artwork images exhibition labels

Transcription

LONG ISLAND’S BEST 2016 RESOURCES
Audrey Flack, Lady Madonna, n.d., Lithograph on
paper with gold leaf. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Samuel S. Mandel
December 5, 2015 – April 3, 2016
ARTWORK IMAGES
EXHIBITION LABELS
These exhibition labels and artwork images for the exhibition You Go
Girl! Celebrating Women Artists are to be used for educational
purposes in coordination with the high school student exhibition Long
Island’s Best: Young Artists at The Heckscher Museum 2016.
2 Prime Avenue
Huntington, NY 11743
631.351.3250
Heckscher.org
Education Department
631.351.3214
[email protected]
Introduction
Over the past several years, the Heckscher Museum of Art has mounted a series of
exhibitions that have explored various aspects of the Permanent Collection. Like most
public institutions, the Museum’s holdings are predominantly comprised of work by male
artists. The cultural environment in the western world may seem gender neutral today,
yet female artists throughout history faced numerous challenges not experienced by
their male colleagues. The scholarly studies by feminist historians like Linda Nochlin
and others of the 1970s explored some of the many obstacles faced by women artists
until the late-19th century, most notably the lack of access to formal training, the
conventions that prevented them from studying the nude model at a time when
depiction of the human figure was crucial to artistic achievement, and a social setting
that situated women firmly in the domestic realm as wives, mothers, and guardians of
the home. Although women achieved more freedoms in the early-20th century, most
significantly the right to vote, they continued to compete for recognition within a system
of galleries, museums, and universities dominated by men. Artists of the 1970s
addressed the plight of the female artist and the patriarchy of the art establishment in
protests at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and
elsewhere. Howardeena Pindell, Ce Roser, and many others joined together to form
numerous activist organizations and cooperative galleries that provided women artists
an opportunity to network, exhibit their work, and advance their cause to end
discrimination against women in the arts.
Early feminist artists like Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago challenged traditional
boundaries by incorporating crafts traditionally associated with women in their work,
drawing upon the long history of women in the applied arts. Others, such as May
Stevens and Audrey Flack, worked within traditional mediums to challenge male
authority in overt or subtle ways. Most women, however, created art similar in form and
content to that of their male colleagues, as reflected in the majority of work by women
artists in the Museum’s collection. While artists such as Emma Stebbins, Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney, Georgia O’Keeffe, Esphyr Slobodkina, Betty Parsons, and Jane
Wilson achieved widespread recognition for their artistic and cultural accomplishments,
many others, less well known, produced equally significant work that broadens our
visual and intellectual experience, as evidenced by the artists in You Go Girl!.
Miriam Schapiro
American, b. Canada, 1923-2015
Berthe Morisot & Me, 1970s
Collage
Gift of Drs. Constance and Lee Koppelman 2014.7.1
A pivotal figure in American feminism, Miriam Schapiro
was a co-founder with Judy Chicago of the nation’s first
feminist art program, established at The California
Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1971. For over four
decades, until her recent death this past June, Schapiro worked to advance the cause of
women in the arts.
Schapiro conceived of her early work as “femmages,” or feminine collages, in which she
incorporated craft techniques historically associated with women, including sewing, embroidery,
and quilting. In her Collaboration Series, Schapiro paid homage to famous female artists of the
past. These works combined images of domestic subjects by artists such as Élisabeth Vigée Le
Brun, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Sonia Delaunay, and Frida Kahlo with craft elements that
challenged the traditional boundaries of fine art.
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was among the most well-known female artists of the 19th century.
She participated in seven of the eight Impressionist shows held between 1874 and 1886.
Societal conventions restricted her access to the bars and entertainment venues that provided
subject matter for her male colleagues, and consequently she principally depicted scenes of
domestic life in her work. This collage references Morisot’s paintings of genteel women and
children, but features an array of textures, decorative patterns, and vibrant colors that speak to
Schapiro’s aesthetic sensibilities.
Emma Stebbins
American, 1815-1882
Commerce, 1860
Marble
Gift of Phillip M. Lydig III 1959.355
Click on the image to view
larger version on www.heckscher.org
Beginning her career as a painter, Emma Stebbins did not receive
significant critical acclaim until after 1857, when she moved to
Rome and began working as a sculptor. Living in the Eternal City,
Stebbins was among the group of American women sculptors
dubbed the "white marmorean flock" by Henry James. In Rome, she
met the actress Charlotte Cushman, the central figure of the AngloAmerican cultural community there, who became her life partner.
Stebbins is best remembered for her exquisite bronze sculpture, Angel of the Waters,
commissioned in 1868 for Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. With this project, Stebbins was
the first woman to receive a commission for a major public work in New York City.
Commerce and its companion Industry (seen in the concurrent exhibition Men at Work) were
commissioned around 1859 by the industrialist Charles August Heckscher (a relative of the
museum's founder, August Heckscher). The figures, a sailor and a miner, represent the means
by which Heckscher, the owner of Pennsylvania coal mines as well as business concerns in
New York, had made a fortune. The two sculptures were greatly admired for their classical
grace and daringly modern subjects.
Ethel Myers
American, 1881-1960
Flowered Gown, c. 1910s
Bronze
Gift of the Baker/Pisano Collection 2001.9.177
From 1898 to 1904, Ethel Myers attended the Chase School of Art,
where she took classes with William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and
Kenneth Hayes Miller. Embracing the outlook of the Ashcan artists, she produced works
depicting the life around her on the Lower East Side. However, she gave up painting in 1906 to
clear studio space for her husband, Jerome Myers, and she subsequently shifted her attention
to sculpture. Although she created commissioned portraits, she is best known for her witty
representations of contemporary women performing everyday tasks.
Flowered Gown uses exaggeration to reveal the personality of a character type. Through the
figure's overly elegant pose and lavish costume, Myers satirizes a fashion-conscious woman of
high society.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
American, 1875-1942
Titanic Head, 1914
Bronze
American sculptor, collector, and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt
Whitney was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family in 1875.
Following her marriage to Harry Payne Whitney in 1896, she was
inspired to cultivate her life-long passion for art and began to study
sculpture. Whitney’s monumental memorials are her most wellknown work; yet, her legacy was the establishment of The Whitney
Studio Club, which evolved into the Whitney Museum of American
Art.
The artist’s Titanic Head is a bronze replica of the head from her Titanic Memorial in
Washington, D.C. (at right). Whitney’s design for the memorial was chosen in an open
competition for the commission and was her first composition for a large-scale public work. The
work was erected in 1931 to honor the men who perished to save the lives of women and
children in the Titanic disaster of 1912.
