INSIDE ON CAMPUS

Professor's work featured at Austin Museum

The Austin Museum of Art’s (AMOA) exhibition, America Starts Here, features the work of Mel Ziegler, professor of studio art and sculpture, and his late wife and creative partner, Kate Ericson.

The couple’s work represents a decade of collaboration that helped rethink the function of public art by creating works and installations that called attention to the subject of community, the public sphere and ownership and use of public space. The AMOA exhibit, showing through May 6, features a model of their 1991 project ‘Camouflaged History.’ The model house, created in Charleston, S.C., was painted 72 colors in a camouflage pattern. Paint names such as “Moorish maroon red” and “Confederate uniform grey” were each labeled with their respective, official trade name. In a larger-than-life, poignant fashion, Ziegler and Ericson’s work addressed racial and historical tensions, community planning and historic preservation.