It was through her artistic work as a sculptor that she came in contact with ancient Goddess images and became interested in archaeology and ancient religion. Her book When God Was a Woman (Dial Press, 1976) reclaimed the Goddess and women’s role in prehistory and laid the groundwork for those who continue to research pre-patriarchal history.
The reclamation of the Goddess has influenced the visual arts, literature, music, theological views, and feminist studies, as well as a movement of women and men who now celebrate Goddess reverence as the core of planetary consciousness and environmental conscience.
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merlin stone,
artist and sculptor
Merlin Stone, Buffalo Evening News, May 5, 1962.
Merlin Stone, Artist and Sculptor
by David B. Axelrod
The trajectory of Merlin Stone’s career as an artist pointed her clearly toward her studies of the Goddess and feminist causes. Born Marilyn Claire Jacobson, on September 27, 1931, in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, her early education showed signs of greatness. Her high level of talent was evident even in high school, where she received the first sculpting award ever presented by Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. She graduated in 1949, and that September entered the State University of New York, Buffalo, where she continued her art studies. In 1950, she married and left school to work and raise a family.
In 1958, she completed her studies at SUNY, Buffalo, obtaining her BS in art with a teaching certificate, and a minor in journalism. She was soon employed as a junior high school art teacher and, in that capacity, was already showing signs of her desire to work outside conventional strictures. A reporter covering a Kenmore School Board meeting for the local paper in 1960 noted that Mrs. Stone of the Kenmore Junior High School art faculty had concerns that “giving the same test to everyone in an individualistic subject like art seemed like a bad idea. … To back up her position, Mrs. Stone wrote to leading art teachers and asked their opinions on standardized tests. … done up in a presentation … to the committee [that] won her case. Kenmore will continue to let teachers grade their own pupils on the basis of their classwork” (Dave White, Buffalo Courier-Express, 1960). Merlin, the reporter noted, “urged freedom of expression and not making them conform to set standards.”
Marilyn Stone, not yet known as Merlin, was creating new and ever-more-innovative art. By May 1962, an article announced that she had received a commission to create a sculpture for a building on Delaware Avenue: “Sculptress Hired for New Building.” The reporter described her as “the trim, dark-haired Mrs. Stone [who] will do the sculpture in her basement studio at home.” Years later, when filling out an author’s information form for Dial Press to assist in the promotion of the first American printing of her book When God Was a Woman, Merlin would complain that they were more interested in the way she looked or who was watching her children while she did her art than in the art itself.
“The City,” a Merlin Stone sculpture placed at Benderson Building, Delaware Avenue, Buffalo.
As for her actual creations, often they were large, ambitious welded-bronze constructions. Photos in the papers show Merlin welding—without gloves, sparks flying everywhere. In another article on her sculpture when it was placed in front of the new Benderson Building, she explained how “the work represents the juxtaposition of buildings along with the activity of people who live within the city” (Buffalo Courier-Express, Nov. 15, 1962). More indicative of her future research and authorship, she continued, “To just display the type of work that was popular four hundred to five hundred years ago indicates a lack of acceptance of life on the part of people today.” Ms. Stone was refining her passion for new ways to see the world—new rules for shaping art and individual identity.
As Merlin’s sculptures were commissioned, built, and placed in more buildings and public places, she wrote a commentary for an “Arts and Culture” section of a Buffalo newspaper explaining how she felt about her creative process, saying that for her, “there is a tension of Earthbound objects.” In the relationships between people and objects, there is a kind of “magnetic push and pull that each of these things creates toward each other,” which can be the truth that art captures. Merlin continues, “There is the encompassing relationship of a shell or cover protecting precious contents, a pregnant woman, a seed in the earth, a flower in its closed bud … There is the emanation from that which is precious, outwards into space” (“What Does It Mean,” The Buffalo News, 1962, p. 9).
Merlin received commissions from some of the largest corporations in America, including Marine Midland Bank, Graphic Controls, Union Carbide Corporation, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and the City of Buffalo.
One of Merlin’s sculptures commissioned for outdoor placement in Upstate New York, circa 1965.
Another of Merlin’s sculptures commissioned for outdoor placement in Upstate New York, circa 1965.
Merlin’s welded-bronze sculpture is pictured to the left as part of
an advertisement for federal housing for senior citizens in Buffalo.
Reporters sometimes asked why she didn’t title some of her creations. On the occasion of the unveiling of yet another massive work of welded, yellow brass, Merlin commented, “I didn’t name the piece. After all the furor over the ‘Spirit of Womanhood,’ I decided to stay away from names.” She was referring to a fourteen-foot bronze abstract sculpture of a woman by Larry W. Griffis Jr., which apparently generated a great deal of controversy over its name and subject matter when placed in a Buffalo park.