Berenice Abbott
American, 1898-1991
West Street, 1936 (printed 1982)
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Mr. Morton Brozinsky 1985.2.9
Berenice Abbott is best known for her photographic portrait of New York City between the World
Wars. She learned the craft of photography in Paris as Man Ray's darkroom assistant, but her
work relates more closely to the French photographer Eugene Atget, who documented the city
of Paris in the late-19th and early-20th centuries as modernization was changing its
appearance. When Abbott returned to America in 1929, she began a project to document New
York, focusing on its progress and change. Abbott was often drawn to the repeated forms seen
in New York's urban landscape, from ubiquitous storefront and newsstand displays to
architectural elements such as windows, columns, and arcades. In West Street, the monolithic
towers of modern Manhattan dwarf the older tenement buildings seen in the foreground.
Produced from negatives dating to the 1930s, these large format photographs were printed in
1982 for a special edition portfolio. At that time Abbott commented on her working method: "All
the New York photographs took a good while to set up because it was necessary to select the
camera position carefully. These photographs were not done on the spur of the moment."
Alice Morgan Wright
American, 1881-1975
Nude, before 1930
Monotype on paper
Born in Albany, New York, sculptor Alice Morgan Wright is most widely known for her role as an
activist for women’s suffrage in the United States, Britain, and France. Her efforts were essential
in securing American women the right to vote in 1920, and she subsequently became a
founding member of the New York State League of Women Voters.
Wright’s interest in the suffrage movement developed in response to the obstacles she
encountered while training to become a sculptor. Although greater opportunities existed for
women sculptors in the 20th century than before, Wright’s male contemporaries doubted her
ability to master stone and clay. She was not allowed to sketch the nude male figure in classes
at the Art Students League and therefore attended boxing and wrestling matches to study the
male body. In this monotype, Wright reveals her understanding of proportion, movement, and
the use of light in evoking form.
Helen Miranda Wilson
American, b. 1948
Interior Kitchen, 1980
Oil on Anco panel
Gift of Martin, Richard, Nancy, and James Sinkoff in
loving memory of their parents, Alice and Marvin
Sinkoff. 2003.7.7
Helen Miranda Wilson has acknowledged the important role feminism has played in her artistic
development. “The glory given almost exclusively to young male painters when I was a young
female painter [in the 1970s] was discouraging,” she explained. “Because we worked to change
this, by the ’80s, more galleries were showing women…. We were no longer relegated to the
roles of wives or lovers of famous men…. How good it feels to say ‘we.’” She still proudly calls
herself a feminist, aware of the continued inequalities between men and women.
Despite their small sizes, Wilson’s landscapes, still lifes, interior scenes, and abstractions
feature vibrantly packed compositions. She enjoys the intimacy of working on a small scale and
the powerful punch a tiny detail can provide. Interior Kitchen explores the relationship between
color and form in a scene constructed from observation, memory, and imagination.
Elsie Driggs
American, 1898-1992
Riot, c. 1929
Watercolor and pencil on paper
Gift of Martin, Richard, Nancy, and James Sinkoff in
loving memory of their parents, Alice and Marvin Sinkoff. 2003.7.3
Best known for her hard-edged Precisionist paintings of the modern
cityscape, Elsie Driggs also produced watercolors of figurative and floral subjects throughout
her career. During the 1920s and 1930s, she created a series of watercolors on the theme of
crowds and workers’ unrest. She captures the unruly aggression of a mob in Riot through
swirling washes of reds and browns. The narrow color palette, expressive use of line, and large
amount of untouched paper are characteristic elements of Driggs’s watercolors.
Despite her critical and commercial success, Driggs gave up painting in 1935 to devote herself
to managing the career of her husband, artist Lee Gatch, and raising their family in Lambertville,
New Jersey. However, even without a studio, she continued experimenting with watercolor,
working at her kitchen table. Driggs resumed her career after her husband’s death in 1968,
returning to figure painting and experimenting with mixed media constructions.
Helen Torr
American, 1886-1967
Night Spirit, c. 1927
Oil on metal
Helen Torr and her husband, Arthur Dove, are the artists most closely
associated with Huntington. Throughout the 1920s and early 30s, they lived aboard their yawl
Mona in the area's harbors, and beginning in 1938 resided in a small cottage at Titus Mill Pond
in Centerport. Like Dove, Torr's subjects are abstracted from nature, although her work is
characterized by stronger rhythmic, lyrical, and decorative qualities than Dove's. Night Spirit was
to have been exhibited in a 1935 joint Dove/Torr show at Alfred Stieglitz's renowned New York
gallery, An American Place, but at the last moment Stieglitz refused to include Torr's work,
although he had exhibited her work in a previous show with Dove in 1933. Discouraged, Torr
never again exhibited her work, while Dove gained prominence as one of the American
modernists of the legendary Stieglitz circle. After Torr's death, her sister Mary Rehm brought
Torr's work to the attention of then Heckscher Director Eva Gatling, who mounted an exhibition,
beginning the reappraisal that has restored Torr's place among America's early modernists.
Georgia O’Keeffe
American, 1887-1986
Machu Picchu, Peru, c. 1956
Watercolor on paper
Perhaps the most famous female artist of the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keeffe first gained
critical and commercial success for her bold, closely cropped depictions of flowers. She
developed her unique style of abstraction under the influence of her teacher Arthur Wesley
Dow, who encouraged his students to express their emotional reactions to their subjects.
Through her relationship with the prominent photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz,
O’Keeffe was able to exhibit her work on a regular basis, a fortuitous circumstance for a woman
at the time. However, she became frustrated that Stieglitz and art critics pigeonholed her as a
“female artist” and focused upon the sexual qualities of her work. From the 1930s onward, she
painted subjects traditionally associated with the masculine sphere, such as cliffs, cityscapes,
and skulls.
In Machu Picchu, Peru, O’Keeffe evokes the mountainous region where the pre-Columbian
Incas settled. Rather than meticulously recording her observations of the landscape, she uses
vibrant color and bold, diagonal brushstrokes to capture her sense of exhilaration amid the
precipitous peaks.
