Permission to Create: The Legacy of Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, at The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art and Technology

February 5 – April 2, 2022

55 S. First Street
Newark, Ohio 43055
attheworks.org

When I was very young my grandmother, Mary Sherwood Wright Jones (1892 – 1985), would often draw a picture and give it to me as a gift when we came to visit. Holding the small sheet of notepad paper I could see her sure hand in the lively pencil lines creating the outlines of a squirrel or a rabbit or a deer. With this exchange an invitation to her world of making images also passed between us. I felt a kinship with her in these moments. I knew I belonged in her world.

Best known as an illustrator, my grandmother’s legacy is complicated. After working with my cousin, Michael Kennedy, on the exhibition “Permission to Create: The Legacy of Mary Sherwood Wright Jones,” at The Works Museum in Newark, OH, over the last three years, I can see that everyone has their own perspective on who our Grandmother was and why she made the life choices she did. What I can say with certainty is the personal space she created for self-expression and her generosity and encouragement gave me permission to claim my own territory of expression, permission that has animated my life’s work.

Mary Sherwood Wright Jones’ warm, understated presence was inseparable from her charmed circumstances. She grew up in an ornate, red brick mansion with Victorian era interiors on the top of a secluded hill surrounded by evergreens, oaks, cultivated lawns encircled by rich farmlands. In her early 20s, with encouragement from her banker father, she left her secure midwestern nest to spend two years studying fine art in New York City. She studied with members of the Ashcan School in 1913 and 1914, and her small oil paintings in the show, The Gardener and Nude, are fine realist works. Several of her charcoal self portraits from this time show a serious young woman deftly revealed in light and shadow looking directly at the viewer.

This is the first time her serious paintings and drawings will be shown to the public. While visiting my studio in Mattituck, NY, this summer Michael proposed we show only our grandmother’s fine art works despite her established reputation as an accomplished illustrator for children’s periodicals. My cousin’s suggestion to show our grandmother’s earliest works freed me to speak something unspeakable in my family: something about my grandmother’s illustrations – and the attention they have gotten – has always bothered me.  Yes, my grandmother loved to draw, she enjoyed collaborating with the top educators who were her editors, and she liked being paid for her work. At the end of her over three decades illustrating for My Weekly Reader, her longtime editor Eleanor M Johnson wrote, “Mary Sherwood Wright Jones had an ability to deal creatively with reality and fantasy. She used the objects and creates of nature (bugs, raindrops, flowers, birds, bees and fish) which mean so much to children in their discovery of the world.” However, I never wanted to create something under someone else’s direction as my grandmother had done – and I wonder if that choice was an unhappy compromise on her part.

After my own life spend engaging with the vagaries, biases and challenges of the fine art world, I can understand her choice. I understand that the trade-off between creative control, money, and access to an audience has many shades. And yet, I felt she had held something back by choosing illustration. Something colorful and full-bodied and real was missing from her work.

The show is meant to bring attention to the early fine art she made for herself, and to trace her legacy across generations, putting her work in company with the work of my cousin, my daughter, and myself. I have been making art since those early days with my grandmother. I’ve searched, explored, and experimented, on my way to finding ways to make meaning. I chose two new large-scale paintings on stained, cropped, and stitched unstretched canvas for the exhibition. These works show my process of working from the inside letting the boundaries be determined by the interior play of paint flows amidst flashpoints of color. Michael is presenting his abstract paintings made in the last year, which draw upon the color palette from our grandmother’s early 20^th century pieces in the show.  And, Phoebe, my daughter, is showing photo-collages that explore trends of the American family throughout the 20^th and 21^st Century using imagery sourced from her own experience together with photographs, letters and other printed matter from prior generations, including those of her great-grandmother.

And yet, like many families I suppose, ours is not without challenges that cloud the legacy we are celebrating. My oldest sister Julia, who kept safe the enchanted, protective circle my grandmother first drew around me, suffered a traumatic injury in 2015. Our family was split in its aftermath making honest exploration of family history fraught at best. One result: my mother refused to loan works by my grandmother for this show. Despite her efforts to bring a limited view of my grandmother’s legacy, we are proudly presenting work that excites us.

In one very direct way, my grandmother’s illustration work has had a renewed influence on me. I have been working on my artist’s book, The Garden, launched at this show, since Julia’s injury. Itpresents a series of emotionally evocative abstract images with eleven semi-autobiographical singe-page stories centering on themes of abandonment and loss. Contrasting feelings of flux and balance run throughout The Garden, generating a cyclical experience that wavers between steady and destabilizing. Stylistically, the work is reminiscent of the children’s fairy tale books my grandmother illustrated. The Garden’s visible binding, with exposed, long, colored threads, highlights the physical joining of the book’s form. I am using my grandmother’s format. Her audience was young children, her iconography bright; I tell a darker more complex tale.  That too, is part of her legacy.

