy, organisms respond and become more animated,
open, connected.

They use this amplified field to shift biological function.

DNA alters; there’s communication across distance.

Organisms can intentionally insert information to strengthen cooperative interactions among,

for example, an Apache plume, ants and an agave in the riverbed, like human families, whose
interweaving, loving bonds represent the long term incorporation of supportive, co-evolutionary
fields continually embedding complex new data.

You and I nest within many such fields from a rose.

Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 18, 2011-2012
wood, pipe, paint, expanding foam, wire, staples
35-13/16” x 17-15/16” x 6-11/16” (91 cm x 45.6 cm x 17 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich
 Verdant Heart

Then, my nervousness made room for my experience in a clearing filled with sweet rue, daisies,
field mint and honeysuckle along a stonewall, grasses, buttercups and blackberries.

Looking while realizing the whole meadow attained harmony, whose end point may be the
passing of my entire garden in a freeze, a kind of synchronization, gravity.

The ripe force bows down sunflowers and branches of the apple tree.

Energy peaked for a summer thins; it’s harder to keep on track, and it can warp experience.

I return to the clearing as to an extended moment.

What I see opens to possibility presenting itself as revelation or synthesis of mythic plants with
a circle of artemisia by the compost.

In the shadow of a hummingbird, I see the energy of a moth.

What you call matter, flowers, represents tones held together in a harmonic spectrum we can
sense.

A garden takes the shape of this harmony, fragrance through which my intention weaves for
flowers to keep their equilibrium of blooming here together last summer, one extending the
other in wavelength as color.

Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 18, 2011-2012
wood, pipe, paint, expanding foam, wire, staples
35-13/16” x 17-15/16” x 6-11/16” (91 cm x 45.6 cm x 17 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich
2

I compare the first shoot of veronica to seeing it now.

The axis of a flower lifespan becomes my memory.

Each image is of affected color, and I can transfer this color imprint onto the healing of others,
like a symbol that can be experienced without my presence or veronica’s.

It’s a matrix of possibility corresponding to experience.

It defines my capacity to perceive a garden as of its same nature.

Days are the colors of petals; sequence aggregates into a rosette (civilization) turning with the
sun and what sun partakes of.

Now, time simultaneously moves out from and back to a corolla between us, in other radiance,
gyre of translucence and origin.

A swan swims in the center of this glitter.

I recall circles of color as symbols, their meaning ancillary, the way honeybees decode
coordinates of this place from floods of daily meaning.

There’s motion and a sense using the entire body to highlight characteristics of feeling a
direction.

Connecting with this is a catalyst for moving my perception along routes other than reality
sunflowers turn their faces toward, light cords between persons and flowers in our lifespan and
between apache plume, artemisia, violets, delphiniums in evolution.

Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 13, 2011-2012
wood, string, paint, spray paint
39-3/8” x 5-1/2” x 6-1/2” (100 cm x 14 cm x 16.5 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich
The following photograph is a detail of Hello, the Roses 13
 3

I ask a plant with dusty gray leaves for inspiration.

From small buds emerge innumerable porcelain white petals of a Madame Hardy Rose.

Communication flows back and forth between the rose and myself, and I begin perceiving
through the plant.

With respect to silver foliage of artemisia, magenta florets of ventana, yellow stock: meaning is
a sense-phenomenon and develops into precise joys of imagination through which flowers are
perceived.

Feeling for flowers is like a three dimensional mirror.

Depth of knowledge within appearance there is expressed through the garden symbol, an
intuition hologram.

Soft margins and wide peripheries unfocused, I don’t give form to my appreciation, but sit quietly
with a quality of blossoms that feels like light.

Radiating lines connect to circular waves I perceive as communication by occurrence, like a

golden frog diving into the pond, a touch from the world carrying experience all at once, not like
time.

Richard Tuttle
Hello, the Roses 13, 2011-2012
wood, string, paint, spray paint
39-3/8” x 5-1/2” x 6-1/2” (100 cm x 14 cm x 16.5 cm)
Photograph by Ulrich Gerbert, courtesy Kunstverein Munich
The following photograph is a detail of Hello, the Roses 13.
Hello, the Roses

My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same laws by which stars
shine, communicating with my body by emanation.

When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean.

Invisibility comes through of deep pink or a color I see clairvoyantly.

This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives light
frequencies of the flower as a hologram.

The entire rose, petals in moving air, emotion of perfume records as a sphere, so when I recall
the emotion, I touch dimensionality.

From a small bud emerges a tight wound bundle of babyskin coral petals, held in a half globe, as
if by cupped hands.

Then, petals are innumerable, loose, double, sumptuous, unified.

I look through parted fingers to soften my gaze, and slow light shining off the object is filtered,
and then with feeling I look at swift color there.

It’s swiftness that seems still as noon light, because my seeing travels at the same speed.