Marguerite Zorach
American, 1887-1968
Moonlight, 1910
Oil on panel
Marguerite Zorach is not only considered to be the most
significant woman in Gertrude Stein's artistic circle, but also
one of the most important American Fauves. She studied in
Europe between 1908 and 1911, and her earliest work reflects
the influence of the avant-garde Fauvist style of Henri Matisse and André Derain, which made
use of bright, pure hues that did not replicate the appearance of the natural world. Moonlight,
created in Provence, conveys a subtle and elegant response to nature in its sensitive use of
color.
In 1912, a year after returning to the United States, Zorach married the artist William Zorach,
and their Greenwich Village home, which they called the "Post-Impressionist Studio," became a
meeting place for artists. The following year, she participated in the Armory Show, the landmark
exhibition that introduced modernism to America, and in 1916, she was included in the Forum
Exhibition of Modern American Painters, exhibiting Cubist-inspired works. Following the birth of
her second child in 1917, Zorach turned away from painting, although she continued to work
with textiles, achieving success for her modernist embroideries and batiks.
Janet Culbertson
American, b. 1932
Scene VIII, 1979
Ink and acrylic on paper, knife drawing
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Miller 1980.3
Combining her passion for gender equality with her enthusiasm
for environmental protection, Janet Culbertson has identified as
an “eco-feminist” since the 1970s. She was actively involved in the women’s movement and has
been a member of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth. In 1981, she
collaborated with the renowned writer, art critic, and curator Lucy Lippard on a special issue of
Heresies magazine that addressed feminism and ecology.
Culbertson investigates the relationship between humanity and the earth in her art. In doing so,
she seeks to stir social change: “I feel that art… can be a force for creating a greater ecological
awareness of our threatened world.” In Scene VIII, she captures the grandeur of the immense,
shimmering peaks of a mountain range.
Ruthellen Pollan
American, b. 1941
Genesis, 1969
Ink on paper
Gift of Mr. Larry Katz 1988.7.2
Ruthellen Pollan is best known for her ink, graphite, and watercolor drawings of rock formations
and chasms. According to the artist, the increasing ubiquity of technology in the modern age
encouraged her to turn her attention to nature. She moved from the east coast to Blanding,
Utah, where she creates works that capture the vastness, vitality, and mystery of the
surrounding landscape.
Pollan infuses the trees in Genesis with a sense of rhythm and energy through the dynamic use
of line and strong modeling. The title refers to the first book of the Old Testament in which God
creates the Garden of Eden and forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit from the Tree of
Knowledge.
Mary Callery
American, 1903-1977
Tree, 1959
Brass
Gift of the Estate of Mary Callery 1981.12
Although trained in a classicizing style, Mary Callery became
captivated by modern art while living in Paris between 1930 and
1940. She befriended many avant-garde artists, including
Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo
Picasso, and she amassed a remarkable collection of their works. Picasso was a particularly
strong influence upon Callery. He encouraged her to abandon her naturalistic approach and
work from the imagination: “What do you need a model for? You know that the human body has
a head… and two legs.” (Mary Callery, "The Last Time I Saw Picasso," Art News, March 1942)
Inspired by Picasso’s welded iron sculptures of the 1930s, Callery created linear metal works
upon her return to the United States. Her artistic approach was described as “drawing in space,”
just as the sculptor Julio Gonzalez had described Picasso’s work. Callery is best-known for her
attenuated figures and lyrical acrobats, whose forms belie the industrial nature of their creation.
In the open-work structure of Tree, the voids define form as strongly as the elegant, linear strips
of metal that delineate the tree itself.
Gillian Pederson-Krag
American, b. 1938
Landscape, 1991
Etching and aquatint on paper
Gift of the Artist 1995.7
Gillian Pederson-Krag’s muted landscapes are not
records of reality, but composites of elements from
her memory, observation, and imagination. She begins her paintings, prints, and drawings by
sketching natural scenery that conjures emotional resonance: “I recognize what I want to paint
because it is akin to something that I feel and already know in some way. It is as though I am
projecting onto nature as much as I am perceiving it—remembering it as much as looking at it
for the first time.” Later, in her studio she transforms her sketches into a unified composition.
According to Pederson-Krag, this process of combining disparate elements into a cohesive
image reflects the tenets of non-duality. Rooted in Buddhist tradition, non-duality maintains that
the multiplicities of the universe are all part of a larger whole. The intermingling of various plant
forms in the background and foreground of this etching thus reveal the interconnectedness of
nature.
Mary Nimmo Moran
American, b. Scotland, 1842-1899
Solitude, 1880
Etching on paper
Gift of Mrs. Hubert de Jaeger 1979.12a
Mary Nimmo Moran met her husband, Thomas Moran, while studying at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts in 1860. After their marriage, Mary devoted herself to managing her
husband’s career and raising their children. Thomas encouraged her to experiment with etching
in 1879, and Mary quickly mastered the medium, earning the acclaim of the prominent English
critic and collector John Ruskin. She was elected to the Society of Painter-Etchers in New York,
the New York Etching Club, and the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers in England, where she
was the only female member. The committee there accepted her membership unaware of her
gender, since she signed her etchings “M. Nimmo Moran” or “M.N. Moran.”
Whereas Thomas gained a reputation for his paintings of the American West, Mary focused
upon the nearby landscapes of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. She was particularly
inspired by the pastures, meadows, and beaches of East Hampton, where she and Thomas
built a summer home in 1884. Mary based Solitude on her direct observations of nature. She
skillfully utilized a variety of marks to capture the textures of grasses, leaves, and twisting trees
near a serene pool of water.
Pat Ralph
American, b. 1929
Remembering Long Island:
Sunken Meadow Dunes, 2008
Oil on linen
Gift of Ms. Anne Cohen DePietro 2009.6
The Long Island artist Pat Ralph has created a diverse
body of work that includes landscapes, figure paintings,
portraits, and still lifes. Her landscapes reveal her
admiration of 19th-century Luminist painters, such as Sanford Robinson Gifford and Fitz Hugh
Lane, whose works convey a serene view of nature. Drawn to open spaces with what she calls
“barely eventful horizons,” Ralph seeks to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere
with sharp clarity.
In this painting, Ralph portrays an unpopulated Long Island shore with patches of wild coastal
grasses and trees. She uses a sepia palette, which recalls the tonality of early landscape
photography, to suggest the appearance of a present-day photograph at an indistinct point in
the future when encroaching suburban development will have destroyed the natural landscape
familiar today.
