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Self portraits

Maggie Poor's and Josh Dunbar's lives revealed in their work

by Leon Nigrosh

IN SEARCH OF FORM: MAGGIE POOR and THE JOSH DUNBAR LIVING MEMORIAL ENCLOSURE At the Fitchburg Art Museum, 185 Elm Street, Fitchburg, through January 4, 1998.

Maggie Poor and Josh Dunbar never met, but they had a lot in common. It appears they were distinctly different people from different worlds. Poor was a vibrant young artist who hung out in Providence and New York City, and Dunbar was an older artist and a former rubber merchant. Poor created a steady stream of sculptures and drawings and built installations. Dunbar sat in his tiny apartment, looked out his window, and scribbled copious notes. Poor died at 42 from cancer. Dunbar died of natural causes at 97. But underneath, they were very much the same. And they each left the world a legacy.

The Fitchburg Art Museum is currently displaying work from both these artists. In one gallery, about 50 drawings, paintings, and sculptures from Poor's later years take us on an odyssey into the mind of a person slowly coming to grips with her terminal disease. But rather than bombard us with morbid images of darkness and despair, she shows us life-affirming work. Earlier drawings present us with lattice works and ladder-like enclosures. But in Poor's desire to make her objects appear more organic, she created drawings that translate into three-dimensional works made of bound sticks that hang on, or lean against, the wall.

In another series, Poor meticulously prepared small stairs, ziggurats, and rippled troughs out of paper and wood strips in an attempt to reconcile both the stability and fragility of everyday life. She introduced a seed-pod element as a constant thread throughout many of the other works on display. This image, in all its variations, can be thought of as the potential for growth in either the plant world or the world of human development. In some drawings, they skitter across the page in pursuit of some unseen goal. In one untitled three-dimensional floor piece, the pods are quietly gestating. In After Endgame, a head-sized pod sits in repose on a rusting steel table, evoking a comparison between natural and manufactured existence. Even in her last days, Poor still drew colorful images of hirsute cells gamboling in space, perhaps as a personal portrait of her condition.

In a second gallery, a life-sized, walk-in recreation of Josh Dunbar's living room stands filled with a hodgepodge of his personal items. Installation and performance artists Merry Conway and Noni Pratt were Dunbar's neighbors and knew him well. Far from being just another cast-off elder, Dunbar, they found, was an insightful and entertaining man. In his declining days, he regaled them with stories of his past and how the world had changed during his lifetime.

Because he was concerned with the disposition of his "estate" (his meager worldly goods), Conway and Pratt convinced Dunbar that they would take care of his possessions after he died. The enclosure in the center of the dimly lit FAM gallery is their way of passing on his wealth of knowledge. The room is virtually a museum within a museum. Conway and Pratt have plastered the walls with written transcriptions of Dunbar's reminiscences, including anecdotes of his first trip to Worcester as a young man and his stint as a "doughboy" in World War I. The floor is laminated with Dunbar's prolific notes, a collection of his canes stands in one corner behind his chair, and aged copies of Life magazine are stacked under his table. Intimate details of his life are set on shelves. His invention for drinking soup without having to use a spoon, his wallet and coin holder, his own pre-written obituary with a blank space for the date, along with other belongings, make us see the person behind an otherwise total stranger.

Both of these exhibits offer concrete proof that Poor, someone who left us too early, and Dunbar, who had become uncomfortable about staying around so long, had crawled inside themselves to see what they could find. They are each trying to tell us something about their lives, and ours, if we would only stop long enough to look and listen.

The Fitchburg Art Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. Call 345-4207.