I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on the back of my eye to optic nerve to pineal
gland, radiance stepping down to matter, and my future self opening out from this sight.

A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new joys where
imagined roses, roses I haven’t yet seen or seen in books record as my experience.

Then experience is revelation, because plants and people have in their cells particles of light that
can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also with the creativity of metaphor, as in
a beam of light holographically, i.e. by intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the Bourbon
rose, then try to separate what is scent, sense, and what you call memory, what is emotion, where
in a dialogue like touching is it so vibratory and so absorbent of my attention and longing, with
impressions like fingerprints all over.

I’m saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment, whereas for the rose, scarlet itself
is matter.
2

The rose communicates instantly with the woman by sight, collapsing its boundaries, and the
woman widens her boundaries.

Her “rate of perception” slows down, because of its complexity.

There’s a feeling of touching and being touched, the shadings of color she can sense from
touch.

There’s an affinity between awareness and blossom.

The rose symbolizes the light of this self-affinity.

I come to visit drooping white cabbage roses at dusk.

That corner of the garden glows with a quality of light I might see when light shines through
mist or in early morning, reflects off water.

I stand quietly and allow this quality to permeate air around me.

Here, with a white rose, color is clairsentient, this color in the process of being expressed, like
seeing Venus in the day.

Walking, I move in and out of negative space around which each rose is engaged and become
uncertain of my physical extent as an object.

Look at the energy between people and plants; your heart moves into depth perception; for
depth, read speed of light.

I set my intention through this sense of moving into coherence with the bio-photons of a plant
and generate feeling in response.

A space opens and awareness gathers it in, as at night my dream is colorless and weaves into the
nuance.

I can intentionally engage with the coherence of light beams, instant as though lightless, or the
colored light of a dimension not yet arrived, as our hearts are not outside affinity with respect to
wavelength, shaping meaning, using the capacity for feeling to sense its potency in a rose and to
cultivate inter-being with summer perfume.
 Trio
What can one expect when one comes to see
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle at ‘T’ Space?

Offered a challenge to collaborate and yet not wanting to be known

as a collaborative couple, we thought to bring the amazingly successful
collaboration we did at the Kunstverein, Munich, 2012, to the States for
this one occasion.

The feeling generated in our Whitney Library Fellows book, Hiddenness

(1987), led to a family and was enhanced and grown in Munich. We
were in awe of and humbled by the experience of seeing a power grown
greater in time by the light it generated.

Part Two I met the collaborative challenge in Munich by making three-foot wooden
brackets, each adjusted, this way and that, by additions and subtractions.
In the end, they were placed in the space while Mei-mei read four plant
poems. Of course, the visitor did not see this, but we felt exonerated
when we heard a young visitor’s comment: these are not sculptures;
these are nets to catch poems. We presume to do the same at ‘T’ Space.

Where architecture was important in Munich, for it was historic, stately and
beautiful, it was background. At ‘T’ Space, we will attempt to foreground
the architecture, making it a true and equal collaborator. Since we have
a house designed for us by Steven Holl, we know his architecture. Thus
we feel we can attempt the same kind of collaboration by using the Trio
form to make chamber music played by three (independent) musicians.

Richard Tuttle
August, 2015

Richard Tuttle
The following photograph is an installation view from the exhibition
Richard Tuttle & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: Hello, The Roses
Kunstverein Munich, October 6–November 25, 2012
Part Three

Steven Holl
Preliminary watercolor for the Turbulence House, 1.21.2001
guest house for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle in Abiquiú, New Mexico
Following page Turbulence House, Photograph © Paul Warchol
 Through Art
The fusion of art, poetry, music, and architecture is a core aim of ‘T’ Space.
Today, the overload of information brings with it an atmosphere of exhaustion and
superficiality. A great breadth of digital information is instantly available and is segregated
into separate categories. The prevalence of separating the Arts prevents the potential
of one to inspire the other. Yet, as in the greatest cultural cycles in history, the Arts are
interrelated. Architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry all inspire one another.
As a place embedded in natural phenomena, ‘T’ Space also aims at reaffirming our
natural being in our time.

Welcoming Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry together with Richard

Tuttle’s artworks at ‘T’ Space brings back fond memories of our
collaboration from 1999. When Mei-mei and Richard asked me to design
the guesthouse for their property in Abiquiú, New Mexico, I accepted a 13.7
x 40.6 x 13.7 cm. sculpture, Bar, in lieu of the design fee.