I have spent a lifetime exercising my grandmother’s permission to create.  I’ve taken my art practice where she could not; I’ve had choices that she did not. Still, precious little has changed for women seeking to be seen. Permission is, of course, just the start of a journey filled with risk. My grandmother showed us both the price of being different and the payoff of putting in the work, day after day. I am now one year older than she was the year I was born; I want to shine a light on the work that shows her undirected self.  I want to give her permission to create.

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November 15 – December 22, 2018
535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor (between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, ppowgallery.com

In her second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W., “Will She Ever Shut Up?”, Betty Tompkins, ever the bold tinkerer and experimenter, finds ingenious new ways to speak her mind. The formal link between three rooms of stylistically diverse, modestly scaled artworks is Tompkins’ strategy of placing socially charged phrases – handwritten, stencil-lettered or directly painted – on top of a separate visual field. These pointed juxtapositions poke us to puzzle out the connections, to think through the implications.

In the first room Tompkins unfurls the latest chapter of “Women Words”, a series she began in 2002. These incorporate phrases by and about women the artist solicits from the public. Interspersed here are companion works derived from the #MeToo movement in a separate series she titles “Apologia,” directly quoting public statements made by prominent men accused of assaulting women. Both categories of text are cleverly applied onto book page reproductions of canonical images by the likes of Titian, Raphael, Gainsborough, Cassatt, Rembrandt, Ingres and Artemisia Gentileschi. For the acrylic paintings in the second gallery, all from this year, selected “Women Words” expressions and accounts overlay her signature monochrome airbrushed, gracefully cropped close ups of genitalia.

As a suffused, solemn backdrop for these timely new works, the third gallery presents her text-only paintings and drawings on paper from the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Bringing to mind their on-going significance, Tompkins hand-copied fragments of our country’s founding legal documents painted in warm colonial hues over a subtle background grid of painted and penciled words. This group from the artist’s considerable archive is a reminder that her earliest, monumental paintings from 1969 through 1974, based on pornographic photographs her first husband had ordered illegally through the mail, were not shown for over 30 years. Since “discovered” in 2003, these and others Tompkins has since created have been shown virtually non-stop in museums and galleries around the world.

Perusing Tompkins’ word-image juxtaposition it is impossible not to think of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “L.H.O.O.Q,” (1919) created by doctoring a post-card reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee. Duchamp’s sly pencil marks succinctly highlight gender ambiguity in Leonardo’s oeuvre. Likewise, Tompkins’ satiric defacement of historical masterworks allows us to scrutinize her repurposed works for lessons in identity formation and gender role definition. Her clustered expressions of scorn, praise, pride and contrition loosely hand lettered in opaque pink paint completely cover single figures in the reproductions of well-known paintings and photographs. The resulting frozen pastel silhouettes also call to mind another historic reference, the ancient catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. As with this end-of-days event, Tompkins’  verbal flows have seemingly stopped the solitary men and women in their tracks ensnaring them for our analysis. Notably, the artist reverses her formula in an outlier work installed on the gallery’s smaller foyer wall, Women Words (Anon #11) (2017). On this vintage photograph, rather than the figure it’s the rural background that is filled with hand painted crude expressions such as, “Bean flicker,” “flesh wallet,” “Hagia Sophia,” “Love Socket”, ”put a bag over her head and fuck her for old glory.”  The young woman is fully dressed but seated in a way that modestly displays her underclothing. Unlike the other 50 plus readymades in the show, this woman is fully visible. She appears protected from the insults by her self-esteem and safe within her self-knowledge—indeed, wearing a quiet Mona Lisa smile.

Naomi Wolf’s landmark book, “Vagina” (2012) explores the implications of new research on the neuroscience of women’s reproductive organs. We now know there are multiple direct nerve connections between these organs and the brain. Wolf discusses how the impact of physical and verbal abuse on women’s psyches can now be more precisely measured. She also presents important correlations between erotic pleasure and personal agency. Tompkins’ seven pale pink and blue-grey paintings in the second gallery combine two contrasting techniques. Her signature soft airbrushed compositions of the swooning folds and creases of a woman’s labia and clitoris are counterposed with hard-edged stencil letters that have been removed to reveal the artwork’s under painting. Despite having its origin in exploitative pornography, Tompkins’ gentle yet emphatically clinical presentation of women’s genitalia tells of the importance for women of having a full understanding of the workings of their own sexuality. Being aware of the profound positive power of full female sexual expression for both men and women is the best defense against the attitudes expressed in the crowd-sourced phrases and narratives “pressed” into the genitalia in Tompkins’ paintings. My ex’s favorite…(2018) perfectly portrays this dynamic by hypnotically balancing the work’s two compositional elements within its floating painted space.

