Architecture & Desire panel Nov. 5th, 7pm

panel talk held at Women and Their Work

UT Resident, Video & Performance Artist, Joan Jonas Public Lecture

UT Resident Artist Joan Jonas to Present Public Lecture in the Department of Art and Art History on Oct. 22

Event: The University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History presents a lecture by internationally recognized performance and video artist Joan Jonas. The lecture is part of the fall 2009 artist residency taking place in the Department of Art and Art History. This public lecture is free and open to the public.

When: Thursday, Oct. 22, 4-6 p.m.

Where: The University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History, ART 1.102.

Background: Jonas is internationally known for her performances and video art, mixing objects and mediated images together in natural and industrial environments. Using video as a mirroring device, Jonas herself appears as a performer in her work, often performing densely collaged narrative texts. Her awards include recognition from the American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art.

If you miss it, you may want to know that Joan’s teaching an undergraduate class here at UT that is going to be part of Fusebox in the spring, with a new performance piece. She’s also a part of this lecture in SA: http://landheritageinstitute.org/2009ARTSCI/Agenda.html

So long, Nancy!

Nancy Spero, Artist of Feminism, Is Dead at 83

New York Times
repost
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 19, 2009

Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political violence, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was infection leading to respiratory problems that in turn caused heart failure, said her son Philip.

Born in Cleveland in 1926, Ms. Spero studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and there met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, to whom she was married for 53 years until his death, in 2004.

The couple moved to Paris in 1959, where Ms. Spero steeped herself in European existentialism and produced a series of oil paintings she had begun in Chicago on the themes of night, motherhood and eroticism. When they settled in New York City, which became their permanent home, in 1964, the Vietnam War and the social changes it was creating in the United States affected Ms. Spero profoundly.

To come to grips with these realities, Ms. Spero, who always viewed art as inseparable from life, developed a distinctive kind of political work. Polemical but symbolic, it combined drawing and painting as well as craft-based techniques like collage and printmaking seldom associated with traditional Western notions of high art and mastery.

One result was a group of pictures in gouache, ink and collage on paper titled “The War Series” (1966-70). With its depictions of fighter planes and helicopters as giant, phallic insects, the series linked military power and sexual predatoriness, but also included women among the attackers. Ms. Spero later described the work as “a personal attempt at exorcism”; it remains one of the great, sustained protest art statements of its era, all the more forceful for its unmonumental scale. Exhibited in 2003 at the LeLong Gallery in Manhattan, its pertinence to contemporary politics was unmistakable.

In 1971, Ms. Spero also returned to the interests of her Paris years in the introspective and tormented “Codex Artaud,” a series that interspersed images of broken bodies and hieroglyphic monsters with the transcribed writings of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the mentally ill French poet who viewed himself as an outcast from society and who spoke of human folly with a mocking rage. To some degree, the work reflected Ms. Spero’s own sense of exclusion from an art world that had the character of a men’s club.

By the time of the “Codex Artaud” her long involvement with the women’s movement had begun. Ms. Spero was active in the Art Workers Coalition, and in 1969 she joined the splinter group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which organized protests against sexist and racist policies in New York City museums. In 1972, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the all-women cooperative, originally in SoHo, now in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. And in the mid-1970s she resolved to focus her art exclusively on images of women, as participants in history and as symbols in art, literature and myth.

On horizontal scrolls made from glued sheets of paper, she assembled a multicultural lexicon of figures from ancient Egypt, Greece and India to pre-Christian Ireland to the contemporary world and set them out in non-linear narratives. Her 14-panel, 133-foot-long “Torture of Women” (1974-1976) joins figures from ancient art and words from Amnesty International reports on torture to illustrate institutional violence against women as a universal condition.

Ms. Spero considered this her first explicitly feminist work. Many others followed, though over time she came to depict women less as victims and more often as heroic free agents dancing sensuously.

Although Ms. Spero received relatively little art world attention during the early part of her career, she gained visibility in the 1980s and ’90s as socially concerned art came into favor. By this time her work had gained in formal complexity and variety, with its weavings of image and text, its time-consuming techniques of painting, cutting and stamping, and its adaptation of aspects of Pop, Minimalism and Color Field painting, styles she had previously distanced herself from.

Beginning in the late 1980s, she transformed the scroll format into site-specific wall murals. In 2001, she completed a mosaic installation for the 66th Street subway station at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. In 2006, despite painful degenerative arthritis that had crippled her for years, she executed wall paintings for “Persistent Vestiges: Drawing From the American-Vietnam War,” an exhibition at the Drawing Center in SoHo. For a concurrent solo show at the LeLong Gallery, she made a single printed-paper frieze that wrapped around the base of the gallery’s walls.

Titled “Cri du Coeur,” (2005) and adapted from an Egyptian tomb painting, the mural depicted a procession of mourning women. Some viewers saw in it a reference to the war in Iraq or to Hurricane Katrina; others understood it as Ms. Spero’s response to the death of her husband the previous year. Like her, he had created an art that insisted on balancing ethics with aesthetics.