Anna Richards Brewster
American, 1870-1952
At Aswan on the Nile, c. 1912
Oil on canvasboard
Anna Richards Brewster learned to paint from her father, the marine and landscape painter
William Trost Richards. She later took classes with William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock
School of Art on the East End of Long Island. Chase’s school was pivotal in training a
generation of female artists, who consistently outnumbered men in his classes. While Anna’s
early work reflected the detailed style of her father, her technique loosened under the influence
of Chase, who urged his students to paint en plein air, or directly from nature.
Anna continued to paint after her marriage to William Tenney Brewster, a Barnard College
professor of English literature. She frequently drew upon the surroundings of their home in
Scarsdale, New York and their summer home in Matunuck, Rhode Island. At Aswan on the Nile
is one of 2,000 landscape sketches she executed while accompanying her husband on his
sabbatical trips to Egypt, Greece, Jerusalem, and Italy.
Lisa Breslow
American, b. 1957
Island Bay #2, 2005
Oil on panel
Gift of the Artist 2007.5.1
Lisa Breslow's landscapes capture more than her physical environment. A profound sense of
mystery is evoked through her use of light and softened atmospheric perspective. Her style
infuses aspects of Impressionism and Minimalism. Landscape forms distilled to their visual
essence reinforce the organic, natural world around us, helping reunite mankind with its natural,
primitive roots.
Lisa Breslow grew up in an artistic household in suburban Long Island. Although her father was
a portrait painter, she gravitated toward landscape painting after a trip to Fire Island in her early
twenties. Her works, which achieve a balance between representation and abstraction, recall
the landscapes of the American Tonalists of the late-19th century.
Cornelia Foss
American, b. Germany, 1931
Ominous Sky, 1996
Oil on linen
The landscapes of Cornelia Foss focus on the East End of
Long Island, where she has lived since 1959. Initially attracted to the area’s empty beaches and
coastal fields, Foss paints the landscape as an untouched, silent haven. Like many artists in the
American landscape tradition, she is especially sensitive to the transitory qualities of light and
atmosphere.
In Ominous Sky, the artist employs saturated blues, greens, tans, and grays to evoke a quiet
expanse of sea, sand, and coastal grasses before an oncoming storm.
Jane Wilson
American, 1924-1915
Midsummer Midnight, 1993
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. John Jonas Gruen 2001.20
Born and raised in Iowa, Jane Wilson's sensibility was shaped
by the pervasive interest in changing weather conditions typical
of mid-western farm life. She settled in New York in 1950, and
began spending time on Long Island in 1957. Her landscapes
and seascapes, often distilled from the environment around her
country home in Water Mill, feature a predominate sky which
bears down with palpable presence on the earth. Her horizon line is always low, informed by the
flat landscape of her childhood and by her working method of starting her paintings from the top
of the canvas and working her way down. Her interest in changing atmospheric conditions, such
as at sunrise or sunset, or of storms and the night sky, make nature an event to experience.
Built up from many luminous layers of thinly-applied color, Wilson's work imbues ephemeral light
and atmosphere with depth and mystery. Her works belong to the romantic tradition of Turner
and 19th-century Northern European artists. In American art, her interest in light and sense of
place find precedent in the transcendental idealism of the Luminist painters of the mid-19th
century.
Cynthia Knott
American, b. 1952
The Three Graces (Grace III), 1996
Oil, encaustic, and metallic on linen
Museum purchase 1996.5
Cynthia Knott started creating seascapes in 1989 after moving from New York City to East
Hampton. She paints directly on site, seeking to capture the shifting qualities of light and
weather conditions. Her works unite sky and ocean into a comprehensive, symphonic whole
without a trace of land. Bordering on the abstract, they reveal the influence of Joseph Mallord
William Turner’s dramatic late seascapes and Mark Rothko’s color field paintings.
To create The Three Graces, Knott built up layers of encaustics, or mixtures of beeswax,
linseed oil, Damar varnish, and metallic pigments. The unique density of the medium enabled
her to capture the fluctuating luminosity of the sea. The title alludes to the Three Graces of
classical mythology.
Rhoda Holmes Nicholls
American, b. England, 1854-1930
Thistle Down and Dark Trees, Shinnecock, c. 1890s
Watercolor on paper
Born in England, Rhoda Holmes Nicholls traveled to South Africa, Rome, Venice, and the
Dolomites before settling in the United States with her husband, the American artist Burr
Nicholls. Her divorce to Burr made headlines after her work was accepted to the Paris Salon
and his was rejected. Newspapers across the country spun the story into a cautionary tale of the
threat a woman's success posed to domestic and marital bliss.
Noted for her considerable skill in watercolor, Nicholls taught watercolor classes at the Art
Students League in New York and William Merritt Chase's summer art school in Shinnecock
Hills, Long Island, where she executed Thistle Down and Dark Trees. Her use of a cool palette
and swift delicate strokes captures the breezy atmosphere of the East End.
Pauline Gore Emmert
American, b. 1923
Carageen II, n.d.
Oil on canvas
Long Island artist Pauline Gore Emmert came to painting later in life,
pursuing a BFA and MFA at C.W. Post College while in her forties.
Although she has traveled to dozens of countries around the world,
her works focus on the familiar environments of Cold Spring Harbor and Lloyd Harbor.
Regarding her North Shore subjects, the artist wrote:
This area, which serves as a microcosm for exploration and expression in my
drawing and painting, is made up of the natural forms of mud; of earth; of the
mark of man; of vegetation, whole or broken by eternal forces; of receding tides,
flowing, slowing, reflecting the sun, the sky…
…I am both observer and participant – as I believe all of us are when we seek to
experience with wonder the living scenes we inhabit and shape. Nothing stands
still; we pass by the scenes as they pass us by; and we must move to catch all
we can of their living, shifting appearances…
More interested in conveying the character of a landscape than its topographical features,
Emmert is intrigued by the atmospheric qualities that result when land, water, and sky meet.
She nearly eliminates the horizon in Carageen II to focus upon the intermingling of leaves and
mud in reflective pools of rainwater. Carageen, a purplish seaweed found on the eastern and
western shores of the North Atlantic, is not represented in the composition. Instead, Emmert
adopts the word in the painting’s title for its poetic qualities.
Miriam Dougenis
American, b. 1928
Poor Butterfly, 1986
Watercolor on paper
A Long Island-based artist, Miriam Dougenis received her training at Hunter College, Long
Island University, and the Art Students League. She chiefly produced watercolors in the 1970s
and 1980s before shifting her attention to oil painting. In 1996, she was elected a member of the
National Association of Women Artists.
