MINNEAPOLIS STAR
1971

Don Morrison
(Edited Transcript )

Couple’s sculpture breathes effortless air

I am positively green with envy at the craftsman skills displayed by Ben Sams and Dana Boussard, who happen to be husband and wife and have a scintillating show thru Sept in The Gallery of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

To be creative and  talented and  craftsmanly and funny leaves us banana fingers back in the dust. . . .

They are wickedly satiric, not just jokes. Their humor can be frighteningly savage, but the laughter is Rabelaisian, not bitter. . . .

I cannot guess at Sams technique but he manages to transfer to his works reproductions of newspaper type that stand out in low relief and are fired into glaze. . . .

Every inch of his figures is full of surprises. . . .

“Unicorn Savings Bank" is another lunatic animal with a coin slot in
its back. 

"Friend to Bosch” is a masterpiece of illusion.  A sort of mushroom cap, on closer inspection looks like a frog's head and on still closer turns into an idiot human face. . . . The Hieronymus Bosch reference is a key.  Sams’ figures are diabolic figments of the human imagination, as terrible as they are funny.

Dana Boussard matches her husband in macabre wit and, like him, expresses it in beautifully detailed workmanship. Her “sculpture consists of stuffed cloth dummies, fancifully dressed and adorned, and of rich quasi-ecclesiastical hangings and vestments. . . .

The wall pieces are really beautiful.  They are also ferociously irreverent. . . .

Both artists make their points with direct, immediate, laugh-out-loud humor. Go admire the art and enjoy the jokes.