Let me suggest one way to consider the show’s composite truth that listening to each other with mutual respect is vital to the survival of our country. Imagine a vocal performance based on all the artworks in this show, simultaneously read aloud by their original authors. Men’s and women’s voices would create a calibrated cacophony merging insults, confessions, revelations and apologies pertaining to the opposite sex. Next, the phrases from Tompkins’ history works with key fragments from our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be recited by male voices. In these works, there is an underlying grid of the single word, “law,” repeated in rows. This would become a chant demanding “Law, law, law, law…” performed in a long, slow crescendo by an all-female chorus in the tens of thousands echoing the recent women’s marches. This multilayered vocal performance would reply to the question in Tompkins’ title with a resounding and hope filled “No!”

The post Speaking Her Mind: Betty Tompkins at P.P.O.W. appeared first on artcritical.

November 1, 2017 to January 27, 2018 (extended)
67 East 80th Street #2, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, victoriamunroefineart.com

A perfect oval, “jewel-tone” and encrusted, is suspended just below the center of Through, (2013) a medium-sized work on paper by the distinguished American painter Pat Adams, presented with nearly twenty of the artist’s richly hued abstract paintings in Then Found at Victoria Munroe. This mysterious, gritty egg is small, held in place by a horizontal mottled sienna band spanning a thick citron haze. Installed in the front gallery, this work and two sibling paintings, Here Occurring (2009) and Drawn, (1997), set a fundamental compositional rhythm for the exhibition. Emphatically symmetrical, these paintings share an ovoid shape placed in the middle of a field of deep space, but through changes in scale, palette and paint application, each picture invites a different apprehension of the same hopeful, transformative prophecy—simultaneously ancient and futuristic.

Adams has been producing beautiful, deeply engaging and keenly relevant work for nearly 70 years. A wealth of literature by renown critics such as Dore Ashton, Barbara Rose, Max Kozloff and Jed Perl has been written about the twenty-five solo shows of her work here in New York City since the mid-1950s and others throughout the country along with innumerable group exhibitions. Proof of Adam’s significance is in abundance in this show.

The central opaque oblong of Here Occurring (2009) painted on a narrow horizontal stretcher over six feet long, is embedded with crushed seashells hovering within a steely violet, pin-striped space highlighted with bright laser-like lines of high-keyed color. Presented in the back gallery, the earliest of the three, Drawn (1997) has a large square format that closely frames a densely textured, burnt sienna oval containing a single light yellow horizontal line flecked with red sand. The light in this painting is tinted dark red, conjuring a dusky Martian sky. An orange-red pool of light fills the bottom of the oval like the pupil of an eye scanning the space below reminiscent of the portentous floating eye-balloon imagery of Odilon Redon.

The works in Then Found span the years 1997 to 2016. This is only a third of the more than six decades Adams has spent building her extensive body of perceptual, non-figurative, mixed media work. Adam’s paintings are evidence of her belief in the powerful and unique exchange between the artist and her individual viewer facilitated by visual expression. She has developed and puts to use her own materials and techniques designed to generate vibrant, yet subtle plays of color, form, light and space with which to enthrall her audience. Raised in the Central Valley of California, she has long been based in Bennington, VT where she taught at Bennington College for 30 years until 1993. She exhibited new paintings every two years at the Zabriskie Gallery, New York from 1956 to 2009 when the gallery closed. This exhibition thus gives New Yorkers a welcome opportunity to see a solo show of Adams’ artwork after a hiatus of seven years. She has also lectured and taught extensively: I was her student when she was a visiting faculty at RISD’s graduate painting program in 1980.

After the intergalactic voyages within the three mystical sister paintings in the show, I found myself drawn to the grounding logic presented in two purely rectilinear compositions, Behold (2004) and Where it Goes (2002). Behold in the front room, is a vertical painting laid out in three columns of perfect squares stacked five high. A warm shifting checkerboard-like interplay of dark sienna and indigo versus corals, pinks and reds balance a single chartreuse square at the bottom left. Adams’ intriguing integration of sand and other types of particles with pigment add texture to her layered applications of color and slow down the reading of her work. The presence of Where it is recedes slightly from its conceptual companion due to its paler shades and thinned applications of paint. Another vertical composition, its right hand column of squares is cropped. There are sets of smaller squares faintly visible with the atmospheric blocks of grey green and rust. The piece is punctuated by a dark, glittering square flanked by a small flat red box abutting the right edge of the painting. I have found my center.

What next? Taking a step back, I realize the works as a whole invite a natural sifting through and pleasurable classification of her pictorial modes. This parallels Adams’ creative process. She wrote in 1996: “The artist presently exercises capabilities that engage a density of formative parameters. There is the intensity of attention; there is the tolerance for the confounding as well as the compounding of that which is discernible; there is the alertness to attraction, which drives the sorting and apprizing through the oceanic character of phenomenality.” Then Found includes an array of other works revealing the range of Adams’ phenomenological investigations. The most recent work in the show, They Say (2016) exemplifies the dense, over-all gestural painted lines she had long used for their “arousal of kinetic sensation.” Some result from Adams’ long held fascination with archetypal, “insistent” geometric configurations, which appear and disappear as they are framed and formed in her irregular shifting fields. Two of these include Long Soon (1996) a small green and red painting using geometry and color to suggest a link between the body and dark matter, and Into The Garden (2003) whose two variant red galaxies are split by a fine “S” curve.