In this still life, Dougenis creates a dynamic interplay of solid objects, decorative patterns, and
reflective surfaces. The careful placement of each visual element results in playful spatial
illusions. While the butterfly in the cloth deceptively appears in flight above the apple, the green
floral pattern to the left seems to spring upward like a plant.
Ellen Thayer Fisher
American, 1847-1911
Lady Slipper, 1878
Watercolor on paper
Ellen Thayer Fisher began painting in the mid-1860s. Although she
never pursued a formal art education, she no doubt learned drawing
and painting techniques from her brother, the artist Abbott Thayer, who
specialized in portraits, landscapes, and figure scenes. Like most
female artists of her generation, Fisher did not have access to nude
models and therefore depicted subjects that were more readily
available, in her case flora and fauna.
Between 1884 and 1887, Fisher worked for the prominent publishing firm L. Prang & Company,
which produced chromolithographs of her floral paintings as greeting cards. An outspoken
advocate for female artists, Louis Prang actively commissioned and collected art by women. In
1881, at the height of his success, his company employed over 100 women as artists,
designers, and embellishers.
Michelle Stuart
American, b. 1940
Voyage to the South Seas: Flora Australis, 1989
Etching with aquatint and chine collé on paper
Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
New York; Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons
Funds 1993.3
For over five decades Michelle Stuart has explored the relationship between nature and culture
through a multifaceted body of work. A pioneer in the use of organic materials—from dirt to
seeds to fossils—she has created monumental earthworks, installations, handmade books,
large-scale scrolls, sculptures, encaustic paintings, drawings, and prints. Influenced by
archeology, ecology, cartography, and anthropology, her work often comments on the passing
of historical and geological time.
Voyage to the South Seas: Flora Australis was inspired by one of Stuart’s many journeys to
ancient sites throughout the Pacific and the Americas from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. She
collected local flora and fauna as records of her travels, representing them as an aged scientific
display of gathered specimens. In a methodical manner, she includes the date and location of
their collection, as well as their Latin classification Dichorisandra. Thus, Stuart’s text tells the
history of a specific place and time, as well as the narrative of her discovery and collecting of its
natural elements.
Mary Bauermeister
German, b. 1934
Sketch for Tanglewood Press, c. 1966
Lithograph on paper, with mixed
media attachments to cover glass
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Milton M. Gardner 1980.7.1
Working in both the U.S. and Europe, Mary Bauermeister rose to prominence as one of the
original exponents of the Fluxus movement in the 1960s and 70s. Meaning “flow” in Latin,
Fluxus was an informal group of diverse artists who reinterpreted Dada's anti-rationalist
approach to art using unorthodox materials, performance, and chance to capture the experience
of modern man.
In Sketch for Tanglewood Press, Bauermeister’s hand-written script reveals her working
process, literally describing the development of her ideas and the visuals of the image. Often,
her words act as instructions for the Tanglewood Press, a printer with whom she often
collaborated. Emerging from the New York art scene in 1965, the Press was known for its
original limited edition prints by Pop artists, as well as for its innovative technical achievements.
The top right corner of Bauermeister’s image includes a letter to Rosa Esman, the company’s
director. Through tiny scribbles, she instructs Esman to “put the objects from the little box on top
of any white space then it is really FULL + finished.” The hands seen throughout the
composition suggest the lithograph is in the process of being created.
At the same time, many of the words are gibberish. Instead of communicating messages, they
are marks that create an array of textures. Although meaningless, Bauermeister aligns them in
interesting ways that form sequential verbal patterns. For example, in one section, she
transitions from “stones” to “st. one” to “st. pierre” to “st. peter” to “saint peter,” to “ain’t sane” to
“insane” to “c’est.” Her progression of words is logical, with the next word constructed out of the
sounds or letters of the previous word. They visually express what the other text in the image
literally describes: the development of her artwork in which one idea leads to the next, and no
work of art is ever truly “finished.”
Toby Buonagurio
American, b. 1947
Mirror Parrots, 1978
Colored pencil on paper
Toby Buonagurio is best known for her colorful, quirky ceramic
sculptures. She first began working in ceramics as a student at
City College of New York in the 1960s. Her interest in bright colors
evolved from her earlier work as a painter. Inspired by popular culture, Buonagurio has created
flamboyant, highly playful works of a wide array of subjects, including robots, stiletto heels, card
players, mermaids, hot rods, and clowns. Buonagurio is the Sculpture Director in the Art
Department at Stony Brook University.
Mirror Parrots exhibits a visual language similar to that seen in the artist’s sculptures. An
energetic array of bold, overlapping geometric forms and brightly colored birds threaten to burst
from the confines of the two-dimensional picture space
Jane Hammond
American, b. 1950
Presto, 1991
Ten-color lithograph with silk-screen and collage
Museum Purchase 2009.1
Jane Hammond is primarily a painter, although she also works
with photography and printmaking. She “…aims to make
paintings 'as complicated, inconsistent, varied, multifaceted as
you are, as I am, as life is’” (New York Times review). Early in
her career, she began to cut illustrations from scientific manuals,
children’s books, books on magic, and charts on alchemy,
animals, religion, and phrenology, creating an extensive file of
images that has become the basis of her art-making. In Presto,
the artist subverts our expectations. Instead of a rabbit being pulled from a top hat, as in a
magician’s act, it is a deer that somehow emerges. Eyeballs, faces, and monkeys add to the
eerie, surreal imagery.
Audrey Flack
American, b. 1931
Lady Madonna, 1972
Lithograph on paper with gold leaf
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Samuel S. Mandel 1976.9.4
Audrey Flack’s mature works date from the early 1970s, when she
set aside Abstract Expressionism for a Photorealist approach. As
the only female participant in the movement, Flack examined and
reinterpreted traditional representations of femininity. The
lithograph Lady Madonna directly relates to her painting of the
same name from 1970, adopting its subject from the history of western religious art and
specifically appropriating a 17th-century religious sculpture by Luisa Roldan. Flack drew a
distinction between her work and that of her male counterparts, stating that “‘Cool,’
‘unemotional’ and ‘banal’ were the terms used to describe the [Photorealist] movement, [while]
my work, however, was humanist, emotional and filled with referential symbolic imagery.”
Through the Photorealist process and her use of traditional female motifs, Flack assimilates
idealized gender roles with modern conventions. Other works by the artist, particularly her
series of still lifes, incorporate a myriad of imagery with historical, cultural, and religious
significance, including red roses, skulls, fruits, mirrors, and famous femme fatales.
