Application for the 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
September 2011
In 1964 I received my BA from Bennington College where I studied painting, sculpture, and art criticism. After college I moved back New York and began to paint exclusively. In 1968 I had a solo exhibition in Vancouver, British Columbia. Then I was a Fellow in Fine Arts in Painting at the University of Pennsylvania (1969 - 1970). The following year I was awarded a fellowship for graduate study at Bennington and returned (1970-1972).
After graduate school I settled in New York. Two years later my first solo museum exhibition initiated by James Harithas (to whom I'd been introduced by Liz Phillips, the sound artist and a former student of mine at Bennington) was held at the Everson Museum, Syracuse. In 1978 I formed an association with the Max Hutchinson Gallery where I began to show regularly from 1979 to 1984. A Yaddo Foundation Award in 1982 provided me with uninterrupted time to paint and think. My next solo exhibition at Max Hutchinson in 1984 was favorably received by long-standing supporters and by others previously unaware of my work including Michael Brenson in The New York Times. One of the most prestigious of the many group exhibitions of this period was Painting as Landscape: Views of American Modernism, curated by Klaus Kertess (1985).
1984-2004
In 1984 I was introduced to Joan Mitchell by Klaus Kertess. She invited me use her place in France as a base while traveling (I was particularly interested in Romanesque art and architecture) and offered friendship, advice, and encouragement. My paintings were included in many group exhibitions and visiting artist positions and lectures sustained me. In 1987 I received a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and my work was included in the prestigious exhibition Paintings and Sculpture by Candidates for Art Awards at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
At this time a fellow artist friend Louise Fishman introduced me to Jamie Wolff who invited me to do a solo show at Wolff Gallery (1988). This exhibition was most favorably reviewed in Art in America, Arts Magazine, and The New York Times. In 1990 I had a solo exhibition at Holly Solomon.
Two more generous grants were awarded to me in the next years, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award (1989-1990) and a Gottleib Foundation Award (1990-1991). During this period I investigated materials from outside of the pure studio realm and began to add crushed graphite, copper, marble dust, aluminum, iron oxide, and polyurethane—among other things—to my works. I was interested in the way these 'extraneous' elements subtly grounded my paintings in the real world and I wanted to paint using their energies and entropies. The surface and substance of my paintings became altered. Inclusiveness emerged as the focus of my practice.
My large painting The Accent of Deviation 1990 was included in an exhibition at Wolff Gallery, New York and traveled to the Feigen Gallery in Chicago. Curated by Saul Ostrow and Jamie Wolff this exhibition, titled Strategies for the Next Painting, created a locus for many artists engaged in the practice of abstraction. I was positioned in relation to a community of artists and a history of recent contemporary art. Strategies for the Next Painting marked a significant strengthening of my career. My work began to be included in articles about contemporary abstract painting. In "Painting and its Others" (Arts Magazine, Summer 1991) Shirley Kaneda presented a cogent description of the operations of my paintings while reproducing Chthonian Way 1991. The following fall, as part of a special series on abstraction, the art journal Tema Celeste reproduced The Accent of Deviation 1990 and Saul Ostrow discussed my work, "What is addressed consistently though indirectly is the meaning of material, process and beauty. The materiality...hovers between chance effect and the intentionality of intervention."
During the early nineties my participation in public aspects of the art community increased. My article "Social Volition" based on exchanges between artists discussing the cognitive process and the practice of painting appeared in Bomb Magazine (1991). In addition I participated in a roundtable discussion on problems of abstraction that was published as "Where the Meaning Begins" in Tema Celeste (April-May 1992) and accompanied by a reproduction of one of my very large paintings, Terrains Vagues.
Among the many group exhibitions that included my work during the early nineties An Esemplastic Shift at the A/C Project Room in New York was particularly important for me. This exhibition that I initiated was based on the idea of an esemplastic process—painting aware of its limitations but behaving as if it's not; painting as a protean form, condensing, expanding, shifting energy to the dimensional. I discovered the precise articulation of the notion of the esemplastic reading Coleridge and it was one that I interpreted and deployed in my work of that period. Social Volition 1992, my painting in that exhibition included mesh, polyurethane and some found materials and was singled out by Roberta Smith in The New York Times. A month and a half later, Holland Cotter cited Tropological Painting, my painting from the same period in his New York Times review of Contemporary Surfaces at the Pamela Auchincloss Gallery New York, characterizing it as "….delicate yet rambunctious."