As a backdrop to this partial retrospective, Adams’ exhibition last year at the Bennington Museum, Gatherum of Quiddities, spanned her entire career revealing her unique aesthetic path. Both shows reinforce Adams’ commitment to a painting practice, or “calling” as she would say, that rises above art world trends. Perhaps because of this, a certain invisibility has long been associated with her oeuvre. Hilton Kramer wrote in 1965, “Hermetic in imagery, poetic in temperament, [Adams’] work has not been sufficiently appreciated for its sheer aesthetic quality.” I, for one, don’t think we need any more evidence of the importance and value of the work of Pat Adams.

The post The Arousal of Kinetic Sensation: Pat Adams at Victoria Munroe appeared first on artcritical.

Books considered in this essay: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor (2006) and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures by Eric R. Kandel (2016)

Nearly two years ago, my sister, at a relatively young age, suffered a rare form of stroke. I learned about the progress of her physical condition from the many medical professionals treating her. It was an artist, however, who suggested I read, My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, to help understand my sister’s own experience of her injury and healing. Taylor, a Harvard-trained brain scientist, was at the forefront of advances in the new science of mind at the time of her own stroke in 1996. She conducted her research into the micro-circuitry of the brain on actual human brain tissue through post-mortem investigations.

The cat scans taken periodically of my sister’s brain provide still snapshots of the impact of her injury and subsequent treatments. Taylor’s writing explains how the brain works in real time. The road map of the brain’s functions starts at the molecular level within a single living cell. The first form of information processing happened through instructions housed in the atoms and molecules of DNA and RNA. They are stored there for use by future generations. As Taylor observes, “[m]oments in time no longer came and went without a record and by interweaving a continuum of sequential moments into a common thread, the life of a cell evolved as a bridge across time.” These shared biological instructions are also a link between creatures alive in the same moment.

Taylor’s knowledge of brain functions is based on a fairly recent convergence of several scientific disciplines. The Nobel Prize winning scientist Eric R. Kandel, who is also a cultural historian, has written important books on the new science of mind, a field born of a merger of behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology and molecular biology. Addressing its multi-disciplinary origins in his most recent book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, he recounts how the collaborations in physics and chemistry in the 1930s led to the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, which paved the way for today’s molecular neurobiology. His goal for this book is to humanize his investigations of brain function by looking for commonality between this pursuit and the arts. My sister and I are both artists.

Just as it sounds, “reductionism” in scientific research reduces the scope of investigation to measurable, and thus knowable terms. For Kandel, reductionism as an investigatory method, “…doesn’t oversimplify a problem, [rather] it allows for a deep understanding of key components that can be extrapolated more broadly.” This book presents current scientific findings about the functions of the brain arrayed around the components of visual experience such as face recognition, color, texture and depth perception. More profoundly, He describes how what is now known about these functions is integrated with “abstract” processing involving emotion, memory and association.

Kandel credits Vienna in the 1850s with supporting the establishment of art history as a scientific discipline grounded in psychological principles. Its famous salons brought together scientists, such as Carl von Rokitansky and Sigmund Freud, and artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Alois Riegl, doyen of the Vienna School of Art History, emphasized a profound and pivotal concept in the relationship between the artist and the audience. According to Riegl: “Art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer.” His term for this phenomenon was the “beholder’s involvement.” His successors, Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, developed this idea further, settling on the term, “the beholder’s share.” Everything we see is an illusion enacted in the brain according to studies in the new science of mind. What an artist does in creating a work of art models her own physical and psychic reality and parallels what our brains do everyday. An artwork thus becomes a form of Rosetta stone between the brain of the artist and that of the viewer.

Thanks to our shared genetic structure, the intricate wiring of our cerebral cortices is nearly identical. “We are generally capable of thinking and feeling in comparable ways,” as Taylor puts it. In describing her stroke experience, she emphasizes the difference between the two sides of the outer brain. The right hemisphere is master of the present moment processing all incoming sensations and giving us our awareness of where we are in space. The left hemisphere strings these moments together, giving them a “voice over” of internal monologue. It also presents us with a sense of self and our relation to others including the dimensions of our body.

During Taylor’s stroke, as with my sister’s, internal bleeding interrupted the normal flow of neurons in her brain. Taylor temporarily lost her ability to move, speak, to decipher the spoken language of others, and make sense of visual images. She tells her story of that morning in a dual voice, as both scientist and subject. As she hemorrhaged she knew that is was the left side of her brain that was affected based on her gradual incapacitation.

Kandel’s scientific investigations are based on studies of the neurons in a lower life form, a large invertebrate sea snail called Aplysia. Although the neuron system in the snail’s brain is so much smaller than ours, it functions in the same way: Kandel has been able to draw conclusions about how short- and long-term memory are formed by studying specific responses in the snail. He has shown that repeated stimulation of physical reflexes initially increases the flow of serotonin between sensory and motor neurons. Further repetition eventually causes the actual growth of additional synapses between the neurons. Memory and learning thus have a concrete physical impact on the brain’s structure.