The Photorealist Movement endured severe scrutiny when it arose in the 1970s. Considered
outright copying by some critics, the Photorealist process involves transferring a photograph to
a support (canvas, paper, etc.) through mechanical means (projector, grid, transfer paper, etc.).
The “copying,” or transferring, of the images allows every detail to be rendered, recalling the
trompe l’oeil (deceive the eye) illusionism of the Dutch 17th-century masters who depicted still
life objects with virtuoso clarity.
Rhoda Sherbell
American, b. 1933
Aaron Copland, 1976
Bonded bronze
Gift of Dr. Mark Weinstein and Susan Honig
Weinstein 1999.25
As one of the youngest artists to have a solo exhibition at the
Brooklyn Museum, Rhoda Sherbell was often referred to as a
“child prodigy.” At the age of sixteen, she received a full scholarship to the Art Students League
in New York, where she studied under renowned artists William Zorach and Reginald Marsh.
Sherbell’s subjects are often prominent public figures. She is acclaimed for her ability to capture
not only the likeness of a person, but also the complexities of their psychology.
Aaron Copland (1900-1990), was a prominent 20th-century American composer. Born in
Brooklyn in 1900, he grew up attending performances by the New York Symphony and at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music. While attending the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau in
France, he sold his first composition. Although he held many titles—conductor, teacher, and
writer—Copland is best known for his innovative compositions that incorporate popular styles of
American music, such as jazz and folk. This portrait of Copland not only accurately portrays his
physiognomy, but also provides insight into the man himself. Sherbell’s honest, aged portrayal
conveys a sense of Copland’s wisdom, while his unkempt hair alludes to his intense creativity.
His gaze is focused, perhaps determined, but his eyes express the satisfaction of a long and
gratifying life.
Bonded bronze, also called cold-cast bronze, is composed of polyester, epoxy, or other resin.
Bronze powder and paints are used to achieve the bronze appearance. This method bypasses
the complex lost-wax process, thereby presenting an inexpensive alternative to traditional
bronze casting.
Charlotte Brown
American, Contemporary
Black Peony, 1988
Computer transfer process collage on handmade paper with rope
Gift of Jonathan David Brown 1996.10
Charlotte Brown has combined traditional craft traditions with
modern technology processes since the 1970s.
Drawing
inspiration from Middle Eastern, Asian, Celtic, and American
colonial textiles, she creates intricate decorative patterns on a computer using varying color
combinations of magenta, yellow, and cyan. She then uses a heat-transfer method to iron the
printed image onto thick, handmade paper.
Characteristic of her collages, this double-sided work features two central still lifes surrounded
by ornate floral borders. Tied in thick rope, it becomes a sculptural object.
Dee Shapiro
American, b. 1944
Isla Ninos, 1981
Acrylic on canvas
Gift of Drs. Constance and Lee Koppelman 2014.7.2
Dee Shapiro is a feminist artist who was associated with
the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s and
80s. In response to the austere intellectual approach of
Minimalism and Conceptualism, Pattern and Decoration
artists sought to reassert the primacy of decorative
aesthetics in their work. With its emphasis on pattern and
ornamentation and its references to craft traditions and the applied arts, the Pattern and
Decoration movement is sometimes considered a feminist movement, although its practitioners
also included male artists. Shapiro was a founding member of Central Hall, a women’s
cooperative gallery established on Long Island in 1973, at the height of the women’s movement,
and she was a contributor to Heresies magazine, a feminist journal published from 1977 to
1992.
Shapiro’s interest in mathematics led her to experiment with a series of geometric paintings in
the 1980s. While she worked within a rigorous organizational framework, she nevertheless
infused her works with a sense of the handmade. The colorful patterning in Isla Ninos recalls
needlework. Inspired by the vibrant colors she experienced on Isla Mujeres (Island of Women)
in the Mexican Yucatan, the artist also references the mythical Isla de Los Niños (Island of
Children). The painting’s richly textured surface was achieved by the artist’s unconventional
application of paint using pastry tips directly attached to tubes of paint.
Grace DeGennaro
American, b. 1956
Nightblooms, 2008
Oil on linen
Museum Purchase with Funds Provided by an Anonymous Donor
2008.8
Grace DeGennaro examines the cyclical duality of life and death in
her work through "sacred geometry." Instead of the concrete,
analytical affiliations of geometric form, DeGennaro's work elicits the
natural, organic world through traditional symbolism. Her inspiration
derives from many sources: American Indian art, dream theories,
literature, music, hieroglyphics, and symbolism.
In Nightblooms, DeGennaro's engagement with feminism is evident through her use of the
feminine curved line and the organic vesica piscis shape. (The vesica piscis resembles a Venn
diagram, with the center of each circle lying on the circumference of the other.) The vesica
piscis was commonly used in early Christian art, and DeGennaro's use of the shape reflects her
Catholic upbringing.
Nightblooms also reflects DeGennaro's interest in the cycle of life. By evoking flowers that
bloom at night, DeGennaro suggests the ability to flourish despite hardship and the possibility of
life after death. Her use of symmetry and balance plays a symbolic role in the passage of time
during a lifespan. There is no way of knowing where or if the vines begin, end, or intersect,
highlighting life's sense of continuity. DeGennaro's compositional balance and repetition also
alludes to life's progression and the delicate, precious sense of time.
Dorothy Dehner
American, 1901-1994
Landscape, 1976
Bronze
Gift of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual
Arts, Inc. 1997.2
Originally intending to pursue a career in theater, Dorothy Dehner turned to art following a 1925
trip to Italy, Switzerland, and Paris, where she was stimulated by modernist art movements,
particularly cubism. Her early work, produced during the years of her marriage to the sculptor
David Smith, was in a two-dimensional format, often in a relatively realist style. After separating
from Smith in 1950, Dehner studied engraving at Stanley Hayter's Atelier 17, and in 1955 she
began experimenting with bronze casting. Her works, such as Landscape, are often constructed
of planar elements and emphasize contour rather than mass. While abstract, her art consistently
refers to the natural world. In the mid-1970s, Dehner began creating ensembles of stacked
wood elements, and in the early 1980s she worked on a monumental scale in Cor-Ten steel.
Ce Roser
American, b. 1930
Solar Talent, 1980
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jens Jebsen 1982.10
Ce Roser is as well-known for her political activism as she is
for her abstract paintings of the natural world. She was a cofounder of the Women in the Arts Foundation in 1971—the
same year that art historian Linda Nochlin published her
seminal essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?” Both artist and art historian agreed that, in Nochlin’s
words:
…the total situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art
maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social
situation, are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and
determined by specific and definable social institutions that overlooked, ignored,
and even ostracized women artists.
