Anna held audette biography templates

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She described her objective as “to learn the visual vocabulary of a place and then create my own vision from the experience.” She toured the infrastructure NASA built on scrubby coastal land beginning in the 1950s. I have always been interested in subjects that are, on the one hand quite real and recognizable and at the same time have a strong abstract component.

On the first visit, with the help of a pilot in a tender, she photographed the Navy boats and freighters from afar, interested in their repeating patterns and crisp edges despite the misty marine atmosphere. I immediately saw the wonderful possibilities of this little piece of glass and metal sculpture. She wrote, “As a coastal city, New Haven often has dramatic light effects.” Audette gave that characteristic local illumination geometric form, contrasting the bright terracotta-colored walls with stark shadows cast by nearby buildings.

This is a fuel pump for a ’49 Cadillac. For this reason, Audette’s paintings were of interest to her doctors who recognized a distinct correlation between her changing imagery and the stages of her disease. Through research, letters, and calls (or sometimes by just stepping through a broken fence), Audette arranged with the owners of industrial properties to get access.

Most civilians would never have the opportunity to see a fragment like this up close, but the artist boldly brings us to one. Audette embraced this quality of her landscapes, writing “this mystery adds significantly to their impact.” As viewers, we are in these places, but with little clue about how to navigate. “The incongruities are marvelous,” Audette wrote to a fellow artist back in New Haven.

In the 1960s it also processed uranium for defense use, leaving behind contamination (and a legacy of environmental injustice) that lingers in so many defunct industrial properties and continues to affect nearby inhabitants. In fact, although the university had accepted women to pursue degrees in fine arts for almost a century, the Yale School of Art did not hire a woman for its own faculty until two years after Audette graduated.

Of her interest in scrap she wrote, “The piles of all different kinds of metal have held a special fascination for me because they contain items in an endless variety of shapes and colors and result in some of the most satisfying combinations of simultaneously representational and abstract energy.”

To Audette, scrapheaps were quintessential products of the modern American technological age, where obsolescence arrived at accelerating speeds.

Often accompanied by Louis, Audette’s travels took her across the country, from blast furnace sites in Alabama to retired shipyards in California. In 2008 she was diagnosed with Fronto-Temporal Degeneration (FTD), a form of dementia, and she stopped working in her studio. Audette wrote a series of letters to the Air Force to request access to the yards to make drawings and photographs as studies for future artworks.

That section of the base appealed to her as a place where workers in an industrial-scale operation deconstructed aircraft that had represented American manufacturing and military prowess from World War II onward. Although they might be escorted off the property, often Anna would leave with the name and phone number of someone who could authorize access.

. Always fascinated by the complexity of views through structures, Audette delineates not only the terracottas and blues of the exterior granite but also the glowing, wrecked interior apparent through the evenly-spaced window openings.