Over a lifetime our brains are literally shaped by its response to all of our experiences. “Since all of us are brought up in somewhat different environments, are exposed to different combinations of stimuli, learn different things, and are likely to exercise our motor and perceptual skills in different ways, the architecture of our brains will be modified in unique ways”, Kandel concludes. Changes to the brain are constant and ongoing throughout life. Having made a full recovery after eight years, Taylor also believes in the plasticity of her brain, in “its ability to repair, replace and retrain its neural circuitry.” This phenomenon also contributes to the nature of a “beholder’s share” in that, according to Kandel, it “accounts for the differences in how we respond to art.”

Kandel relates his and other brain experiments using reductionism specifically focused on visual perception to the advent of abstraction in modern art. As if modeling their choices on Kandel’s methods artists responding to the modern zeitgeist reduced or isolated the components of their expression to color, form, line and texture. Neurologists now believe that there are two fundamental modes of cognition . Bottom up processing, linked to survival, is hardwired from birth. It encompasses the sensory processing of faces and other identifiable objects. This mode allows us to recognize contours and intersections: it is the one that would be employed, for instance, when we look at figurative works of art. Alternatively, top-down processing which we use when looking at abstract art draws upon higher order thinking such as attention, expectations and learned visual associations. Compared to figurative art, abstract art makes more creative demands on the beholder’s share. Rather than rely on the visual processes universally inherent in the brain’s circuitry, abstract art—with its reductive focus on form, color, line and light—draws on a more active response involving the unique personal psychological context of each individual viewer.

As precursors to the abstract artists centered in New York City from the 1930s to the ‘60s, Kandel establishes an art historical narrative linking Turner, Monet, Kandinsky and Mondrian. Their work shares a common trajectory transitioning from figuration to abstraction. The earlier artists collectively worked to “escape the dreary task of mimesis” (Turner) and express the “sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul through abstraction” (Kandinsky.) Similarly, the later group of Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters could be represented by Barnett Newman’s claim, that “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of …[the] devices of Western Painting.” Kandel highlights the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Newman as artists who used reductionism in the form of self-imposed formal and technical restrictions in their work. Kandel, a scientist coming from outside the arts, relies heavily on the received canon of modern art for his examples. There are many other artists – I would want to add Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay (Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, and Joan Mitchell, among others – whose work fits his bill.

Kandel selects the work of Alex Katz, Andy Warhol and Chuck Close to discuss how the lessons of abstraction and top-down thinking have, more recently, informed ways that figurative artists use representation in their work. Last year, the exhibition “Tight Rope Walk,” curated by Barry Schwabsky at London’s White Cube gallery presented modern and contemporary figurative work impacted by abstraction. In Schwabsky’s catalogue essay he concludes that “[t]he problem [of representation] …needs to be solved all over again every time…This is the great and difficult gift of abstraction to painting: that we can no longer assume that the how and they why of it are already given.” Again, casting a wider net than Kandel, Schwabsky presented work by over forty artists including Tracy Emin, Barkley L. Hendricks, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, and Henry Taylor.

Reductionism as an analytical tool can be a useful way to parse the impact on the creativity of both the artist and her viewer of evolving expressions in traditional and new media. Kandel leaves us with suggestions of what is to come in the study of brain science including further explorations of preconscious thinking in our brain’s default network which we call into play when looking at figurative art and ideas about the role of physiological distance in creating conditions that encourage less concrete, abstract cognitive processing in the Construal Level Theory. As a scientist Kandel has seen proof of the benefits of cross-disciplinary investigations. He hopes that “[a]rtists today can enhance traditional introspection with the knowledge of how some aspects of our mind works”. By challenging each other’s methods and claims, scientists and artists can move forward together.

When Taylor’s left cortex was incapacitated during her stroke, she experienced the freedom of living in the present moment available through her right cortex. She felt she was able to let go of negative judgments and long held feelings of anger and resentment. As she gradually rebuilt her abilities during her recovery, she has worked to stay in touch with this state of spiritual release, which she believes is available to all of us. Kandel’s premise that abstract art can also give us access to the spiritual realm resonates with me. Shortly before my sister’s stroke my painting transitioned to complete abstraction. In a short video of my sister taken before she went home from the hospital she is shown making an artwork as part of her physical therapy. While working, she observed, “Your attention is so devoted to what you’re doing and what you are constructing that everything else just fades away.”

The post The Beholder’s Share appeared first on artcritical.