Following a 1972 protest at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Roser was one of the
organizers of the Foundation’s exhibition “Women Choose Women,” which was mounted at the
New York Cultural Center. As quoted in The New York Times, Roser wished to “[point] out to
museum people that they never get to see a representative selection of women’s work because
the commercial galleries’ only criterion is business. Women have the reputation of being hard to
deal with and hard to sell.” Roser continued to be an outspoken proponent of women’s art, while
creating her own body of work—including the vivacious Solar Talent—throughout the following
decades.
Lillian Dodson
American, b. 1931
Earth Skin, 1972
Acrylic on canvas
Lillian Dodson began her career as a painter before turning her
attention to clay sculpture. In Earth Skin, her interest in organic
forms and predilection for movement is evident in the layered
oranges and yellows, suggesting layered soil and foreshadowing
her aptitude for clay abstractions.
Although soil is traditionally depicted as brown, it contains a variety of composites, creating a
colorful array of compressed layers and intricate patterns. Red, orange, or yellow soil indicates
the presence of iron oxides, many of which play an important role in geological and biological
processes. While Dodson's portrayal of soil, or earth's "skin," is an abstract work, it is perhaps a
more accurate interpretation than the depictions of brown soil that are typically seen.
Hedda Sterne
American, b. Romania, 1916-2011
Outboard Motor, 1948
Oil on canvas
Gift of the artist in memory of Betty Parsons 1999.28
Hedda Sterne is one of the many European artists who sought
refuge in the United States during World War II. Although she
exhibited widely in the 1940s and 50s, she is best remembered as
the only woman in the group of Abstract Expressionist artists
known as "The Irascibles," who protested the conservative policies of the Metropolitan Museum
toward contemporary American painting in the 1940s. Through fellow Romanian Victor Brauner,
Sterne was associated with the Surrealists in Paris in the late 1930s, and in New York she was
among the Surrealists who exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of this Century gallery.
Sterne's early style focused on machine-based imagery of urban and industrial America;
however, in the 1950s she began painting non-objective works that consisted of bands of color
suggestive of landscape. In 1943, Sterne married the cartoonist Saul Steinberg, from whom she
separated in the 1960s. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in 1973.
Mary Frank
American, b. England, 1933
Woman with Palms, early 1970s
Terra cotta
Gift of Martin, Richard, Nancy, and James Sinkoff in loving
memory of their parents, Alice and Marvin Sinkoff. 2003.7.5
Mary Frank’s sculptures explore the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world. She
began working with clay in 1969 after years of experimenting with wood. Made from the earth
itself, her terra cotta works reflect her lifelong fascination with ancient civilizations, natural
history, and mythology.
Frank created Woman with Palms from a rolled-out slab of clay, which she then molded,
prodded, scored, and raked. She used a small tool to incise diagonal scratches that refer to the
forms of ferns and leaves. Evoking fossils, these marks act as traces of life from a time long
past. The presence of a nude female body among the plant forms recalls creation myths.
Elaine de Kooning
American, 1920-1989
Black Mountain #6, 1948
Enamel on paper mounted on canvas
The wife of Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning was a
prominent artist in her own right and an important art critic who wrote early reviews and articles
about Franz Kline, David Smith, Josef Albers, and Arshile Gorky, among others. De Kooning
worked in both abstract and figurative styles, and is best known for her expressionist portraits,
including that of John F. Kennedy, on which she was working when he was assassinated in
1963. In her earlier abstract work, de Kooning concentrated on formal problems, such as the
spatial relationship between objects across the picture plane, as in Black Mountain #6. This
work was executed at Black Mountain College where she and Willem lived during the summer
of 1948, Willem teaching and Elaine studying with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.
Founded in North Carolina in 1933, Black Mountain College was one of the most important
artistic experiments of the 20th century. Students were expected to design their own course of
study, and a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to the visual, literary, and performing arts
was emphasized. The faculty consisted of leading American artists, poets, musicians and
architects, including Josef Albers, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Merce
Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller.
Esphyr Slobodkina
American, b. Russia, 1908-2002
'Doodled Up', late 1940s-early 1950s
Oil and fabric on gessoed masonite
Esphyr Slobodkina's creative life found expression in a wide range of artistic media and in many
related fields, including interior design, architecture, textiles, millinery, and dressmaking. She is
probably best known, however, as the author and illustrator of the children's classic Caps For
Sale. Born in Siberia, Slobodkina immigrated to the United States in 1928 and the following year
enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York, where she met fellow Russian Ilya
Bolotowsky, whom she later married.
While Slobodkina'a earliest work is Impressionist, under Bolotowsky's tutelage she began
working in a flattened, abstract style that incorporated line, interlocking shapes, and pure color.
In 1936, Slobodkina and Bolotowsky were among the founding members of American Abstract
Artists. The hard-edged geometric works of Slobodkina's maturity, such as ‘Doodled Up’,
remained true to the abstract ideals promoted by the A.A.A., and Slobodkina remained active in
the group, organizing exhibitions and involving new members in the organization through the
early 1980s. For many years, she lived on Long Island in Great Neck.
Betty Parsons
American, 1900-1982
Gulf of Mexico, c. 1951
Oil and gouache on masonite
Gift of the Betty Parsons Foundation 1999.1
Betty Parsons is best known for her pivotal role as an art dealer
who championed modern art from the 1940s until her death in
1982. While her roster of artists is long and impressive,
including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett
Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Hofmann, and many others, Parsons always thought of
herself first as an artist. She was inspired by the modern art she saw at the Armory Show, the
watershed 1913 exhibition that introduced modern art to America, and decided, at the age of 13,
on a career as a sculptor. In the 1920s, she lived in Paris, taking art classes at the Académie de
la Grande Chaumière and studying sculpture with Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, whom she had most
admired at the Armory Show, Alexander Archipenko, and Ossip Zadkine. Her earliest paintings
were realist landscapes and portraits, but in 1947, in trying to depict the color, noise, and
excitement of a visit to the rodeo, she turned to abstraction. Her works, executed in response to
her environment, are exuberant and whimsical, employing incised calligraphic line created with
the butt end of her brush in colorful shapes that float across broad areas of flat color.
Sue Contessa
American, Contemporary
Blue Bamboo, 2007
Acrylic on canvas with pencil
Sue Contessa is an abstract painter based in St.