As an assistant art professor at State University College, Buffalo, in 1962, she was asked to lecture on the history of sculpture. Later, Merlin explained that her preparations for her lectures helped her discover lost Goddess cultures. Time and time again, she encountered figures of women from ancient civilizations, but their roles were either subordinated to a male patriarchal system or simply dismissed as not central to the cultures where they were found. Worse, they were characterized as lewd vestiges of female cults.
By the mid-sixties, Marilyn C. Stone was branching out, not just in sculptures that broke away from old forms, but with kinetic art and art constructions that escaped the frame. Divorced in 1964, she moved to a farmhouse in Upstate New York, where she continued to sculpt and create. Later, she worked out of her large studio on West Ferry Street in Buffalo, where she established herself as a force in the arts community. She became an instructor at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where her work was not only exhibited but won sculpture awards. Merlin exhibited widely in 1966, a banner year for her. She created a three-dimensional wall of eight floor-to-ceiling panels, which, she told the Buffalo Courier-Express, “should appear that the paintings are growing, like a wall-to-wall painting [with] implied motion” (Garcia de Campos, October 2, 1964, p. 24D).
A sketch for a painting by Merlin that escapes from its frame.
Merlin with her creation in her backyard in Oakland, CA.
Spurred on by her increasing success, Merlin applied to and was given a teaching fellowship to study in the MFA program at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now known as California College of the Arts). Early in 1967, she moved to the San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley area, where she soon began working with the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc. (E.A.T.). The group itself was new to the area and had just published its first newsletter. E.A.T. promised to “emphasize the collaborative relationship between artists and engineers… [to] maintain a constructive climate for the recognition of the new technology and the arts … eliminate the separation of the individual from technological change” (E.A.T. News, vol. 1, no. 1, January 15, 1967, p. 1 and back cover).
Merlin appears in the foreground of this photograph, working with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company to create the entrance to an E.A.T. show entitled “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”
In her MFA diss
ertation, entitled “The Energy Systems of Marilyn Stone,” Merlin not only presented a summary of her multimedia environmental sculptures but also articulated some of the most basic concepts that would shape her future feminist work. Looking back on her art to that point, she stated: “My original concerns for the spatial and temporal aspects of our existence have led me to an exploration of what visually causes our sensory perceptions of space and time” (Dissertation, 3). Using the shift of mountains—too slow to perceive—and the spin of a propeller—too fast to perceive—she explains that “we do not see slow enough and we do not see fast enough to perceive other than a very narrow scale of temporal existence. This offers us a very limited definition of what we refer to as visual reality and that which artists have explored until now.” But from that basic declaration of her need to seek new technologies that offer more dimensions for us to experience and perceive, she extrapolates to make a highly prophetic statement: “There appears to be a kind of humanistic provincialism or sort of religious fear of what ‘The Powers That Be’ intended for us to know, that has until now controlled our explorations of what is visually interesting” (Dissertation, 4).
In her quest to expand the media, Merlin came to believe that we are only able to advance if we can see the world in new patterns. In her summation of her environmental sculptures and her MFA, she stated, “The colors that we perceive are the eye’s reception of photons of varying wavelengths. We may, then, begin to explore controlling these wavelengths with fluorescence, phosphorescence, diffraction gratings, fiber optics, polarization as we have until now explored controlling these wavelengths by mixing chemicals together that we refer to as paint.” To that end, she constructed a series of four increasingly large environments that combined sound, music, and lighted objects turned on and off to create a feeling of motion, and projections of video and film images—all of which surrounded a person in a room-sized environment rather than simply presenting itself as a static object of art to be viewed.
Two light constructions that Merlin built for her MFA project. Above is a time-lapse photo showing light patterns for a room-sized environment. Below is a bench with a moving light pattern.
“I had become too concerned with static solid forms,” Merlin declared, but the same disillusionment with conventions of art would imbue her later desire to change the way we look at the role of women. In her art she stated, “If new information is found that does not fit into the original system, a new system must be developed which will either negate or include the original one. … We start to think of evolution, anthropology, archaeology, cinematography and relativity. When the distant points of history force us to regard our own existence as another point in time, the comprehension of our own existence as another point in time, the comprehension of a fourth dimension is pressed upon us” (Dissertation, pp. 11, 13). Merlin’s subsequent research into our forgotten and/or suppressed matriarchal societies would provide the stimuli, the building blocks, that helped create a new dimension of Goddess awareness and feminism.
This flashing, fluorescent light sculpture, which Merlin created for her MFA, was later included in the University of California, Berkeley,
“Energy of Art” exhibition.
