Otto Rigan, a nationally renowned sculptor, originally from Roswell, moved to Truth or Consequences three years ago, purchasing, with his partner, Stacy Blum-Hay, also an artist, a 10,000 square-foot building on Marr and South Foch streets downtown.
While in the lofty upper reaches doing renovations, Rigan fell, breaking his back in several places in the lumbar region. He’s been recovering for two years so far, adapting to the necessity of working vertically for 15 minutes and then sitting for a spell. Sitting does not pain him. The injury, “changed my life,” Rigan said.
It also threw a wrench in his renovations, which he is mostly doing himself. He recently brought his sculptures and works-in-progress to what will be studios and a home. Like good interlocutors, being surrounded by his materials and works have reinvigorated him.
He mostly does big, commissioned pieces—public, private, corporate—out of stone, glass, metal and wood.
To get the big commissions, to do the big works, takes a big person, and Rigan is that, although he’s surprisingly soft spoken and self-deprecating when his erudition shows too much, in contrast to his physicality and boldly hewn and constructed sculptures.
In an era in which art has no predominate schools of thought or styles and each artist is something of an island, Rigan’s career is marked by civitas and collaboration—with architects, engineers, art boards, university deans and corporate decision makers. “Agape” rather than “philautia,” love for humanity vs. self-love, cultural-expression vs. self-expression, social -good vs. self-actualization are what occupy him.
Besides creating art for public spaces, he played an integral part in increasing Phoenix’s inventory of art in public spaces, serving on boards that tracked and monitored federally-funded capital projects and then ensuring that one percent of that project’s budget went to public art. Rigan also wrote the California State University at Stanislaus’ master plan for its public-art collection, averting most universities’ bad-practice of having no guidelines or driving mission in its collection practices.
Rigan, starting at age 14, sought out mentors who could give him classical training and apprenticeships in drawing, painting, architecture, glass and stained glass—at a time when academia offered a potpourri of Abstract Expressionist, non-representational, “find yourself” art classes. “I wanted the skills. I didn’t need help with concepts,” Rigan said.
Gifted students, if not hampered by their parents or teachers or institutions, will dive deeply into what interests them, hammering out their own thesis- antithesis-synthesis learning processes. Total integration, making it one’s own is the result, with the ability to generalize what one knows in one area to another.
An example of Rigan’s generalizing from one art form to another—his sculptures have a lot of drawing in them, but instead of a pencil, he’s wielding a big circular stone saw to create line, rhythm, light-and-dark contrast, shadow-shading and gesture.
His concern with “creating a space” that communes with surrounding buildings, nature and people who use the space is an architect’s preoccupation more than a sculptor’s—another instance of Rigan bridging art forms.
Rigan has ingested and made his own the archetypal forms ancient Greeks, Southwestern tribes, Tibetan monasteries and other cultures created to memorialize, celebrate, unify and edify its people.
Form, for a modern sculptor engaged in commissions for public spaces, must predominate, not subject matter. The patronage system that nurtured public art based on “noblesse oblige,” a sense of duty to the people to support artists and to advance the culture, no longer exists. We no longer have a homogenous or theocratic culture and therefore no common subject matter or narrative. In Phidias’ day, he was told what to sculpt—Athena Parthenos—because it was Athens and because she was the city’s patron goddess.
Form must carry the message in our secular, eclectic society. Rigan has the vocabulary that transcends disparate cultures and times—archetypal forms. He groups, names investigates, experiments and does sculptural series based on these forms. “I think in terms of form and space,” Rigan said.
One series is “columns and monoliths.” The vertical column, an archetypal form occurring across many cultures, expresses honor, strength, maleness, order, support. Think of Trajan’s Column and Brancusi’s Endless Column, both war memorials. Rigan, using his “bridge saw, digitally programmed, diamond blade, water-cooled,” cut stone columns vertically and inserted glass. The glass transmits light “through the stone, back to front—like stained glass.” Throughout the ages, what architect or sculptor has deconstructed and then reconstructed and so emphasized the vertical axis in a column? And enlivened and reinvigorated it with inserts of glass, speaking to its core, like exposing a tree’s sap, alive and running?
In his “markers and reconstruction” series, he searches out “discards” at New Mexico Travertine, a quarry in Belen, that has grown used to his odd preference for broken and irregular stones with inclusions and occlusions. His mark-making, with his stone saw, is a “precise” sort of human language that contrasts yet balances with the stone’s “own story” formed by organic pressures over millennia.
His “low stones” series can be likened to the archetypal “omphalos” stones in ancient Greece, the low, rounded form associated with the Earth’s or humans’ nurturing by Mother Earth’s navel or umbilicus. Unlike the vertical command of a column or monolith, these are meant to be “happened upon” and looked down on, evoking a more intimate communion with the viewer.
One of Rigan’s most recognized commissions is his Spaceport America sculpture. The archetypal form is the arc or architectural curved arch. When curving down, the arc brings heavenly energy down to earth, brings man under the dome of heaven—think of the ancient Egyptian images of Nut, goddess of the sky, her body arching over the people. Rigan tilts the arc skyward—humanity, reaching for and soaring into the heavens. The arc is made out of metal, a human amalgam, cast and shaped and soldiered by earth-bound homo erectus. Rigan contrasts the arc, the Icarus-like daring and longing, with polished glass stones placed in constellation-like patterns across the metal surface, bringing the heavens down to earth.
Archetypal forms are not tired tropes in Rigan’s hands, but a seminal, ever-changing language that speaks to our collective spirit.
Please find the link to his studio web page: https://ottoriganstudio.com/
Thank you, Kathleen, for the wonderful article on Otto. Absolutely right on!
Great article! Feel better Otto!
Beautiful. Thank you for this article. I knew that Otto has made a studio space near my home but until now I had not seen his work. It is spectacular.