James, Long Island. Her work focuses on repetitive
mark making through the process of ritual. Before
starting each painting, she establishes a distinct set of rules regarding “scale, color, size, and
placement of the marks. Making decisions first allows me to proceed without interruption.
Working this way, the act of painting becomes a form of meditation.”
Part of Contessa’s Linear Series, Blue Bamboo is composed of subtle layers of acrylic paint and
graphite. The accumulated marks, which reveal the history of the painting’s creation, produce
subtle nuances of color across the canvas. It was not until after Contessa finished the work that
she realized the motifs resembled bamboo stalks.
May Stevens
American, b. 1924
Big Daddy Paper Doll, 1971
Serigraph on paper
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sol Orlinsky 1979.10.31
In an interview published in 1981, political activist and artist May Stevens noted the various
analyses given to her series, “Big Daddy Paper Doll,” confiding that, whatever interpretation was
applied, she “had conceived of them as anti-establishment.” Whether this concept included her
father, who she openly identified as a racist, and the seemingly unshakeable patriarchy of
1960s America, Stevens’ intentions did include rebelling against the country’s racial tensions
and the Vietnam War. In the present version of Big Daddy Paper Doll, Stevens presents the
viewer with a blatantly authoritative and white male, who adopts a number of identities including
butcher, policeman, soldier, and executioner. The fusion of authority figures and men who
deliver death and their easy interchangeability questions the true distance between the four
occupations. Mockingly, Stevens transforms these constructs of the American establishment
into thin, two-dimensional paper dolls whose power lies only in their symbolism.
In 1973 Stevens was a founding member of SoHo20, one of many women’s cooperative
galleries established across the U.S. during the 1970s to provide collegial support and exhibition
space for women artists.
Nola Zirin
American, b. 1943
Architectural Fragment, 1993
Pencil, pastel, oil crayon, and graphite on blue-toned paper
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Rice 1994.1
Nola Zirin is a native New Yorker who has a studio in Long Island
City, Queens. Her complex abstract drawings hover between the
familiar and the unknown. While Architectural Fragment alludes
to a built structure, Zirin combines it with an array of dynamic
forms that twist, curve, splatter, and float in an indeterminate space. Through the eerie use of
light and shadow, she creates a confounding vision that is oddly sinister.
Francine Tint
American, b. 1943
Cloud Nine, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
Gift of Jonathan and Puja London 2008.7
Considered by critics to be one of the most adept contemporary Color Field artists, Francine
Tint intuitively explores an idiosyncratic palette while maintaining the gestural brushwork of the
Abstract Expressionists. Tint pays homage to those who have inspired her by incorporating
previous theories and styles in her work, such as Hans Hofmann's "push and pull" theory,
Jackson Pollock's energetic brushstrokes, and Jules Olitski's large blocks of color. She applies
her paint in thick layers, creating an irregular surface. In Cloud Nine, Tint's palette evokes the
colors of the sky, while the idiom "on cloud nine" refers to a state of bliss and serenity, often
symbolized by the color blue.
Howardena Doreen Pindell
American, b. 1943
Relationships (Kandinsky #1), 1996
Mixed media
Howardena Pindell incorporates bold artistic techniques in a
complex, abstract style that combines texture, geometry, and
unconventional materials. A founding member of A.I.R., the
women’s cooperative gallery established in New York’s Soho
in 1972, Pindell often addressed political issues such as
feminism, racism, slavery, exploitation, and violence in her
work. Her radical themes have brought her both acclaim and criticism. The landmark gallery’s
name, A.I.R., evolved from Pindell’s reference, at an early meeting, to Charlotte Brontë’s
independently-minded heroine Jane Eyre, which led to “air,” and then to “A.I.R.,” also referring
to the “Artist in Residence” certification that allowed artists to live in otherwise illegal commercial
space in Soho.
After the death of her mother in 1991, Pindell began a series of works based on memorials. In
Relationships (Kandinsky #1), she combines abstract forms with discernable, figurative imagery
to commemorate great artists. At the same time, through the incorporation of text, Pindell
portrays affection despite discord. LOVE and JOY appear several times across the chaotic
canvas, along with SZERETET (“love” in Hungarian), DZIAUGSMAS (“joy” in Lithuanian),
FELICITA (“happiness” in Italian), GIOIA (“joy” in Italian), and SPENSIERATO (“carefree” in
Italian).
Margery Caggiano
American, b. 1929
Blue Bulb, 1974
Oil on canvas
Museum Purchase: Partial funding provided by the
Creative Artists Public Service Program 1975.7
Photo (or super, or hyper) realism originated in the 1960s as an offshoot of Pop Art. Often
based on photographs, meticulously reproduced and seemingly detached from the artist's
intervention, photo realist paintings depict banal, mass-produced objects from the urban and
suburban environment, appealing to popular taste and providing subtle commentary on the
banality of our society. Caggiano's Blue Bulb also falls into the long tradition of trompe l'oeil
(trick the eye) painting. Intended to deceive the viewer into thinking that what is painted is real,
trompe l'oeil dates back to the illusionistic frescoes of ancient Rome, which depicted
architectural elements on flat walls. Caggiano's masterful rendering of the shadows cast by the
light bulb and wires heightens her realistic depiction.
Barbara Roux
American, b. 1946
Ecology: Glass, 2002
Color chromogenic print
Referring to herself as a conservation artist, Barbara Roux's
message concerns the inherent conflicts between nature and
culture. Growing up on Long Island, Roux's early fascination with
natural history found an outlet in long walks through the wilderness. Sensitive to the rhythms
and mysteries of nature, her work reveals the world of natural cycles and highlights man's
impact on the environment in suburban sprawl, environmental pollution, and loss of wildlife
habitat. Her work in photography, sculpture, and installation evokes the intimate experience of
a solitary wanderer in nature. In Ecology: Glass, Roux uses a piece of mirrored glass to reflect a
patch of sky against the ground.
Katinka Mann
American, b. 1925
Green 2, 1984
Dimensional photographic cutout, Cibachrome print
Since the mid-1980s, Katinka Mann has employed permutations of
the trapezoid in her paintings, shaped canvases, and sculptures to
explore depth perception and spatial illusion. The interplay of light
and shadow upon the reflective, angled planes of Green 2
produces confounding optical effects. It is difficult to discern
surface from depth, form from shadow, and recession from projection. Although the sculpture
appears to be made of heavy enameled metal, Mann constructed it out of a polyester-based
photographic print.

artwork images exhibition labels

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