The concept for their guesthouse, the Turbulence House, emerged from
imagining its architecture as the tip of an iceberg indicating a much larger
form below. A void in the structure’s center allows turbulent wind to blow
Richard Tuttle through the house, merging architecture and site.
Bar, 1998. acrylic, corrugated
cardboard, glue
13.7 cm. x 40.6 cm. x 13.7 cm. As the Turbulence House’s form emerged, our friend Kiki Smith called it a
“brooch pinned to the mesa.” For me, as a collaboration with Richard and Mei-mei,
the little house exists in the blurry territory between art and architecture. In some
ways, it is like a fragment from Francis Ponge’s 1942 poem Escargots:

Unlike embers that are the host of hot ashes, snails love the damp
earth. … they advance glued to it with their whole bodies. They
carry it with them, they eat it, they excrete it. It goes through.
They go through it.

Steven Holl
August, 2015
 Three For The See-Saw
In 1999, artist Richard Tuttle and poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge asked their friend
architect Steven Holl to design a guest house for them in Abiquiú, New Mexico where they live
part of the year. All three were respected members of their disciplines who became increasingly
successful as the years passed. Yet none consciously pursued that goal. Instead, they were
all immensely productive, steadily producing work that really fit no established category.
Working, like cooking or gardening, was just part of life, a view that has much in common
with Zen aesthetics. There is no doubt that their shared worldview in which humans are
part of nature but not its dominant form does relate to Asian philosophy. Yet one could
say the same of the life style and values of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner who lived
and worked together in the country just as easily. Being in the world while not of the
world was the definition of the good life, as it was understood by the nineteenth century
Transcendentalists, Thoreau and Emerson. Transcendentalism, an American tradition,

