Leland Rice

Leland Rice, a self-described ‘visual archeologist,’ began photographing the Berlin Wall in 1983, returning each year to document its ever-evolving surface of imagery and text until its fall in November 1989. The artist commented:

‘Accumulated over many years, countless graffiti had turned the Wall into a semantic playground full of forceful messages. I gradually realized that I no longer could relate to the Wall as just a physically tangible medieval barrier symbolizing the ideological division of Europe. Certainly the Wall did exist for divisive reasons, but now it took on another purpose for me - that of a creative catalyst. And, since walls had long been a primary subject of my work as an artist, I felt deeply compelled to photograph it.’ (Leland Rice, as quoted in Up Against It: Photographs of the Berlin Wall, p. 114)

Indeed, photographing walls in various forms had been a particular focus for Rice. In the mid-1970s, he repeatedly photographed vacant interiors, which he titled Wall Sites. By the late 1970s he documented the walls in painters’ studios where the traces and run-offs from canvases accumulated. 

Rice’s Berlin Wall photographs capture the transitory mash-ups of texts, poetry, pictograms, and expletives that we now read as a visual archive of the Cold War era. In the sliver of wall shown in the present work, Rice recorded a roster of names (Alex, Olaf, Femke, Jasper, and Indra, among others); a profile of a face drawn with yellow spray paint and finished with menacing red teeth; a Cheshire-like cat sketched in white chalk; and a stenciled figure of a runner carrying a torch. Other images and text are completely obscured by the layers drawn on top of them, a palimpsest that cannot be unraveled. 

Rice’s work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Art Institute Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.