In February 1993 I had my first solo exhibition at Jason McCoy Gallery, New York. It was well received by critics, specially featured in The New Yorker and reviewed favorably by Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Lily Wei was laudatory in the lead review of Art in America (June 1993). Jason McCoy Inc. published a catalogue to accompany my 1994 exhibit for which Linda Nochlin wrote an accompanying essay.
In the fall of 1995 a traveling survey exhibition of my work was initiated by William Dooley, Director of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art of the University of Alabama. The paintings I had made over a thirteen year period and my altered x rays — works on exposed x ray film in which the paint and mediums I applied transformed the photographic images both physically and chemically — were to be included. Until then my altered x rays had been exhibited primarily in Europe and in a few experimental New York exhibition spaces. A catalogue was published in which Sidra Stich discussed my work and Barry Schwabsky interviewed me about my painting and its development in relation to my ideas and ideals.
Soon after my exhibition opened in March of 1996 at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art I went to Sweden for a group exhibition at Galerie Ahnlund and to give two seminars. In May I rented a studio in Köln. I painted and looked at art in Paris, Basel, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Munich. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make the sort of paintings in which touch was more evident, an art with a greater emotive and psychological resonance.
In the spring of 1997 my exhibition The Mob Within the Heart opened at Hering Raum Bonn in Bonn. Consisting of non-rectilinear paintings on vellum, altered x rays, three-dimensional pieces, and my paintings on stretched linen, this first solo exhibition of my work in Germany was characterized as ambitious and serious by the press, and it was received favorably by the museums of the Rhine region. After the Fall: Aspects of Abstract Painting Since 1970 curated by Lily Wei opened at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art (1997). My painting, For the Listener Who is Almost Lost was given a prominent position in this encompassing survey of abstraction.
In September of 1997 an exhibition of paintings I had worked on after returning from Europe at the end of 1996 opened at Jason McCoy Gallery. Well attended by the art community and singled out by many as a quintessential painting achievement this exhibition marked a change in my work. By reintroducing brushwork as surrogate for my touch, my work had become more reliant on emotive and psychological force and connected to personal contingency. With listings and reviews in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Ken Johnson in The New York Times, Yvette Brackman in Time Out, David Ebony in Art Net, Eleanor Hartney in Art in America, and Jed Perl in The New Republic, the exhibition received considerable positive attention. In November 1997 my solo exhibition at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco garnered additional support for my paintings. T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner became strong supporters of my painting. A Pollock/Krasner Foundation Fellowship was awarded to me in January 1998. Drawing began to inform my painting, (extending its range???).
My New York/Köln drawings were shown at "Upstairs" Hering Raum Bonn in 1998. This solo exhibit was well received by earlier supporters, Dr. Alfred Fischer the drawing curator of the Ludwig Museum and Dr. Martin Seidel who had written on The Mob Within the Heart in 1996. Jürgen Raap, the Köln critic responded viscerally to this work with a text as yet unpublished.
In June 1999 a solo exhibition of my work was presented by collectors in the former studio of Gerhard Marcks, a wonderful venue for contemporary work. The vastness and light of my large painting Parts of the World, the Condition of Nature 1999 was reinforced by the space and light afforded by the unique architectural setting. The Culture Bureau of the City, several Köln collectors, and other artists became more involved with my work. Also in 1999 I was the recipient of the New Faculty Grant and the Kohler Fund Award from The University of North Carolina, Greensboro where I had joined the faculty as Associate Professor in 1998.
My paintings entered several prestigious collections during this period. Bentley Dillard a collector and the owner of Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona acquired Won From the Heath and As the Leaves To A Tree first shown in 1997 in my solo exhibition at Rena Bransten Gallery was acquired by T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner. The Swedish Arts Council purchased Another Telling and The Secrecy of Impersonal Address from Galeri Ahnlund for a new Stockholm concert hall. In March 1999 Immediacies of the Hand: Recent Abstract Painting in New York, curated by Carter Ratcliff and Kim Sobel, opened at the Hunter College Times Square Gallery. Many artists praised Portrait of the Artist 1997 and Holland Cotter singled out Parts of the World, the Pleasure of Text 1999 in The New York Times. This painting was reproduced in Art News to accompany a review of the exhibition.