September 24, 2016 to January 2, 2017
Picadilly Circus
London, +44 020 7300 8000

“Abstract Expressionism” at London’s Royal Academy, the first overview of the American movement since one held at the Tate Gallery in 1959, is a landmark event, a sprawling exhibition featuring painting, sculpture and photography from the 1930s to the ‘70s. The curators appear to have entertained two conflicting goals: to present a comprehensive survey of work from this period and to make a lucid case for its artistic achievement. Their solution has been to embed five solo shows and a two-person show amidst a composite display of work by 26 other artists. The singularly showcased painters are Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt in the two-man room. Other canonical AbEx’ers of the caliber of Philip Guston, Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell are sparsely represented in the six remaining salons.

These mixed-artist galleries are organized chronologically or, alternatively, by stylistic theme (“Color as Gesture,” “The Violent Mark,” and “Darkness Visible.”) One possible explanation for the exhibition’s muddy curatorial direction is that it reflects the accomplishments of the show’s guest chief curator, David Anfam. The author of a recent textbook on Abstract Expressionism, Anfam is also Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado and author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist. This left me wondering whether the decision to feature a strong, cohesive selection of Still’s work in the exhibition’s best gallery was intended to show that artist’s superior aesthetic standing among his peers or if it was merely a byproduct of Anfam’s professional interests.

The term “abstract expressionism” was coined in 1946 by Robert Coates, a critic for The New Yorker. The movement’s fiercest critical champion, Clement Greenberg, preferred “American-Type Painting” in a pivotal essay dated ten years later. The artists themselves did not self-identify as part of an organized endeavor. No manifestos were written for the group as a whole and, as this current exhibition attests, the work ranges in style from highly textured gestural handling to flat, hard-edged monochrome compositions. (David Smith’s steel sculpture and a selection of works on paper and photography are also included in the show). However, statements by the various artists suggest a common commitment to unearthing a subjective interiority as part of their reinvestigation of artistic traditions. As Rothko wrote, in 1945, “We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world…If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.” The Abstract Expressionists collectively pioneered introspective territory unfamiliar at the time to most other Americans.

The artists in this show worked in the turbulent times preceding, during and after the Second World War. These seismic political and cultural shifts can be read in the experimental searching evident in their output. The passing of UK’s Brexit vote earlier this year harkens back to isolationist tendencies that set the stage for war.

Likewise, the conversations surrounding the current US presidential elections echo England’s social conservatism and increasing signs of lack of tolerance. The Abstract Expressionist’s work quickly led to an explosively creative era in contemporary art in the US that spread around the world. This period of rich innovation is a reminder of the importance of pushing back against limiting fears and hatred. I think the work in the exhibition still captures the imagination, celebrates the individual, and is a reminder of the need for on-going dialogue.

The first room, “Early Works,” is a sure-footed introduction to the artists and their signature orientations. For example, Rothko’s Self-portrait (1936) presents prophetic qualities such as feathered edges and blocky forms. The composition of Pollock’s Male and Female (1942-43) is rooted in the Jungian symbolism that continued to fuel mature work.  I thus expected the last gallery, “Late Works,” to function as as a cohesive conclusion to the AbEx story. Instead it contains one late-stage work each by Hans Hoffmann and William Baziotes whose only other paintings in the show are in the very first gallery. Are we meant to cast these artists as the mascots for this movement? As a second non sequitur these paintings are abruptly placed together with a monumental work, “Salut Tom” (1979) by Joan Mitchell and one of Philip Guston’s late figurative paintings.

Two-thirds of the way through the exhibition, Still’s gallery refreshingly sidesteps any didacticism the show might have been veering towards. A spacious, generously installed room of ten large, stylistically consistent paintings allows for the digestion of his most mature style. Known as a stubborn outsider, Still’s work dodges the queasiness of Surrealism, while keeping its irrational contours. Passages of hot yellow ochre, oranges and deep reds meet patches of white and black alongside fissures of primary colors that open up like scars. His brushwork is alternately efficient and luxurious. Anfam, in the exhibition catalogue, convincingly connects Still’s work to the realm of skin and sensation, whereas it is typically associated with landscape.

Radiating out from this highpoint of the exhibition are two galleries of color field paintings and a gallery of diverse works on paper and photography. Rothko’s flat floating lozenges are presented in a dimly lit, chapel-like room on one side. The two-person gallery of geometric works in reduced color palettes by Reinhardt and Newman are on another side. Rothko’s gallery leads to de Kooning’s solo room of works from 1945 to 1966. De Kooning and Pollock are arguably the artists most often associated with Abstract Expressionism yet, in contrast to Still’s aesthetically powerful gallery, de Kooning has been selected for breadth over depth. Across 13 works de Kooning shifts from the subject of figure — such as in his iconic “Women” series — to landscape, although as the focus passes there is, in fact, a merging of his subjects.

A large gallery devoted to Pollock’s mature drip paintings, while selected in a way that represents the power of his work, was divided by two temporary walls that diminished its impact. Pollock’s largest painting, Mural (1943), commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim, is placed opposite the iconic Blue Poles (1952), contrasting his all-over compositions at two distinct points. The second largest painting in the Pollock gallery is by his widow, Lee Krasner, the stylistically consistent The Eye is The First Circle (1960).