After the completion of her MFA, by spring of 1969, Marilyn Stone, who was now known as Merlin, was the E.A.T. Bay Area coordinator, expanding and articulating the mission of E.A.T. in its newsletters. The University of California, Berkeley Extension, where she taught as an instructor, acknowledged her by her professional name, Merlin Stone, noting in their description of her course that “her own work with energy systems of electronically activated light-modules has led her into recent explorations of the electric waves of the human brain as a control device to activate light and sound environments” (“Energy Art: New Media of Art and Technology,” E.A.T. spring catalog, 1969).
Merlin was, once again, a subject of newspaper articles, one headline declaring “She’d Light Up the Sky.” A reporter, still as interested in describing Merlin’s looks as her art, began her story, “A tall brunette who always dresses in black and wants to turn the City on with light configurations is behind a far-out happening now taking place at the San Francisco Museum of Art” (Virginia Westover, San Francisco Chronicle, 1969). The article chronicles Merlin’s work on a project entitled “Outside/Inside,” described as “an electronic video-audio performance that … picks up sights and sounds of the crowds as they walk through [and allows] participants to see themselves on large video monitors which also transmit pre-programmed images.” At the time—when videography was anything but ubiquitous—the idea of putting art patrons into the art itself was highly innovative. The article, which later characterizes Merlin as “vivacious,” makes note of Merlin’s work with brain waves in art as well as plasma gas light sculptures, and ends by quoting Merlin as wanting “to laser-beam a light show on the moon” (Westover).
Marilyn Claire Jacobson’s metamorphosis from Mrs. Stone, to Marilyn Stone, to Merlin Stone—a highly innovative artist and sculptor—did not end there, of course. In her own résumé, and in her informational sheet she provided to Dial Press, Merlin says that she began research for her book When God Was a Woman as early as 1962. She dates her specific independent studies for the book between 1970, when she devoted herself to research and writing, and 1976, including time at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology in Oxford, England. She also spent time at the British Library’s special collections in London, and traveled to Greece, Crete, Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other birthplaces of the Goddess to collect evidence and additional research material for her book. But beyond the actual dates of her career, the strains of her independence of thought and feminist beliefs were evident even in her demand that she and her junior high school colleagues be allowed to determine their own standards by which to measure their students. She bristled at those who reduced a woman’s career to a hobby, or worse, those who described the physical attributes of the artist (as opposed to the art itself), and she asserted that art must be dynamic, not bound by past conventions or even contained within the measured space of a frame. That same inquisitive nature set in motion her Goddess research. After the appearance of and acclaim for her feminist writings, she continued to speak at conferences on women in the arts, moving easily between the art world and gender studies for the rest of her life.
List of Merlin’s Commissions
Marine Midland Bank, Vassar branch. Turley, Stievater, Walker, Mauri & Assoc., Architects. “The Group”—welded bronze.
Benderson Building, 135 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY. Harold Bell, Architect. “The City”— welded brass.
The Cloister Restaurant, 472 Delware Avenue, Buffalo, NY. James DiLapo, Architectural Designer. “Fountain”—welded brass.
Union Carbide Corp., Linde Air Division. House of Crafts. “Cage”—welded copper.
Marine Midland Bank, Wappinger Fall, NY. Turley, Stievater et al, Architects. Divider screen—welded bronze.
Graphic Controls Corp., Buffalo, NY. Arthur Carrara, Architect. “Three”—welded bronze.
Continental Inn, Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY. James Sapienza, Interior Designer. “Furnace”—brass and bronze.
Marine Midland Bank, Syracuse main office. Turley, Stievater et al, Architects. “Wall Squares”—brass, bronze, and copper.
Milky Way Restaurant, Williamsville, NY. James DiLapo, Architectural Designer. Forty-foot screen divider—welded brass.
Buffalo Dental Supply building, Amherst, NY. Suburban Galleries, Interior Designers. Series of three: “The Odyssey”— brass, copper, and enamels.
Federal Housing Project for the Elderly, Cornwall Avenue, Buffalo, NY. Robert T. Coles, Architect. “Fountain and Screen.”
Merlin’s graduate school transcript from what is now
California College of the Arts.
Merlin sculpting, 1964. Buffalo, New York.
Letter to Merlin informing her she’d bee
n awarded an honorary PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Merlin in her studio, circa 1964. Buffalo, New York.
Bank installation, welded bronze.
Letter from Robert F. Kennedy thanking Merlin for her art the exhibited in the lobby of his New York City Senate office, 1965.
The New York Times (July 23, 1965).
“Struggle.” Welded brass. 26th Western New York Exhibition. Albright-Knox Gallery, 1960.
Welded bronze, 1964.
Detail of panel/wall (displayed on next page). Welded brass, 1966.
Milky Way Restaurant, Williamsville, New York. Forty-foot screen divider. Welded brass.
Welded bronze, circa 1965.
Mylar construction on canvas.
Merlin Stone embracing a lighting column as final photo in her 1968 MFA dissertation.
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i remember merlin
Merlin Stone Remembered Page 24