A book of photographs I made of New York and Köln, The Record, the Death, the Surprise, was published by Abaton Press, New Jersey also in 1999. As a chronicle of my source material this book provides an expanded context within which to view my work. It was purchased by The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library, and several European institutions.
I began exploring the contingencies between ‘real’ world space and abstract painting space while I was dividing my time between New York and Greensboro, North Carolina. I tried to make as much spatially available within the confines of a rectilinear canvas with little use of perspective. In 2000 I was the recipient of The Saltzman Foundation Award.
In the Fall of 2004 a solo exhibition of my paintings opened at the Jason McCoy Gallery. A text by Barry Schwabsky accompanied the exhibition. In Schwabsky’s piece my ideas and attitudes in relation to painting and Modernism, and my resulting processes were astutely characterized. The art community responded with praise to this exhibition with positive reviews in The Brooklyn Rail and Art in America.
2005-2011
In early 2005 a solo exhibition opened at Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, and in June 2005 a solo exhibition of recent drawings, photographs and altered x rays was held at Abaton Garage, Jersey City. In 2006 I was the recipient of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award which was reinforcing to me as an artist practically and psychologically. I could buy supplies and pay living and studio expenses while teaching only one day a week and giving an occasional lecture.
In early 2007 a solo exhibition of drawings of several decades and two large new paintings was held at the Markus Winter Gallery, Berlin. In the fall of 2007, Oblique Forms: Spray Paint Paintings, Photographs, The Hybrid Indexical Adventure Series with a text by Stephen Maine opened at Abaton Garage, Jersey City, New Jersey. The turnout and support from the art community for this experimental, playful work was positive and in the spring of 2007 Barbara MacAdam featured my work in Art News, April 2007, Volume 106, Number 4 in an article entitled “The New Abstraction”.
When I was forced to vacate my home and studio in November 2007, I maintained my practice in borrowed and rented temporary studios and in those provided by The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program Residency, Brooklyn, New York and at The Edward F. Albee Foundation Residency, Montauk, New York.
In the fall of 2008 my exhibition Come in a Little Closer opened at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts in Chelsea. Rather than relying on a stylistic or formal organization I included paintings that evidenced my thinking and attitudes as I had done in the exhibition in Berlin. Very many in the New York world of painting saw it as an individual and significant achievement. Written about by Joan Waltemath in The Brooklyn Rail (November 2008), Jennifer Riley in Art Critical (October 2008), and cited by Roberta Smith in The New York Times (November 2008), the paintings in this exhibition set the course for my future work. The small paintings were dense and gnarly with a worked materiality. The large ones were open and expansive with air and light.
From 2008 to the present my work has been included in many group exhibitions. Amongst the more prestigious was 70 Years of Abstract Painting - Excerpts curated by Stephanie Simmons, who has followed my work for many years, held at Jason McCoy Gallery, New York. Amongst the more adventuresome was Polis, curated by Markus Winter who showed my work in Berlin, at Artblogartblog, a popup space in Chelsea, New York. I am most pleased that my work will be included in Drawings curated by Gottfried Hafemann at Galerie Hafemann, Wiesbaden opening in October 2011, American Women at Elder Gallery, Charlotte and Hex: Cora Cohen, Loren Erdrich, Tamara Gonzales, Margrit Lewczuk, JennyLynn McNutt and Joelen Mulvaney, curated by Joelen Mulvaney will be at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in Brooklyn.
In 2011 a solo exhibition of my work was held at the Raketenstation Museum Insel Hombroich. Initiated by Georg Schmidt, an artist with a studio for life at Insel Hombroich, this exhibition was successful on all levels and consolidated my relations with early collectors of my work of the Rhein region. One, Bernward Malaka, who had mounted an exhibition of my works in 1996 is interested in presenting a concept for a book of my work to publishers. In addition, he has introduced a culture writer to my work who is now interested in working the text.