Presenting over 150 works, many of them masterpieces, this exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to draw new conclusions regarding the stylistic origins and creative power of the phenomenon widely considered the first true American aesthetic achievement in the visual arts. This only makes more painful, however, the institutional bias against women and minorities found in this exhibition, which includes but four women painters and one person of color (Norman Lewis). Mercifully, one painting that is included is by Janet Sobel, whose allover compositions arguably inspired Pollock: she is usually consigned to a catalogue footnote. Ironically, in view of the apotheosis of Clyfford Still in this exhibition, this summer the Denver Art Museum presented the exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” curated by Gwen F. Chanzit. Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler, who are minimally represented in this exhibition, were featured there extensively with nine other artists. The catalogue for the show in Denver includes biographies for a total of 42 artists whose careers have regrettably been over-looked.

On the plane ride home to New York City, I watched Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977. As with the artists in the show, select characters in the film are subconsciously driven to express themselves as part of a bonding process with creatures from outer space. Unlike the exhibition, however, I noticed the movie wasn’t burdened with an academic voiceover-like narration. The plot climaxes with a successful exchange between aliens and humans: dialogue in place of destruction. In the 1930s and ‘40s, making a commitment to radicalism in the fine arts was an alien endeavor for most American artists compared to their counterparts in Europe, especially Paris. Furthermore, introspection was considered (and in some circles still is) a sign of weakness and a waste of time. During the war, a motley crew of Americans from both coasts achieved a fertile exchange of aesthetic ideas with recent émigrés from Europe that reached across their cultural differences. To acknowledge and act upon the subconscious required heroic leaps of faith for the characters in the movie and for the Abstract Expressionists.

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September 15 to October 18, 2015
33A Orchard Street (between Canal and Hester streets)
New York, 646 944 6197

There were essentially two bodies of work festively commingled in Carol Szymanski’s solo show, “My Life is an Index” at Tanja Grunert this fall — each made under different circumstances. A portion of the work was squeezed out in free moments while performing a demanding day job. The rest of it was deliberately produced as part of the artist’s recently resumed full-time studio practice, which had been set aside about a decade ago. The show makes a case for why, even if you have to keep your day job, you should find a way to keep making work. Her book of wry daily accumulations, called Cockshut Dummy Desk Version (2004-2015), was the heart of the show. Note the word play in the book’s title: “Cockshut” and “Dummy” are synonyms, albeit obscure, chosen by the artist for the words in the name of London’s The Evening Standard tabloid, which she passed on the newsstands during her workday commute. Reminiscent of an old-school library reference tool, the 12-inch stack of two-hole-punched, letter-size pages were bound by a pair of upright metal loops. 11 years in the making, the self-published tome was presented on a small vintage table with a stool in the middle of the gallery. The book’s culturally diverse, encyclopedic content has been shown previously in different forms. To support her family, Szymanski put her studio practice on pause in the early 2000s to take the aforementioned day job as an investment banker, the demands of which only left time for composing one daily email — of images, text or both. The subjects of her messages were based on free-association responses to her day’s experiences paradoxically organized around the comprehensive epistemological classes found in Roget’s Thesaurus. Hillary Clinton-style, the emails have been saved, printed and bound.

Cockshut Dummy was reformatted in two ways in the exhibition: uploaded digitally on a wall-mounted iPad installed near the front door, and edited down to a single quote in 833, Cheerfulness; “Ciao Berlusconi, Libia sta benissimo, non c’e problema” (2015), which was silk-screened on the opposite wall. The phrases in the title of the work which comprised the selected quote broadcast — in large dark blue, hand painted letters — the cheery words of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to his pal, Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi just before their respective falls from power. Szymanski selected the quote because it most perfectly represented the profoundly absurd and dangerous sphere she was privy to while working inside an established financial institution as world markets collapsed.

By presenting the book in these different ways the artist established a loose formal connection to the second, more recent body of work spilling around the space, reviving the artist’s multidisciplinary exploration of units of expression. Szymanski’s 12 tone interjection series (2015) graphs Arnold Schoenberg’s modern musical scale with involuntary vocalizations, two-letter musical alphabets, an encoding of color with different emotions, hand gestures, and composite letter forms. Framed in white, the silkscreen print presents 8 rows of text and pictograms stacked in 12 columns banded in the colors of the spectrum. In correlating these multi-sensory elements, some created by the artist and others credited to writers, scientists and musicians from the last five centuries, Szymanski offers us rudimentary tools for building new languages, presumably in order to think new thoughts. The work on paper functions as a Rosetta Stone-like key to her newest work; she has also translated its concepts into various physical forms, including here neon sculptures, shaped floating inflatables made of Mylar, abstract cibachrome photographs and flat, single-image paintings. Content from Szmanski’s two oeuvres was also intertwined in musical compositions by Betsy McClelland performed in the gallery by Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble during the run of the exhibition and in readings by Mary Ann Caws and Barry Schwabsky.