Part Four
embraced many Zen attitudes, redefining them in a distinctly American idiom. Barnett
Newman wrote of the definitive influence of Emerson’s Walden -- the pastoral paradise
where Newman and his wife Annalee chose to spend their honeymoon.
Taoism, too, had a profound effect on American culture. The translation of Taoism
is The Way, a path to be travell ed by searchers. Much has been written about the influence
of Zen on American culture but little about the influence of Taoism, which Georgia O’Keeffe,
among others, embraced. I remember the small jade sculpture of an ancient Chinese figure that
she had placed in a niche. I wonder if it is still there.
The idea that art is work, but it can also be play (in the sense that spontaneity and
freshness are valued) are also part of an aesthetic that Arden Reed, a writer who also lives part
time in Santa Fe, discusses in his new book Slow Art. All three artists involved in Trio value taking
time as necessary to have a real as opposed to a fugitive experience.
By coincidence, I ended up in the same place where the collaboration between
Berssenbrugge, Tuttle and Holl started. So I was especially happy when Susan Wides asked me
to write this essay. The place of course was Abiquiú, New Mexico, where I spent long stretches
of time studying the work of Georgia O’Keeffe. One day in 1968, I got a letter written in the
large ornate calligraphy that by now has become familiar as Miss O’Keeffe’s signature, inviting
me to visit her. She said she was inviting me because she hated what critics said about her work,
but she liked what I had written. Of course I was flattered, but mainly I was dumbfounded. The
first trips were like an endless hegira. There were stopovers because there were no direct flights
to Albuquerque, the closest airport. Then there was the rattling van from Albuquerque to Santa
Fe where O’Keeffe was waiting for me in her white Mercedes, dressed in a white cotton kimono
fastened with the silver pin in the shape of her initials, a gift from Alexander Calder.
Since then, Abiquiú, which began as a cluster of adobe houses built by the Native
American community who have always lived there, has become an international shrine for
tourists visiting O’Keeffe’s house and the nearby Ghost Ranch. Cultural tourism, however, was
not in the minds of the many artists and writers who live and work in New Mexico. The values
of Native American culture, on the other hand, do continue to inspire them, and perhaps this
is the reason Tuttle and Berssenbrugge decided to live and work in Abiquiú in adobe houses I
probably saw when I was there, which like Tuttle’s work are handmade and structurally simple.
The term “trio” literally means a group of three people or things. Usually we think of a
trio of three musicians or perhaps a cocktail made with three diverse elements --a spirit, a liqueur,
and some creamy ingredient. But this suggests an intention to harmonize rather than expression
of a similar view of the world. That was the definition of collaboration between choreographer
Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
This kind of side-by-side collaboration began at Black Mountain College where like-minded
poets, painters, dancers, writers and other artists interacted in a spare, communal environment.
Buckminster Fuller, who was on the faculty, developed his modular Dymaxion House there,
and the connection to Holl’s Turbulence House, which he designed for his friends in Abiquiú, in
terms of modular elements used in a surprising new way seems obvious, especially since he was
originally asked to design something streamlined like a mobile home.
Richard Tuttle’s sculptures and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry would have seemed
very much at home at Black Mountain where the “campus” was hardly the hallowed halls of ivy
but rather the simple countryside of rural North Carolina. This show is a happy occasion for me
to get to know Berssenbrugge’s poetry. Like Tuttle’s constructions, her poetry is about surprise
and encounter, freshness and direct, unmediated experience. I find her poetry as engaging and
direct as Tuttle’s constructions that I saw for the first time in 1965 at Betty Parsons’ gallery. I
did not know the artist or that he was 24 years old, but I loved the work and included his fragile
paper boxes in my by now notorious article on minimal (lower case) art. I thought they were
wonderful. I realize critics are not allowed to use the word wonderful because it is so corny and
ordinary. But ordinary, unpretentious and unheroic were a large part of the aesthetic of the artists
who interested me.
I followed Tuttle’s work as it continued to grow and change although those changes
were within the parameters of a style he defined as a young artist. What he and Berssenbrugge
have in common is a desire for direct experience unmediated by theory or any form of academic
tendentiousness. Her poetry, like his constructions, relates to a discipline and tradition. Yet it
is not determined by any strategized formula. Both require attention to detail and depend on
epiphany and surprise as communication. Their own dialogue, however, depends on shared
experiences as artists working and living in a particular landscape and culture of their choice.
His art does not illustrate her poetry nor does her poetry reference his art. When Berssenbrugge
reads her poetry in the context of Tuttle’s work, it is not collaboration in the traditional sense but
rather an intuitive dialogue, an intimate performance without a stage that may or may not have an
audience, which will necessarily be small because of the context. Their collaboration is very much
like the interactions between artists, performers and audience at Black Mountain College in which
one art form or artist does not illustrate the other but rather interacts with the other.
Since I first saw his work, Tuttle’s art has evolved. But its fundamental principles
have remained the same: it uses familiar materials and formats suggesting objects rather than
paintings or sculptures. Nothing has ever been said about it, but I have always felt his work was
connected to Betty Parsons’ own modest, quiet painted wood reliefs. Her gallery was such a
special place because she was not just a dealer but a practicing artist, which is why she was the
first to recognize quality in new, untested art. Fragility has always been part of the content of
Tuttle’s work. At the same time that he participates in the rejection of illusionism characteristic
of minimal art, he introduces quirky, unexpected elements or changes geometric structures
into seemingly casual ways of putting ordinary things together. He uses many different kinds
of common materials and especially, cloth. His rejection of the stretcher as a presentation for
painting, or the pedestal as the site of sculpture, or the white cube as the determining context for
art has much in common with the French group who called themselves Support/Surface.
The Support/Surface artists deserted Paris in the way that serious artists, focused on
their work rather than their careers, are leaving New York, many of them to live in small towns
or in the country. What is surprising is that today Support/Surface artists, who are Tuttle’s age,
are having an unexpected international vogue. What is perhaps even more surprising is that
Richard Tuttle has inadvertently become a chef d’école for a younger generation of artists
reacting against minimalism.
Which brings us back to the issue of art and life. In the end, it is unavoidable that
artists make work that expresses how they live, what they believe, what they cherish. Trio is a
collaboration about friendship and community, about creating the extraordinary out of the
ordinary, and about the transformation of the everyday into the wondrous.
Barbara Rose
August, 2015
 Hello, the Roses
September 5 - 25, 2015
‘T’ Space is honored to present this extraordinary collaboration between artist Richard Tuttle
and poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. A version of this exhibition first appeared as Hello, the
Roses at Kunstverein Munich in 2012. We are fortunate to have this new iteration in response
to Steven Holl’s architecture of ‘T’ Space. The ‘T’ Space mission, to create shows which
demonstrate the interconnectedness and synthesis of the arts, has been greatly
enhanced by Richard and Mei-mei’s generous spirit and enthusiasm for a collaboration
between sculpture, poetry, and architecture.

We are grateful to Richard Tuttle, Barbara Rose and Steven Holl for their essays on the
collaborative process and insight into the artists’ works and to Jim Holl for the design of this
catalogue and the poster. For exhibit inspiration we thank Kornelia Tamm, and thanks goes to
Javier Gomez, Jessica Merritt, Molly Blieden, Gail Wides and Func Art for their assistance.

Susan Wides
‘T’ Space Director / Curator

Please consider a tax-deductible donation to continue the ‘T’ Space programs.

PATRON:
SMH Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) [New York]
SPONSOR:
Lars Muller [Switzerland]
SUPPORTER:
Paola Iaccuci [Italy]

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, recipient of the 2015 ‘T’ Space Poetry Award, read her poetry at the opening celebration on
September 5, 2015. Following the poetry reading, Michael Bisio performed a concert on the double bass.

The poems ”Glitter,” “Slow Down, Now,” “Verdant Heart” and “Hello, the Roses” appear in Hello, The Roses by
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, (New Directions Books), 2013. ISBN 978-0-8112-2091-0.

Richard Tuttle’s work appears courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

Back cover photograph of ‘T’ Space by Susan Wides.

All materials copyright the artists and authors 2015. All rights reserved.