A Deeper Perspective
Source: Odessa American - TX - 11/1/98  
Much of the isolated child - the little girl who stayed in her room sculpting with model clay, Scotch tape and tinfoil while her schoolmates played loudly outside - remains with New Jersey-born artist Abby Levine. She is a quiet woman. Settled in a small wooden house in Marathon, with a reflective cactus garden still and alive outside, Levine lays a pencil to quarter inch birch plywood, turns it beneath her stationary scoll saw and assembles her wooden dioramas to give her life meaning. The result of her labor is loud and demanding. The brightly colored, three-dimensional scenes celebrate the rule breakers, the outsiders and the dangers of North American culture.
  As an alienated child - a little too smart, a little to fat, a little too clumsy for her peers, she says - Levine said art gave her a sense of self worth. "Art is what I do to justify my existence," she said as she sat among framed photographs and postcards displayed as a tribute to Americana. "I always felt separated from other people." Levine attended school in philadelphia. She has lived in New York, Saint Louis and Seattle. She found the Northwest was "just too dark. I couldn't take it." Then a New York Times article about Big Bend National Park caught her eye. She and longtime partner Gary Beugel decided to visit. They arrived at the same time as other New Yorkers who had read the same story, she said. But while these armchair tourists soon would leave, the dry, barren terrain spoke to Levine, and she and Beugel settled in Fort Davis in 1991. They moved to a house in Marathon in 1994.
  But when this 40-something East Coast artist began incorporating Western themes and icons into her works of art, when met with resistance. "I got a lot of flack - mostly from male Western artists who thought I had no right to do Western art because I wasn't born in the West." Some smelled something "fishy" about Levine's smiling cowgirl's and ranchero figures. "They thought that I was making fun of something," she recalled. But Levine's attraction to the history of the West and the figures within it is genuine, she said. "Coming out of the East Coast, it just really amazed me with these people went through. Cowgirls really interested me." She said that while the traditional gender rules applied to Western women, she was suprised to find many of them were forward and aggressive. The dichotomy suprised Levine. "On one hand they were expected to be really traditional. But if their husband died they were expected to run the ranch by themselves," she said, perhaps in reference to legendary Big Bend Country rancher Hallie Stillwell who passed away in 1997. "As a person who never climbed a tree and can't ride a horse, it was just amazing for me to see a whole different way of life."
  But Western images do sell. Once settled in West Texas, Levine's mail order business began to skyocket. Cutout wooden cowgirls complete with red boots and check scarves were soon reaching homes from coast to coast . Her works have been awarded to inductees of The National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. And while this attention was nice for the time, mail order was not what Levine wanted to pursue. "I couldn't see going into the manufacturing end of things because I would  never hire anyone." The title "boss" is not one that sits well with Abby Levine. She doesn't appreciate the better known artists who leave the "grunt work" to paid underlings. "If I can't make the stuff myself - it's not mine," she said disdainfully.
  Despite the success of these quirky cowgirl cutouts, Levine is moving back toward a more decidedly fine art vein, with which she is able to flex her political cortex on matters of revolution and personal dignity. But an obvious sense of humor keeps even these more challenging pieces from being inaccessible to the public. Her assembled works introduce the viewer to rebels and revolutionaries such as Emiliano Zapata, Paul Robeson and Oscar Wilde as well as to multitudes of the cheery pink-cheeked icons of 1950s-circa American Dream. "People don't quite know how to handle my work," Levine laments. The biting commentary of the themes she tackles, as well as the non-traditional format, creates confusion with many viewers, she said. "Some don't know whether to think of it as art or as a craft or some sort of sick toy. It can't be defined really easily and it doesn't look like what people have seen before," she said."People sometimes feel personally challenged. A lot of people find that threatening." Enlighted by this knowledge, Levine continues to produce her visions unhampered by the market. This commitment to her personal vision brings her closer in character to the personal heroes who are treated in many of her works. "I really don't think there is any point in being alive unless you have your own viewpoint on life," she stated matter-of-factly. Occasionally her unconventional views come in conflict with others that are just as deeply held.
  A year and a half ago, the sprightly New Jersey woman was sharing her work at a folk art convention in Austin. She showed slides. She spoke of pieces she hoped to produce in the future. One such planned piece was to deal with the Manhattan Project and the aftershock that chaffed the atomic bomb creators' consciences. She wanted to capture the moment the scientists realized the bomb "wasn't this wonderful thing," Levine said. One man, a veteran of World War II, objected to Levine's conception of the bomb. "He said, 'I wish we had more bombs so we could bomb more Japs,'" Levine recalled. "He respected the work, but he was repulsed by the impulse, by its message. I respect him for it. I can't say everybody's got to think like I do."
  Levine also accepts commissioned projects. One of the better known portrays Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein chumming it up with the Marx Brothers. She finds these contracted works therapeutic. "It is some other world to enter into, someone else's life to explore." After a brief pause, this small framed woman with big boned art, considers, "I'll always regret that I couldn't be a writer." Levine's art has been featured at New York galleries like SIXTOSIX Gallery, Jim Diaz Gallery and 10 on 8. She has exhibited pieces in Santa Fe, Seattle, Austin and Dallas. In Alpine, her work is found at Kiowa Gallery. In Marathon, she exhibits at Chisos Gallery. She is one of more then 80 artists whose work will be displayed at 23 locations in Alpine, during Gallery Night, on Nov. 21. Fueled by the large number of artists who have settled in far West Texas, Gallery Night often features high profile artists. Last time, works by Tom Cury, Michael Atkinson, Fredrick Remington, and  Picasso were on display, said Kiowa Gallery owner Keri Null. "We want to promote original art and things made by hand," said Null. "With so many artists living here now, we can offer arts and handicrafts that you would have to travel to other, better known places to buy." Originally held twice annually, Gallery Night is changing to an annual event, Null said.