May 242 min read

‘To Love One Another’ (Day Labor)

Updated: Jul 16

Work by Molly Valentine Dierks

Sheila and Houston Hill Memorial Courtyard Gallery

To Love One Another (Day Labor) uses the materials of hidden infrastructure (like rebar) to explore healing and connection. With a color palette and form inspired by nature (beautiful Texas sunsets...) and the vibrancy of the Texas LGBTQIA+ movement, the work explores joy, pain, and growth. The title is inspired by poet Rainer Marie Rilke, where he touches on the importance of the labor of loving one another.

This work was supported by the University of Colorado Boulder Center for Arts & Humanities Small Grant, and a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York, NY).

Artist Bio

Molly Valentine Dierks is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator. Dierks has participated in exhibitions nationally (Dallas, Detroit, LA) and internationally (Russia, South Korea); including at the University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, CICA Museum (Korea), and 500X Gallery in Dallas, Texas, among others. Her work has been featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s 'Post Industrial Complex', CICA Museum’s Art Yellow Book, Designboom, Voyage Dallas, The Jealous Curator, Peripheral Visions Arts, and more. Dierks’ public installations—exploring vulnerability—have appeared in Minnesota, Detroit and the DFW Metroplex. She currently works from Boulder, Colorado—where she is an Assistant Professor of Art + Design at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Artist Statement

By reconfiguring unlikely materials in unusual ways, I am on a quest…seeking to distill the formal and linguistic qualities of desire, conformity, and love. My public installations use the formal language of construction to explore collective healing.

The Plinth Program

North Texas artist Kris Pierce's series of three permanent sculptural concrete plinths form an exterior gallery for temporary outdoor artworks, a new program of Arts Fort Worth. Part of the Fort Worth Public Art program, each cast concrete plinth honors the spirit of the Fort Worth Community Arts Center's original Bauhaus-informed architecture by Principal Designer Herbert Bayer, whose 1925 universal alphabet served as inspiration for the plinths' minimal, balanced forms. The plinths are designed to allow for temporary exhibition of three-dimensional artworks.

The Plinth Program fulfills a recommendation included in the Fort Worth Public Art Master Plan Update (2017): to “embrace new initiates and partnership, including … temporary art” that “provide opportunities to experiment and to engage the public and artists in new ways." An extension of the Fort Worth Community Arts Center’s galleries, the Courtyard Gallery provides a prominent outdoor venue for temporary sculptural artworks in one of the most architecturally significant Cultural Districts in the United States.