Ms. Spero had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1992 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1988. A traveling career retrospective was organized by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in 1987. In 1997, she was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. She often exhibited in two-person shows with Mr. Golub. A Spero retrospective is planned for the Pompidou Center in Paris next year.

In addition to her son Philip, who lives in Paris, her survivors include her sons Paul, also of Paris, and Stephen, of Swarthmore, Pa.; six grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Neuman, of Portland, Ore.

Kiki Smith, one of the many younger artists influenced by Ms. Spero, once said in an interview: “When I first saw Nancy Spero’s work, I thought, ‘You are going to get killed making things like that; it’s too vulnerable. You’ll just be dismissed immediately.’ ”

Ms. Spero herself, who experienced both being dismissed and celebrated, said simply of her work, “I am speaking of equality, and about a certain kind of power of movement in the world, and yet I am not offering any systematic solutions.”

Erin Curtis Review in the Statesman

Backwaters

Check out Jeanne Claire van Ryzin’s review of Erin Curtis: Perspective Threshold, show up now through Nov. 18 at Women and Their Work Gallery.

Yeah! Austin Friends in ArtForum

Leah DeVun and Levi Dugat
DOMY BOOKS
913 E Cesar Chavez
September 12–October 22

Leah DeVun and Levi Dugat, The Exhibit of the Past Is the Certainty of the Future
Year, 2009, graphite and acrylic on wood, 49 x 48 1/2″.

Leah DeVun and Levi Dugat’s works love the eye, using alternating stretches of seamless, misty penciled passages and scribbled fill-ins to enmesh reverie with alienation. “Your Heart Is Not a Museum,” an exhibition of drawings, is the artists’ second collaboration; most of the works on view were authored together via conversation rather than by hand. Viewers can imagine each artist visiting the other’s studio and leaving ideas like so many Victorian calling cards, generating the vulnerability, intimacy, and occasional identity dysphoria that bind the resulting works together.

Their styles are disparate: DeVun’s renderings of diamonds and soap-opera characters speak to intimacy’s promise, but her works’ obsessive, almost cold technical proficiency precludes any closeness that her subjects might otherwise exude. Dugat is a sweet crafter of cursive titles and embroidery-sampler-esque ovoid compositions. He shades his works with repetitive marks, which gives his compositions a sense of pixelation, as though to highlight the excessive daydreaming that was poured into the image.

A collaborative graphite-on-wood portrait of the two seated on a colored quilt offers a depiction of Dugat gazing just above the viewer’s eyes, while DeVun assumes the ramrod-straight spine of an uncomfortable teenage girl, each representing a dimension of identity that bears out equal risks when made either public or private. Here, aspiration and comfort are well married, proving that the currencies of one’s inner and outer life can sometimes collide beautifully.

— Katie Anania

ART FORUM

Alma Thomas in the White House

Obama has borrowed art from several Washington museums to decorate the white house. One of the choices was the abstract expressionist, Alma Thomas.

Holland Cotter discusses the life and work of Alma Thomas in the Sunday Times Week in Review section, naming her the artist in the Obama collection he would choose for his own apartment.

In the 1950s, she took weekend studio classes at American University, working briefly with Jacob Kainen, one of a group of abstract painters — Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland were others — gaining national attention as the Washington Color School. Thomas, who loved color above all else in art, always felt a kinship with them.

Thomas herself was a popular favorite in her late-blooming career. Howard gave her a retrospective in 1966. In 1972, at 80, she was the first African-America woman to have a solo at the Whitney Museum. Critics raved. There was a second retrospective in 1977, and Jimmy Carter invited her to the White House. People couldn’t get enough of her. Why?
Her art was accessible. Her abstraction was never really abstract: you could always see the nature in it: flowers, wind. Her paintings were modern but part of some older tradition too, as close to quilts as to Matisse. In a racially charged era, her art wasn’t political, or at least not overtly so. When asked if she thought of herself as a black artist, she said: “No, I do not. I’m a painter. I’m an American.”

Instead of talking anger, she talked color: “Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.” American museums, under the gun after their neglect of black artists, breathed a sigh of thanks. But when Thomas said color what was she really saying? She vividly remembered being barred from museums as a child because of her race. A lifetime later, she acknowledged that things were still hard. “It will take a long time for us to get equality,” she said in an interview. “But what do you expect when whites closed up all the schools and libraries on us for so long? They know that schooling would give us our salvation.”

In many ways she’s an ideal artist, and power of example, for the Obama White House: forward-looking without being radical; post-racial but also race-conscious; in love with new, in touch with old. A genuine rainbow type. She would have enjoyed being in Rothko’s company, and she would have understood where Mr. Ligon was coming from.

Sky Light, 1973

submitted by Steven Kaplan on mon, 2009-10-12 08:32.