The artist’s consideration and practical application of the philosophy of knowledge is the fundamental connection between the pieces associated with the book and those related to the 12 tone series. How, as part of making our way in the world, do we make and use categories? Recent brain research shows that language, which is dependent on classification systems, is one of the drivers in the evolution of the structure of our brains; what and how we think ultimately affects what we are capable of conceiving. In a 2014 interview, Szymanski cited the work of cognitive linguist George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987), as one of her inspirations. Lakoff summarizes the potential for his new way of organizing our thoughts, “[We] will be considering … a shift from classical categories to prototype-based categories defined by cognitive models. It is a change that implies other changes: changes in the concepts of truth, knowledge, meaning, rationality—even grammar.” Cockshut Dummy alloys specific information Szymanski gleaned from her work in the material world with the artist’s philosophical concerns, while the 12 tone series reveals the artist’s response to related ideas made in a cloistered, open-ended context. Overall, the more recent, brightly colored work creates an upbeat, scavenger hunt aesthetic with Szymanski celebrating the freedom of her return to the studio.

As with the new research on the workings of the brain Szymanski’s more recent work overall feels bold and intriguing, but also somewhat preliminary; some of her objects suggest but don’t fully embody her ideas. Ironically, while engaging to ponder, the instructional 12- tone chart took some of the fun away from one’s own decoding of the images and materials in the show. I found myself musing about alternative installations of the exhibition where a reduced selection of work was included. The iPad, 12-tone chart, the neon and floating sculpture appear superfluous to the viewer’s explication of such engaging objects as the book on its table, the photographs, silk-screened wall text and a set of smaller paintings and photograph fragments exhibited in a cluster. Cockshut Dummy, created in a less-is-more environment feels more inherently resolved and tied to the tenor of our times; a weighty prize for the deserving winner of the show’s party game.

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May 22 to June 21, 2015
147 Roebling Street (between Hope and Metropolitan)
Brooklyn, 718 782 2556

Long guided by a circumspect approach to unfurling his intuition, Peter Fox shows his vulnerability in the suite of paintings on display through June 21^st at the Front Room Gallery in Williamsburg. Since December last year, the artist has maintained white spaces on his canvases. The “blank” areas develop between the prodigiously varied effects he produces by extruding bundled stripes of semi-liquid, matte, acrylic paint, which are then left to slide partway down the clean surface. The melting ribbons of clear, bright color-groups represent hypothetical nations or advertise various emotional states. Owing to the addition of more water to thin the texture of the paint in the new works, the striped bands alternately shrink to thin vacillating lines or abruptly spread out like broad waving flags. Overall, the dripping striations look like spooky, alien forms of calligraphy and gestures from a private dance. The resulting erratic negative spaces sing the strange, knotted song of Fox’s new freedom.

These paintings are a far cry from the prior hypnotic, yet rigidly composed color spectrum paintings Fox produced in the same way, though with the use of a thicker gel medium that choked the paint’s flow. For the last decade Fox has centered his work on mastering a form of readymade technique: the drip. According to the artist, he perfected rendering the “world of the drip” after years of experimentation with a large, squeezable, syringe-like tool; Fox succeeded in becoming a virtuoso at controlling the chaos of oozing paint as he formed frozen showers of candy-colored drops. Without completely leaving behind his adherence to hands-off practices such as painting without touching a brush or letting his colors mix automatically inside a plastic tube, Fox takes a breath here and jumps into the open air. Rather than restrict himself to merely employing the physiology of the paint and its relation to gravity, he shows his hand, its gesture and the movement of his body. The results look like he is using a form of automatic application to indicate it’s harder not to acknowledge the range of emotions that come with risking direct, intimate contact.

The transitional nature of the artworks in “Blind Trust” may have left the show susceptible to old installation habits for the gallery and the artist. The density of paint and color in his prior pieces made them more self-contained: the context for each artwork had less impact on it’s viewing. The difference between the way the work is shown in the gallery’s two rooms points to the importance of fully recognizing its current porous identity which bridges beyond the edge of the stretcher. The first room in the show is dominated by a sampling of Fox’s fluid technique across small works presented in a large grid. This dense, regimented arrangement diminishes the thrill of the new responsiveness in Fox’s paintings and works against the hard-won stance of the show. The other structural clutter in the room — a display platform and reception desk — adds to the distraction. The spare installation of four larger paintings in the second, more cloistered room clarifies Fox’s broadened scope. The most gratifying piece in the show is also the largest: HERALDIC (2015), spanning over nine feet. It is the lone anchor of the space’s long far wall and mesmerizes with the possibilities of paint Fox has realized on its surface. The tailored installation in this room allows for a fuller appreciation of the extent to which the artist has revealed himself within the new body of work. In a final twist, however, the inevitable downward pull of the paint’s physical weight that Fox leaves unchecked across all the paintings in “Blind Trust” could be read as trumping his, or anyone’s, self-liberating strivings.

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