MARYLYN DINTENFASS PARALLEL PARK
MARYLYN DINTENFASS PARALLEL PARK is the first book to document this internationally-known artist's most recent work that reveals her life-long love affair with automobiles, especially the culturally iconic high-powered, sporty, sexy muscle cars that streamed out of Detroit from the late 1950's to the mid-1970's.
This monograph is the story of the artist's most recent achievement - one of the largest and most transformative art installations in the United States of the past decade. The book expands upon Dintenfass' drawings, monotypes and paintings on the automotive theme and critically explores how they are the genesis for this site-specific installation - the latest in a long series of such works - entitled PARALLEL PARK in Fort Myers, Florida. PARALLEL PARK is a major new study on the artist, a review of popular culture and gender issues in contemporary art, and an invaluable public art reference.
As visually stimulating as its message is groundbreaking, the book's punctuated division into three sections - with full color plates - boldly progresses like rhythmic traffic lights. A brilliant scholarly essay by Aliza Edelman provides an innovative and gendered look at the artist's primary and biographical sources in postwar automobile culture. Included are all of Dintenfass' automotive themed oils and monotypes as shown at her 2011 exhibition at the Robert Rauschenberg Gallery in Fort Myers, Florida. The third and final section documents the commissioning of PARALLEL PARK. Barbara Anderson Hill, Consultant to the City of Fort Myers Public Art Program, outlines a detailed account of the project's initial proposal and realization. Dintenfass then follows with her own comprehensive narrative on her artistic vision of PARALLEL PARK's evocative subject matter and challenging fabrication, accompanied by a remarkable, on-site photographic essay of the installation, including incisive commentary by the architect, the printer and members of the construction team. In conclusion, an interview by John Driscoll, with public art expert Jennifer McGregor, places the project in context and discusses the qualities that distinguish PARALLEL PARK.
While the automobile provided the artistic vocabulary to champion the machine, it is Marylyn Dintenfass and her individual lexicon of symbols that express the irresistible thrill and freedom associated with the automobile. All that exuberant driving around - with 'No Particular Place To Go' - gave rise to another twentieth-century necessity: the ubiquitous parking garage. The Lee County Justice Center Parking Garage in Fort Myers, Florida - a once bland, mundane municipal space - is now an ultimate destination with Dintenfass' three-dimensional work of art, stretching 529 feet long by 33 feet high, around the four facades of the building. Exploring the conceptual correlation between contemporary art and the transformation of public space - a common theme in Dintenfass' work - several primary subjects link the artist's career with her installation. At play here are the relationships of color, chromatic density and light on geometrically arranged surfaces; the repetition of interlocking units suggestive of organic forms; and the effects of translucence and opacity.
PARALLEL PARK is destined to become a classic reference in public art circles on the development, partnership and transformation of a remarkable project. This title offers critical consideration on a field that deserves more scholarly attention with art in public places commanding ever more presence throughout the world based on rapidly developing new technologies and innovations.
PARALLEL PARK has just been named a final selection for the 2011 Public Art Network Year in Review at the Americans for the Arts 50th Anniversary Conference in San Diego, CA. "This year's entries signal a resurgence of work that emphatically declares the independence of the artist and the artwork while acknowledging the circumstances of the site."
Dintenfass' visceral visual series of metaphorical high-octane, fleshy, chrome and chroma automobile inspired paintings entitled SOUPED UP/TRICKED OUT will be on display at Babcock Galleries, 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, October 11 - November 18, 2011. Opening October 13, 2011.
The Flint Institute of the Arts in Flint, MI has commissioned Marylyn Dintenfass to create an edition of 100 prints for the Institute's Print Society. Each year the Print Society commissions an artist to do a print for its membership and past commissions have gone to artists including Janet Fish, Richard Bosman among others. The print will be on an automotive theme and will be released to the Print Society members at a special event in the late Fall, 2011.
In 2012, an exhibition of Dintenfass' automotive themed works is planned for Michigan's Flint Institute of Arts.
"Rarely does art and architecture form the seamless bond evidenced in Fort Myers' new parking garage, a studied improvisation in form, color, and light. Marylyn Dintenfass' PARALLEL PARK, like alchemy, transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary, providing both a physical and imaginary civic gateway."
- Michele Cohen, FROM THE INTRODUCTION, PARALLEL PARK MARYLYN DINTENFASS BY ALIZA EDELMAN, 2011, HARD PRESS EDITIONS
Read the full introduction.pdf 
